Too many br*nds at the grocery store, I can’t decide, why do we need 14 br*nds of laundry detergent? Destroying br*nds is essential for the revolution.
There will be one br*nd of soup. One br*nd of soap. One br*nd of orange juice.
Lenin’s Own Orange Juice. A man we can trust.
As a not artistic person, there should be a way to contract out. Like if I want a nice shirt with a dinosaur on it but I can’t draw dinosaurs, there will be some system (whether informal or not) where I get somebody else to do that, possibly in exchange for something else but not coercive.
David Graebaer describes pre-monetary societies as relying on intersecting systems of interpersonal small debt (w/ no concept of interest or dividends) and communalism. Exchange and debt are perfectly natural forms of human interaction, even within a potential communist society. It is the profit motive and inherent coercion within a capitalist system that turns debt and exchange unjust.
The rule was you always gave back in gifts/services slightly more than you got in the first place. That way the debt and obligation was always there between people. To pay back in full was essentially saying “I dont want to see you or have you in my life anymore.” You probably practice this in your daily life with your friends or significant others even if you dont realize it. Its the default social relation and the one we “grew up” in so to speak as a species.
For a problem like this, I thought an ELO system would do wonderfully. People pursuing some kind of art degree could take random orders from customers and get rated for their performance based on their ability to use the skills they’ve been taught, how well they satisfy the customer, and their own creative flair. Artists who excel get to be in museums, attend functions, earn the degree, and get a bunch of cosmetic/prestige perks that they can flaunt. They don’t need to get paid because there’s an audience for ELO systems surely as there’s an audience for League of Legends. Maybe a perk of working full time as an engineer is priority on artistic orders.
Things like this that are predicated on somebody who does nothing being guaranteed a roof over their head, food in their belly, and a doctor to look at their illnesses are what I envision. Then you get a dignified entrance into the labor pool filled with quality of life upgrades for doing the bare fucking minimum and cosmetic/prestige perks for going above and beyond.
