Market Anarcho-Collectivism: Imaginative Proposals, Part One
Anti-Democratic Democratized Ownership
Part Zero of this series is here, though it does not have to be read to understand this piece. It is a thematically-linked grouping of posts, not one that has to be read in sequential order:
As I explained in Part Zero, this is not something that I am going to feel tied to. It isn’t what I believe is the one solution to humanity’s ills. I think it would work, mind you, and if anyone wants to go make a market anarcho-collectivist commune I will tag along.
But I’m not describing this to convince you of anything, let alone out of the hope that we will all go somewhere and enact it on the world. Though, I should note, we most definitely could. It would be very easy — you’d just need to program an app, and then either get people within a given city to use it as counter-economics, or if you would like — go make a commune somewhere.
What I am doing, instead of the usual, is laying out an example of how things could be. It is an example of those ‘alternative economic institutions’ that we always find ourselves talking about building. I want this to expand your horizons, and so I have designed it to run counter to as many of your assumptions as I could make it.
Enough with this preamble — let me explain what “market anarcho-collectivism” (what a ridiculous phrase!) means.
The basic idea of regular anarcho-collectivism, mostly expounded by Bakunin, is that the economy of a commune should be democratically centrally-planned at a meeting, but with the taking of jobs being optional, doing one-hour of any job giving you one labor-token — with more difficult or dangerous jobs being democratically assigned more tokens, and everyone being provided with a baseline amount of tokens.
Now this is all, of course, a bad idea. Not as bad of an idea as anarcho-communism, but still.
Democracy is extremely bad at satisfying any sort of minority needs, and is generally terrible at figuring out how badly anyone needs something — it reduces that down to the binary of whether or not they care enough to vote for it. Further, planning everything in periodic meetings, for an economy of sufficient size, becomes an impossibility. There are far too many details happening far too fast — amongst them not only which jobs need to be done, but how they need to be done, and how much pay they deserve.
Market anarcho-collectivism is an attempt to take this and fix it — stripping out all the democracy and central planning, but keeping the collective ownership of means of production and the worker self-management — i.e., retaining the socialism.
What should be retained is the collective ownership, in the sense that the system itself would retain ownership of all or most of the means of production. Private property, in the sense of property ownership that can be used to extract unjustified rents, is to be abolished — or, at least, minimized.
Run the system itself on as an encrypted and distributed application, running off of everyone’s cellphones — essentially unchangeable.
Have the system assign its own digital money, off of the app. Don’t bother to set up an exchange rate or foreign-currency backing — a money market will develop on its own.
The only fair, and the only optimal, way to determine who gets to use the system’s means of production is by renting it out — with the rents determined at monthly auction. As a nice side-effect, such a rental-dominated economy would seem to favor cooperatives — without individuals owning private property, wage-labor and workplace domination are necessarily much less likely. There is no concern of a buyer of the means of production needing to be compensated for their investment, nor of a new worker-owner of a cooperative needing to buy their way in.
The revenue from these rents, minus other expenses — such as investments — should be used to provide a UBI to all members of the system: the capital-share of income justly belongs to no-one, and so can most justifiably be instead given to everyone.
The UBI also incentivizes everyone to act to protect the system’s property — all benefit from its income, and so stealing from the system is the same as stealing from all of its members. If that proved to be insufficient, however, you could allow organizations and/or individuals to register as police for a given area — which would entitle them to some cut of the rental revenue of property in that area, but would also make them financially liable for any property of the system in that area that was stolen — giving them an incentive to recover it.
To prevent members from abusing the means of production (as, after all, they do not really own them) take/give to the tenant, upon the next renter renting it:
If this is positive, it can simply be directly “printed” by the system, without causing inflation — after all, it represents the creation of new value, likely through the renter improving the rented means of production, in some way.
To make buying decisions, just let any member (or, any member who hasn’t been sufficiently bad at investing) choose to buy for the system, using (up to a certain amount of) the system’s (digital and self-printed) money — but give them skin in the game.
Make them pay/pay them the difference between the return on that investment and the average return on an investment of that price. To prevent abuses, or just special incompetence, have some sort of system to disallow bad investors from continuing to invest — and limit how much an investor is allowed to spend.
As an example, you might decide set aside a certain portion (perhaps determined by an average of numbers entered by all members of the group) of the system’s rental revenue to be used as a monthly investment fund. Of this, everyone could be allowed a share, weighted by:
With unused investment funds either rolling over to the next month, or being paid out as part of the UBI — a matter that could be settled by allowing everyone to vote on it, in app. Though, of course, rolling over the investment funds seems much more prudent.
To further limit idiocy or sabotage, you could disallow anyone with sufficiently low returns — for example, more than one standard deviation lower than the average — on their investments from spending any more of the system’s money.
There are several reasons that one might want to allow some continued private ownership. Among them are a preference for retention of that degree of autonomy, an awareness of the difficulty of actually eliminating private property completely, and an attempt to anti-recuperate any remaining or external capitalist elements.
As such, one might want to exercise a tax on the self-assessed (with unassessed items being assumed to have a value of zero) value of any ownership — both personal and private — at a monthly rate set by, again, perhaps an average of member-supplied numbers.
The condition would then necessarily be that the owner must sell to the system at the self-assessed value, or revise their self-assessed value upwards. This would both limit and gradually reduce private property, but would also be a way to clearly and organically distinguish between personal and private property: personal property could safely be valued at zero, because there would be no reason for the system to buy it.
To make selling decisions for the system, offer to sell any of the MoP for an amount equal to or greater than:
I.E., have the system sell off property if it gets an offer for a one-time payment that exceeds the time-discounted value of future rental payments at the current rate — perhaps earmarked for only the investment fund, rather than splitting with the UBI.
The idea behind all this high-concept nonsense is to teach you three conceptual lessons:
- it is entirely possible to be egalitarian without being particularly democratic
- there is no real contradiction between collective ownership and worker self-management
- there is no real contradiction between socialism and making decision-makers have skin in the game
