Who would win? The entire music industry or a bunch of file-sharing bois?

P2P Networks were able to cut yearly music industry revenues by $10 billion. That’s some serious ~degrowth~ and ~disruption~. Now the music industry isn’t the most exploitative industry on the planet and musicians should be paid fairly for their work. However, remember the short term goal of weakening capitalism? A few P2P programs were able to completely change the music industry business model in the course of a decade to make parasitic record companies a whole lot less money. I’d say that’s a small win.

Now imagine if we could do the same thing except to very large and exploitative industries like finance? My mouth is watering just from thinking about it.

Dual Power Structures

There is an ongoing economic war between the Capitalist mode of production and an inclusive and democratic alternative. There is a Capitalist power structure in which the institutions of Capitalism exert their power to reach their goals of making profit. Then there is the State power structure in which State institutions exert power based on who has control of it based on elected and unelected officials. By and large, the Capitalist class has significantly more influence over the State then the rest of us. Taking control of State institutions is one way of trying to create an alternative, but what if instead we create our own alternative based on social principles? Lucky for us, some people have already started it!

The social economy is represented by economic activity based on principles like:

Mutualism

Direct Action

Cooperatives and other types of worker-owned businesses

Solidarity

Essentially people over profits. Of course this isn’t “real” socialism, but we need to think bigger. Capitalism did not spring out of Feudalism in an instant of realization that giving a large portion of your harvest to your lord to feed the God-ordained Monarchy was actually a silly idea. It came as a gradual transition over time after the material conditions for it to become a prominent mode of production were reached. Today we would call the mini-Capitalism during Feudalism with created Capitalism, Mercantilism. We can view the social economy as essentially “mini-Socialism”.

Unsurprisingly, one big problem the social economy faces is access to capital. Under Capitalist assumptions, solidarity is very rarely profitable. One reason behind this is that fiat currency (normal money) is controlled by Capitalist and State institutions and use it as a leash on the working class to force them into wage slavery. If they made it easy for you to make money, you wouldn’t need to join the labor market and get a job at a company owned by Mr. Burns from The Simpsons with low pay and few benefits to get by.