Forums of the Libertarian Left

Individualist: If wage labor is exploitation and capitalists are just parasites who live by paying workers less than their full product, why should I trade a boss who siphons off, say, 20 percent of my labor for a "community" that siphons off 100 percent, and gives me only minimal input into who to give it to and how it should be directed?

Likely responses:

1. Because you voluntarily join the commune and contribute.

Individualist: Wage labor is voluntary, and you don't consider that a sufficient justification.

2. The majority agrees.

Individualist: So if a greater number of people want to fuck me, does that entitle them to just go ahead and rape me, or do they still need my consent? How about forcing me to work and produce for them in the first place, instead of redistributing my product after it's been created? Why is mutual consent so absolutely necessary in some areas but not others?

Although it pains me to admit it, I think you've got a good point there. I'll ask an anarcho-communist for his comments on this.

You are missing the point of Anarcho-Communism. It is not about syphoning anything you make (ie taking your stuff). Under Communism (Authoritarian Communism is an oxymoron btw) you always have whatever you need and you simply use your skills to fulfill the needs of others. More simply, you choose to give away whatever you produce in exchange for getting anything you want. The only restriction is that you cannot have something which would lead to inequality, ie you cannot accumulate capital.

db0 wrote:You are missing the point of Anarcho-Communism. It is not about syphoning anything you make (ie taking your stuff). Under Communism (Authoritarian Communism is an oxymoron btw) you always have whatever you need and you simply use your skills to fulfill the needs of others. More simply, you choose to give away whatever you produce in exchange for getting anything you want. The only restriction is that you cannot have something which would lead to inequality, ie you cannot accumulate capital.

What sort of inequality? Socio-economic? Political?

wombatron wrote:
What sort of inequality? Socio-economic? Political?

All of them.

I've often commended to db that I don't see the difference between his anarcho-communism and mutualism. Maybe this issue is the means to examine those differences.

Want to put an anarcho-commie in trouble (at least a vulgar one)?

It's pretty simple, go to some infoshop.com forum and just ask them how do you get a pencil in a anarcho-commie society!

Seriously, recently I've seen this in a Brazilian forum, and none was capable of answering this simple question...

"I, Pencil" them, huh?

I believe that criticism of the vulgar anarcho-communists is warranted. But I also think that some of them could be brought over to a more reasonable position via Bakunin.

Soviet Onion wrote:Individualist: If wage labor is exploitation and capitalists are just parasites who live by paying workers less than their full product, why should I trade a boss who siphons off, say, 20 percent of my labor for a "community" that siphons off 100 percent, and gives me only minimal input into who to give it to and how it should be directed?

It would be nice to know what actual anarchist-communists of any note actually propose anything of this sort. Otherwise, this just seems like a rather weak straw-man.

Most communists, anarchist or otherwise, are likely to begin -- as mutualists and some other market anarchists might as well -- by reminding the "individualist" of the social nature of most production, including the "production" of the laborer, a little thing which complicates the "full product" questions considerably. Kropotkin was attempting to be consistent in the application of the anarchist critique of property, and thought that the collectivist anarchists had left themselves in a contradiction. He was probably wrong; Bakunin's crowd were probably on something like the right track, when it came to applying the implications of Proudhon's "collective force" critique of property. But that's a complicated way to be "right," since we know the twists and turns of Proudhon's thoughts on property.

There is nothing in any of the anarchist-communist proposals I am aware of that justifies the claims being made that anarchist-communism necessarily "siphons off 100 percent." The common consumption of common labor leaves itself open to questions about how it will work, and how it will deal with free riders, but that's a different set of questions.

To be honest I sometimes do not understand the anarchist communists' critique of property, because I don't understand what they mean by the word property. As I read in Anarchist FAQ they don't mean houses, food, clothing, and justly acquired wealth (via not exploitation), these things are called possession. Mutualists call these things property, but they essentially agree with communists with what is just.

The question is: Will an individualist anarchist society look much different than a anarcho-communist one? Of course not. I'm led to believe that it is semantics fucking it up once again, and the fact that communists want to make a critique of anything that smells capitalism. This leads them to overemphasize the differences between individualist and socialist anarchist, because we use the word "free market" which they think equates "capitalism". But anyone can say them that as "state ownership" is not "communism" so they deserve free market ,even if they dislike it as an idea, justice.

Generally anarcho-communism is very appealing to a lot would-be-Marxists, so that's why some of them are so vulgar.

Here in Greece however Anarcho-communists have a very bad relationship with Marxist Communists (so much that they don't call themshelves communists anymore).

DennisV wrote:To be honest I sometimes do not understand the anarchist communists' critique of property, because I don't understand what they mean by the word property.

We mean the concept of possesing something you do not use yourself. You use your house. You use your clothes and your food. You do not use "your" factory. You do not use the house you rent out.

More simply, we do not recognise private property of the (non-trivial) means of production.

PS: In Greece, those Marxist Communists are not "Marxist", they are mostly Stalinist which is quite a different thing. Sure, they appropriated the word, similar to how US MInarchist-Capitalists are trying to appropriate "libertarianism", but that does not really make it correct.

DennisV wrote:Generally anarcho-communism is very appealing to a lot would-be-Marxists, so that's why some of them are so vulgar.

In my experience usually it's the other way around. Many Marxists are attracted to libertarian Communist because there seems to be a sort of disenfranchisement with Marxism among some of its supporters. The problem is they bring in their Marxist bias to the Anarchist position making them more vulgar and when combined with platformism, the result isn't always the friendliest to differing opinion. These are usually the loudest. Although, that being said, many Marxists loathe Anarchism in its totality, and I have seen Marxist publications that have described Anarchists as 'infantile'.

But of course, I'm not suggesting this applies to all Anarcho-Communists.

db0 wrote:
We mean the concept of possesing something you do not use yourself. You use your house. You use your clothes and your food. You do not use "your" factory. You do not use the house you rent out.

Who gets to determine if you are using something or not? How about a room in my house where I seldom go - like a study. What about if I take a long vacation?

How about a second home that I visit on the weekends - am I using that?

AndrewKemendo wrote:

db0 wrote:
We mean the concept of possesing something you do not use yourself. You use your house. You use your clothes and your food. You do not use "your" factory. You do not use the house you rent out.

Who gets to determine if you are using something or not? How about a room in my house where I seldom go - like a study. What about if I take a long vacation?

How about a second home that I visit on the weekends - am I using that?

Look around, Andrew. We've been through all this stuff, over and over again.

Not this again?

I was at the library the other day. I left my stuff on a table and went to look for a book. When I came back an hour later, my stuff was still there. I'm still freaked out about it. It...it just can't be. Why on Earth didn't people just assume I had abandoned it? So I just re-homesteaded it and went home.

shawnpwilbur wrote:

AndrewKemendo wrote:

db0 wrote:
We mean the concept of possesing something you do not use yourself. You use your house. You use your clothes and your food. You do not use "your" factory. You do not use the house you rent out.

Who gets to determine if you are using something or not? How about a room in my house where I seldom go - like a study. What about if I take a long vacation?

How about a second home that I visit on the weekends - am I using that?

Look around, Andrew. We've been through all this stuff, over and over again.

I guess I am just missing it then. Can you point me to the definitive answer?

neverfox wrote:I was at the library the other day. I left my stuff on a table and went to look for a book. When I came back an hour later, my stuff was still there. I'm still freaked out about it. It...it just can't be. Why on Earth didn't people just assume I had abandoned it? So I just re-homesteaded it and went home.

and if you had left it for a week or a month?

...don't worry I'm working on the other thread too.

AndrewKemendo wrote:I guess I am just missing it then. Can you point me to the definitive answer?

"Definitive answer"? I'll leave that to someone who thinks there are definitive answers to such questions. Occupancy and abandonment pretty much always seem to be, in practice, more-or-less local conventions. But we did have a fairly lengthy discussion, Summer/vacation house and mutualism, back in November. There's some stuff that seems simply beside the point to me, such as attempts to reduce mutualism to some form of registration system, but there's also a lot of pretty concrete treatment of some of the ways that use-based property rights might play out.

That was a good thread. I learned a lot and cleared up some of my own confusions.

A definitive answer to the question of abandonment may be achievable with a definition of "abandonment."

To abandon:

1. To withdraw one's support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one's claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

The obvious connecting thread is a yielding, a "letting go." So with regards to property, this clearly means ceasing occupancy without the intent of returning.

There's no way to judge intent, unless you can read minds, so we need to judge actions. If a property owner returns to their property, they obviously intended to return. In general, that means their claim of ownership must be respected.

If a person tracks their property down and demands it back, it was by definition not abandoned, and what the current occupant/user has done is theft. The question under which circumstances do we disregard this claim as spurious is a tricky one, and the only moral way to resolve it is by mutually-contracted arbitration.

John Higgins wrote:A definitive answer to the question of abandonment may be achievable with a definition of "abandonment."

To abandon:

1. To withdraw one's support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one's claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

The obvious connecting thread is a yielding, a "letting go." So with regards to property, this clearly means ceasing occupancy without the intent of returning.

There's no way to judge intent, unless you can read minds, so we need to judge actions. If a property owner returns to their property, they obviously intended to return. In general, that means their claim of ownership must be respected.

If a person tracks their property down and demands it back, it was by definition not abandoned, and what the current occupant/user has done is theft. The question under which circumstances do we disregard this claim as spurious is a tricky one, and the only moral way to resolve it is by mutually-contracted arbitration.

This is only "definitive" in the sense that it involves dictionaries. "Ceasing occupancy without intent of returning," even if it cleared up all of our other questions, only throws us back into the question of defining "occupancy" and "ownership." But it really doesn't answer our questions, for some of the reasons you have noted. If we are to judge actions, then why isn't the apparent abandonment as significant as the return? Arguably, it is not a "property owner" who returns. After all, the nature of property is one of the things contested by the various schools of anarchism.

shawnpwilbur wrote:

AndrewKemendo wrote:I guess I am just missing it then. Can you point me to the definitive answer?

"Definitive answer"? I'll leave that to someone who thinks there are definitive answers to such questions. Occupancy and abandonment pretty much always seem to be, in practice, more-or-less local conventions. But we did have a fairly lengthy discussion, Summer/vacation house and mutualism, back in November. There's some stuff that seems simply beside the point to me, such as attempts to reduce mutualism to some form of registration system, but there's also a lot of pretty concrete treatment of some of the ways that use-based property rights might play out.

Thanks. I'll take a look at that.

I have had to debate this so much with capitalists that just seeing the question being raised again makes me want to throw up. Can't we just make a FAQ or something?