re op: 'his ownership of the river' ? I would think people wise enough to set up such a society would make sure not to allow the private ownership of vital water ways. How does Ben become any different than the state at that point?
On 'all agreed to a set of immutable rules, they could all live happily.'
Wouldnt that kind of absolutism lead to coercion?
thoughts: I dont see how Voluntaria would deal with criminality and security.
Problems that will exist so long as we labor under a system that pits people against one another, creates mass concentrations of wealth. Why cant we seem to even imagine moving beyond the old paradigm of work wages and competition? and use technology and our strong social dynamics in the wisest ways possible, by fucking taking care of the basic needs of and education humanity? (answer bc the global power elite depend on poverty, war and drugs)
It seems to me that this can only happen if we free ourselves from the underlying disease of competition and the accumulation of personal wealth. What are essentially vestiges of nature-born scarcity, that we have created an economic system based on it, so that even while we produce surpluses scarcity in the form of planned obsolescence, is manufactured. While we destroy the planet and a Fed note is worth more than a person's life. At what point and how, do we leave it behind?
We should be competing against physics, music and math, not one another except in productive ways. We can educate, house and feed everyone on earth with the goal of ultimately harvesting the global potential of human mental and creative ingenuity. Imagine anyone could study any field they loved. Academia would not be poisoned by money. Just look around the whole of global society. It corrupts almost everything and breeds far more misery than anything else.
Profit has driven the technological marvels we see today. At the same time,nearly 20k babies below the age of 5 die every day bc the water they have to drink is not as clean as what I use to flush my toilet. The world is so fucked up im sure sure of this is a blessing or a curse.
A paycheck would not be necessary bc we would want for nothing. Somehow striving towards a world like this strikes me as more important given the double-edge nature of technology, the mind-blowingly destructive state of things as they are (drugs and war are the two biggest money-makers for the establishment) and the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.
Imagine a world with no notions of financial profit because money is no longer necessary. Because this is unprecedented it strikes us as hopelessly naive and idealistic and yet it's not outside the realm of possibility and given the benefits, people would take to it bc it would be a vast improvement over what we have now. And of course, automation would be the main catalyst. It could be implemented gradually by taking money back to what it should be: a means of exchange. It simply requires the overthrow of the central bankers/military industrial complex.. I'd like to think the Romanian model on a global scale could work. Of course no immediate change is possible but with gradual change with that end goal in mind, we could far better live up to our potential as a species. Looking at how fucked up the world is I just dont think it will ever happen so we can stop imagining now.
-pardon this long rant, if anyone even reads it, pardon any repetition, im tired/
You are proposing communism. But that went so well every other time in the past when it was tried. Surely your scheme would work where everyone else's failed?
Do you know that the reason why the USSR did not die of starvation was because Lenin basically allowed agriculture to be a free market? This is why even still today in Russia most farms are family concerns and average size is 5 acres.
The problem with your scheme of ubiquitous commons is that human beings are not commons. Who gets to decide whose is the greatest 'need'. When you boil it down, and I am going to be a bit nihilist here, nobody needs anything. You don't need to be alive. Need is no metric. Humans survive in very extreme situations although if it goes on for a long time it usually ends their lives prematurely.
Everything everyone wants is a want. There is no needs. We don't need you, you don't need me. We are here, and the real question is how can we both profit at each other's gain.
You are actually not unanimous in thinking that the commons should be preserved, and this is really interesting to me - so I wrote another post:
For a discussion on the commons in an anarchist society, check out my new discussion on the commons in an anarchist society.
The river is not an unlimited resource. Therefore it can not be a common. It will get clogged up with boats and nobody gets any value out of that. Nothing that is limited can be a common. Who profits most from it should be who uses it, since their profits flow into more business, more spending, or, even, just holding money off the market and making others' money more valuable.
There is no good outcome from any common property, except when the multiple owners are a very very small group, like family sized. And ultimately the kids grow up and want their own private piece of their own anyway.
what do you mean by 'you are not unanimous?' The ambiguity of the english pronoun 'you' is very troublesome in my view. In most languages the plural is also formal. Why would we all be unanimous, some here are also unicorn land of non-scarcity socialists also.