I had a conversation on Lemmy about this recently which is the inspiration for my question. I hope this is the right community to be asking this question.
Added context:
Arguably, you’d need start-up cash in our current system to start a cashless community, but once it’s up and running, you technically can use bartering and maybe a handful of people with jobs outside that community to get anything else the community would need.
So, could people buy land/properly that is not currently that developed, in a territory/state with no property taxes, and just build up from there? The land could be put into a community trust as well, so it’s not something that could get sold down the line after the land already gets developed.
I feel the pros of the concept are that it could legitimizes many of the points online about a cashless society being possible. If the proof of concept works out for one community, that eventually grows to a town, then the concept could be tried in other places as well.
I think another benefit of the concept is that it’s not something that should require having to change the current outside system to functionally work. Whatever is produced in excess by the community can be sold externally with the funds entering back to the trust to spend on resources that community may not be able to produce on their own.
To me, as an outsider, I feel this would be a tangible and realistic way of even popularizing the concept of cashless society being possible. It would take time and investment for a project like that to get off the ground, but I think it would be a beneficial way for people that do see a cashless society as the future to really reap the immediate benefits of the concept, and show its something sustainable and even scalable.
this has been tried over and over and over. it was all the rage in the 60s. it does not scale.
things like this require people be predictable and assumes a lot of their desires/goals. that is not how human beings work.
I could see it being difficult, but selling people on the concept I feel almost requires a real world example of it working.
With the internet, I feel like people trying to organize it would have an easier time finding matching applicants/participants based on the type of labor/lifestyle that these people would be okay with doing. Organizers could curate who joins at least while something like that is still fledgling. I imagine food security would be a big part of limiting who else can join at certain points of time.
I think a Hybrid approach could work. Maybe cashless on a local level and more market oriented on a state/regional level.
I agree that a hybrid approach like that makes the most sense, since you need some capacity for trade and probably some level of exchange going on to be in good standings with the rest of the state/region.
For sure some communes pull off some level of this, but I’d be curious to see how one of these types of societies functions if it did scale to a town or city level. I believe enough tools are out there for people to make it happen, but it not something I see talked about more as an immediate alternative to the existing system.
