this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
302 points (90.2% liked)
Showerthoughts
29325 readers
1 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes. Regulation helps to work around the problem but doesn't fix anything
All systems dealing with human nature will inherently be flawed and require workarounds and bandaids.
There is no perfect system, but throughout human history, capitalism seems to have consistently resulted in technological growth and improved outcomes in terms of health, lifespan, creature-comforts, etc.
We tried communism - over 30 countries did - and the only ones left are China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. Interestingly, current and previous communist states got a lot closer to "regulating breathing" than anything we have today. It's not a good look as far as stable and free systems go.
Nothing is perfect and there are infinite other options than capitalism or fake communism
What are those options? Have they been trialed and errored?
If not, how do we actually know they will work in practice? For instance, communism was ideal on paper and fell apart in practice - no country was able to ever "truly" implement it. What other ideologies exist that could practically work? It's a bit premature in my opinion to call any of them "better than capitalism" when none have been tried.
that's the thing, the same things were said about participatory goverment (democracy) and capitalism before they were implemented. Greece implemented participatory oligarchy and got conquered. Rome tried it out but resulted in dictatorship and fell apart. France wanted to abolish feudalism and ended in bloody tyranny... Reminds you of previous and current socialists experiments, doesn't it?
@[email protected] which systems are currently most viable options instead of capitalism or totalitarianism
There are several alternative systems to consider as alternatives to capitalism or totalitarianism. Here are a few examples:
Socialism: Socialism aims to distribute resources and wealth more equally among members of society. It emphasizes collective ownership, democratic decision-making, and social justice.
Communism: Communism envisions a classless and stateless society where all property is collectively owned. It advocates for the abolition of private property, emphasizing common ownership and the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."
Anarchism: Anarchism seeks to eliminate hierarchical structures and promote self-governance. It rejects the authority of the state and advocates for decentralized decision-making and voluntary cooperation among individuals and communities.
Participatory Economics: Participatory Economics, also known as parecon, proposes an economic system based on self-managed worker and consumer cooperatives. It aims to ensure economic justice, workplace democracy, and balanced decision-making through participatory methods.
Democratic Socialism: Democratic socialism combines elements of socialism and democracy. It advocates for democratic control of the means of production, a mixed economy, and a strong welfare state to ensure social equality and protection.
It's important to note that the viability and effectiveness of these systems can vary depending on the context, as their implementation and outcomes can be influenced by various factors. Additionally, there are several other alternative systems and models that offer different approaches to economic and political organization.
This response was generated by GPT 3.5 because you exhausted your daily limit for GPT-4.
Neither capitalism nor communism was tried either. Capitalism has taken over by force. Totalitarians have tried the same in the name of communism. Some actual communist attempts seem to be working when left unintervened by capitalists or authoritarians.
It's anyone guess which other system could be worth moving forward. Currently the only limiting thing seems to be the lack of a mindset to progress by a critical mass.
It is disingenuous to say that communism has never been tried. It's been tried over 30 times, but it's never been able to live up to the ideal of "true" communism.
If your system falls apart as soon as people become greedy or power hungry, it's not a practical or stable system. You can't expect people to ignore those emotions and you definitely cannot bake that expectation into a system that needs to be resilient enough to sustain a society for centuries.
I'm pretty sure most can agree that communism has been tried in village and tribe sized societies through the history of humanity.
It's not the most honest claim to say that big authoritarian states like USSR or China have ever even tried it, and just used the name for marketing and support from gullible population.
Are places like Rojava and Kerala relevant examples? Maybe, I'm not an expert on the subject
Greed is an interesting topic. Capitalism creates and rewards greed and it's prominence in human psychology could be less in alternative systems.
I agree it works at village-scale, but in my opinion what we have seen is a failure of communism to scale to a nation with tens or hundreds of millions of people, and survive for decades at that.
Sounds like you'd want some kind of anarcho-communism where those smaller groups of people work together with other ones to form networks encompassing millions. Democracy at human level instead of top-down authorities
There is still a power incentive. In the proposed system we would likely factions rapidly forming to gather the most power and resources as quickly as possible. It would probably be quite bloody. (What you are describing is effectively the tribe system, which rarely ended well for most tribes.)
As long as resource scarcity exists I just don't see this working out, unfortunately.
In my mentioned system the power would be in cooperation. Fighting against that would lose power.
Resource scarcity is mostly a decision problem. Capitalism doesn't have incentive to let anyone benefit from the excessive resources so those in control won't decide for it.