Post Capitalism – Why it’s time to think utopian

Post Capitalism – Why it’s time to think utopian.

The Systems Analysis of why we should move beyond Capitalism.

Paul Mason from the Guardian newspaper, may have just penned one of the most influential pieces of our time.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

Where to move from Capitalism might not be found within Economics. Instead, it might be found in the realm of Systems Analysis and System Design. This is where the same questions are asked of any system. Questions such as

‘Who is the System for?’ and ‘What is its purpose?’

With our system I am yet to find a single person who doesn't believe that the System should be for everyone.

Many in politics tend to fall back to their side of which redistribution of wealth model is best, the Left or the Right’s, But you need to complete the analysis to see where it takes us and it needn't be wealth redistribution and the underlying class war that comes with it. It needn't be about Left vs Right politics that move us a couple of degrees to the left or the right every few years whilst the world around us continues to get worse. It could be about putting us on a path to a better future than the one we seem to be on now. So let’s see what happens when we do the analysis of what a system for everyone should deliver and why.

If the system should indeed be for everyone, then what is everyone?

Before we were separated by geography, religious belief, political ideology and race the one thing we all have in common is that we are all human beings. We all live on a planet orbiting the sun that is within a solar system that is part of a galaxy that is part of the Universe in which we all live. So what is it that we do here on planet earth at the most basic level?

We all live a life.

But what is a life?

A life can best be described as both a consecutive series of experiences and a single experience at the same time. Given the choice, what sort of experience or experiences would people want to have?

Taking into account that experiences are too vast to individually list we can make the assumption that all experiences can be categorized into the following good or positive experiences, bad or negative experiences and finally indifferent ones. We can also make the assumption that given the choice, people would choose to have on the whole, good or positive experiences were they able to choose.

So what does a person need to have a good experience?

Once determined, how well does our current system deliver the ability to have a good experience to each individual?

One thing we can all agree on is that we all have needs, wants. The needs are fairly consistent from one individual to the next and consist of the following:

• Air.

• Water.

• Food.

• Clothing.

• Home.

• Sex.

• Sleep.

• Excretion.

In this day and age in a modern society I think it is pretty safe to add electricity to the list too and probably the ability to communicate. A good test for any need is what happens to us when we are without the ability to access the need for an extended period of time. How does that impact our experience? A good system, a system that is for everyone, will first and foremost be able to ensure that those needs are met. Logic and reason dictates that in the event that a person is unable to obtain and satisfy their needs, their experience is not generally going to be a good one.

In light of that, the question is, how well does our current system deliver these things to each and every individual?

It is important because any system that does not do what it is required to do will at some point fail. Not just once, but time and time again until it gets to the point where it either needs to be fixed, so that it does do what it is required to do, or it will be replaced altogether. Systems that fail get replaced. Communism failed, it failed to consistently deliver basic needs for the people in its society and in the end was overthrown because of the fact that it was failing.

Capitalism is now failing for the same reason in that It is increasingly failing to deliver many of the basic needs to many people around the world. What’s more is that Capitalism is beginning to fail more and more in countries that are considered first world countries. Countries like The USA, England and New Zealand. The most glaringly obvious failures are in the areas of food security for the poor and in housing As evidenced by tent cities springing up in the US, people having to resort to living in cars permanently in New Zealand, not to mention the rising cost of housing and other basic needs in all three countries mentioned. The cost of buying a home is at the point of being simply unattainable for a larger and larger section of society and is only set to get worse for generations to come. This would be fine if real wages were likely to rise in response. Unfortunately they aren’t. Automation has been slowly replacing men and woman in the workforce for years, This combined with other factors such as immigration and needing to compete with countries where the cost of labour is much lower in a global economy has put long term downward pressure on wages. The simple fact is that Invisible hand of the Market under Capitalism is supposed to fix all of this, but it isn’t. So we have a problem and it’s a Systemic one for Capitalism.

Whilst Communisms failure was in its inability to supply, this isn’t the problem with Capitalism. In fact far from it. Under Capitalism we now have a worldwide global distribution network, so ability to supply isn’t the problem. Capitalisms problem is that whilst the price of many wants are coming down, the price of needs are increasing. The problem with Capitalism is that the price of those essential needs are being priced out of the reach of an ever increasing number of people.

Our wants on the other hand aren’t essential items but in life, in our experience there are always things that we want and desire. They are vast in number and different for everyone. As such they are impossible to categorize them as we have done with needs. The thing is that we don’t need to categorize them. We simply need a system that enables people to obtain those wants and desires. Ideally in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. Can they be obtained? Provided you have the money, yes. Under Capitalism we now have a worldwide global distribution system in place. You can order anything from almost anywhere in the world and have it delivered to your door in less than a week. For many countries around the world it can be delivered the very next day or at the outside two days, so the ability to obtain wants exists…..provided you have the money.

Unfortunately an increasing number of people don’t have the money and thus despite Capitalism's ability to deliver the product in a logistical sense and a physical sense given the product exists, it still fails under the current construct due to the simple fact that it is priced out of the reach of an ever increasing number of individuals in society. If the failure of the system to enable individuals to obtain the things that they need and want continues (especially at the level of basic needs), then the Capitalist system, just like Communism will need to be replaced in exactly the same way as all other systems no matter how big or small that don’t deliver what they need to are replaced.

To have a successful fit for purpose system. A system that is for everyone. That system whatever it is, needs to enable people to meet their needs and wants, within reason of course.

Currently the systems that have been tried to date use a monetary system in order for people to be able to obtain the things that they need and want. Capitalism’s solution is the same to this end. It too relies on money to enable people to obtain the things that they need and want. Money and the market.

But what happens when these no longer work as intended for an ever increasing section of society?

The fact that ‘Money’ and ‘the Market’ are Capitalism’s solutions is the key point. To have a successful system. A system that works for everyone. The solution, whatever that may be, needs to simply enable people to meet their needs and wants. It is the same of any system no matter what its purpose is. Too be successful, it just needs to be able to do what is required of it. Whether that system is the flight control system to fly an airplane, Whether it is the automated system that runs something as big and monolithic as a hydro dam (consider that many of these have been fully automated since the late 80’s) or a system to enable mankind to meet their needs and wants. Thus if the system is supposed to be for everyone. Then its purpose should be to enable everyone to have their needs and wants met in a sustainable and efficient manner, using the available technology to do so.

It should be geared toward enabling people to have good positive experiences.

How well does our current system enable this?

The answer is not that well when you consider the increasing number of people stuggling to meet their basic needs. But then to be fair, it was never designed to.

Considering what is happening right now in Greece with this information in mind. Ask yourself regardless of how they got there. How well is the current system working for the people of Greece today? Consider if you as an individual wanted to take a holiday in Greece, would you want to see the people of Greece happy and content only too willing to share their country and their culture with you? Or would you want to see people struggling to pay their bills and simply to put enough food on the table? Consider that the people of Greece, just like you want to have a good positive experience in life. If the System has them struggling to meet their basic needs let alone any wants they may have, how does it enable that? The fact of the matter is that it doesn't.

Now consider that the European Union, vetoed a bill in the Greek Parliament called of all things the Humanitarian Crisis Bill. The purpose of the bill was to help address poverty among pensioners and homeless families. It was to provide free electricity for some households most desperately in need. These are basic needs. Consider that for a moment in light of what’s been discussed above. These are fundamental basic needs that the current system is not delivering. These are men and woman from one country telling men and woman from another country, ‘Your people can’t have those basic needs. What sort of system do we have if that sort of travesty is allowed to occur? That is system failure.

We are now entering a phase where automation will reach unprecedented levels and as such emerging technologies under the sharing economy perhaps give us by far our best opportunity to harness them to provide a solution that would benefit each and every individual in the manner outlined above. This is automation at its finest it is also automation that is targeted at an individual level thus enabling people to use technology to lower the cost of obtaining goods and services that they as an individual do need or want. The problem is that the true and full benefit of this type of automation is not being realized at an individual level. It is instead being directed to benefit the corporate bottom line whilst at the same time putting immense downward pressure on the wages and incomes of individuals in many of the industries that are being automated. In many cases it is eliminating them altogether. The problem is that rather than realizing the true benefit that could come from such automation those people under the current system have to retrain and find another job in order to survive. The benefit that is being sold to us is the new technology and the ease with which we can use it in our lives.

This sounds good, but not when compared with the true and full benefit that could and should be realized at both an individual and a societal level. The true and full benefit that comes with the level of automation we are now beginning to see, is the need to work far less than we do now. Try 3 days a week with four day weekends for example and that’s conservative. We have the technological capability to be able to do away with 60% of the current roles in society and we should.

In order to achieve this sort of benefit at the individual level, the benefits cannot instead be directed toward corporate profit or the true potential of automation is lost and If it is then we are signing up to a future of low wages, long hours in the end just to be able to afford the basic needs. We are resigning future generations to the same fate.

Consider that right now when people lose their jobs to technology, they fall back on the State welfare programs that are the safety net for society. In a time when automation is increasing, more and more individuals will be put in this position. More and more will end up in roles paying low wages and end up working longer hours in order to be able to afford the basic needs. All of this against a backdrop where the cost of basic needs continue to increase. They are already at a point where they are becoming unaffordable for many, This too puts a far greater strain on the State in a time when many countries are already heavily in debt. The only answers Government have is higher taxes or austerity depending on which side of the political spectrum they fall.

It is easier to alter the course of a river than it is to reverse its direction.

Governments often write legislation to incentivize of dis-incentivize particular behavior. It’s what they do. You don’t pay your taxes, there’s a law that helps put you in jail. That sort of thing Perhaps one of the ways to take the burden off Government and to enable us as a society to realize the true benefits of automation, is for Governments to have programmes to incentivize businesses to automate. Perhaps if a business and its employees elected to join such a programme and were able to largely automate the business, That on doing so, the business could receive tax breaks but still had to pay their workers at least 80% of their salary even if their role had been automated.

You might need to read that again as it is a new and radical concept. Paradigm shifting even. and it is. But then in the age of automation, should the goal of business simply be profit for profits sake? Automation is about gaining efficiencies. Efficiencies lead to cost savings and cost savings can lead to lower prices. Those businesses once automated could still run with lower costs than businesses that haven’t yet automated their operations. The best part is the closer we get towards a far more automated society the more freedom we get. Imagine working 24 hours a week instead of 60, 80 or 90 even.

How much do we value freedom?

Isn't that why people buy tickets in the lottery with the dream of one day winning the Jackpot and being able to free themselves from having to work as much or to have the financial freedom to be able to do the things that they really want to do in life? What if we could do that without winning the lottery.

Would you want to work for such a business? I’d like to think that any business that adopted such an approach would have never found it so easy to motivate their employees. So it seems like a win, win all around. Would you want to support such a business given the sort of change the concept could bring about in the world? In theory at least, it works. It reduces the future welfare burden on of the State. It means the person doesn’t end up in a low wage job. Best of all the true benefit of automation is realized where it should be, at the level of the individual and not simply on the corporate bottom line.

By retaining the existing business structures, we can begin to move society toward a far more positive future. We keep the economy intact during what is essentially an evolutionary step beyond Capitalism.

There are other benefits too. By retaining multiple points of production or provisioning of services via businesses that are automated, you have significantly reduced the risk of system failure at any point by having multiple failover points (other businesses) whilst charting a course that would begin transitioning us to a far more automated and much more free society. We can then focus on ensuring that every man woman and child on the planet is able to meet their basic needs and many of their wants too.

At the right time a further rationalization of roles and job sharing could be used to free up the remaining individuals in society who's roles by their nature do not permit them to be automated.

At this point the potential future burden on the State is reduced and even concepts such as the Universal Basic Income which is being talked about more and more, become much more possible and could greatly aid in transition.

The alternative right now is to retain the corporate retention of profit model and resign the 99% to being a wage slaves for the rest of our natural lives. But even so in taking that approach, we still have the problem of an increasing number of people being unable to meet their basic needs over time and we still have a system failing to deliver what it needs to.

This isn’t the only way and you by no means have to subscribe to it. It is probably one of the least painful, least disruptive and most positive overall..

Society needs to change. It all comes back to the questions of ‘Who is the System for?’ And ‘What is its Purpose’? It’s about having a solution that enables people to meet their needs and wants to the best of our ability as a society, using the available technology of the day. If people can. The system works. We work less. We get to live life more. How many of you reading this have reached the age of 40 and realized that your halfway through your life and how quickly have those 40 years gone? If on the other hand people can’t meet their needs and wants, well regardless of how well their neighbor is doing, or the guy in the suburb across town, or the guy in some country halfway around the world who is part of the 1%, then unfortunately the System, the System that is supposed to work for everyone, It doesn’t work for them.

For many this thinking will be difficult to wrap ones head around. To those people I’d say that if you want the system to head in the right direction and to provide better outcomes and a more stable society incentives are important. We need to incentivize the behavior we want in society.

Here’s some examples in our current world where Capitalism and Society doesn't give the right incentives for what we want to see.

• We don’t want war yet we incentivize war by paying millions upon millions for weapons.

• We call some people soldiers which makes it ok for them to kill other people.

• Love and compassion which promote life are mocked as facile where as war, which harms life, is seen as honorable.

• We think a healthy family life is important for a healthy society yet we put financial pressure on families and incentivize both parents to work and spend more time apart than together.

• We incentivize those same parents to instead of raising their kids to instead work and place their children in the care of others, by imposing financial pressures on them, forcing them to work harder and longer with the end result being that they miss out on vital stages of their child’s development.

• We send children to school for their entire childhood to memorize facts and skills that they will rarely use by teaching them what to think and not how to think..

• We prioritize money and the economy over basics like clean air, clean water, quality food, our community and the environment.

• Anyone with a really useful invention, can forcibly prevent others from using or modifying it even if that invention would be of immeasurable benefit to Society.

• Most people given the choice would prefer to work less. But our current system incentivizes them to work more.

• We have people with not enough food to eat. Yet supermarkets and restaurants throw out food by the truckload.

• We need to produce less for the sake of our environment. but are locked into a system where the key incentive is profit backed by planned obsolescence. The profit motive is what drives production and the unsustainable use of resources.

Incentives are important in building the kind of world we want to live in. As you can see from the list above the world is already crazy. We need to start taking steps to make it less so. It really is time we developed a system to work for mankind rather than the other way around.

Moving from the price and market-driven mechanisms of Capitalism toward automation as an alternative solution for society, we start working our way towards a system that at a future point in time enables us to remove the barrier of price altogether. We then have a robust system with multiple failover points that works for everyone.

One where all people no matter where they are from will be able to meet their basic needs and many of their wants that they have too.

To many this might seem Utopian and from where we are today, that perception can be understood. However, ignoring that it isn’t by virtue of the fact that we cannot automate an estimated 40% of the roles in society. Consider the definition of the opposite of ‘Utopian’, ‘Dystopian’.

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary Dystopia means:

“An imaginary place where people are unhappy, and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly.”

This is the reality for many people. If that’s the reality then maybe it’s time that we as a society aim for Utopia for everyone’s sake and not least of all for the sake of our future generations.

The thing is this isn’t Utopian, automation is here; its already happening and more and more jobs will be replaced with it. The challenge before us is to ensure that the full benefits are realized by each and every individual and not only by a select few, whilst more and more people are resigned to low wage roles or worse, struggle to find work at all.

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. Fuller published more than 30 books over the course of his life. He said:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

I think in some ways he was right and we have never been in a better position technology-wise to set ourselves on a course that could one day make this a reality.

One thing is clear. We will not solve the problems facing us with the same sort of thinking that we used to create them. Take it from someone who has been determining requirements for and designing systems for 20 years. Everything that has been outlined is quite achievable. To many IT professionals out there, this is the sort of thing we have been doing our entire careers. The technology that is available now and that which is coming, only serves to make this sort of thing possible more and more.

ENDS

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