cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/13355449
Capitalism is a game where only a few people get to win.
We have also seen time and time again that it is a game that is able to manipulate and change whatever ideology or behaviour you have to work towards its own benefit.
So the only way to actually “win” is to not play the game.
Right now that seems impossible because it is a massive collective action problem, however this whole platform is a testament to show that it’s possible to overcome that kind of problem.
Reddit is a dominant platform that is starting to destroy itself. People are in turn finding alternatives such as Lemmy to satisfy the need that Reddit once did.
I view capitalism in the same way. It will never truly completely cease to exist (the same way Digg never truly died), but it can become irrelevant over time if we collectively decide to just use another system to satisfy the same needs that capitalism is satisfying today.
The one example that I can think of that tries to tackle this problem is the idea of free stores that are based on a gift economy. If more people decided to use this system instead of capitalism then capitalism will have less sway over people’s lives.
And in the end it doesn’t have to be specifically a free store that needs to be adopted by wider society but whatever it is does need to satisfy the same basic need that capitalism does in our current society.
So the only way to actually “win” is to not play the game.
Start an employee-owned socialist company and get to it! It’s been done before, somewhat successfully. So get on it!
Sadly you often need a lot of capital, a resource available largely to the wealthy.
Details matter, but there are low capital businesses. Ice cream and pizza shops as examples.
Also, this is a website with a lot of tech professionals. You can get together a few fellow professionals and set up a coop. Law offices are kinda like that with partners being owners. You can follow the partner model which is very bougieoise or you can include even your cleaning staff as coowners. It’s not like starting a factory
I’d probably need at least half a million to start a business in my industry (early childhood education).
Yeah that’s fair. I work in industrial settings so I’m in a similar boat. Historically when my folks obtain the means of production force is involved. You probably shouldn’t do that one either.
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A daycare, or something else?
We need more daycares, so I encourage you to challenge the idea of it costing so much up front.
Kinda a disparaging name for the industry, but close enough.
There’s a lot of things you’re required to have in my country to open one, for obvious safety and education reasons. Add to that exorbitant prices on renting a suitable site.
Kinda a disparaging name for the industry
I apologize. It was not my aim to insult.
I have been thinking of doing exactly this. Super intimidating though.
I keep getting hung up on which step to do first. Get customers, contracts for customers, advertising, or processes.
Try talking to small business incubators. They don’t need to know you’re planning to create a worker owned coop.
And remember, if you take on business debts in the beginning, so long as they’re well documented it’s ok to charge all that to the company as loans to you. I would gladly join a coop that pays its debts to its members
Isn’t the “company” part of what you mentioned still playing the game?
Capitalism isn’t “organizations involved in work” or even the idea of trading goods and services for others or currency.
Capitalism is the idea that there’s people who own the land, buildings, machines, and materials, hire labour, and pay them as little as they can convince them to work for while taking profit for just being the boss of that stuff.
Ok I agree with that definition, but the suggestion that you were making, at least how I interpreted it, was to start a socialist company to try and be successful within that same exploitative system which I think sort of misses the point of what I was trying to say.
You can’t not participate in capitalism from day 1. You start a company (or call it whatever), then someone else does the same. You trade with them. You build.
Unless you have an island with no government where you’d like to start fresh?
Exactly. And you can help fund fellow socialist companies. Sure maybe you’re a coop with low startup expenses, but if you put aside cash to help fund a factory that’s either part of your coop or a sibling coop that’s helping spread worker ownership
You start a company (or call it whatever), then someone else does the same. You trade with them. You build.
Expanded/extended mutual aid networks amidst non-profit/not-for-profit companies and worker coops might be really interesting. This reminds me to dig around some more for any histories on attempts of this nature to identify what issues emerged to try to address them.
One Free Community is full of like minded people doing a bit of this
It wasn’t my suggestion. And personally, I only think it would work at a small scale. If it gains momentum that makes some capitalists nervous, they’ll come down hard on it with the power of the state. And even before it gets to that point, other companies won’t likely play nice with you. You wouldn’t just be a competitor in their market, you’d be a competitor to their way of life.
If you start a company, you don’t have to maintain controlling ownership of it. You can also separate the proceeds from the decision making process. You can define a different manager/managee relationship where the managers aren’t mini dictators that just tell others what to do and make more money than any of them. You can allow employees to have more (or full!) control over their own schedules. It’s a bunch of partnerships working for mutual benefit instead of subordinates working for your benefit for the lowest you think you can pay them.
Not all models or definitions of Capitalism even follow that, go read Henry George. You can represent collective ownership of land through taxing the shit out of those that own it, and since it’s the one resource you can’t make more of its the best way to eliminate the landlord parasite problem because no one will own land they don’t intend to use to fulfill a use case. Supply for housing, for example, would even out as landlords start seeing holding unimproved land as a huge red check on their balance sheets. They would be incentivized to sell or build something that people need on said land.
Trickle down economics was a joke because the more wealthy people become, the more they want with that wealth, and the more they’re desires influence what the market creates. So we spend resources making diamond studded hand bags and mega yachts when the market wouldn’t even create those things if the richest among us (always land owners in the end) actually got taxed on the one thing they can’t tax dodge, land holdings.
The only way to move beyond capitalism is to find the source of free energy that will enable post-scarcity. Until then humans will continue to compete for resources.
Or move to circular economy and accept that GDP doesn’t measure prosperity. We already have free energy from the Sun.
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We may technically have enough food for everyone, but we don’t have teleporters.
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This is a commonly held belief and one that I had for most of my life. I don’t know what finally did it for me, but the book Trekonomics definitely gave me a push.
We are already post scarcity. Most energy use is just a complete waste.
Most of our energy is used wastefully in the pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet. We have enough energy to provide for every person. We do not have enough energy to provide for capital
This.
This is why investment in fusion is so important. For one thing all energy markets will become null and void. But secondly, the point where we have no more energy scarcity is a point when we finally have replicators.
I can taste the raktakino now.
free stores that are based on a gift economy.
How do those who gift the stores the free goods get those goods to gift?
Yeah it is through capitalism at the moment. My point is that it doesn’t have to be.
I was pointing out free stores as a model.
I’m inclined to agree but I worry about capitalism’s vampiric ability to co-opt things. Sort of like how any country that tries to do socialism gets attacked by the US or suffers a coup at some point. Capitalists are so greedy that they’ll see people having fun without them and try to take a piece for themselves somehow, or find a way to make the population dependent on capital. (Just look at the IMF and Africa.)
That is sort of my point. If you play the game you are going to lose (in this case get co-opted) so you need to be able to not play the same game that they are.
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if I can’t win I’ll get a printer and ruin every economy possible
Free stores? Gift economy? I think you’re giving people too much credit and are waaaayyyy too optimistic.
I already lived under socialism, and it’s much worse than anything capitalism has to offer.
