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One of the great tragedies of our time is that collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems. In the few hundred years b
by abdullahkhalids 3y ago
One of the great tragedies of our time is that collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems. In the few hundred years before 1990, there was a lot of imagination of what could be, and many of those systems were attempted. But since then, it seems everywhere we are stuck.
Reading Ursula Le Guin's work is essential because she boldly tries to re-imagine. Not to say any of her fictional worlds should be made reality, but that we need to do serious intellectual work going forward. Surely, humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago> We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Ursula K Le Guin [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-gu...
- 7thaccount 3y agoI was literally just thinking of this quote 15 minutes ago. Weird to see it at the top of HN. Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems) , but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives. Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
- 082349872349872 3y agoIf you're into christian anarchists, consider Tolstoy.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
- krapp 3y ago"Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
- 082349872349872 3y agoIt's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff. The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?) There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
- sickofparadox 3y agoJesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
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- 082349872349872 3y agoOne of the advantages of reading older authors is the sensation of cognitive dissonance inspired by their taking it for granted that monarchies are superior to oligarchies. You'll find a lot of this pre-1914, but also pre-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=According%20to%20Polybius%2C%20who%20has,ochlocracy%2C%20oligarchy%2C%20and%20tyranny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=Ac....
- rexpop 3y ago> Dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Paulo Freire [0] 0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed - https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire...
- StefanBatory 3y agoPerhaps because it's the best system. We've had communism in my country, never again.
- logicprog 3y agoFortunately the options aren't merely some form of marxist communism or capitalism! There are whole branches of (anarchist/federalist) socialism that actually predicted what would happen in the Soviet Union while Marx was still alive and writing and had very different plans themselves (Bakunin and Proudhon), and there were also distinct forms of socialism that predated Marxism, and forms that came after it, so even if we were to restrict ourselves to socialist schools of thought that have existed for round about 200 years (a very narrow slice of economic systems), there are a lot more options to try than "bureaucratic oligarchy, with a top down centrally planned economy and a fundamentally authoritarian ideology" and "a system designed to give some power over others via absentee property ownership, and facilitate the concentration of that power through the concentration of property due to the right of increase and profit."
- adrian_b 3y agoCapitalism appears to have worked optimally around the 1960 to 1990 time interval. After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
- aebtebeten 3y agoBefore 1990* there was competition; capitalism without competition doesn't seem to slice the pie as well as it did with? * Danke, Gorbi!
- 082349872349872 3y agocompare "...And Then There Were None" https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9555488
- pookha 3y agoI'd love to take a 70 year old Chinese victim that lived through the great-leap-forward and culture revolution and to get their honest perspective on this. They managed to live through starvation and wide-spread Maoist violence to witness the end of capitalism only to see the same bozo's re-introduce capitalism forty years later in the form of crony-capitlism...And if they try to speak about any of what they'd learned to their grand kids they're likely to get hauled off to a gulag while their grand-kids bytedance and chow down on Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- bllguo 3y agoan amusing fantasy. I'd love to see your western biases shatter when you do just that. do you think it's at all hard to find a 70yr old Chinese person?
- melagonster 3y agoactually, this is the description of chairman Xi.
- jokethrowaway 3y agoBecause unregulated capitalism is just property and trading. Hard to imagine sentient beings without the concept of property and trading. You have to kill all humans to end capitalism. What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoIt's a massive error to conflate capitalism and commerce like this. Capitalism describes a specific structure of organizing ownership of productive resources and allocating their surpluses. Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
- thefaux 3y agoI don't think capitalism and the concepts of property and trade are synonyms. It is also not clear that historical understandings of property or trade or universal amongst human civilizations and I'd be wary of dismissing other civilizations as having been made up of unsentient beings.
- keybored 3y agoWhat is water, the fish asked.
- int_19h 3y agoProperty and trading existed for most of the history of humanity, but capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon. Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoWe're globally stuck in a local minimum.
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- aebtebeten 3y ago> ...humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems. Programming languages are often reduced to a blurb along the lines of "everything is a ${foo}"; what do socio-economic-political systems reduce to? my attempts: tribalism - everything works like an extended family feudalism - everything works like animals in a barnyard capitalism - everything works like marketplaces in a port communism - everything is haunted by the spectre of class warfare democracy - everything is the electorate's fault aristocracy - everything is the selectorate's fault monarchy - everything is the prime minister's party's fault anarchy - everything is voluntary warlordism - everything is either voluntary, or subject to ultima ratio regum
- tigerlily 3y ago> ultima ratio regum Great game that: https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/ https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/
- lproven 3y ago« Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him. He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half. Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water. Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode. “See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,” Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun. »
- lanfeust6 3y ago> collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems ...right that's why it never stops being salient on social media like an undead beaten horse and you're talking about it right now. Maybe one problem is that imagination qua alternatives tends to stop rather short, and idealists too often consider the details and consequences to be an afterthought (everything just gets sorted if only you're rid of Capitalism). Or disregard history in some cases. It's comforting that the suggested approach by those who aren't fond of State Socialism (e.g. ancoms) is some variation on "do anarchism/syndicalism until communism happens", which seems harmless. They can get the worker-owned coffee shop out of their system.
- creer 3y agoAnd perhaps social media doesn't exactly encourage long thought. And cooperating on deeper thought political ideas. Debate and sports education push winning quick by crushing the opponent - not by building a gorgeous final conversation to be revered by the reader years later.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoThis is such a deeply ingrained part of Anglosphere social media culture that the GP didn't even have to take capitalism in name, but all of us know exactly what fight is being started and what position the GP is taking. I don't think anyone has stopped imagining alternate socioeconomic systems. The problem is that the people that like to discuss this on the internet just want to argue large, abstract ideas instead of the actual details of life under an alternate system. Le Guin herself did a lot of the latter in The Dispossessed. Her book wasn't a flamewar on Capitalism/Communism Bad (TM).
- creer 3y agoSeems to me sci-fi is still as full of political creativity as it always was? Perhaps it's now more diluted. Single books stood out for that. And perhaps it's harder for single SF books to stand out anymore? For sheer quantity? I mean, it's not like these books were ever taken very seriously as political works either...
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- Karrot_Kream 3y agoNo the tragedy of our time is that people who use social media love to start flamewars on this topic resulting in very little light and mostly heat. I guess the poster gets to socially signal to the right crowd what side of the issue they're on though.
- keybored 3y agoYour comment is a dim 40 degrees Celsius.
- 082349872349872 3y agocompare Lafferty, "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966) (for that matter, it may be worth pursuing other entries in "Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography From 1516 to the Present" https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ )
- incanus77 3y agoI feel the same way about our computing systems these days, and on a similar timeline.