Is It Both Desirable AND Possible to Abolish the Use of Money?

This wonderful egalitarian woman want to have no rich and no poor. This is best accomplished by abolishing the use of money. Go here to see 500+ photos of more wonderful egalitarians in my zip code.

The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sam-dolgoff-editor-the-anarchist-collectives is a wonderful collection of articles about what happened in about a quarter of Spain, inspiring events that our rulers don’t want us to know about. (I have written about this Spanish Revolution here, where there are links to more articles I have written about it.)

Here’s something from its preface:

“In Spain, millions of people took large segments of the economy into their own hands, collectivized them, administered them, even abolished money and lived by communistic principles of work and distribution — all of this in the midst of a terrible civil war, yet without producing the chaos or even the serious dislocations that were and still are predicted by authoritarian “radicals.” Indeed, in many collectivized areas, the efficiency with which an enterprise worked by far exceeded that of a comparable one in nationalized or private sectors.”

Here’s something from the section “Money and Exchange”:

“Aside from the loose use of the term “money,” Burnett Bolloten gives a fair general idea of the exchange system in typical libertarian communities:

“In those libertarian communities where money was suppressed, wages were paid in coupons, the scale being determined by the size of the family. Locally produced goods, if abundant, such as bread, wine, and olive oil, were distributed freely, while other articles could be obtained by means of coupons at the communal depot. Surplus goods were exchanged with other anarchist towns and villages, money [the legal national currency] being used only for transactions with those communities that had not yet adopted the new system. (pp. 61, 62)

“Some collectives did in fact abolish money. They had no system of exchange, not even coupons. For example, a resident of Magdalena de Pulpis, when asked, “How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?,” replied, “Nothing. Everyone works and everyone has the right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.”

“However, these attempts to really abolish money were not generally successful. Peirats recalls that:

“Under the constant pressure of political-military circumstances, the first attempts to abolish money and wages had to be abandoned and replaced by the family wage. (Los Anarquistas en la Crisis Politica Española, p. 131)”

Please note that it was the “constant pressure of political-military circumstances” (i.e., the constant threat posed by the fascist General Franco, not anything inherent or problematic about the abolition of the use of money per se) that explains why attempts to abolish money were not generally successful.

I suggest that if you believe the abolition of the use of money is utopian (impossible) that you reconsider that it is a very good and possible thing to do and that it requires also abolishing the “political-military circumstances” (i.e., the hostile anti-egalitarian military forces) in order to be generally possible. (Read here why the Spanish anarchists failed to defeat General Franco.)

If you wonder how an economy could work without money, even a very large-scale economy, please read my two articles that discuss this question here and here. The key point is this: Yes, in a society based on money one needs money. But in a society not based on money one does not need money.