Capitalism is a game where only a few people get to win.
We have also seen time and time again that it is a game that is able to manipulate and change whatever ideology or behaviour you have to work towards its own benefit.
So the only way to actually “win” is to not play the game.
Right now that seems impossible because it is a massive collective action problem, however this whole platform is a testament to show that it’s possible to overcome that kind of problem.
Reddit is a dominant platform that is starting to destroy itself. People are in turn finding alternatives such as Lemmy to satisfy the need that Reddit once did.
I view capitalism in the same way. It will never truly completely cease to exist (the same way Digg never truly died), but it can become irrelevant over time if we collectively decide to just use another system to satisfy the same needs that capitalism is satisfying today.
The one example that I can think of that tries to tackle this problem is the idea of free stores that are based on a gift economy. If more people decided to use this system instead of capitalism then capitalism will have less sway over people’s lives.
And in the end it doesn’t have to be specifically a free store that needs to be adopted by wider society but whatever it is does need to satisfy the same basic need that capitalism does in our current society.
The best way, imo, is to put your cash money in people and businesses that support socialist ideals rather than capitalist ones. What you propose sounds like a utopian scenario, but until we can step out of paying money for things, we should do our best to keep it out of the hands of the bourgeois. And I want to emphasize that this includes the big banks that make money off of processing payments.
I very much agree with the rest of your comment but the processing of payments is not the most pressing issue of capitalism and there’s no practical alternative. (No, your central database stored in a P2P network does not count.)
Absolutely, I agree, but the banks hold a lot of power so it benefits us to keep as much capital out of their hands as possible. Do what you can, especially when it comes to dealing with other anti-capitalist entities - just use cash where you can. It’s not about tearing down the system right now, it’s about relocating resources and shifting power.
You might be interested in https://taler.net/en/index.html. Really cool tech that conserves most of the benefits of cash. The only feature of cash that it can probably never implement is transfer between two offline parties.