It's hard to know what to recommend to help you enhance your understanding without knowing your background OP, but Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? deftly explores the contradictions underlying the framing of the question asked in your original post and I felt it was helpful during my political education. In terms of directly laying out alternatives, no one book has all the answers from every single angle or aspect that constitutes emancipation in the 21st century but in terms of generalities, Peter Frase put out a book called Four Futures: Life After Capitalism that I think someone asking this question might find interesting. There's also Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' Inventing The Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which gets into the more technical aspects of capitalism's tendencies, and more recently Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism which has good accounts of how scientific and technological revolutions have the potential to enhance universal prosperity instead of private ownership, though in my opinion the book is a little naive with its use of the concept of populism in its advocacy of how we transform current global society. From another angle and much shorter is Laboria Cuboniks' The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation which explores emancipation and system change from the dimensions of gender and sexuality which complements the other recommendations I've listed above. Hope these recommendations were helpful to someone who (genuinely?) is interested in alternatives to capitalism.
"Assume a can opener"
Can you show me the scientific evidence that says that capitalism is a genetic predisposition of the human species?
Can you show me a single meta study that concludes that producing and consuming more and more resources from the planet is an innate trait of most specimens of the human species? If not, why do you believe that's true?
People do want for more, but we also simultaneously know that human fulfillment and happiness generally caps out at something like between $75-100K USD, so we know there literally is a ceiling of fulfillment for most people. "Yeah, some people want more than that and want to be multimillionaires and billionaires."
Okay? Fuck 'em. Some people really like being serial killers, and they have a psychological inclination to killing, but that doesn't mean we allow them to do it, now does it? We can curb the excesses of the worst people without forcing ourselves into this unnecessary false dichotomy that doing so will endanger us all. This is one of the many lies that capitalists tell you. "Why, if you stop me from doing whatever I want, you'll only be hurting yourself. You're going to be rich someday if you just keep on working hard. Don't hamstring yourself."
You're arguing that slave labor (the only alternative theory proposed) is scientifically innate in humans and makes them happier, Nepenthe. You're basically leaning into the Lost Cause mythology that slaves were happier and more fulfilled under slavery because they had intact families and less crime. You'd be offended at the comparison and attempt to silence it because you know it's true.
You'd think that for someone who insists that she continues to be harmed to this day and every day by people with the same skin color once being enslaved she would understand the distinction between owning your own labor or yourself being owned a little more clearly.
The lesson of the 20th Century wasn't that communism failed, that was clearly going to happen but some people don't learn except through experience. The lesson was that every time the communist states lifted their hand slightly the market came roaring back to fill the gap. The Soviets and CCP spent how long baffled by this? Modern communist states don't even pretend they don't accept markets anymore.
Confiscatory taxation isn't an alternative to capitalism, it's simply deliberately making yourself poorer to try and skim off the profits that capitalism provides. These idiots don't even understand the debate they think they're having and have devoted their personalities to. Labor
is capital. You either own your own labor and can freely contract and trade it (capitalism) or the state owns you (the alternative theories), this is the moral debate. The economic debate is whether free trade or central planning is superior and if you still think there should be testing done to determine this you're actually immune to evidence, that's assuming you're not smart enough to grasp that having less information means central planning is inherently inferior and exponentially so when you establish a totalitarian state (dictatorship of the proletariat) where dissent earns you death or worse.
You're marks (or marxs?) because you believed that some German dude getting a divine vision of utopia he guaranteed would happen is somehow better evidence than human history. You don't even listen to the nonsense you claim to support because you can't defend that his step one was "establish permanent slave labor for everyone on the planet" so you handwave endless slavery where any opposition let alone emancipation is outlawed (until it naturally "withers away" per Engels) as somehow being more freeing than being able to own your own labor. You're demanding perfection against good then arguing against good on the basis of being falsely promised perfection.
I can read all those stupid books, I read lots of stupid things willingly, I have devoted my life to reading stupid things especially those about politics, but before I do this, those of you arguing for an alternative proposed in one of these should tell me if any of the books address what happens when I labor on my own and wish to trade the results from that labor to Nintex for profit. Does the state tell me no and orders me to labor only for the state? It's the fundamental moral question and most Western communists refuse to answer it because they know the answer isn't acceptable in liberal democratic society. Anarchocommunists almost never answer the variation of it towards them because it's their ultimate blind spot. "People won't labor for anyone but the community because humanity will have evolved out of the profit motive" isn't an answer to what happens
when someone does. Gene Roddenberry sniffing his own farts and trying to make free trade into abject evil couldn't even bring himself to do it and he was the Great Bird of the Galaxy. I'm suppose to believe that you, person who willingly discloses to have not engaged with any of the work, has figured it out?
