Green capitalism is still capitalism

Today, many Greens promote community-centred economics based upon small businesses, municipal-owned enterprises and cooperatives. Such a small business-based market economy would supposedly permit us to avoid the problems of corporate capitalism and bureaucratic state-ownership. They accept the idea of private property and competition for profit are natural where small businesses must serve the public, because they can never be powerful enough to manipulate the public or control the government. This is all an idealistic fantasy of a make-believe capitalism. There is nothing "natural" or ecological about private property, capitalist competition, or the profit motive. These are part and parcel of class society.

Greens insist that many small mom and pop businesses and small farmers are kindly and benevolent. Perhaps so. But to be sustainable, every single small capitalist would have to be a saint, would have to give away his profits to his competitors and to the community if he started winning too much at their expense. That is impossible. And if we talk about workers' cooperatives, or the various utopian schemes put forward by the populists for broad employee-and-community-shared stock ownership, the same problem applies. With competition for profit, most such cooperatives will eventually go under, while a few will survive. Competition always intensifies, because the rate of profit tends to fall. Capitalists, big or small, cooperative or corporate, compete with each other on the market, and they do so by cutting their prices. The best way to do this is to replace their workers with machines. This works out for the first capitalist who gets the new technology: he can undercut his competitors. But then his surviving competitors get the same technology. Since profit is based upon human labour, profits, in general, fall, as they get squeezed between falling prices and higher technological costs. As profits fall, competition for profits intensifies. As competition intensifies, there will be a strong temptation for relations even within cooperatives to become hierarchical, for a few "elite" members to drive the rest to work harder, so that the cooperative can compete better, externally. In the case of both small businesses and cooperatives, as they compete with other concerns for survival, their decisions will be based upon profit and survival rather than upon what is good, in the long term, for the environment, the larger community, or even for their own workers and their smaller shareholders. The more powerful and larger businesses will use their superior wealth and power over the economy to ensure that their candidates will win, so as to distort the electoral process, the law, and the state to favor their own interests.

No matter the starting point, competition will always lead to the corporate capitalism abhorred by the Greens. The only alternative to capitalism is community based, democratic socialism, a theory of sharing and living in common dates back to prehistoric times, even being mentioned in the Christian New Testament as a way in which some of the early Christian communities ordered their lives. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labour without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action or "dot-communism" is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and Flickr is astronomical. Add to this the millions of videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fan sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless. Not only that but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Sites like Reddit and Twitter let users steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks.

Organised collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism. We've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees." The tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production such as Linux that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. We find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale. A company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles. The biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralised town or village. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model of free access is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions. Collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step. We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? 

The force of online socialism is growing. Some people abhor the term because of its connotations but the only alternative is socialism, where property is owned and administered in common by all the people and not merely one section. We know the principle works because we witness it with the collaborative nature of the internet everyday.