this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I'm not pro-capitalism but I'm curious what flavor of replacement you would choose.
Socialism. When properly implemented, it has a fair amount in common with capitalism but you keep what you earn, the disabled aren't left to die, and billionaires aren't an option.
The only one of these I can see socialism eliminating is unemployment. You can easily have dictators and wars with socialism.
Socialism contains within it pressures against war and dictatorship, while Capitalism contains within it pressures towards war and dictatorship. Socialism alone wouldn't outright eliminate dictators and war, but would go a very long way towards eliminating them over time.
DAE ReAl SoCiAlIsM.
Much like how capitalism is judged by it's results and not it's intentions we've had enough socialist experiments to know that it's the people that are the problem not the system we use to organize them.
I think every ideology that wants a fighting chance of working requires excellent checks and balances. Globalization had made this particularly hard though.
Super capitalism. It's like capitalism, but superer.
Let's try Universal Basic Income with proportional representation and lobbying made illegal.
How about capitalism with the appropriate government controls? Break up monopolies and all anti-competitive practices. Use regulations to actually punish violators (and not with some small fraction of profits gained from that violation). Increasing tax rates for the super wealthy with the right tax shelter penetrating laws.
Sprinkle in some appropriate social policies and safety nets.
Capitalism inherently violates a basic tenet of justice. For example, consider a bus vehicle company, the employer owns 100% of the produced buses and owes 100% of liabilities for used-up inputs. The employer is solely legally responsible for the whole result of production. Workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce buses. The basic tenet of justice is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. There is clearly a mismatch here in capitalism @memes
Wait, so you're saying the bus drivers should be responsible for maintenance of the bus they drive, and own it, and the company should just take a cut? So, uber but for busses?
I was describing a company to produce buses i.e. the actual vehicle. Not for driving buses. The alternative to what I describe as the problem with capitalism is to structure all firms as worker cooperatives. In a worker cooperative, the basic tenet of justice is satisfied i.e. legal and de facto responsibility match @memes
Like southwest airlines?
No. Sole proprietorships are not Socialist. A more accurate outlook would be a given city's bus drivers all sharing ownership of the busses, along with the other workers at the bus driving firm like the maintenance employees and coordinators. That industry itself would be collectively owned by the Workers, not at an individual level.
The distinction would be rather than a dictatorial Capitalist owning the firm, the Workers would share ownership of the firm equally.
I prefer Georgist economic democracy.
@memes
How are dynamics of violence and power handled? Within such systems I'm always worried about elites, coercion, consolidation. How are binding decisions made, and how do we prevent those powers from bringing about the things mentioned previously?
Worker coops are firms that are democratically worker-controlled. Communes are democratic also.
Unemployment would be less worrying due to the UBI. Worker coops are committed to their workers so have incentives to train them. Also, worker coops prefer to reduce pay during downturns rather than employment.
Trade policy between communes would be set by free agreement. Quadratic funding helps resolve collective action problems such as for defense. Power concentration is severely limited @memes
Hmmm, I see. I guess I'm asking about the nonlegal basis of law, or the non-normative basis of norms. Is there good contemporary research about the social dynamics of this at scale? I remember Lenin writing about commune clusters, and there's mention of scaling in Das Kapital volume one.
It was a good question. I am limited in response length because I am on Mastodon.
In terms of social dynamics of a stateless society, The Possibility of Cooperation by the game theorist Michael Taylor uses game theory to argue against the Hobbesian case for the state. Radical Markets by E. Glen Weyl covers how to do common ownership with minimal administration @memes
Thank you for the sources! I'll take a look eventually. Since both sources seem to interface with rational choice theory, there's probably a cool post-Homansian social network analysis angle that can be explored. I.e. how the weights & pathways of available choices can be modulated by the types of ties between people. I guess I'd expect entity-level decisions to be shaped by emergent structures, regardless of what their initial state was. So, a co-op could become something else entirely over time, regardless of what it says on the can. It's super neat that my Marxist thought is exploring these areas as well (sorry for the label!).
@jlou
A different thread: why only worker co-ops, and not also other sorts of co-ops?
I do wonder if, in order to encourage innovation, it's a good idea to allow non-coops in limited forms.
For example (and feel free to adjust these numbers), you can start a business and employ people but as soon as you pass €1 million revenue or 5 employees (whichever is first) then it has to become a co-op.
The existence of UBI, UBS and an economy that's majority co-ops should limit exploitation.
@memes
@jlou Can you expand on number 3? Distributing resources and/or capital for investment is the part of economic democracy for which I've never quite seen a good solution.
I've read Schweickart, Dahl, Olin Wright and Hahnel and none of their proposed systems are that great IMHO.
@memes
Based on ideas of Dmytri Kleiner and Glen Weyl. The commune's members lease all their capital from the commune. This is structured for minimal administration from the commune. Each member coop self-assesses a price for their capital. They pay a recurring fee on that price. The member is required to transfer the capital to anyone that pays the self-assessed price. With the right percentage, the incentives to over-assess and under-assess cancel out. The fee can be used to invest in coops @memes
Socialism. Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Society run and owned by the Proletariat, for the good of the people, not profits for megacorps and large Capitalists.
The fact that this is downvoted tells me that American propaganda is still going strong.
I think it's also a symptom of Solarpunk not being explicitly anticapitalist, it's an aesthetic and a goal that liberals can appreciate as they see climate change accelerating, but haven't done the analysis necessary to agree that Capitalism is one of the largest underlying causes of climate change.
Anti-capitalism ≠ socialism @memes
We've had this discussion before. While technically correct, what you describe as what you want would best be described as Market Socialism, you just prefer to take on the mantle of Liberal for what I perceive as optic reasons.
The majority of anticapitalism is Socialist in nature, though you'll probably still find mercantilists or monarchists somewhere.
When people think of socialism they think of central planning in an authoritarian government, this has nothing to do with economic democracy and is its opposite.
I prefer the term economic democracy for the system I advocate.
It's not just optics. The arguments for economic democracy are based on the liberal theory of inalienable rights. These arguments demonstrate that capitalism is illiberal and violates liberal principles @memes
Socialism only means Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. This does not necessarily entail Authoritarianism or central planning, and central planning itself doesn't even entail Authoritarianism by necessity.
An economy can be democratically run via worker councils, which would constitute both central planning and economic democracy.
Essentially, you're just arguing off of vibes. You even said it yourself, "when people think," implying optic reasoning.
As for the mantle of liberal, you're using it to refer to philosophy, rather than its far more common usage as ideology. Using your own methods against your claim, when people think of liberalism, they know and understand liberalism the socioeconomic ideology surrounding Capitalism and individualism!
That's why I perceive your verbiage as optics, rather than anything of substance. In my view, you're a Socialist that rejects the term but accepts the model.
I know how leftists define it, but when communicating with non-leftists, it doesn't help in understanding the economic democracy position.
The strongest critique of a system is that the ideology used to justify it, after mapping out its logical implications, is actually opposed to it @memes
So it's optics, then. I'm not sure why you're trying to convince leftists like myself of this, if your goal is to convince right wingers to become leftists.
I want to convince leftists that there is no benefit to pro-market anti-capitalists referring to themselves as socialist. It is an unnecessary association that only comes with downsides @memes
There absolutely is benefit, though. First of all, I'm anti-market anyways, the profit motive is terrible and needs to be done away with, so that's my internal bias.
With my bias out of the way, Market Socialists gain a lot by stating they are Socialists because that very idea seems foreign to Liberals. If they hear Socialism and think mega-communism 100 gorgonzillian dead, then hear markets attached to that, that very term challenges and destabilizes their preconceived notions.
Why is the profit motive terrible in your view? What should we replace the profit motive with?
What is the benefit to pro-market anti-capitalists to challenging that particular preconceived notion? It creates an unnecessary roadblock when pro-market anti-capitalists can just describe themselves as radically democratic liberals, who want to extend democracy into the workplace @memes
Incentivizing profit instead of outcome results in power imbalances and enshittification. What was once disruption becomes scientifically engineered to extract as much money from the users as possible.
The only way incentives based on outcome work is when people produce directly for their own use. For cases where people produce for others, the profit motive helps coordinate people to produce. Power imbalances can be avoided by collectivizing means of production across multiple coops.
Enshittification requires IP monopolies. Economic democracy shouldn't have IP monopolies. Instead, it should secure software freedom. Digital public goods should be funded through quadratic funding @memes
Citation needed. Profit doesn't incentivize working for others, it incentivizes extraction from others. There's still a power imbalance between customer and provider in a market.
Enshittification happens regardless of IP, it's a result of competition. Over time, people find new ways to extract more from their customers.
Whether there is a power imbalance between customer and provider is dependent on how competitive the market is. When providers have market power, consumers can form associations to collectively bargain down providers' prices.
Is there an enshittification example without IP?
Enshittification usually happens with monopolistic firms not competitive markets.
What would you replace markets with specifically?
Quadratic funding lets public goods be free. I can't see how it's extractive @memes
Yeah, we probably should have been working on that 50 years ago. Oh well