This article describes ideas on how capitalism has run its course, and that we are now entering a postcapitalist economy.
New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.
It mentions the fundamental shift in the way that the economies could be going and in order to embrace that shift we’d do well setting aside old ways. We can only say that that past has led us to the now which we can experience and the future that is being built.
Safe Network reminds me of a private digital world. So this is the digital realm where we are free to exist digitally. Because others can not infringe on others; therefore, basic rights can be established and practiced for the first time in a digital world.
It isn’t even possible to have privacy on a game like Second Life because we’d submit our life data to its makers. The digital era would afford more efficiency, and direct interaction with computer intelligence would elevate creativity.
Andreas A appropriately hates this “sharing economy” and on several occasions he said it’s called so because you don’t own anything.
I completely agree with him. The road to serfdom. To lower your carbon footprint or something.
Of course the source of this article (The Guardian) should arouse worst suspicions all by itself.
I think people are entitled to their opinions… idk what Andreas antonopolous has to do with the article, or where that came up. Looking further the banks adopting block chain and shredding bitcoin and compromising it completely could be accredited to his work. Banks are the true serfdom. But I cannot take your quoting as fact, post a link to it or something, and I’ll tell you it aroused suspicion.
Sharing economies, you actually do own things, because people are the ones who share with other people. Someone has to be an owner.
Empirical data: The only way I’ve been able to own a car is sharing economy → made a downpayment through a bank (unfortunately → I wish there was a clear sharing economy for loans of car size) and then I share that car for about half of the days in the month to be able to maintain the car. I’m an owner man, and with automatic cryptographic contracts I can only see this ecosystem improving. Getting on the road and owning a car even without much money at all and without a job which extends my reach and empowers me, it’s atleast good for that. Sharing economy.
But Marx is evidently related to “the sharing economy” and if that doesn’t alarm you, nothing will.
The sharing economy the socialists talk about is definitely not related to capitalist “rent a car” or “taxi service” business model.
The latter is a well established capitalist property rental model that existed before “neoliberalism”, but TFA attempts to claim that some rikshaw puller in Bangladesh is a “neoliberal” capitalist and that without a new economy in which he doesn’t own anything is going to help him get out of poverty.
Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework…
Do you see “private property” anywhere in the quoted text? Why do we need freaking Safecoin when everything is “free”?
And how don’t you see how Andreas’es comment is related to all this?
Total mumbo-jumbo! I’ll post a more complete comment when I get to my desktop.
We need Safecoin to regulate resource distribution; this way one single person won’t be able to take over all of the data capacity. Ootherwise we would be at the risk to denial of service.
Same as we can’t have one single person or organization owning all of the cars.
There are great ideas that stem from recycling resources by contributing their excess to others in exchange for additional necessities. Any extra funds I’d earn from sharing a car can go on and buy gas as well, for example. @janitor I urge you not to linguistically stunt and confuse Marx and some ideas there with what transpired as Lenin and later Stalin. That’s like saying China is a communist country, far from it.
I read quite a lot of the article, but found it very long and couldn’t find anything about how a ‘post capitalist’ system could work.
The simple things should be explained first: if there’s a post-capitalist economy forming, who will own the factors of production, who will own goods, and how is distribution and resource allocation controlled efficiently without markets?
When these things aren’t mentioned upfront, it’s hard to see what someone means by post-capitalism, though the author implies the state will somehow make things happen (without specifying how, from what I read).
This quote is quite telling: “We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like”
It all reads like nonsense to me, and it takes so long to say so little I couldn’t get through it.
However, I am excited about what new technologies, including the Safe Network will bring to enhance our capitalist system significantly, by increasing productivity, and reducing our reliance on some of the worst parts of our current system (including dependence on banks).
Markets exist to divide non-abundant goods. Maybe when we have replicators and unlimited energy generation we can have a post-market based economy. However, not everything can be abundant, such as someone’s time.
Automation will definitely change dynamics, where some things that are now scarce will become less scarce, but things will always require resources to produce, so there will still be resource allocation issues that markets can be very useful in balancing out.
For example, a cutting edge replicator machine will be expensive, so it’s time will be valuable, and be rationed by market mechanisms. Technology will keep marching forward, and R&D is expensive, so needs a return.
It’s fun to explore, and exciting to see these kinds of things starting to become feasible!
I find the perspective of these sorts of articles strange.
Free markets by their description cannot rely on force to insist on an exchange, yet intellectual property requires force to implement it.
It is rent seeking that is the problem, plain and simple. Whether it is land or information being granted a monopoly, the same result occurs - money flows from the poor to the rich, from the many to the few. Such legal monopolies are granted by the state and the only way to prevent them is to circumvent the reach of the state. Believing that the state can be turned to support the many is, at best, naive.
This is why open source is gaining ever more momentum. This is why peer to peer is getting ever more popular. This is why encryption and the networks which allow anonymity of data exchange are in demand.
Society is moving on with or without the state and its corporate puppeteers. Sadly, freeing us from our physical rentiers will be much harder to achieve - locations will continue to funnel money from the many to the few until the state stops meddling here too.
That was a good read, thanks for sharing that article!
My take from the post capitalism era is that, we’re slowly shifting away from the thinking of
“I can do it all myself and keep 100% of the profits”
to
“We can build this thing together and although I get a smaller reward, collectively we come up with a solution that has a much greater chance for success and yields a much greater reward”.
The key is cooperation. A hive mind. I remember this game theory experiment I had to do in school for a project, it was the prisoner’s dilemma experiment. And the algorithm that won it was a variation of the “tit for tat” algorithm which basically won because it cooperated with the most number of people that cooperated back.
Mutual cooperation is an ideology that has always proven successful. In other words, a consensus based approach, where the consensus is striving towards a common goal (hopefully it is a goal towards a greater good).
It;s a reference frame of mind, like the car example - I choose that one because I know it best first hand. Peer to Peer meaning I am a person who would perfectly take care of your car, and if you are the same then you are my peer, and for the nominal fee the peer can utilize the car. Scarcity becomes access. It takes effort to haul that hunk of metal and negotiates its purchase to make it readily available to it. I made the effort for that so I’ll manage that One car.
If someone then did the efforts and had a garden with many tomatoes then likewise we can have a mutual benefit. There are so many people of us these days that we’re able to be diverse and still get what we need. Someone maintains the gardening. And others maintain other services. The great thing about automation is that now all the gardner needs to do is unembarrasingly contact the technicians when the machinery needs correction, and especially the engineer should want to make sure it doesn’t break because they should maintain the machinery on a regular basis and someone would commit to maintaining all machinery.
I’d mention this is really how things happens these days; hwoever, societies rely on the paper money. That is what is changing the movable type has served us making paper money. We’re now doing digital money, and thus we can achieve efficiency of unprecedented levels. The very interaction we can have on a forum sharing knowledge demonstrates this. The hive mind can form within the digital ecosystem and everyone can be heard and understood through their expression.
You’re right, Traktion, it’s really not guaranteed to happen even if everything becomes free.
Why? Well, human nature is such that people long for power. Guess what would some fanatic do with access to free manufacturing and energy?
This is where State comes in - to take the role of a free market and boss people around so that the only people who can terrorize others are the corrupt government and private sector cronies around it.
I’d really like to comment on that article because it contains dozens of mistakes, but I see that most people can barely focus on reading the original. The author has 0 understanding of how economy works and what’s really going on.
LOL! The evil rickshaw driver strikes again!
Instead of joining the Union and investing in the latest Tesla model financed by public debt generated through the cooperation of his government and Wall St. firms, he’s doing his own thing!
Here we see a small free market capitalist who makes an honest living by serving people well enough so that they are willing to part with their money in exchange for his service. He “can do it all alone”, owns his means of production, and he “keeps 100% of the profits.”
Clearly he should be re-educated (on the taxpayer dime) to learn the Way of the Sharing Economy.
Sigh… Some people just don’t get it.
And even though the article repeatedly tells you that in the sharing economy it is the manipulative, corrupt State bureaucrats who define what a greater good is, you still ignore all the red flags.
Did you read and understand what I wrote? Not sure what your post is even meant to be.
I was simply giving my view on what the end of capitalism will mean, my view on post capitalism. I was referring to decentralizing and mutual cooperation being the way businesses are starting to go. Not the sharing economy necessarily. A consensus network is one of mutual cooperation toward a common goal dictated by the majority of the network. Just look at the way safe network works. It is open source and will let app developers contribute to the network, building apps, contributing resources, using maidsafe coin. All participating startups on the safenetwork would bolster the price of the coin, and everyone wins.
And even though the article repeatedly tells you that in the sharing
economy it is the manipulative, corrupt State bureaucrats who define
what a greater good is, you still ignore all the red flags.
Do you know what consensus means? It means majority of the network dictates what the greater good is. Not “corrupt state bureaucrats”.
@dallyshala its a code world that is emerging, or it was code all along. Coders coding the and being coded by the code. But we have to make sure its not quite the war of code against code. That’s not the best method of evolution, cooperation is better.
@tracktion and @janitor there were a few good decades for states and people right after WWII. But it degrades and people get a culture or some are born with something like an instinct that tells them money is the way you reduce the power of others over you and increase your power over others and that using money this way is right and sacred. They can’t understand why they can put their name on something that is mainly the work of others (a business) and then are not able to put it all in their own pocket. When that something (business) becomes larges its generally crime in the true and absolute sense if they are able to cash in i.e., if they want to put more than 4% of it their own pocket (state meddling or not.) Unless we’re talking about someone that is truly constructive for humanity it would be much better to burn the excessive share they’d like to pocket than let them convert it to increased corrupting power over others. But we have it today from corrupt courts that money in politics is not bribery/censorship but its opposite: free speech. They literally want a system where a lack of money means you have to take orders or can’t eat or live and a system where you have to take orders from people who have more money than you. Its idiocy and it leads to rule by inherited wealth or monarchy type set ups where the rich tax the poor and maximally corrupted/psychopathic idiots rule- the range is Paris Hilton/W. to Caligula and Nero.
people get a culture or some are born with something like an instinct that tells them money is the way you reduce the power of others over you and increase your power over others and that using money this way is right and sacred. They can’t understand why they can put their name on something that is mainly the work of others (a business) and then are not able to put it all in their own pocket.
Those people are the government, crony capitalists, the public sector and various unions (mostly from the public sector).
Theft is institutionalized in the institutions, starting with central banks.
Since the early 20h century state money has become the primary tool for state-sponsored crime. Instead for calling for the demolition of the state and a revival of free capitalism with voluntary association, articles like these promote destruction of the concept of private property and money in which nobody owns anything and can’t save anything, thereby increasing dependence on the state and solidifying this new totalitarianism. Fascinating, yes, but in the negative sense.
There is nothing new in that: a simple explanation is that people distrust the government and want free markets, including private currencies.
The rickshaw guy would prefer to get some silver instead of rupees, I am quite sure of that. And why would he even need the government, unless he wanted to take something from his fellow man?
Wealth-building scarcity is possible only when there is private property. Without private property and sound money the only kinds of scarcity that can exist are state-rationing and uneconomic depletion of resources (again, common to command economies in which state plays a dominant role).
I commented on the abundance nonsense several times on this site. The moment “everyone” can have a small army of gardening robots (impossible, but let’s imagine that), tomatoes will become worthless (price=0). There wouldn’t be any scarcity, so how would that economy work? Why not grow corn, or manufacture wooden skies or glass bottles instead? You can’t know what to make when everything is free. Actually, why do anything in the first place - since everything is free, why not just stroll down the street and take from your community what you need. In case they complain, you can compose an instant haiku for them and claim that’s fair compensation for their hassle.
Of course it is a complete nonsense. Which is why this utopia cannot work without a controlling state which sets “fair” prices, assigns “useful” work to idled laborers, rations “wasteful” consumption (no more than one pair of non-biodegradable sneakers) and fire-fights constant disturbances with ever increasing police and surveillance apparatus.
You’re failing to see the article for what it is. The site on which it was published should have been enough of a warning.
I agree with that analysis but I also don’t trust the unfettered market. It won’t stop monopoly or cartel or wage suppression. If you have 75% of revenue going to labor as the US did for 30 years then you have a middlw class. If you have only 34% going to labor then I think you get slavery and civil war and possibly the end of the species given where modern war can take us. Having people sell themselves and 34% or less going to labor was the norm before the New Deal in the states and it wasn’t even remotely good enough or stable. The dust bowl wasn’t just a farming tech error.
We have been in post capitalism for quite some time already. Do you really think capitalism includes bailing out those who are about to get eliminated by the competition?
Hold on - how do you build and maintain a monopoly, without the support of consumers, in a free market?
Where there are no barriers to entry, competition is rife, what is leveraged can be used to keep other out? Every company is going to need to provide the best products and services to get to and maintain their market leading positions.
Sure, there will be some with massive market share, but if they are providing good products/services, what is the problem? If they use their cash to surpress competition, money will just leak back to consumers anyway, allowing them to launch more attacks in the market space.
It has always been about using force to evade competition - to seek rent - and this can only occur where institutional force is possible.
