[lbo-talk] The State and Capitalism

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Tue Mar 11 15:30:19 PDT 2008


Doug Henwood wrote:
> Some kind of money has been around for thousands of years, so this
> moneyless prehistory isn't really very relevant to anything today, is
> it?
> ___________________________________
>
We've had monarchies for thousands of years. Does that mean any future human society must have a monarch?

--All I'm saying here is that the inability to think coherently about a society without money is a consequence of enculturation into a currency-based capitalist society. (The problem here is not that industrial societies without currency are impossible; rather, our imaginations have been stunted by existing social conditions!)

As usual, changes in social conditions will precede and transform psychological tendencies. I refuse to eliminate the possibility that people living in different social conditions will develop an economy that you and I cannot begin to imagine, and they will look at our currency-based economy with the disdain that we have for slavery. Asking us to imagine the details of that society is like asking a two-dimensional being to imagine a three-dimensional space.

Miles



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