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On HN, we should think about socialism as a startup. Prove it with a small number of loyal customers, listen and learn from them, and then show how it scales to
by chmod600 3y ago
On HN, we should think about socialism as a startup. Prove it with a small number of loyal customers, listen and learn from them, and then show how it scales to a lot of customers.
It seems to be stuck at the "scale it up" stage. Attempts to scale it up are generally non-voluntary, and have bad outcomes. Even keeping a small group of loyal customers is challenging.
- eestrada 3y agoAn obscure hippie commune would like to talk to you about an early stage investment opportunity. /s Seriously though, to your point, existing and historical communes require 100% voluntary buy-in to work. That doesn't scale beyond a couple hundred people. So, as you say, it becomes "non-voluntary" beyond a certain size, which is a nice way of saying it is made possible via force.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoWe already have all this infrastructure and socially organized modes of production for producing goods and services, it wouldn't make sense not to use them to build a more rational society instead of one based on domination.
- snapcaster 3y agorational is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this comment
- DiscourseFan 3y agoI'm not sure how you could argue that building a society in service of profit motives is somehow more rational than building a society for the people living in it.
- Tiktaalik 3y agoI feel like the thousands of homeless people in my city would not be "loyal customers" of Capitalism if given the chance.