this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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I'm pretty sure most can agree that communism has been tried in village and tribe sized societies through the history of humanity.
It's not the most honest claim to say that big authoritarian states like USSR or China have ever even tried it, and just used the name for marketing and support from gullible population.
Are places like Rojava and Kerala relevant examples? Maybe, I'm not an expert on the subject
Greed is an interesting topic. Capitalism creates and rewards greed and it's prominence in human psychology could be less in alternative systems.
I agree it works at village-scale, but in my opinion what we have seen is a failure of communism to scale to a nation with tens or hundreds of millions of people, and survive for decades at that.
Sounds like you'd want some kind of anarcho-communism where those smaller groups of people work together with other ones to form networks encompassing millions. Democracy at human level instead of top-down authorities
There is still a power incentive. In the proposed system we would likely factions rapidly forming to gather the most power and resources as quickly as possible. It would probably be quite bloody. (What you are describing is effectively the tribe system, which rarely ended well for most tribes.)
As long as resource scarcity exists I just don't see this working out, unfortunately.
In my mentioned system the power would be in cooperation. Fighting against that would lose power.
Resource scarcity is mostly a decision problem. Capitalism doesn't have incentive to let anyone benefit from the excessive resources so those in control won't decide for it.