Anarchism and a moneyless economy

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Tuesday January 31, 2006 18:01

by Alan MacSimoin - WSM

wsm_ireland at yahoo dot com

Anarchists are usually pretty good at listing the things we are against: capitalism, racism, religious sectarianism, authoritarianism and so on. We are usually pretty good at explaining how best to struggle: direct democracy and mass direct action. Where we often fall down is in explaining what we want at the end of the day, and convincing our listeners that it is a realistic alternative rather than a utopian pipe dream.

Too many anarchists throw up revolutionary slogans without explaining what they mean.

To give an example: most people think the state is the country where they live, i.e. Ireland. So there isn't much point in shouting 'smash the state' without first explaining what the state is and why we want to smash it. Unless we want to look like idiots!

Similarly, there is a slogan in one of the toilets at work that says 'abolish all prisons'. Without a discussion about what is a crime, what causes crime, why we believe most of the causes can be eradicated - we sound like nutters who just want to open the doors for rapists, gangsters and murderers.

If we want to be taken seriously we have to convince people that what we say makes sense.

We often sum up our goal of a communist non-market and moneyless economy with the slogan 'from each according to ability, to each according to need'. Tonight I will try to kick off a discussion about what this means and how it might work.

To start, I’ll reject the collectivist idea of exchange between independent workplaces and localities. That may have made sense when the productive forces were only in their lower stages of development, but now capitalism has created the conditions which makes communist economy a realistic option.

Those at workplace level who produce goods would have no say as to how those goods would be distributed or used - since if they did they would have a property right over them and that would not be socialism.

Society as a whole is immediately the owner of any product of labour supplied by each of its members, who will have no special rights over what they have produced.

Under anarchism production will be social, and thus there is no ownership by anyone of the instruments of production, including the land and fixed installations like factories, power stations or transport fleets.

Social ownership would not be based on the state (or nationalisation), or even on common ownership by the workforce in each job, but on the complete absence of any exclusive use-controlling rights over the means of production and their products; and it would involve the complete disappearance of buying and selling, of money, of wages and of all other exchange categories, including enterprises as autonomous economic units.

The administration - or whatever we choose to call the bodies we delegate to administer distribution – will allocate whatever proportion is needed for general services like health, education, housing, foreign aid, etc. and leaves the rest for daily individual consumption.

Naturally, there being no money, the goods which the administration make available for individual consumption would be available for individuals to take freely without charge.

But what happens when there is not enough to go around? That's really the key question isn't it? There will be conflicts and disagreements. Should we put a new roof on apartment building A or apartment building B? And if we want to do both we might need to use timber obtained by cutting down trees in an area that some people believe should be left untouched because it is important to a local ecosystem.

So disagreements will exist, the difference is that we will seek to resolve them democratically rather than through the rule of the rich.

What about "supply and demand"?

Anarchists do not ignore the facts of life, namely that at a given moment there is so much a certain thing produced and so much of is desired to be consumed or used.

Neither do we deny that different individuals have different interests and tastes.

However, this is not what is usually meant by "supply and demand." Often in general economic debate, this formula is given a certain mythical quality which ignores the underlying realities which it reflects as well as some unwholesome implications. So, before discussing "supply and demand" in an anarchist society, it is worthwhile to make a few points about the "law of supply and demand" in general.

Firstly, as the historian E.P. Thompson argued, "supply and demand" promotes "the notion that high prices were a (painful) remedy for dearth, in drawing supplies to the afflicted region of scarcity. But what draws supply are not high prices but sufficient money in their purses to pay high prices. A characteristic phenomenon in times of dearth is that it generates unemployment and empty pursues; in purchasing necessities at inflated prices people cease to be able to buy inessentials [causing unemployment] . . . Hence the number of those able to pay the inflated prices declines in the afflicted regions, and food may be exported to neighbouring, less afflicted, regions where employment is holding up and consumers still have money with which to pay. In this sequence, high prices can actually withdraw supply from the most afflicted area."

Surely anarchist-communism would just lead to demand exceeding supply?

It's a common objection that communism would lead to people wasting resources by taking more than they need. Kropotkin stated that "free communism . . . places the product reaped or manufactured at the disposal of all, leaving to each the liberty to consume them as he pleases in his own home." [The Place of Anarchism in the Evolution of Socialist Thought, p. 7]

But, some argue, what if an individual says they "need" a luxury eight bedroom house or a personal yacht? Simply put, workers may not "need" to produce for that ‘need’. As the British synicalist Tom Brown put it, "such things are the product of social labour. . ..it is improbable that any greedy, selfish person would be able to kid a shipyard full of workers to build him a ship all for his own hoggish self." [Syndicalism, p. 51]

Therefore, anarchist-communists are not blind to the fact that free access to products is based upon the actual work of real individuals - "society" provides nothing, individuals working together do. Therefore, the needs of both consumer and producer are taken into account. This means that if no factory or individual desires to produce a specific order then this order can be classed as an "unreasonable" demand - "unreasonable" in this context meaning that no one freely agrees to produce it.

There are plenty of examples today to indicate that free access will not lead to abuses. Let us take just three everyday examples, public libraries, water and pavements.

In public libraries people are free to sit and read books all day. However, few if any actually do so. Neither do people always take the maximum number of books out at a time. No, they use the library as they need to and feel no need to maximise their use of the institution. Some people never use the library, although it is free.

In the case of water supplies, it’s clear that people do not leave taps on all day because water is often supplied freely or for a fixed charge.

Similarly with pavements, we do not spend our free time walking up and down the street because it doesn’t cost us anything extra.

In all such cases we use the resource as and when we need to. Why would we not expect similar results as other resources become freely available?

In effect, the anti-free access argument makes as much sense as arguing that individuals will travel to stops beyond their destination if public transport is based on a fixed charge! And only an idiot would travel further than required in order to get "value for money."

However, for the defenders of capitalism the world seems to be made up of such idiots. It would be interesting to send a few of these clowns to hand out Progressive Democrat or Fianna Fail leaflets in the street. Even though the leaflets are free, crowds are most unlikely to form around the person handing them out demanding as many copies of the leaflet as possible. Rather, those interested in politics or current affairs take them, the rest ignore them.

Part of the problem is that capitalist economics have invented a fictional type of person, whose wants are limitless: someone who always wants more and more of everything and so whose needs could only satisfied if resources were limitless too. Needless to say, such an individual has never existed. In reality, our wants are not limitless - people have diverse tastes and we rarely want everything available nor do we want more of a thing than is necessary to satisfies our needs.

Anarchist-Communists also argue that we cannot judge people's buying habits under capitalism with their actions in a free society. After all, advertising does not exist to inform us about the range of products available but rather to create needs by making people insecure about themselves.

Advertising would not need to stoop to the level of manipulation that creates false personalities for products and provide solutions for problems that the advertisers themselves create if this was not the case.

Crude it may be, but advertising is based on the creation of insecurities, preying on fears and obscuring rational thought. In an alienated society in which people are subject to hierarchical controls, feelings of insecurity and lack of control and influence are natural. It is these fears that advertising multiples - if you cannot have real freedom, then at least you can buy something new. Advertising is the key means of making people unhappy with what they have (and who they are).

It is naive to claim that advertising has no effect on the psyche of the receiver or that the market merely responds to our needs and makes no attempt to shape our thoughts. Advertising creates insecurities about everyday things (how we dress, how we look…) and so generates irrational urges to buy, urges which would not exist in a libertarian communist society.

However, there is a deeper point to be made here about consumerism. Capitalism is based on hierarchy and not liberty. This leads to a weakening of individuality and a loss of self-identity and sense of community. Both these senses are a deep human need and consumerism is often a means by which people overcome their alienation from their selves and others (religion, ideology and drugs are other means of escape). Therefore the consumption within capitalism reflects its values, not some abstract "human nature."

This means that capitalism produces individuals who define themselves by what they have, not who they are. This leads to consumption for the sake of consumption, as people try to make themselves happy by consuming more commodities.

In other words, the well-developed individual that an anarchist society would develop would have less need to consume than the average person in a capitalist one. This is not to suggest that life will be spartan and without luxuries in an anarchist society, far from it. But what I am arguing here is that an anarchist-communist society would not have to fear rampant consumerism making demand constantly outstrip supply.

Investment

As for when investment is needed, it is clear that this will be based on the changes in demand for goods in both collectivist and communist anarchism. As Bakunin's colleague, James Guilliame put it this way, "by means of statistics gathered from all the communes in a region, it will be possible to scientifically balance production and consumption. In line with these statistics, it will also be possible to add more help in industries where production is insufficient and reduce the number of men where there is a surplus of production." [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 370]. Today it makes more sense to talk about the use of bar codes to track demand.

Obviously, investment in branches of production with a high demand would be essential and this would be easily seen from collected statistics. Tom Brown states this obvious point: "Goods, as now, will be produced in greater variety, for workers like producing different kinds, and new models, of goods. Now if some goods are unpopular, they will be left on the shelves. . . Of other goods more popular, the shops will be emptied. Surely it is obvious that the assistant will decrease his order of the unpopular line and increase his order of the popular." [Syndicalism, p. 55]

The abolition of money is an ancient dream, the most radical demand of every social revolution for centuries past.

400BC: Hey all you thirsty people, though you've got no money, come to the water. Buy corn without money and eat. Buy wine without money and milk without price. (Isaiah).

1652: There shall be no buying and selling . . . If any man or family want grain or other provisions, they may go to the storehouse and fetch without money. (Gerrard Winstantley).

We must not suppose that it is therefore destined to remain a utopian dream. Today there is an entirely new element in the situation: Plenty.

All previous societies have been rationed societies, based on scarcity of food, clothing and shelter. The modern world is also a society of scarcity, but with a difference. Today's shortages are unnecessary; today's scarcity is artificial.

The world is haunted by a spectre - the spectre of Abundance. Only by planned waste and destruction on a colossal scale can the terrifying threat of Plenty be averted. Wine lakes, butter mountains, cars built to fall to pieces after less than 10 years, etc.

Money means rationing. It is only useful when there are shortages to be rationed. No one can buy or sell air: it's free because there is plenty of it around. Food, clothing, shelter and entertainment should be free as air. The only excuse for money is that there is not enough wealth to go round - not a valid excuse in a world which has developed the means of production to a level capable of satisfying everyone's needs.

If we made a list of all those occupations which would be unnecessary in a Moneyless World, jobs people now have to do which are entirely useless from a human point of view, we might begin as follows: Wages clerk, Tax assessor, Stockbroker, Insurance agent, Ticket puncher, Salesman, Accountant, Slot machine emptier, Industrial spy, Bank manager.

Of course, the itemising of those jobs which are financial does not end the catalogue of waste. All production today is carried on purely for profit. The profit motive often runs completely counter to human need. 'Built-in obsolescence' (planned shoddiness), the restrictive effects of the patents system, the waste of effort through duplication of activities by competing firms or nations - these are just a few of the ways in which profits cause waste.

What this amounts to is that perhaps up to ninety per cent of effort expended by human beings in the industrialised countries today is entirely pointless (an estimate by the Socialist Party of Great Britain). So it is quite ridiculous to talk about 'how to make sure people work if they're not paid for it'. If just ten per cent of the population worked, and the other ninety per cent stayed at home watching telly, we'd be no worse off than we are now.

But there would be no reason for them to watch telly all the time, because without the profit system work could be made enjoyable. Playing football or climbing mountains are not essentially any more enjoyable than building houses, growing food or programming computers. The only reason we think of some things as 'leisure' and others as 'work' is because we get used to doing some things because we want to and others because we have to.

In a moneyless world work would be a completely different affair. Those tasks that are unavoidably unhealthy or unpleasant, such as coalmining, would be automated or the jobs rotated so that that nobody has to stay doing an unpleasant job for the rest of their life.

But not every country will go anarchist at once. Although modern mass communications and easier travel will mean that the positive experience of the revolution will be known pretty quickly in most parts of the world, there will still be unevenness in the growth of the revolutionary movement.

In the period between, say, Western Europe making a revolution and the rest of the world catching up, how will we cope?

It's one thing to make non-exportable goods and services (like electricity, basic foodstuffs, housing, health and so on) free - but if everything is free what's to stop capitalists like Tesco sending their trucks over here to load up with our free foodstuffs?

I would suggest that we will need a customs service (or if we want to sound more radical, a workers inspection team!) to stop abuses like that.

We would also need money to trade with non-anarchist countries, and indeed to holiday there. But this would be a very minor part of everyday economic life for the average man or woman.

And what money we may need could have an expiry date after a few years, so that it could not be traded internally and hoarded.

These are the sorts of questions we should devote more time to if we are to move from being protesters at the injustice of capitalism to being the advocates of a system that our friends and neighbours will see as a realistic possibility.

---
A talk given by Alan MacSimoin to the Jack White branch in late 2005, first published on indymedia.ie

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Comments (7 of 7)

Freedom n Economy

by Sean Mallory - (WSM pers cap)

Sat Feb 04, 2006 12:42

Liz any question around the issue of freedom and in freedom I mean the real sense of the word(not as a concept as it is today) relvoves around the issue of the individual/collective freedom and acess to resources. these are inseperable when it comes to the issue of freedom.
We obviously can't seperate access of resources from freedom......are you really free when you can't afford or don't have time to be ( which is a realirty for alot of people today)? This is what liberal democracy does we are all free and equal except in relation to the economy and this is where exploitation begins. Exploitation is usually (but not always) rooted in the fact that there is an uneven access to resouces. People are coerced by the fact they have to access these essential and nonessential resources through other individuals or collectives.
So if we want to be free therefore surely we must have equal access to resources. If you individually own a nice peice of land with water etc. inequality, domination and cercion has already taken root. You now have power over me. Before I know it I'll be working for you cultivating your land to get wages to buy the food back off you. In my opinion this leaves us with no option to be free we need to get rid of concepts of ownership in the western sense of the word
On the other side of the coin you can't have equal access to resouces and the "social gains" we take about without freedom.
. This was attempted in nearly half of the globe over but I think your example of Cuba is very good as any other perhaps because in ways it may be the best of a bad lot stalinist states. You say
"Che guevara hoped for a whole different being in cuba, people who would be proud to give as much as they could to their society but he overestimated people's capacity and interests and worse he did not give them a choice in whether or not to participate in the experiment. "

He was offering a varity of authoritarian socialism which is in many respects is the other side of the same coin of Western Liberal Democracy. In words of Bakunin
"We are convinced that freedom without Socialism
is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is Slavery"
A new elite has siezed power and controls access to resources and show bias to their cronies- this is the Communist Party, instead of business and political classes here

Finally people always question that this concept of collective freedom cannot work. The largest example is the City of Barcelona in 1936 immediatley after the revolution. Many commentators (such as George Orwell) in the city at the time were amazed that the anarchist political organisation did not impact on the individual freedom and the ability to discuss atitudes (poitive or negative) towards the CNT or other powerful organisations in the city.

Re: Liz

by James

Fri Feb 03, 2006 14:04

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>>I'm wondering first of all why Libertarian Communists sometimes use 'Anarchism' as shorthand for ideas that may not be shared by all 'left libertarians' or 'anarchists' for example, although i believe strongly in horizontal organising i don't find your 'free society', or anyone ese's utopia very appealing, or even free.

Because anarchism and libertarian communism mean the same thing. The phrase libertarian communism was first used by anarchists to sidestep a ban on “anarchist” propaganda, it was used by the Spanish anarchists to describe their vision of a free society, and it’s the view of the vast, vast majority of anarchists both historically and today.
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>>not having a say over how goods i make are distributed or used sounds to me like the opposite of organising, controlling & taking responsibility for myself, my workplace and my community, which is what Anarchism means to me

And to me. And that’s not what Alan or anarchists say either. Anarchists are all for people having a say on matters in proportion to how much they affect a person. For internal organising of a workplace that is mostly the concern of the workers. For the goods produced, while they have a strong interest they do not have a monopoly on it as it affects wider society as well. Therefore wider society needs to have some means of inputting. We don’t want a rogue factory polluting the environment or building dangerous products.
----------------

>>and yet you have rejected collective or autonomous enterprises without explaining why other than because communism is now possible.

That’s not true. We just don’t think that autonomy or working together needs to be done in isolation from everyone else in society.
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>>co-ops that came out of occupied factories work very successfully in Argentina. the workers pay themselves a decent wage & support the community and are a model for what is immediately achievable by workers even within a 'free-market economy'.

Their achievement is admirable but inevitably limited in what can be achieved under capitalism.
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Liz
>how can 'society as a whole' own a product of labour?

No product is just the labour of, say, a factory. It also involves the labour of those who educated the workforce, the transport workers who get them there, the medical workers who keep 'em alive, the farmers who feed them etc. Therefore while the final link in the chain should have a say in how its products are used it shouldn’t be a disproportionate one and other sectors of society need to have input. I would say a model of community or neighbourhood councils is necessary for this.
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Liz
>>how could a system with no exchange exist in a capitalist world?

It can’t. It doesn’t.
Exchange or sharing isn’t the problem for communism. It’s exchanging for profit and by exploiting people.
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Liz
>>how would it be possible to prevent the appropriation of goods etc from people who aren't even managing them themselves?

It should be illegal, like theft, rape, murder etc. If the people doing it were cynical and trying to build up wealth in order to re-establish a leader and led society (a class society) then the workers’ and neighbourhood councils should prevent that. If people just have problems looking after themselves then society should take care of them by providing food, shelter, and all the rest of it.
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Liz
>>How could delegates be trusted to administer distribution? we already have a 'representative democracy' which isn't working. surely localization is the key where delegates are accountable to their communities and are recallable & rotated regularly

They shouldn’t be trusted. The assemblies or councils need to particpate and keep a watchful eye on them. And to rotate them regularly and recall if necessary. Localisation isn’t a prerequisite for anarchist organisation especially in this era of fast communication
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>>centralization has never worked. it's cumbersome, bureaucratic & wide open to abuse.

I agree.
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Liz
>if i've misunderstood this part & you're talking about small, local administrations how do they interact with each other who makes the final decisions where there's conflict or emergency decisions quickly?

I think it should operate on a federal system. IF there are different wishes between different sectors or areas then there is no reason that it can’t be solved by a process of negotiation. All policy decisions should be available to be ratified by the assemblies.
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Liz
>>as for 'to each according to their need and from each according to their ability' i've only seen that work on a very small scale,….

While that’s your experience it doesn’t invalidate libertarian communism for all time though. I would be shocked if anarchism was allowed by the state to prosper. The one time an in-depth experiment was attempted (in the 1930s) it was crushed by a combination of states. You haven’t provided any argument as to why Alan was incorrect to say that the productive ability, which can be organised in an anarchist way, could be turned for ethical use and to increase our leisure time to boot.
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Liz
>>as to the human nature argument ……etc

That’s a big stumbling block for a lot of people and one which merits a longer answer than I can give it right now. I’d hope that an anarchist society would be structured in a way that fosters responsibility and decency etc. Personally I have confidence that if a society as badly structured as capitalism (encouraging wastefulness, greed etc) manages to survive then an anarchist one will prosper. Capitalist leaders may survive by the gun and the indoctrination but society is only possible through the decency of most people.

In the society you are describing where are the people who don't want this?
People who want to be slaves or slave drivers can go to a specially allocated (and disarmed!) location. I always thought Britain would do nicely for this. 

>who would prefer to own their own land and do what they want on it?
No problem, good luck to them. I don’t think there will be that many though as it’s not in their interests imo. But it’s their call.
--------------

Liz:
i have a few queries, at the risk of being called either a liberal or a conservative.
in the comments not by you :). that 's the other discussion i'd like to have on indymedia & beyond, about how the risk of labelling is unfortunate as it ends debate instead of expanding it: 'of course you'd say that you're a liberal / reformist / commie!' which is an easy way of not taking a different point of view seriously which doesn't show the tolerance horizontal organising tries to demonstrate.

Well it depends. Sometimes labels are accurate and a useful short-hand. If they are used well and not to close off debate then what’s the big deal? Imo that’s more of a reflection of your general approach to rational thought, hence any coherent ideologies. I think they’re esential components of freedom. Anyway, that would be to restart another old topic I guess!

How can any such society be free?

by Albo

Thu Feb 02, 2006 18:48

It's difficult to see how any moneyless society such as the one you describe be free. You describe a utopian society in which everyone has everything they could need.

But even in the unlikely event that the structure could provide for everyone, what about things you want? Where is the right to choose? The whole point of money is that you can do what you want with it. Luxuries should be permitted. It's not a question of needing, it's a question of being free to do whatever you like whether you need it or not, even if it would make Lenin roll in his grave.

You say that the only reason we hate work as opposed to leisure activities is that we have to do work. But the other reason is that it is repetitive and interferes with our leisure time. Even if we used the job-rotation system you describe, how could you train everyone into each job at every rotation? And would this make it impossible to remain jobs which appeal to your interests?

What about taking a month off? I may be prepared to sacrifice a month's pay to take holidays and head off to another country. But under a communist system I would surely be duty-bound to work at something, my duty would be to the country rather than myself.

What about development? Without the demand of a money based society, why would anyone produce new inventions, or improve existing ones? Take the mobile phone for instance - Few can argue that the proliferation of mobile phones is a bad thing (except maybe the mast-haters, but that's another story). But without the lure of money made from them, how could they ever have reached the level of sophistication they have now? With no reward for research and development, the authorities would never have bothered to waste resources on it.

Sure there are flaws - plenty of them - in the capitalist system. For one, any overall increase in people's money simply results in inflation, thereby setting everyone back again... And it's the gap between rich and poor that's the deciding factor, not the amount of money itself. And you can also argue that many people can't afford the freedoms or the state-of-the-art developments I mentioned.

But these are problems of bad capitalism. Corruption, incompetence, bad managementm, dictatorships, gangsters, etc.

Both bad capitalism and bad communism are horrific thoughts, as we can see from history, or in the case of bad capitalism - still going on today.

Good communism, on the other hand, may have everyone getting what they need. But it still does not have the freedom or the development and advancement of society.

freedom to choose

by liz - not really

Thu Feb 02, 2006 11:21

Alan, thanks for going beyond what you are against and into what you are for, which is much more complicated and also brave. I 'm not looking for answers to all the questions below, just discussion on them. i had a similar idea to gareth- the dodginess of centralisation.

i have a few queries, at the risk of being called either a liberal or a conservative.
in the comments not by you :). that 's the other discussion i'd like to have on indymedia & beyond, about how the risk of labelling is unfortunate as it ends debate instead of expanding it: 'of course you'd say that you're a liberal / reformist / commie!' which is an easy way of not taking a different point of view seriously which doesn't show the tolerance horizontal organising tries to demonstrate.

as a disclaimer i don't have a solid understanding of the political theories of either anarchism or communism and am instead basing my questions & comments here on experience of horizontal ( non-hierarchical) organising.

I'm wondering first of all why Libertarian Communists sometimes use 'Anarchism' as shorthand for ideas that may not be shared by all 'left libertarians' or 'anarchists' for example, although i believe strongly in horizontal organising i don't find your 'free society', or anyone ese's utopia very appealing, or even free.

not having a say over how goods i make are distributed or used sounds to me like the opposite of organising, controlling & taking responsibility for myself, my workplace and my community, which is what Anarchism means to me. instead i think empowerment means people taking complete responsibility for their activities and yet you have rejected collective or autonomous enterprises without explaining why other than because communism is now possible. co-ops that came out of occupied factories work very successfully in Argentina. the workers pay themselves a decent wage & support the community and are a model for what is immediately achievable by workers even within a 'free-market economy'.

how can 'society as a whole' own a product of labour? how could a system with no exchange exist in a capitalist world? how would it be possible to prevent the appropriation of goods etc from people who aren't even managing them themselves? How could delegates be trusted to administer distribution? we already have a 'representative democracy' which isn't working. surely localization is the key where delegates are accountable to their communities and are recallable & rotated regularly. centralization has never worked. it's cumbersome, bureaucratic & wide open to abuse. if i've misunderstood this part & you're talking about small, local administrations how do they interact with each other who makes the final decisions where there's conflict or emergency decisions quickly? & how to interact with States that have a different system? such a place would need to be completely self-sufficient and capable of defending itself . again cuba is the closest example, yet written off as not properly communist. how could it be done differently?

as for 'to each according to their need and from each according to their ability' i've only seen that work on a very small scale, for short periods of time under extreme or unusual circumstances eg free festivals, activist camps, like G8 summits & environmental campaigns and 'intentional communities' in the U.S. which are set up around environmental, political or religious/spiritual beliefs.i've also seen it work well materially but not allow for personal control, responsibility and freedom as in Cuba. personally i want the freedom to give what i can & take what i need but i would resist handing over those responsibilities to any administration, delegated or otherwise.

as to the human nature argument , libraries and books are very different examples to energy and food or any resources people might have to compete for or which they believe to be scarce .yes people can be very generous when not forced to be eg giving more if an event is by donation. contrast that with how many people take no responsibility for their actions. are you suggesting that basic problems of how humans tend to behave will disappear in a 'free society'? in our society personal responsibility is not encouraged but assuming that these problems disappear in a libertarian society may be naive. che guevara hoped for a whole different being in cuba, people who would be proud to give as much as they could to their society but he overestimated people's capacity and interests and worse he did not give them a choice in whether or not to participate in the experiment.

in the society you are describing where are the people who don't want this? who don't want to go to meetings? who would prefer to own their own land and do what they want on it? who have no interest in communism? what happens to them? are they unnecessary? bottom line for me is diversity of tactics and ideas where there is no overarching ideology and solutions are created by the people who need them and are specific to their situation. the zapatista model , which encourages all to think of their own solutions may be the closest i can think of to this. i wouldn't want to live in a world with one system or ideology, no matter how good, even if it were possible. no one system has the answers.

Addendum

by Gareth

Wed Feb 01, 2006 19:02

Also, I should mention that your article skirts around the whole morass associated with the centralisation issue. Centralisation inevitably involves the secession of power and less direct worker control over the means of production, and what is produced. Bureaucratisation leads to the formation of a mandarin class of administrators (not to mention the dangers of a brahmin class of intellectuals). To my mind, control of the means of production should not be moved away from workers to spectral governing authorities. The greater the degree of delegation, the greater the loss of autonomy. Basically, I don't want to tell people what to do and I don't want people telling me what to do. I want to reach these decisions within my own community, in light of the interests of other communities. I should stress that I am critiquing a position with which I have a close affinity, with which, in fact, I partly agree. These questions and debates aren't as cut-and-dried as people sometimes would like to think. We should remain fluid and open in all our thoughts and interactions.

Some thoughts

Wed Feb 01, 2006 18:43

I would like you to expand on how exactly "That may have made sense when the productive forces were only in their lower stages of development, but now capitalism has created the conditions which makes communist economy a realistic option.". The productive forces may now be overdeveloped, but this overdevelopment is based on the stimulation of pseudo-needs in consumer-citizens. Replacing the ideological hegemony of individualistic ideologies based around the model of the 'good life' structured by the accumulation of aestheticised commodities, is a major obstacle to any radically progressive model of society that does not confine itself to utopian thought (which is valid in itself, but that's another argument). Although negative gestures have definite value and place in the struggle, positive gestures: the (re)creation of communal spaces, clubs, workshops, dual power, reading groups, cooperative farms - our own semiautonomous zones, known collectively as dual power, are sometimes overlooked. That's not to say we shouldn't be bricking empty mcdonald's, sabotaging atms, and participating in the struggle on the street, but rather that people should be aware of the media caricature of the wantonly destructive and angry 'anarchist' and its alienatory effect, sublating as it does the compassionate and liberatory nature of the struggle. Revolutionary praxis does not lend itself to too-tidy anwers and solutions. There is no one true liberatory solution or theory that can guide us forward on the path - (social) life is just too complex, although that is not to say that we shouldn't orientate ourselves according to the individuals and collectives that have come before us. I'm sorry if I've wandered rather far from your article, Alan, but these are just some of the series of thoughts it stimulated.

Further comment on moneyless society talk

by Terry

Wed Feb 01, 2006 18:05

There was some further comments generated as a result of a report back on this talk which took place on 22nd Nov 2005 over on Anarkismo. URL below.

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