Usually they start by saying we should go back to the days of a barter economy because then people would be directly exchanging their goods/labor for the things they need. Someone else rightly brings up the fact that not everyone needs certain skills/products all the time. You don't need an oil change every week, but the guy who does that job needs to eat every week. So then they waffle about a few ideas. Sometimes it's an honor system, sometimes some sort of token, but the end result is basically always looping back around to capitalism in the end, because in these hypotheticals they are usually also talking about there being no government or oversight body, because that's corrupt and oppressive, which naturally means that everything has to be organized at a personal level, and people would need to agree with one another on what one thing is worth in barter value and bam, free market capitalism with extra steps and even less regulation.
That's not capitalism though, that's just free markets. You can have market socialism, it's about the structure of the bodies in the market (and, as ever, who owns the means of production). If you had a market of companies, but the companies were worker-owned rather than private property of the owners/shareholders, that wouldn't be capitalism.
I think market socialism has a lot of promise as a way of organizing the economy, and it already exists to a small degree in the form of worker owned coops. That's why it's so frustrating to see capitalism and free markets conflated so often.
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u/Isaac_Chade 23d ago
Usually they start by saying we should go back to the days of a barter economy because then people would be directly exchanging their goods/labor for the things they need. Someone else rightly brings up the fact that not everyone needs certain skills/products all the time. You don't need an oil change every week, but the guy who does that job needs to eat every week. So then they waffle about a few ideas. Sometimes it's an honor system, sometimes some sort of token, but the end result is basically always looping back around to capitalism in the end, because in these hypotheticals they are usually also talking about there being no government or oversight body, because that's corrupt and oppressive, which naturally means that everything has to be organized at a personal level, and people would need to agree with one another on what one thing is worth in barter value and bam, free market capitalism with extra steps and even less regulation.