Isn't the point that the current system doesn't provide a stable, peaceful and qualitative life for most of the population? Are you saying it's good enough because you and your dearest have it good?
> But the hours worked has steadily gone down while the hours spent in front of the TV has steadily risen. Something doesn't add up in your calculations. People don't work themselves to death any more. In fact, they have so much free time on their hands, that they spend money to kill it. They literally pay other people to entertain them, to take the free time off of their hands, and they don't know what to do with it. That's a very different situation from 200, 100 or even 50 years ago.
For most of humans history, humans have worked a few hours a day, or 15 hours/week. It's only in recent times that it went up. It happened when it became possible to store goods, and then a few eyed their chance to start exploiting the rest by claiming all the means of productions and forcing the rest to work all their life while the capital owners reaped the benefits. Sure, in some places in the western world, for example in Denmark where I live, it has improved a lot since just 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean it's good enough. People should only work as much as necessary, not as much as they can be forced to to fill the bottomless pockets of a few.
> Right, right, until people starve and we go back to the evil system because, when all is said and done, it's just more efficient. I mean, it's not that this hasn't been tried before.
It hasn't been tried for some thousands of years for a prolonged period for a vast majority of the population.
There has been a few places where they tried in recent times, like anarchist Catalonia in the thirties, but every time capitalist powers see free people as a threat because it might give their own people ideas about how life could be, so every time, like in anarchist Catalonia, they arrive with weapons and kill everyone that won't capitulate to their demands of surrender.
> And yes, I'm absolutely aware that it can work in smaller groups. I'm convinced you can have wonderful small groups based on solidarity. They will run on social control and everybody will make sure that everybody contributes as much as they are able and as much as is needed. But it doesn't scale, unless you want to create a massive police state that takes over the social control thing, and I don't want that.
It doesn't have to scale. That's the problem. We shouldn't try to create such big communities like the US, or Denmark for that matter. It's too big. Science has shown that people cannot trust and function properly in groups of more than ~150 individuals, so why do we try do force them to? Just look at the US, where the difference between the people are so vast, that it's a wonder that it's only now that it's crumbling.
Obviously 150 is too small, but the solution is lots and lots of small communities, a hierarchy, not in power, but in communication structure so that communities can cooperate while keeping sovereignty over themselves instead of being at the mercy of people that live hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.
There's lots of great writing about this. A good place to start is Murray Bookchin[1].
[1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...
> Burn it down, maybe we can build something better in it's place. But what if we can't? What if we end up with something that's terrible because all those nice ideas just don't work? Then you've burnt down a few centuries of progress for a dream. You may be willing to accept that risk, but I can guarantee you that most people are not, because, after all, even for the poorest 10%, this is the best time to be alive during pretty much all of humanity's existence. Well, okay, maybe witnessing the aliens landing the pyramids was pretty great, but aside from that, this is it.
Actually more people in absolute numbers are not able to meet their basic nutritional needs every single they than ever before[2] so while I have it pretty great, it's pretty damn bad a huge amount of people.
[2]: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
Also I'm not sure why you think we couldn't at least build something like this again, if all else failed. It was build ones, we could probably do it better with a clean slate. Still, I think we can even strive for more, and we would succeed. People want to survive, and if there is not something stopping them, they will. I have full faith in that, because humans have survived for so long, even when all the previous societies and civilisations has failed, even when Rome fell, and we will survive when this one fails. The question is how we will structure what comes next. Will we finally base it on solidarity, or will it ones again be based on greed, favouring the few over the many.