One of the primary challenges in starting a technosocialist society is the difficulty in trade between technosocialist and non-technosocialist societies. While trade between a society based on the dollar and a society based on the yen only requires a currency exchange to enable trade, it is far more difficult when one side uses currency and the other does not. I’m not sure that I have a perfect answer for this, but there are a couple of possibilities that might work.
The challange is not so much how goods could move from one society to the other, since bartering would likely work, but how Contribution and Consumption could be determined when an item is being sold beyond the Market to the outside world. And much as I hate to admit it, I think this might be the one case in a technosocialist society in which merchants, those who buy and sell for a profit, would be needed. In the essay on profit, I mentioned the example of merchants in historical times bringing products from the far east to Europe, and even if they weren’t producing anything temselves, that function of a bridge between two otherwise unconnected markets was a useful one. To that end, people who wish to act as merchants should have the ability to purchase things through the Market, barter or sell them in the outside economy, purchase outside goods, and offer them up in the Market for Contribution credit. In the case of a small technosocialist society nested within a larger Capitalist one, this would enable the technosocialist society to obtain goods that it could not produce for itself, and in the case of a larger technosocialist nation, it would enable the society to obtain natural resources it might lack in its own territory.
One restriction that would be very important in this sort of arrangement is that while the importation of outside goods should be allowed, and at times even encouraged, the importation of any outside currency must be strictly prohibited. We’ve talked before about the importance of stifling the formation of a black market, and an important part of that is the lack of a currency for a black market to trade in. The key to establishing a currency that people trust is having its value guarenteed somehow. Either by gold, or wheat, or another commodity, or by a government. On their own, black marketeers would have little hope of establishing a currency system that people could put their faith in. For one thing, they would need to organize a mint, and a mint being run by criminals just isn’t fated to work very well. But if there is a currency coming in from the outside, backed by an outside government and an outside economy that gives that currency buying power, all of a sudden the black market has somewhere it can go with ill-gotten gains, and that significantly increases the incentive for crime in the technosocialist society. Current trends in Capitalist societies are largely moving away from physical currency in favor of various types of cash and charge cards, so this may not be a problem in the future, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.
Another import restriction that would be important to consider would be the labor and environmental conditions involved in the production of imported goods. It is important for a society to be able to set its own moral standards for the treatment of workers and the environmental impact of its consumption, and any environmental restrictions that apply to goods produced inside the society should also be applied to imports coming in. Merchants should be required to verify that the goods they’re bringing in have been produced in a safe and environmentally clean manner. The exact process of this verification should be left to the society itself, as should the nature of the standards. But the equality in standards between imported and domesticly produced goods is important to avoid an influx of toxic goods from the outside from flooding the market and driving individual producers within society out of business.
Similarly, outside products must be held to the same standards for durability, safety, and general quality as domestic products. Because the actual manufactorers of the goods are not members of the technosocialist society, the responsibility for their safety and quality falls on the merchant who imported them. As with domestic goods, all mass-produced items must be tested for and labeled with an expected use life, and if they fail within that time period they must be replaced at the merchant’s cost.
When it comes to trade between two technosocialist societies, the answer is simple: there can be no such thing as two technosocialist societies. There can be different cities, different regions, but for the sake of efficiency of scale and accuracy of the Market, all technosocialist communities across the world must be connected. Other than the logistics of shipping between regions, there is no reason that it should not be as simple for Fred to send one of his hats to a customer across the country as it is to send it to a customer across the street. The centralization of the Market should, as the internet is beginning to, equalize prices and availablility of goods across the country and even the world.
These measuers might sound at first like protectionism, but they really aren’t. They are simply ensuring a level playing field for all products. If there were exceptions to our modern American labor laws for companies with an ‘e’ in their name, there would be public outcry. Exempting foreign imports from those same laws is not fundimentally different, and still must be avoided. Ideally a technosocialist society would be self-sufficient, so that this sort of trade would not be necessary, but there are unavoidable advantages to global scale that simply can’t be reproduced in a developing community. Trade between technosocialist and capitalist societies must be possible to fill the lacunae in resources manufacturing capabilites of both societies, and the only way it can be done efficiently and democratically is to allow it on an individual level.