Given the stagnation of the global economy, depressing life of work and destruction of our ecosystems. It is hardly surprising that people are starting to question the core assumptions of our civilisation. One such thing that is coming under increasing attack in the concept of money. It’s not difficult to see why, but it’s a very easy criticism to dismiss, after all, without money, why would anyone go to work?

Pollution, poverty and depression. It’s a not so beautiful world we live in. Credit to Wikipedia.

Firstly, mainstream psychologists and businessmen don’t even believe money is the best way to get people to work. Hundreds of articles, manifestos, videos, lectures and books have all been written explaining the various reasons why money and incentive plans fail at delivering results. In almost every study done on the subject, people demonstrate far more creativity, ability to innovate and critical thinking skills when they’re not being paid.

But the core issue I have with these people is that they argue money is still necessary for ‘boring’ work and thus a necessary incentive in certain situations. If we look at the Kibbutz, we know that’s simply not true.

Kibbutz have around 100,000 people (about 1% of the population) spread across 270 Kibbutzim, with the populations of individual Kibbutzim going up to 2000. Despite this, Kibbutz produce about 9% of Israeli manufacturing, and 40% of Israeli agriculture.

Kibbutz are also becoming centers for advanced and sustainable technology. The average Kibbutz worker also puts in more hours of work than the average Israeli worker. So what’s their secret to high productivity and innovation?

Kibbutz viewed from the air. Credit to Shalom Israel Tours.

Well, there are four reasons.

1) Selfishness

2) Altruism

3) Satisfaction

4) Recognition

(Note: These are all according to Melford Spiro, an anthropologist who studied Kibbutz. Unfortunately, I cannot find his work online.)

Selfishness is fairly basic, in the Kibbutz, people often understood how their work was connected to their standard of living. That they needed to work to ensure they’d maintain their high living standards. To quote Peter Gelderloos on the squatter community in Barcelona:

‘To a large extent, work and exchange have been abolished from these people’s lives, whose networks run into the thousands. Many do not have waged jobs, or they work only seasonally or sporadically, as they do not need to pay rent. For example the author of this book, who has lived within this network for two years, has survived for much of that time on less than one euro a day. Moreover, the great amount of activity they carry out within the autonomous movement is completely unwaged. But they do not need wages: they work for themselves. They occupy abandoned buildings left to rot by speculators, as a protest against gentrification and as anti-capitalist direct action to provide themselves with housing. Teaching themselves the skills they need along the way, they fix up their new houses, cleaning, patching roofs, installing windows, toilets, showers, light, kitchens, and anything else they need. They often pirate electricity, water, and internet, and much of their food comes from dumpster-diving, stealing, and squatted gardens.

In the total absence of wages or managers, they carry on a great deal of work, but at their own pace and logic. The logic is one of mutual aid. Besides fixing up their own houses, they also direct their energies towards working for their neighborhoods and enriching their communities. They provide for many of their collective needs besides housing. Some social centers host bicycle repair workshops, enabling people to repair or build their own bicycles, using old parts. Others offer carpentry workshops, self-defense and yoga workshops, natural healing workshops, libraries, gardens, communal meals, art and theater groups, language classes, alternative media and counterinformation, music shows, movies, computer labs where people can use the internet and learn email security or host their own websites, and solidarity events to deal with the inevitable repression. Nearly all of these services are provided absolutely free. There is no exchange — one group organizes to provide a service to everyone, and the entire social network benefits.’

Altruism is the understanding that your friends, family and even total strangers might go without if you don’t work. The very basic human impulse of empathy can drive work. If you think about it from the point of view of evolution, we’re just trying to spread our genes to another generation and get enough energy (food) in the process. Sometimes its better to work in groups than act on our own, and humans (along with ants, octopus and baboons) know that really, really big groups can be the best.

Satisfaction is the basic joy in certain kinds of work, like gardening, cooking, crafting or cleaning. In the words of urban planner Colin Ward:

‘The novelist Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on “incentives” in industry. He remarked that “Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.”

But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging in his garden because there he is free from foremen, managers and bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the same thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to himself and not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and not because he has to. He is doing his own thing. He is his own man.’

Also, in the words of Peter Gelderloos about environmentalist communities in Europe (especially Spain and Italy):

‘ There was plenty of work to do, and some days it was exhausting, but you invented the curious tendency to do it willingly and happily. You could sit around all day if you wanted — if you were feeling sick or low it was encouraged — but before too long you felt moved to get up and participate in an act of creation. There was no separation between work and leisure, and the pace of activity, whether resting or working, was relaxed and self-guided. Certain days brought a burst of energy to finish some project, and those involved worked fast and hard, but the next day would happen to be a rainy day and we would do nothing but talk and cook or nap under warm blankets. There was no system of inducements, no rewards and punishments, and if you had a problem working with someone else you talked about it as a group, argued a little, laughed and resolved it. Or, I heard, personal dramas would grow and deepen, and maybe they would go away in time, or maybe somebody would leave. This wasn’t paradise. Some of the folks in the collective got sick of one another, and they often had to work hard to communicate well or find common ground. But it was great to see in practice how people need no wage or fear of punishment as long as they are living for themselves, not working for someone else.’

This all seems to line up well with self-determination theory, a perspective in psychology which says that motivation is based on autonomy, community and skills (the desire to be good at something).

Recognition is just the feeling of pride you get from your peers when they know that you have done something. If you’re the person who cooks lovely meals, or makes really cool chairs or can do great art then other people can recognise and praise you for this. If you’ve ever tried to impress your friends by showing them a cool trick, then you understand this motivation.

In light of all this, a critic might say that these are just examples of small-scale societies, and couldn’t work in a community with more than a million people. But this is equally nonsense, plenty of thriving civilisations have existed without money. The Iroquois, Catal Huyuk, Cucuteni-Trypillia, Pueblos, Hopi and many more. These groups are notable, as Catal Huyuk is likely the world’s first city, and the Cucuteni-Trypillians built the largest cities in the world for their time, and are likely candidates for inventors of the wheel and complex structures. Even in a world where a history of violence has forced everyone to use money, we still see moneyless communities forming on the internet, even by people who believe money is necessary to exist.

Digital reconstruction of the Cucuteni-Trypillia. Credit to Wikipedia.

Screenshot from ‘nexusmods’, a popular online video game modding community, where users freely distribute files to other players they don’t even know, often pouring hours into their work for no pay.

The surprising twist here is that money doesn’t make us more productive and creative, but it’s holding us back from reaching our full potential as civilisation. You might be tempted to launch the criticism that if money isn’t the best system for working, then why does it exist? My answer: It’s a tool of power.

Of course, this doesn’t automatically make a civilisation with no money possible. You still have to deal with problems like The Tragedy of the Commons or the Economic Calculation Problem. Not to mention the massive political changes that would be required to create this kind of economy being nearly impossible. However, it is always worth challenging our core assumptions about what drives people and how society works.