6 ms·

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I co

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".

fallingknife 5y ago
Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
  - michaelscott 5y ago
    A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc. It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.
PeterisP 5y ago
Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them. That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc. This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
lobocinza 5y ago
> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  > Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices. > Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital. > Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds. > It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy. Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey! Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_and_resilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...

fallingknife 5y ago

Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.

beaconstudios 5y ago
joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
- michaelscott 5y ago
  A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc. It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.

PeterisP 5y ago

Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them. That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc. This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.

beaconstudios 5y ago
nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.

lobocinza 5y ago

> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.

beaconstudios 5y ago
> Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices. > Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital. > Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds. > It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy. Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey! Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_and_resilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...