Is It Possible to Organize People Without Money or Bureaucracy

The modern western world is largely organized by corporations. The production of almost every necessary and luxury good is carried out by a corporate organization, and all the planning is done using money as a symbol of "the good". Money and prices of goods end up being defined by that mode of planning and organization, so "the market" for things ends up being set by that system rather than by a "free market".

Most of the posts in this blog point out problems with this approach. The financial system, and the corporate system are mostly systems of control of human activity and they are at least equally about maintaining a hierarchy of people from the equivalent of modern day dukes and barons down to peasants, as they are methods for organizing people for productive activities. Also, using money as a representation of "wealth" has cheapened everything that's not money, e.g. the natural world. So in the 19th century, for example, settlers of the newly opened frontiers of the USA all but obliterated the natural world, and today in China, factories pollute the air, water and land of that country to pursue money tokens that managers and workers can exchange for luxury items.

Sub-cultures within the United States exist outside the financial system for the most part. The Amish are one example. Prior to the centralization of the banking system and widespread industrialization in the United States most people lived outside the money/financial system and conducted business in terms of credit agreements and in-kind trades, e.g. chicken eggs for flour.

I have the sense that we've come full circle in the modern system. The credit that's extended to corporations like Tesla, for example, seems pretty worthless in real world terms. The project of electrifying cars, building smart cities, and new infrastructure for self-driving vehicles seems pretty stupid and uninspiring to many.

Is it possible to do something different and have a different basis for civilization that's more aligned with the natural world? One of the really interesting questions I've thought about in recent years is: are natural systems more efficient and "productive" than agricultural systems of man? It is quite possible that's the case. If that's true, then agriculture, as currently practiced is a dismal failure and our civilizations are really a sort of millstone around our necks.

Alt Media and Social Media Passivity

In my own life, I notice that many of the social habits I've developed over time are bad ones. They make sense within the day-to-day world I live in: with my full time job, commute, various bills to pay, etc... However, I'm living in a way that's not necessarily in accord with how I'd like to live. I think this is the case for countless millions of people in the western world. This might be true for most people throughout all of human history. It might be part and parcel of being a living animal on this world.

Alt media and social media provide a parallel ghost universe where these ideals can be shaped and the limitations of animal-man world can be shed. The ghost existence can start to seem real, especially because their are other ghost people there to share them with.

The ghost world, though, has very little immediate impact on day-to-day reality, except to possibly breed some paralysis and maybe even unhappiness. Quite a lot of social media political theoretical discussion centers on what the mainstream calls "conspiracies". The pejorative sense in which the "conspiracy" label is used makes sense, not because there are not people conspiring, but rather because it subtly demotivates and passifies the person who knows about "the conspiracy" or who knows how "the system" works.

How Christianity Became Socialism in the US

Horace Mann an early Progressive,
and Abolitionist and Antioch
College President

If you read journals and diaries and accounts of daily life in the early 19th century United States, you will find that Church life, mainly protestant small-town churches, were very important in organizing the day-to-day and week to week activities of people. Some churches were very severe in their discipline, in a sort of stupid, oafish way--and life for parishioners was sort of like being in a permanent childhood with a strict, domineering parent. Sundays, for example, were spent in forced lassitude. Even raising one's voice or laughing might bring chastisement.

At the same time, in the first half of the 19th century, the United States was wealthy beyond measure--there was more land than could be settled and farmed by the settlers and there were more natural resources that could ever be consumed (or so people thought). You could buy a farm for the equivalent price of a years' supply of coffee (give or take). The lumber on the land could offset the cost you paid (if you were smart). Much of the time there were severe shortages of laborers, especially skilled laborers, and if the economic conditions in one area soured, you could easily move to a new town and start over fresh.

So while the strict bible thumping churches and their clergy were trying to discipline and direct the minutiae of people's lives, the country was exploding with changes on a daily basis. As the frontier opened up, and the political system protected individualism, people sought a wilder, wide open religion in new Christian cults. More importantly, they sought to put into practice Christian ideas and build new Jerusalems. The town of New Harmony, Indiana is one example.

When people built experimental commune utopias, they also built new colleges and universities, especially in places like Ohio. Institutions like Antioch College and Oberlin College emerged from "radical" denominations of Christianity. Focusing on this world and improving the material lot of people basically killed religious Christianity off and it turned into Socialism and social activism. So the people who were agitating against the Vietnam War or for Civil Rights were informed by latent Christian ideas from those institutions. The strident Abolitionists and people who ran the underground railroad were Christians and they were strongly affiliated with those institutions.

By the 1940s, the ideals of Christianity from the US frontier towns had morphed into the socialism of factories and the Chrisitian activists became various versions of communists.

Turning Techno Amish

People are always trying to figure out better ways to live. Many people in our consumer/technology/corporate society are pretty strongly opposed to the approach to life they were socialized into even as they keep going to work and turning the crank at the gloppita-gloppita factory.

The life of debt slavery and consumerism has very little appeal. False freedom. Lots of low level stress and constant avoidance of existential questions that sit in the corner and stare like a dog who knows its time for you to go outside.

There are books and youtube channels who delve into the nitty gritty details of alternative approaches to life that require no debt, and exist outside the consumer mainstream. It's striking how much their approaches to life resemble the pioneer lives I've read about in recent months and years. Growing and making food stuffs from scratch, or making clothes rather than buying them were necessities back in the 19th century, but are a means to avoid debt today.

If you wanted to live deliberately, and make deliberate choices about your life, it makes a lot of sense to pick and choose from all the historical examples of what worked and what didn't and basically go back in time with some modern technology rather than following the general flow of the contemporary culture.

Credit Systems and Markets

In the 19th century in the new states and territories of the United States money was scarce to the point people often used Spanish silver. Real goods, like lumber or grain, were valuable and relatively plentiful and in immediate demand. Consequently, people mostly used barter and issued credit agreements as an everyday thing. For example, if you were building a mill and needed some steel parts, you might strike a deal with a blacksmith to provide 100 bags of wheat or a portion of your production for 2 years to pay for a steel axle for the mill.

Banks weren't really necessary for farming on a small personal scale, but with the development of the transportation systems like the canals and railroads, banks could serve as an intermediary between more anonymous distant parties, and money/credit could facilitate trade between producers of unlike goods without the hassle of negotiating contracts for every transaction.

Railroads developed agricultural infrastructure, like grain silos, to facilitate the mass movement of commodities like corn or wheat to where they'd be actually consumed or processed. Money was a sort of token within the context of that entire system that started to represent a portion of the productivity of it as an entirety.

Large scale commerce and concentration of commerce in cities and ports also led to the ability to command large quantities of goods and manpower which led to the growth in industry and a parallel growth of the "financial system". As a side effect the banks which issued "credit" within those systems were able to leverage the productivity of all the commerce that was carried on within them even though the bankers didn't actually do anything.

By the Bubba Clinton presidency, the financial markets completely disassociated from the "real" economy of railroads and grain elevators. The real economy is hugely productive and massively undervalued, while the paper and electronic economy is parasitic, country clubbish, and hugely overvalued.

Barter "Finance" in the Old Northwest

It's an eye opener to read how people conducted business in the early 19th century. Money was not readily available since there was nothing like the banking system we have today that issues credits that are ubiquitous and widely accepted, so people struck barter-based deals all the time on all scales. The land company that bought the Western Reserve from Connecticut "bought" the land at about $0.30 an acre in a deal that was financed by bonds, which were really backed by the future land sales rather than any collateral put up by the company, for example. Similarly, within the settled territories, none of the people had money so they struck deals in barter terms. The credit they extended to each other was in terms of labor or goods and food.

A person who lived within such a system had to be fairly realistic and understanding of the limitations of the value of things like bushels of peas or bags of corn and the "volatility" of those things. There really wouldn't be any concept of "price" like we have now, which is mostly set by gamblers in futures market-casino games rather than between producers and consumers.

Another interesting aspect of the financial dealings of the 19th century people is the Indian population, at least within the context of the sources I've read, didn't participate in this type of credit system. Dealings between settlers and indians were either one-off purchases or were like deals conducted with a foreign nation done through treaties and deals with "chiefs" and governments.

The American's credit system tied them to the East Coast and its institutions, even though those institutions were totally feeble and remote from the settlers in the newly opened interior of the country. It's really not hard to imagine the Indians issuing credit in the same way the land companies or states did, but they actually just became peons and clients to these agreements the same way individual settlers did.

How Trump Got Elected

In retrospect, the people who got Trump into the White House were brilliant in their use of Social Media as a propaganda tool. My guess is they developed all that stuff and then recruited (or ordered?) Trump to serve as their front man.

A peculiar feature of Social Media is groups can self-select and segregate into ersatz tribes. (lots of posts on that) Two groups inhabiting cyber-space might not even know the other exists.  When they discover one another, it's simple enough to just screen the others out if their ideology is hostile. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the Trump coalition included both strident evangelical zionist and jewish zionist conservatives AND alt-right cosplay nazis.

Both of these Groups Voted for Trump

Subsequently, I believe other social media accounts were created (or formed spontaneously to fill an obvious void) to try to keep all these groups on task. In recent days, for example, as the United States and its allies appear to be agitating for a war or at least "regime change" in Iran, the alt-right "white nationalists" and "nazis" are cajoled by the idea that the Iranians are Aryans who deserve to be free from Mullahs and/or are Muslims that should be mass murdered anyway before they rape white women in London. Meanwhile on another vector, "White  Nationalism (muh white race!)" is equated with Kosher Nationalism. Identitarian ethno-DNA-state of Israel is held up with toxic levels of irony, as a model for White Nationalists.

It's become more obvious that tribal marketing techniques were very carefully planned and employed against the population via the Internet--social media and YouTube specifically and that Hillary Clinton (who's policies Trump now puts into practice) and her old style campaign had no chance against weird alt-media personalities like Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, which is pretty damn amazing.

Trump's people created a web of cross-promoting social media  accounts in various overlapping ideological categories from the hoodoo alt-media people who talked about bigfoot, aliens, and alt-history topics, to alt-finance, to libertarians, to pick-up-artist websites, to the weird rabid anti-semite performance artist Brother Nathanael.

All of these were a feeder system into the cloaca maxima of the Trump campaign. It started several years before the election and continues today.