Nothing is “free” just because it doesn’t cost money. Money is, essentially, a representation of our time and effort, and making a living out in nature takes a lot of time and effort.
No, that is literally a definition of free - not costing or having to be paid for.
The whole world doesn’t resolve around money, you can do work for free without exchanging currency. That is not mutually exclusive.
The whole world doesn’t resolve around money
Bud, you’re the one here defining things solely around the involvement of money. I’m saying personal worth exists beyond that.
It’s literally what the image is bloody talking about. The image is not anti-work, it’s anti-money.
I didn’t read it as anti-money, I read it as pro-nature, from an indigenous man who owes his entire existence to his people’s relationship with and stewardship of nature.
I don’t know much about his culture other than that. I do know that there are cultures that operate without formal currency. One example is a gift economy. These systems are argued to foster closer relationships and a stronger community than a monetary economy.
I don’t know how they could scale up to millions of people though, since they seem to depend heavily on personal relationships and reputation to punish cheating and free-riding. If you’re further arguing that we shouldn’t have societies of millions of people and instead we should live in villages with large extended families and kinship networks, well now you have my attention!
It’s a Rorschach test showing us what we want.
I read it as Christian based anti-capitalist messaging that highlighted the Garden of Eden exists, it’s Earth, and the people tearing down the world for greed are the snakes who will ruin this Garden forever.
Time and effort are costs.
You use divergent definitions of “cost”.
The quote specificately says money. Money is a form of measuring exchange value.
You’re talking about “use value” which is not what OP is talking about. No one is talking about ptopia, where figs and wine bust spontaneously fall into our mouths. Stop strawmanning.
If money represented time and effort, we wouldn’t have billionaires and homeless people.
Somehow billionaires barely do anything and have all the money and all the time.
Money was supposed to be a representation of value, but it hasn’t been that for centuries either.
Money is, essentially, a representation of our time and effort
Well said. Although I tend to say: money was originally a representation of out time and effort.
Money sucks, but it’s also kinda also how a complex society like ours can exist. You put in work you get reward, in smaller societies it’s alot easier to keep people in line without a currency since everyone tends to far more connected to the production of food and other resources and can directly benefit eachother through cooperation. Buddy working in the box factory over here has never met the person gathering their food, nor the 1k others possibly involved in that food getting to the table.
Idk can we do something in the middle? How about we just remove the need for money to acquire basics for humanity and allow currency’s to be used for extras like drugs and alcohol.
Like diseases, death, natural disasters…
TIL: currency cures diseases, death, and natural disasters.
Currency is the alternative to nature? I would say society/technology gives us medicine and protection/warning against natural disasters, whether it’s a capitalist society, socialist, or anything else.
See the image, see how it’s talking about money?
Yes, and about nature, and about the “free” things it supposedly gives you - except Nature doesn’t ‘give’ us anything, it just exists. And if we want to get useful things from it, it’s usually not free, we have to pay with our labour and time - and money is just the capitalist proxy for labour and time that enables people to have specialised jobs while still getting all the different types of things people need. Alternate systems could distribute the resources more equitably, but it would still require time and labour to extract it from Nature.
So ‘pay’ with labour, no one is arguing against that here. Do you think the housing this person is standing in formed naturally or that they have an issue with working? The issues they are talking about are money and ownership of resources.
Money (and capitalism) is a terrible way to abstract labour value, and as we can see it leads to hoarding by people who do no work.
Genuine question: how would you replace money in a complex society? Exchanging favors and services works only on a very small scale.
Exchanging favors and services works only on a very small scale.
- Care to back up that thesis with some kind of proof?
- I think OP wants to step away from all that transactional “exchange” business.
Mutual cooperation as seen in anarchism.
Money at its most simplest it’s just a representation of labour to facilitate trade. Hell, depending on how you define “money”, there’s a good chance the quote source uses it happily too.
Your gripe appears to be with capitalism, and maybe fiat currency.
Money at its most simplest it’s just a representation of labour to facilitate trade.
Yeah… and the quote says “nature doesn’t trade”.
The most logical of people
does anyone have the source of this?
https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/indians-in-brazil-children-of-the-land-mother-earth
All I can find is this clip and the intro for some show called “Indios no Brasil”
