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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Rather than say "people are jerks", we could say "these people do not respect community property". One thing they have in common is that they probably all grew up in an individualistic capitalist society.

I can imagine that, if they lived in a functioning society where the dominant method of acquiring tools was by borrowing from some community pool of tools, the community might develop customs that protect the tools. Perhaps instead of having "bothersome bureaucratic certification" to get approval to use a tool, which is what I often see at hacker spaces, such a community would have elders who explain to the youth how to use and respect tools.

I imagine such a society could offload most of their survival needs to automation.

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To keep it short..I think this line of reasoning has little basis in actual day to day reality.

Sometimes, people are just jerks, no matter how they were raised, where they came from, or what they are doing.

"Capitalist Society" or not.

Most people don't even respect their own property. Look at the states of disrepair of most houses..

Due to easy access to cheap credit, government policies, and government subsidies, probably half of people who buy a house in the US can't actually afford to care for that house.

That was tried in USSR, and the result was that even less care was taken of community property.

The USSR was a capitalist society also, except the state was the sole owner (or owned most businesses at least).

I think you should use other types of society for comparison: African tribes or Eskimos maybe?

You and GP are romanticising socialism. Japanese people are, for example, very conscientious on average. I recall images of them cleaning up after themselves at world cup events.

This has nothing to do with capatilism. And capatilism is not necessarily evil any more than socialism is.

My claim was that people who live in a sharing-based society would in general be more respectful of community property than those who live in a capitalist individualist society. I was not talking about all capitalist societies, just an individualist one. That some capitalist societies are more conscientious than others only lends credibility to my claims. You could have a sharing-based capitalist society, for example.

And I agree with the other poster - USSR was not even remotely socialist, it was a state capitalist society. The state owned the means of production. I am more interested in societies where the workers own the means of production - so some kind of Marxism.

However my original comment could be satisfied by a capitalist society that chose voluntarily to fund open source robots that provide for human survival - no Marxism required. In a way though, open source is similar to everyone "owning" the information, so in that way open source resembles communist ownership of information.

You are aware that "the state" isn't a thing, right? "The State" is merely what we call what you're referring to as the workers if it doesn't do what we want it to. The State is just a group of people.

This type of revisionist romanticism towards the USSR is an excellent example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. We don't like the result, therefore it wasn't socialism.

People have this knee-jerk reaction when you point out similarities between the USSR and capitalist economies, as if they had to be opposites in every dimension of life.

Being a worker in a capitalist society (be it a democracy or not) and in the USSR meant, in both cases, that you didn't have much of a say in how your job went. Corporations are not democracies. And if you live in a society in which you don't really have a say or much control, you can't really expect people to care.

And this is what my interpretation of TaylorAlexander's argument is. It is also why I think it would only make sense to investigate this matter further if we looked into societies that are different in this respect. Do the Amish take care of each other's stuff better? I don't know, but I would guess so.

"The State" exists as much as "Google" or "Microsoft" does.

Either of them is run by specific people and has specific interests. And I believe it is generally fruitful to look at an organization of living organisms as a thing in its own right.

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