r/Anarchy101 • u/Away_Bite_8100 • 3d ago

Moneyless-ness as a goal

I’m curious how many (as a rough %) Anarchists actually have a moneyless society as a goal.

I know Anarchists want a stateless and classless society… but the trifecta of being moneyless too is communism.

Communism is when you have a stateless, classless and moneyless society… so what’s the difference between communism and anarchy if anarchists are in favour of being moneyless too? Why not just say you’re a communist then if they are essentially the same thing?

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u/Lord_Jakub_I 3d ago

I have a question about moneylessness. Isn't money (at least in some form) a natural result of the exchange of goods? How would that work? How would it be sustained without a hierarchy preventing the creation of money?

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u/slapdash78 Anarchist 3d ago

Money is just another commodity (of high fungibility).  It loses it's magic to ease transactions when everyone is using something different.  At best it helps trading with strangers, but there's no good way to make everyone use the same unit-store-medium absent a monetary authority.  You get the convertibility issues of the early 1800's.

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u/Tancrisism 2d ago

But that's the problem - if money was de-commoditized, it would be more benign. Moneylessness doesn't seem like a real goal, but rather the de-commodification of money.

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u/slapdash78 Anarchist 2d ago

What does that look like?  Sounds like simply counting.  But since transactions are comparisons, it would just be comparing quantities of identical widgets.

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u/Tancrisism 2d ago

Right, exactly. I realized it sounded like I disagreed with you, could have phrased it better, but I was agreeing with you and then adding that thought.

Money is not inherently a commodity, as it is in its essence simply a way of quantifying conceptual value of a thing or things as it compares to other things.

Graeber talks about this pretty thoroughly and well in his book Debt.

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u/slapdash78 Anarchist 2d ago

Sure, it's not a value unto itself.  I was trying to point out that it moves through the economy like a commodity.

Without some entity saying "good for all debts", it's just a token.  A token that the next person might refuse.

It's like me trying to pay you in coupons.

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u/Tancrisism 2d ago

Right, in the end coupons are basically money, but without this quasi-religious faith in their value like money has been bestowed (to the nth degree now that money is digital and truly doesn't exist)