On the Feasibility of a Century Commune, Starting from the Biggest Difference Between Mutual Aid Platforms and Insurance Companies

The most significant difference between a mutual aid platform and an insurance company should lie in fund management—an insurance company can collect premiums of ten billion, a hundred billion, even a trillion, whereas a mutual aid platform cannot gather large-scale funds because of its post-event cost-sharing nature. So in terms of assets and capital, an insurance company is a giant while a mutual aid platform is negligible.

This gives rise to many derivative problems:

Because the scale of premiums is enormous, insurance companies need to manage and invest those funds. Investment may gain value or lose it. Gains make everyone happy, but losses are hard to handle. Large sums of money also bring out human fear and greed. These constitute one of the major operating risks of an insurance company.

For government regulators, they must guard against problems at insurance companies that concentrate too much social capital, lest those problems create social risk. Hence layer upon layer of management measures, and the cost of regulation is also relatively high.

Mutual aid platforms have few of these problems. They have none of the joy of capital appreciation, and therefore none of the worry of losses, and they do not bring much risk to society or to government regulation.

So purely from the perspective of capital accumulation and operation, I believe mutual aid platforms and insurance companies each have advantages and disadvantages. Without the opportunities and risks of large-scale capital operation, mutual aid platforms in fact have stronger resilience when financial crises and the like occur, and do not bring serious risk to society. Therefore mutual aid platforms have the capacity to exist stably over the long term. KangAi Commune intends to become a Century Commune, and from this standpoint that is quite feasible.