Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@freemo @JonKramer @trinsec

> How does that solve the problem?

IIUC, "the problem" is monopolies charge unnaturally high prices because of lack of competition. If, instead, a monopoly is charging unnaturally low prices and losing money, then that particular problem is gone. yes? (At least temporarily – you saw my next paragraph...)

> Why go into business if it is mathematically garunteed to fail?

That's what I meant by scared away.

@HeavenlyPossum Curious – did Bird-David talk about people who were seen as stingy – are they "punished" in any way, like people don't give to them or want to work with them? Or was it more of a social thing, like you just don't want to be seen as stingy, just for its own sake?

@freemo @JonKramer @trinsec My first reaction to "just undercut costs within 50 miles of the new station to rates so low it would operate at a loss" is: sounds good to me, problem solved!

I guess there's an implicit argument here though that people will be scared away from entering a market dominated by someone with those kinds of economies of scale or whatever. But... do we see that much in practice? Megacorps don't have an infinite capacity for scaring off newbies; a loss is a loss.

Maybe what I need to do is a bunch of case studies – how often are problematic monopolies able to do this without government help?

@JonKramer @freemo @trinsec I'd say the same thing about Unions, too, of course: I think workers negotiating as a bloc (price fixing, essentially) would be totally fine if nothing prevented people from undercutting the bloc. I realize this takes the wind out of the sails of Unions, though. I think this is probably what Freemo means by "You wont have strikes".

@JonKramer @freemo @trinsec Yeah – when we see problematic monopolies, I always wonder: why can't someone else sneak in and undercut? It seems like more often than not the answer is something like "regulatory capture".

Do we really need antitrust legislation? Or maybe what we need is just less statism?

@admitsWrongIfProven @freemo What is Freemo saying that sounds like arguing "that workers should not be able to control the price point of their work"?

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange

> Is it even useful for us to think in terms of "allocating resources"

Maybe I'm using the wrong language; let me try this: Suppose we have a factory for making phones so people can read posts about anarchist collectivism on Mastodon. How do we decide whether to expand the factory so we can make more phones every year? I mean, maybe this is a great idea, or maybe it's a terrible idea – there has to be some mechanism for making that decision. "everyone who works there votes" is one way. "The owner(s) of the factory wants and can get investors, or not" is sort of Capitalism's answer.

> Capital's demands are all-powerful

By this do you mean like there's this pressure to optimize the bottom line at all costs even if it means you're building crappy products, destroying the environment, and making people miserable? Or are you getting at something else?

@HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy

> are often owned in corporate), so there’s still no economic function for private ownership.

Even in this case they do – the owners vote for directors to make decisions about resource allocation. But maybe this isn't what you're getting at?

> all extant private ownership of productive assets originated in violent state expropriation

There is/was certainly a lot of unacceptable violence (colonial oppression/theft, slavery, regulatory capture, etc, etc, etc), but I don't think I see how this is fundamentally or always true, or understand where you're going with this?

Like, suppose I work somewhere and save up enough to start a business or something – where's the state violence there? Are you getting at things like police protecting my assets? The place where I earned my money was on land stolen by colonialists? Or... ?

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum Yeah, I think you're right – it did seem a bit on the statist side and I was having trouble finding material in it about fundamental stuff like how resource allocation decisions could be made better. Alright – thanks for the pointer!

@neonsnake @RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum

This is a good point – and how risky a job is is something I think a lot about when I look for a job.

I guess the difference here is theoretically the non-investing employee just has to find a new job, while investors lose their invested savings. (And some investors lose a lot more than you're making it sound like here – lots of people borrow against their house or whatever to start a business.)

But your point remains, of course – that oftentimes doesn't work out so great for employees of companies that go under.

(Fixing this doesn't seem straightforward to me, though, and investors diversify.)

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @mmclark @RD4Anarchy Right; the ownership doesn't contribute directly; I get that.

IIUC with capitalism ownership is the mechanism for deciding investment allocation. If you have capital, you decide how that capital is to be used for productivity. (As noted in this thread the state can do that, too, in which case it's in some ways the same thing, which is something I hadn't really thought about before.)

Obviously any system needs a way to solve this problem of allocating resources – and "whoever happens to 'own' stuff" is obviously sub-optimal. I am aware of a few different answers to this problem; the part I'm trying to wrap my head around is how they might be better in ways like less coercion/etc.

@HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange @RD4Anarchy

> How did you even stumble on this conversation?

The OP has a bunch of boosts so it shows up on /explore. (The "algorithm", I guess?)

The lede was intriguing – obviously the fact that hobbies exist and can be useful for others doesn't quite answer all my questions about a world without capital, but it's a good intuition pump. A lot of comments were super interesting and I was learning a lot, then I asked a question about a claim that I didn't understand.

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum The failures and shortcomings of capitalism are well documented, and I don't dispute them. I'm trying to learn about possible alternatives; I think the lament in this broader thread is accurate – unless people try pretty hard, they're going to only learn about a silly clown version of what Socialism is, either whatever Sweden is doing right now, or something about sharing toothbrushes. I appreciate threads like this – I learned a ton just reading the comments here, and got pointers to other materials like ABCs (I read some of that just now) etc.

So: Thanks!

I've read a bit about the righty version of anarchy – a lot of it appeals to me, but it seems ultimately unworkable or basically indistinguishable from what we have now. (They like to talk about "neighborhoods", but ultimately it seems like those are just "states", complete with coercive violence.)

@williamgunn @SallyStrange It does have quite a track record. It is interesting to explore whether we could do even better, though.

@neonsnake @RD4Anarchy @messaroundmarx @HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange I think ancaps do actually want to pay explicitly and directly for police protection. (e.g. "Chaos Theory" by Robert Murphy talks about everyone hiring "insurance companies", which are basically private security.) (I'm maybe not using the same definition of "ancap" as you are, though, if so beg pardon.)

The claim that security would be unaffordable is interesting, but I don't think that's the main problem with this approach.

@HeavenlyPossum @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy @mmclark @SallyStrange Thanks!

Heh, I definitely think of it as mine the whole time.

I like how you put it: "pay your employer for permission to work." Most firms have infrastructure that I am paying for when I work there. If I get a job scooping ice cream, I have to pay my employer for equipment, supply chains it set up, marketing, risk of not enough customers (insurance, effectively), etc. (Of course, as we've been talking about, all of this is done, practically, in the form of (value I add) - (my wages).)

This feels reasonable; my ice cream scooping wouldn't happen without those things. (Of course, some businesses are collectively owned by the workers, which is maybe nice because then you're paying yourself rent as a worker, but I suspect that doesn't meet the bar here? – workers still need to buy in (with capital) or starve.)

I think I need to educate myself more about alternatives: without *some* ownership of those things who would make decisions about investment? A coop would mean you're stuck in the same spot if you disagree with the outcome of the vote or whatever, or you opt out and starve. The ABCs of Socialism mentioned in this thread talks about state-run banks, so anyone wanting something different there would be subject to the same kind of coercive violence we're discussing in this broader thread, or starve.

I like the ABCs of Socialism for dispelling some of the silly caricatures of Socialism, like toothbrushes and iPhones, or that it is necessarily statist.

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum It's definitely good faith? I mean, I have a job where I get wages/salary – it doesn't feel coerced or unpaid, so I'm trying to understand that point of view. I guess yeah – theoretically/ideally some percentage of the value I add isn't paid to me in compensation, so if that's what is meant then I can see the point there.

I don't feel too bad about it, though, because I'm not taking on any of the risk, and my work is taking advantage of the infra/etc that was at the firm before I got there, and so on. (heh – I'm still weirded out by how much my CEO makes, though!)

In your virus scenario, I guess the standard retort would be that workers wouldn't work as hard and it would be unclear how means of production are allocated?

Is that what you mean by coercion – that we're coerced by need for money that makes us work? (I'm just guessing here.)

> Should I be telling you to fuck off?

Up to you, I guess; or just don't respond – I won't pester you.

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @HeavenlyPossum heh to me it seems funny to talk about any of that being coercion.

@RD4Anarchy @SallyStrange @mmclark @pixelpusher220

> 3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit being the unpaid labour of the producers.

Would someone please help me understand what is meant by "unpaid labour"? Is it this:

unpaid labor = (net value of labor) - wages

?