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what if?
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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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.
People will volunteer to do the job because it is something they (and everyone) needs done. People won't let their entire community collapse because people "didn't want to do it". But these unsavory jobs would theoretically also spark innovation to make the jobs more bearable and probably even unneeded. Better working conditions and more free time leaves time for people to do things like invent and think.
I did volunteer work in several associations. From personal experience I can tell you that "someone will do it, a volunteer will rise" should not be relied upon. I have seen many instances of tasks that everyone was aware of, and yet no one wanted to do; even though they were important. At the end of the day, guess who completed them? The president of the association, because that's their responsibility ultimately; until they got sick of always doing these tasks so they did not want to be president again the next year.
In the case of a society where no one is responsible for given tasks, I can only guess that vital tasks would be left undone and the whole society would be collapsing. Imagine getting your electricity cut each day of "insert your most favorite celebration here" because no one felt like working during celebration day. Imagine fire becoming widespread and burning every building because at that particular day, there were not enough people with fireman skills around to extinguish the initial fire
We need to have assigned roles and responsibilities based on our skills. How do we do that in a world where you can say "Na, I know I'm the only expert on this available right now, but I don't feel like doing it today" and get away with it?
I believe people are like this due to the conditions they live in. Capitalism is a system that encourages selfishness in order to survive. I whole heartedly believe that if conditions changed, people would change. Not immediately of course. No anarchist is saying that it wouldn't be a rough transition, or that it's a flawless society, or any of that. But we do think that it would work and that it'd be better in the long run than what we have rn
Good on you to believe that. It's really sweet that you have so much faith in people.
... I don't. Look at any society on Earth. Pre-capitalism, feudal, the celts, medieval japan, whatever. Shit ain't rosy, in fact shit really fucking sucks and people suck and too many of them will mooch and rape and steal and trick and kill and endlessly seek to achieve absolute power over others if they're allowed to. That's a basic fact of human nature.
To pretend it's capitalism's fault that some people are awful to others or complete freeloaders, is just an insult to those people's intelligence of free will. A lot of people just suck, they don't need excuses.
IDK, it's not like I much care to have this conversation to be honest. It is a purely academic study of a (imo) overly utopist viewpoint, because the vast majority of people either aren't "good" in the way that you think everyone is (i.e. they know they wouldn't be a good member of an anarchist society, so they deduce that other people would be either), or they don't have such faith in their peers due to experience. Either way this is the fundamental reason why anarchism never has, and never will, take off on a large scale, regardless of how much you theorycraft it and try to explain it. Anarchists just disagree, fundamentally, with everyone else on the very nature of humankind.
Easily fixed through voluntary association in the interest of everyone. Stuff could work along the lines of everyone who wants to benefit from thing x must contribute to thing x when it comes to essential but undesirable jobs. You want sewage? You sign up for sewage. Everybody who does, has a week assigned where they must do the necessary maintainance for that utility. In practice, since so many people want sewage, it would end up once every few years. Moreover, these associations could federate and make it so that contributing to those that are shorthanded could exempt you from others. Say, you have the necessary electrical knowledge to work on that system but hate maintaining sewage. You could work on that celebration day when nobody wants to work and in exchange you are exempt from sewage duty.
If someone doesn't want to contribute in any way to society, that person won't benefit from society. It's another thing if someone cannot do anything, but those people are very few. Even those who are bed bound can contribute in some ways.
So I'm supposed to learn everything about sewer maintinence before this week, or are we throwing untrained people at critical infrastructure simply because they want to use it? And what then if I also want food, transportation, a computer, cat food, smokeables, drinkables, shelter, etc? Do I have to become an expert in all of those things too and work in those to get food, shelter, etc? Have to churn butter for a week if I want access to the butter store, and make bread for a week to get access to the bread lines, then I can make toast?
Personally I'd prefer if there was some way to make what I make or do what I do, exchange those items or services for some thing with an agreed upon value, which I can in turn take to the store and trade for bread and butter.
Goods are not the only form of incentive. The jobs that nobody wants to do would have more people doing them for less time. For example you can be a graphic designer for 1 year or work the sewer for 1 month.
(Everything you are about to read, put a grain of salt in it, and go read about the system of work in the Inca empire and connections to communism. I'm not saying it was the same thou)
The Inca empire functioned something like this.
And why they where successful.
The people did all sorts of work, throught the year and in turns.
So all shared the labor and the benefits of the labor.
There was still the central "state" in the emperor dictating what to do and when to do it. But i think AI will replace that in the future saying where the production needs to go (besides olygarchies, a problem of capitalism is inefficiency, a lot of food going to waste instead to the millions going through hunger. Vacant mansions while people sleep in the streets).
I don't work because of money.
I need it, I live in a capitalist system.
But i work in public function, I do a lot of schedules in the public pools, the public gym, and the cultural center with theater, exposions, cinema and also the school gym after hours with sport teams from associations and clubs.
I clean in most of those places, receptionist work in all, have the keys to everything (they trust me).
All this to say:
Do to to the system we live in and all the shit I went through (disease, deaths in the family) i have a depression.
I am taking medication and see a doctor.
But the work, helps me get throught it better.
I wake in the morning to open the place I have on schedule, besides the depression, to assist, and serve and connect.
I do a lot of places and/or schedules that no one wants, holidays, some weekends.
That gives me a lot of extra hours.
I take time went i need. Mostly when my grandma needs ๐
I dont get paid extra, and i don't care, but i always try to show perspective to people.
Be it here or in the everyday life.
I remeber being afraid of factory automation and what that would do to the work force, specially in my town, where hundreds or a few thousands work in factories.
What and idiot...those people could live their lifes. Enjoy it, the factory itself produces the products.
Even better, if i need a door for the car I downloaded in the comunal printer 10 years ago, or the one i have at home, I just print another door, recycling the material of the damaged one.
But it's difficult to make people understand what communism even is, when they think the capitalist factory of the world where Apple produces their planed obsulence products and workers, wich are not owner of the means off production, and hrow themselves from the factory roofs wich such frequency, that they put webs to catch them...is comunist...where the f### is China commist.
Don't words have meaning?
I'm sorry.
Stay safe everyone.
We will do it because we benefit ourselves from having this infrastructure. Certainly the people who first conceived of these systems were passionate about sewer maintenance, no?
The difference is we will not need to coerce people into working 8 or 12 hour shifts, so we would also have more time to devote to other interests and become more well-rounded individuals than we are under capitalism. We see things like sewer maintenance as undesirable drudgery because of how that work manifests under our current system.
You're thinking about all this from a capitalist point of view, in which we have to be coerced into being productive. You're failing to see this through the lens of an actual anarchist/communist society. You assume the same inequities would just carry over. The whole point is to eliminate these hierarchies altogether.
And yes, I do think people would be willing to do these things. I'm not above it myself.
I don't subscribe to this cynical view of human nature, nor do I subscribe to the belief that hierarchies are natural or inevitable. Even the classic example of hierarchies in nature -- wolves -- only exhibit hierarchical behavior in captivity. Moreover, we are uniquely intelligent animals who don't need to be bound by the same shortcomings that lesser intelligent animals exhibit instinctually.
Hierarchies are certainly not desirable and create more problems than they are able to solve.
The resentment you described is also a product of our current system and is the very sort of thing that anarcho-communism would address, and which state-based systems and capitalism invariably fail to do and even exacerbate.
This is not to say there would not be people with specific training, expertise, experience, and interests. For instance, I wouldn't see a piano tuner to treat a gaping wound. One false assumption I often see people make is that expertise = hierarchy, which is simply not true.
Also consider that the nature of infrastructure may look different than what we have now. Many of our current models are highly wasteful and inefficient.
No one expects any of this to happen overnight by the way.
If you're really interested, I found this to be an excellent read and surprisingly easy to grasp, even for someone like me: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
You can honestly just scroll to the sections that concern you. I had many of the same concerns that you had, but the more I read, the more I see how this could really work. (I'm not a political expert by the way, so I may not be describing all this as well as someone else could. I've also been trying to learn more about anarcho-primitivism, which has its own answers to these questions. Regardless, I think most of us agree that the current system is bad, so we're looking for better alternatives.)
There is a gap between conceiving a system and maintaining it. Sure, there are architects who conceived sewers. But I doubt they went inside to maintain it on a regular basis.
Yes I do. I have a job many consider repulsive, yet I'm very passionate about your mom.
I felt really smart when I did it. Getting the job took many hours of study, and careful listening. She was an uncommon woman, but I have a PhD in pussy. My arguement can't be debunked.
People might not be passionate about sewer maintenance, but they are about having working sewage disposal. And hey, those shitty jobs in this dynamic are valued more highly because most don't want to do it. I think that's a good thing.
Anarchists don't believe in a state. That does not only mean that we don't believe in the government. It also means we do not see use in the centralisation of power and responsibility. This is a good example of that.
In an anarchist society, there would be no sewage workers and other job-havers. We would live in communities, where everyone takes up partial responsibility for the maintenance of the community. You might not want to commit eight hours a day to do sewage work, but what about four hours a week of dirty work? Elinor Ostrom did a lot of research into common pool resources that has shown under certain circumstances everyone does buy in.
We already allocate some work towards parts of our job we do not like (hell, pretty sure loads of people people spend more time in traffic than it would require). It's not that big of a stretch to believe we would do so in maintaining community infrastructure. Especially if it is a shared responsibility. Even people who work "dirty jobs" full time tend to have high job satisfaction as long as they have good work conditions and a strong sense of community and collaboration.
Failing that, social systems can regulate labour through camaraderie and expectation of reciprocity. If someone does not pull their weight in a relationship, you talk about it and set boundaries. In an anarchist society, you would do the same. You want to be part of the community? You better be doing your bit to help or you aren't welcome.
Not everyone has to be passionate about it. You could devise a sort of lottery system for jobs that can't be automated and suck, where everyone will have to do that job for a set amount of time. People do these jobs for 40 hours a week now because they know it's necessary for their own survival, so I personally don't feel like it's far-fetched to think that people would okay with doing a certain job for way less time a week, knowing that in a few weeks or however long they'll never have to do it anymore because their name is now gone from the lottery pool, because they know it's necessary for the survival of society (and thus also themselves).
You could do that. You could also make it a bit more nuanced, where the pool of people only consists of people doing non-vital work. So maybe doctors and nuclear engineers and firefighters and teachers could be excluded, while only people doing non-vital work get rotated in, and it wouldn't be such a big deal if one person is missing for a couple of weeks or months. Nobody is gonna die if you have to wait a bit longer to get your hair cut or your house painted or to see that new movie, and there would be an understanding that you have to wait a bit longer because important work is being done. You'd also have so many people who are freed up from useless or destructive work like ceo's, finance, middle managers, marketing, etc that maybe you wouldn't even notice if someone got rotated in, because everyone else could just pick up like 3 extra hours a week for a little while.
I'm not sure the problem is so trivial.
Long before the existence of IP, people who developed something new would keep their manufacturing process secret in order to prevent competition. Even today, sometimes they still do (in fact, the purpose of patents is to discourage trade secrets).
Now suppose someone invents a new medicine, or a new alloy, or a new machine, or a new algorithm, and refuses to tell anyone how it was made or how it works.
And suppose reverse engineering isn't feasible. Maybe it's too much work considering the value of the product (nobody is interested in reverse engineering your particular favorite shampoo). Or maybe the machine uses sufficiently strong encryption to prevent its reproduction. Or maybe there is some other obstacle.
Again, before modern capitalism these problems were the norm. If you wanted a very particular product, you often had no choice but to find a very particular provider.
As before, at what point does paying someone to help make such a product become exploitation?
You're still missing a chore part of the point. In most/all of the world today and in history, when you make something new, your reward is dependent on stopping other people making or selling the same thing without paying you. It therefore makes sense to keep things secret. People don't even always do that, though - if you look at GitHub or Thingiverse, you'll see loads of people giving the right to use their intellectual property away for free. Reasons for that vary, but some are similar to how people would theoretically think under anarcho-communism. Some examples include:
As for things that aren't generating intellectual property, and just involve doing labour, the idea is that there'll be enough people upset by something not getting done that they'll do it proactively. E.g. some people will want to take a look at the sewers once a week to check for blockages because they're worried their drains might overflow of they don't. It's not too different to people volunteering to clean up community spaces today, except people wouldn't have to do it on topa of a day job. If that gets too annoying, people will invent new tools to make it easier or totally automate it, whereas they'd have instead been inventing whatever their manager thought would please investors under the current system.
A cultural shift where nearly everyone agreed this was a good way to do things would be necessary, but it's not like they're aren't examples of the same ideas working in the real world.
You missed the third camp. Anarcho-communists would hate both of these solutions.
Nationalizing the economy goes against anarchist ideals due to nationalizing means giving it to the government (entirely contrary to anarchist thought). The second one, even after the "trial period", has ended is still taking the fruits of your labor. Under anarchism, there are no companies. They are free associations of workers. The workers who work the capital own the capital. And there isn't money, that's contrary to communism and no matter how you split it money is unegalitarian. A worker keeps what he wants from his labor, and communalizes the rest. And is thus entitled to what he needs from the community.
Edit: Rojava is also not an anarchist project. At best it's a libertarian socialist project. And I've never heard of this "trial period" stuff in anything I've ever read about and anarchist example