this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Market socialism with an emphasis on genuine co-ops. It's not hard, it works, and you don't necessarily build an immutable heirarchy.
Exactly. Capitalism isn't bad because of free markets, free markets are great and arguably way better than planned economies in most applications (minus things like healthcare, if you can't reasonably choose not to buy a product then prices will inflate out of control).
The problem with Capitalism is the concentration of capital which inevitably leads to oligarchy. Put profits in the hands of workers instead of investors and watch the problems melt away. Hell, I can see the merits of totally replacing wages with proportional stake in the company. When everyone gets a percentage of the profits, they're way more motivated to work efficiently with less waste and higher productivity.
I'd argue that the emergence of capitalists and capitalist ideology, and the amassing of currency is just a natural tendency of currency itself. Currency itself is a tool of transactional thought, and I'd argue that if we could move away from transactional trade and focused more on mutual wellbeing, we could do without currency entirely.
That requires a basically unanimous raising of class consciousness. I just don't see that happening anytime soon. We're just not wired that way on a scale above small communities. Even without currency, hoarders gonna hoard. Before we had currency, we had people hoarding resources directly. It works in Star Trek because they're post-scarcity.
Until we're post-scarcity, we need a way to exchange goods and services on a scale larger than a neighborhood.
We are post scarcity, on basic needs.
Don't think that's gonna be enough.
As an aside, idealistic free market is impossible to achieve without regulation. At the very least, contracts need to be enforced. Free market also demands price forming to happen through bids on the market, needing protection from extra-market negotiations. As an elastic system, it can also be broken by a concerted application of force and needs protection from such actions.
Whatever is being sold as free market sounds like a myth at best.
PS: Coop corporations should really become the norm. Trickle up systems create concentrations of power by design, and concentration of power is how you stretch elastic system beyond its deformation limits.
The market will just force coops to behave like capitalist companies again...
Also:
But without checks and balances then we could end up with corrupt plutocrats like the Soviets had.
The heart of Marxism is spreading power out as much as possible by giving the working class control over our resources and economy.
Howso? Capitalism is when non-worker investors own the means of production. In a co-op the workers literally own the means of production, so the workers are getting their fair share of the profit.