I don’t know whether to post in this thread or the companion / mirror-image thread, since I don’t identify as Left or Right. I’m an anarchist. I think “left” comes closer overall, I guess.
What the fuck is an “economy” in real terms, in terms not defined by the economic system itself? What does it mean to humans and other life forms for an economy to “grow”? Is it a good thing for an economy to grow?
There was once a time when there was an incredible amount of work that needed to be done in order for the group to survive. If the work wasn’t done, the food would not be there, either because it had not been planted or harvested or because it hadn’t been defended against the raiders from the next valley over. “Ya don’t work, ya don’t eat!” The economic system as we know it originated from that situation, a means of quantifying work performed and tying access to resources such as food to the performance thereof.
Before that, there was a time when we wandered, plucking that which grew from the place it was already growing of its own accord, and periodically chasing down some of the animals and stabbing them dead, and we ate of these and the work that was required of us was much much less per week per person. The remaining human bands of hunter-gatherers “work” for an estimated average of about 7 or so hours per week to live this way. It would have been less in the era before hunter-gatherers were isolated on the lands that no one else wanted, the infertile deserts and barren spaces. We didn’t quantify labor or resources back then. We just shared what we had, because there was plenty (and also no easy means of hording a surplus).
The most common complaints about the current economy is that there aren’t enough jobs available. Not enough work to go around. I would imagine that our ancestors from either the hunter-gatherer era or the “Ya don’t work ya don’t eat” early agrarian era would be flabbergasted and have great difficulty wrapping their minds around why this constitutes a problem. “So you got all the laborers you need to do all the stuff that needs doing, that’s great!” No, you don’t understand, those who don’t have labor to do don’t get any money. We use money to track who has and who has not done their share of the load, the tasks that need doing, we use money to prevent laziness because hey, ya don’t work ya don’t eat, right? But our problem is that there isn’t enough load to go around, so lots of people who would like to be working can’t work, so we either let them starve because hey, ya don’t work ya don’t eat, or we take pity on them and take some of the money that the employed people earned and hand it over to the unemployed people so they can eat. Either way, horrible situation, woe is us, if we tax the wage-earners we remove the incentive to work, and if we don’t the folks who can’t get jobs starve.
“Well why don’t you quit using the money system then and go back to sharing what you’ve got, since you’ve got a surplus and you’ve got people willing to work if there’s work to be done?”
Oh no that would never work. That would be horrible. People would take advantage of the system and not work and still eat. We must stick with the system we’ve got in which money goes to the employed and then we tax them and provide subsidies to the unemployed so they can eat, it’s better this way.
Yeah, so. The “economy”, and the desirability that it “grow”. I think in the abstract it translates into “we would like ourselves, in the plural sense, to do more productive things so that there is more largesse to distribute”. And also “we would like more useful things for more people to do because people are bored out of their goddam tree having nothing to do, we need challenges and useful occupations for people”. Is that a fair representation of “grow the economy”? Well we’ve got a surplus. We’ve become amazingly proficient. We don’t have lots of additional challenging jobs for people unless maybe we educate them more equitably and fully and in a more flexible manner. Or put value on things that don’t happen to result in products people would pay money for but which would nevertheless improve the quality of life for people in general— that could be rewarding and challenging tasks for people, too. (No one tends to purchase clean roadside verges but if someone were to remove the litter from the roadsides we appreciate the results). (Actually corporations are now adopting stretches of highway and paying, in some sense of the word, for exactly that) (but other things of that ilk are possible)
The Left has a tendency to Blame the Rich. Have you noticed? As if the rich invented the competition game and then gamed the system on purpose to exploit and oppress and steal from the poor. That’s assbackwards. The competition game invented the rich. It’s Parker Brothers Monopoly in real life. You’ve played? You think you would win the game if you did not bankrupt your opponents? The rules say you would not. The rules say that if you did not, someone else would and they would win. The rules guarantee the outcome of oligarchies, monopolies, the rich favoring policies that make themselves richer by concentrating resources into their own hands. It’s fundamentally stupid to blame the rich as individuals as if their personal motives are responsible for the behavior observed. It’s the game. It’s the rules. It’s the economy, stupid.
The Left, on the other hand, has a good critical assessment of what they call “capitalism”, which the Right prefers to call “the free market”, and which I am simply going to call “the money system”. That critique was leveled by Karl Marx. The Right says, rightfully, that Marxism offers no solution. Indeed it doesn’t. Marxist revolutions would be rotations instead, the replacement of winners of Parker Brothers Monopoly games with the winners of political gaming of the control of the mechanism of redistribution of resources. The Big Chief game. The Right is right on about communism’s love affair with the police state. Because the Marxist solution leaves the money system fully intact (have you noticed?) then redistributes with a heavy hand. It’s Band-Aids on a bad machine at best, and its badness is defended from critics with brute force.
But that doesn’t make the critique any less accurate. The Left is spot-on about capitalism’s tendencies.
We should be as busy as we wish to be, or as busy as we need to be to meet everyone’s needs, whichever is greater. It’s less busy than we are now. We could be at comparable leisure. It’s silly to worry about people abusing the non-quantified system against the current backdrop in which vast quantities of employed people are employed doing things that are only relevant within the confined of the money-system game. If you aren’t playing Parker Brothers Monopoly you don’t need bankers. Insurance companies. Soldiers. Police officers. Stockbrokers. You finish the list.
Admittedly a functioning anarchy needs planning and communication but it’s not a profession but a civic duty of the participants. It might even be possible to have a NON-anarchy that departed from the money system, for that matter, although as an anarchist I haven’t spent much time contemplating that. The point is, the money system itself is no longer serving our interests, and the perceived need to “grow the economy” is an illusion wrought by the failures of the money system itself.
