What if money didn't exist?

Not a bee

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What if money, currency, and everything related with finances and their concepts straight up didn't exist? Would we function as a society or even have a society?
 
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I feel at some point that you inevitably fall into some sort of exchange system for the simple fact that nobody wants to work for free. Maybe a tribal village where community is valued above all else can function on the logic of "for the good of the tribe", but any sort of broader society or interaction requires people to exchange their goods and services for something, ergo the barter system, which can then be standardized, which then leads to a currency system of some sort.

Of course, currency isn't a necessity for functional society. Egypt didn't have a currency system until the 7th-6th century BC, relying mainly on barter or local, non-centralized things like exchange of non currency precious metals. This only really became a...
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I feel at some point that you inevitably fall into some sort of exchange system for the simple fact that nobody wants to work for free. Maybe a tribal village where community is valued above all else can function on the logic of "for the good of the tribe", but any sort of broader society or interaction requires people to exchange their goods and services for something, ergo the barter system, which can then be standardized, which then leads to a currency system of some sort.

Of course, currency isn't a necessity for functional society. Egypt didn't have a currency system until the 7th-6th century BC, relying mainly on barter or local, non-centralized things like exchange of non currency precious metals. This only really became a bigger deal as the world got better connected, and people wanted an easier way to exchange value with each other than broken off bits of precious metals or bartering.
 
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I think the fact that I have seen several groups of anarcho communists independently invent tokens to represent work because too many people were mooching off the people who were actually doing stuff points towards money being inevitable.

To answer your question, trade was happening before money existed in bartering systems. I have no idea if our technological society would exist without currency, but if I had to guess I'd say no.
 
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Money can be thought as a practical tool for exchanging goods/services, it's such a basic concept that in the extremely unlikely hypothetical of a "society" without money (like there's some magic that prevents humans from conceiving the notion of it), directly trading stuff would be the norm.

Maybe it would develop into having a material such as gold, to be used as a trading tool (so like money, but technically not because it's a good you're exchanging), so if you give me 3 cows, I'll give you 10 chickens, or maybe I can give you 1 gold-coin instead.

That sounds like money, but it would be more like bartering in this scenario.
 
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Without money or any financial concepts, society would need to rely on barter and communal sharing to distribute resources. This would likely lead to small, close-knit communities where trust and reciprocity are paramount. Large-scale projects and complex economies would be challenging to manage, limiting technological and infrastructural development.
 
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You don't need money in a society where everyone is a slave to the king. Of course, you probably won't get much past the Bronze Age, either.
 
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