Gift economies favor the rich, because the are the ones who can gift the most. A gift economy obscures the power and transactions. It replaces direct transactions with indirect ones. Money makes it transparent, flexible, and decoupled.
In a gift economy you depend on the goodwill of the rich. Meaning you have far stricter social control and restrictions on your behavior.
A gift economy also doesn’t favor redistribution in practice. You have to stay in the good graces with the rich in order to survive. That means you have to gift your best gifts to the rich to curry favor.
A gift economy encourages strong social bonds. However that means neurodivergent people, and people with below average social skills, will be disadvantaged. Narcissistic sociopaths will be more empowered than even now.
lack of profit motive
Humans are social animals. There will always be desirable and rare things. People also want to improve their living conditions. Even without money, this will remain the same.
It fits more with a more traditional family, clan, feudal, and religion based system than contemporary individualism. That’s not inherently bad, but a huge difference.
Gift giving would be formalized, ritualized, and kept track off. For example Turkish people tend to have big marriage parties with hundreds of guests. The gifts given to the couple are carefully documented and tracked by the family. Depending on the value of the gift you and your family will receive favors, opportunities, or not be invited to the cousin‘s upcoming wedding, leading to social exclusion.
A gift economy is an economy based on favors and bribes.
Japanese culture might potentially be a good fit for this type of society. Complex manners and etiquette, prioritize group over the individual, favor of conformity and hierarchy, value specialized skills highly, also high honesty and honor.
There would be no rich in a fully libertarian socialist society, as it would be extremely difficult to accumulate wealth when there is no exploitative power over others, and where anything that isn’t able to be created by an individual can only be created in a voluntary worker cooperative where everyone benefits equally.
If all basic needs are freely lent out in a library economy, and everyone participating in the 2 to 3 months of yearly work equally benefitted from it in the form of free housing, food, healthcare - and public transportation and private property is abolished (distinct from personal property), then there would be virtually no avenues for an individual to accumulate enough personal property to wield any sort of substantive power over others.
difference between private and personal property
Personal property is classified as what an individual person or family can actively use themselves.
If you begin hoarding more than you or your family can realistically use, the excess is no longer considered personal property, but private property, which may get you ejected from that community if you actively hoard under a libertarian socialist society and you refuse to stop.
Quoting someone else:
I like to link the word “private” with “privation” or “deprivation”. Private property is easily identifiable by its effects on others, specifically, it’s deprivation. There are hundreds of thousands of hammers. Having one doesn’t deprive anyone of anything. At most only one person can use the hammer.
A house is usable by an entire family, and if I own it but don’t use it myself, my ownership deprives an entire family of its use. That scales to apartment buildings pretty easily. Then there’s farms where basically it’s impossible for one person to do all of the work on a farm or eat all of the products of a farm, but my ownership has the effect of depriving anyone the right to work there or the right to consume its products. A factoryn is truly impossible for one person to use, but my ownership of it allows me to deprive everyone of its products unless they meet my price demands and also allows me to deprive everyone of use of the factory to make anything at all.
Private property entails a deprivation of society of socially necessary commodities.
With the elimination of private property, and basic needs a human right, that would leave the gift economy on top of that, which would realistically be limited to just what individuals can create and share amongst themselves.
Either you’re describing anarchism with new words or you’ve got some really weird views.
Like libraries are a clear no-no under libertarian ideology because it “perturbs the market”. If access to something is free then you destroy competition which “breeds innovation” or some shit…
I’ve just never heard of a libertarian library… It’s so antithetical to the concept!
Either you’re describing anarchism with new words or you’ve got some really weird views.
It’s not new, I assure you. Libertarian Socialist is label that goes back to 1872. It’s often synonymous with Anarchism, which I do consider myself to be, but I sometimes use Libertarian-Socialist since it doesn’t immediately bring to mind the concept of chaos or bomb throwing that people unfamiliar with Anarchism may attribute to it.
Anarchists have never been for lawless chaos, that’s been put on them in a decades long smear campaign.
There was a time 100 years ago when ‘Propaganda of the deed’ was seen as a viable method toward waking up the masses, but it was quickly found to actually do the opposite of what they intended, and Anarchists today generally do not endorse such methods. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m just trying to avoid knee-jerk reactions from decades of anti-anarchist propaganda.
I don’t know who you’re trying to fool. Probably yourself, but we have plenty of video much more recently than 100 years with actual anarchists doing exactly what you’re trying to pretend they’re against.
An extreme minority, perhaps, but it hasn’t been a mainstream anarchist position for a century. And accepted Anarchist theory has never in all of its history advocated for lawless chaos.
Out of curiosity, what is your own personal political worldview?
I had noticed the tension between right and left wing libertarian concepts. Very interesting stuff. I suspect on Lemmy anarchist or anarchosocialist will get more love than libertarian-socialist. But that’s an interesting name to use in public because it invites questions rather than fear of ANARCHY!
Gift economies favor the rich, because the are the ones who can gift the most. A gift economy obscures the power and transactions. It replaces direct transactions with indirect ones. Money makes it transparent, flexible, and decoupled.
In a gift economy you depend on the goodwill of the rich. Meaning you have far stricter social control and restrictions on your behavior.
A gift economy also doesn’t favor redistribution in practice. You have to stay in the good graces with the rich in order to survive. That means you have to gift your best gifts to the rich to curry favor.
A gift economy encourages strong social bonds. However that means neurodivergent people, and people with below average social skills, will be disadvantaged. Narcissistic sociopaths will be more empowered than even now.
Humans are social animals. There will always be desirable and rare things. People also want to improve their living conditions. Even without money, this will remain the same.
I agree. It’s going to be a lot more personal favor and nepotism. People skills and social capital are going to dominate society. Sounds like hell.
There are other ways to do this
It fits more with a more traditional family, clan, feudal, and religion based system than contemporary individualism. That’s not inherently bad, but a huge difference.
Gift giving would be formalized, ritualized, and kept track off. For example Turkish people tend to have big marriage parties with hundreds of guests. The gifts given to the couple are carefully documented and tracked by the family. Depending on the value of the gift you and your family will receive favors, opportunities, or not be invited to the cousin‘s upcoming wedding, leading to social exclusion.
A gift economy is an economy based on favors and bribes.
Japanese culture might potentially be a good fit for this type of society. Complex manners and etiquette, prioritize group over the individual, favor of conformity and hierarchy, value specialized skills highly, also high honesty and honor.
There would be no rich in a fully libertarian socialist society, as it would be extremely difficult to accumulate wealth when there is no exploitative power over others, and where anything that isn’t able to be created by an individual can only be created in a voluntary worker cooperative where everyone benefits equally.
If all basic needs are freely lent out in a library economy, and everyone participating in the 2 to 3 months of yearly work equally benefitted from it in the form of free housing, food, healthcare - and public transportation and private property is abolished (distinct from personal property), then there would be virtually no avenues for an individual to accumulate enough personal property to wield any sort of substantive power over others.
difference between private and personal property
Personal property is classified as what an individual person or family can actively use themselves.
If you begin hoarding more than you or your family can realistically use, the excess is no longer considered personal property, but private property, which may get you ejected from that community if you actively hoard under a libertarian socialist society and you refuse to stop.
Quoting someone else:
With the elimination of private property, and basic needs a human right, that would leave the gift economy on top of that, which would realistically be limited to just what individuals can create and share amongst themselves.
Also @dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone
Libertarian socialist?
Either you’re describing anarchism with new words or you’ve got some really weird views.
Like libraries are a clear no-no under libertarian ideology because it “perturbs the market”. If access to something is free then you destroy competition which “breeds innovation” or some shit…
I’ve just never heard of a libertarian library… It’s so antithetical to the concept!
It’s not new, I assure you. Libertarian Socialist is label that goes back to 1872. It’s often synonymous with Anarchism, which I do consider myself to be, but I sometimes use Libertarian-Socialist since it doesn’t immediately bring to mind the concept of chaos or bomb throwing that people unfamiliar with Anarchism may attribute to it.
Libertarian alone also used to refer to left-wing anarchist types, but the term was co-opted by right-wing free-market ancap type folks a while back. I’m just doing my part to reclaim it :)
Anarchists are the ones that created that view in the first place. If you’re ashamed of it, perhaps you aren’t really meant for anarchism.
Anarchists have never been for lawless chaos, that’s been put on them in a decades long smear campaign.
There was a time 100 years ago when ‘Propaganda of the deed’ was seen as a viable method toward waking up the masses, but it was quickly found to actually do the opposite of what they intended, and Anarchists today generally do not endorse such methods. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m just trying to avoid knee-jerk reactions from decades of anti-anarchist propaganda.
I don’t know who you’re trying to fool. Probably yourself, but we have plenty of video much more recently than 100 years with actual anarchists doing exactly what you’re trying to pretend they’re against.
An extreme minority, perhaps, but it hasn’t been a mainstream anarchist position for a century. And accepted Anarchist theory has never in all of its history advocated for lawless chaos.
Out of curiosity, what is your own personal political worldview?
It is all the public facing anarchists. They are the face of the movement whether you believe it or not.
I had noticed the tension between right and left wing libertarian concepts. Very interesting stuff. I suspect on Lemmy anarchist or anarchosocialist will get more love than libertarian-socialist. But that’s an interesting name to use in public because it invites questions rather than fear of ANARCHY!