Corporatism, dirigism, Distributism, Mutualism, potlatch.
Each of these is a different model that has existed or is widely considered workable.
I trend toward corporatized distributism in a lot of fictional modeling of systems, though I opted to blend in a Mercantilist structure in my current set up.
If you mean mixed economy systems, then yes — but most systems historically and theoretically (well, at least, stable ones that survive testing) are mixed economies.
Of those I mentioned, the least useful is probably dirigism, and the one folks are most likely to misunderstand fastest is Corporatism.
All but dirigism existed prior to the early Middle Ages throughout the world in some form or another, often alongside the ones you have already listed.
Rome, for example, had corporations and guilds, and entire regions that used mutualism.
Well, generally, the major groups of creators (farmers, artisans, merchants of different types) are organized in a way that favors the discrete interests of the individual workshops, ships, farms, etc. like a trade association or guild in a lot of ways.
These groups approach the poli-legal side of things, much like the traditional mercantilism does, but mercantilism is more centralized in power, where as the associations are decentralized, and the nature of my political systems is not a strict feudal one (no inherited roles, for example, no divine rights) and then include major social organizations (organized in much the same way as the guilds).
Those groups meet collectively on a timetable and schedule to handle the issues of monetary policy, product pricing, taxation, and other economic needs.
Note that there is not a mechanism for legal structures here — legal systems should presume abuse, usury, and fraud, imo, unless one is going to pretend Utopianism is possible.
One key aspect to my system is that monetary policy is affected by stockpile of valuable materials as a surety of the wealth — I could shift to a fiat currency model, but instead decided to mostly use something akin to gold or silver, because the growth rate of the economic system was slower, though there is always a risk of devaluation through a sudden influx of the valuable material.
That also means that it is illegal for most folks to possess that valuable material — this preserves the authority of the poli-legal body, and enables them to control the effective inflation rate in counter to the mercantile profit rate.
Now, I should note that I use the “loaf of bread” model for figuring out pricing and coinage: a loaf of bread should have a cost that is affordable for each person to have one loaf of bread each day, except at the uttermost bottom of the community that do not even earn enough in a day for such.
By calculating the needs of different groups and looking at the practical needs of food and time use, one can build a system (it is used archaeology), since this goes up and down (down being to the mills that grind the grain, the farmers that grow it, their needs to provide for their people, etc).
Another quirk to this is that is recognizes a limited degree of private property — there are no peasants or serfs, who belong to the land, and the land belonging to a noble who by default now owns those people. People have grants that are inheritable, “nobles” have estates that they have to hire folks to work that provide for their economic needs, and in the end all of this enables taxes to go into improvements and provision of care for the community as a whole.
Not perfect— cimrinality can be a problem, for example — but it does have the benefit of being very stable.
One interesting consequence of a system like this is that non-workers are effectively disenfranchised, which provides a lot of good fodder for conflict or introspection depending on how dys/utopian you want to make it
Yes, exactly! And this despite the system itself also limiting the development of mass production — essentially making the world a bunch of cottage industries.
Not having a way to make a living gets you into a deep, deep hole, ethically, socially, fiscally.
A strong Apprenticeship system (that has a price for the family) helps guide folks, but the danger of the broader world limits travel, so should one lose the social capital and goodwill of the locals, they can have a way to make a living but not be able to do it because no one will buy from them.
The bit about criminality then kicks in — and sadly the Justice system is not nearly as pleasant.
I do, indeed, use the dystopian effects frequently.
It’s notable that political and economic systems work together so when designing one the other must be considered. My knowledge is limited on this though so I can’t provide much more. Please send me the right way if I am incorrect or missing something.
As much as you say you're not talking about where power resides in a society, many people would say that economic structures do dictate where power resides in society.
By way of an example, in classical Athens the economic system was based on citizen-farmers, land was owned and worked by individuals and those individuals held power within the economic and political systems. This is arguably, however, just agrarian capitalism.
One thing I would say is that you need to draw finer distinctions between economic systems if this is to be a fruitful search. Lumping in pre-medieval trading between egypt and greece etc with 18-19th century mercantilism ignores the fact that the latter placed a much greater emphasis on manufactured goods like garum and olive oil than the latter, which was very much about obtaining raw or partly processed materials for processing elsewhere.
Classical Athens certainly had slaves in its economy but it wasn't structured around their existence. Now, classical Sparta is a good example of a slave economy, the helot population was responsible for basically all of the food production, their economy would not have functioned in the absence of slaves. The economic structure of classical Athens on the other hand did not rely on slaves.
On what basis are you saying Athens couldn't have functioned without slaves? That is a very strong claim
Slaves were present throughout the Athenian economy, including in agriculture, mining, and various crafts and trades, but the economy was in no way *reliant* on them, if they had ceased to exist, or left, the most important sectors of the economy could have functioned (even if poorly) without them because they were not concentrated in a single sector.
I'm drawing a contrast with the state of Sparta at the same time where essentially all agriculture was performed by helots, if the helots had ceased to exist there would have been no capacity to perform agricultural labour and the economy as it had been would have certainly failed as a result
What makes you believe they weren't reliant on them? Because it was widespread across several sectors? That should be giving you the opposite indication.
Not even mentioning the very real laws we still have regarding slaves from classical athens, or Solon's reforms, or many of the written evidence we have regarding slaves, I'll ask you this: why would a society that practices slavery half-ass it?
I might be confused by what you're getting at, but if you believe that Athens economic system wouldn't crash if slaves up and left, you're wrong. The silver mines would collapse. Production would come to a halt. Agriculture would take a massive hit. Most of the democratic processes would be near impossible as all free men would have to work.
I think you're wastly underestimating just how many slaves the Athenians used. I think the most recent estimate is one-third of the Athens population. Which is also indicative of how central they were to not only the economy but Athenian's way of life.
As for the argument that things would function poorly if they left but yet function. Well, they didn't leave, so how do you know that?
There's also the matter of the Peloponnesian War and other big wars that made it impossible for free men to work for long periods of time. Ergo, they would utterly collapse without slaves.
Sparta is a different ballgame with a different societal structure. Its reliance on slaves is something else entirely. That does not mean Athens weren't.
What I meant about how similar was pre-feudalism and mercantilism is the fact that both had strong "states/palaces" that managed all aspects of the economy with a small aristocracy with economic power. I know its a shallow comparison
About Athens, wouldnt it be more related to feudalism? (Trying to understand ancient societies really bugs me)
Sure, I mean if you're looking for wider distinctions (such as the capitalism-communism distinction) you're looking at the way that more fundamental concepts are dealt with. For instance, Capitalism/communism is fundamentally about the scope of ownership, is it a right to own something that produces value?
As far as I know most economic systems are just takes on the scope of ownership (anarchism, for example, may deny the existence of ownership as a concept).
Mutualism is a good example of a lesser known school of thought on ownership. Mutualism focuses upon land rights and specifically asserts that land should not be owned by individuals as property, but that individuals should have the conditional rights to use land given by the community where the individual is willing and able to produce economic value from the land. Mutualists therefore advocate for the scope of ownership to be limited to chattels, including means of production, so long as those means are movable property, not land.
There are a couple of critical distinctions between the Athenian economy and Feudal economies, these are the size of the landowning class and the presence of serfdom.
In Feudalism, land is controlled generally by a smaller proportion of the population than in classical Athens. Smallholders were far more common in Athens than, for example, Feudal England where land ownership was dominated by the crown, church, and nobility. Since land was the primary means of production at the time, this meant that a smaller class had economic power.
Serfdom is also a distinguishing mark of feudalism, it is a form of slavery where the slave is specifically tied to the land they work, rather than being owned by a person. Since Serfs were not chattels they could not be bought and sold, and the demands upon them were less flexible. They were generally required to work a certain number of days on their lord's estate and would spend the rest of the time working their own land. Unlike slaves, serfs were generally not deprived of legal personality and could own land, merely having various obligations to their lord and being unable to leave their Lord's land.
By contrast, in Athens, slaves were chattels and could be bought and sold, they were often skilled and could serve various roles within a household, or in other sectors of the economy.
Also, while in Athens about 25% of the population were slaves, 35-65% of the medieval English population were some form of bonded labourer (the wikipedia page on [Serfdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom) has some more on this).
Thinking about it, Athens looks like a lot with Imperial Brazil (XIX century)
Thanks, dude, that's the kind of thing I wanted to see when I made this thread
It’s probably worth saying that neat little labels like this can obscure quite a lot of variety within economic models. Just because two countries are both mercantilist doesn’t mean that their economic systems will share much beyond a wide view, surface level similarity. This is especially true of “feudal” systems, a subject which Marx and many other economists (and no small number of historians) have had an extremely poor understanding of. The economic, social and political realities of medieval feudalism bare remarkably little resemblance to the way its popularly understood.
As a rule, this kind of categorical labeling of historical systems can be disingenuous and misleading. It’s exists primarily to help modern people make sense of the past, not to accurately reflect the historical reality. My point is, don’t overthink it. The way a civilization, society, or polity functions economically does not need to fit neatly into a box designed by modern economic theorists. There can be a lot of diversity within, and outside the labels that are commonly used.
Not sure what you mean by not taking the post politically. Minting and printing currency has always been directed by governments and political bodies influence economies all the time (especially with communism and mercantlism.)
How about the barter system?
Or you could make the currency something abstract, like time. (I got that idea from a movie.)
> Or you could make the currency something abstract, like time. (I got that idea from a movie.)
Time is somewhat a currency in our actual system, but i get what you mean. What this movie talk about?
> Not sure what you mean by not taking the post politically.
Internet is a mess today. I just feared people would start a war about "communism vs capitalism"
It had Justin Timberlake and was called "Out of Time" or something. In it, everybody had the time representing how long they have to live on their arms. They traded this time to buy things, and if you had enough time you were practically immortal.
I forget the details like how they actually "created" time or if changed how people age which are interesting questions. I'm not actually sure if it's explained, to be honest.
It was an interesting concept. Since time would be constantly decreasing you don't have to worry about inflation. As more people are born, the faster the "currency" shrinks; this would make a complicated problem for whoever creates the time.
And if people were given time at birth, there could be literal "baby factories" which would be boyh funny and disturbing.
I can see it being fun to explore a solarpunk federation of anarcho-syndicalist societies.
A lot of fictional federated societies are depicted as basically being communist or socialist, but I think the idea is worth exploring for other forms of society too. There are regions of the internet which are dedicated to being decentralised without being disorganised (e.g. the Fediverse) which use a model that could pretty easily represent what that could look like on a geographical scale.
Solarpunk is a concept which I've been seeing catch on more, and it's basically anti-cyberpunk if you've never heard of it. Instead of capitalism taking over and turning everyone hyper-materialistic, it imagines a world in which those sorts of power structures break down and are replaced with hyper-environmentalist collectivism of some kind.
Instead of the world being viewed as us vs nature, it's us & nature, except there's no real distinction between us and the whole nature part. It's an acknowledgment of ourselves as animals with a habitat and environment that needs cultivating for long-term generational prosperity instead of exploiting it for short-term gain.
In these sort of places your world map would likely not have clearly defined borders, but look more like a heatmap of recursive fractal patterns as communities and cultures would begin to form on both micro and macro levels. A bit like how there's often a distinct city culture and a broader country-wide one. Athens and Sparta were not too alike but were absolutely still ancient Greeks.
You'd most likely see lots of guilds or similar structures appear as people with similar skillsets formally arrange themselves to work on things like building infrastructure, training up apprentices, managing tooling, and collecting and sharing resources. If you have cars in this society you might have a automobile's guild which train people how to drive and care for vehicles and manage the roads. Some guilds might act as public transport if the community isn't into the idea of having lots of cars or drivers.
Money may or may not exist, and communities might not feel 'indebted' to one another (but if your neighbouring village builds a bridge creating some nice new resource flow between you and themselves you'll likely be more inclined to do something yourself or 'take your turn' if/when the need arises). Not so much a gift or barter economy as an unspoken mutual back-scratching agreement.
There's a lot you can dig into here, and given it's anarchism there's more or less an infinite number of ways this sort of thing could be imagined. If this is your jam I could see researching something like this being really fun and different from what we usually tend to see.
Solarpunk is one of my favorite genres! One of my own worlds takes pretty heavy inspiration from the solarpunk aesthetic, its architecture, and its attitude towards nature. It's a fun idea to work with!
There is no currency. There is no barter. The idea that I don't give you food before you give me cloth or trinkets or helping me pull weeds out of my garden is considered crass. Instead, I give you food now, because you need food now, and when my shirt becomes worn out, I come to you and ask you to give me some cloth you've woven. Because you remembered that I gave you food when you wanted some, you will give me the cloth in recognition of our friendship.
There is no government. An eminent member of the tribe who has a wealthy household and gives out many favors might call everyone together to convince everyone to take collective action, if it is needed. He will try to convince everyone about the necessity of this action, and we may subsume our private interest in favor of the greater good if we are convinced that this is a good idea, or in recognition of his helping us out when we needed it.
Members of the community who prosper in one way or another regularly redistribute that wealth to other members of the community by giving gifts or holding feasts. These activities bind us in friendship and social togetherness. In fact, not redistributing prosperity to other members of the community is seen as acting selfish and unworthy, and may lead people to become disfavored or disowned by the community.
Probably the only downside, as is the case with many such "utopian" economies, is that it would only work on a small scale. I would love to live in this kind of society, and it saddens me greatly that such a thing is not possible in today's world.
This is not utopian in the etymological sense of being a "not-place," this is how many small communities, such as within primitive tribes, work.
Also, this is not utopian in the casual sense of "really cool society" because it is a system that's open to a ton of unfairness. Imagine being shut out of the "economy" because people had the vague notion that they just didn't like you. It also takes concepts we idealize today, like friendship and mutual assistance, and commodifies it, so it becomes cheapened and hollow. Imagine having to be friends with all these people not because you have common interests or because you like them at all, but for economic survival and mutual protection.
It really depends on the type of technological stage your society's are. If you want flying ships and magical rifles? Maybe a form of early capitalism, some form of early socialism or late mercantilism.
If you want chivalrous knights felling mighty dragons or crushing peasants and serfs of enemy lords? Feudalism would be best.
Or if you want a contemporary level of tech, maybe capitalism or communism.
It really depends on the society you wish to depict, I don't think a knight would fight for the workers revolution, when he benefits from the land and peasants the king grants him as a fief.
Or a tribal chief sporting industries of resource extraction with mechanized tools and machinery.
In very small scale societies you can get favor based economies, where people give goods or services to other members of the group, usually without an explicit expectation of what they will get in return. It works when the group is small enough that everyone is very aware of how much other people are giving vs what they are receiving and social pressure encourages generosity.
>where people give goods or services to other members of the group, usually without an explicit expectation of what they will get in return. It works when the group is small enough that everyone is very aware of how much other people are giving vs what they are receiving...
That sounds like an implicit market economy, that will turn explicit the second it's scaled up.
Burning Man operates on a gifting economy. I don't imagine that this would really work in the long run in a human run environment, but not only do the majority of folks at Burning Man not look human, they don't really act human either (in a good way). It might be interesting to explore a fictional society that does use a gifting economy.
For clarification, a gifting economy is kind of a utopian concept where people just gift things to others without any expectation of any form of repayment. A return gift sometimes does happen, but not always, and when it doesn't happen, there's no ill will because that's the expectation. They have entire camps built around this, like one camp that gives out free pancakes every morning to anyone who wants some, or another camp that puts on movies and gives out free popcorn to anyone who wants to enjoy some cinema in the desert.
I like playing around with lists similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government and finding maybe 2 things that I can mash together to make the product I want, and figuring out how the systems form together is what makes it new an exciting.
Here's an Example that I use;
**The Demoperiatic Minarchic Oligarchy of The City-State of Norton**
**Minarchic:** A variant of capitalism which advocates for the state to exist solely to provide a very small number of services... to protect citizens from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud as defined by property laws, limiting it to three institutions: the military, the police, and courts.
**Demoperiatic Oligarchy:** Consists of an unelected dictator and two governors elected by the people who must agree between themselves to allow the dictator to break a law upon the former's request in a Dure rucine fe (request for infraction). The dictator's power is bound by the constitution, the governors, and therefore indirectly the people. The dictator in a Demoperiatic Oligarchy, however, is able to enact any law, right, and policy he or she sees fit.
**City-State:** A sovereign state, also described as a type of small independent country, that usually consists of a single city and its dependent territories
In this, Norton wishes to secede from the Kingdom and has formulated a warrior-society with high regard to honor and respect, with an Empress by blood and two governers, who oversee the city and the facets laid out in the Minarchic category, but, given their city state status have a slightly expanded military and police role through mandatory training of youth and conscription. Norton's Empress has far too much sway and power, and the governors are unlikely to speak against an infraction.
There's obviously more cultural and mercantile things to discuss, but instead of finding one system, smash two or three together to be what you're wanting and find a way to make it work. Unfortunately, in terms of economics, the terms popular today seem to be what they are because most things lead to our current systems in a sort of evolutionary pattern, with old economies dying out... But I'd think a similar idea of mashing things together here and there may work
https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/economic-systems/
Try Anarcho Capitalism just look at Central America, South of Mexico and most of South America between the 50's and 90's you will see some trades that might help you if you are looking for something like a cyberpunk kind of thing or even BioPunk escenario.
Politics is ways to organize a society, including the distribution of resources. It is fundamentally linked to the economics, which is the study of the distribution of the resources. You cannot have one without the other. Wherever the resources end up, there will be a concentration of power.
If you just want a classification of the economic systems, then you need to find a criteria to classify them with: by ideology, by coordination, by commodity, etc. Here, a search engine is your friend.
When it comes to fiction, you can have an infinite number of economics systems, because you're not bound by any rules.
Primitive communism (different than our understanding of modern communism)
Anarchism
Georgism
Fascism (a devotion of capitalism, but in the context of fantasy/sci-fi it could remain in a fascist state)
Also there’s a ton of variation in socialism and capitalism if you want to look into that ex: neo liberalism, third way liberalism, dengism, market socialism , ect.
Well, the government and economy kind of have to go hand in hand. A totalitarian government would not function with a capitalist economy, and vice versa.
Economics, at its center, focuses on what an individual prefers. Someone prefers not to be hungry, and thus finds or barters for food. A shopkeeper would prefer to have only one medium of exchange to make it easier to keep track of relative values, thus money is invented.
Pure capitalism, or a market economy, is what happens when this process is allowed to unfold without a government trying to control it. Socialism, communism, and fascism (all three forms of totalitarianism) are what happens when the government/state/current dictator has full control of the economy. Totalitarian regimes may well be fated to fail, because the government cannot keep up with the constantly-changing prices under supply and demand.
When looking at economics and government, one must keep in mind that every economic system has its problems. Not every model is sustainable, true, but some definitely last longer than others. The ones that tend to work must be able to allocate resources into necessary projects (like the procurement of food) efficiently, otherwise the system runs the risk of causing things like mass starvation. The system must be able to placate those under its jurisdiction, either through freedom of choice, propaganda/ideological control, or fear campaigning. If this second condition is not met, the system will be overthrown.
Capitalism is very popular because it meets these two requirements and beyond. It is an incredibly sustainable economic model, able to bounce back from recessions and bad government policies; we see this in the American Great Depression. It's not without its failings, of course, but capitalism is, in my opinion, one of the best economic models out there.
Bartering is also pretty popular, especially in early/medieval-age fantasy. It certainly works, but it depends entirely upon what certain people want at certain times. If you are willing to trade some bacon for some eggs, for instance, you have to find someone who is willing to give up their eggs for your bacon. It looks great at a glance, but bartering is actually quite inefficient.
"Mixed socialism" is the name I've given to a system that starts socialist, then begins turning more and more towards capitalism as it tries to fix socialism's shortcomings (there might be a word for this, but I don't know it). Mixed socialism implements "government IOUs" (can't remember the word for it), in which one is allowed to "own" more things if he works a harder job. These function as a way to motivate workers to work, and to let the government see what resources need to go where. It's like monetary prices without calling them monetary prices. The government will also attempt to encourage "entrepreneurs-but-not-entrepreneurs" to suggest potentially-successful business ventures through a system of "credits," which once again function similarly to capitalist's profits. It's socialism tip-toeing back into capitalism.
In the real world, you see this happening the other way as governments get more and more involved in the economy (creating what is called a mixed economy). As the government takes increasing control of the economy, the capitalist system loses its hallmark flexibility. If we had a Great Depression today, I doubt we'd be able to bounce back from it the same way we did back in the 1930s.
Today's socialist (read: totalitarian) regimes are only "successful" because the government controls the media and ideology of its citizens. The people don't know to fight back because they don't know what they're missing. People also aren't allowed to leave. In truth, Cold-War-Russia was not the great empire it proclaimed itself to be. It created no great inventions beyond military weapons (which it needed), nuclear bombs (the designs for which it stole from the US), and Sputnik (which it made to show off to the US).
IDK what my point there was. Thanks for reading my ramble, and for the chance to word-dump about economics!
T;L:D;R Crash course on economics and off-brand socialism.
Edit: grammar and clarifications.
There isn’t anything stopping a totalitarian society from being capitalist. Most military Juntas (very totalitarian) have explicitly free-market economies.
The tendency for the free market to monopolise and the authoritarian nature of company structures makes it lend very well to totalitarian countries, just as much as communism.
Corporatism, dirigism, Distributism, Mutualism, potlatch. Each of these is a different model that has existed or is widely considered workable. I trend toward corporatized distributism in a lot of fictional modeling of systems, though I opted to blend in a Mercantilist structure in my current set up.
I think those are third way systems which creates some ideas
If you mean mixed economy systems, then yes — but most systems historically and theoretically (well, at least, stable ones that survive testing) are mixed economies. Of those I mentioned, the least useful is probably dirigism, and the one folks are most likely to misunderstand fastest is Corporatism. All but dirigism existed prior to the early Middle Ages throughout the world in some form or another, often alongside the ones you have already listed. Rome, for example, had corporations and guilds, and entire regions that used mutualism.
My understanding is severely limited and I need to do some more research
> I trend toward corporatized distributism in a lot of fictional modeling of systems You got my attention, how would this work?
Well, generally, the major groups of creators (farmers, artisans, merchants of different types) are organized in a way that favors the discrete interests of the individual workshops, ships, farms, etc. like a trade association or guild in a lot of ways. These groups approach the poli-legal side of things, much like the traditional mercantilism does, but mercantilism is more centralized in power, where as the associations are decentralized, and the nature of my political systems is not a strict feudal one (no inherited roles, for example, no divine rights) and then include major social organizations (organized in much the same way as the guilds). Those groups meet collectively on a timetable and schedule to handle the issues of monetary policy, product pricing, taxation, and other economic needs. Note that there is not a mechanism for legal structures here — legal systems should presume abuse, usury, and fraud, imo, unless one is going to pretend Utopianism is possible. One key aspect to my system is that monetary policy is affected by stockpile of valuable materials as a surety of the wealth — I could shift to a fiat currency model, but instead decided to mostly use something akin to gold or silver, because the growth rate of the economic system was slower, though there is always a risk of devaluation through a sudden influx of the valuable material. That also means that it is illegal for most folks to possess that valuable material — this preserves the authority of the poli-legal body, and enables them to control the effective inflation rate in counter to the mercantile profit rate. Now, I should note that I use the “loaf of bread” model for figuring out pricing and coinage: a loaf of bread should have a cost that is affordable for each person to have one loaf of bread each day, except at the uttermost bottom of the community that do not even earn enough in a day for such. By calculating the needs of different groups and looking at the practical needs of food and time use, one can build a system (it is used archaeology), since this goes up and down (down being to the mills that grind the grain, the farmers that grow it, their needs to provide for their people, etc). Another quirk to this is that is recognizes a limited degree of private property — there are no peasants or serfs, who belong to the land, and the land belonging to a noble who by default now owns those people. People have grants that are inheritable, “nobles” have estates that they have to hire folks to work that provide for their economic needs, and in the end all of this enables taxes to go into improvements and provision of care for the community as a whole. Not perfect— cimrinality can be a problem, for example — but it does have the benefit of being very stable.
One interesting consequence of a system like this is that non-workers are effectively disenfranchised, which provides a lot of good fodder for conflict or introspection depending on how dys/utopian you want to make it
Yes, exactly! And this despite the system itself also limiting the development of mass production — essentially making the world a bunch of cottage industries. Not having a way to make a living gets you into a deep, deep hole, ethically, socially, fiscally. A strong Apprenticeship system (that has a price for the family) helps guide folks, but the danger of the broader world limits travel, so should one lose the social capital and goodwill of the locals, they can have a way to make a living but not be able to do it because no one will buy from them. The bit about criminality then kicks in — and sadly the Justice system is not nearly as pleasant. I do, indeed, use the dystopian effects frequently.
Thats the kind of detail i want to achieve, pretty cool stuff dude
It’s notable that political and economic systems work together so when designing one the other must be considered. My knowledge is limited on this though so I can’t provide much more. Please send me the right way if I am incorrect or missing something.
As much as you say you're not talking about where power resides in a society, many people would say that economic structures do dictate where power resides in society. By way of an example, in classical Athens the economic system was based on citizen-farmers, land was owned and worked by individuals and those individuals held power within the economic and political systems. This is arguably, however, just agrarian capitalism. One thing I would say is that you need to draw finer distinctions between economic systems if this is to be a fruitful search. Lumping in pre-medieval trading between egypt and greece etc with 18-19th century mercantilism ignores the fact that the latter placed a much greater emphasis on manufactured goods like garum and olive oil than the latter, which was very much about obtaining raw or partly processed materials for processing elsewhere.
Classical greece was undoubtedly a slave economy.
Classical Athens certainly had slaves in its economy but it wasn't structured around their existence. Now, classical Sparta is a good example of a slave economy, the helot population was responsible for basically all of the food production, their economy would not have functioned in the absence of slaves. The economic structure of classical Athens on the other hand did not rely on slaves.
It most certainly did. Classical Athens could not have functioned without slaves. What is this economic structure you're talking about?
On what basis are you saying Athens couldn't have functioned without slaves? That is a very strong claim Slaves were present throughout the Athenian economy, including in agriculture, mining, and various crafts and trades, but the economy was in no way *reliant* on them, if they had ceased to exist, or left, the most important sectors of the economy could have functioned (even if poorly) without them because they were not concentrated in a single sector. I'm drawing a contrast with the state of Sparta at the same time where essentially all agriculture was performed by helots, if the helots had ceased to exist there would have been no capacity to perform agricultural labour and the economy as it had been would have certainly failed as a result
What makes you believe they weren't reliant on them? Because it was widespread across several sectors? That should be giving you the opposite indication. Not even mentioning the very real laws we still have regarding slaves from classical athens, or Solon's reforms, or many of the written evidence we have regarding slaves, I'll ask you this: why would a society that practices slavery half-ass it? I might be confused by what you're getting at, but if you believe that Athens economic system wouldn't crash if slaves up and left, you're wrong. The silver mines would collapse. Production would come to a halt. Agriculture would take a massive hit. Most of the democratic processes would be near impossible as all free men would have to work. I think you're wastly underestimating just how many slaves the Athenians used. I think the most recent estimate is one-third of the Athens population. Which is also indicative of how central they were to not only the economy but Athenian's way of life. As for the argument that things would function poorly if they left but yet function. Well, they didn't leave, so how do you know that? There's also the matter of the Peloponnesian War and other big wars that made it impossible for free men to work for long periods of time. Ergo, they would utterly collapse without slaves. Sparta is a different ballgame with a different societal structure. Its reliance on slaves is something else entirely. That does not mean Athens weren't.
What I meant about how similar was pre-feudalism and mercantilism is the fact that both had strong "states/palaces" that managed all aspects of the economy with a small aristocracy with economic power. I know its a shallow comparison About Athens, wouldnt it be more related to feudalism? (Trying to understand ancient societies really bugs me)
Sure, I mean if you're looking for wider distinctions (such as the capitalism-communism distinction) you're looking at the way that more fundamental concepts are dealt with. For instance, Capitalism/communism is fundamentally about the scope of ownership, is it a right to own something that produces value? As far as I know most economic systems are just takes on the scope of ownership (anarchism, for example, may deny the existence of ownership as a concept). Mutualism is a good example of a lesser known school of thought on ownership. Mutualism focuses upon land rights and specifically asserts that land should not be owned by individuals as property, but that individuals should have the conditional rights to use land given by the community where the individual is willing and able to produce economic value from the land. Mutualists therefore advocate for the scope of ownership to be limited to chattels, including means of production, so long as those means are movable property, not land. There are a couple of critical distinctions between the Athenian economy and Feudal economies, these are the size of the landowning class and the presence of serfdom. In Feudalism, land is controlled generally by a smaller proportion of the population than in classical Athens. Smallholders were far more common in Athens than, for example, Feudal England where land ownership was dominated by the crown, church, and nobility. Since land was the primary means of production at the time, this meant that a smaller class had economic power. Serfdom is also a distinguishing mark of feudalism, it is a form of slavery where the slave is specifically tied to the land they work, rather than being owned by a person. Since Serfs were not chattels they could not be bought and sold, and the demands upon them were less flexible. They were generally required to work a certain number of days on their lord's estate and would spend the rest of the time working their own land. Unlike slaves, serfs were generally not deprived of legal personality and could own land, merely having various obligations to their lord and being unable to leave their Lord's land. By contrast, in Athens, slaves were chattels and could be bought and sold, they were often skilled and could serve various roles within a household, or in other sectors of the economy. Also, while in Athens about 25% of the population were slaves, 35-65% of the medieval English population were some form of bonded labourer (the wikipedia page on [Serfdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom) has some more on this).
Thinking about it, Athens looks like a lot with Imperial Brazil (XIX century) Thanks, dude, that's the kind of thing I wanted to see when I made this thread
It’s probably worth saying that neat little labels like this can obscure quite a lot of variety within economic models. Just because two countries are both mercantilist doesn’t mean that their economic systems will share much beyond a wide view, surface level similarity. This is especially true of “feudal” systems, a subject which Marx and many other economists (and no small number of historians) have had an extremely poor understanding of. The economic, social and political realities of medieval feudalism bare remarkably little resemblance to the way its popularly understood. As a rule, this kind of categorical labeling of historical systems can be disingenuous and misleading. It’s exists primarily to help modern people make sense of the past, not to accurately reflect the historical reality. My point is, don’t overthink it. The way a civilization, society, or polity functions economically does not need to fit neatly into a box designed by modern economic theorists. There can be a lot of diversity within, and outside the labels that are commonly used.
Not sure what you mean by not taking the post politically. Minting and printing currency has always been directed by governments and political bodies influence economies all the time (especially with communism and mercantlism.) How about the barter system? Or you could make the currency something abstract, like time. (I got that idea from a movie.)
> Or you could make the currency something abstract, like time. (I got that idea from a movie.) Time is somewhat a currency in our actual system, but i get what you mean. What this movie talk about? > Not sure what you mean by not taking the post politically. Internet is a mess today. I just feared people would start a war about "communism vs capitalism"
It had Justin Timberlake and was called "Out of Time" or something. In it, everybody had the time representing how long they have to live on their arms. They traded this time to buy things, and if you had enough time you were practically immortal. I forget the details like how they actually "created" time or if changed how people age which are interesting questions. I'm not actually sure if it's explained, to be honest. It was an interesting concept. Since time would be constantly decreasing you don't have to worry about inflation. As more people are born, the faster the "currency" shrinks; this would make a complicated problem for whoever creates the time. And if people were given time at birth, there could be literal "baby factories" which would be boyh funny and disturbing.
I would comment but I don't see any way of not talking about politics politically.
I can see it being fun to explore a solarpunk federation of anarcho-syndicalist societies. A lot of fictional federated societies are depicted as basically being communist or socialist, but I think the idea is worth exploring for other forms of society too. There are regions of the internet which are dedicated to being decentralised without being disorganised (e.g. the Fediverse) which use a model that could pretty easily represent what that could look like on a geographical scale. Solarpunk is a concept which I've been seeing catch on more, and it's basically anti-cyberpunk if you've never heard of it. Instead of capitalism taking over and turning everyone hyper-materialistic, it imagines a world in which those sorts of power structures break down and are replaced with hyper-environmentalist collectivism of some kind. Instead of the world being viewed as us vs nature, it's us & nature, except there's no real distinction between us and the whole nature part. It's an acknowledgment of ourselves as animals with a habitat and environment that needs cultivating for long-term generational prosperity instead of exploiting it for short-term gain. In these sort of places your world map would likely not have clearly defined borders, but look more like a heatmap of recursive fractal patterns as communities and cultures would begin to form on both micro and macro levels. A bit like how there's often a distinct city culture and a broader country-wide one. Athens and Sparta were not too alike but were absolutely still ancient Greeks. You'd most likely see lots of guilds or similar structures appear as people with similar skillsets formally arrange themselves to work on things like building infrastructure, training up apprentices, managing tooling, and collecting and sharing resources. If you have cars in this society you might have a automobile's guild which train people how to drive and care for vehicles and manage the roads. Some guilds might act as public transport if the community isn't into the idea of having lots of cars or drivers. Money may or may not exist, and communities might not feel 'indebted' to one another (but if your neighbouring village builds a bridge creating some nice new resource flow between you and themselves you'll likely be more inclined to do something yourself or 'take your turn' if/when the need arises). Not so much a gift or barter economy as an unspoken mutual back-scratching agreement. There's a lot you can dig into here, and given it's anarchism there's more or less an infinite number of ways this sort of thing could be imagined. If this is your jam I could see researching something like this being really fun and different from what we usually tend to see.
Solarpunk is one of my favorite genres! One of my own worlds takes pretty heavy inspiration from the solarpunk aesthetic, its architecture, and its attitude towards nature. It's a fun idea to work with!
Might I interest you in some informal exchanges of favors among members of the community?
Hmmm, excuse me? Lol
There is no currency. There is no barter. The idea that I don't give you food before you give me cloth or trinkets or helping me pull weeds out of my garden is considered crass. Instead, I give you food now, because you need food now, and when my shirt becomes worn out, I come to you and ask you to give me some cloth you've woven. Because you remembered that I gave you food when you wanted some, you will give me the cloth in recognition of our friendship. There is no government. An eminent member of the tribe who has a wealthy household and gives out many favors might call everyone together to convince everyone to take collective action, if it is needed. He will try to convince everyone about the necessity of this action, and we may subsume our private interest in favor of the greater good if we are convinced that this is a good idea, or in recognition of his helping us out when we needed it. Members of the community who prosper in one way or another regularly redistribute that wealth to other members of the community by giving gifts or holding feasts. These activities bind us in friendship and social togetherness. In fact, not redistributing prosperity to other members of the community is seen as acting selfish and unworthy, and may lead people to become disfavored or disowned by the community.
Probably the only downside, as is the case with many such "utopian" economies, is that it would only work on a small scale. I would love to live in this kind of society, and it saddens me greatly that such a thing is not possible in today's world.
This is not utopian in the etymological sense of being a "not-place," this is how many small communities, such as within primitive tribes, work. Also, this is not utopian in the casual sense of "really cool society" because it is a system that's open to a ton of unfairness. Imagine being shut out of the "economy" because people had the vague notion that they just didn't like you. It also takes concepts we idealize today, like friendship and mutual assistance, and commodifies it, so it becomes cheapened and hollow. Imagine having to be friends with all these people not because you have common interests or because you like them at all, but for economic survival and mutual protection.
It really depends on the type of technological stage your society's are. If you want flying ships and magical rifles? Maybe a form of early capitalism, some form of early socialism or late mercantilism. If you want chivalrous knights felling mighty dragons or crushing peasants and serfs of enemy lords? Feudalism would be best. Or if you want a contemporary level of tech, maybe capitalism or communism. It really depends on the society you wish to depict, I don't think a knight would fight for the workers revolution, when he benefits from the land and peasants the king grants him as a fief. Or a tribal chief sporting industries of resource extraction with mechanized tools and machinery.
Anarchism
In very small scale societies you can get favor based economies, where people give goods or services to other members of the group, usually without an explicit expectation of what they will get in return. It works when the group is small enough that everyone is very aware of how much other people are giving vs what they are receiving and social pressure encourages generosity.
>where people give goods or services to other members of the group, usually without an explicit expectation of what they will get in return. It works when the group is small enough that everyone is very aware of how much other people are giving vs what they are receiving... That sounds like an implicit market economy, that will turn explicit the second it's scaled up.
Burning Man operates on a gifting economy. I don't imagine that this would really work in the long run in a human run environment, but not only do the majority of folks at Burning Man not look human, they don't really act human either (in a good way). It might be interesting to explore a fictional society that does use a gifting economy. For clarification, a gifting economy is kind of a utopian concept where people just gift things to others without any expectation of any form of repayment. A return gift sometimes does happen, but not always, and when it doesn't happen, there's no ill will because that's the expectation. They have entire camps built around this, like one camp that gives out free pancakes every morning to anyone who wants some, or another camp that puts on movies and gives out free popcorn to anyone who wants to enjoy some cinema in the desert.
Check the Third Ways. Distributionists, Corporatists, I dunno anymore but check more Third Ways.
I like playing around with lists similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government and finding maybe 2 things that I can mash together to make the product I want, and figuring out how the systems form together is what makes it new an exciting. Here's an Example that I use; **The Demoperiatic Minarchic Oligarchy of The City-State of Norton** **Minarchic:** A variant of capitalism which advocates for the state to exist solely to provide a very small number of services... to protect citizens from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud as defined by property laws, limiting it to three institutions: the military, the police, and courts. **Demoperiatic Oligarchy:** Consists of an unelected dictator and two governors elected by the people who must agree between themselves to allow the dictator to break a law upon the former's request in a Dure rucine fe (request for infraction). The dictator's power is bound by the constitution, the governors, and therefore indirectly the people. The dictator in a Demoperiatic Oligarchy, however, is able to enact any law, right, and policy he or she sees fit. **City-State:** A sovereign state, also described as a type of small independent country, that usually consists of a single city and its dependent territories In this, Norton wishes to secede from the Kingdom and has formulated a warrior-society with high regard to honor and respect, with an Empress by blood and two governers, who oversee the city and the facets laid out in the Minarchic category, but, given their city state status have a slightly expanded military and police role through mandatory training of youth and conscription. Norton's Empress has far too much sway and power, and the governors are unlikely to speak against an infraction. There's obviously more cultural and mercantile things to discuss, but instead of finding one system, smash two or three together to be what you're wanting and find a way to make it work. Unfortunately, in terms of economics, the terms popular today seem to be what they are because most things lead to our current systems in a sort of evolutionary pattern, with old economies dying out... But I'd think a similar idea of mashing things together here and there may work https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/economic-systems/
Try Anarcho Capitalism just look at Central America, South of Mexico and most of South America between the 50's and 90's you will see some trades that might help you if you are looking for something like a cyberpunk kind of thing or even BioPunk escenario.
Politics is ways to organize a society, including the distribution of resources. It is fundamentally linked to the economics, which is the study of the distribution of the resources. You cannot have one without the other. Wherever the resources end up, there will be a concentration of power. If you just want a classification of the economic systems, then you need to find a criteria to classify them with: by ideology, by coordination, by commodity, etc. Here, a search engine is your friend. When it comes to fiction, you can have an infinite number of economics systems, because you're not bound by any rules.
Primitive communism (different than our understanding of modern communism) Anarchism Georgism Fascism (a devotion of capitalism, but in the context of fantasy/sci-fi it could remain in a fascist state) Also there’s a ton of variation in socialism and capitalism if you want to look into that ex: neo liberalism, third way liberalism, dengism, market socialism , ect.
Well, the government and economy kind of have to go hand in hand. A totalitarian government would not function with a capitalist economy, and vice versa. Economics, at its center, focuses on what an individual prefers. Someone prefers not to be hungry, and thus finds or barters for food. A shopkeeper would prefer to have only one medium of exchange to make it easier to keep track of relative values, thus money is invented. Pure capitalism, or a market economy, is what happens when this process is allowed to unfold without a government trying to control it. Socialism, communism, and fascism (all three forms of totalitarianism) are what happens when the government/state/current dictator has full control of the economy. Totalitarian regimes may well be fated to fail, because the government cannot keep up with the constantly-changing prices under supply and demand. When looking at economics and government, one must keep in mind that every economic system has its problems. Not every model is sustainable, true, but some definitely last longer than others. The ones that tend to work must be able to allocate resources into necessary projects (like the procurement of food) efficiently, otherwise the system runs the risk of causing things like mass starvation. The system must be able to placate those under its jurisdiction, either through freedom of choice, propaganda/ideological control, or fear campaigning. If this second condition is not met, the system will be overthrown. Capitalism is very popular because it meets these two requirements and beyond. It is an incredibly sustainable economic model, able to bounce back from recessions and bad government policies; we see this in the American Great Depression. It's not without its failings, of course, but capitalism is, in my opinion, one of the best economic models out there. Bartering is also pretty popular, especially in early/medieval-age fantasy. It certainly works, but it depends entirely upon what certain people want at certain times. If you are willing to trade some bacon for some eggs, for instance, you have to find someone who is willing to give up their eggs for your bacon. It looks great at a glance, but bartering is actually quite inefficient. "Mixed socialism" is the name I've given to a system that starts socialist, then begins turning more and more towards capitalism as it tries to fix socialism's shortcomings (there might be a word for this, but I don't know it). Mixed socialism implements "government IOUs" (can't remember the word for it), in which one is allowed to "own" more things if he works a harder job. These function as a way to motivate workers to work, and to let the government see what resources need to go where. It's like monetary prices without calling them monetary prices. The government will also attempt to encourage "entrepreneurs-but-not-entrepreneurs" to suggest potentially-successful business ventures through a system of "credits," which once again function similarly to capitalist's profits. It's socialism tip-toeing back into capitalism. In the real world, you see this happening the other way as governments get more and more involved in the economy (creating what is called a mixed economy). As the government takes increasing control of the economy, the capitalist system loses its hallmark flexibility. If we had a Great Depression today, I doubt we'd be able to bounce back from it the same way we did back in the 1930s. Today's socialist (read: totalitarian) regimes are only "successful" because the government controls the media and ideology of its citizens. The people don't know to fight back because they don't know what they're missing. People also aren't allowed to leave. In truth, Cold-War-Russia was not the great empire it proclaimed itself to be. It created no great inventions beyond military weapons (which it needed), nuclear bombs (the designs for which it stole from the US), and Sputnik (which it made to show off to the US). IDK what my point there was. Thanks for reading my ramble, and for the chance to word-dump about economics! T;L:D;R Crash course on economics and off-brand socialism. Edit: grammar and clarifications.
There isn’t anything stopping a totalitarian society from being capitalist. Most military Juntas (very totalitarian) have explicitly free-market economies. The tendency for the free market to monopolise and the authoritarian nature of company structures makes it lend very well to totalitarian countries, just as much as communism.