4 ms·

What would be a good alternative to capitalism? Employee-owned corporations? Worker cooperatives?

by desdiv 10y ago

visarga 10y ago
Or a loose-kind of cooperative based on social networks. An online market of goods and services, similar to Ebay and AirBNB but not owned by a corporation. People, even if they receive BHI, should work directly for themselves (or indirectly, by providing services to other people), in order to multiply the value. There is no purpose in industrial production other than to serve human society. If capitalist industry gets rid of human employees to a large degree, it becomes detached from its very own purpose. So, a large company should contribute to BHI or hire people, otherwise how will people have money to buy products from corporations? An idea would be to invent a human-centric currency, paid to each individual as a BHI. The state should require a part of the taxes be paid in this currency at a sustainable rate, thus forcing companies to subsidize BHI. In the meantime, people need to organize in order to bootstrap a human-based economy, where automation could still play a role, with the crucial difference that it would be regular people who are the owners of the capital, and not just a select 1%. Or someone could invent a self replicating factory that only uses common materials, thus becoming virtually free to multiply and serve humanity wherever it is needed. At this moment, the self replicating factory is economy on the whole. But we can do better, we might compress it to a small size and make it more independent of rare/expensive raw materials, and make it open source. Then it could bootstrap human population out of scarcity without work.
pdkl95 10y ago
While those can work well in some situations, I think one of the key problems is thinking in terms of whole ideologies. Capitalism has some good features and it's a great system if and only if its prerequisites are met. The same it true for every other system. Use capitalism (or variant) if a proper market exists. When a natural monopoly contraindicates market-dependent methods, use a cooperative or publicly managed service or whatever is more appropriate for that specific situation. A pragmatic approach should use all of the available tools. Pretending that one ideology is "better" without first considering the local context is the political equivalent of seeing every problem as a nail because you only use hammers. Replacing capitalism with another system that has a different set of problems isn't the solution. The core problem starts with the consolidation of power and resources, amplified by the unbounded risk created by rapidly increasing complexity. In software we (try to) manage complexity with various types of modularity. Separating the problem into manageable pieces limits risk and prevents some forms of common mode failure. Thus, a good "alternative to capitalism" is probably capitalism with a strict upper limit to the size of business and other organizations. if your business grows to more than N employees, it must be divided into pieces smaller than N.
- wnkrshm 10y ago
  That is a very interesting idea - a kind of meta-ideological legislature for the management of markets. I wonder how such a system could be balanced properly, I can imagine it's difficult to do with little quantitative data on the alternatives (but a huge dataset for our current system). A pitfall could be the legislation itself: How do you fight lobbying at the fringes of each system - although maybe it's not too bad that it exists, since there is a ceiling for how much a lobby can profit before it is basically disbanded.

What would be a good alternative to capitalism? Employee-owned corporations? Worker cooperatives?

by desdiv 10y ago

What would be a good alternative to capitalism? Employee-owned corporations? Worker cooperatives?

Or a loose-kind of cooperative based on social networks. An online market of goods and services, similar to Ebay and AirBNB but not owned by a corporation. People, even if they receive BHI, should work directly for themselves (or indirectly, by providing services to other people), in order to multiply the value. There is no purpose in industrial production other than to serve human society. If capitalist industry gets rid of human employees to a large degree, it becomes detached from its very own purpose. So, a large company should contribute to BHI or hire people, otherwise how will people have money to buy products from corporations? An idea would be to invent a human-centric currency, paid to each individual as a BHI. The state should require a part of the taxes be paid in this currency at a sustainable rate, thus forcing companies to subsidize BHI. In the meantime, people need to organize in order to bootstrap a human-based economy, where automation could still play a role, with the crucial difference that it would be regular people who are the owners of the capital, and not just a select 1%. Or someone could invent a self replicating factory that only uses common materials, thus becoming virtually free to multiply and serve humanity wherever it is needed. At this moment, the self replicating factory is economy on the whole. But we can do better, we might compress it to a small size and make it more independent of rare/expensive raw materials, and make it open source. Then it could bootstrap human population out of scarcity without work.

pdkl95 10y ago

While those can work well in some situations, I think one of the key problems is thinking in terms of whole ideologies. Capitalism has some good features and it's a great system if and only if its prerequisites are met. The same it true for every other system. Use capitalism (or variant) if a proper market exists. When a natural monopoly contraindicates market-dependent methods, use a cooperative or publicly managed service or whatever is more appropriate for that specific situation. A pragmatic approach should use all of the available tools. Pretending that one ideology is "better" without first considering the local context is the political equivalent of seeing every problem as a nail because you only use hammers. Replacing capitalism with another system that has a different set of problems isn't the solution. The core problem starts with the consolidation of power and resources, amplified by the unbounded risk created by rapidly increasing complexity. In software we (try to) manage complexity with various types of modularity. Separating the problem into manageable pieces limits risk and prevents some forms of common mode failure. Thus, a good "alternative to capitalism" is probably capitalism with a strict upper limit to the size of business and other organizations. if your business grows to more than N employees, it must be divided into pieces smaller than N.

wnkrshm 10y ago
That is a very interesting idea - a kind of meta-ideological legislature for the management of markets. I wonder how such a system could be balanced properly, I can imagine it's difficult to do with little quantitative data on the alternatives (but a huge dataset for our current system). A pitfall could be the legislation itself: How do you fight lobbying at the fringes of each system - although maybe it's not too bad that it exists, since there is a ceiling for how much a lobby can profit before it is basically disbanded.