Humble request: do you know of any real life experience of post-capitalist economies, even partial ones? Local currencies? Cooperative models? Community land trusts? Priority given to resilience over efficiency? #solarpunk economies? There are a few usual suspects (Mondragon, Cooperativa Integral Catalana, Transition Network...), but I struggle to find long lists of cases. Boost appreciated @g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel#postcapitalism#economics#degrowth#postgrowth
@alberto_cottica "Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives—our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual, and political organizations—are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle.In a way, capitalism is an ongoing disaster anticapitalism alleviates..." —Solnit
I was one of the initial (donors? investors? I'm not comfy with either term) for the Stokes Croft Land Trust but am not a local, I thought it was a shame the area was at risk of gentrification. It's just acquired its first building so the HQ of the People's Republic of Stokes Croft has been brought into community ownership.
@alberto_cottica@g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel Rojava has a pretty radical democratic society as far as I know. I’ve watched some documentaries about it. This is just the first youtube video in English I could find, but you might find better ones:
@alberto_cottica ... des tas de réponses possibles en + de tout ce qui a été nommé déjà, champ si vaste selon où on regarde ! En effet comme dit la camarade et le principe de permaculture : on préfère les solutions petites et lentes, qui s'interconnectent, ça n'est pas que rarement très visible ... #HakimBey#zadpartout et #coven off-média
J'ai pensé aussi aux xp des organisations économiques, do you know the Frederic Laloux's best seller Reinventing organizations ?
@alberto_cottica me ha parecido muy curioso que dos de los ejemplos que mencionas sean españoles y más aún teniendo en cuenta que mi compañera participó en la fundación de uno de ellos (la CIC)
Now this project is not trying to create a new society like you asked for, but instead the focus is on trying to evolve into a better society by reducing the need for trade. I recommend watching this live presentation by @tio explaining why he chose this path - videos.trom.tf/w/6R92qduTeGHma… (sorry for the bad audio)
This 4 part #documentary miniseries is the best explanation I've seen of how #capitalism was formed and how we can get rid of it through collective effort, and it's free to watch on #peertube.
@alberto_cottica@g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel I used to be a part of barter community that traded goods and services for credits. I earned virtual credits doing odd jobs for people and traded those credits for farm goods and clothing at monthly market meetings.
If you're not able to get it in a local library, I think the two authors are Australian, and many Australian academics put their academic articles in institutional repositories so they can be read for free, without paid access to the academic journal itself.
You might have success searching on Google Scholar for their names, at least as a starting point?
The version described here is "compatible with capitalism", as a "neighbourly investment groups", but it's a part of what makes 65% of Kenyans work in co-ops (which generate >30% of the GDP).
@alxd hello and thanks! I am aware of chama-like forms of savings in many countries, including Argentina (pasanaku), Sudan (sanduk), Ethiopia (qub), Cambodia (tong tin) and others. I had no idea that coops were so prominent in Kenya, would you have a source for that? @g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel
"Cooperative Alliance of Kenya (CAK) chief executive officer Daniel Marube on his part said the sector provides sustainable livelihoods to their members as well as to 32 million people as indirect beneficiaries which translates to 65 per cent of the total population."
A lot depends on the nomenclature used. A lot of people are not directly employed, but still work within saccos.
@alxd super interesting. I wonder if this is similar across other countries in the GLobal South? Do they ALREADY (still) live in a post-capitalist world? @g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel
@alberto_cottica@g_kallis@jks@jasonhickel depends on your understanding of post-capitalist, but a lot of countries never internalized the "late capitalist" stage of the modern West and a lot of our behaviors are unimaginable for them.
@alberto_cottica@jks@jasonhickel There are non-capitalist economies everywhere: families, mutual-aid networks, buy nothing groups, any kind of civic groups. As Rebecca Solnit says, they're all around us. We should look to what we already have. And if your instinct is "but that's just women, poor people, queer people" maybe that's exactly right and also important to think about.
@susankayequinn yes, that predates the use of "long-termism" by Silicon Valley ghouls. It just means "thinking long term", not "time discounted utilitarianism". @jks@jasonhickel
@susankayequinn at the time, my group was working with an organization called Climate KIC (still exists). It was investigating an idea they called "deep demonstrations", and one of them concerned long-term thinking, as in the kind of thinking you expect of medieval cathedral builders.
@alberto_cottica I found out about that factory through anti-fascist Twitter accounts. It's been written about and video'd a fair bit so there should be other sources.
@glightly@alberto_cottica capitalism is going to fail - in fact it's doomed. It is a system whose internal contradictions are irresolvable. What Marx got wrong was the idea that capitalism required a revolution to overthrow it - it doesn't. It will simply collapse of its own accord.
@rmblaber1956
I think what Marx and Lenin got wrong was that the state will whither and no longer be needed. In fact, it will march on as demonstrated by state capitalism and corporate capitalism to plunder an epoch of life into collapse and an already occurring extinction event. @glightly@alberto_cottica
@doomscroller@glightly@alberto_cottica I would agree, but that doesn't negate my point. Global capitalism is doomed - the question is, how to stop it from dooming Homo sapiens with it. I fear a large percentage of our species' population are going to die, & there may well be no avoiding that. The gross injustice is, many of those who do will have contributed very little, if any, to the cause of their deaths, while most of those who HAVE will escape death from climate change.
@doomscroller@glightly@alberto_cottica You may well be right. But I have young relatives - the youngest of them just two years old - & I don't want them to live to see it happen - to have to experience that horror. Thankfully, at the age of 67, I probably won't.
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