willj.dev / millennial-utopia / A Millennial Utopia

Introductionlink

The Millennial Social Code (MSC) defines a set of rights which we believe are possible to guarantee equally to every individual in a contemporary human society. It is taken to be self-evident that in 2021, human society is divided between nations whose governments are each, to some degree or another, corrupt: they willfully or negligently allow some of their citizens to benefit from the exploitation of other people. This exploitation is an active part of contemporary human society all over the world, but it has also been a constant presence for as long as we have been keeping historical records. Some particularly egregious examples still exert an influence on modern society even after hundreds of years. This happens when sufficiently dedicated evildoers conspire to maintain exploitative social systems that work in their benefit, and society as a whole is unable or unwilling to stop it.

The source of this corruption is always the unreasonable influence of a small number of individuals who accumulate a vastly unequal proportion of humanity’s wealth by manipulating the social and economic system to their own advantage. These individuals will be referred to here as plutocrats, after the concept of a plutocracy: a system of government controlled by the wealthy. They have been part of human society since the invention of private property, and plutocrats in today’s globe-spanning, consumer-capitalist, high-technology societies can be found in many positions (not necessarily national government) but they all have one thing in common: they each control a shockingly vast proportion of the total wealth generated over millennia of human economic activity.

Despite this, it is the goal of this document to show that human society has reached a sufficiently high technology level to enable the gradual and peaceful transition to a truly just society, free of capitalist abuse, where a transparent and competent government can safeguard universal equal access to at least a frugal but comfortable lifestyle by contemporary standards. To achieve this, that government directly manages the distribution of essential goods and services alongside an open but reasonably regulated market for nonessential goods, services, art, and research. This government has two duties:

1. Guaranteeing the equal rights of all persons as defined in the Millenial Social Code, by guaranteeing wages for at least enough jobs to meet or exceed basic goods and services requirements
2. Fair, transparent, and reasonable allocation of money from excess production for the enjoyment and enlightenment of individual citizens and humanity as a whole.

We will (humbly) refer to this society as the Millennial Utopia (MU). The name reflects our belief that it is a truly just society, and that it has been possible to implement it at least since the beginning of the contemporary era near the start of the third millennium AD. However, we do not believe it is necessary (or advisable, or even possible) to implement the MU from scratch as an independent nation-state. We will use the word government to mean the governing body of any institution from a nation-state down to a local PTA. The MU can be adapted to work peacefully, openly, and legally within an existing national government, where it can fill in any access to the rights stipulated by the MSC which that government fails to provide equally to each person within its borders. (For instance, see Transitioning From Capitalism.)

In fact, in the early 21st century where national borders cover the entire globe, the only way to achieve independent statehood through a “top-down” approach would be with violent revolution in the vein of Marxism-Leninism or the American Revolution. These already have a historical precedent of egregious bloodshed even when they can claim “success”. When they fail, the key point of failure is when the revolutionaries grant the new government, by complicity or apathy, the prerogative to coerce non-revolutionaries (perhaps violently) into supporting their cause. Even when this is done out of genuine belief that it is for the common good, it is at best a self-defeating strategy, because it gives that government a legal justification to treat non-revolutionaries as less deserving of equal personhood by preventing them from exercising their personal agency. This creates a significant population with eroded trust in, or even resentment toward, the government that unjustly coerced them. If the government is allowed to choose which persons deserve full personhood, how can any citizen trust that it will continue to uphold their own rights throughout their lifetime?

By contrast, the primary duty of the Millennial Utopian government (MUG) in whatever form is to uphold the MSC equally for all persons, without regard for anything as arbitrary as national borders or individual circumstances. It does this by managing shared resources openly and without coercion, and guaranteeing wages for citizens who choose to work. These wages can be used in an open market for more extravagant housing, consumer goods, or leisure activities. Non-citizens can use national currency (such as the US dollar) to purchase goods and services provided by MU citizens, and that currency can be used either by the MUG to support social programs, wages, and expansion of MU benefits to new citizens.

By building popular support and trust through non-coercive means, the MU can build further representation in the national government (for instance, by establishing an MU political party), and legally reform it as necessary to better uphold equal rights under the MSC. This way we can gradually erode the plutocrats’ power base from the ground up, exactly the way popular movements ought to be accomplished. A total commitment to transparent governance and universal equality will guarantee the MU a foundational base of trust upon which to work and thrive. This is a crucial factor which has been consistently underemphasized or even completely neglected in historical revolutions.

Government Services in a Millennial Utopialink

Here we examine some ways that a hypothetical MUG might function without regard for a transition process. Upon interaction with the real world, this may end up diverging, more or less immediately, in many of the minor details. Nonetheless we intend to prove that in its general shape, it is a social/economic system that is completely feasible to implement in a contemporary human society. Several overarching themes will occur over and over again, and bear calling out ahead of time:

• Resist the urge to make any government activity secret.
• Accept the inevitability of evil; enable and encourage non-evil people to counter it.

Government Transparency, Public Data, and Personal Privacylink

To ensure equitable distribution of social benefits and enable efficient allocation of critical resources, the government will need to be able to collect identity data from its citizens: their names, addresses, how to reach them, and where they choose to work. It also needs to collect a certain amount of economic data to answer questions like “How many apples did everyone buy this week?” and “How many apples did orchards produce this week?” In any form, this data must be the minimum necessary to allow the government to determine, for instance, how much food needs to be produced overall to afford everyone adequate nutrition; how many and what kind of jobs are required to produce that food; how many people are willing to do those jobs; and how much they expect to be paid.

One really terrible option is to keep a central database of every single little transaction that anyone, anywhere, ever does. Not only does this show flagrant disregard for the right to personal privacy guaranteed by the MSC, it is also a completely silly waste of resources. If all we want to do is figure out how many apples to ship to which grocery stores, there is no possible reason for a government to need data at the level of an individual person’s daily activities unless they are conducting a legal investigation of a crime with due judicial process. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of data that government economists already have lying around, but they only use it for the mystical and bizarre task of predicting the behavior of commodity markets. This boggles the mind; we base our economic forecasts on how economists think investors will react to real-world events! We don’t need finance wizards to tell us how they think the economy is doing; we have enough networked computers that it’s possible to process the actual economic data on the necessary scale. This is why our utopia is Millennial, rather than Overdue (but it probably is that too, depending on who you ask).

In practice, all we really need for planning purposes is aggregate data like hourly (if not daily or weekly) total sales at licensed businesses like grocery stores or orchards. Of course, a dedicated evildoer with sufficient computer skills could probably even pick out enough patterns to form the shape of a specific individual’s activity from this, if we are really serious about keeping planning-related data public. Even so, attempting to black out certain data cannot help but plant a tiny little seed of distrust which will inevitably develop into corruption. Someone will say, in complete honesty, “No one can hide dodgy finances in daily grocery store sales data!” Eventually this will become “I wonder if it’s possible to hide dodgy finances in daily grocery store sales data?” We hope it turns out to be false. Unfortunately, once in a while, someone will find a way, bribe a government official to implement it, and then tell their friends.

The strategy to avoid this is just to hold government transparency paramount at all costs. Any data that goes into planning, and how we use it, must be public; and a really dedicated and civic-minded citizen could look around and check the numbers to verify that they describe the real world. This is an example of a non-evil (if a bit odd) thing that will inevitably happen in a large enough population, and the way to handle it is easy: do our jobs right and make it easy for anyone who cares enough to keep an eye on us in case someone tries something funny. In the process, we keep the aggregation of that data as coarse as we can get away with to minimize the risk of an equally dedicated evildoer figuring out a way to game the system without being noticed. The risk will still never be zero, so we accept the inevitability of evil and try to think of ways to parry evil schemes. We could, for instance, keep (also aggregated, also public) data about government data access, and use the same strategy against our hypothetical evildoer. Whatever information is used for any kind of planning, keep it as far as possible from the level of individual people; always assume that someone will someday be smart enough to exploit that data anyway; and search for legal strategies to counteract that inevitability which maintain government transparency.

Now we admit to the one exception that proves the rule: actual identity information. Arguably one of the ways to define a government is “The only organization in any given society which should be allowed to have the name, address, contact, and employment information of every person in it.” Above, we argued that any personally identifiable data like individual grocery store receipts should be aggregated and virtually shredded before entering the tubes of government planning. The government doesn’t need (or want) to know what you get up to all day, but it does actually need to know that you exist, where you live (to determine, for instance, which government officials you vote for), and if/how you are employed (so that we know whether or not enough people are doing enough jobs to keep society running). This data is radioactive from the perspective of digital security, because we want to handle it as little as possible, and every single evil person in the whole world will constantly try to steal it. So we accept the inevitable and just make it as hard as possible for evildoers to succeed by making sure that government jobs are attractive to the kinds of people who can best defend it from corruption.

No Need for Taxationlink

The MUG does not need to collect tax, per se, in order to provide its services freely to all of its citizens. Taxation is only necessary when a government needs to tap into an existing economic system for its funding. By contrast, MUG forms the root system which feeds the workings and organic growth of the open market economy built on top of it. (See also: Public and Private Enterprise.) By definition, all of the resources necessary to provide for the equal rights of its citizens are directed first, because this is the government’s primary duty; the inevitable (and quite enormous, in comparison to basic needs) excess production is allowed to flow freely through the market system, subject to the usual forces of supply and demand. The actual resources needed to keep everyone fed and housed in decent conditions are so small by comparison to the entire economy that the government’s footprint in people’s daily lives will be basically the same as a US state government without income tax: judicial facilities and licensing offices, but now also without the fees.

Of course, if one wants to broadly define “tax” to mean “any resources reserved for the government”, then of course this is still the case; we don’t mean that the government doesn’t need resources at all. Rather, the government simply knows that in order to pave the roads, it needs to find X number of people who can be paid to operate the machinery; Y to be paid to work in factories to make that machinery; Z to build the factories, run the smelters, mine the ore…. At every point in this process, there is inevitable overproduction: we can’t start a brand new factory just to provide the build the machinery necessary to pave just one road. A given factory merely churns out whatever machines it happens to build, and we can schedule road work based on their availability. The fundamental assumption of the MU is that with high enough automation, the production capacity of an “average” factory is enormous compared to what is necessary to secure the MSC’s universal equal rights. This excess capacity is seamlessly converted into what capitalists call “profit” (we call it social development funding) the same way it is today: it all happens inside an existing money-fueled, consumer-driven open market system. Various currents and eddies in supply and demand cause pockets of cash to start collecting in places where the average cost of doing business, for whatever reason, ends up being less than what was collected in income. In a capitalist system, this profit is distributed to shareholders as dividends. This is, in fact, capitalism’s defining feature. The theory is that all of the profitable people (and the government, by siphoning some of this off as taxes) will then be able to do things like fund research projects and have cool ideas for new things to make or do. Good thing business owners are all trustworthy and wouldn’t exploit anyone for their own benefit!

By contrast, the MU doesn’t need an enormous bureaucratic monolith to drive around vacuuming a bit of an economy’s money out of wherever it can make up an excuse to look. It is a post-capitalist system exactly because it also doesn’t need investment bankers to collect (and hoard) all of those profits. Rather, it just uses its knowledge of who’s employed doing what things to know where these pockets of cash are lying around, and where they can be redirected: wages, other operating costs for licensed businesses, and grants for science and the arts. When people work, the government pays their wages rather than the business owner, because people don’t need to own businesses any more! Anyone who wants to build a roller coaster park convinces the local business bureau that enough people would pay for tickets to make up for the costs; the bureau puts up job postings for attendants and checks to see where it can get raw materials, contractors, and engineers. Meanwhile, the original entrepreneur can manage the actual building and operation, or even let the government find a business manager and just go back to whatever they were doing before they thought of the roller coaster park. If the park ends up taking in more money from tickets than it costs to run, regardless of who is actually directing its operation, a little pocket of profit starts forming, and as soon as it shows up on government ledgers, it can make it available for any of its expenses.

This system has no more or less risk than exists naturally in a completely free market system based on capitalism. Sometimes a business will, for whatever reason, consistently cost more than it was expected to gain. Someone who works at the business bureau will come around to see what’s up (maybe they forgot to hire someone to sell tickets), and if no one can come up with a way to get it to be self sustaining, it will shut down and the employees will have to find new jobs. But this will never cause anyone to become homeless, hungry, or unable to find health care, because all of their basic needs are guaranteed by the government anyway with a bit of all that spare cash that bubbles up everywhere in a vibrant economy. The loss is simply accepted as an inevitable risk, which we avoid (but never eliminate) the same way banks avoid it when they extend credit for a new business in a capitalist system: find someone experienced enough to check that it’s a good idea before granting a business license and providing for its operating costs. The loss from the businesses that do go under can be vastly outweighed by the successful ones if the people who approve the funding know what they’re doing; the proof of this is that investment banks exist at all!

Meanwhile, the MU can avoid having to spend any of those cash bubbles on tax collectors, auditors, or finance mystics, because they are no longer needed. We avoid the corruptive influence of a plutocrat class because all of the ledgers that say which roller coaster parks turned a profit are public information, and anyone with a very odd choice in hobbies could examine the books and confirm that indeed, that popular amusement park was able to make up for all of its expenses, and also fund another entrepreneur’s ice cream stand across the street, part of a new library, and innumerable other tiny droplets of excess income that got whisked away by market forces to fund any number of other activities humanity can come up with.

Benefit Usage and Personal Identificationlink

In a society with ready access to digital information technology, we’ll suppose (for instance) that wherever public goods or services are provided, such as a grocery store, one can find a kiosk that dispenses NFC cards. Each card’s programming contains nothing but an identifier to distinguish it from other cards, and a certificate to say that it was indeed issued on behalf of the government. (This still works, but becomes less efficient, if DIT is unavailable; just use Official Paper with numbers written on each one, a great deal of scribes, and extremely competent librarians.)

Off the shelf, the card doesn’t need to be linked to anyone. Public resources should be available anonymously (that’s one way to define “public”), so anyone should be able to walk into a grocery store with nothing and then walk out with an apple and a new card so that they don’t have to get one at every store. Or they can toss it in a bin and get a new card at the next store anyway; the old one will eventually make its way back to a card kiosk and be given a fresh certificate and issued to a new person. In general, though, a citizen will want to associate a card with their personal identity so that they can use it to access their residence (which is assigned to a person, not a card), use their cash balance (for non-public goods and services not obtainable with an anonymous card), or update their employment status (so that wages can be paid to the person who earned them). If a card is lost and used fraudulently instead of simply being recycled, the fraudulent activity can be disputed similarly to how lost credit cards are handled today.

To get a card that is associated with themselves personally, a person can do something to prove their identity to the kiosk and it will send a record to the official identity registry to say “this card is being used by this citizen”. All purchase and employment records associated with a specific person are forwarded to their residential encrypted data store (if they even want it) and cannot be accessed except by that person or with a search warrant. Records relevant to public benefits are de-identified and aggregated before being stored (and made publicly available) on a government ledger.

Housing & Utilitieslink

todo

Food & Nutritionlink

todo

Healthcarelink

Duh. Unfortunately, covering this for citizens in the US until we are popular enough to employ enough doctors (and nurses, and pharmacists…) for everyone will be rough, because health care in the US is probably the second most nonsensical industry behind banking. But it’s a pretty obvious service that everyone will be asking about, and I don’t really think we’d build a lot of public trust by half-assing it. So we’ll just have to accept health costs being a huge money hole while they’re still subject to the plutocrats’ market, and plan accordingly.

Educationlink

Properly funded. Also duh.

A few private schools are going to have to be accepted as inevitable; even if we tried to ban them, people would (justly, but misguidedly) start underground schools, which would be embarrassing. On the other hand, contemporary public education in the US is such a travesty that we are all a little brainwashed into forgetting exactly how effective a properly funded and managed public education system could be. The goal is therefore to make public schools good enough that the only private schools will be run by cults. We will have to accommodate this in planning; we can start with providing tutoring, and also try to estimate what a real public education system would cost.

Employmentlink

todo

Public Safety & Emergency Preparednesslink

Military / Public Defenselink

As long as MU is operating within an existing national government, we should rely on the national government to provide for the public defense. MU should never need its own military unless it is operating as an independent state among potentially hostile non-MU nations, and we should endeavor to avoid this scenario if possible. Hostile non-MU nations are expected to decline in the long run, but in the meantime, mutually agreeable disarmament should be pursued whenever possible.

If it is not possible to completely avoid the formation of a standing military, working in the armed forces is obviously extremely high-risk and therefore needs to be well-compensated, like any other high-risk employment. In addition, we should strive to keep the defense budget as transparent as any other government activity. Rather than attempting to maintain impractically elaborate secret funding networks or (even worse) fudge or obfuscate public data to hide defense information, we should simply work under the assumption that an adversary has complete access to knowledge about defense programs and spending, and that it is effectively impossible to prevent leaks regardless of what we do. Defense capabilities should be designed to remain effective even when the adversary knows everything about them. Military training should therefore be based around effective leadership and improvisation on the ground, and discouraging predictable responses or exploitable patterns.

Disaster Recoverylink

In the event of a natural disaster, procedures should be in place to prevent social affluence from dropping below zero, even in the event of widespread technology failures (such as large-scale cyberattack, or solar flares killing off electronics) or significant damage to infrastructure (tsunamis, meteors, earthquakes, ….). People in urban and suburban areas will need access to emergency stockpiles with enough capacity to keep everyone alive until they can develop supply lines from rural areas and start rebuilding. Digital systems must always have fallback strategies to analog backups. Hard copies of enough knowledge to reconstruct a digital society (or maintain a non-digital society), from the ground up must be readily available, and there must be a process for devolving to distributed local governments, each of which should be capable of sustaining itself independently in case long-distance communication and resource management becomes impossible.

Social Developmentlink

The Enlightenment era in the middle of the second millennium laid the groundwork for the contemporary concept of work “for the common good”, such as research in STEM fields; artistic development of existing or novel forms of expression; or operation of business ventures beyond basic goods and services. Throughout the ensuing eras, human society has struggled to determine the best way to allocate resources to these ends. It is almost universally agreed that development in any one of these areas can have astounding social benefits, even though it is fundamentally impossible to plan this development in detail. This is because discoveries often happen due to random chance instead of an intentional process such as the scientific method, and even then it is not possible to guarantee success.

First, a definition: social development is any activity, funded by any mixture of shared or private resources, which is not required to maintain universal equal rights, which is always prioritized over any social development. When there are insufficient resources to fully fund all proposed social development projects (which is probably always going to be the case), projects should be prioritized by reasonably comparing the likelihood of a net benefit to society and the amount of time projected to realize that benefit with various levels of funding. Conflicts involving such funding (“No way, MY project is the most important!”) should be referred to a judicial process and jury review; if the jury cannot unanimously decide in favor of one or the other, divide the funds equally until a more appropriate distribution scheme can be determined, if ever. This follows the tried and true principle that if it isn’t possible to make everyone equally happy, a just society should at least endeavor to make them equally annoyed to the least possible extent.

Contemporary society historically tends to use two independent ways of categorizing social development projects: public/private enterprise, and scientific research/artistic expression.

Public and Private Enterpriselink

Public enterprise is any social development activity which is funded entirely by resources granted by the government. Private enterprise is any social development activity funded entirely by privately owned resources. Any real-life project will fall on a spectrum between these extremes, and be funded by a mixture of public and private resources.

Capitalism sanctifies private enterprise, rational self-interest, and free market forces as the most efficient means of distributing shared resources. This could even be true in theory, but it probably isn’t. In any event, we must not confuse “most efficient” (whatever that means) with “most just”, and our goal is to build a just society, not the most efficient one. It is immediately obvious that the contemporary social and economic system is deeply unequal and corrupt, and the historical forces that led to this state of affairs must be counteracted on a large and coordinated scale if we want to establish a society which truly guarantees the same rights equally to all persons.

By contrast to the fundamental tenets of capitalism, the core belief of the MU is that it is possible to provide universal equal rights while still having plenty left over to fund lively social development. In the absence of any convincing evidence to the contrary, it seems unlikely that public funding will ever be able to adequately provide every single thing a society needs or wants. We will therefore assume that the least disagreeable strategy is to divide excess resources evenly between public and private enterprise. This way, everyone is equally annoyed, but at least no one has to worry about availability of housing, food, or health care.

In practice, this means that, given all of the resources created in excess of basic requirements, half will be the responsibility of the government to distribute fairly between science and art projects, which we will look at in more detail presently. Next, we will look at how private enterprise is funded in the MU.

Public Enterprise: Science and Artlink

Science is any social development activity which is conducted under a systematic process of experiment, observation, and peer review. Art is any social development activity which is not scientific.

These are often taken to be mutually exclusive endeavors, but just like public/private enterprise, real-world projects will fall anywhere on a spectrum between “pure art” and “pure science”, which are both imaginary ideals anyway. The only thing we can be certain of is that human history is full of examples in which either strategy, separately or together, made huge leaps in our social development and understanding of our existence. With that in mind, and lacking a universally agreed upon way to prioritize one or the other, public funding should try to take a balanced approach and aim to even out support of art and science when averaged across all public social development funding. Any of these projects may also have some amount of private funding, but this fact should not be taken into account when distributing public funding; that way madness lies.

Private Enterprise: Business Operation and Salarieslink

At this point we have set aside a certain amount of “social profit” (overproduced resources across an entire society) which we have promised to set aside for the kinds of things that the government doesn’t really want or need to be in charge of: latte stands and roller coasters. Historical precedents and additional considerations toward this end are discussed in much detail in [Equitable Management and Distribution of Shared Resources][].

Form of Governmentlink

In the Enlightenment tradition, the MU government has three branches (Legislative, Executive, Judiciary), and structural checks and balances between them to prevent abuse. However, unlike the thinkers who gave us our first liberal-republican governments, we have the benefit of three centuries in which humanity was able to (not without difficulty) achieve an extremely well-educated general population, by 17th-century standards. This was the primary excuse (which may not have been valid even then) for including systemic advantages for an aristocratic elite class. In the US, this can be seen in institutions such as the Electoral College or the Senate, not to mention more recent symptoms of systemic corruption of democratic processes: gerrymandering, corporate lobbying, and other evils. With hindsight, we can do away with such antidemocratic patterns and institutions and build a government which can truly be said to provide equal representation for each person in practice as well as in theory.

See the Millennial Utopian Constitution for details about the actual structure of this government. Here we will provide some concrete ideas for its real-world implementation.

Executive Councillink

The MU Executive Council (EC) is responsible for implementing the laws passed by the Legislative Council (LC). The EC elects its own chair, the Chief Executive, who holds ultimate authority and responsibility for its activities. Executive activity is organized by law into departments, each of which has a Director who is chosen by the Chief Executive (and approved by the LC) from among the other councillors of the EC. These Directors may be referred to collectively as the Board of Directors, which need not contain every single Executive Councillor; but this should be considered merely a convenient label.

Here is a possible (and not necessarily exhaustive) list of executive departments and their respective duties.

• Transparency and Citizen Support
  • Maintain availability of public data
  • Identity services
  • Social workers
  • Public defenders
  • Emergency services
  • IT and digital security
  • “Public services customer hotline”
• Housing and Utilities
  • Maintain housing database
  • Plan housing development/refurbishment
  • Handle housing applications
  • Manage and maintain adequate short term housing
• Personal Health
  • Medical providers
  • Nutrition (i.e. basic groceries)
  • Rehabilitation
• Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
• Environmental Rehabilitation and Management
  • Waste collection and reclaiming
  • Raw resources (e.g. mining)
  • Parks, wilderness reserves
• Education
• Social Development
  • Public funding for science and art
  • Approving applications and salaries for private businesses
  • Managing payment system for market goods and services
  • Maintaining centralized database of both critical and market job data to inform planning
  • Maintaining employment records
• Government Management
  • Maintain interdepartmental communication and availability of data (e.g. ensuring that resource needs for each department are properly reported to the department which manages that resource)
  • Office management for all branches of government
  • Maintaining the official codified law
  • Certification and authentication of official documents (warrants, records, …)
• Capital Relations
  • Director of Capital Relations is the CFO of MULLC
  • MULLC financiers and lawyers
  • National government outreach/lobbying
  • PM sales and marketing

Transitioning From Consumer Capitalismlink

Starting from a consumer-capitalist society and a certain population of volunteers to donate existing capital, the MU can operate peacefully on an opt-in basis alongside persons who wish to continue living under the plutocrats. It would function like an employee-owned LLC managing “company towns”, without the unfortunate negative connotation of exploitative industrial magnates. Each MU citizen gets one share of MULLC, regardless of how much they put in at the beginning - hence the need to truthfully and effectively convince people that it will work. They don’t need to put in all their money, but enough people will need to risk a substantial amount at the beginning so that there is sufficient capital to support the MSC until MU can provide for itself independently of the plutocrats’ market (PM). During the initial phase, MULLC pays for basic goods and services which cannot be provided independently or through the national government, and uses this funding to begin selling goods and services back to the PM. As long as sufficient care is taken in defining the initial capital requirements and properly managing resources to maintain a positive social affluence (since profit is literally overproduction, which is implied by a positive social affluence), market forces themselves will guarantee the continued growth of MULLC’s resources, and incidentally use the PM’s own mechanisms to advertise for its competitor, by making more people aware of a better life.

At least, for a little while. It would be foolish to assume that the plutocrats will happily give up and allow the system they rule to be bought out from under them and absorbed into the MU where they cannot use their exploitative system to hoard personal wealth. Maybe this will happen - if the MU spreads so quickly that the plutocrats cannot gather a coordinated defense in time - but more likely, at some point, plutocrat-controlled businesses will refuse to sell MULLC goods or services if we keep taking their workers, and plutocrat-controlled banks will no longer agree to hold MULLC’s assets or issue it credit.

See Transitioning From Capitalism for more details about the general shape of this undertaking.