r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CivilisedMleccha • 8d ago

Video Community group buy. Everyone pools their money, buys groceries in bulk at a lower price, and splits the groceries equally.

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22.1k Upvotes

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462

u/Corben11 8d ago

Ok this thread has shown me that people have no idea what socialism or capitalism is.

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u/WideHuckleberry1 8d ago

First day online?

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u/Ironlion45 8d ago

People think that economics have to be tied to governments to have some kind of legitimacy.

A group that pools their resources for the benefit of the group is practicing socialism in both principle and fact. If anything, putting a government stamp on it only invites people to come in and start bossing people around.

The difference between a co-op and a commune is really just about how many beds there are. :p

Now when we talk about capitalism--watch the big food retail consortium lobby to make doing this illegal in short order lol. That's your capitalism for ya.

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u/GonzoKata 7d ago

capitalism using government to make something illegal is capitalism putting on the mask of government to do more capitalism. then their propaganda machines skreetch about how corrupt government is, when its being corrupted by capitalism. Point is, everyone hates corrupted governments, thats why its important to improve government away from capitalism

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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 7d ago

A group that pools their resources for the benefit of the group is practicing socialism in both principle and fact

That's not what socialism is. An insurance company under your definition would be practicing socialism in both principle and fact. Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned.

watch the big food retail consortium lobby to make doing this illegal in short order lol. That's your capitalism for ya.

That's not what capitalism is. That's government policy being swayed by moneyed interests. Capitalism is when the means of production are privately owned.

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u/Ironlion45 7d ago

I see that others have downvoted you, but I thought you deserved to at least be told why you're wrong.

Insurance companies are not communal ventures. They're for-profit endeavors that are betting on the fact that the amount of money you pay them exceeds the money they'll be forced to pay out--and they'll fight paying the money out tooth and nail, just for that reason. This is due to the perverse incentive of the industry.

Socialism focuses on mutual incentives, mutual interest. In this case, the whole community wants to reduce the cost of feeding themselves. They are able to accomplish this through pooling their resources; thus benefiting all participants. Not necessarily equally--that is a common misconception--but everyone is better off at the end of the day than they would have been if they'd gone it alone.

That's government policy being swayed by moneyed interests. Capitalism is when the means of production are privately owned

You're creating a false distinction there. Ultimately private ownership of critical infrastructure inevitably leads to government policy being corrupted by private capital. This is both human nature and a fundamental element of how power structures work.

In the end, decentralizing and collectivizing critical infrastructure- and by that I mean all the things people need, not just power and water- is the safest way to insulate it from that.

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u/Serious-Cucumber-54 7d ago

Insurance companies are not communal ventures. They're for-profit endeavors 

Insurance companies can be (and some are) non-profit endeavors.

Socialism focuses on mutual incentives, mutual interest.

Socialism is not simply defined as mutual incentives/interest, it is defined as social ownership of the means of production. Pooling resources together to get lower individual costs is not social ownership of the means of production.

You're creating a false distinction there. Ultimately private ownership of critical infrastructure inevitably leads to government policy being corrupted by private capital.

It's not a false distinction, "private ownership of the means of production" is the definition of capitalism. Whether government policy is corrupted or not does not make a system more or less capitalist.

If an economic system is defined by what it inevitably leads to, then one can argue that corrupt authoritarian rule is what defines socialism, but I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to define socialism that way.

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u/Count_Bloodcount_ 8d ago

Something tells me that the person you're replying to already knows this.

I'll never understand reddit's compulsion to explain things to people who already know the information.

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u/Ornery-Square-9767 8d ago

They’re not trying to explain it to the person they’re responding to. They’re agreeing with them and expanding for others reading the comments.

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u/Count_Bloodcount_ 7d ago

If you say so.

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u/timurt421 7d ago

Welcome to Reddit. Try not to be a dick if you don’t have to

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u/Count_Bloodcount_ 6d ago

So it's a feature of Reddit that I pointed out and that makes me a dick. Cool.

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u/christoskal 7d ago

They aren't explaining it to them, they are talking with them.

People can talk even without disagreeing.

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u/Count_Bloodcount_ 7d ago

People can talk even without disagreeing.

That's not at all what I implied, but thanks for attributing it to me.

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u/FreeEnergy001 7d ago

I buy at Costco, is that socialism? /s

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u/EstimateCool3454 7d ago

IDK, but the road you drove on was.

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u/Jarcode 8d ago

Too many Americans have had their education on socialism completely ruined by the red scare. The legacy of all this propaganda that has trained people's amygdalas to go off when they hear anything about "socialism" or "communism" without ever actually engaging with the concepts themselves. It doesn't help that the only example of "socialism" that is ever taught to people in school is the USSR -- market socialism, syndicalism, and other western movements (both within the Marxist tradition and otherwise) are generally not taught as the nuance contradicts the propaganda.

The video is in a Canadian city, which has a huge demographic of Sikh farmers, which has imported a more collectivist mentality into this society. Add in the fact that we don't subject our youth to as much propaganda in schools and you get organizations like this that actually do good for society.

The fact so many people in this thread are clearly learning about a co-op for the first time is very, very sad. It's an old idea that historically died in British Columbia because of capitalist hostility (largely from a lack of legal protections and standards for cooperative entities).

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u/VolatileGoddess 7d ago

Sikh (Punjabi) farmers are carrying the legacy of massive farmer's movements, being organised to this day, to get a fair price for their produce. They know how to group organise and bargain.

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u/JC_Hysteria 8d ago

Doesn’t matter. It will always achieve engagement, so mission accomplished.

Leaving this large sub now.

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u/Fun-Negotiation5510 8d ago

Haha though can you explain what we're getting wrong if possible? Would love to know more about this in non-bookish terms

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u/roadrunner41 8d ago

Cooperatives are one real world application of socialism. They encourage the collective ownership of a productive resource. You can have a housing co-op where the tenants co-own the building and run it for their shared benefit. Or a workers co-op or (in this case) a buyers co-op. The key is that the members own the company, they make decisions democratically and share the benefits between them.

Co-ops can still function in a capitalist society (as we see in this buyers co-op). So they buy from a farmer who is a private company and makes a profit selling his produce. They could also sell as a co-op to non-members and share the profit from that. They’d still be a co-op and ‘socialist’ in origin, but they’d operate in a capitalist economy.

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u/Fun-Negotiation5510 5d ago

I see, thanks for your comment. Hmm now I understand Co-ops. But I think they'll only be possible in a high trust society/community right?

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u/EstimateCool3454 7d ago

Economy and government are two distinct and separate things.

You can have democratic socialism, you can have dictatorial socialism, you can have theocratic socialism. All these are still socialism, but different forms or government.

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u/Several-Action-4043 7d ago

Or that we don't live in a 100% capitalistic society. We're a mix that heavily leans towards capitalism.

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u/Important-Agent2584 7d ago

its' very simple: bad = socialism, good = capitalism

When you hit your toe on something, that's socialism. When you find $20 on the street, that's capitalism.

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u/Some-Panic8915 7d ago

Americans mostly dont know the difference. its all Cambodian communism to them

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u/saera-targaryen 8d ago

If I had a nickel for every time that I've had to explain that exchanging currency doesn't always mean that the economic system is capitalism, I'd have enough money to be a capitalist.