Political Memes

I’m not viewing them as partners or saying they should be left unchanged. The fight against these structures doesn’t need to be all or nothing.

The cancer metaphor is apt. When a tumor is embedded in vital organs, you don’t simply operate and hope for the best. You pursue other strategies to try to shrink the tumor instead.

Like it or not, billions of people today depend on the state and capitalism to meet their basic needs for survival. While I would like to start taking radical steps to disassemble that dependency, not all elements of the state and capitalism are equally necessary and not all are equally harmful. While there as some elements that are so harmful they need to be stopped as soon as possible (the war machine, coal power, etc.) there are others that are more benign and can be retained while we build alternatives.

In my mind, markets are a great example of such a feature. While today’s markets emphasize growth to meet the needs of the wealthy, it seems quite possible to engineer markets that behave differently. Markets are not inherently evil—they’re merely decentralized optimization algorithms that operate on the knowledge of the masses. But of course if you optimize to satisfy the whims of a tiny minority of people, of course you’ll have a terrible outcome. But can we design markets that optimize for human and ecological well-being? Maybe not perfectly but certainly to a much, much greater extent than today. And as right-libertarians correctly point out, markets, by their decentralized nature, avoid the concentration of power that is necessary in a centrally planned economy.

Long term, I hope that mutual aid will be able to replace most or all market activities. And I certainly support efforts to develop those networks out starting today. But there’s never been a mutual aid network anywhere near the scale we need and there are a lot of potential pitfalls to navigate there. I think it’s smart to pursue multiple strategies and see which works best in a given situation.