This is a niche topic and I’m not sure this is the right community. Let’s say we start to move on to a society less focused on capital. Not perfect but on the way there. There are still companies and there is an overall economy running around small businesses. How would a small business get started without access to “capital”? What are the alternatives?
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This is a very good discussion topic. I think it fits here just fine. My comment is kind of a definitional quibble, but I think the point is relevant to your last questions.
Capital of some kind is absolutely needed - by definition - to start any enterprise under any system you can name. Capital is surplus value from labor. If your labor doesn’t produce any excess value beyond your mere survival, you have no capital. If every waking moment is spent securing what you need to survive another day, well you are completely bereft of any significant capital. However, if you can satisfy your needs and get adequate rest and still have some time left in a typical week? That free time is a form of capital. Money is also a form of capital, but my point is it is more than just money.
If I understand what you mean, I would suggest that a more expansive definition of what constitutes ‘capital’ is what many small businesses need. Capital is so much more than money. When you don’t have money, you have to be extra clever. Any idiot can get their rich dad to write a check. The real genius is in figuring out how to grow a small pile of capital into a bigger pile without having a lot of cash.
For instance, say I have two free afternoons a week where I don’t have to work to survive. That is a form of capital. I could use that time to work on my business.
I don’t strive to eliminate reliance on ‘capital’ because capital is value-neutral. ‘Capital’ is just the name we give to the fruits of labor. It’s the capital-ists who hoard a disproportionate share of the capital we all produce by our collective labor, these guys are the problem, not the monetary wealth, infrastructure and free time that capital produces. Fuck capitalists and fuck those who elevate them to such a privileged position. Capital is ok by me, though. I want more of it, mostly in the form of my own free time. A bit of money helps too, but part of the sickness in our global culture is the thinking that the only form of capital that counts is money.
So to sum up, I’d say the alternative we need is an alternative to capitalism, not an alternative to capital. Capital comes in alternate forms beyond cash money and we all have at least a little capital we might be able to leverage. Creativity is key.
That’s a good point. Capital is surplus value which can have multiple forms. I see what you mean creativity and I agree. If the whole could think like this we could start to build something like a post capitalist society without actual parting with capital. Thank you for your comment!
You are going to need tools and other resources to start a company and that is capital. So the question should propably be how to get those. In Italy the cooperatives run combined funds to start new cooperatives with. If you get money from that you have to pay money back in. That works. Then there is the option of spin outs. So you have a large company maybe even specializing in starting new companies and let them go. A lot of universities, start up hubs and so forth do that right now. If that is owned by a non capitalist owner, that might work pretty well. Obviously government grants are an option too. Then you also have cooperative banking, which might offer some less capitalist deals. Also stuff like presales might be an option, like you see with crowdfunding.
If there was ever a good reason for pre sales I think that’s that. The problem I see with start up hubs college based is that they are limited in terms of help and mostly lead to companies falling into VCs hands. At least in my country. I think the most “anarchist” way of doing it may be just crowdsourcing mostly because it’s the potential clients that actually fund the venture. I think it’s probably a pain mostly because it turns into a marketing campaign but at least the funding is honest. No VCs, no angel investment, no quarterly projections. A company could actually aim to be sustainable instead of infinite growth based.
There would have to be some system to allocate limited resources, mostly real estate and materials. A command economy type system might say a local government gets a proposal and if it looks good allocates what is in their discretion to allocate: “your business is assigned to this address and up to X resources a month”. There are more democratic ways to do that as well, you could do a community vote to allocate community resources.
Capital abstracts resource allocation, without capital you need to really dig into who is getting what and why.
So some sort off central government resource allocation? Would it be possible in another way? I think crowdsourcing is a basic example that alternatives exist even if that in particular is highly dependent on a globalized economy. The main problem I see with central government is that it’s much more susceptible to corruption, even if it’s on a local level.
Crowdsourcing is basically the direct democracy version of what I described. I show off my business plan and everyone gets a vote on if it goes through. In this case they’d need to vote with their collective share of local resources though. You can’t allocate more rice than exists locally, no matter how many burrito stands you want in town.
I think you’d want to avoid any system that relies on how many resources a person personally has accumulated. That’s the libertarian nightmare state where rich horder-preppers rule the world with their stash of toilet paper.
“Everyone” might be a bit hard to organize, but you rarely start in a vacuum. For example there could be an agricultural cooperative that you are already a member of, or someone you know is. That cooperative might be willing to sponsor your burrito stand if that is beneficial to their members, either because you buy maize from them and/or because they would like to have a tasty food shop near their shared warehouse or so.
