People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
It surprises me how many people in the open source community are libertarians when open source embodies so many traits of humans interactions under socialism. Not to mention the absurd amount those people criticize capitalist practices in software just like Twitter but never take it a step further.
Yeah I find it weird as well. I love to use open source as an example of how things can work outside capitalism. It shows that you don’t need profit as a motivator for people to participate and that effort can be organized organically from bottom up instead of needing a business owner to direct it. It’s a really great example of communism working in the wild.
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Its also a source of profound wealth transfer upwards. All of FAANG but moreso the web companies are built on foundations of a billion lines of non-AGPL code they could use for profit.
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Many people (e.g. Eric S Raymond) would argue that this type of efficiency gain from switching to a communist economic model is only experienced in the software industry. The reasoning behind that would be that software (and other digital
contentworks) has special traits: it is cheap to produce and infinitely reproducible (the economics of free software are essentially post-scarcity economics).On the other hand, certain industries, like the mass production of clothing and mining for precious metals, would massively lose out as a result of a communist economic model because they can no longer extract maximum value from laborers by underpaying them and must provide quality working conditions, which would result in a decrease in productivity. Additionally, there would be an allocational problem: if a resource is scarce, where should it be sent, and for what purpose should it be used?
It should be noted that I’m not intending to criticize socialism in any way - it’s just that socialists should gain a better understanding of economics so that socialism can be presented as a highly sophisticated alternative economic system rather than some knee-jerk ramblings.
EDIT: Crossposted your post to /c/debatepolitics in a shameless effort to promote my community :)
I’d argue that we have clear evidence that the communist model works quite well in the physical world. Consider what USSR managed to accomplish in an incredibly short period of time. Russia went from a backwards agrarian society under Tsarism, through the devastation of WW2, to being the first nation in space. USSR was a world leader in technology, and it was doing it on a far smaller budget than capitalist US.
While it’s true that mass scale exploitation under capitalism can increase the amount labour that’s generated, a lot of that labor ends up being applied towards things that have questionable value to society. As with your example of clothing production. Capitalist model creates a huge amount of waste because companies need to continue selling new clothing. A socialist model would simply produce less clothing that lasts longer, which is far more efficient.
I’d argue that we have clear evidence that the communist model works quite well in the physical world. Consider what USSR managed to accomplish in an incredibly short period of time. Russia went from a backwards agrarian society under Tsarism, through the devastation of WW2, to being the first nation in space. USSR was a world leader in technology, and it was doing it on a far smaller budget than capitalist US.
I would argue that the USSR was not truly communist or socialist since it also exploited workers - it was just the government exploiting workers, instead of private corporations. Russia’s rapid industrialization was due to the fact that Stalin was literally willing to mass murder peasants who didn’t give up all their grain to the government so the government could give it to factories and industrial projects - a policy that was incredibly brutal, but worked.
A pattern I’ve noticed in history is that the speed of industrialization is dependent mostly on how much state power is aligned with the bourgeoisie (in “communist” countries they may not call themselves the bourgeoisie but they certainly act like it, pursuing “development” and “progress” over all else). In Britain, the enclosure movement used massive state power to force peasants to give their land to large landowners to be farmed more efficiently and forced peasants into the city to take up miserable factory jobs. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s forced collectivization and grain confiscation did the same. And today in China, the same is being done.
In many ways Marx was very right. Nobody but the bourgeoisie (or a “communist” party that acts like the bourgeoisie) can successfully pursue industrialization, because a (democratic) socialist government would never have the brutality and coercion required to successfully force a drastic and unprecedented change of lifestyle for the majority of the population.
While it’s true that mass scale exploitation under capitalism can increase the amount labour that’s generated, a lot of that labor ends up being applied towards things that have questionable value to society. As with your example of clothing production. Capitalist model creates a huge amount of waste because companies need to continue selling new clothing. A socialist model would simply produce less clothing that lasts longer, which is far more efficient.
Touché. Agree on that one.
