Thanks for responding Lampy!
You got me there. Anarchism also includes “social ownership of the means of production,” but I’m trying to say that in a more accessible way. When people hear “social ownership of the means of production,” they think “I don’t know exactly what that is, but it sounds scary,” and dismiss it outright.
First off, let me state up front that this isn’t a game of “Gotcha!”. My goal was to prod the thinking process.
Also here, There is a desire/need to be cautious with word choices. While I understand your desire to keep things simple and not scare people off, it would be disingenuous to mislead those same people.
Maybe their commune really needs or wants corn, so our communes sign a contract agreeing to trade corn for coffee beans. I skipped over a lot of the details because I want to focus on the workplaces I actually use and understand.
Without those details no one knows if those workplaces even exist.
And I realize you are using a lot of wording loosely here but.. no contracts. Anarchism + contracts = Libertarianism. Contracts are problematic in anarchism. If the contract is unfilled then it has value. It’s a form of currency and currency can’t exist. There is also the question of whether anyone would abide by or recognize any contract. If the other side backs out what do you do? There is no government overseeing enforcement between communes so you can’t sue to force them to comply with the contract’s terms.
This is a mischaracterization of anarchism. Once again, it would take a pretty detailed answer to address this, but the assumption under anarchism is that anyone who behaves like an asshole has an incentive to do so.
It’s not a mischaracterization when you start taking this thought experiment to it’s natural ends. And that isn’t that assholes have an incentive under anarchism. The problem is that there is in human nature and societal organization. Pretty much everyone, by nature will be an asshole at some point. But anarchism, by definition, has a very limited toolbox to draw from to deal with that so there is little disincentive in anarchism.
We can address those incentives by either changing our system or by providing psychological care for the people who behave like assholes to make them stop behaving like assholes. For example, if someone is caught stealing, it’s probably because they don’t have enough of something, so we talk to them and figure out what their needs are and how we can address them as a society. It may also be that they steal compulsively for no discernible reason, if they are kleptomaniacs, in which case we give them psychological care.
That might happen for the first few years if you happen to be in one of the communes that has someone trained in psychology. But there are a few problems with the whole idea.
There have been numerous studies that have looked at what works and what doesn’t work for communal living arrangements. The short and sweet of it is that in order to maintain social control over the group without some sort of established government, the group size is limited. In religious groups that is generally to a few hundred people. In secular groups the sweet spot is 80–100 people. Once you exceed a group size of about 150 people, “talking to them” no longer works. You can’t exercise enough peer pressure to get people to conform to social norms. The Hutterites have been doing this for about 500 years now. When one of their communes gets to about 160 people, they split it into two.
That leaves you with psychological care. Who is going to provide that? You might be lucky enough to have someone in your commune or a neighboring commune but eventually, they’ll die. Who trains their replacements? And what about all the communes that don’t have access to anyone with mental health professional training? Once you’ve eliminated government, all those government run schools go away. Government funded mental health care no longer exists. There is no capital to invest in training people for future “what if?” scenarios.
As with most other communal living groups, the simple answer is that the commune has to either split into smaller communes to maintain social control of it’s members or they have to start resorting to banishment of the assholes. Banished assholes tend to remain assholes (and now they’re pissed-off because you threw them out!) and they aren’t tethered to any society at that point. They cluster with other assholes and become gangs that survive by taking what they want/need from others.
Long story short, there are lots of details that we can’t really parse out until anarchism is fully or nearly fully achieved, which is why I think honing in on the problems that we can solve is useful.
But there are tens of thousands of details that have been figured out by people running through this thought process and by looking at how social groups have formed and lived in the past.
Can you imagine a way that you and/or your coworkers might be motivated to do work if there were no money?
The motivation to do work for pretty much everyone would very quickly become the basic need for survival. This is Maslow on steroids. They’d be hungry, dirty and tired. Most of them would be scared shitless.
If there is no money, there also isn’t going to be electricity, public water supply, public sewer systems, public (and most private) transportation, etc… Most people aren’t going to do anything related to their current occupation.
Even if the people that run your local power plant wanted to continue working and providing power, they need fuel to run the power plant. No fuel = no power. What would they have to trade for a train load of coal or diesel fuel that the people that have those resources would want in return? What are the people that run that train going to trade with the mine or refinery in order to get the coal or oil to deliver to the power plant?
Our complex web of utilities and services work because much (if not most) of it is paid for in advance (with capital!). Who is going to come up with enough trinkets to trade for the equivalent of $1 million worth of fuel? You need it by the end of the week. Tick tock!
There is no government to run Air Traffic Control or subway and bus systems. Delta Airlines isn’t going to take a basket of carrots in trade for your flight to Chicago. And even if they would, they aren’t going to put people in a plane on a runway unless someone can tell them that the runway is clear and they have some way of being assured that plane isn’t going to crash into another plane mid-flight.
There is a reason pretty much every communal societies are all either hunter/gatherer or agrarian. Without easily convertible/transportable currency (aka “money”), the supply chain can only extend to a few people. You can’t rely on a chain that is 300 people deep. The trading of trinkets gets to complicated.
So the motivation is going to be to find a way to make yourself useful to filling the most basic needs of others and then find others with the same thinking that are providing for some other basic needs and band together in whatever area they can find that is rich in natural resources.
John grows corn, Bill raises cattle, Mary grows hay, Bob bakes bread, Jack chops wood, Steve mills lumber, Sue builds houses, Sylvia makes clothes, etc…
Bill would want to trade his meat/dairy products with Mary to get hay in order to keep producing more cattle. He’d also trade with Sue to get a house built and with Jack to get wood to heat his home with. All of these people would be trading their labor with the others to fill their basic needs.
How many of them would put aside their basic needs in order to go to a coffee shop and trade their labor for a cup of coffee? There are a couple thousand communes around the world. I wonder if any of them have a coffee shop?
