I was talking to a friend of mine about this talk, and he said something that caught my attention. He told me an idea this extreme would put him off from the get go.

I found his comment curious. First, I was surprised he found the topic extreme. I thought many would have the opposite feeling that it was utopian, some kind of pipe dream and would just roll their eyes at the topic and dismiss it.

But, it also got me thinking about how we use, and think of, the word extreme. If advocating for a world without money is extreme, what does that make the status quo? Safe? Moderate? Are these the terms that pop into your mind when you think about your relationship with money?

Or do you automatically start to think about how far you have to go to reach your next goal? Buy a house, start a family, or your next vacation? Maybe it’s more immediate things for you, like how you’re going to cover this months rent or get enough food?

Now that you’re thinking about money, are you feeling a bit anxious? Well, you’re not alone, Money issues have consistently ranked as the primary causes of stress in the US and the UK.

The thing is, not many of us place an inherent importance on money itself, most of us see it as a means to an end. But we also understand the risks of not having it, the state of insecurity we would have to face if we don’t make “enough”.

Since we know that we need money, we are happy to deal with some disappointments around how, or what we do to get it. Putting up with a bad boss at work, dealing with annoying customers, taking that unpaid internship to gain “experience” to then get a job. We take student loans, we choose to study things that may not be what we wanted, but that we know will give us a better opportunity at earning a living.

But our necessity for money doesn’t just have an impact on our own choices, it makes all our lives interconnected through competition. We compete against each other for the “opportunity” to work. We’ve accepted this as part of a system, and we’ve built what we like to think is a science around it — we call it economics.

With this, we’ve also accepted that many of us will be left behind, that many simply won’t be able to make enough money and will lose access to basic needs.

Some countries are lucky enough to have governments that take a stand and say that no matter what, there are some things that we should all have access to. Here in Scotland, the government ensures that everyone has access to healthcare, prescription drugs, and secondary education; and for those squeezed out of “opportunities” even more there is subsidised housing, shelters, and food banks.

But even these government provisions, which are aimed at counteracting the coerciveness of money, are themselves coerced. How many times has the term balanced budget come up in the news? Governments find themselves in a tricky position of making sure they don’t upset those who offer the work, and those who do it, this way making sure that they always have enough money to provide these services. So, taxes and job creation, interest rates and money supply become the core functions of the government as it tries to maintain that balance.

But, even with all this interference, every once in awhile, and with a higher frequency, we have some sort of crash sending the entire system into a panic, leaving even more people without the access they need to survive.

Even if we wanted to look at money away from the complexity of government and politics and purely through the rules of economics, through the idea of exchange, we would come across an even more damning predicament. If we’ve found ourselves trading our time for money, does that mean that we don’t even own our time? Isn’t that where the phrase time is money comes from? And if so does that mean that all we’re doing is working in the hopes that we can make enough money to buy our time back?

So no matter how you look at it, money is an extreme force. On an individual level, it forces us to make decisions we might not otherwise make. As a society, it forces us to compete against each other. And it paralysis our government from being able to directly meet our needs.

But what’s the alternative here? We can’t just go back to bartering.

Well here’s where it gets interesting. Anthropologists the world over agree that the “barter phase” of the economy never existed. It’s a myth that had to be created by economists when the anthropological information we have today was unavailable. As a matter of fact society has always been built on some form of implicit or explicit understanding of debt or favour and all sorts of things were used as “money” from notched twigs to feathers and construction nails.

So no, if we were to imagine a world without money, it wouldn’t be to go back to a barter phase that never existed. We would need to move beyond the idea of “exchange” altogether. We’d need to imagine a world of equal access. A world where we all have access to healthcare, housing, and food, and even everything we consider leisure — technology, entertainment and cars, and more importantly it would be a world that doesn’t “require” anything in exchange for them, a world where all of this, is free.

I know what you’re thinking here as you roll your eyes, this is crazy, if everything is free why would anyone work? and we would all want the same things, it’ll be anarchy!

Well, let’s break that down

First, I want you to think about why it is you do what you do. Most of us are motivated not by money, but by the want to make a difference. We want to be engineers, doctors, musicians, ecologists because we understand the value that has on society and our quality of life. We do it because we seek meaning from our lives. How many of us volunteer in our free time or give to charity. We do this because we understand that we all depend on each other and that we exist in a society that depends on us pitching in and pushing it forward.

But even if we don’t subscribe to this noble narrative of making a difference, and we simply and selfishly pursue our curiosity or passions, wouldn’t our unhindered pursuit of those things lead to breakthroughs that benefit society as a whole? Think about every great inventor, did they invent what they did to make money or because it was their passion? Sure they made money because of it, but I doubt that Alexander Bell was thinking of how to make his first million when he invented the telephone.

Of course, a world without money would also mean that a lot of the work we already do stops needing to be done. In a world without money the entire industries of banking and finance will become redundant. The jobs that will remain, and will be reinforced, would be ones that hold social utility the things that are necessary for survival and that make life worth living.

Work on those things will be voluntary, people will be motivated by a sense of responsibility towards themselves and society. Work will also be structured in a more democratic way as opposed to our current corporate structures. We could elect our bosses and decide as a group where wour companies should go and what they should do, those who have proven their skills and abilities will have a greater impact. Since we won’t have to worry about competition, we can collaborate with other organizations and help drive innovation and efficiency through best practice. Work will be grouped through organizations on a regional, industry, and national level to help meet our needs.

So a world without money doesn’t mean that no one will do work. It would just mean that why we do work and how its structured will change. It would mean that the underlying social causes of why work exists in the first place, will rise to the surface.

A world without money also wouldn’t mean anarchy. Our idea of anarchy, that everything will just fall apart without money is actually based on the core theory of economics, that we all function to maximize self-interest and therefore we need something like money to keep a lid on things, to keep us controlled and civil.

But is this a fair assessment of human nature? Or are our current trends of self-serving maximization a result of money and the economy? If we had no need for money would we all be looking to hoard wealth or would we be looking for ways to develop ourselves and society? None of look at ourselves as the greedy hoarding type, so why are we quick to cast that judgment onto others?

Well that fear comes from the fact that we live in the world with a scarcity of resources, here the idea of competition comes back in fueling this fear. But if we know anything about the world we live in today, it is that not much IS scarce. In the west, we have the ability to produce food at levels well beyond what we need, factory farming and advances in harvesting see us overproducing and dumping goods on the “free market”. In England alone, there are more than 600,000 empty houses, and automation has meant there is less and less work to be done as machines not only do it for us, but do it 10 times better.

If we have reached these levels of advancement, removing money from the equation means that most of us will get to enjoy life and find some other way to contribute to society besides being part of a system that overproduces.

As for the things that are scarce, well we can learn how to manage them democratically, we might all want lamborghinis but we know that that’s unrealistic and wasteful. Here, we can use the power of democracy to where those resources should go and how.

But to get to decide on what to do with our resources we need to technically own them, they need to be held in commons. Only then will we truly be the sole owners and decision makers on what we do with them.

If we owned our resource sin commons, we can liberate the government from its current balancing act and its role will become to assess, identify, and meet our needs. It will become to help organize us into the work groups and companies we just discussed.

Through these systems we can push for innovation to continuously improve our quality of life — if we’re the ones doing the work, I’m sure we’d all want to do less of it. And since technology will also be held under commons, we would continuously be able to improved it and apply in greater and more beneficial ways instead of having it hoarded with copyrights and “trade secrets”.

Common ownership may sound like a foreign concept but it’s already a part of our colloquialism. Think of community gardens, and solar panels. We think of these as ways to be more “self-sustaining”, but really it’s also a way to take control away from large, centralised, and private organizations. It’s a way that allows us to own our resources.

Communal ownership has also been successfully implemented, and on a much larger scale in France, Spain, Italy, and Mexico; where entire industries were run under commons from farming to manufacturing.

These experiences have taught us a lot about how to self organize, and more importantly how to make sure that power is not abused by leaning on the principles of democracy to their full extent. Ideas ranging from industrial syndicates, to any and all elected representatives being subject to immediate recall. All ideas that have worked and helped found egalitarian societies around the world.

The outstanding question then becomes, how would this world without money come around? Some think it can only be brought about through revolution. Others think that it should be brought around by the government slowly buying up stocks in private organizations, also known as nationalising. Others think it will happen by strengthening employee unions and creating workers cooperatives. The ideas and real life examples of moneyless societies are as diverse as our current theories on the world with money. Yet somehow they are continuously dismissed, even as it becomes more apparent that we need to reassess our relationship with money as automation and technology replaces the need for a human workforce.

But even if automation wasn’t happening, wouldn’t a world without money be an idea worth entertaining to get rid of the extremes that a world with money creates? A world that has convinced us that we need to be controlled, that we need something external to us to drive us and keep us civil?

Don’t we deserve to see ourselves as something more? To see ourselves in a world where we can be unleashed and empowered to give into society based on our natural abilities and take from it based on our needs?

I think we do, and I think we owe it to ourselves to explore these ideas with a bit more seriousness. Our future just may depend on it.