My problem with this is that in practice the working majority in many centralized economies didn’t own shit. If they did, it wouldn’t have been possible to replace the systems in the Eastern bloc even though most people preferred them. The centralized systems allowed few people to take private ownership and pocket the profits of the economies’ entire industrial bases leaving the majority with nothing.
And that’s the happy case when the centralized system took good care of its people by sharing enough of their surplus with them. There are of course the ones that don’t do that and use their populations as slave labor, even renting it out to other countries.
So I’m thinking that the sustainable alternative isn’t a centralized economy but a mix where the decentralized part is worker-owned. At least that’s my best guess at this point in time. And you have to have a real democratic political system. Without that, the upper layers of the centralized part are just as untouchable and can afford to be unaccountable as the upper layers of the capitalist monopolies today.
My problem with this is that in practice the working majority in many centralized economies didn’t own shit. If they did, it wouldn’t have been possible to replace the systems in the Eastern bloc even though most people preferred them. The centralized systems allowed few people to take private ownership and pocket the profits of the economies’ entire industrial bases leaving the majority with nothing.
And that’s the happy case when the centralized system took good care of its people by sharing enough of their surplus with them. There are of course the ones that don’t do that and use their populations as slave labor, even renting it out to other countries.
So I’m thinking that the sustainable alternative isn’t a centralized economy but a mix where the decentralized part is worker-owned. At least that’s my best guess at this point in time. And you have to have a real democratic political system. Without that, the upper layers of the centralized part are just as untouchable and can afford to be unaccountable as the upper layers of the capitalist monopolies today.