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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
Ownership exists because many (most?) things are rivalrous - if I have it, you can't, and vice versa - and finite. Even things which are not rivalrous or finite are generally produced with such things (e.g. software may be functionally free to reproduce, but producing it in the first place took real labor effort and material resources). Different ownership schemes are different ways of determining who gets to decide to use/have/dispose of various rivalrous things.
You can't escape from this. A communal ownership arrangement is still an ownership arrangement. If the question is "why private property?" the short answer is that private property with regulation has so far proven to be preferable to alternatives in most cases.
This is a word game, intent on framing things as negatively as possible by drawing a dubious analogy. There's a fair point about how original title is often rooted in a claim asserted by violence, but there's an equally fair counterpoint of "so what are we going to do about it?" Someone is getting final say over the disposition of stuff. That's not a distinctive feature of capitalism - the State (or Community or whatever entity you imagine) asserting their right to dispose of resources is no less arbitrary - so the real question is what gets us the best outcomes (or at least better outcomes)?
I call it adversariality. It's a mental pathology, and a lot of people can't manage to think about things in any other way. To them, it's not "realistic". Well, that just shows the narrowness and lacks in their experience. Love and mutualism and cooperation are very real, and over the span of homo sapiens' history, it's by far the majority report. Even these last 10-15K years, although our "history" gives the opposite impression, quantitatively, the vast majority of human experience in person-hours has been at least mutualistic and cooperative, if not friendly, if not loving.
Your last paragraph is a characterization that does not engage with the idea. It's a tactic. You made a couple of fair points, but nothing that detracts from the obvious parallels.
Yes, the real question is what gets/gives us the best outcomes. How are you going to determine that without trying alternatives? And how are you going to try alternatives when a guy can't even get you to explore them?
That, uh, doesn't address any of the points. The existence of ownership doesn't preclude cooperation. Coining a new term doesn't do anything about basic physical realities like "if I eat that apple, you can't."
Please, put something forward. I'm not going to think your thoughts for you, especially since they're apparently inscrutable. All you've said so far said "property is a mental disorder" on repeat.
What points did I leave out? I didn't take yours point-by-point, but I can. My point was that you couched your points in an adversarial framing, as if "rivalry" is the only way to frame our interactions. Of course, that's not even close to true.
No one here said it did.
What "new term"?
There's a difference between using/consuming the same thing at the same time, on one hand, and one person declaring their right to prevent any and all others from using/consuming it at any particular time or at all times. They're not the same. I'm talking about the latter. "If I eat the apple, you can't" is just physics. What's true and relevant to one isn't necessarily true or relevant about the other.
Nor am I going to think your thoughts for you. I invited collaboration on an alternative to "deprive-first, ask questions later or not at all" ownership. No shame in coming up dry. I came up dry for a long time. My thoughts aren't inscrutable, but neither are they subject to demand on command, lol. A couple of people have touched on sharing as the alternative. Most have given reasons why alternatives aren't workable. A couple have strongly claimed that no alternatives are available. For me, this is a revisit to a topic I broached years ago. I know the kinds of responses I got then, and now I know something about the kinds of responses I got this time. The differences are informative. A shift is in progress.
Besides, I didn't want to influence the responses by making a suggestion of my own. I'm happy to do so at this point, though:
What about provision as an alternative to deprivation? What would that look like?
Indeed. What would that look like? Any ideas? Given that you seem to sometimes use not-quite-standard language, I think a whole lot can be cleared up if you just describe what you think your use of this language looks like.
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Have you ever lived in a commune or in any off the grid community? Because I assure you. People have tried the alternatives.
Humans are functionally incapable of "love and mutualism" beyond around 100 people. It's overridden by familial bonds even at smaller scales. And even then it only allows for subsistence.
The division of labor required to get medieval levels of existence and upwards can't be achieved without money, let alone without property. Nobody is going to transport valuables accross far distances or extract minerals that aren't immediately useful for their whole lives out of love for their fellow man. You need money, violence or some equivalent power to make it happen.
No, I've looked into it, but every one quickly seemed kinda creepy and cultish. I've had enough cult in my life, thank you very much, lol. I considered going down to Chiapas and checking out the Zapatistas, but the whole lookie-loo gringo thing gave me pause, and the whole militant/militaristic aspect of the scene kinda puts me off.
People have tried alternatives, no argument. To presume that my thinking/ideas can be reduced to "nothing new" that hasn't "already been tried" is silly at this stage. No one on this thread knows that. It's been hard to find the kind of open, interested, curious discussion (here and elsewhere) that would inform and thereby qualify people to pass that judgment.
False on two levels.
Level 1: Being incapable of the same level/degree/intensity of love and mutualism they participate in on small scales does not ipso facto mean they're completely incapable of any degree of love and mutualism at larger scales. It's not an on/off switch, it's a spectrum. And there are easy ways to compensate. Black/white thinking.
Level 2 (two parts): a) The tacit implication is that we have crucial needs that can't be met at small levels; and b) those needs require love and mutualism in ways and to degrees that we aren't capable of and can't compensate for. Have you thought that through? Which needs do we have that our small circle can't provide? Can we change that? If not, what needs are those and do they require the kind/level/degree of mutualism and love evident within our small circle? If they do require it, can we compensate? Etc.
I find that people simply don't take the time and effort to think questions like that through -- but the definitely make claims and pronouncements as if they had and is if they "know".
The best way I know to work through things like that is to take an credible, significant example and start thinking through how we would (instead of how we can't) do it. I'm game.
Keep in mind, though, that when we work examples through and end up stumped, it does not in any way mean there is no way, no how, merely because we got stumped this time. It's amazing to see that so many people are certain it means exactly that. Weird.
I've heard this song too many times to believe it without some solid hard hitting evidence. I've met so many people that think they could have made it work because they are better intentionned than Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin. It's never true. You and I are not better people than the Bolsheviks in any meaningful sense. And I have to be skeptical of any doctrine that doesn't take this into account.
But that's just not true. And I speak from experience. There is a very specific moment you can pinpoint in any commune style community where the general intuitive understanding of each other's needs can no longer maintain the commons and it stops feeling like a tribe/family and becomes impersonal enough administrative enforcement becomes a requirement. And then you just made the State again.
I have seen Dunbar's number with my own eyes. I choose to trust them rather than conjecture. It's not a spectrum.
Look if you want to do the primitivist thing and destroy industrial society, be my guest. I even have some sympathy for it. But let us not pretend that this is a desirable or realistic proposition for most humans.
I don't think it's weird at all. It's impossible to prove non trivial impossibility empirically. So the best way of reacting to negative feedback is to lower the expected possibility of something until it eventually rounds down to zero.
It was very understandable and perhaps even necessary to be a socialist in the 19th century. The awesome power of the industrial revolution changed the world to such a degree that anything seemed possible.
We have since had dozens of very serious attempts at realizing this vision, in a large variety of starting conditions, with a large continuum of tools and ideological specifics. And all that it has ultimately managed is a lot of death and a bunch of state capitalism.
A rational actor would adjust their priors based on this information.
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My kid needs heart medication each month or she’ll die, nobody I know can make it. Similarly, she needed open heart surgery as a baby and I don’t know any pediatric heart surgeons. We had to fly over a thousand miles away just to find one, since there aren’t any in my state. Which reminds me, I don’t know anybody with a plane that can fly that far, nor anybody who can make a plane that can.
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