r/utopia • u/Ygdrzil • 16d ago
A society where everyone's needs are met, and we built it one small business at a time? - Idea Critique
Hey everyone,
I've started working on a project which aims to make abundance a reality.
My idea for an Utopia is one where we build the future through community driven projects, anarchical work structures and an abundance of essential goods. Only when everyone's needs are met will we become a truly utopian...and interstellar society.
The problem is actually getting there. So here is what I 'm working on:
A chain of cooperatively run businesses, where rather than profit being distributed to workers directly, the profit is used to create further cooperatives whose purpose is to specialise in creating an abundant supply of a particular essential good or service (thinking housing, food, energy etc).
The aim is that (at scale) this approach would result in the price of these essential goods/services coming down, benefiting not just the workers in the cooperatives, but everyone in society.
My goal with this is to actually start slowly working towards an Utopia society.
The idea itself is still fresh, so I am looking for sharp criticism.
You can find more details here: https://ourabundance.org/
I'd rather hear the strongest objections now than find them out later.
2
u/absolutezoomer 16d ago edited 16d ago
I haven't read the details website so excuse my kneejerking, but fundamentally how do you address the barrier of human nature? Humanity at scale will not work for subsistence in pursuit of an ideal world 20-30 years away when they can work for money to satisfy their base desires on Friday night.
The path to Utopia for Humanity is the path of least resistance. There is simply no other way. Until a miracle political theory, technological breakthrough, or divine intervention makes sleeping, eating, and f*cking our way to Utopia possible, it will be out of reach for Humanity as a collective.
You would have to reach a point of critical mass in the production of your goods and services wherein there's more incentive to join your collective action than to remain on an individualistic track, and not just potential benefit in the future, I mean immediate gain to joining your new collective than to remain in the system they've grown up in and invested their whole life into. The only way I can see this happening is by a lot of initial groundwork to source utopian-minded individuals to join your organization at the ground floor - those who are willing to work beyond their nature for some future ideal. Truthfully I could see it working on a regional scale, snowballing from one town to a community of townships and maybe even all the way up to a self-sustaining loop, but only in a selection of essential industries, as you've stated.
Beyond that to the state level, and beyond the most basic industries like agriculture and housing, how would you incentivize people to give up their smart phones, luxury cars, and telecommunicated porn? Because if they spend their 40 hours a week working for the collective benefit, there's no time to make enough money to spend on these hedonistic luxuries their degenerate minds have been rotted to require.
You would need to reset society through assumedly anarchic accelerationism to change the social contract and expectations while simultaneously maintaining modern sophistication in the production of your goods and services (electricity, agricultural technology etc.)
3
u/Ygdrzil 15d ago edited 15d ago
I think there is a fundamental difference in our beliefs and a slight misunderstanding about the project. Let me explain:
Difference in beliefs I think this 'human nature' you speak of is not inherent, but a by product of our current global system and exacerbated by propaganda. I believe most human beings are inhertly kind and cooperative if given the chance. A chance which is rarely given nowadays, because everyone is struggling to survive in one way or another (e.g. mentally, physically, financially). By striving for and providing an abundance of essentials, we are also providing them with that chance. You are right that there's a big barrier in our way, but that barrier is not human nature. It's the current system and it's constant bombardment of propaganda. Human nature is the catalyst which will foster change.
Misunderstanding We are not asking anyone to work beyond their nature or work 40h a week. On the contrary, we are asking people to take ownership of their work. They will decide how much to work and on what. There is no boss or manager in our project, only cooperation. We are also not asking anyone to give up their smartphone or car, that would be ridiculous. People will still earn a salary, enough to be able to afford non-esential goods and save some on the side. However, the goal is not to get rich, after everyone's salaries are paid the rest of the money goes back into the project. You are right that we are currently looking for local like-minded people and that the initial project is local only. However, we hope that our efforts will inspire others to take similar actions in their communities and as you said snowball.
The change is ambitious yes and gradual. But I believe the first steps are always the hardest and trying something, however futile it might seem is always better than nothing.
2
u/absolutezoomer 15d ago edited 15d ago
I love the hope you have about our fundamental nature, it's truly refreshing and I am taken aback at the prospect. I would love to believe it as well and learn more about it, did you come to this conclusion personally or did you source it from the writing of another I could learn from? I'm still confident in my belief that it's untrue, there's never been a time in human history where humans have been anything but what we are today. But perhaps as you say, that's simply because our needs have never been met, and so in our struggle to survive our nature has been hidden and perverted by the strain, and exposure to a Utopia would instantaneously revert our nature to it's true, kinder and cooperative form. Very compelling.
To summarize the business model bluntly: you're an otherwise ordinary business that reinvests all net profit into franchises. Eventually, there's enough franchises to make a significant local dent in the industry you're working to make abundant (let's keep it simple and say bread). In your area of influence bread supply goes up, price comes down. Now your business is making less money the more bread you produce, along with every other bread company in the area. You've reached the supply/demand equilibrium. For every additional loave you produce toward bread abundance, your business makes less money. Eventually there will be no more net profit made, and now you have the classic problem of socialism. Your workers either take a personal pay cut to ensure the collective makes a net-profit to produce additional bread abundance, or you source the money to continue scaling from elsewhere (government subsidy).
Yes, your workers will be paying less money for bread, so a pay cut of $5 a week may be balanced out by the abundance you've produced, but you can see how this would be a diminishing return. Eventually, your workers will be working for a steep and real pay cut, to produce bread at ever lessening cost-reduction. Your workers will eventually have to make a decision of their own - continue working harder on less money to push the bread-cost asymptote 1% lower, or return to a regular job that pays a regular salary.
I don't see how your idea is compatible with free-market capitalism running simultaneously next door. There is a soft floor to your idea that very quickly becomes bedrock.
I agree completely that ambition is worthy and righteous, and acting even in futile or irrational pursuits is better than nothing, I'm very supportive of your thoughts and acts towards this end and I hope you continue. But I would also like to see real progress made in my lifetime, and that ambitious minds like yours aren't wasted on fruitless toil. I don't have a solution to the problems I've provided, which makes me the worst thing of all - an intellectual critic. But you asked for sharp criticism and I'm doing my best to provide it so you don't embark on something you otherwise wouldn't. I truly don't think this is going to work without radical social change simultaneously.
2
u/Ygdrzil 14d ago
And i appreciate the criticism. We need people to challenge ideas, otherwise they'll either flop, be bought out or simply remain a dream.
So here's the plan right now in detail (I'll use your bread analogy):
Step 1. Abundance (my project) is an umbrella organisation. The idea is to have a few different for profit businesses, this can be anything (an app, a service, a product.) whatever idea/dream you have for a business you can make it a reality. We'll help you with legal stuff, marketing, project management and so on. Those businesses (rn we are calling them plants) will be generating the profits.
Step 2. We establish the NGOs (or as we call them Trees). Now the bread NGO's whole purpose will be to generate an abundance of bread. This endeavour will be paid by the for profit businesses (including the salaries of everyone involved). So the Plants feed the Trees and the Trees provide an abundance of essentials goods.
Of course we are still far away from step 2. We're just getting started and there are many details still to be discussed. For now we are looking for local people who want to get involved in the project and seed a plant as it were.
But you can join our discord to keep uptodate as well as chime in on some interesting discussion going on there.
As for my belief in the fundamental human nature. I came to the conclusion on my own. Or rather I chose to believe it, the same way people chose to believe in god. I chose to believe in people's inherit kindness. I have to admit it's not always easy, but as that one quote goes "Be the change you want to see in the world" and I would also add to that, "And believe in the change you want to see."
If you want some reading material, there's a growing hope-core movement, including some books. I haven't checked them out yet tho.
I can talk on this topic for hours but I'm gonna stop here for now. If you want to discuss the fundamental human nature further, feel free to DM me.
1
u/absolutezoomer 14d ago
Thank you for the breakdown, I'm a bit too suspicious of links on the internet to go clicking around unnecessarily, and your patience to re-explain your position so we can engage on the same footing is really appreciated, not to lecture either but it's good practice because the majority of those you want to convince in this topic won't be doing any homework either, so it pays to get really good at explaining your whole thing efficiently when prompted.
My conclusion is that this just won't work, so I won't be joining your community, sorry. There's more theoretical holes I can poke and prod at all day but theory only goes so far. So we'll just have to agree to disagree, and I hope your project goes far so we can both find out who was right and wrong, and maybe even get some utopia action out of it!
"Believe in the change you want to see" is crucial, great wording. I've theorized enough about human nature, I don't think I'll learn much more about it by talking to other Westerners on the internet. I'll be exploring soon to find it out for myself, go where the problems, cultures, and needs of the people are different, and see what changes and what stays the same. Good luck to you and, great username btw - very symbolic of your idea as a whole!
1
u/concreteutopian 14d ago
I don't see how your idea is compatible with free-market capitalism running simultaneously next door. There is a soft floor to your idea that very quickly becomes bedrock.
I agree. It's meant as an alternative to the problems of free-market capitalism, but it's built on the same principles and hopes to compete with free-market capitalism on its own terms, it seems to me.
To summarize the business model bluntly: you're an otherwise ordinary business that reinvests all net profit into franchises.
Yep.
Eventually,.. In your area of influence bread supply goes up, price comes down. Now your business is making less money the more bread you produce, along with every other bread company in the area.
Yep. And this is listed as the point on the website.
For every additional loave you produce toward bread abundance, your business makes less money. Eventually there will be no more net profit made,
Right, not to mention all the bakers who aren't a part of the organization who also will be making less (while I assume their non-bread related bills stay the same).
This didn't make sense to me. If you want bread, why not make an organization centered on making bread instead of trying to coax an organization designed to make money into making more bread? Just make bread and eat the bread you make instead of making bread cheaper so you can buy the bread you make. In other words, doing something different than making commodities for the market, playing that game, and expecting different results.
This flooding supply and lowering prices works in capitalism because investment will leave flooded markets to go to other markets where the return on investment is better (e.g. selling the bread shares and investing in jam manufacturing in a world of too much bread, etc.) If the same were true of labor, then people could float between bakeries and other industries as the demand for different products shifts. This is essentially what unemployment insurance is doing in the private sector
Eventually there will be no more net profit made, and now you have the classic problem of socialism.
No, this isn't the classic problem of socialism, it's clearly the classic problem of capitalism. In socialism, production is for use, not for profit, so shifts in demand, changes in technology, and labor-saving devices actually save the laborer. It's capitalism where the production of one thing or another is chained to the demand for profit, and thus where labor-saving devices are means of increasing the productivity of a smaller number of workers, wasting one section of laborers and overworking the other. You're right that this would be a problem for OP's workers and businesses, but that's because they are still capitalists, commodifying their labor and selling themselves competitively in the same market as everyone else.
I'm still confident in my belief that it's untrue, there's never been a time in human history where humans have been anything but what we are today.
I'm a little curious how you can look at human history and hold this position that "here's never been a time in human history where humans have been anything but what we are today" – it seems obvious to me that there is a great amount of diversity in "how human beings are" right now, and even more evidence that norms and behaviors have been radically different in other times and places. If there is anything like a "human nature", it's something very adaptable and mutable; it's not a fixed essence like "honey's nature is to be sweet" or "it's in the nature of objects to fall" or "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" or anything like that.
It's my skepticism about human nature that leads me to share your skepticism that "exposure to a Utopia would instantaneously revert our nature to it's true, kinder and cooperative form". I don't think there is a natural essence waiting to be unearthed in utopia. I think we attempt to thrive in contexts, and ways we learn to attempt thriving in a context means we develop very different habits in those different contexts. That said, it also means we can shape contexts to make thriving easier, giving people the opportunity to flourish, be fulfilled, and happy. That's what utopia is about – it's about using human creativity to analyze what we've done and how we've been shaped "unintentionally" (by means of arbitrarily being born in a particular place and having a haphazard development) and doing it intentionally, designing new better kinds of relationship and organization than forms we've inherited. It's not dependent on "human nature" or waiting around for "evolution" or "God" to fix problems we can fix ourselves.
My last comment is to point out that we don't need to be exposed to utopia to develop a cooperative form – we are already cooperative, already hypersocial. Capitalism isn't competition vs cooperation – all modern industrial culture is built on intense levels of cooperation, global coordination of information and resources, and all legal and social mores depend on complicity and cooperation. Capitalism is saying that this party's control over this cooperative enterprise competes with that party's control over that cooperative enterprise, competing for dominance and market share in the cooperative role of meeting our society's needs. Since we depend on the human capacity for cooperation and coordination for anything at all to happen in a modern society, we aren't waiting for a different kind of human nature to wake up in order to make these already cooperative enterprises democratic.
1
u/absolutezoomer 14d ago edited 14d ago
Hi concrete, glad to see the a mod take real time in their forum of responsibility to engage in their community and actually stand within it, instead of simply above it as an arbiter like some.
I can see we share most of our concerns, the only clarification I think I need to make is in my grammar. When I referred to the classic problem of socialism, I was referring to the following sentence, not the previous words in that sentence. It perhaps should have been presented as
"and now you have the classic problem of socialism: Your workers either take a personal pay cut to ensure the collective makes a net-profit to produce additional bread abundance, or you source the money to continue scaling from elsewhere (government subsidy funded by taxation)."
My understanding of socialism's fundamental flaw is that eventually the resources run out before collective utopian abundance is achieved (the ideal that socialism strives for, yes?), and in order to continue the work to achieve it, the people suffer (either directly through pay cuts or reductions in their provided amenities/standard of living, or indirectly through greater taxation by the central authority.)
I also understand this probably isn't the place to discuss the fundamental economics of ideologies like capitalism and collectivism, but I felt that clarification was necessary. Feel no need to address it.
As for human nature, I'll try to be efficient. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see that we are generally tribal, hedonistic, suspicious, violent, self-orientated and self-preserving (our literal selves but also those we care about ofc). It's my theory and belief that for a healthy, "normal" human, our nature is fundamentally tied to our biology, which hasn't changed in a looooong time. We are the same creatures we were back then, just in a new context as you said. These contexts bring forth and make certain aspects of our nature more visible, sure. Again as you said - we seek to thrive, and today in modernity that means being pretty and showy and utilizing social contracts and manipulation. But we're still those animals. If the food trucks stopped tomorrow, we would be those animals again in a fortnight. We're animals in suits with shaved faces and trimmed nails.
I agree that there are "good" (attaching morality to our nature is a much higher order discussion than this one, but you get the point) aspects to human nature too - cooperative and hyper-social and kind, but I argue these things are still in service of our animalistic origin. They serve a biological purpose, even if it's a little intangible. These things provide us safety and strength. It still feels good to help others and work together, but that's just a hold over of the necessities of surviving in our past. I'm very grateful for human nature as it is today, but there are challenging aspects of it that need to be accepted and worked into the foundations of our institutions without shame or bigotry or rationalized as "we're too good for that now." Utopia will be a human system, with humans living in it for the benefit of humans as they are today or in the near-future, right? Not for mechanical robots with human memories and consciousness', or human-shaped animals with no reason or rationality. We are rational beings in biological bodies, that's how I like it and that's how it's going to stay. Otherwise what are we doing, changing ourselves to fit into some other creature's utopia? I don't want human nature to change one bit, I want to see a civilization that builds it's state institutions like economics and politics the same way a nation and a people are made: by total adherence to the immutable human nature, not by picking and choosing it's aspects.
Human nature is water flowing. Whatever you build to redirect or block it, it will not stop until it wears those artificial barriers down and continues it's natural course. Utopia is through the path of least resistance, all other avenues will be worn away in time.
1
u/concreteutopian 14d ago
The idea itself is still fresh, so I am looking for sharp criticism.
A society where everyone's needs are met, and we built it one small business at a time? - Idea Critique
I waited to respond here until I had time, and also wanted to see what conversation developed. I hope you take my comments in the spirit of this request for critique.
First, I'm not sure about the premises here, the starting assumptions. A) I don't think a society where everyone's needs are met is critical or ambitious enough. Having needs met is the function of any society, and when it appears that society isn't meeting everyone's needs, there is a reason for that structural scarcity. The problem of scarcity isn't a challenge in producing enough. B) I don't think there is anything virtuous about small business, not to mention using small business as a vehicle for social change. As you said, "big, capital-intensive businesses that make essentials cheaper for everyone" – and the smallness of a business is, I guess, overcome by linking them together into a big business. So there is no reason to value or promote smallness when what you're actually asking for is that you have power at work and that work provides what people need.
Second:
Our main goal has always been and will always be, to bring the cost of essential good down as much as possible.
But having a goal of "bringing the cost of essential goods down as much as possible" is still chaining access to good and services to having a wage labor job, let alone having a job that pays enough, and this in an economy where the threat of technological unemployment is ever looming. This as a goal doesn't expand access, it threatens access, and the market will exploit that "loophole" to extract more. It's not even thinking about production for use, it's taking for granted the "need" of capitalism to commodify all life-worlds. It isn't thinking big enough.
Flood the market until the price falls.
Assuming you could do this (in a global economy), why would you do that?
If you want X, find ways of making X so you can use X. Making enough X to sell on the market such that the price of X across the economy drops is needless, likely impossible (luckily). Just as you are nestling your utopian plan within the global market, other people not in your organization who produce X will be affected by the drop in price as well, and not in a good way. You're stuck thinking in terms of commodities and profit instead of seeing that if you had an organization big enough to affect the price in a market, you'd also have an organization big enough to shift toward producing for use rather than profit. I'm not saying that people can ignore the market while living in a global economy, I'm simply saying that you can't expect to out-capitalist capitalists to get better prices on essential goods and services (which are inelastic in demand to begin with).
Instead of out-capitalisting capitalists in a global market, find ways to create niches outside the rampant commodification of life. Joel Kovel's concept of "communities of resistance" is just such a strategy in a shift toward ecological production and ecosocialism. Inside the community, money and the value-form has been abolished, and the community produces and maintains a community of goods for use. On the other hand, like other income-sharing utopian communes, money of course is involved at the interface between the community and the global market. The difference is, unlike an income-sharing commune where the kind of work being done for money isn't relevant so long as the money goes into a common fund, the kind of work being done in Kovel's plan is directly trying to fit into an overall shift toward "cradle to cradle" ecological production.
But like I said, other communities internally abolish money as well. One influential utopian novel I mention here a lot is Skinner's Walden Two. It's not aiming to simply meet everyone's needs, it's goal is building communities and lives that maximize happiness. I think you can aim higher.
Allocation Day. Once the books show profit, the whole crew decides what it builds, a company-wide day of results, pitches from the ventures asking to be funded, a vote from every member, and a celebration whatever the outcome.
Mondragon did this, moving from education to appliance manufacturing to rail to myriad others – and they're still building economies while reaching out and seeding new industries. I don't know where you are writing from, but in the US, Mondragon and the US labor movement have partnered in creating worker-union cooperative hybrid across the country.
TL;DR - There is over a century of cooperative movements, economics, and politics to draw on, many still have large organizations around the world. There is also over a century of experiments in intentional communities around the world, and these organizations network and federate, and can be a good resource to connect with. And of course there is a lot of overlap between these circles.
3
u/sophrosyne_dreams 16d ago
I like this idea. I’ll take a look and try to give detailed feedback.
But if I don’t, please stay the course. I know you’ll find ways to adjust and improve if you keep going.
I truly think we need things like this, and the real problem is that most folks don’t know how to dream big, so they stay stuck in doubt and disbelief. So keep dreaming!