In response to my previous post someone said that currency will always exist based on humanity’s need for greed. This is a very simplistic cynical understanding of our use of currency. Currency is found and most utilized in highly populated urban societies, as agrarian based societies which use only what the natural world provides them utilize trade for what they can’t find in their immediate area or for the little technology they might have. Having spent time in Afghanistan where much of the country is still agrarian I’ve been witness to trades which would leave most Westerners flabbergasted that something of little worth to us has so much worth to them. Would you accept six pigs as dowry for your daughter? The difference lies in a society’s reliance on the natural world and its access to it. A farmer who uses human or animal (natural) labor solely to survive has no need of fuel for transportation or to run machines to work the land, he doesn’t need electricity to run appliances in his home, so for him he can survive entirely without ever needing currency. You start needing currency when you start relying more and more on the labor of others for your survival so you can justly compensate them for their work.
There’s a lot of talk about what Socialism is and is not, a lot of Socialists can’t even really explain it or don’t really know what exactly it is. Socialism by itself isn’t bad, in fact it’s something that everyone should be striving for, but unfortunately it makes certain people obsolete and that scares them. They will thus argue against it tooth and nail until they die and it no longer concerns them. It flips the Free Market currency based Capitalist economy on its head, eliminating the need for investors and the ability to accumulate wealth without having actually produced anything. Likewise the people who currently profit from the necessities of people by claiming ownership of natural resources would also become obsolete ending their tyranny over said resources.
Lets be honest, you can’t read a political article without that dirty word Socialism being thrown around. Most of the people doing so have probably never once picked up the Communist Manifesto and read it for themselves. It’s not their fault, they’re products of an education system that teaches to the test instead of instilling the habit of expanding one’s mind and understanding of the world around them. These are people who expect others to tell them what to believe, they wait for others to do the research for them. This allows the unscrupulous to pursue their own agenda at the expense of these people by claiming they are the sole vanguards of truth, much like a cult leader does with their flock.
This isn’t a one sided phenomenon, especially when talking about concepts such as Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. When you start getting into the details of the three you quickly venture into a complex system of systems and if you don’t make the attempt to understand them all you come out with a distorted singular understanding of them. Today we break it down to simple one liners which doesn’t do any justice to the issue and many Americans who are running around calling something Socialist or Communist are utterly wrong. Again, you see this on both sides of the fence. If you don’t consider yourself an ideologue or think you can suspend your tendencies long enough to consider and discuss what I have to say, please, continue.
With that out of the way, allow me to share with you what I plan to do here. I have little interest in discussing the moral, ethical, metaphysical arguments of whether Capitalism is just or not. My being a Socialist stems from my logical deduction of the information available to me. My opinions aren’t based on fleeting emotional attachments to a concept. That’s not to say that I won’t at some point get into that and post those ideas under a different section, but the core of my focus will be on logic, not emotion. I hope we can have some productive conversations, and welcome.