Workerism
I've been thinking about capitalism a lot these days. Communism with complete state control over resources is obviously not the answer. Capitalism with heavy redistribution of resources could work, but it seems very vulnerable over time and it seems a little off: when someone gets money only to have it taken away as tax, that creates potential resentment.
(Technical side note:
'Socialism' is a very broad brush that doesn't really tell you much about the system, some people use it as a synonym for 'authoritarian communism' and others mean 'capitalism with heavy taxation and free health care', which are totally different systems.
My MCAT psychology book claims the definition of socialism is any governing system with re-distribution of resources. So obviously, if you distribute resources nicely in the first place, you don't need to RE-distribute.
Now, arguably, there is no 'true capitalism' today what with all the price fixing, tariffs, and subsidies to the military, corn and fossil fuel complexes. But when most people say capitalism, they mean our current system. And Smith didn't exactly like organized labor, and is an outdated old fuck, so true capitalism isn't that gravy. Even after union dues, they make you more money folks. Although, I DO like how old school capitalism is supposed to have free schools and public roads and utilities.)
Communism's fundamental failure is that it meant to give control of capital to workers, but it did not. In practice, it gave it to the state.
(yes, I know, some communists like to define state controlled as 'not real communism'... but you lost the cultural word war.)
There is a simple alternative:
A worker's capitalism, where you actually give control of capital/land and means of production directly to workers, which I like to call 'workerism' for short. Let anyone who works in a company automatically own shares and an equal vote over what to do with the future of the company and how it assigns wages; basically, turn every company into a co-op.
Workers deciding wages by vote = No redistribution needed as in socialism.
Some workers owning some production via control over their company = NOT all workers owning all means of production via the state as an intermediary (which as you know opens room for corruption if the state is run by less than ethical people).
The slightly more socialist version is to let the entire community (although we could restrict to just the local community) get some say too, in order to prevent selfish company behaviors en-mass when public health is being weighed against corporate dollars (or episodes where a company decides to protect workers who do a lousy job in a 'natural monopoly' situation, which a public say would help fix). We might call this version 'community productionism/capitalism' as an alternative name, although it doesn't sound as catchy to me. Community companyism? Community workerism? Something like that.
The global health crisis has brought nursing shortages brought on largely by low pay and long hours, and this has hit both countries with private health care and public. Workerism regardless of the original funding source would help fix this, because nurses would be able to set their own pay and hours fairly out of the available hospital wage funds. (It wouldn't help not having money to pay everyone or not enough nurses in the first place though; only sufficient investment publicly in your hospitals and higher ed can fix that. Well, that or letting people just die in ER if they don't have insurance which is kinda sick and twisted.)
You might've heard how recently the movie Batgirl was produced and then just dumped, written off as a loss on taxes and then made illegal to show anywhere. All that creative work, just up in smoke. Even if you don't like Batgirl (I personally had little interest) the idea of a work being made illegal to show by the whims of one executive who doesn't like its message or just wants profits should horrify you. (The same executive also removed dozens of shows from HBO such as episodes of Sesame Street, I believe, and targeted minorities which may get them in trouble with antitrust laws.)
And you may have heard how sometimes patents get bought up only to not get used, which is actively harmful to society as innovation is stifled. Or how privatization is undermining public education as people try to get away with teaching the bare minimum or leaving parents high and dry if their voucher went to a predatory school.
You may have even heard how even mildly socialist efforts like giving workers more land and better wages often led to American sponsored coups against the democratically elected leaders proposing those policies, leading to mass atrocities and death.
And you probably know that corporations are spying on you every time you use your phone or access the internet.
We as a society could do better, while still providing cash flow incentives for people to patent/invent in the first place or providing protections against production flops.
The Problem Of The Wealthy And Our Corrupt System Where The Rich Dictate Policies
Rich people can manage to pay almost nothing in taxes and have on paper 'zero wages' because all their money is in stocks, and they can do things like purchase a piece of art for 20 bucks and then donate it as a million dollar art piece and deduct this as a 'loss'. They've so twisted the system that it's like pulling nails to try to chase the money to get them to actually pay anything. Upping taxes in a 'socialist' system will only go so far, especially since they will use all their wealth to try to lobby against it again, if you can even manage to get past the corrupt politicians to do it in the first place.
There's a simple solution.
Cut out their wealth from underneath their feet. Build a network owned by workers, for workers, that supplies all of our needs, and their stocks will crash.
When I was reading about the story of record breaking small dollar donations adding up to over a million in campaign funds for political campaigns, one thing that immediately struck me is that if people could organize all that on money that is literately basically thrown away (only one candidate can win, after all, and it's only for one race) then they could start a company just as easily.
We have the power. We just need to realize it and effectively communicate. How many worker named companies can you recall? I think I've seen one or two and not in my 'area'. We need something like a federation, a network hub where fellow workerismists can see all the products and companies that were ethically produced, and also put out demands for products that aren't being produced - one time I was looking at a site that said it 'ethically produced goods' and all it sold was candy and bracelets. I'm sorry, but I don't need candy and bracelets. I need staple food. I need (well, not right now, but in future) proper clothing.
We need something like a worker's version of Amazon bringing a huge number of goods and services together in an ethical way. But I feel we can do more than just remake companies: we can aim to give to other members of our network including the most vulnerable; if we're trading essential goods to each other in mutual aid, that lessens the need for cash in the first place. A 'semi-profit', if you will. But it requires our cooperatives be networked together, not just a bunch of separated worker companies that have no association with each other.
I once tried to look at joining a local food-exchange mutual aid and found they weren't accepting registrations right now because of the 'high number of needy people'. Our current cooperative efforts aren't adequate and cannot stay on just the local level; not only does that lead to vulnerability of disruption, local communities aren't big enough to produce everything a person needs in this day and age. It will take time to scale to truly cut off the pigs, but if we start with the simpler to produce essentials as well with vanities, or even something like sports (they make a shit ton of money off of us - why not organize our own competitions that actually go back to the community and don't have that transphobic shit?) we can eventually subsume more and more industries.
Right now, if you go and strike or protest, you face risks (arguably worth it, but still), especially in 'fire whenever the employer feels like it' states.
If instead you quietly organize your own fucking company with the help of other people who don't want to fund this capitalist shit of a system, and fucking quit, they can't do anything to you. This won't happen overnight, obviously. Ten fast food workers don't have the capital to start their own company. A million do, but then not all million can immediately join that company. It's going to require some financial sacrifice in the beginning, and a lot of us are already hurting.
But if we can just cut one industry or neighborhood out from under them, then another, then another...
We win.
Game over. A quiet, and totally bloodless*, revolution.
*Well, in practice, some of us will probably be tracked on our phones, doxxed, and shot at. If MLK were alive today, who believes the police wouldn't shoot him?
For those still asking why they should care:
I define living beings as automatically valuing, because that's what makes sense to me. What is life, but something that values? The one true producer of value, without which the universe would be cold and dead?
Under that system, we are diminished when we treat life as having less value than cheap products.
Stop and ask yourself a question or more before you argue with me:
Are you truly happy?
At the end of the day, do you really give a shit about subjective or objective or would you want to not be tortured either way regardless of what stupid category (or neither!) morality falls under?
Did the acts of selfishness in your life give you long term happiness, or was it a short term kick?
Are you scared, contemptuous or angry, and if so, don't you remember other people being scared or angry being harder to reason with? Can you really say you're at your best when you're like that?
It may sound sappy, but people who engage in kindness actually score higher in happiness themselves. If that sounds hard to believe, maybe ask yourself why that is. If you find yourself thinking 'sure, I buy that, but kindness just is not realistic', ask yourself: did you ever actually hear of workerism before I mentioned it? If not, how can you be so sure it doesn't work? (if y'all are reading this from the far far future, ignore this question and replace it with 'what experimenting with workerism has actually been done, and did it follow the model I stated?')
Who told you that you had to be cruel? Why did you believe them? If it's a gut feeling, are you aware people also have gut feelings about things like the earth being flat? Gut feelings aren't truth, but insidiously, they feel like truth to us.
Are you benefiting from the current economic system and other people's misery? Or feel like you are about to at any moment and you've sunk too much cost into it to go back? Then maybe this post isn't for you. But it could be, if you want it to.
It's never too late for you to change yourself and to start valuing living things themselves.
(if you responded 'But it is communism and we all know commies are bad!' you fail reading comprehension 101.)
Now, what would be a good political system to implement this (or any system really) in? Well, the ideal might be a scientocracy - by which I do not mean a 'rule by scientists' but a 'rule by science'.
What would a scientocracy look like?
If you know anything about science, then you know that science is not just the collective opinions/consensus of a bunch of scientists, but instead is about experiments and the consensus of experiments with each other. If I gather 50 scientists in a room and ask them their opinion on pizza, and they all agree they prefer a vegetarian version of Hawaiian, this does not make pineapple pizza being the best a 'scientific truth', just an opinion of a bunch of scientists.
So what would a genuine scientocracy look like? If it was just 'rule by scientists', we might end up with a rather nonscientific result. But if we actually meant 'rule by science', then it's clear that simply putting scientists in charge does not make a scientocracy. Rather, to be a scientocracy, the rules that any leader put into power must follow should mirror science, such as phrasing new laws in terms of their hypothesized effects and all of their major consequences.
For instance, let's say your theory is that banning abortion will save more lives without endangering women and no negative outcome on the life of born children. If experiment (such as putting the law into effect in one state/area for a trial period) contradicts this, then you would not be able to use this justification in a scientocracy and could be challenged in court for having no basis in reality. [One could still phrase a nastier law where one outright says a lot of women will be killed and many of those that do live with an extra child will have that child live with a much worse life outcome than if they had been allowed to wait until they were ready for a kid, conforming with data. You would need additional restrictions that don't come from science like 'sufficiently nasty laws with mainly negative outcomes should not be allowed' or the like to prevent laws like 'forcing people to give their body parts to other people is now legal'.]
Or say that you wanted to raise the minimum wage, one of the negative consequences you'd have to address is cost inflation. To do that, you could point to places where the minimum rage has been raised and look at how costs are higher (or, in some cases, lower. Yes, that's right; there are countries with better minimum wage and lower prices for McDonalds. USA is basically a third world country now...)
Let's say you did raise the wage and used appropriate experimental backing, but the wages still rose higher than expected. Then it could in a scientocracy get challenged. To meet the challenge, you would have to come up with a 'rescuing hypothesis' that is a 'no-fault' condition of the new law and then give decent evidence for this rescuing hypothesis: for instance, if you could demonstrate that at the same time, a war occurred causing massive inflation, a phenomena that is expected to cause wage rise. (To be more careful, you could have included 'wages will rise more coincidentally if a war occurs'.)
This could have some issues, like say what if your rescuing hypothesis is 'the millionaire jackshit class decided to collectively raise prices because they get better short term profits by doing that, with lots of incentives to undermine their own company long-term, and they have a monopoly so nobody is going to stop them by offering better prices'?
After all, this could be difficult to demonstrate, at least not without breaking up monopolies. You would need the additional power to pursue an auxiliary hypothesis. But one can pile up auxiliary hypotheses without end, so, one need to put some kind of limiter on how many one is allowed to have, like one or two.
So my conclusion is that while a scientocracy could be very different, and act/be defined by forcing politicians to act like scientists rather than rule by scientists, it would not be a cure-all, and it would have to be done carefully or it would just end up not really being a scientocracy at all, just people throwing jargon around that sounds vaguely scientific to justify things that don't actually have a lot of experimental data behind them and cherry-picking to avoid facing the conclusions of their own experiments/laws.
One problem is that most politicians are probably not statisticians and would have no competence in evaluating data. But that is a problem we already have today.
Unlimited polyarchy
Another interesting system (not necessarily independent of the previous one, both could be implemented) is that of a polyarchy, a many leader system. I've never understood anarchists - at the very least, you'd think if they were smart they'd come up with a different brand name instead of one used as a synonym for lawlessness.
An unlimited polyarchy where the number of leaders trends toward infinity can be close to anarchy without ever actually becoming it. An example is of Mastodon: anyone can create their own server and enforce rules on it, so the hypothetical number of leaders is infinite. Anyone can leave their leader if they don't like them and choose a different leader or be a leader. This is probably alike to how very primitive societies were like, back when the Earth was poorly populated and everyone really could just move away if a leader annoyed them.
The problem in real life is that there is not infinite land that everyone can just move to if they don't like their leadership. So one would have to explain how conflict resolution will work when resources are finite and two different leaders want to enforce different rules over the same plot of land.
Probably the 'easiest' version to imagine is a mass democracy where every single person has to directly vote on laws or appoint someone to do so for them; as a matter of practicality, many people would probably appoint someone, but not all of them. Thus everyone can have at least a minor leadership role if they want it. Actually putting this into practice and figuring out HOW everyone is going to vote on all the laws is a different matter of course.
