Are there any large scale examples of this actually working? It seems like, in practice, there are too many bad actors for it to actually play out like you're describing.
Mind you, capitalism certainly has it's issues, too... but it seems to better limit the negatives than every "share everything utopia" I've read about beyond tight knit groups of friends/family. Every single large scale example of what you describe seems to end in "and then it all burned to the ground", more or less.
Of course it's possible, it existed before capitalism and had tons of mutual aid and resilience. It's called "subsistence farming". Without surplus extraction + capital accumulation, it was always stuck at low equilibrium where everyone is poor. See e.g. [1] Also as a side note I don't discuss here, anyone quick enough to band together and abuse the mutual-aiding community was easily able to do so, hence feudalism, or e.g. cartels in our times.
In fact they observe it even in existing cultures where strong kin institutions prevent saving, both via "mutual aid" itself, but also cultural expectation of mutual aid creating an incentive to spend ASAP - cause if you don't, your family/friends/... are going to ask you for money. Meaning again everyone ends up poorer. Breaking kin institutions and "mutual aid" is one of the keys to actually improving QoL for most people [2]
you've just described a communist utopia. I think we can all agree that this wonderful pipe dream has not been proven to work at scale in practice. Theoretically it's a great idea of course, which is why a quarter of the world tried it.
No it doesn't. I'm not pro socialism, communism, nor capitalism (as defined today). However, we can have proper societies with great standards of living, while having extremely rich people (i.e. billionaires). It's been done in the past, and no reason why it can't be replicated other than people not wanting to address the true underlying causes of the messed up financial system we live in today.
Oh, your enemy is capitalism. But who is your friend? Well, ideally we could find a friend, could run experiments, big and small, and gather data about alternative ways to organize society. What works? What doesn't? And also, of course, we need to pay attention to the outcomes, both good and bad (something Americans in particular are very bad at).
Insofar as capitalism tends to squash such experiments, because it feels threatened, yes, that is evil. But the good news is that few people would do that for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that they (we?) believe that capitalism is pretty damn good at organizing society, all things being equal, and it's hard to feel threatened by such an experiment. However, given the revolution in technology, particularly with smartphones, all kinds of possibilities open up which have not been explored. Such experiments tend to need champions, capitalists with a magnanimous (or curious) bent that can carve out a space to run, fund, and protect these experiments from predators. Such experiments would be like startups, but with a different success criteria (not just "eventual profitability") and a more comprehensive set of behaviors for the participants (not just "find product/market fit").
It may be time for another round of utopian experiments, but this time supercharged with knowledge of those failures, and adding ~50 years of new knowledge about psychology, society and science. What sorts of minds could arise in these unusual places? Optimistically, in the worst case you'd raise a generation of unique minds that, with any luck, would be highly sought after in the wider society, such that even in the event of failure the participants would be okay. And if they succeed, they can spread and grow, and gradually replace components of capitalist society. (Success is when the real danger starts, of course, because it goes from curiosity to threat.)
I just hope you don't give up on your dreams. If undermining capitalism is what you want, you have to play the cards you're dealt. Capitalism is ascendant, although it is showing tremendous weakness WRT wealth concentration. The world is the way it is, so pick a path that uses what you have. Good luck!
Is that happening at any scale though? Theoretically capitalism would do exactly as described but we are not operating in a purely capitalistic society by any margin
I genuinely want to believe that these are alternatives to the shotfalls of capitalism, but I find the evidence pretty sparse. When you say this, what is the best example you are thinking of that makes you believe it can work? I'm not asking you to do research for me, but I am curious if others have clear examples in mind when they suggest these.
Every country that has tried this has failed miserably. It can be extremely hard even on a small scale.
The only thing coming close is Social Democracy. But in Social Democracy there is usually lots of capitalism going on. Sometimes with highly perverse incentives, if the markets has been altered in a ham-fisted way.
In conclusion, the track record for socialized production is not stellar. Far from it.
The way it works is called communism: you put a small cabal of people in charge of deciding what you can and can't do. Everyone gets whatever amount of land the ruling cabal says they get, rather than being able to get an amount proportional to their wealth.
Unfortunately, we all know what happens when you put groups of self-interested humans in charge of a society, and I don't think any group of completely altruistic ones is going to take over the world any time soon.
Also, the only successful communist country currently in existence is actually a hardcore capitalist dystopia.
I'm not sure there is any other "common ownership of land" scheme that isn't just communism with window dressing or superintelligent AI thrown in. If there is, please do enlighten me.
You are right, but this would only be possible in a truly capitalistic society. We are much more socialist as a world than capitalist, as thats what maintains the elite's power, so right now what you say is just too utopian from any current perspective.
People haven't done it recently because it simply doesn't work for many of the same reasons that nonmarket socialism doesn't work.
You inevitably have people with notions that everyone should work as hard as they can and only be paid based on need. Claims that its an extended family. Everyone belongs to each other, yada yada yada.
It gets real twisted real quick, and the only people to benefit are those that lie at everyone elses expense. The ones that are exploited the most are the ones that produce the most, so it drives any kind of efficiencies out of the business. There's no incentive to do anything productive, and you get the same inefficiencies of bureaucracy and corruption with negative production value. Those that are better get socially punished for being better and making everyone else look bad.
You also can't have that dynamic when you are using other people's money (investors) unless you want to lose everything.
Yes, what you describe sounds similar to what I'm starting to see everywhere too. Join me in moving to Open/Protocol Cooperativism (vs. today's Platform Capitalism), and Commons based peer production.
The real matrix over our eyes is mis-judging 'money' as a neutral protocol - when it is in fact a proprietary protocol that steers every part of our lives and is aimed at extracting a rent. [1][2]
The big question is - maybe we should really move away from capitalism, to something like communism, but more like crazy utopic communism, where everyone is CEO? So such kind of problems wouldn't really happen? How do you think, could it help?
We have room for worker owned cooperatives and decentralized social networks already.
A world where profit is not the motive, honestly sounds great to me, but it’s not a real counterfactual unless someone explains how it would work.
Without such an explanation it’s like talking about a world where nobody needs to eat. You can imagine it would be good, and somehow possible in some sci-fi future, but there are no actual examples.
Agreed, but even modest fungibility of wealth and power (which happens almost by definition) makes any such solution fragile.
The technological approach is more interesting to me. If you can make distributed manufacturing efficient enough that a single person or group of people can own the capital needed to sustain themselves, you place a lower limit on the extent to which market-based social contract regression can harm a population. Alternatively, from the capitalist angle: companies that directly trade goods for labor are in a unique position to profit from a glut of labor that is not competitive on the global market.
This isn't a new idea. We call them communes. They have a well deserved reputation for being a shitshow. Probably because what they're trying to do -- boil a globe-spanning sprawl of infrastructure and trade down to an acceptable MVP -- is really, really hard. Unlike the world economy, though, that difficulty is a function of technology, rather than politics. Technology improves over time. Politics does not. Which means there's probably going to be a crossing point. I haven't the faintest clue when. I do my (tiny) part by contributing to "industrial" open source projects (mechanical and electrical modeling and simulation), which sorely need any attention they can get, regardless the underlying philosophy.
Mind you, capitalism certainly has it's issues, too... but it seems to better limit the negatives than every "share everything utopia" I've read about beyond tight knit groups of friends/family. Every single large scale example of what you describe seems to end in "and then it all burned to the ground", more or less.
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