Technology

Thanks for the long reply. I also took the time to read the wp on mutualism. Proudhon has been on my reading list forever because of his great quotes, but other things were always more relevant.

What you're describing about industry sounds perhasp like joint-ventures? It also sounds a lot like a cartel. Zeiss, along with other lens makers, was fined in 2010 by german antitrust enforcement because they had conspired to overcharge consumers.

But I agree with you (or I think that’s your implication) that pure mutualism will not work for these kinds of “put a man on the moon” projects,

I would never judge a school of ideas based on a few minutes of youtube. But I admit, I was thinking it and I would not have been motivated to spend more time on it without your reply.

I'm not concerned about stuff like putting a man on the moon. I'm thinking about feeding 8 billion (and rising) people, most of them living in cities. This takes an uninterrupted stream of food and water from strangers to strangers. As it goes today, you need fuel and spare parts, replacement machines. To grow the food you probably need fertilizer, maybe pesticides and so on (I'm not knowledgeable on agriculture).

We do this through markets. This decentralized method seems superior to central planning. Obviously, we can do very well without overt hierarchies. As we know, behind most markets is a government enforcing laws and possible intervening to impose fixes for perceived problems.

You may lose your farm if you don't make enough money to pay the bills. This can be framed as simply circumstance; predefined rules operate without any individual decision and thus without hierarchy. Or one may point to the individuals involved who still make the choices to enforce contracts or laws in the specific case.

If the farm passes to someone who makes more money with it, then that hopefully means that it is better at meeting the needs of other people. We don't need to discuss the flaws in the market system, but a system should have a way of ensuring that the meets of other people elsewhere - of strangers - are met. Scarce resources need to be put to a use that meets the needs of the many.

I have to think of crowd crush disasters. No one in such a crowd does anything very bad. They may even try to help other people if they can. They do the best they can with the information they have. But when 100s or 1000s of people are all pushing just a little, then the guys at the front get squished by the collective force.