There are a few ideas, such as basic income that can be tried. Personally I think that there is a need for extremely well funded organisations with a mission to acquire money now against the problem of actually creating a humane society in the future when this stuff really kicks off.
The key problem is what was mentioned above - capital accrues capital exponentially, labour accrues capital linearly. The only way to fix this is to give everyone significant stakes in capital (or for the Marxists, the 'means of production'). The Norwegian pension fund, which owns about 1% of global equity is exactly the kind of thing that will be required to create any kind of future. Governments aren't the only organisations that can do this kind of work though. Any organisation that is giving workers the same kind of leverage that capital gets or sees that as part of its long term mission is part of the solution.
I see this as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity over the next few decades.
19th century capitalism was quite free and rampant. States acknowledged this and engaged in legislation to humanize the system, e.g. through banning child labour and other things.
I would not say capitalism is broken, but that it needs occasional strict bounds by government to make living bareable. Market is not suitable as the only economic controller - state intervention is needed as well in the form of taxes and legislation to provide basic human conditions for the majority.
Recent decades have seen the rise of free market liberalism. I hope it is fairly obvious by now that unbridled this will lead to human suffering for many.
And indeed one of Marx key predictions was that capitalism through increasing efficiency would eventually lead to an overproduction/under-employment crisis.
You don't get to keep waiting for a prediction to finally come true when it doesn't come with a deadline. It already didn't happen despite all our labor saving technology so far (we don't even weave cloth by hand anymore!). Sure it might happen in another 100 years, or another 1000. But that's almost a given for most predictions.
>We've known capitalism is broken since at least the times of Karl Marx.
By what measure is it broken when it's produced literally orders of magnitude more improvement in human living conditions than anything in the thousand years prior to the advent of capitalism?
... including Marxism. I mean, Marx's ideas are great on paper, but they have actually been tried, and they just don't work. East vs West Germany, North vs South Korea, Cuba vs Miami, the world has seen plenty of controlled experiments in this field.
They're not great on paper. They ignore some powerful personal human motivation that we know exists. Perhaps you should say "They're great for robots that can be programmed to think in whatever way is convenient for the academic imagining them".
IMHO the biggest mistake and "the root of all evil" of marxist and capitalistic countries was that people with:
- capitalistic mindset were not allowed to get out; (marxist countries)
- communist mindset were allowed to stay in. (capitalistic countries)
This created discontentment and abuses, undermining the system and his initial followers: "If they are taking advantage, I am stupid if I don't do the same"
That has been tried too, in Britain in the 1960s the govt introduced punitive taxation but didn't close the borders. What happened next was the origin of the phrase "brain drain".
I'm not aware of any capitalist society that erected barriers to members wanting to go and live in a communist country. Weirdly, they didn't want to. Take the late Eric Hobsbawm for example, wouldn't stop banging on about how great the USSR was. But for himself, he preferred the life of a wealthy author in the West...
I live in South Europe. Here we want the best of both worlds: the best of Marxism and the best of Capitalism. IMHO, this is the root of our problems because this mindset is not sustainable. Just have a look on Greece. Tsipras (the Greek people) wants to follow both. This indecision will undermine them.
It's not just Capitalism that has good things, Marxism have good things also (I have lived in East Europe where you can still feel the marxist mindset presence and believe me, some things are MUCH better than in the West). But I am not even arguing which direction to take, it's just not possible to follow both.
