alt Hacker News> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
Replies
Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"
Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.
Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.
Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.
This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.
But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.
The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."
I would like to propose a cap on net worth.
Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.
People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)