The Liberal Gun Club Forum

ABNinfantryman wrote:What I find hilarious is that all of you principled intellectual folk are still thinking of Socialism and Communism in Capitalist terms. Money, in Communism? For Communism to exist Socialism has to succeed in eliminating the need for currency by removing the necessity to work to survive.

Eliminating currency would only work if most of one's time is spent doing work trying to survive. If that's not the case, people will want things they don't need. Money is just an extension of balanced social interactions.

Specifically it seeks to put research and development into machines which handle production of the necessities of life for people to survive making a fully automated system which negates the need to work to survive.

the comedian wrote: Well said!
Is this your blog?

Currency Will Always Exist, Or Will It?
In response to my previous post someone said that currency will always exist based on humanity’s need for greed. This is a very simplistic cynical understanding of our use of currency. Currency is found and most utilized in highly populated urban societies, as agrarian based societies which use only what the natural world provides them utilize trade for what they can’t find in their immediate area or for the little technology they might have. Having spent time in Afghanistan where much of the country is still agrarian I’ve been witness to trades which would leave most Westerners flabbergasted that something of little worth to us has so much worth to them. Would you accept six pigs as dowry for your daughter? The difference lies in a society’s reliance on the natural world and its access to it. A farmer who uses human or animal (natural) labor solely to survive has no need of fuel for transportation or to run machines to work the land, he doesn’t need electricity to run appliances in his home, so for him he can survive entirely without ever needing currency. You start needing currency when you start relying more and more on the labor of others for your survival so you can justly compensate them for their work.


You will probably never meet the miners who mine and smelt the metals used in the machines in your home. You will probably never meet the oilers who risk their lives to fuel your car or the heat in your home. This is why we have currency, because it is very unlikely that you would be able to trade directly with the people who provide you with your necessities, so we attach currency values to what we produce allowing us to trade without having ever met one another. This leads to the creation of the middle men, the people who produce nothing, but they provide the service of trading goods and services among one another, that is Capitalism.

The biggest problem for people living in a Capitalist society is thinking outside of the established paradigm, so even people who would consider themselves Socialists or Communists find themselves thinking about issues in Capitalist terms and concepts. What Socialism seeks to do is naturally destroy the Capitalist paradigm by negating the necessities of its existence, namely labor, currency, and middle men. It’s the intrinsic evolution through the use of technology back to the agrarian society we all came from where you’re able to survive without the need of someone else’s labor. In large societies this is only possible through the use of intricate machinery and automated systems so your reliance for survival is not on the labor of others who need to be compensated, but on machinery which doesn’t. Much like how we used to rely on the labor of nature to provide us with the food, water, and air we needed to survive. It’s Nature’s way of restoring the balance.

So what about those who like to own things? Socialism doesn’t stop you from owning material goods, it just requires you to provide something of real value in return. So if the most you do is sit on your couch watching TV you will still be able to survive, but you won’t have anything to show for it. On the flip side, if you spend your days building boats because its what you enjoy doing you can trade them for say jewelry that a jeweler has spent his time cutting in intricate designs. Currency is far from necessary, it is only as such currently because of those who produce nothing having a tyrannical hold on a necessary service they’ve laid claim to.

ABNinfantryman wrote:Gendo, you and I are done in this conversation. You're restating a position I've already addressed, which means you don't get it and probably won't.

ErikO wrote:My response to that is 'never leave the damned meeting first!'

amrev360 wrote:more

WillCarry wrote:I might be a liberal but I ain't no socialist. I might be a closet socialist but communism is quite out of the question.