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  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Wondering how they expect to have the ability to produce anything to be their fruits if they refuse to cooperate with society

  • 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.

86 comments