You fail to tell me what actual mechanisms you're proposing to fix this, and until you've got that you've got nothing.
Is it just a call to action? Asking people in tech to think about the problems?
Because the people who were inclined to think about this already are, whether it's Charles Stross talking about interfacing centrally planned economies with capitalism in his novels, or the pirate party working on fluid democracy.
I'm also not convinced your socialist/communist political theory is up-to-snuff. No one is arguing that the capture-value/create-value disparity isn't a big problem, but claiming that it's all because of human-selfishness instead of more nuanced coordination problems is concerning.
Read meditations on moloch, and less communism 102. Don't make an ideological tract, try to build something.
The essence of open socialism is to have a cooperative system without free enterprise. I think most people would accept that without resources expended due to competition and controlled wealth inequality, a cooperative system is more productive since everyone is working primarily on the good of society, not for their own personal gain. A large proportion of the surplus created can be reinvested into the good of society and not go to a small percentage of wealthy people where it often does more harm than good. I think on paper this type of system is much better for the majority and for long term progress.
The traditional (valid) criticism of such systems (eg. communism) is that the 'state' has too much power in these and those in control will become corrupt. Open socialism is quite focused on this key flaw and primarily addresses it by having society run much like an open source project, with all deliberation and operation done entirely in the open. Add to this the consensus seeking model to making corrupting decisions more difficult.
I posted it here hoping that people would give feedback or help if they are interested.
Cheers
When I said "Created value vs captured value", I was essentially saying
>cooperative system is more productive since everyone is working primarily on the good of society, not for their own personal gain
I'm not misunderstanding what the problem is with capitalism, or what socialism hopes to achieve. So please to read my feedback with that in mind, and don't just keep trying to explain socialism/communism to me.
I'm on-board, capitalism is bad.
The classic issues that I am aware of are:
- Those in power have too much power and cannot be deposed democratically. As such they will assuredly become corrupt.
- 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' means that people aren't incentivized to strive and will be lazy and won't invent and innovate.
This page https://opensocialism.com/open-socialism covers these two points.
Are there other classical issues I am missing? Is there any literature you would recommend for this?
Thanks
Anyway, I think it is safe to ignore that discussion, because it is way too common and biased.
My humble suggestion is that you should start on the purely economic side of the high-level discussion. This[1] is something that raised a lot of discussion (pro and against the socialist side) between top economists of the previous century and that has lasted many years. I think you should start there.
[1]: https://mises.org/library/socialism-economic-and-sociologica...
I created Open Socialism as a compelling alternative to democratic capitalism.
Democratic capitalism had some good years and achieved a lot, but it has started to be highly inequitable and exploitative. With modern technology and science (including agile and open source practices) we can create much more equitable and productive systems.
I created a tl;dr page for software industry people - https://opensocialism.com/tldr-for-software-people
I have written a moderate amount but it is more a starting point to be iterated upon. Any feedback or help is greatly appreciated.
https://github.com/open-socialism/open-socialism.github.io
Happy to answer any questions in the comments.
Thanks
