This is a good start: en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Doughnut_(economic_model)
Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror
CooperRedArmyDog@lemmy.ml 2 days agoI mean what do you propose, I mean I personaly do not want to regress farther to fudalism
kayazere@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Wogi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Heavily regulated socialist democracy.
Provide basic needs, food, clothing, healthcare, childcare, and education. Hell even a phone and Internet access.
Emphasis on the basic.
Allow for those who do not wish to, or are unable to work to live with all basic needs covered. Those who wish to work are incentivized to do so, with access to luxuries. Better housing, better clothing, better technology. Allow a place for the market, but don’t make people depend on the market.
No reason to work a job you hate, no reason to employ people you don’t need. Everybody wins.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I mean, you’re almost speaking of the exact system Marxists want to work towards, just with the caveat that Marxists think Markets are only useful tools in less-developed and less-critical industries temporarily, before public ownership and planning becomes more efficient, and that the spread in difference between “luxuries” decreases over time as productivity improves to account for that.
Have you read Marx, or Marxists?
Wogi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’ve read The Expanse lol. I was describing the system on Earth in that series.
The thing is, markets predate the written word. Some form of trading is literally one of the first things humans did. It could even be a prehuman invention. Eliminating markets is like trying to eliminate prostitution, or drugs.
Markets, much like life, uhh… Find a way.
Instead of turning up your nose, make them work for you, in a way you want. We don’t want the markets to spread, unrestrained, like kudsu. We want Bonsai markets.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Trade isn’t the same as a market, necessarily, and markets aren’t the same as the specific Capitalist iteration that depends on the M-C-M’ circuit where commodities C are produced with money M in exchange for greater money M’. When Marxists say they wish to abolish markets, they mean so by stating that they wish, rather than production being handled through competing entities where that M-C-M’ circuit applies, we instead fold all of these entities into the public sector and democratically plan them along a cooperative basis.
Early on, there would presumably be labor vouchers, which differ from money in that they would be destroyed on first use. A sort of credit for work, for use in the only “store” that exists. Social services and safety nets would be deducted from your “pay” and be free at point of service. Things like that, and this doesn’t really constitute a “market” in the normal sense of the word. Eventually, these labor vouchers would likely be abolished once they became unnecessary.
fakir@lemm.ee 2 days ago
This has been my conclusion as well after many years of deep reflection amidst my depression since the pandemic. The problem with current capitalism isn’t markets, it’s ‘how vulnerable the entire system is to greed & power and if it can grow unchecked like cancer to corrupt the nervous system of society - the government itself’. This sure happened in the most capitalist nation of all as we’re witnessing it now, but don’t tell me a strong centrally controlled government isn’t susceptible to it. A government that can dictate what you can & cannot make holds enormous power over all individuals. Markets really represent individual freedom. I can make a fucking cake and exchange it for whatever piece of jewelry I want from the free market. Currency just allows for easy exchange of goods. These are just tools, not the root of the problem.
dontbelasagne@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not to be the um actually guy, but before any recorded trading existed, there was something called the gift economy. We just gave people the things they need, without expecting anything in return. No trading at all. I wonder what life could be like if we kept that system and people would be free to do whatever they want.
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 days ago
This.
Also, extremely agressive measures to stop the harm of others through the accumumation of mass wealth.
Basically, once you reach, I dunno, 5-10 million total “worth”, you get taxed at 100%.
Something like that. No one will ever need that much ever, and they can feel free to just reture and live out their life doing nothing if they manage to get there.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This sounds fantastic, and will never work in the USA as long as there are classes of people who live above the rules and can influence society through policy and social media. If they smell any extra income, rights or services you receive, it’s like blood in the water and they will come from miles to get a piece of anything you own, exactly as they do now.
Wogi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Only if they live above the rules
dontbelasagne@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Capitalism lets them live above the rules.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Obeying in advance is fucking pathetic
trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Socialism is when the government is nice to you bottom text
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Any government that has the power to grant these goods/services will have the power to take them away. Unless the public can directly own and administer the property through local councils and administrative bureaucracies, they are banking on the largesse of national socialist leadership to continue indefinitely.
All of that is predicated on a continuously expanding surplus of raw materials, advanced technologies, and an educated labor force.
You can either import these as luxuries, in which case you’re operating an export-oriented economy predicated on the market price of your domestic surplus. That requires a bigger economy you’re effectively beholden to. Looks good in the moment, but over the course of centuries you just end up as a West African / Middle Eastern / East India Tea Company-controlled kingdom, wherein the bottlenecks of trade produce oligarchs of immense personal fortune.
Or you produce domestically, in the Juche model, and live within the means provided by your real estate and your people. But that requires an economy that can plan and organize resources on the order of decades (if not centuries) and invests domestically rather than keeping an eye towards meeting the needs of foreign import markets. It won’t work as a capitalist system, because the capitalist demand for growth will push you back into the export-oriented model that foreigners exploit.
“Free” markets follow the bubbles in credit and compel local economies to chase short term speculative bubbles for long term economic needs. Planned economies can build infrastructure in advance of future needs and plan social policy to curb economically regressive short-term profitable impulses with long term costs (opium consumption, coal/NGL power grids, cash crops that deplete arable land and water reserves like tobacco and pistachios).
They aren’t durable. They produce rapid consolidations of wealth and political capital. And they create intergenerational risks that the current cohort of investors have little reason to acknowledge or prevent.