Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution

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My thanks to @CodesWithHammer for helping me expand that example. At the time I posted this answer, the U.S. government had created an artificial condition where a skilled laborer refuses to work because all his/her needs are met without labor. Whether or not the employer could, should, or would pay more to overcome the "economic inertia" created by that artificial condition isn't relevant to the question. What is relevant is that the workers could have easily returned to work "for free," contributing their skills for the greater good of society as there were (and there were) people in need of those skills. Given the choice to work "for free," they chose to stay home - thus making my point. In the section of the Communist Manifesto devoted to “German or ‘True’ Socialism” Marx and Engels said of “German philosophers, would-be philosophers and beaux esprits” influenced by socialist ideas that “beneath the French criticism of the economic function of money, they wrote Alienation of Humanity’, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote ‘Dethronement of the Category of the General’, and so forth”. Vila, Luis E. (2000). "The Non-Monetary Benefits of Education". European Journal of Education. 35 (1): 21–32. doi: 10.1111/1467-3435.00003. JSTOR 1503615.

A lot of work is done not because it is rewarded monetarily, but because it needs to be done. For example, I clean my toilet not because I am paid to do it and definitely not because I enjoy it. I do it because it needs to be done to avoid future problems (and because I hate dirt more than I hate cleaning toilets). So Marx’s argument was not directed against the Jews as people (from one point of view it can be seen as a contribution to the debate then going on among Jews and ex-Jews—like himself—as to their future) but rather against the sort of society described by Hamilton which now exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in all countries. The argument that the solution to the Jewish Question lay, not in the Jews disappearing by becoming atheists or Christians as others had suggested, but in the establishment of a moneyless society in which “Jewish . . . (money-making) behaviour” would be impossible, was bound to be regarded as anti-Semitic by religious Jews and Jewish nationalists in the quite different political and historical context of the 20th century. This charge is nonsense; otherwise it would have to be pinned on all advocates of Jewish assimilation and on all critics of the Jewish religion (and as an atheist Marx was naturally a critic of Judaism, with its ridiculous rituals and rules governing all aspects of everyday behaviour, as of all other religions).

a b Ironmonger, D. S. (1996). "Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: estimating Gross Household Product". Feminist Economics. 2 (3): 37–64. doi: 10.1080/13545709610001707756. The biggest issue that time bank coordinators face, as a result, is funding. Time banks do not rely on volunteers, but require financial support — to pay the time broker’s salary, for a publicly accessible drop-in office, for marketing costs — to successfully attract socially excluded people in deprived neighborhoods. While many UK time banks have been supported by grant funding from the National Lottery, over time it becomes harder to secure ongoing funding, or to increase the funding available for time banks overall, and established projects close while new ones are begun elsewhere. [3] United States time banks and the IRS [ edit ]

The other form of home-based nurturing also serves benefits society as a whole. Care giving provides assistance for those who are elderly, disabled, suffering terminal illness or chronic illness, or are generally frail or in need of assistance. Someone who cares for someone in any of these positions is a caregiver. This is largely provided unpaid by friends or family of the patient. Living without money is not easy. You have to really care and also give up some things. You will give up the comfort to buy what you desire. Instead you'll get another lifestyle: one in which you'll be happy with what you have. One in which you are obligated to be more creative to satisfy your needs. I did not find even one research paper that would suggest that money is the only motivation to make people work. Most research suggests that correlations between salary and job satisfaction and between salary and work engagement are almost negligible. Internal motivations (like curiosity, interest in a specific topic, self-improvement, self-challenge, and so on) are much better predictors not only of job satisfaction and engagement but also productivity. The eternal problem of communism is that " from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" doesn't work unless: Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2012: 31-1011 Home Health Aides".It is a popular saying that capitalism stimulates innovation. I also read and heard many times that any non-capitalistic country will always and inevitably lag behind in innovation. I am not sure that this is entirely correct. One could argue, that the material incentive to work in fact discourage people to work efficiently. Karl Marx said, that the alienation caused by the need to perform work which one do not enjoy, leads to the dicrease of one's possibilities and thus hinders the progress of the society. One who perfom his job only to satisfy his most basic needs will never be an efficient worker. A moneyless society is a very utopian idea. Nevertheless human beings were living in a world without money at some point in the past. According to Wikipedia money emerged already around 12,000 BC. Though the first coins have been created quite a bit later. As many other concepts such as insurance, banknotes have first come up in China. The first banknotes were merchant receipts of deposit in the 7th century. Is a moneyless society possible? Yenmez, M. Bumin (2015). "Incentive compatible market design with applications". Int J Game Theory. 44 (3): 543–569. doi: 10.1007/s00182-014-0444-8. S2CID 45772688. (Refers to models without transfers.) Clearly, one could be afraid that if we remove the finiancial incentive and move toward removal of workers' alienation, some jobs would be vulnerable to extinction. But currently a lot of working positions are the so-called bullshit jobs which are in fact pointless, or even damaging to both the workers and the society. It is hard to make a claim, that disappearence of such jobs would be a bad thing.

Large-scale algorithmic distribution (as envisaged by Stefan Heidenreich) for negotiating "matched transactions," each of which "has effects beyond all immediate participants." Yet, the procedure emulates money "when our profiles, our likes, and our consumer histories are used to calculate who will buy what and where." [20] The transactions are recorded and, along with utility/urgency and reputation/personal history, the "matches" are determined. [21] Altruistic society: as proposed by Mark Boyle, a moneyless economy is a model "on the basis of materials and services being shared unconditionally" that is, without explicit or formal exchange. [31] Deguchi A., Kajitani S., Nakajima T., Ohashi H., Watanabe T. (2020) From Monetary to Nonmonetary Society. In: Hitachi-UTokyo Laboratory (H-UTokyo Lab.) (eds) Society 5.0. Springer, Singapore https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-2989-4_6 Even Marx, whose work Critique of the Gotha Programme made the slogan 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' popular, was admitting that a direct transition from a capitalist to communist society is not possible. In the same work, he suggests that this transition will happen in two stages. At the lower stage, labour contribution to society will determine how much workers receive from this society. The transition to the higher stage (i.e. communism how it should be) becomes possible only when society and its members are completely free from the values and traditions of capitalism:

Moneyless society in the bible

But in a communist society there is no money. Since there is no money, there are no prices. Since there are no prices, there is no way for production to be informed of what's needed to be produced. Since there is no way for production to be informed of what's needed to be produced, you will always have overproduction of some things and underproduction of other things. He goes on to discuss the ways in which he sees the transition to a moneyless society taking place and then poses and answers, in convincing fashion, some of the most common ‘objections’ (many of which socialists are used to hearing) to a free access society of voluntary cooperation without money and wages. These are objections such as ‘don’t we need money as a motivator?’, ‘aren’t human beings intrinsically lazy and selfish?’, ‘would there be enough to go round?’, ‘how could we operate an economic system without a pricing mechanism?’, etc. Finally, he issues a ‘Call to Action’ urging those who agree with the need for a moneyless society and see it as possible to share their views with others and ‘get this information into the world’, thereby helping to put into the mainstream an idea that may currently seem ‘extreme’ to many. He also encourages people to communicate, cooperate and associate themselves with other movements with similar ideas, listed in a ‘Resources’ appendix to the book. Here he includes some 50 organisations, including the World Socialist Movement, as well as, for example, his own ‘Moneyless Society’ group, the Auravana Project, the New Zealand Money Free Party and the Zeitgeist Movement. To be frank, I cannot imagine a situation where workers are not rewarded at all. Even housewives whose work is often undervalued, unrecognised, and looked down upon, receive at least some reward from friends and families complimenting their cooking, smart arrangements in the house, the aesthetics, and so on. Although, I do admit that this kind of reward can be insufficient motivation for many people. It is also worth considering that for the most part of human history, people worked without being paid any money. Salaried jobs (with salaries paid in money) became common only after the Industrial Revolution. And even with salaried jobs being the norm today, a significant amount of work 1 is done without being paid: Domestic labour, child and elderly care, volunteer work, hobbies, and so on. There is a caveat. If we suddenly remove money from today's world and ask people to work without being paid, there will be a lot of people who will refuse to work, at least, initially. The number of those people will be most likely higher in cultures that assign high value to money and tend to see money as an indicator of personal success and fulfilment. I am talking here about cultural views and stereotypes, in other words, the perceived role of money in human lives. Whether this view is correct or not is a different topic.