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.
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.
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.
You know we have enough food for everyone. Scarcity is created and would be if we had free energy.
We may technically have enough food for everyone, but we don’t have teleporters.
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
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.
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.
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.
