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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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For those thousands of year people lived in extreme poverty, because "just making stuff yourself" is actually extremely inefficient. There's a reason industries started to centralize in the first place - the scale effect is huge, and we can't expect to beat well-coordinated, centralized entities by just "doing stuff for ourselves".
We need to organize and unite, but as I said, in a capitalist competition, unless you accrue capital bigger than the corporations (which is, well, problematic), you'll just die to a price war (unless you convince everyone to go starve).
The only way is to change the system, to put already existing production capabilities to serve general population. This means strikes. This means protests. This means instating the new government if need be. Those are exactly the methods that drove us to more equality and prosperity in the past, the thing you talk about.
We cannot move further in an existing frame, and "just believing your dream" won't change objective economic issues discussed in every economy 101. People who ignored basic economics for their idea ended up very poorly.
Making stuff ourselves and breaking free of the corporate vice grip is the only way we can make doing that viable.
Unless you thought corporations won't just stop producing until the people surrender.
The only way is to capture the means of production - they're only owned by corporations because some legal papers say so.
Corporations can and constantly do kill independent initiatives. It's actually super easy, and doesn't require anything but big cash reserves allowing them to wage price wars.
Besides, it is simply impractical to reinvent existing economy, and it will get to the same point over time. We can skip this and move directly into the factories that are already built.
That's impossible because it will require bloodshed in which millions of people will die, whereas a non-profit cooperative effort can provide people goods for free, especially when fully automated. And corporations can't beat free.
You might want a war but the rest of us don't, and we can solve our problems through peaceful means.
There are examples of peaceful transition to socialist rule - Alliende's Chile, for example. Ironic that capitalist rule was reinstated there by force in a coup led by CIA (which we know from CIA's own unclassified archives).
The cooperative can share food for free, but how will it obtain the equipment, fertilizers, seeds and everything else needed to sustain modern efficient agriculture, if it doesn't have money to do so? How will it pay its workers, or are they expected to only live off what cooperative produces? (Which means recreating entire parallel economy, something that is both not feasible with any donations anyone can make and is a stupid waste of enormous resources).
I do not want war, and I hope for the peaceful transition of power, but your "solution" ignores basic laws of economics - science that can't be ignored by "let's abolish money", because it's about resources first and foremost. You suggest that we somehow rebuild the essentially communist world from scratch - but do you understand we need the worth of entire world of resources given to us immediately for that? We cannot outcompete capitalists in a capitalist world by giving everything away, we'll quickly run out of money or resources. Thereby, we cannot grow in the economy, and will die off unless we completely overwhelm markets by the amount of goods bigger than one currently produced in an entire world, and attract everyone to work for us.