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aiwendil wrote

I try to live this way also, but I think in the US, because it is hyper-capitalist makes it very difficult and the last 10 years here has seen a push to criminalize and enforce any behavior that would allow you to live outside the system in any way. I still spend a lot of time in the woods in shelters that I have built myself and try to live outside of the system in any way that I can, but I guess I don't feel that collectivism and individualism have to be so mutually exclusive that they become reactions to the other. I think it would certainly benefit everybody(save maybe the robber barons) if certain resources were collectivized, including individualists. I also think that anarcho-communism can allow for personal property, while collectivizing things that are currently considered private property. The distinction being that it is possible to own certain things, without denying those resources to other people. The classic argument here being the collectivized toothbrush thing that ancaps always bring up. I don't think anybody envisions a society in which we are all swapping one toothbrush because we've collectivized the toothbrush(maybe some tankies would be into this idea, but I'm certainly not). Like I think you can still have some sense of ownership of your home/shelter, provided that the way you've built it is not denying access to other people(like if you decided to build your home in the middle of a street for example, or you chopped down endangered trees to build it). I think maybe we need to make more room for things like this philosophically while allowing for collectivization of things such as the means of production.

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