I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?
China Miéville
I tried City and the City but struggled with it. Will try another one! Thank you.
Embassytown is my favorite but the whole Perdido Street Station trilogy (?) is much lighter/more plot oriented than city and the city.
Cory Doctorow. He covers some stuff like this in his books. I just read “Rapture of the nerds” and am currently reading “walkaway”, both are pretty good.
“Cory” 😉 His name is Cory Doctorow.
Thank you, fixed it.
Last thing i read from Cory was “little brother,” a YA book about democratically opposing totalitarian regimes. I was a bit out of the target market, but it read well and was actually a real guide about how to do the above. Basically a techno anarchist cookbook embedded in a novel.
LeGuin also wrote Earthsea, which was later labeled as YA, but IIRC she felt that was bizarre. It’s not like she wrote it for YA. And as far as high fantasy, it is some of the best out there, in my opinion.
I generally prefer the term “light novel” to “YA”. It seems to capture the target audiences more accurately.
It was also very much a specific moment in time, where it was possible to be optimistic that the Web 2.0 explosion of decentralized access to tools for users self-publishing and distributing content to millions of readers/consumers would democratize the exchange of ideas.
And then, over the decade and a half since, the old gatekeepers were replaced with new gatekeepers, where the wild west of the unrestricted web turned into a cesspool of spam/scams and clickbait, and people organized into walled gardens controlled by corporate interests. The internet as a whole is still somewhat decentralized, but it’s getting harder and harder to meaningfully participate in public dialogue without first pledging fealty (that is, signing away rights in some Terms of Service) to some digital lord in this new feudal landscape.
That’s also to say nothing of the power of corporate or governmental forces to influence the discussion on those platforms, through old and new propaganda techniques that leverage existing social and technical feedback loops.
Coming back to this two months later. Really disagree with the comparison after reading Walkaway. It was more Ayn Rand in style than Le Guin. The characters were mouth pieces for ideologies, the story was half baked at best, and a lot of the nuance is entirely lost to “but look, they’re the bad guys and it went wrong for them!”
Not sure I’ll try again. Thanks for the recommendation, but my search continues!
Gary Doctorow
Cory, right? I was an avid Boing Boing reader back in the day, but I thought Little Brother was YA and that ain’t my genre so hadn’t been paying attention! Will go pick up some of his work.
Guy Debord captures the problem best in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
In theory, you could probably go against it. Problem is that the Spectacle (capitalist ideology visually manifested) is tautological and self-reinforcing. Even to critique it you have to make the critique a spectacle, which immediately undermines that very same critique (think of any YouTube video critiquing YouTube).
So no, it’s no the same. The odds are insanely stacked up in favor of keeping the structure in place—unlike breaking away from said belief in the divinity of kings.
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OK, how?
Refuse to buy things? Live in a cardboard box?
Supply and demand. Either reduce the demand or increase the supply and costs go down. Now target the things people need to survive and the cost to exist goes down.
Then they downsize workers and further erode merchantability while jacking up prices. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and those at the top have made sure they will literally be the last to fall. You want to get a billionaire to sell their 4th yacht, it’ll only cost us a million people going hungry.
There are ways out of capitalism, but the only fast ones are violent and worse than capitalism themselves. We should be working on moving towards incorruptable governance and social expansion. It happens in slow steps. The millionaire tax in MA managed one of those steps recently, despite some pretty dramatic opposition by the ultrawealthy.
That’s just capitalism though???
Yes, but then keep going. More supply! MORE! There is no demand, demand is gone! We literally cannot give it all away, no one wants it, there is no market!
Imagine if we produced so much food that everything was free. Imagine if all the water you ever wanted was clean and free! Imagine if housing was so abundant people could move around freely.
What would keep you in one place? Why not travel the world knowing that anywhere with people has the basics to live. Travel, see the sights, meet the people, never stress about needing to work just to keep existing.
Now you’re free to work on what you want. Create things. Create art, tell stories, cook interesting new dishes. Visit friends, be there for your family, raise your kids. Do all the things that you don’t because you need to work just to live.
I mean that’s fairytale land but yea that would be good.
Unfortunately in the real world there is limited resources and labour. So there is a real cost to things and things can’t be produced for free in unlimited supply.
Realistically? Only successful and subsequent revolutions will resolve anything.
Absolute monarchy and feudalism ended after the bourgeoisie revolutions of the 17th and 18th century. Only after then.
Organizing politically.
While private ownership of production is in place, there’s no amount of boycott we could reasonably do too make changes. As you’ve noted, it would end up starving people and making them homeless.
On the lowest effort end. Using the power we currently have; we should vote for the least fascist of the two party members. This will not save us, but it will slow the decay and give time to others who are more actively working to solve the problem.
People with more time and effort, should organize. Push for getting rid of the first past the post voting systems and replacing them with less broken voting systems. Try to create leftist candidates and get them elected locally. Spread leftist ideology to public.
Any politician that thinks we shouldn’t be allowed tools of our own ought to be ridiculed until they go away for good.
Start with unions. That’s the only way workers get power.
I’m aware my point of view is not very popular, but in my country unions have been well-established since I don’t know how long ago, and they’ve become as corrupt (if not more) than political parties… full-time union representatives here are nothing other than people who pretend to be leftist but actually have a very capitalistic way of life behind close doors… at least here, that ain’t gonna fix the capitalism problem
Probably because you’re in a union in a capitalist society. Unions are lacking when missing a leftist ideology. Unions are a hold over for the working class and should be used as a stepping stone in society until an economy of worker co-ops are created.
That’s a really good point, thanks
Seize the means of production!
Paraphrasing and bastardizing Gödel, all sufficiently complex systems are either inconsistent or incomplete. Gödel used recursion to reveal an inconsistency within typographical number theory. Programmatic restrictions on what one can do within a system (jails and sandboxes) can generally be escaped by finding and using a reference to the parent system.
Capitalism is a system. All systems can be broken if one chooses to do so. There’s even a generic formula for doing so.
Ok, what mechanism within capitalism traps us within it? None, the mechanism isn’t defined within capitalism. But we know that there is something trapping us. What about the parent system? The parent system in most capitalist countries is liberalism (enforced by state violence). It is the police of the liberal state who harass or kill you if you refuse to engage, or who otherwise enforce your starvation. It’s actually the state that forces you to use money by collecting taxes.
So there’s the issue. If you can figure out how to make something that fulfills the functions that you need from those within capitalism and the state, but do so without paying taxes then you can functionally escape capitalism. Ok, within liberalism there is an institution that operates similarly to the state (it collects taxes and provides services with those taxes), but does so without itself paying taxes: the church.
If you want to escape capitalism, start a religion.
New copy pasta
Step 1: Think of a viable alternative.
No-one has yet achieved step 1, which makes subsequent steps harder. It’s easy to get your hands on people who will answer with magical thinking, but a system that will actually work and isn’t capitalism has yet to be invented.
Democratic socialism is definitely a viable alternative. Even capitalism with a strong safety net vis a vis Nordic countries is better.
I live in Sweden. Sweden is not a socialist country. It’s a hard regulated capitalist country with social safety net paid for by taxes.
I don’t understand why people keep saying that the nordic countries are socialist countries just because of the tax funded welfare. The taxes comes from hard working people, be it owners of businesses or employees.
I literally said capitalist with a strong safety net.
You are right, I misread. My point is still valid, though. Many refer to the nordic countries as socialist but they are not.
And yet, still better than what USA has.
Much better, I’d say.
Capitalism with a strong safety net sounds like you’re avoiding the question. The question is how to replace capitalism, not how to improve it.
How are you defining democratic socialism? Usually when I ask people to define socialism they answer with capitalism with extra undefined steps whereby the set of employees of a business is legally forced to be equal to that business’s set of owners. I’m not familiar with “democratic” as a modifier to the term, though.
The right answer is most likely a mixed system, so will most likely include some form of capitalism.
Wikipedia describes what I mean pretty well.
The article you linked has at least 3 different kinds of socialism that satisfy “democratic” socialism:
Democratic socialists have promoted various different models of socialism and economics, ranging from market socialism, where socially owned enterprises operate in competitive markets and are self-managed by their workforce, to non-market participatory socialism based on decentralised economic planning.[127] Democratic socialism can also be committed to a decentralised form of economic planning where productive units are integrated into a single organisation and organised based on self-management.[22]
What definition do you mean by it?
RIP. She wrote the best dragons
This is a nice idea. But, it’s an oversimplification. To replace capitalism, we’d need to replace it with something more powerful.
Kings were overpowered by the merchant. If we want to overcome capitalism, something new must overpower the merchant.
The people.
The working class should control the economy democratically. It’s called socialism.
What does removing the king look like in our deeply ingrained, hyper capitalist society?
Get rid of billionaires first as they are the #1 problem. Then go step by step.
The French did it before, so we can do the same
I feel like we have a lot more obstacles in our way than the French did during their revolution. Most notably heavily armed militaries, inscrutable governmental ties with wealthy elites, and a large fraction of the population conditioned into thinking that our current system is infallible.
It was the same when most of Europe’s monarchies were dethroned. Heavily armed militaries were there, it was the time of the Great War after all. Inscrutable government ties? Half the monarchs were cousins, the ruling class was essentially one family. A large fraction of our population thinking that the system is infallible? Divine right of kings, everyone was religious as hell, and you literally had your church in your ID cards.
The system still rolled over when millions of armed men came home from the war, their friends brutally killed for four years, their country which they were taught to sacrifice for debased, themselves having lived in a trench for four years.
The thing is, systems where the few accumulate ever more resources by taking it from the many is not sustainable. Of course, it seems we’ll give up democracy before giving up capitalism. The thing is, democratic traditions are the difference between what happened to the Windsors and the Romanovs when the inevitable change comes. It also is the difference between the experience of the common man living in England vs Russia.
We all going to die eventually. Give my life meaning, I dare you.
The French did it before, so we can do the same
And pray tell what happened consequently, good sir?
They had their cake, and ate it too!
Diminishing the central state to its most minimal form: judicial system, police and military. Everything else should be based on freedom.
Guillotine the state! I wouldn’t say absolute no to some semi-accidental deaths of business leaders who grossly abused the state via lobbying etc while doing this transition, frankly. But not primarily because they’re billionaires or capitalist, rather because they’re scumbags.
(It’s possible that all current billionaires became billionaires because of abusing government lobbying, but I don’t know)
judicial system, police and military
Oh! Yeah those are definitely the good parts of the state!
You think they should be private as well? That’s a bit more radical form of ancap that I’m not at all certain about. Also, I don’t have a clue how a private judicial system could ever work.
Not an ancap at all. I would argue the judicial system, police, and military are already in the hands of the wealthy, so aren’t they kinda private?
If that’s true, then they’re the worst kind of private, the kind where there’s no competition. So technically private yes, but in the most abhorrent and corrupt way. The libertarian position is that such links must be eradicated.
For a lot of things, that eradication can be done by simply removing the whole thing (e.g. how Milei seems to be doing in Argentina), but those three things most probably cannot exist privately. Thing is, the fewer things we as citizens have to be very vigilant about (and I dare to say that everyone agrees these three are such things – some people just argue that they are not the only things), the easier it is to do so.
Nothing makes me feel better about the hopelessness in America more than platitudes. (/s)
The fact here is that most people are paying triple for groceries, 30-50% more for their rent, and have to work multiple jobs to survive. They’re not going to care that Trump or DeSantis are fascists. They’re going to care that Trump or DeSantis aren’t Biden.
Good may come of it, but not without a ton of carnage in the interim.
This isn’t a platitude.
This is the eternal cicle of social democracy. Not good enough, riches getting richer and poor pooring, inevitable the fascism should arrive to give an answer that is not related with the ruling class, but an external agent.
I track my groceries very closely and I am paying about 9% more than last year.
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“We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources, because they align people’s incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources.”
If there exists another system that can do this more efficiently, it hasn’t been discovered yet.
This is such a bullshit take. Look at the current system where we use precious resources to build dumb IoT devices. This is not efficient at all.
Tell me how shipping fruits from China to North America is more efficient than growing food locally and buying locally.
The only thing capitalism is efficient at is making more capital when you already have capital.
Nothing more. This is a scam that people gobble up.
“Tell me how shipping fruits from China to North America is more efficient than growing food locally and buying locally.”
I like how this sentence shows you fundamentally don’t understand how efficient shipping is. I’m not sure where you live, but where I live is some of the most economically productive land in the entire world. Wasting it to build a few pounds of a single fruit which can be grown somewhere else would be wildly inefficient.
“Look at the current system where we use precious resources to build dumb IoT devices”
Ah yes, a seller providing something people want. Classic case of inefficiency /eyeroll
Tell me how taking a fleet of truck, a shipping container, then another fleet of trucks is more efficient than a farmer’s market or a vertical farm right next to the market resources wise?
A seller providing an electronic device that cannot be repaired, rendering it an e-waste is an efficient use of resources?
Stop licking the capitalism boot, it is far from an efficient way to use the resources, unless that resource is capital.
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Tell me how taking a fleet of truck, a shipping container, then another fleet of trucks is more efficient than a farmer’s market or a vertical farm right next to the market resources wise?
That’s the cool thing, we live in a system where if vertical farming is more efficient, then it wins. We want a system like that.
That’s the cool thing, we don’t. As I said many times, the only efficiency in capitalism is to make more capital. Resources are only being used to generate more capital, they aren’t used efficiently.
So again, tell me how shipping food across oceans is more efficient than growing food locally.
My guess is that you will offer another platitude to bootlick capitalism as this beacon of efficiency. It is not.
If vertical farming was more efficient then it would be cheaper.
Heres to hoping it is cheaper. Cheaper food is always a good thing.
I’d doubt it is cheaper where I live. Land, labor, electricity and water are all expensive, and we have high taxes for the services provided to us. Where I live is extremely economically productive. I’d doubt growing a few pounds of fruits could compete with producing high value services.
Other places are so efficient at growing fruit, free sunlight, free rainfall, land is plentiful and cheap, labor is cheap, and shipping is so efficient that it’s better to just ship to us.
This is just saying that capitalism is the best because it behaves like capitalism.
Not really. Markets are great at rewarding clever improvements. Other systems are not great at that.
Can you quantify that statement in any way?
Spoiler: he can’t
“they align people’s incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources.”
Well it took America proving democracy works and WW1 to topple a couple of monarchies.
Ah yes, America, the first successful democratic nation Give me a break
It’s not even a democracy, much less the first successful one
We need WW3 and the Bell Riots to topple capitalism.
Don’t forget the Irish Unification
Democratic republics existed before America mate
Also, the glaring racial inequities of America were ridiculed by contemporaries, even anti-monarchists across the world.
America proving democracy works
Lmmfao… 🤣🤣
The truth is American “democracy” does “work”, but not for the reasons, nor the people, you surely think it does (hint: it isn’t you, nor the benefit of society)…
https://libcom.org/article/capitalist-democracy-illusion-choice
We’ll never said their democracy works it’s just theirs was the first alternative to govern a nation that the status quo of monarchies since Roman empire fell. Fuck American democracy is clearly not the democracy I wish to one day have, but it did provide stability in leadership relative to monarchies since the leaders (in theory) are chosen by a supportive people for their ability to lead and not because someone fucked had a kid with their cousin and now that kid is destined to lead.
There are many government systems out there, unfortunately some are bad, some are good but I do not know of a one size fits all.
Capitalism is imo so hard to remove because it’s a system that evolved out of our base biological nature. It’s a system very close to what’s “natural” if we didn’t have much education or philosophy.
We have the possibility to think about better systems and ways to inhibit our base nature, but that requires effort and a willingness to do that. I think capitalism is what comes out if you don’t do this.
I notice in myself all the time the impulses that fuel capitalism. To acquire more resources. To better my status. To be selfish at the expense of others. I have to work actively against them to live my life in a way that I think is right, and I still fuck up often. Unless everyone understands this and does the same, this system will stay.
Umm, no it’s not “natural”. I mean sure hoarding is natural, but so is taking care of each other. Disciplining or expelling greedy fucks is also natural.
The stock market is completely un-natural in almost every thinkable way.
You might’ve noticed I put natural in quotes, meaning I don’t actually think it’s a natural system in itself. The only thing I said is that it evolved out of our nature. I explained what I meant here.
I didn’t notice, should read better.
It’s fine, I could have been clearer, and probably shouldn’t even have engaged in writing a comment here.
I don’t understand anything you said, sorry.
Well, it has a lot to do with “conservative” (fascist) dogwhistles and the culture of faux-rationalism they’ve built around people like Jordan Peterson as he preaches a sociopathic doctrine of bootlicking and heirarchy worship but there’s a whole ecosystem to unpack there so I’ll just leave this short video by Cody Johnston instead, because I think he does the best job of laying out the case in an easy to digest way overall:
Yea, i don’t care about that.
Bro what the fuck are you talking about
The OP parroted Peterson’s manifesto that “capitalism is the natural heirarchy.”
You really should be more aware of these things if you’re going to join the commie instance, it’s actually embarrassing for you to not recognize it immediately.
I’ve literally never read/seen anything by Jordan Peterson.
Capitalism is imo so hard to remove because it’s a system that evolved out of our base biological nature. It’s a system very close to what’s “natural” if we didn’t have much education or philosophy.
“Natural” would be that the alpha male gets what you have or if you disagree he kills you. Capitalism is a system of financing prospects by selling future profits. It requires a society to uphold private property rights. These systems are about as far from each other than can be.
Also if we look at the time periods before free markets arrived properly, the world was littered with centralized states, in which markets were dictated by kings, emperors and other royalties instead of letting them be – in pretty much the same way as that main competitor to capitalism tried to do in the 1900s. That’s also pretty far from a free market capitalist system, and you could say that those systems arose “naturally” from the base biological alpha male concept.
I explained here what I meant.
As a separate point though, private property is imo also very natural, very many animals have a sense of what is “theirs” and defend it as such.
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Maybe we need to start with the definition. What do you think of capitalism is? Do you understand that it’s completely different from commerce?
I don’t think it’s natural to believe that someone should sit around at home while other people make a lot of money for them. If you ask me, if you asked small children even, we would all say it’s just ridiculously unfair. If you want your money, go out and work for it.
If you’d ask small children, they’d say that mum and dad should make a lot of money for them :D
Jokes aside, what I meant was that it’s in our nature to be selfish at the expense of others. Of course it’s also in our nature to be cooperative, but this also only because it was actually personally beneficial to us.
Obviously, capitalism is not natural in the sense that that’s what would happen if you’d start over now. Of course it’s in total a completely arbitrary system with very weird and specific rules and mechanics that’re only there by chance and would never exist again if you’d start humanity over in a slightly different situation.
I only said that it’s what evolved out of our nature - i.e. the complete selfishness we inherently have.
Even our altruism is selfish, because cooperation is often better at acquiring resources than acting alone. (And for propagating genetic material, it makes sense to view your children as 50% of “you”, and so on with other relatives.)
And if capitalism isn’t completely selfish, idk what else is.
I’d like to see people try to remove themselves from capitalism and yet still get the necessities they require to live. It doesn’t work. Capitalism isn’t necessarily the worst form of living. Yes things are crazy expensive, even for people with money it’s not easy, and yes nobody is paid enough and people are exploited, but it’s hard to deny we have nice things, good houses, everyone has a car and a cell phone and lots of food.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of problems, but it beats any other system out there. People who have tried to run their own commune away from capitalist society soon find themselves falling back into capitalistic behaviors, because that’s the best tried and true system we have going for us. And we love to hate it, but it’s a necessary evil.
everyone has a car and a cell phone and lots of food.
the word everyone is doing a loooootta work there, buddy
Not only are you massively overgeneralizing, you’re plain wrong. There’s numerous examples of successful communes, the idea that they always end in failure is a myth. There’s also lots of agrarian societies that are too primitive to even classify as capitalistic, that rely on barter and lack the formal institutions to allow for the consolidation of capital.
The naivete is also laughable. No, people do not have good houses, or any houses for that matter. Many people are forced into debt to own cars, because without one they can’t maintain employment. One in eight families in America experience food insecurity, which is a pretty far cry from having lots of food.
Grow up and step outside of your bubble, your response reads like something written by a child.
It doesn’t read like a child wrote it, just someone who’s been indoctrinated into capitalism so much that they can’t even fathom something else existing, let alone being successful.
To me it sounds more like a layperson explaining their religion. They don’t know about other ones, insist theirs is the best, and then come up with reasons to support that.
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it beats any other system out there
Name one or more of the other systems currently in widespread use.
It’s a spectrum, really. No government is completely free market capitalist, and not even North Korea is a total dictatorship that decides everything. There are 195 countries in the world, so more or less 195 different systems currently in use.
Here’s one opinion of how the spectrum is https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
What people try is freedom or less freedom. Freedom works the best but requires constant upholding to stay free.
If you think freedom means capitalism or vice versa you’re as wrong as the heritage foundation.
What do you think it means?
