Daniel Gortz on the Competitivity of the Commons within Capitalism

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Daniel Gortz on the Competitivity of the Commons within Capitalism

Daniel Gortz:

"The economic logic of capitalism is now shifting due primarily to the advent of the Internet; as such, it becomes more profitable for societies at the aggregate level to not enclose information, and to invest in the happiness, inner growth, perspective-taking, and mutual trust among citizens (as well as other markers of the quality of relationships), as this drives the solution of complex problems, which is the great scarcity of our time. Volumes of goods are not the main scarcity; complexity management is. This creates an impetus to develop economic systems such as the commons, to the extent that these can attract greater investments and resolve more complex issues. This all flows from the plain fact that creativity cannot readily be bought: it emerges through relations, play, and inspiration by ideas and purpose. And creativity drives value creation more than anything else in a world that is already postindustrial to a significant extent.

In other words, to the extent that we can engender postcapitalist institutions that attract more capital because they genuinely offer more of what people want in the long run, and these can reinvest a larger part of the capital than capitalist companies do (because they are loyal to stakeholders rather than investors), this leads to an accumulation cycle in which postcapitalist institutions can begin to supplant capitalist ones.

The key issue here is "by which logic is human agency coordinated over time and space?" -- and the irony is that, under the current technological circumstances, the aggregate profit is higher when people are coordinated by non-monetary means, which in turn allows for more efficient reinvestments of that same profit." (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Daniel_Gortz_on_the_Theory_of_Moral_Revolutions_as_Rooted_in_Socio-Economic_Transformations)