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Divide & Conquer
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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The ultimate answer is to eliminate money and wage labor entirely in favor of a gift economy, as practiced in parts of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, and depicted in The Dispossessed.
That would also mean all of us would only need to work about 2 to 3 months out of the year to maintain the base needs of everyone, with the rest of the year being free time to do with as you please. The lack of profit motive would also set us up to stop the progression of climate change before it destroys humanity and most other life on earth.
Gift economies favor the rich, because the are the ones who can gift the most. A gift economy obscures the power and transactions. It replaces direct transactions with indirect ones. Money makes it transparent, flexible, and decoupled.
In a gift economy you depend on the goodwill of the rich. Meaning you have far stricter social control and restrictions on your behavior.
A gift economy also doesn’t favor redistribution in practice. You have to stay in the good graces with the rich in order to survive. That means you have to gift your best gifts to the rich to curry favor.
A gift economy encourages strong social bonds. However that means neurodivergent people, and people with below average social skills, will be disadvantaged. Narcissistic sociopaths will be more empowered than even now.
Humans are social animals. There will always be desirable and rare things. People also want to improve their living conditions. Even without money, this will remain the same.
I agree. It’s going to be a lot more personal favor and nepotism. People skills and social capital are going to dominate society. Sounds like hell.
There are other ways to do this
It fits more with a more traditional family, clan, feudal, and religion based system than contemporary individualism. That’s not inherently bad, but a huge difference.
Gift giving would be formalized, ritualized, and kept track off. For example Turkish people tend to have big marriage parties with hundreds of guests. The gifts given to the couple are carefully documented and tracked by the family. Depending on the value of the gift you and your family will receive favors, opportunities, or not be invited to the cousin‘s upcoming wedding, leading to social exclusion.
A gift economy is an economy based on favors and bribes.
Japanese culture might potentially be a good fit for this type of society. Complex manners and etiquette, prioritize group over the individual, favor of conformity and hierarchy, value specialized skills highly, also high honesty and honor.
There would be no rich in a fully libertarian socialist society, as it would be extremely difficult to accumulate wealth when there is no exploitative power over others, and where anything that isn't able to be created by an individual can only be created in a voluntary worker cooperative where everyone benefits equally.
If all basic needs are freely lent out in a library economy, and everyone participating in the 2 to 3 months of yearly work equally benefitted from it in the form of free housing, food, healthcare - and public transportation and private property is abolished (distinct from personal property), then there would be virtually no avenues for an individual to accumulate enough personal property to wield any sort of substantive power over others.
difference between private and personal property
Personal property is classified as what an individual person or family can actively use themselves.
If you begin hoarding more than you or your family can realistically use, the excess is no longer considered personal property, but private property, which may get you ejected from that community if you actively hoard under a libertarian socialist society and you refuse to stop.
Quoting someone else:
With the elimination of private property, and basic needs a human right, that would leave the gift economy on top of that, which would realistically be limited to just what individuals can create and share amongst themselves.
Also @dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone
Libertarian socialist?
Either you're describing anarchism with new words or you've got some really weird views.
Like libraries are a clear no-no under libertarian ideology because it "perturbs the market". If access to something is free then you destroy competition which "breeds innovation" or some shit....
I've just never heard of a libertarian library.... It's so antithetical to the concept!
It's not new, I assure you. Libertarian Socialist is label that goes back to 1872. It's often synonymous with Anarchism, which I do consider myself to be, but I sometimes use Libertarian-Socialist since it doesn't immediately bring to mind the concept of chaos or bomb throwing that people unfamiliar with Anarchism may attribute to it.
Libertarian alone also used to refer to left-wing anarchist types, but the term was co-opted by right-wing free-market ancap type folks a while back. I'm just doing my part to reclaim it :)
I had noticed the tension between right and left wing libertarian concepts. Very interesting stuff. I suspect on Lemmy anarchist or anarchosocialist will get more love than libertarian-socialist. But that's an interesting name to use in public because it invites questions rather than fear of ANARCHY!