Lampy
Lampy
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

Hi Jim, thanks for the thoughtful critique. I haven’t had a lot of practice articulating my ideas to an audience, so I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Capitalism is about more than just “profits”. It also includes the right to claim ownership of assets.

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. Or they don’t have the time or patience to learn a whole new concept. So I’m trying to speak to those people, and since everyone knows what profit is, I figure a good way of summarizing anarchism is by succinctly articulating its relationship to profit. But you’re right that private assets are an important concept in capitalism that I kind of glossed over. I just need a good quick way to explain social ownership of the means of production. Maybe “democratic control of the workplace”? “Worker control of assets”? I’ll work on it.

If the world suddenly switched to being 100% anarchist, the grower of coffee beans no longer “owns” any land or crops. Where do you get your beans from? The distributor no longer “owns” any ships or planes. How does coffee get from where it is grown to your shop? Would the coffee grower have the ability to continue growing beans? Would they have the ability to grow enough beans to supply distant lands with those beans? How would they get there? There is no money so you’re reduced to trading trinkets. Would you expend your own labor to build a boat, sail to South America (or Africa, Indonesia, etc…), trade whatever you have to get coffee beans (assuming the person with those beans wants whatever it is you have to begin with), sail them back and then trade them for… what?

The short answer is: you get everything from the workers who make and control those things. I do not know anything about distribution or coffee growing, nor do I know anybody who works in these industries, so I can’t tell you what would motivate them to continue their work if money suddenly disappeared. The point is, they and their commune would negotiate trades of services and goods on their own behalf. 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. This is also why I asked others how they would imagine their workplaces running in an anarchist society.

The distinction between anarchism and any other -ism used to describe a society is that all those other -isms have a system for identifying and controlling assholes. Anarchists practice wishful thinking and hope the assholes don’t show up.

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. 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.

It’s true that we don’t have the knowledge to cure all psychological problems, and in those cases, society would provide psychological care and an appropriate level of supervision until the person’s death.

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. What workplaces are you familiar with? Can you imagine a way that you and/or your coworkers might be motivated to do work if there were no money? What systems would have to exist? Would anyone be willing to do that work just for the joy of the work itself? If not, could our society survive without that work? If not, could trades be made? Which ones?

Thanks again for your comment!

    Lampy

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    Lampy

    I’m a lamp with some opinions.