Fun techcentric utopian speculation about this: Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" and Ruthanna Emry's "A Half-Built Garden."
Essentially, can we leverage our current post-scarcity society to expropriate everything people need in a sustainable way that cuts capitalism and the State out of the loop? For example, why would people buy food if they can get it for free from farming syndicates or similar? (see: Global Village Construction Kit, Food Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns) Why would people buy medicine if they can print it for free from pirated recipes? (see: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective)
I see the Right to Repair and FOSS movements as a foundation to build upon for this. Anarchism (or at least, anti-capitalism) exists right under everyone's noses, in all the FOSS software installed on their computers. Existent example of people laboring without profit motive and contributing to the commons.
My personal life goal is to figure out how to capture that same energy to tackle the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy.
I'm not entirely cynical, people generally are very open to be generous with one another and collaborate for a common good, but up to a point.
Currently people spend the majority of their hours doing relatively hard work for the collective's benefit (kinda). Exactly because capitalism makes selfishness into selflessness (very kinda). Also people are relatively civilized to one another thanks to the considerable latent force of the state's monopoly on violence.
People will be nice to each other when it doesn't cost them much and/or when the opposite costs them dearly. But will they work as hard as now for each other just to be nice? Will they not harm each other when there are no significant consequences and something to gain?
A fair free market is far from a natural phenomenon, it needs to be protected and maintained by some external force. If you let things unfold naturally, what you get is kings, and many layers of dominating hierarchy underneath, exploiting the masses, which exactly what we had the whole time.
I suppose that the post-scarcity idea is that people neither need to work hard, nor have significant reasons to harm, if they have everything they want. Sure, let's talk if we ever get there, but until then we have other problems to deal with.
PS: Don't forget that people are able to do FOSS because they have well paid jobs that don't completely drain them of their energy. For others, getting the reputation and/or experience for a better job is the incentive. There's a very different social infrastructure making that work, FOSS doesn't sustain itself, not even close. But yes, it does prove that when people's needs are covered, some of them will do great things for everyone without much incentive, but usually not enough to cover everyone's wants.
What I am weary of is that such experimentation, and the energy it generates, will eventually be overtaken by the next iteration of people who want to stop nibbling at the margins and break a few eggs already, some sort of anarchist revolutionary vanguard. Much like with communism, skilful opportunists with a thirst for power will be all too happy to take over this energy and direct it toward building the next totalitarian regime, one which will of course claim to be rendering the State obsolete, but will be about as anarchist as North Korea is a people's democratic republic.
That's an important point. It's so hard to think of a better system, if you take the task seriously and actually think through all the consequences of each option.
As a result, as usual, the loud people that ignore all the details end up capturing everyone's imagination with a good story, and we stumble upon yet another century of nightmares.
Do you truly have a answer for a social architecture that is substantially better than a capitalist social democracy, flawed and compromised as it is? Because I really don't if I'm being honest with myself, and I am yet to hear one.
I think the problem I find with arguments that Capitalism is the best/least bad system tend to be that they start from a false premise, in my opinion. I have a friend who makes the joke all the time that any system of government works if people were just nice to each other, but he has a point. I often hear that "oh, communism doesn't work because humans are inherently selfish." That's true, if you believe that humans are inherently selfish, but my counter-point to that is asking how much of it is innate vs. how much of it is trained by our culture and reflects back in those communist attempts because the sudden change in social architecture didn't give enough time to 'train it out of' the culture.
Back to the thing my friend says - if you believe that communism doesn't work because humans are inherently selfish/greedy/etc, I'd say to you also that capitalism is currently not working _because humans are being selfish and greedy_ in a system _that explicitly rewards that_. Which, maybe is worse. Not as in the outcomes are worse immediately than Soviet Russia etc. but for the long-term trajectory of human society.
I don't pretend I have an answer for how we can get from point A (capitalist system) to point B (future space communism) in a way that slowly shifts human thinking towards mutual aid and collective action, but I think it's short-sighted to assume that the way humans act in a system that rewards greed/selfishness is innate.
That's one way to put it. Another perspective (mine) is that capitalism enables anyone to try and make things better, and if you make things better for the right user, they will reward you.
> "my favorite, seems the least likely to lead to police state"
Like if the means of production is land, and you are seizing land, sure that makes sense to me.
But most goods are not made by land alone but by machines and factories and transport systems and etc. If you seize those as preexisting entities, what happens after you seize them? If you as a group can operate and expand those things, can’t you just build them yourselves also, and if so there is a way to work within the existing framework to do that, which is to start a company. Is seizing the means of production not equivalent to starting a company and stealing things others have built for the company to get started with? Why is that a good thing?
Like I personally agree that wealth accumulation is bad if it has political power go along with it, and there are huge problems with our system and lots of debt formats should be made illegal, I just don’t get why anyone thinks “seize the means of production” is the answer and I feel like I might be confused about what that really means.
"Seizing" kind of sounds like theft. If McDonald's employees at one shop in Pasadena Texas suddenly stopped sending money up the chain, isn't that theft of that particular McDonald's shop? I say no, because the theft has already occurred, but legally: faceless profiteers at wherever McDonald's is headquartered stole the land from the locals in Pasadena for the purpose of generating profits for people in NYC. Their labor and the surplus value of same is stolen to actualize and maintain those profits.
"But McDonald's provided the equipment, training, advertising!" Yes, and long after the value of that equipment, training, and advertising is "paid off" (the given franchise has achieved profitability), the headquarters will continue to steal surplus value from the local workers. Indefinitely.
Why don't Pasadena McDonald's employees just build/buy their own equipment, start their own burger shop, call it something other than McDonald's? Because society is designed to serve the needs of McDonald's shareholders, not Pasadena minimum wage McDonald's employees: they could never get together the kind of capital needed to do so. Get a loan, investment? Sure, now they're in the same situation: someone is extracting the surplus profit off their labor, and nobody's gonna go for a loan to a bunch of minimum wage Pasadenans without a very juicy potential profit margin.
Capitalism is structured around exclusion: capital, land, patents, credit, licenses, distribution networks, rent, and monopoly advantages are already controlled. The era of "just compete with McDonald's" is long dead.
> Is seizing the means of production not equivalent to starting a company and stealing things others have built for the company to get started with?
So to answer your original question, "seizing the means of production" doesn't mean "starting a company." Within the context of capitalism, you could do what I did and start a co-op, which is a worker-owned entity where profits are distributed equally, so no theft of surplus. However that's not a sustainable solution to the overall problem of capitalism because we will never have the kind of capital accumulation that allows much larger companies to start influencing governments or engage in lawfare. If AKQA decides to eat us, there's not much we can do to stop them. Also all institutions of capitalism are against us: nobody wants to give us loans or an investment, it's stupid hard to navigate bureaucracy, the very formation mechanisms are so much more complicated than when a business is a simple minority shareholder owned corp. On the other hand our members make way more than local rates (3x, sometimes more) and are much happier than AKQA folks, and our client outcomes are phenomenal, so idk, everyone should convert their business to a co-op.
Sorry, rambling. Seizing the means of production doesn't mean taking people's toothbrushes, it means abolishing the right of an owner class to control the productive infrastructure everyone depends on and extract profit from other people’s labor simply because their name is on a piece of paper.
Means of production: land, factories, warehouses, tools, machines, logistics networks, software infrastructure, housing, energy systems, water systems.
Seizing means transferring control away of the means of production from distant profiteers, to the people who actually build, operate, and maintain those means.
Incidentally this shifts priorities away from pure profit and usually to things that are better for the workers and users: compare the incentives and impacts of Linux versus those of Microsoft.
Seizing can look like: occupying, collectivizing, expropriating, squatting, unionizing, converting firms to worker control, building commons, abolishing intellectual property, refusing rent, creating parallel distribution systems, and making capitalist ownership unenforceable or irrelevant.
> If a landlord owns 500 homes and tenants pay off the mortgage
So I agree that this situation feels like a scam, and I think that feeling is based on human instinct and so it is in a way just objectively true (since unfairness is fundamentally defined by that instinct).
But, what is inducing this unfair situation?
Is it the part where someone owns the land and the building and someone else pays them to use it?
Or, is it the part where some third party gets to decide who can use its money, which is to say “who is in the club”, and people outside of that club pay both the third party and the people in the club for basic necessities, without which they will die. In essence they are held hostage and must pay their own ransom. And the reason that’s ostensibly fair under the current moral regime is that club membership is… itself determined by money.
Do we think that part might be the root cause of the unfair feeling in this situation?
Please do respond to my specific point here as I’m curious to engage and I’m not trying to nitpick you. If you just respond with a dismissal such as “the argument doesn’t rest on this point”, then I will conclude your overall argument is not sound (whether due to being insufficiently thought through or whether due to being fundamentally invalid, I don’t know, but I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to figure that out and I can just dismiss the claim until someone comes along with a more well structured argument).
Well, it's rather patronising of of me to call that "the hard part", after all the terrible struggles workers have gone through to earn a seat at the table, but you know what I mean.
