this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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OK, how?
Refuse to buy things? Live in a cardboard box?
Supply and demand. Either reduce the demand or increase the supply and costs go down. Now target the things people need to survive and the cost to exist goes down.
Then they downsize workers and further erode merchantability while jacking up prices. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and those at the top have made sure they will literally be the last to fall. You want to get a billionaire to sell their 4th yacht, it'll only cost us a million people going hungry.
There are ways out of capitalism, but the only fast ones are violent and worse than capitalism themselves. We should be working on moving towards incorruptable governance and social expansion. It happens in slow steps. The millionaire tax in MA managed one of those steps recently, despite some pretty dramatic opposition by the ultrawealthy.
That's just capitalism though????
Yes, but then keep going. More supply! MORE! There is no demand, demand is gone! We literally cannot give it all away, no one wants it, there is no market!
Imagine if we produced so much food that everything was free. Imagine if all the water you ever wanted was clean and free! Imagine if housing was so abundant people could move around freely.
What would keep you in one place? Why not travel the world knowing that anywhere with people has the basics to live. Travel, see the sights, meet the people, never stress about needing to work just to keep existing.
Now you're free to work on what you want. Create things. Create art, tell stories, cook interesting new dishes. Visit friends, be there for your family, raise your kids. Do all the things that you don't because you need to work just to live.
I mean that's fairytale land but yea that would be good.
Unfortunately in the real world there is limited resources and labour. So there is a real cost to things and things can't be produced for free in unlimited supply.
Realistically? Only successful and subsequent revolutions will resolve anything.
Absolute monarchy and feudalism ended after the bourgeoisie revolutions of the 17th and 18th century. Only after then.
Organizing politically.
While private ownership of production is in place, there's no amount of boycott we could reasonably do too make changes. As you've noted, it would end up starving people and making them homeless.
On the lowest effort end. Using the power we currently have; we should vote for the least fascist of the two party members. This will not save us, but it will slow the decay and give time to others who are more actively working to solve the problem.
People with more time and effort, should organize. Push for getting rid of the first past the post voting systems and replacing them with less broken voting systems. Try to create leftist candidates and get them elected locally. Spread leftist ideology to public.
Any politician that thinks we shouldn't be allowed tools of our own ought to be ridiculed until they go away for good.
Start with unions. That's the only way workers get power.
I’m aware my point of view is not very popular, but in my country unions have been well-established since I don’t know how long ago, and they’ve become as corrupt (if not more) than political parties… full-time union representatives here are nothing other than people who pretend to be leftist but actually have a very capitalistic way of life behind close doors… at least here, that ain’t gonna fix the capitalism problem
Probably because you're in a union in a capitalist society. Unions are lacking when missing a leftist ideology. Unions are a hold over for the working class and should be used as a stepping stone in society until an economy of worker co-ops are created.
That’s a really good point, thanks
Seize the means of production!
Paraphrasing and bastardizing Gödel, all sufficiently complex systems are either inconsistent or incomplete. Gödel used recursion to reveal an inconsistency within typographical number theory. Programmatic restrictions on what one can do within a system (jails and sandboxes) can generally be escaped by finding and using a reference to the parent system.
Capitalism is a system. All systems can be broken if one chooses to do so. There's even a generic formula for doing so.
Ok, what mechanism within capitalism traps us within it? None, the mechanism isn't defined within capitalism. But we know that there is something trapping us. What about the parent system? The parent system in most capitalist countries is liberalism (enforced by state violence). It is the police of the liberal state who harass or kill you if you refuse to engage, or who otherwise enforce your starvation. It's actually the state that forces you to use money by collecting taxes.
So there's the issue. If you can figure out how to make something that fulfills the functions that you need from those within capitalism and the state, but do so without paying taxes then you can functionally escape capitalism. Ok, within liberalism there is an institution that operates similarly to the state (it collects taxes and provides services with those taxes), but does so without itself paying taxes: the church.
If you want to escape capitalism, start a religion.
New copy pasta
Step 1: Think of a viable alternative.
No-one has yet achieved step 1, which makes subsequent steps harder. It's easy to get your hands on people who will answer with magical thinking, but a system that will actually work and isn't capitalism has yet to be invented.
Democratic socialism is definitely a viable alternative. Even capitalism with a strong safety net vis a vis Nordic countries is better.
I live in Sweden. Sweden is not a socialist country. It's a hard regulated capitalist country with social safety net paid for by taxes.
I don't understand why people keep saying that the nordic countries are socialist countries just because of the tax funded welfare. The taxes comes from hard working people, be it owners of businesses or employees.
I literally said capitalist with a strong safety net.
You are right, I misread. My point is still valid, though. Many refer to the nordic countries as socialist but they are not.
And yet, still better than what USA has.
Much better, I'd say.
Capitalism with a strong safety net sounds like you're avoiding the question. The question is how to replace capitalism, not how to improve it.
How are you defining democratic socialism? Usually when I ask people to define socialism they answer with capitalism with extra undefined steps whereby the set of employees of a business is legally forced to be equal to that business's set of owners. I'm not familiar with "democratic" as a modifier to the term, though.
The right answer is most likely a mixed system, so will most likely include some form of capitalism.
Wikipedia describes what I mean pretty well.
The article you linked has at least 3 different kinds of socialism that satisfy "democratic" socialism:
What definition do you mean by it?
I think your question was, "has anyone thought of a viable alternative to pure market capitalism", to which the answer is yes.
But they wanted to move the goalposts :(((