Then so be it, but it seems like it would be beneficial to do so
I could go out in the woods right now and try to live on my own, but I’d have a much better time in a community with other people
If an individual wants to gain an individual benefit from their work instead of giving it to the community, what would prevent them from bartering for more personal good than they’d get otherwise?
Well then they do not get the benefits of society? Idk im not Communist but that seems like the best option to me
What keeps individuals from benefiting from society without contributing to it? Who determines appropriate contributions? I don’t know if you can do that in an anarchical framework
The community themselves decide. If it’s enough of a problem, the community will organize to address it how they see fit. That’s the whole point of anarchism. We don’t have all the answers and we don’t claim to, the people that run into these issues will find the solutions that best suites their needs.
So does the community vote on everything then? If there are too many decisions, could they appoint someone to make some of the decisions on their behalf? Or does every little decision need to be voted on by everyone? If not, I don’t see how it’s different than democracy
Democracy and capitalism are not synonymous.
And about capitalism, rich people (and by “rich”, I mean people that don’t need to work to stay rich and stay getting richer) have more access and influence on decision making them anybody else. Decision power should be spread more evenly, your society can have people delegated to take decisions, but that decisions should reflect the interest of the society as a whole, not only who gets economic power.
Democracy and capitalism are not synonymous.
Agree, but are democracy and anarchy synonymous? The original post was taking about anarchical communism witch I thought was different than democratic socialism.
are democracy and anarchy synonymous? Idk enough of anarchy to answer that.
I thought was different than democratic socialism. AFAIK they are different indeed
I mean sure, but what we have now are people not sharing the fruits of other people’s labor. Your favorite billionaire did not earn that wealth through their own labor.
Wondering how they expect to have the ability to produce anything to be their fruits if they refuse to cooperate with society
the point is not to exploit others labor by expropriation of the means of production, no one cares what you do with your own labor
What if a person creates a new type of clothing that has high demand because it’s better than what exists before?
What if that person starts getting interest from other people who want the clothes and they try to trade currency (I’m not sure if in your communist system this exists, so consider other items people have or something) and then transactions start to happen?
What if the person gets so busy, he gets another person to help him with the trades in exchange for a fixed amount?
In which of these steps does it turn from “no one cares what you do with your own labor” to “give us your business or else”?
This simply wouldn’t happen because an anarchist society wouldn’t recognize intellectual property and so it would be trivial to just… make more of this kind of clothing. And no, there is no currency, and barter would be pointless as access to goods is common anyways.
This whole point to me signals a deeper (but common) misunderstanding as to what the point of it all is, though; there would be no incentive or reason for someone to act this way in any kind of postcapitalist society, because the assumptions you are making that even make this situation possible are false.
Labour is not a repulsive act that people have to be paid to do; for virtually any “job”, even the most repulsive, there are some people who are truly passionate about it. But in a society where doing said work is demanded under threat of starvation, any appeal it may have had is soured by the reality of this situation and it shifts from a fulfilling and desirable action to a repulsive one.
As an extra point that not all anarchists will agree with, increases in productivity thanks to automation and technological progress (often spearheaded not by corporate projects under NDA but by the open-source community and individual hackers, only to be commercialized by corporations) mean that the real quantity of work that needs to be performed to uphold humanity at a good standard of living is drastically less than the amount currently being performed. Capitalism is inefficient, both in that it doesn’t allocate resources where they’re productive (accumulation of capital) and because of work duplication and artificial barriers (tech and engineering firms keeping code/designs private or patented, industry keeping trade secrets, etc.)
tl;dr that scenario is impossible.
I’m not sure the problem is so trivial.
Long before the existence of IP, people who developed something new would keep their manufacturing process secret in order to prevent competition. Even today, sometimes they still do (in fact, the purpose of patents is to discourage trade secrets).
Now suppose someone invents a new medicine, or a new alloy, or a new machine, or a new algorithm, and refuses to tell anyone how it was made or how it works.
And suppose reverse engineering isn’t feasible. Maybe it’s too much work considering the value of the product (nobody is interested in reverse engineering your particular favorite shampoo). Or maybe the machine uses sufficiently strong encryption to prevent its reproduction. Or maybe there is some other obstacle.
Again, before modern capitalism these problems were the norm. If you wanted a very particular product, you often had no choice but to find a very particular provider.
As before, at what point does paying someone to help make such a product become exploitation?
You’re still missing a core part of the point. In most/all of the world today and in history, when you make something new, your reward is dependent on stopping other people making or selling the same thing without paying you. It therefore makes sense to keep things secret. People don’t even always do that, though - if you look at GitHub or Thingiverse, you’ll see loads of people giving the right to use their intellectual property away for free. Reasons for that vary, but some are similar to how people would theoretically think under anarcho-communism. Some examples include:
- you’re annoyed that the previous best way to do something is crap, so you make a new one. The more people copying your design, the less the annoying old one gets used, and the less annoyed you are.
- working on interesting projects is interesting in and of itself and finishing annoying ones is satisfying, so when you don’t need a particular reward beyond that, there’s no reason not to share.
- you think your cool new thing will be even cooler if other people collaborate with you, and that’s easier if everyone shares their improvements.
As for things that aren’t generating intellectual property, and just involve doing labour, the idea is that there’ll be enough people upset by something not getting done that they’ll do it proactively. E.g. some people will want to take a look at the sewers once a week to check for blockages because they’re worried their drains might overflow if they don’t. It’s not too different to people volunteering to clean up community spaces today, except people wouldn’t have to do it on top of a day job. If that gets too annoying, people will invent new tools to make it easier or totally automate it, whereas they’d have instead been inventing whatever their manager thought would please investors under the current system.
A cultural shift where nearly everyone agreed this was a good way to do things would be necessary, but it’s not like they aren’t examples of the same ideas working in the real world.
Just my own $0.02, but…
If people are hoarding and stockpiling, at least part of the response needs to be to look at the motivation these people have to stockpile and address that motivation. A hoarding problem is probably a valuable signal of some deep societal issue of distribution that needs resolved.
The vast majority of scarcity we face in this capitalist-controlled world is manufactured, so I wouldn’t think actual scarcity would often be an issue, but if hypothetically it was and someone was stockpiling more than they could use of some basic need like food allowing others to starve, I’d say the starving taking the surplus (the portion the stockpiler can’t use) by force would be justice.
Communism isn’t just about division of labour so fruits are spread equally, and is far more about the worker getting screwed in the deal that is capitalism, and a better way to actually divide the fruits of labour so the people actually DOING everything get a fair share.
Capitalists and their supporters won’t read any actual books about this that aren’t written by other capitalists and their shills generally, and it’s far more complex and has many different ideas of how this works even within strictly communist circles, so whatever. People just gonna do buzz lines and memes because of what Ben Shapiro said on Joe Rogan this week or whatever, and I get why it’s so much easier to do that, because theory is boring and exhausting, but it is frustrating to see sometimes.
Your goose will die if it tries to survive alone. Individualism doesn’t work.
But who would bare the cost of goods held in common to avoid the tragedy of the commons?
I’m no specialist in communism or anarchism but it’s the first time I see the term “Anarcho-communism”. And AFAIK anarchism and communism are movements that are looking for different paths to their means (or even different means).
Is “anarcho-communism” a thing? Or is just a made-up term to be a counterpoint to anarcho-capitalist? or just strawman?
Anarcho-communism is just the longer name of what came to be called anarchism by most observers. The tenets of anarcho syndicalism are fairly close to Marx’s ‘ideal’ communism in theory but obviously Marx, Bakunin and Kropotkin all had differing views on how to achieve those goals.
There are a lot of big words with more or less meaning. Can be very confusing and not really helpful. But anarchist communism is a thing. Peter Kropotkin is the one who wrote about it first in Conquest of bread i think :)
deleted by creator
Well, that’s new.
Anarchism is a sub-ideology of communism that seeks to abolish all kind of unjustified hierarchy, including capitalism. It’s the farthest left ideology.
“Anarcho-capitalist” is a strange concept that’s very recent and only seem to exist in the USA, that tries to reimagine feudalism in the industrial age, meaning that very rich people are free to have their own army and own massive area of land, where people living there will subjected to the laws of that lord, with no possibility to remove them through voting. It really doesn’t have anything in common with anarchy.
You can read more on the wikipedia page, it seems to be pretty good.
