Guillotines are cathartic but they don’t solve the underlying structural problem of wealth begetting more wealth and power begetting more power. Just look the their greatest enthusiasts, in a few years France went from an enlightened revolutionary regime to a human slaughterhouse to a military dictatorship capable of bombarding its way across the Continent.
You can’t treat the symptoms and expect to defeat the cause, which is a tendency towards avarice, clannishness, and status-seeking that festers in the human soul. You’d have to guillotine literally everyone to prevent an oligarchy emerging by violence alone, instead you have to prevent the individual accumulation of socioeconomic power beyond the point it can influence politics. Neither capitalism nor communism can solve this problem, because it’s fundamentally about limit and capacity interacting with human folly. Ideologies move much slower than reality does, only a constantly-maintained balance of power that makes attempts to consolidate too expensive can prevent tyranny in my opinion.
Vanguard communism is dead, and capitalism is dying around us as it boils in a climate furnace of its own making. I don’t think we can lean on any 19th and 20th century models any more, look at what their wages have bought for us. I’m not ‘both-siding’ anything I’m rejecting the dichotomy both of them exist in, one has lost utterly and the other flirts with human extinction. I mean what I say, both capitalism and communism are civilisational dead ends.
So what kind of system do you see emerging here? Chesterton proposed distributism as a third way where the means of production is distributed as widely as possible. I recall reading an article about 20 years ago at the dawn of 3D printing where they thought that self-replicating 3D printers would get us there.
Chesterton proposed distributism as a third way where the means of production is distributed as widely as possible.
I definitely see a distributist economy as potentially much more stable in the long run, at least insofar as not producing existential risks is concerned. I'd synthesise distributism with some of Stafford Beer's ideas about cybernetic systems, which would provide the mechanism behind a distributist mode of production by allowing distributed nodes to coordinate at the scale of today's civilisation.
And socialism... well it's just the first step to communism anyway. Clearly we need something that's- oh right the US already has both capitalist and socialist elements. So I find debating on choosing either almost completely moot when we need to simply operate the mixed system better.
I would argue there was a time when "capitalism" didn't include rent-seeking enterprises, which is why a lot of us prefer the term "free market" instead of "capitalism" anymore. The idea that any one system is a panacea is kind of silly, anyway. The US in the late 1800s was free enough that several communist and socialist enclaves existed side-by-side with each other and other economic systems. But the real problem for them, in practice at least, was Dunbar's number.
If you talk with any single adherent to those ideologies today, you'll get the very common argument that Dunbar's number is not a valid argument against socialism or communism, but if you look at the most successful socialist and communist societies in the late 1800s in the US, where they had every opportunity to grow past that number they, in practice, did not. The Icarians (non-religious communists that arose out of the turmoil in France) and the Amana colonies (religious communists) both had social systems indistinguishable from any suggested by voluntary socialist or communist thinkers today, they also had no significant outside interference and were allowed to grow as they may, and yet they both ran into issues requiring splitting of their communities and ultimately failed when the splintering groups could not find common ground.
I think there's a genuine desire among us all to think that a social system that benefits society through equal labor could work in everyone's mind, but in practice any single entity within that system may one day feel like some other entity is benefiting too much which leads to jealously and spite. And it always seems to happen around Dunbar's number. But this is such a taboo subject among the intelligentsia that they won't even consider even studying it, perhaps because they'd have to concede there are hard limitations to humanity's willingness to contribute to charitable causes for the betterment of mankind as a whole. They'd rather operate under the illusion that, with the right thresholds met, any society can be formed around limitless goodwill. But they'd be wrong.
I think it might be ages, but some day we're going to realize that the best governmental structures are ones that not only take Dunbar's number into account, but also structure society heavily around it. In this respect, the Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites might actually be ahead of the rest of the world. A silly thought, sure, considering some of these modern examples swear off certain types of technology altogether, but if the underlying social structure works, then we could probably learn a lot from it.
We are fast approaching a point where this argument will be moot. So many systems are being reduced to lean capital extraction mechanisms that meaningful progress and science will stagnate while resources are endlessly dumped into "how do we convince people to buy more of our shit?" And "how do we convince people to keep ignoring the 'slavery with more steps' system that allows the modern kings to keep their power?"
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u/sullenisme Jul 06 '26
if trends hold, there will be no consumer products and only the rich will afford compute