Yeah. Some people already live like that but are hippies on the sidewalk of the capitalist system.
Post-scarcity economics? What’s hard to imagine about that?
I don’t, but that’s because I believe in IDIC, and that eventually it will win out.
This was also said in an era after a nuclear war wiped out a vast amount of the population, and the beacon of hope that brought us together was literally world changing.
We need that hope, but I feel like right now anti-matter science would just be used to make a bomb.
I realized after I commented this that this is an antiwork lemmy and not a Star Trek one. Fuck it, I’m leaving this here :).
Imagining it? No!
Not every individual lives this way, communities as well, and have been for millennia.
IMHO, Getting societies Globally to shift away from this is the hard thing to strategize!
Personally I think that the acquisition of wealth is inherent to what it is to be alive, especially if you think about it in terms of increasing the practical capability to get things enacted in the world. Technological progress and building infrastructure is still that thing.
obviously the startrek quote is meaning currency though and there’s nothing I disagree with there but still.
wealth in this case meaning use-value, of which the acquisition is important to the basic maintenance of one’s own life. Whereas financial value or exchange value is an intermediary and could theoretically cease to be meaningful (think: robots produce all goods, exchange value of everything important is less than pennies)
so what I said but in marxist
It’s not clear how that could ever be the case. People want food, people who have more food (and better food) are wealthier than those who don’t. People want homes, people want better homes. People who have those are wealthier than those who don’t. Clothing, tools, hobbyist supplies. Vehicles. Land. You name it. All those things are wealth. You have to work pretty hard to come up with something that is considered wealth that people don’t want for its own merits.
All these things are traded for money (rather than bartered) because money is so much more fungible. While I suppose I can imagine a world without money, that just makes those things more difficult to trade for… it doesn’t make the desire for them to go away. And so it doesn’t make the desire for wealth to go away.
Psychologically, it might be true that those who feel as if they want this “driving force to go away” are those who are unable to mature. They want to return to a time when they were 4 years old and unaware of how anything was provided to them, they want to return to a time when every desire of theirs was magically fulfilled by parents.
Supposing that this elimination of the desire for acquisition of wealth isn’t literally extinction for the human species, I can’t even imagine how sad and miserable those people would. They would have little and never even appreciate that they might seek more. Half-starved, freezing, unable to want a full belly or a warm bed.
It’s not a driving force in my life today. In fact, it blows my mind that this is a driving force for anybody who has their needs met and lives in relative comfort. In fact, studies from US show that happiness tends to top out at around 100k income, and making more money doesn’t actually play any meaningful role past that. This basically comes back to Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Once people have their basic needs secured they start thinking about self actualization.
I absolutely love this vision of a post capitalist future.
