what if?
what if?
what if?
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
Yes I think the point is the entirely missed by others.
This all just sounds like a free market, or anarcho capitalism, or really just anarchy. Horseshoe theory, and all that...
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.
What if the person gets so busy, he gets another person to help him with the trades in exchange for a fixed amount?
If a person A, who already started a business, hires someone (Person B)to work for a fixed amount, than it is has to be only a share of what that person contributes. Otherwise, if the fixed amount is equal to contributing value of the person B, Person A would not gain anything and would not hire him in the first place. Ergo, from the value the worker, Person B, creates, Person A will take some funds for the development and maintenance of the production (material, rent, taxes etc.), and will keep a portion for himself. At that point, that is exploitation, because the Person B gets only a fraction of what he had earned due to the Person A.
Communists are a huge and diverse ideological group, therefore there are at least two different camps to this. Either you nationalize everything and run the economy from the planned position, therefore (through proxy), turning all companies into public property, or the other (my) camp, in which every worker who works at a business is, after a trial time, given the exactly same share as all other workers and has voting right in how the company is managed. Part of his pay still go for the maintenance and growth, but most goes to him as the owner of his own labor.
Then so be it, but it seems like it would be beneficial to do so
I could go out in the woods right now and try to live on my own, but I'd have a much better time in a community with other people
If an individual wants to gain an individual benefit from their work instead of giving it to the community, what would prevent them from bartering for more personal good than they'd get otherwise?
Sharing one's fruits with the community not only benefits the community itself, but the individual as well. This is anarcho-communism. I'm not the best person to describe it since I'm not that knowledgeable about politics, but I'd encourage you to read The Conquest of Bread, it's actually a pretty straightforward read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
Well then they do not get the benefits of society? Idk im not Communist but that seems like the best option to me
What keeps individuals from benefiting from society without contributing to it? Who determines appropriate contributions? I don't know if you can do that in an anarchical framework
The community itself would make those decisions in a way that works for them. Us telling them in the future now from the past how to live their lives is tyrannical
The community themselves decide. If it's enough of a problem, the community will organize to address it how they see fit. That's the whole point of anarchism. We don't have all the answers and we don't claim to, the people that run into these issues will find the solutions that best suites their needs.
Valid point... Didn't account for the anarchy part
Than he/she keeps it. You just can't keep others work...
I mean sure, but what we have now are people not sharing the fruits of other people's labor. Your favorite billionaire did not earn that wealth through their own labor.
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.
Wondering how they expect to have the ability to produce anything to be their fruits if they refuse to cooperate with society
Communism isn’t just about division of labour so fruits are spread equally, and is far more about the worker getting screwed in the deal that is capitalism, and a better way to actually divide the fruits of labour so the people actually DOING everything get a fair share.
Capitalists and their supporters won’t read any actual books about this that aren’t written by other capitalists and their shills generally, and it’s far more complex and has many different ideas of how this works even within strictly communist circles, so whatever. People just gonna do buzz lines and memes because of what Ben Shapiro said on Joe Rogan this week or whatever, and I get why it’s so much easier to do that, because theory is boring and exhausting, but it is frustrating to see sometimes.
They will be lined up with the other anti-revolutionaries.
I think "his labor" and how you define it is the key here. For example it's different if it's an individual or the manager of a factory.
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?
Well, that's new.
Anarchism is a sub-ideology of communism that seeks to abolish all kind of unjustified hierarchy, including capitalism. It's the farthest left ideology.
"Anarcho-capitalist" is a strange concept that's very recent and only seem to exist in the USA, that tries to reimagine feudalism in the industrial age, meaning that very rich people are free to have their own army and own massive area of land, where people living there will subjected to the laws of that lord, with no possibility to remove them through voting. It really doesn't have anything in common with anarchy.
You can read more on the wikipedia page, it seems to be pretty good.
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.
But who would bare the cost of goods held in common to avoid the tragedy of the commons?
Your goose will die if it tries to survive alone. Individualism doesn't work.