What solarpunkers think about money?
What solarpunkers think about money?
Capitalism is obviously destroyed but I read very little on "money".
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Money is not inheritly bad, just think of it as a tool to make accounting easier.
The problem with capitalism is the unconstrained protection of capital and overreliance of commodification to all sorts of human activities, thus creating unjust hierarchies. Some things might be suitable in a market setup, but most large scale issues concerning many stakeholders need to be managed in a more democratic way by the community. In any of these cases we would still need a convenient way to do accounting, so money will still exist.
Even if we do abolish money in a solarpunk society, the Lagrangian multipliers of whatever optimization goal the community has agreed upon will still be there, so we will just have to account for the active constraints in a more implicit manner. It would be much easier to communicate with each other with the Lagrangian multipliers themselves
We can argue that in a solarpunk society monetary value of stuff and labor becomes more connected with the actual environment and social values they represented. But what does this actually means? In the current capitalist society no economic theory (neoliberal or socialism) can explain economic notion of "value" in a consistent manner (neoliberal theory easily turns into circular reasoning while Marxism theory requires implausible mathematical assumptions), so this is something economists in a solarpunk society has to figure out.
Money is not inheritly bad, just think of it as a tool to make accounting easier
Is it though ? Not saying it is inherently bad, but in itself it forces a market value on everything - which is a rather limited proxy to usage value. In that sense money in itself is not neutral, not "just a tool", as it shapes how exchanges are made in a society.