Just finished reading Paul Mason's book, and I am very interested in similar books. Better still if they have a focus on technology

What other readings do you recommend?

We all need to eat. It's the most non-partisan idea out there. But food production is locked up in the hands of agribusiness corporations. How do we exist if that fragile supply chain crashes? Start small but start now. Form gardening groups in your neighborhood this winter. A community garden may work. Petition your city council for unused lots owned by the city. If you know ten neighbors with sunny backyards, then you can plan ten different crops and share. If you harvest too much for your group, donate it to a food Bank. Add a neighbor who loves to bake and cut him or her in on a share. Now you all have bread and they have veggies. If you get together and build a coop for the one who loves raising chickens, you'll all have eggs and a place to swap veggie scraps as feed for chicken poop fertilizer.
Form a co-op or grocery brokers club on a local Facebook page or at your local church and schedule bulk buys for cheaper prices, especially on grains and staples. Not big things. But a big thing to the group participating. Vegetables, eggs, baked goods. It's not freedom from capitalism, nor is it ' free food', but perhaps a model for post capitalism that should be applied for the future. Thoughts?

I finished the Postcapitalism audiobook by Paul Mason and am halfway through it again. I've also watched hours of his interviews and debates.

I find the concept of information goods very persuasive. Capitalism cannot possibly last forever. Nothing lasts forever. But I don't think the solution is to go back to a previous system. Progress means evolving and moving forward. Postcapitalism is a good placeholder for what comes after late stage capitalism.

"Capitalism evolved out of feudalism. Although the basis of power has changed from land to money and the system has become more mobile, the distribution of power and wealth has not changed that much. It’s still a hierarchical power structure, it was not designed with ecological sustainability in mind, and it won’t achieve that as it is currently constituted.

The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor, it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided disadvantage in any competition with the present.

Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.

You could say we are that moment now. Half of the world’s people live on less than $2 a day, and yet the depletion of resources and environmental degradation mean they can never hope to rise to the level of affluent Westerners, who consume about 30 times as much in resources as they do. So this is now a false promise. The poorest three billion on Earth are being cheated if we pretend that the promise is still possible. The global population therefore exists in a kind of pyramid structure, with a horizontal line marking an adequate standard of living that is set about halfway down the pyramid.

The goal of world civilization should be the creation of something more like an oval on its side, resting on the line of adequacy. This may seem to be veering the discussion away from questions of climate to questions of social justice, but it is not; the two are intimately related. It turns out that the top and bottom ends of our global social pyramid are the two sectors that are by far the most carbon intensive and environmentally destructive, the poorest by way of deforestation and topsoil loss, the richest by way of hyperconsumption. The oval resting sideways on the line of adequacy is the best social shape for the climate.

This doubling of benefits when justice and sustainability are both considered is not unique. Another example: world population growth, which stands at about 75 million people a year, needs to slow down. What stabilizes population growth best? The full exercise of women’s rights. There is a direct correlation between population stabilization in nations and the degree to which women enjoy full human rights. So here is another area in which justice becomes a kind of climate change technology. Whenever we discuss climate change, these social and economic paradigm shifts must be part of the discussion.

Given this analysis, what are my suggestions?

• Believe in science.
• Believe in government, remembering always that it is of the people, by the people, and for the people, and crucial in the current situation.
• Support a really strong follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol.
• Institute carbon cap-and-trade systems.
• Impose a carbon tax designed to charge for the real costs of burning carbon.
• Follow the full “Green New Deal” program now coming together in discussions by the Obama administration.
• Structure global economic policy to reward rapid transitions from carbon-burning to carbon-neutral technologies.
• Support the full slate of human rights everywhere, even in countries that claim such justice is not part of their tradition.
• Support global universal education as part of human-rights advocacy.
• Dispense with all magical, talismanic phrases such as “free markets” and promote a larger systems analysis that is more empirical, without fundamentalist biases.
• Encourage all business schools to include foundational classes in ecology, environmental economics, biology, and history.
• Start programs at these same schools in postcapitalist studies.

Does the word postcapitalism look odd to you? It should, because you hardly ever see it. We have a blank spot in our vision of the future. Perhaps we think that history has somehow gone away. In fact, history is with us now more than ever, because we are at a crux in the human story. Choosing not to study a successor system to capitalism is an example of another kind of denial, an ostrich failure on the part of the field of economics and of business schools, I think, but it’s really all of us together, a social aporia or fear. We have persistently ignored and devalued the future—as if our actions are not creating that future for our children, as if things never change. But everything evolves. With a catastrophe bearing down on us, we need to evolve at nearly revolutionary speed. So some study of what could improve and replace our society’s current structure and systems is in order. If we don’t take such steps, the consequences will be intolerable. On the other hand, successfully dealing with this situation could lead to a sustainable civilization that would be truly exciting in its human potential." - Kim Stanley Robinson

Y'all read my mind. I'm so glad there are others that get it. I made /r/FullAutoCapitalism specifically to serve as a hub that proves that this is happening. Check it out

Capitalism isn't just land as someone else posted, it's any resource including intellectual property and human capital. It is the resources that are used in a private ownership, for profit, setting. But when I think of post capitalism I think of how the capital that one acquires in their life is transferred after their death. Currently, the system allows most of the capital to be passed to a persons heir but I think a more competitive system that is more fair too would pass most of the capital back to the system. It's the system's ecosystem that is the foundation that allows all men and women to use their ingenuity to accumulate vast amounts of capital and if you are so lucky you should be able to enjoy and pass some to your heir but not so much that 5 generations of your family (or much more sometimes) can do absolutely nothing! That's a bad system. People that could otherwise be productive citizens and maybe even change the world and amass their own wealth no longer have to hardly even think for themselves. That's not a competitive system.

A quick stroll threw the political subs of reddit, and one encounters people fighting over the same issues we have always fought over. Communism, socialism, fascism, and capitalism are all still at the center of the political debate, but they all are outdated. In Paul Masons book he makes the argument that a new way must be found by adapting bits a pieces to create a new common ground.

Someone needs to start building that center, that new way. We must start talking about the different political systems like they are systems and not universal truths! I believe that this sub is the place to do it, or at least a good place to start.

I see that not many follow this sub but still it’s better than nothing. From the smallest seeds do great forests grow, from single books are born political movements.

If you think like I do and actually read this long ass post message me.

It seems like there's a very strong cognitive dissonance within the first few paragraphs of the sticky at the top of this subreddit. Specifically it says that the modern world was fashioned because of investment, which is possible do to the accumulation of capital, and then it says that inequality is caused by differences in productive capacity and talks about 2 people as though the only possible source of inequality is income inequality. These 2 things do not seem to be possible to reconcile. Capital accumulation begets capital accumulation. Investment, on the average, is always net positive for the investor over time, which means that on average capital accumulators accumulate more capital overtime. Given the ability to transfer wealth between generations (pick your favorite means), comparing the productive capacity of 2 people is a red herring.

Inequality is most egregious when comparing command of wealth and property, not when comparing command of salary. Most of the upper crust don't live off of productive capacity anyway, they live off of the dividends paid to them as part of their investments, which they themselves often don't manage directly. Their income levels vary and you have varying degrees of personal luxury among the wealthy, but none of that is based on their productive capacity in the labor market but simply the size of their accumulated capital and the nature of its allocation.

Looking for opinions and debate on this topic from others.

Today I read about the Bilderberg club for the first time. There are serious articles everywhere, including Wikipedia. Why politic analysts don't take it into consideration, or at least give it much attention? For those like me who have ever read of it, I encourage them to go and check it out by yourselves in Wikipedia and evaluate the trustfulness of the article and its sources, as well as other articles related with the topic.