One of the great tragedies of our time is that collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems. In the few hundred years before 1990, there was a lot of imagination of what could be, and many of those systems were attempted. But since then, it seems everywhere we are stuck.
Reading Ursula Le Guin's work is essential because she boldly tries to re-imagine. Not to say any of her fictional worlds should be made reality, but that we need to do serious intellectual work going forward. Surely, humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems.
Seems to me sci-fi is still as full of political creativity as it always was? Perhaps it's now more diluted. Single books stood out for that. And perhaps it's harder for single SF books to stand out anymore? For sheer quantity?
I mean, it's not like these books were ever taken very seriously as political works either...
compare Lafferty, "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966)
(for that matter, it may be worth pursuing other entries in "Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography From 1516 to the Present" https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ )
No the tragedy of our time is that people who use social media love to start flamewars on this topic resulting in very little light and mostly heat. I guess the poster gets to socially signal to the right crowd what side of the issue they're on though.
Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
“See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,” Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.
Been so long I can't remember if I noticed back then -- was Mr Ng also the name of the guy with the robo-dogs...? Same guy? (And was he the representative of ex-territorial Hong Kong [or whatever it was] who sold Hiro a citizenship? Time for a re-read, it seems...)
> collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems
...right that's why it never stops being salient on social media like an undead beaten horse and you're talking about it right now.
Maybe one problem is that imagination qua alternatives tends to stop rather short, and idealists too often consider the details and consequences to be an afterthought (everything just gets sorted if only you're rid of Capitalism). Or disregard history in some cases.
It's comforting that the suggested approach by those who aren't fond of State Socialism (e.g. ancoms) is some variation on "do anarchism/syndicalism until communism happens", which seems harmless. They can get the worker-owned coffee shop out of their system.
And perhaps social media doesn't exactly encourage long thought. And cooperating on deeper thought political ideas. Debate and sports education push winning quick by crushing the opponent - not by building a gorgeous final conversation to be revered by the reader years later.
This is such a deeply ingrained part of Anglosphere social media culture that the GP didn't even have to take capitalism in name, but all of us know exactly what fight is being started and what position the GP is taking. I don't think anyone has stopped imagining alternate socioeconomic systems. The problem is that the people that like to discuss this on the internet just want to argue large, abstract ideas instead of the actual details of life under an alternate system. Le Guin herself did a lot of the latter in The Dispossessed. Her book wasn't a flamewar on Capitalism/Communism Bad (TM).
I like Le Guin's novels but if they deserve accolades it's not for "details" of an alternate system. This one depicts central planning, syndicalism as the proxy for democracy, and a bureaucracy that "just works".
It doesn't get into the details of the system, but I felt that The Dispossessed was a good look into what it was like to practically live under that sort of a system. Bureaucracy that was clunky, slow, and led to inefficiencies. Poor living standards even for highly educated people. Time spent doing manual labor despite skills that could be better applied to other things. Yet a sense of togetherness due to the relative lack of class differences and a general welcoming of the other rather than the atomization Shevek experienced off-world.
I was especially struck by Shevek noting that Atro was unique for A-Io in that his behaviour was reminiscent of an Anarresti: the same way all the time, whether public or private.
I'm not sure Dispo needed to go into details; we all can think of analogues to the nations of Urras, and Anarres itself mentions many things reminiscent of 1970s kibbutzim. (when I watched «Карьера Димы Горина»* the work camps also reminded me of Shevek's experiences in the Anarres outback)
* 1961. sometime I need to watch it with subtitles to check how it scores on the Bechdel Test. Cameo by Sputnik.
I'd love to take a 70 year old Chinese victim that lived through the great-leap-forward and culture revolution and to get their honest perspective on this. They managed to live through starvation and wide-spread Maoist violence to witness the end of capitalism only to see the same bozo's re-introduce capitalism forty years later in the form of crony-capitlism...And if they try to speak about any of what they'd learned to their grand kids they're likely to get hauled off to a gulag while their grand-kids bytedance and chow down on Kentucky Fried Chicken.
an amusing fantasy. I'd love to see your western biases shatter when you do just that. do you think it's at all hard to find a 70yr old Chinese person?
> Dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Paulo Freire [0]
One of the advantages of reading older authors is the sensation of cognitive dissonance inspired by their taking it for granted that monarchies are superior to oligarchies.
I was literally just thinking of this quote 15 minutes ago. Weird to see it at the top of HN.
Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems)
, but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives.
Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times.
> Distributism views laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism as equally flawed and exploitative
This is also termed "anarcho-communism" within the academic literature and grassroots movements, just FYI (A common misconception of anarchism is that it is a 'lack of law and order' -- it is merely the lack of centralization). The Bolshevik implementation of Communism was called State-Capitalism for a long time by Lenin himself, and many Communist thinkers (I'm thinking of Tony Cliff, who was exceptionally progressive for his time) disagree with the Bolshevik implementation of Communism.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to debate on Communism. I was somewhat aware that many of the proponents have pointed out that the major failings were partially because they were implemented incorrectly. The common counterargument is that despite the very real and good intentions that they would all end up the same as an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving. Is that too simplistic though? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
for which, see Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (appearing in [Orwell49])
> "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." —EAB
"Communism" is not like the others in one important sense: all regimes that have been or are called communist derive from the same one source, namely the Russian Bolsheviks. Of all the people who called themselves communist, only they have succeeded in taking power and holding it long enough to entrench. Consequently, every subsequent communist revolution elsewhere was largely bankrolled by them, and they made sure that everyone they supported adopted their ideology - even if there were later breaks over detail, the fundamentally authoritarian core of Bolshevism always remains. This is, of course, quite different from capitalism, which has evolved organically in many places in parallel.
(It should also be noted that whether "feudalism" is even a thing that can be meaningfully defined is contentious, and many modern historians consider it a largely nonsensical retroactive attempt to fit very diverse systems and patterns into a single category.)
In general, look up "libertarian socialism" - it is an umbrella term for left anarchists of various stripes as well as more moderate socialists who don't shy away from some degree of centralization but still place a lot of emphasis on avoiding any kind of authoritarianism as crucial to success of any such political system. I would particularly draw attention to Murray Bookchin and his "libertarian municipalism", not the least because Le Guin herself did in later prefaces to her books.
For real-world examples, something along these lines (but less, shall we say, theoretically pure - which shouldn't come as a surprise!) has been practiced for a while in the Chiapas in EZLN-affiliated communities, and more recently also in AANES (Rojava). As you rightly note, the real question there is how well it all would scale to a modern industrialized society - Chiapas are pretty rural, Rojava somewhat less so but still hardly comparable to what first-worlders are generally used to. It's also interesting to note that the Rojava take on it is a milder version where e.g. cooperatives are encouraged but there are still plenty of privately owned businesses.
Yes, I was just thinking of Distributism in this context. Communism says the means of production is owned by the state, Capitalism says the means of production is owned by those with capital (so in practice that means in a few hands). Distributism says let's distribute the means of production as widely as possible. I recall an article in Make magazine about 15 years ago on distributism - they made the case that things like 3D printers could be the technological enabler to allow distributism to work.
> communism [is] obviously worse in my eyes due to
Death squads, Banana Republics, indefinite US embargo and coup attempts, Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, risking the US military invading you in order to avoid the Domino Effect.
> Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism.
Distributism as described in that article is socialism modeled on the ideal of the small-time craftsman or whatever of that time. That would probably be called naive by normal socialists (certainly by communists like Leninists) but it has some similarities with socialism. On the other hand it seems to outright reject anything like the modern capitalism that we are dealing with in the present.
> Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
Riffs on socialism, an idea which is over two-hundred years old and has adherents all over the globe.
Fought against and repressed is not the same as niche.
I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. It may suck at times, but I do have a choice. I'm thinking about Hayek's well known road to serfdom here that explains how well meaning systems like communism inevitably end up.
I think you may be splitting hairs with regards to terminology. I said niche as in unpopular and not well known. I think it and many other systems match that description and are interesting to talk about.
> I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty.
Freedom to form death squads, Banana Republics, establish indefinite [US] embargo and coup attempts, help out Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, freedom to invade countries just because they are communist.
First of all you respond to my really-existing-things-that-happened/happen by asking about a hypothetical what-about for the other side. I’ll just note that.
Second of all, where is the symmetry? The common thread here is that some countries wanted to self-determine and use their resources for themselves. But then America/American corporations didn’t want that because they wanted those things for the corporations. National-level socialist ambitions thwarted by corporations. Is then the supposedly (hypothetical) evil of a Soviet Union thwarting upstart capitalist corporation in its backyard? Hmm, if that makes sense to you, whatever.
EDIT: I realize now that this is another commenter. But the same applies.
"Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
I think we should be careful about the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people. Christian anarchism seems quite consistent with the words and actions of Jesus as written in the gospels. But if looked at from the perspective of American evangelical christianity or traditional Catholicism, yes it seems absurd.
There are also other conceptions of God beyond the coercive demiurge. Again I think we should be careful when throwing around words like God as though we all agree on the meaning.
> the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people.
«
“All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus—that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.”
It's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff.
The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?)
There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
Jesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
The cleansing of the Temple isn't evidence that Jesus objected to combining spiritual with temporal power. Jesus didn't object to the existence of the Temple, he objected to its' corruption by the presence of the merchants and moneychangers. He was still traveling to Jerusalem and to the Temple, and he referred to it as "my Father's house." He was a Jew preaching to Jews and claiming to be the messiah of the Jews. All of that presupposes the legitimacy of the extant temporal Jewish hierarchy and the Temple itself as a holy site. By my reading, Jesus wasn't an anarchist, he was a reformist.
Also Matthew 16:18, where Jesus declares Peter as "the rock" upon which his church shall be built, is well known. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_Peter
Although personally I would claim the modern church owes more to Paul (for better or worse) than Peter.
I'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
Fortunately the options aren't merely some form of marxist communism or capitalism! There are whole branches of (anarchist/federalist) socialism that actually predicted what would happen in the Soviet Union while Marx was still alive and writing and had very different plans themselves (Bakunin and Proudhon), and there were also distinct forms of socialism that predated Marxism, and forms that came after it, so even if we were to restrict ourselves to socialist schools of thought that have existed for round about 200 years (a very narrow slice of economic systems), there are a lot more options to try than "bureaucratic oligarchy, with a top down centrally planned economy and a fundamentally authoritarian ideology" and "a system designed to give some power over others via absentee property ownership, and facilitate the concentration of that power through the concentration of property due to the right of increase and profit."
Capitalism appears to have worked optimally around the 1960 to 1990 time interval.
After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
Because unregulated capitalism is just property and trading.
Hard to imagine sentient beings without the concept of property and trading.
You have to kill all humans to end capitalism.
What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.
Property and trading existed for most of the history of humanity, but capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon.
Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.
It's a massive error to conflate capitalism and commerce like this. Capitalism describes a specific structure of organizing ownership of productive resources and allocating their surpluses.
Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
I don't think capitalism and the concepts of property and trade are synonyms. It is also not clear that historical understandings of property or trade or universal amongst human civilizations and I'd be wary of dismissing other civilizations as having been made up of unsentient beings.
Reading Ursula Le Guin's work is essential because she boldly tries to re-imagine. Not to say any of her fictional worlds should be made reality, but that we need to do serious intellectual work going forward. Surely, humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems.