Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange@strangeobject.space

"It can be difficult for us to imagine what things might look like outside the pervasive influence of capitalism." Yeah, that's basically my questions :)

A lot of things seem better in straightforward ways with socialism, a few things like this one I'm having trouble wrapping my head around. thanks!

@RD4Anarchy @HeavenlyPossum @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @SallyStrange@strangeobject.space Oh interesting; it sounds like you are unasking my question, essentially – there would be no factories or complex industry/etc, yes?

@davidzipper US automakers make plenty of small cars? I don't quite understand you.

@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange@strangeobject.space @neonsnake @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy Although, it does seem like risk management is much nicer in the kind of non-capitalist systems that we're discussing here – it seems unlikely that anyone would feel compelled to e.g. mortgage their house out of desperation to save their business, which in and of itself is nice.

@HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange@strangeobject.space @neonsnake @mmclark @pixelpusher220 @RD4Anarchy "not something at all intrinsic to production" – I feel like risk is pretty fundamental, at least in that any decision regarding allocation of resources might be suboptimal, and execution might be flawed.

To tie it back to OP: suppose I spend a month adding some awesome features to my fork of Mastodon, then launch my new instance, and nobody joins or upstreams my changes. Oops.

@dangillmor It also matters (or should matter) what Eastman *did* exactly. People like this like to talk about the Declaration and consent of the governed and all that. Which is possibly problematic exactly for the reasons the article describes. But, at the end of the day, if all he did was "hey consent of the govern mumble mumble so I filed a lawsuit (or 100 lawsuits) about counting dimpled chads" then of course that isn't a reason for criminal prosecution. IOW: if you go through the "front door", then whatever weird rhetoric you use probably doesn't matter much.

The question is, instead: are the Eastman Memos the "front door"?

@freemo @JonKramer @trinsec Yeah, I hope it's clear I see this point. I articulated it myself several messages ago, even. I think my other observation remains, though.

@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@strangeobject.space

> 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@strangeobject.space @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@strangeobject.space @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@strangeobject.space @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@strangeobject.space @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@strangeobject.space @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.