AaronI think a lot of people miss the fact that at the root of our current political woes lies an economic one. People in this nation have always been racist, ablist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, etc. That's awful, but it's nothing new here. But add to that mix a general feeling of powerlessness and deprivation, and it becomes easy to use that bigotry to stir people up and get them to support a fascist leader.
DziadekThe capitalist economy works by funneling wealth away from workers and consumers and into billionaire shareholders' hands. Its entire purpose is to turn economic exchange into a source of passive income for those who can afford to purchase the infrastructure used to generate wealth. In the past, we had ways to mitigate the inevitable concentration of wealth into the hands of billionaire capitalist investors -- wealth taxes and such. But for the last 50-75 years, those mechanisms have been muted or derailed, due to economic capture of our political system by the wealthy.
The result is that wealth has continued to accumulate in the hands of those who already have an advantage. (It takes money to make money, as they like to say. Or, as I prefer to put it: It's expensive to be poor, because some rich fuck will use his money to leverage yours out of your hands.) If you look at wealth inequality in this country, you will see that in recent decades it has reached a fever pitch, leading to the Occupy Wallstreet demonstrations, the various bubbles and collapses we've seen including in 2008 when the market tried to correct but was stopped, and after that, the rise of populist candidates and general malcontent with "politics as usual".
That's where Trump derives his power. He makes the little people feel powerful, even though they aren't. He gives them someone to hate, which keeps them occupied: the people he blames and targets (for his followers) and himself (for everyone else). And because of the division he sows, he is a useful patsy for the billionaires as they attempt to divide and conquer and distract, so they feed him money and support and humor his grandiosity. Fascism is just a tool to them. So is Trump, and so are all his followers.
When we finish dispatching this wannabe king, we should turn our attention to the guillotine.
After that, we need to redesign our market economy to excise the capitalism from it. We don't need an oligarchy or an aristocracy, and we should do away with their means of sustaining themselves. We can support a free market, decentralized economy that *doesn't* concentrate wealth to obscene levels, that *doesn't* create the likes of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, that *doesn't* harvest rent/profit from every economic exchange, and that *doesn't* result in market instability and drastic corrections or collapses. We can do this by doing away with all corporate models that aren't either single proprietorships or cooperatives. No more stocks, no more stock markets, no more billionaires.
GhostOnTheHalfShellEgalitarian societies, Hunt gatherers being the most well studied versions, ensure that young men because it’s usually young men don’t get egotistical and don’t get megalomaniacal about themselves.
These cultures despise selfishness. Then, if you look at the history of most major religions, they also did so. They have undergone a subtle transformation and specific areas like debt and interest.
This isn’t surprising given social realities
Murdoc Addams 🧛🏻
🇨🇦@hosford42
I absolutely agree that the root of the problem is an economic one, and things must be dealt with there in order to be properly fixed. However I don't think that we can reform the market system in a way that will prevent this from happening again. I think that as long as we use a money based system, people will find ways to accumulate it, as well as use it to subvert any laws we enact to prevent it. That's how we got here in the first place. It would only be making things a little better for a little while.
But even if we could do that, our troubles are deeper than that. Because we have long been capable of producing a much higher standard of living for everyone, but continuing to use a scarcity-based economic system, not only have we been simply keeping most people poorer than they need to be, but we have been wasting massive amounts of resources in doing so, resulting in the environmental degradation we are seeing the results of everywhere. We have to ditch the outdated system that is creating artificial scarcity by its very nature and employ a modern, scientific system that was designed for this very problem, that has both sustainability and efficiency built right in. Howard Scott's Technocracy is such a system: https://www.technate.org/tiki-index.php?page=IB28
The result would be no more environmental degradation (by whatever countries use this anyway), no rich or poor classes, a much higher standard of living for everyone, very little work needed to produce that standard of living, and much more.
#Technocracy #Technate
@murdoc You may be right, IDK. But I don't see billionaires happening overnight from a cooperative-based economy. There would be time to recognize and deal with the problem *long* before regulatory capture became an issue, unlike with our current system. I also think things have to happen in stages. People won't be okay with too massive of a change all at once, because their ability to survive is being gambled. We already know that cooperatives work, that a market-based economy works, that money works. My approach consists only of doing away with one specific option: the for-profit corporation, and it substitutes that model with another one that is already tried and tested. One step at a time!
@hosford42
But money and markets don't work, not as long as we have the tremendous productive capacity that we currently have. They may have worked in the past, when scarcity was natural, but not anymore. The system has been on life support since the Great Depression, requiring ever larger accumulation of debt and resource wastage that is destroying the ecosystem in order to survive. A good part of the reason that the billionaire class has been doing what it is isn't just for their own gain, but to simply keep the system going. Without it, the whole thing will finally collapse like it should have nearly a century ago.
And we don't have time to wait for doing things in steps either. There is going to come a point where we will no longer have the resources to produce an abundance (post-scarcity), and then this option will be gone from us for centuries if not longer. We have been given one chance to pull this off and we've almost exhausted it.
As for people not accepting large change, yes, it is a big problem, but not an insurmountable one. All that is needed is a properly strategized education campaign so that people understand how this works and why it is needed. As the saying goes, between a slim chance and none, I'll take slim. The alternative, the upcoming collapse, is just too terrible, but the benefits of succeeding are also great.
I hate to pull the doom and gloom card--that's why I try to focus on the positives first--but we don't have the option anymore of hiding from the unpleasant truth. We know what kind of state the world is in, and we have known for a long time now.
That being said, there's nothing saying that we can't do the thing of getting rid of the oligarchs while we perform the education campaign at the same time. Really, that'd probably help a lot because then there'd be less interference. But there is no fixing this sinking ship we're on. Technocracy's analysis shows why this is so.
@murdoc What makes you think it will collapse? Not capitalism; I agree that capitalism is unsustainable. I'm asking specifically about the free market.
During the great depression, credit unions (banks that are cooperatives) flourished because they offered financial stability and were robust to market swings. Cooperatives take the best of both worlds: They follow market signals and are decentralized, like capitalism, but are cooperative, social endeavors with local governance and shared burden, like socialism. They are mini democracies within the larger democracy, and as such adhere to the people's will, including proper treatment of the environment and the community. Why would that fail, when it has already been shown to be more stable than the current system?
@hosford42
Stable on a small scale and in the short term perhaps, but not on a national scale.
So there are two answers to why this would collapse. If we are talking about a natural situation of scarcity, i.e. pre-industrial, then all such exchange economies (called a Price System in Technocracy) have a natural life cycle. That is, they are born, they grow, then decline, and finally die. Then some sort of revolution occurs and the process begins again. For more details on that you can find here: https://www.technate.org/purchasingpower/page1.html
But as I said, our situation is more than that. The introduction of high-powered machinery to the equation has caused a unique problem that is what prompted the development of Technocracy in the first place. In short, without interference, all that machinery does two things: increases production and decreases labor. This in turn increases supply and decreases demand (because people have less money to spend). Both of these effects lower prices, and in the first part of the 20th century did so at an unprecedented rate. The result was collapse, which the original Technocrats were able to predict would happen within an accuracy of 6 months (they actually thought it would happen later than it did). This is described in more detail in the article I linked to before (IB 28: Why Technocracy). Everything since then has been keeping the system on life support with massive spending, waste, debt, and imperialism. So really capitalism has been responsible for our apparent prosperity over the last almost-century, along with all the terrible costs you are already well aware of.
So your proposal does not address this issue because it maintains a scarcity-based economic system, and thus would have the same underlying problem. People would be left with the same choice we have: either switch to a post-scarcity economic system that can accommodate our productive capacity and desire for a better standard of living, or continue to artificially keep goods and services scarce.
> it maintains a scarcity-based economic system
It does not. It's a system that can smoothly transition between the two. The workers and consumers are the *owners* of the means of production. As work progressively becomes less relevant, money flows less to workers and more to owners. In a capitalist system, that means investors end up owning everything, and former workers and consumers are elided from the cycle. But if workers and consumers are the owners, no one gets left out. Work phases out, but the products continue to be provided to all.
@hosford42
If it's still using money, then it is still scarcity based, because money itself is inherently scarce. You can't sell an abundance, it would be like trying to put a price on air, it would have no value. And if you can't sell it, money has no use. You need a completely different economic system in order to deal with abundance. That's why Technocracy was designed the way it was.
If it's still using money, then it is still scarcity based, because money itself is inherently scarce. You can't sell an abundance, it would be like trying to put a price on air, it would have no value. And if you can't sell it, money has no use. You need a completely different economic system in order to deal with abundance. That's why Technocracy was designed the way it was.
@murdoc You can just vote to give it away for free, if you cooperatively own the means of production when that becomes possible.
@hosford42
Why vote? Giving it away is the only thing you can do. What's the alternative, deliberately enforcing scarcity?
Why vote? Giving it away is the only thing you can do. What's the alternative, deliberately enforcing scarcity?
@hosford42
But what's the advantage of doing it that way? Why waste time asking people their opinion on something that is already objectively determined? It would be like asking people to vote on whether vaccines cause autism, or if Covid should be treated with horse medication.
But what's the advantage of doing it that way? Why waste time asking people their opinion on something that is already objectively determined? It would be like asking people to vote on whether vaccines cause autism, or if Covid should be treated with horse medication.
@murdoc Because there is a clear progression from how people do things now to that end goal. Small enough steps that people won't be afraid to take them. It's not just about finding a solution; people have to be willing to take the leaps to get there.
@hosford42
It almost sounds to me like you are saying that it is better to take the path that is easy rather than the path that is best, which I wouldn't agree with.
But regardless, I submit that as far as most people are concerned, the steps to Technocracy would be far easier than for your plan. The biggest obstacle for them would be the first step, that of simply learning enough about it in order to make an informed decision as to whether to adopt it or not.
Satanic Garden Rake 🇨🇦🏳️⚧️In all seriousness, yes.
David J. Atkinson@hosford42 @GhostOnTheHalfShell You are correct. Now how to we get it back?
@meltedcheese @GhostOnTheHalfShell
First, we have to tear down the fascists and regain control of our government. That's the hard part, and it's going to take time, energy, and an enormous level of public outrage.
Then we have to get people to see the root cause of the problem, which is what I'm already working on here.
After that, we can ease into a cooperative-based economy by first incentivizing cooperatives as a business model, disincentivizing for-profit corporations (through high corporate taxes, as one option), and encouraging the "exit to community" model.
Later, as the economy transitions and people learn to trust it, we can begin to phase out for-profit corporations altogether.
With corporations and the stock market fully phased out, and a wealth tax in place, we can ensure no one ever becomes a billionaire again, no oligarchy forms, and our government remains free of economic capture.
I think my own point is that the process of regaining control is the process of local organization. It is the systems we build through organization that are the replacement.
The primary way we do this is to first eject the operation of large corporations from our communities. This is going to mean, pushing out the Walmart /Home Depot's as well as fulfillment and data centers and instead direct community/ the city to invest in local business.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @meltedcheese This will require coaching people on how to meet their needs effectively without those large corporations -- something I'm not qualified to do. Maybe someone else can step up for this portion?
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @meltedcheese I'm eager to learn
Everyday.Human Derek@hosford42 @GhostOnTheHalfShell @meltedcheese
I’m down too. I’m always eager to learn practical stuff.
I’m down too. I’m always eager to learn practical stuff.