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
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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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.
The thing is, there are jobs that need to be done but no one wants and there are jobs everyone wants but only few are needed/have the ability to do it.
Do you really believe that in a state where everything you need is provided enough people will be "passionate" about sewer maintenance?
The thought of enough people will be passionate about every job in order to fill the required number of positions in those jobs, when everything is provided whether they work or not, is simply a delusion.
Goods are not the only form of incentive. The jobs that nobody wants to do would have more people doing them for less time. For example you can be a graphic designer for 1 year or work the sewer for 1 month.
(Everything you are about to read, put a grain of salt in it, and go read about the system of work in the Inca empire and connections to communism. I'm not saying it was the same thou)
The Inca empire functioned something like this.
And why they where successful.
The people did all sorts of work, throught the year and in turns.
So all shared the labor and the benefits of the labor.
There was still the central "state" in the emperor dictating what to do and when to do it. But i think AI will replace that in the future saying where the production needs to go (besides olygarchies, a problem of capitalism is inefficiency, a lot of food going to waste instead to the millions going through hunger. Vacant mansions while people sleep in the streets).
I don't work because of money.
I need it, I live in a capitalist system.
But i work in public function, I do a lot of schedules in the public pools, the public gym, and the cultural center with theater, exposions, cinema and also the school gym after hours with sport teams from associations and clubs.
I clean in most of those places, receptionist work in all, have the keys to everything (they trust me).
All this to say:
Do to to the system we live in and all the shit I went through (disease, deaths in the family) i have a depression.
I am taking medication and see a doctor.
But the work, helps me get throught it better.
I wake in the morning to open the place I have on schedule, besides the depression, to assist, and serve and connect.
I do a lot of places and/or schedules that no one wants, holidays, some weekends.
That gives me a lot of extra hours.
I take time went i need. Mostly when my grandma needs 😁
I dont get paid extra, and i don't care, but i always try to show perspective to people.
Be it here or in the everyday life.
I remeber being afraid of factory automation and what that would do to the work force, specially in my town, where hundreds or a few thousands work in factories.
What and idiot...those people could live their lifes.
Enjoy it, the factory itself produces the products.
Even better, if i need a door for the car I downloaded in the comunal printer 10 years ago, or the one i have at home, I just print another door, recycling the material of the damaged one.
But it's difficult to make people understand what communism even is, when they think the capitalist factory of the world where Apple produces their planed obsulence products and workers, wich are not owner of the means off production, and hrow themselves from the factory roofs wich such frequency, that they put webs to catch them...is comunist...where the f### is China commist.
Don't words have meaning?
I'm sorry.
Stay safe everyone.
Not everyone has to be passionate about it. You could devise a sort of lottery system for jobs that can't be automated and suck, where everyone will have to do that job for a set amount of time. People do these jobs for 40 hours a week now because they know it's necessary for their own survival, so I personally don't feel like it's far-fetched to think that people would okay with doing a certain job for way less time a week, knowing that in a few weeks or however long they'll never have to do it anymore because their name is now gone from the lottery pool, because they know it's necessary for the survival of society (and thus also themselves).
So would then other people be rotated in order to fill the positions of the people already being rotated and so on?
You could do that. You could also make it a bit more nuanced, where the pool of people only consists of people doing non-vital work. So maybe doctors and nuclear engineers and firefighters and teachers could be excluded, while only people doing non-vital work get rotated in, and it wouldn't be such a big deal if one person is missing for a couple of weeks or months. Nobody is gonna die if you have to wait a bit longer to get your hair cut or your house painted or to see that new movie, and there would be an understanding that you have to wait a bit longer because important work is being done. You'd also have so many people who are freed up from useless or destructive work like ceo's, finance, middle managers, marketing, etc that maybe you wouldn't even notice if someone got rotated in, because everyone else could just pick up like 3 extra hours a week for a little while.
If you divide between people working vital and non-vital work, aren't you creating two distinct classes where the system is supposed to eliminate all classes?
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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?
Well then they do not get the benefits of society? Idk im not Communist but that seems like the best option to me
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.
They will be lined up with the other anti-revolutionaries.
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.
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Your goose will die if it tries to survive alone. Individualism doesn't work.
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