Explain what might happen in the economy if there were no financial institutions.
Answers
An overriding concern of many people participating in protests since 2010 has been the financial system. From the September 17, 2011 protests against financial institutions and the symbolism of Occupy Wall Street to the widespread discussion of alternative currencies, money received more air time than even human rights and war. The current human rights atrocities and endless wars did not even cause the Arab Spring; it was the unfairness of the economic systems (starting with the fining of a fruit seller in Tunisia) which were the initial driving force behind the 2011 protests. The current speculation regarding the possible collapse of the financial system focuses on possible replacements.
With all of this attention, it would be easy to assume that financial systems must be a very important part of any future economy. But must they? Before we discuss alternative systems or how to repair our current system, we need to look at why we need a financial system at all. If we define the function of our financial systems, form should follow easily, be it community currency, barter, p2p digital, resource based or other.
Dissociation
The current financial system functions as a means to tie the work that is done for corporations to basic essentials such as food and housing in an entirely artificial relationship. Despite an abundance of basic essentials, individuals or entire countries can be deprived of them based on the labour or rights they are providing to corporations. A system where banks, governments, and many other valueless institutions also stand between individuals and basic needs and demand payment completes the creation of true wage slavery where no worker can survive outside the system. By providing a complete disconnect between work required to produce basic essentials and ownership or access to them, this system also assures gross overabundance of resources for people who do no work of value at all. The financial system enables very inequitable distribution of resources.
Wages are commonly described as a motivator to work. We are told that no one would work if they were not paid. This is belied by the amount of people raising their children, cleaning their homes, tending their gardens, volunteering for fire departments and and writing open source software and it is belied by cultures in myriad times and places which survived happily without a financial system. Women in all cultures are expected to do very difficult, time consuming, laborious and high risk unpaid work to give birth and raise children, and in many cultures they remain as an almost entirely unpaid foundation of slave labour that the rest of the economy is built upon. What is referred to as women’s right to work is really the right to do paid corporate work. All of the work that benefits society is, has been or could easily be unpaid, while pay is only required for work that is harmful to society. Valuation of work rests with corporations and governments which ensure that workers will engage in pointlessly dangerous and immoral work that they would never do otherwise. People are paid to kill people. People are not paid to give birth. Is it now more socially acceptable to kill people than to give birth to people? Or is it just more immediately valuable to corporations? Wages were created not to motivate us to work, but to control our work.