this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
People aren’t equal in their abilities, need, desires, and dreams. Being able to perform better should be rewarded in some way. Otherwise the incentives aren’t there to get anywhere.
How selfish do you have to be to not understand that there are incentives other than the profit incentive?
If the only reason you do anything is because you believe you are rewarded for it, you're a terrible person who needs to practice some introspection at why you are only motivated by personal greed.
No, nobody should fucking be rewarded more than another. Wellbeing for fucking all you right wing fuck.
You can’t ditch currency. Currency isn’t some grand invention of the state. It’s the direct result of beings valuing things at different amounts at different times. Technically current is using any stand in to ease the trade barrier but colloquially some people use love as a currency. Many kinds of social animals trade and what they trade could be deemed currency.
You can 100% ditch currency, you don’t not need a trade or barter based system. Humans have been operating on a gift economy model for hundreds of thousands of years, currency and trading is a blip in our history.
People are capable of supporting each other without profit incentives.
Gift economies mean the rich get to buy favors and influence with their gifts. Those who can gift the most will be the ones with the most power and influence. A gift economy is pure trading of favors and influence. At the same time there’s zero transparency. It’s institutionalized bribery. It’s pretty horrible for people with below average social skills. Charming narcissists will rule this society according to their whims.
. . . There can’t be rich people in a system where resources are owned by the community.
Please just stop arguing nonsense takes and go learn about anarchism. I’m not here to debate bro your lib shit opinions.
So let's say I really want to investigate superconducting magnets, because I really like that field and want to do research. I need processed rare earth products that only exist on the other side of the globe.
In your gift economy, how would I proceed to acquire those?
I suspect these policies often assume that either we live in startrek or we’re back to the woods and have no need for superconducting magnets :-/
Great, now please scale this up to all of human civilisation and society with all of its mind-bogglingly complex logistics and infrastructure, ever changing needs, countless adversarials and requirements for advanced science.
Its a nice idea but doesnt feel very applicable unless the entire human race just kinda has a change of heart.
Okay, there is literally nothing about it that can’t be scaled up except for capitalism being the predominant system backed by violence.
You shouldn't state this as fact. It's not, archaeologists have been arguing between the formalist and substantavist theories of economic models for decades now. You seem to be favoring the formalist view, but there is a strong arguement to be made that market principles such as supply and demand existed deeper in the past as well.
While there may not have been currency, the historic economics of humanity were certainly greater than a gift economy model.
You can absolutely do away with currency if the current mode of production got abolished. Currency itself is a necessity in a society that produces commodities for exchange, which creates rise for social constructs such as value, value forms like money, the possibility for an innate crisis and so on.
The first 2 chapters of Capital explains this, the commodity production system was a historical development rather than something coming out of nature (no chemist was able to find value through microscope), and we can certainly produce things to satisfy needs rather than exchange, with a much lower amount of work hours needed to do so.
No. Currency is convenience and convenience wins 99% of the time.
Yeah I’ll pass thanks, currency and capitalism is killing the planet and us along with it.
Nothing easier than being dead tho I guess.
The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.
Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?
Given I’m an anarchist, I value a gift economy where we stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing.
How much a person should have is as much as they need.
But that's not what a gift economy inherently results in.
Yes it is.
Unless you have something concrete to prove all societies (even the current ones still existing) that engage in such practices inevitably must change away from such a system, that isn’t just a “this happened a few times historically so it must always be true even though there are still gift economies operating today” I don’t want to hear it.