(maybe I’ll make a separate comment about currency, but I feel I need to get on the soap box for a moment here)

This might be controversial so hear me out. I don’t we should assume capitalism is destroyed. But more importantly I think the reason is absolutely critical to the success of solarpunk.

We like to pretend “direct democracy good, other systems bad”, but almost all forms of governance; dictatorships, oligarchies, capitalism, republic democracies, communism, direct democracies, and socialism have their own applications. We use them all over the place; militaries almost always function as a mostly-dictatorship with some distributed autonomy. Courtrooms function as an ad-hoc oligarchy. Companies, Unions, Churches, and Cities have thousands of different governance models, from Gabe Newell leading Valve with one of the most flat companies ever, to Steve Jobs being effectively a dictator.

Yes, Solarpunk is a rejection. But it’s a rejection of the dystopian outcome.

We give the middle finger equally to Xi Jinping, Ben Shapiro, and Joseph Stalin and any other spokesperson who prescribes one medication for all problems while ignoring the dystopia flourishing around them! All of them were/are so infatuated by style of governance that they forgot the original mission.

That’s where we can be different. Solarpunk doesn’t have “a prescription”. All of us have extremely different views, backgrounds, ideas, and values. The only commonality is “we want a society worth living in”.

I strongly feel the Solarpunk ideology is:

1. “prescribe” systems of governance for specific things
2. See if symptoms improve
3. and $&!#-ing change the prescription when it doesn’t work

We should angrily reject the current prescription (and in the US that means rejecting our pay-politicans-to-win, fake-freedom, megacorp dominated capitalism)

But.

We should not get so angry as to forget; the difference between medicine and poison is the dosage & situation.

Okay, I’ll get off my soap box now.

• Library Economy [Piped]
• Gift Economy / Gift Economy
• Mutual Aid
• Commons [Piped]
• FOSS

Many down-votes but no comments?

I think as long as they serve the community as a means of exchange (as opposed to a store of value) and are freely inflated as by need of the community, many local currencies can co-exist in a Solarpunk world. But they would probably play a more minor role in day to day life.

A local currency could for example be created by an community fund to pay the workers of a larger public project and people accepting this money would in a sense become investors into this community structure then.

I would check out Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein for a thoughtful analysis of money and its corrosive effects on human society. It goes beyond capitalism. He also has suggestions for how money could be changed into a more neutral or even positive influence. It is long and a bit of a slog through. Curious if there are any authors that summarize the same ideas a bit more succinctly.

Money is a symptom, not the root of the problem.

If you have scarcity of production and means of production, you need an algorithm to allocate the resources. Most widely used ones are free markets and central planning (both used by most systems whether they call themselves capitalist or not). Money is a convenient unit to convert resources to a single comparable value. To get rid of money you need to propose an algorithm that do not use it.

I guess people will call “money” any fongible item that can be exchanged for useful things but money can take various forms. For instance a dollar would mean something very different in a world where wages do not exist because work is done voluntarily: you would not be able to buy someone’s time.

I personally think that if things move peacefully in the correct direction, money will not downright disappear but will slowly morph into something that’s more reserved for vanity items that are scarce by design. I don’t mind money still being around if I can get food and cloth at the local depot for free but that “limited designer shoes” or VIP tickets at the latest pop star concert still cost money. I live in France and often compare it to nobility titles: they used to determine your place in society and were the most important thing about you. Nowadays they are still around, you can stumble upon a baron or a viscount who proudly wear their sigil, but they do not matter anymore outside circles that exist only to make them matter, and are mostly folklore. I can imagine a world where being a billionaire would be similar.

I think it is wise to account for the existence of competitive people and obsessive hoarders. They would recreate money in a world that got rid of it. That’s fine by me, everyone needs a hobby, just make it optional for people who do not enjoy that rat race.

Maybe form your own opinion?

Money is not inheritly bad, just think of it as a tool to make accounting easier.

The problem with capitalism is the unconstrained protection of capital and overreliance of commodification to all sorts of human activities, thus creating unjust hierarchies. Some things might be suitable in a market setup, but most large scale issues concerning many stakeholders need to be managed in a more democratic way by the community. In any of these cases we would still need a convenient way to do accounting, so money will still exist.

Even if we do abolish money in a solarpunk society, the Lagrangian multipliers of whatever optimization goal the community has agreed upon will still be there, so we will just have to account for the active constraints in a more implicit manner. It would be much easier to communicate with each other with the Lagrangian multipliers themselves

We can argue that in a solarpunk society monetary value of stuff and labor becomes more connected with the actual environment and social values they represented. But what does this actually means? In the current capitalist society no economic theory (neoliberal or socialism) can explain economic notion of “value” in a consistent manner (neoliberal theory easily turns into circular reasoning while Marxism theory requires implausible mathematical assumptions), so this is something economists in a solarpunk society has to figure out.