One of the things I’ve been trying to tackle in my brain box recently is the idea of what a post capitalist system would look like. I’ll not further beat the tired corpse of the analogy of a fish in the ocean not knowing what water is. I do however think it’s helpful to actually model out how a cooperative only system of economics and production could function.
There are countless areas where the only differentiation in consumer goods is personal preference or affordability. How different really are all the different products across the same type amongst brands? Products don’t vary too wildly in most areas, the big three is mainly: build quality, affordability and repairability. Sure there may be one company that corners a market but it’s generally only because they strangle competition in the exact opposite of a free market. What amazing new technology is in the 2025 iPhone compared to the 2018? Aside from a different UI and slight differences in camera, maybe a larger battery that they nerf after a while anyway. Do the top models of phones really have that much over each other?
There is a misconception that forms of non-capitalist economies are driven by owning nothing, that literally everything is shared, even your toothbrush. This of course is a fallacy but it strikes at the core of what could be the main fear with throwing off our consumerist shackles. The grey jumpsuit and legions of people moving around like bees in a mindless funk unable to have any choice whatsoever is an image that often goes hand in hand with the word communism. What would be left to get when there is no competing in the marketplace? Does this mean only one type of car is available? One type of cereal, one coffee, one shirt, one cut of jeans, one type of phone? But to that I ask, perhaps the real question should be – do we really need 50 different brands of the same sedan? Or bread? Or sheets, cereal, deodorant, pasta? On the other hand, an obscene amount of money is spent yearly by incumbent brands like Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s, not to sell you on some revolutionary new product but just to stay in the cultural eye.
Capitalism has done away with making the best possible products, we’ve known this for a while. The focus is on repeat sales, with the lowest possible production costs and as limited (to no) repairability as possible. This drives a cultural mindset that it’s easier to buy a new one rather than bother fixing, practically anything. When was the last time you stitched up a shirt that got a rip in it? This is a two pronged assault in that the capacity is there to generate a monumental amount of goods for consumption, but they are not made to last by design and they are made for a cheap as possible but sold at a greatly inflated price so that margin gap between the cost and what the end customer pays is as large as possible. For the things that are too expensive to be easily produced in abundance, an artificial enforcement of low-repairability is made by installing DRM, a great example of this is John Deere that means farmers can’t fix their own tractors without special coded systems, even though they could feasibly have the tools and know how to make the repairs. The profit margin has essentially become a tax on survival and profiteering has become rife in times of turmoil.
Patents and intellectual copyright is actually an anathema to cooperation and free market competition both. A visceral example that is not too far fetched from reality is a company locking away the designs to a biological wonder cure behind copyright and patent because it’s too profitable to continue selling a lesser recurring treatment. This is an illustrative case where anti-sharing and market dominance has a tangible human cost and hurts society at large. The main shift needs to be away from quarterly dividends, profits and wealth accumulation as the central tenent of society. Moonshot projects like the Apollo program and the Human Genome Project, as well as many open source projects, are not driven by the profit motive – it is the social capital and the betterment of human existence that foster the incentive to do great works. A move toward cooperation would lead to a flourishing of human society, some of the greatest leaps forward in technology and advancement have been when we cooperate at a grander scale rather than compete in small fractured parties. Unfortunately it’s been the historic norm that these times are usually when we are having larger competition on the world stage. Trying very very hard to murder each other out of existence. The goal needs to be moving beyond our tribalized basis of huddling together to cooperate in times of need only and to make it a decisive conscious choice as we evolve beyond the scarcity
If instead of hoarding innovation and advancements within a walled garden, each company shared it’s intellectual property, we could see a better class of product that each company gets a piece of, albeit a smaller piece. Apple makes a super stylish device, Samsung makes an incredible camera, Google makes a super fast processor and BYD makes a battery that lasts a week all able to play together nicely in the one device.
Imagine a world where you have one phone for 10 years. But it does not stay stagnant, every year you swap out the camera for a better one, you double the memory, upgrade the processor every two years. And the true holy grail, you can replace the battery when it honestly starts losing capacity not because the manufacturer needs you to buy a whole new handset to increase their exorbitant bottom line. You only replace the entire thing when absolutely defunked or obsolete.
The reason all the companies would play so nicely together? It’s in their interest to be cooperative rather than compete and wall off from each other. If there is no “profit”, no shareholders to appease, no investors to pay back and with extra surplus, then that extra can go back into the workers and process of making the products. The workers being paid their full worth, the operational costs get factored into each device, the designers & developers of the next device being fairly compensated for their value. And the real kicker? The price would still probably be a good deal less than with the margin that is currently slapped on to the top of the line phones & tech products today, not to mention everyday consumer goods.
And then there’s the robots. LLM driven “AI” is already replacing large swaths of worker employment. Autonomous robots will be even more impactful on society. More than likely however, any autonomous robots will initially be first used to lick the boot of the capitalist & wealthy by replacing production workers at every possible turn and then just for good measure lick more boot doing service work even down to simple chores and menial tasks around the home that the wealthy deem beneath them and not worth hiring an actual person to do – especially when they can have a live in slave that just needs charging every night. We as a society need to push for autonomous robots to be used in a cooperative way, instead of a replacement of human workforce – it will be a huge boon to human society. Working cooperatively alongside us to build, move and construct could lead to unprecedented achievement. Productivity augmented with robots doing a majority of the demanding work in hazardous environments where a machine could operate within without any issue what so ever. Pesky human lungs and their fragility to toxic chemicals or extreme temperatures.
Lastly there is no real choice in our society. At best you can only chose from the subset of things that you can afford. At worst you have one basic choice: you either work or you die – our entire survival has been commodified. There is no third option, sure in theory you can freely go and fend for yourself in the wilderness. But living on what is deemed “state” land, cultivating crops, building a house without the permission of the levers of institutional power, is not a reality in 2026. The infrastructure and systems are already built for a distribution of basic human necessities what we currently live under is a scarcity of access, artificially enforced because it is not to the benefit of capital. We don’t send food to parts of the world that can’t pay for it, we don’t build more houses increasing supply because that hurts the value of the investors hoarding the vast majority of available housing. The argument is not that there isn’t room for luxuries or personalised goods, it’s that only those should be the commodities and the purview of a small subset of the social and economic attention, society at large should focus on everything else.
When viewed through a cooperative lens the world seems like a playground of possibilities. The scope of that possibility seems quite literally endless, the very stars above within reach. Seems like we need more choice is our economic system if you ask me.