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celebratedrecluse wrote

Hm. this seems based in the logic of scarcity, which is fundamental to capitalism/malthusian thought

I'm not saying the general point you're making is illegitimate. But you're not engaging with the nuances of the argument you're opposing (ancom).

For example, a key anarchist communist argument is that waste/endless growth imperative is created at least partially by capitalism. If decision making was localized in workers or in some other collectivized social unit, where a discourse of environmental consciousness was cultivated, ancoms might argue that people would choose to produce only what is needed and then split up equitably the needed produce. Thus producing a lot less waste, and a lot less work, than a commodity based consumer economy.

But you don't really acknowledge this in the OP. didnt read this entire thread, maybe someone else brought this up and you acknowledged it. However I'm just saying that the initial OP is weaker for having chosen to not engage with the actual ancom argument, and instead mischaracterize what a lot of those people are saying.

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

Arguments like this basically come down to "no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so".

I reject that line of thinking because it's wistful idealism that has had no real world model since Kropotkin wrote about it in 1892 that has come close to demonstrating its feasibility.

Industry cannot be made "green" any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods and distribute them to millions / billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems. Ancoms are not magical beings that can somehow escape the consequences of this because they're supposedly "good".

But you don't really acknowledge this in the OP.

I don't acknowledge it because, much like the "we'll all dedicate our days to laboring and give the results of our labor away for free to any random stranger that wants it" claim, I don't consider it at all realistic. If anarcho-communism were attempted, half the "nuances" it supposedly has will be thrown out the window for being fantastic. Compromises will be made to make the system functional.

A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because a) resources aren't infinite, b) industrial output has a high 'hidden' cost and most importantly: c) labor isn't voluntary.

People labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories in "a communist society" is if they are forced to by the system. No hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes. It's something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system. Industry is a clear authority and anarcho-communist theory is completely oblivious to that.

ancoms might argue that people would choose to produce only what is needed

That word; "needed" is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being "needed" when almost none of the things defined as such are actually needed. This is why anarcho-communism isn't tenable: anything and everything will be defined as "needed" by civilized people, no matter how authority-forming the things are if it means they get to keep consuming.

This "needed industry" argument is a lot like the "justified authority" argument modern ancoms keep making to justify everything all the way up to states and police forces. It's meaningless. People thrived without industry and agriculture for millennia.

Industry and agriculture have led to the extinction of near everything on the planet. 99.9% of industrial goods are not "needed", they're wanted. Ancoms aren't going to suddenly decide to give up their smartphones, Doritos and washing machines when they find out they're environmentally destructive. They'll just rubber-stamp all the things they want as "needed" and call it a day.

Keeping people in the mines and factories building those consumer goods that "the people" decide they "need" will require massive authority that will be just another iteration of capitalism.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

"no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so".

I actually don't really care about kropotkin, i think they are an interesting historical figure but my politics don't follow from hero worship like that.

Really all I'm saying is that anarchist communist praxis toward the problem of work is to put workers in the decision making seat. The reason this may result in less work and industry, is that there would finally be an option for working people to work less-- they have collective power over their working environment, and money has been eliminated or otherwise marginalized from its current central role.

By attacking and contesting the alienation of labor, and giving working people more choices over how their day is spent, a lot of people would probably decide to work less. For example, David Graeber's work on Bullshit Jobs is an interesting window into this repressed social conversation around unnecessary work.

But of course, as an anarchist communist i reject the silly MLM kind of trajectory, where the teleology is a foregone conclusion. Even if worker control over industries is achieved, that by no means guarantees good ecological outcomes. Within anarchist communist controlled spaces, there will be additional political work needed in order to ensure that environmental concerns are centered. The same goes for confronting racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. Anarchist spaces can be quite shit if you aren't white, middle class, etc. I don't see that changing fundamentally, at least not to the point that these conversations will be unneeded, anytime soon. Similarly, in a more worker-controlled society, it will have to be a further ongoing push to make sure that decisions are being made in the ways we want to see them made. Any ancom, or anyone at all, who says that political effort is unnecessary "after the revolution" is trolling or totally foolish. I would join you in ridiculing that idea.

I would nod to your earlier writing and posts, where you speak about the false idea of "revolution". Change usually doesn't happen at one moment we can forecast in the future. It's a process, or a series of processes, usually not linear and always occurring in unpredictable and complex ways. I think that promoting worker control of industry will probably result in less hours worked for a higher standard of living, could feasibly undermine capitalist commodity markets and consumer culture, and will reduce the amount of overall production and labor which is conducted (helping to avert some destruction of the biosphere). So i see it as worth working towards, because I see how it will help the people around me and the environment.

Of course, it's not enough, an the world is ending. But i don't see how i can really do anything on a sufficient scale to destroy the entire industrial systems of the earth, so i just try to make things less better on a scale I can actually take part in

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

Really all I'm saying is that anarchist communist praxis toward the problem of work is to put workers in the decision making seat. The reason this may result in less work and industry, is that there would finally be an option for working people to work less-- they have collective power over their working environment, and money has been eliminated or otherwise marginalized from its current central role.

And I'm saying that's completely incompatible with anarcho-communism because production needs to meet demand. People need to be able to take everything they 'need' from the communal stores which means the goods need to be manufactured everyday or people will go without. This is what anarcho-communism is by definition. Saying you don't care about Kropotkin doesn't change that. In a real life application, it'll all be thrown out the window and limits will be put in place to slow down consumption, but on paper, anarcho-communism has unlimited consumption hardcoded in.

By attacking and contesting the alienation of labor, and giving working people more choices over how their day is spent, a lot of people would probably decide to work less. For example, David Graeber's work on Bullshit Jobs is an interesting window into this repressed social conversation around unnecessary work.

In anarcho-communism, the bullshit jobs may go away (though they certainly didn't go away in other socialist societies), but instead everyone will be expected to do menial labor so that industrial labor is no longer outsourced to the global south / migrant workers.

Without capitalism outsourcing food production, the local populace will have to pick up the slack. Everyone will have to work in the fields and factories to maintain industrial civilization's expected living standards.

And if you don't maintain the living standards the people are used to, they will revolt and bring back capitalism so they can go back to their old jobs / lifestyles.

Everyone in the West who is used to easy work sitting in air-conditioned cubicles will be given a shovel or a pickaxe and be expected to do gruelling manual labor to feed society. If they don't work, everyone starves.

This isn't giving people "more choices over how their day is spent". Instead of migrant laborers and people in faraway lands doing all the work, everyone in the local communities will need to produce real goods immediately or ancom society will collapse.

How many American and European office workers do you think would even be willing to forgo their immense privilege to muddy their hands growing beets and potatoes for the communal stores? How many of them will actually do this manual labor when they can just choose not to and wait for other, darker skinned people to pick up the slack like they do now under capitalism? Except those people will no longer be chained up by capitalism, so they can say no to industrial work too. If everyone can say no to industrial work and just stay home and draw or play videogames, how does industry continue to operate?

You claim people will be able to "choose to do less work" in an industrial anarcho-communist society when every indication is that anarcho-communism would give them far less options since all the bullshit jobs would go away.

So with communism, jobs will actually be meaningful, hard work to feed, clothe and shelter society. The vast majority of jobs will be farm, mine, kitchen or factory work because without imported products, everything we're used to having under capitalism will need to be produced locally.

There's ZERO indication that people would have more choices for how they spend their day. There will be no accountants. There will be no bank clerks. There will be no cashiers. There will be no fashion boutiques. There will be no taxis. No advertisement firms. No online retailers. No warehouses. No car dealers. 99% of the jobs people have today will go away and be replaced with manual labor jobs and communal kitchens to feed the manual laborers.

And ancoms assume people will just be able to choose not to work and the society will take care of them anyway. Fuck that. Why should I work my ass off in a factory all day so other people can sit at home all day watching TV and eating snacks? Why should I sacrifice my health hitting rocks with a pickaxe while other people just get to declare they're artists and make a couple of shitty paintings a year? Don't you see how authority-forming a society separated between artists/intellectuals and laborers is?

Either everyone works or no one works. If you have an industrial society, constant labor is needed to keep it afloat. If people are able to opt out of work because they don't want to do it, then the whole society will cease to function. A work-based society only functions if people are forced to work by people who have a monopoly on violence. Industrialists went through great lengths to force us to switch from being hunter gatherers and peasants to being workers. At first people kept leaving the cities because they hated their new industrial jobs and they went back to the forests, so the rulers made new laws so it was illegal for people to live in the forests. People will not work the machines out of the goodness of their hearts. Every one of us who works in industrial labor will tell you that it is is a fucking shitty existence and we would bail in a split second if we had the ability to.

The only reason I work in the chemical warehouse now is because I'm forced to in order to survive. If you tell me I no longer have to work to survive, I will stop working. Anyone that spends their life laboring in industry for "the common good", sacrificing their life so other people can sit at home writing poetry is a fucking tool.

It's just another class system except with nothing to actually keep the system in place since it lets everyone decide what class to join. Why would anyone join the laborer class if given a choice?

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celebratedrecluse wrote

key anarchist communist ideas

  1. Automation has reduced, and will continue to reduce, the need for menial labor. Increasingly, factories have fewer and fewer workers, and the productivity of the average laborer has risen over time. In the future, there will be so many people without jobs, the only choice even within capitalism will be to create UBI or some other way of discoupling the direct yoke of social value from labor. The wage system is dissolving itself as we speak, and it doesn't have to be such a terrible thing if we consciously shape our society to adapt to these changes.

  2. The elimination of unconsensual labor can only happen if unconsensual consumption is also eliminated. It seems a bit unfair to anarchist communist ideas, the way that you assume that any industrial society is also a consumerist one-- it's incorrect that "unlimited consumption is hardcoded into anarchist communism". We're not going to see a ton of LEGOs or credit cards being produced, but there will always be people who create medicines and food-- and some of them will use industrial processes to create these things, because in those cases the results are meaningful and the means are humane.

  3. What menial labor which is felt to be socially necessary, will be shared and disaggregated throughout society. For example, caretaking work, or farming. 4-hour days would become easily feasible when this burden is shared equally by the dissolution of class differences. Currently, only a tiny fraction of people in western societies work in these contexts where the labor is actually socially useful.

  4. With the elimination of commodities, the needs for goods will be determined by working people who create them, not managers whose only motivator is profit. This will decrease the need for goods, because people who work will only do so if the work is meaningful and humane.

  5. You shouldn't have to work in the chemical warehouse, but it's not unreasonable to ask that in exchange for the product of other folks' labor you participate in some aspect of society which is needed by others. However, no serious anarchist communist would seriously ask you to work somewhere you are miserable. The point is that you find opportunities to do labor which allows you to do things you want to do, rather than only things which you don't want to do. There will always be undesirable things that need to be done, but it shouldn't and won't be the only thing you do everyday anymore. That's the goal.

  6. The use of so much menial labor under capitalism is unnecessary to a technological society. It is only necessary for a commodity society.

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

It seems a bit unfair to anarchist communist ideas, the way that you assume that any industrial society is also a consumerist one-- it's incorrect that "unlimited consumption is hardcoded into anarchist communism". We're not going to see a ton of LEGOs or credit cards being produced, but there will always be people who create medicines and food-- and some of them will use industrial processes to create these things, because in those cases the results are meaningful and the means are humane.

Because I know that 7 billion people aren't going to behave the way anarcho-communism wants them to behave. Including the people actually calling themselves anarcho-communists, who are almost without exception domesticated, elitist, materialist and consumerist as all fuck. And almost all of them insist they won't actually do any of the hard labor because they'll be too busy writing theory or playing with their train sets.

You're honestly just saying "but this is how people will act under communism because Kropotkin / Bookchin / Bakunin / etc say so". People won't act the way they're told to act by dead men.

The billions of people who are used to industrial capitalism will not suddenly be okay with going without fashion, junk food, designer shoes, cars, iphones, game consoles, robotic vacuum cleaners, heated swimming pools, air-conditioning, etc, etc, etc. They'll expect anarcho-communism to give them everything capitalism gives them or they'll reject it. This includes the hundreds of anarcho-communists I've argued with over the years who insist they won't have to give up anything and the only thing that will change is there will be no more inequality in the world.

If you tell civilized domesticated industrial people they have to give up everything capitalism gives them and switch to basic bread and water so that industrial communism can work they'll just tell you to fuck off. That's why ancoms promise fully automated luxury communism. One giant walmart where everything is free of charge.

When Kropotkin wrote his theory, mass consumerist culture didn't exist. The products people made in the factories were much more limited than what people are used to now. So when he promised everything would be free at the communal stores, he wasn't talking about macs, macbooks, iphones, ipads, ipods, iwatches, apple TVs and playstations. But the modern consumer absolutely expects all those things and if you think ancoms have any intention of giving up their consumer tech, you're not being honest with yourself. Every ancom on reddit will swear up and down that all this garbage will be free under ancommunism.

What menial labor which is felt to be socially necessary, will be shared and disaggregated throughout society.

Felt by whom? By "the people"? So the same people who are accustomed to an endless list of snacks, electronics, entertainment and so on? They get to decide what is "socially necessary"? Yeah good luck with that.

4-hour days would become easily feasible when this burden is shared equally by the dissolution of class differences.

This has no basis in reality. You have no way to quantify how much local labor would be needed to replace outsourced labor.

I'm telling you right now that I'm not working so you can have industrial consumer goods. I'll take everything I want from the communal stores and never devote another day of my life to furthering industry / ecocide. Instead, I'll sit at home all day writing angry rants about how much everyone annoys me.

Currently, only a tiny fraction of people in western societies work in these contexts where the labor is actually socially useful.

But if they suddenly need to produce everything they consume locally, that will obviously change so I'm not sure why you think you can quantify how much labor would be needed to maintain industrial civilization without outsourcing. It honestly seems like you're just making an assumption based on other people's assumptions.

With the elimination of commodities, the needs for goods will be determined by working people who create them, not managers whose only motivator is profit. This will decrease the need for goods, because people who work will only do so if the work is meaningful and humane.

The needs will be determined by society at large, not the workers. If the workers don't give society what they want, society will reject communism and the system will collapse. Society becomes the manager. The workers labor to keep the system afloat.

You shouldn't have to work in the chemical warehouse, but it's not unreasonable to ask that in exchange for the product of other folks' labor you participate in some aspect of society which is needed by others.

Anarcho-communism doesn't do that though. It assumes most people will want to work, and allows anyone who can't or doesn't want to work to abstain from work.

Someone has to work in chemical storage in order for industrial society to function. If no one will do it, society fails.

However, no serious anarchist communist would seriously ask you to work somewhere you are miserable.

Literally no one would voluntarily do this job, which is exactly why anarcho-communism is untenable. Without authority to force me to be here, without capitalism bulldozing the forests so we can't be self-sufficient, I'll ran to the forest and lever look back.

The point is that you find opportunities to do labor which allows you to do things you want to do, rather than only things which you don't want to do.

Then industry will collapse. No one wants to do menial labor. We do it at figurative and sometimes not-so figurative gunpoint.

There will always be undesirable things that need to be done, but it shouldn't and won't be the only thing you do everyday

How would I be able to leave and do other stuff under communism? Then this job wouldn't get done. It's highly dangerous full time specialized work. It's not something you can just walk away from because the economic system shifts from industrial capitalism to industrial communism. I can't even take sick days or it would affect dozens of people.

The use of so much menial labor under capitalism is unnecessary to a technological society. It is only necessary for a commodity society.

Bullshit. My job won't cease to be menial just because the workers take control. I'm not going to stop taking safety precautions and take other shortcuts that make things much more hazardous so I can save time and go home early.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Nah you're putting words in my mouth. Ya got an axe to grind, so keep grinding. A lot of us can see a world where free association gets the goods-- and we're slowly making it happen. If you want to run off to the woods, or others do, go for it. The rest of us will be doing our own thing

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ziq OP wrote

It annoys me when people make empty promises about how work will change under communism with literally no evidence to support it. Soviet and Chinese workers worked way harder than anyone on this forum can even begin to imagine. Industry will not be made ethical, voluntary and fun because you say it will be made ethical, voluntary and fun. Your promises are no different than Elon Musk promising ethical, fully-automated space capitalist industry.

If you want to run off to the woods, or others do, go for it.

I can't "run off to the woods" as long as industry exists to turn those woods into desert.

The rest of us will be doing our own thing

Your thing actively prevents me from doing my thing.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Your thing actively prevents me from doing my thing.

Does it? Or does your boss & the system of wage labor do that?

At most, the potential theoretical consequences of anarchist communism prevent you from doing your own thing. But we don't live in an anarchist communist world, not even remotely. We live in an industrial capitalist mass society. Most anarchist communists I've found in my area aren't even wanting to continue most forms of industry, like private cars or fossil fuels or roads, most toiletries, foods grown out of season and trucked in, etc...

I think you have this ultra oppositional way of talking about your type of politics, which doesn't really lend itself to finding the ways in which you can work with others. On the contrary, you are looking for ways in which you can poke holes or critique others, and put down what they are thinking or doing. This can be a useful skill, but as a mode of creating a political reality it has serious drawbacks. The creation of a different social and economic world will require people to look for ways to cooperate concretely, not prove abstract points. If the words anarchist communism offend the people I'm talking to, I tend to just let you have your way and explain whatever I was going to explain without using those words. Inevitably agreement is reached on the matters closest to hand. You know?

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

Does it? Or does your boss & the system of wage labor do that?

Industry does that. Communist industry wouldn't stop the ecocide. Communist theory does nothing to face the reality of our situation. All it does is promise workers a fairer share of the industrial spoils.

Most anarchist communists I've found in my area aren't even wanting to continue most forms of industry, like private cars or fossil fuels or roads, most toiletries, foods grown out of season and trucked in, etc...

Those people are all irrelevant. The other 7 billion people would decide the trajectory of society, regardless of what economic system is in place.

I think you have this ultra oppositional way of talking about your type of politics, which doesn't really lend itself to finding the ways in which you can work with others. On the contrary, you are looking for ways in which you can poke holes or critique others, and put down what they are thinking or doing.

It's not that I'm trying to be oppositional, it's that I see the world around me through deathly sober eyes and know the proposed "solutions" offered by blissful ancoms would do exactly nothing to address the ecocide that is crushing everything I see around me. No one in this thread has said anything that isn't simply a rewording of "everything will be okay if we just get communism because communism is good". It both infuriates and frightens me that no one seems to understand that the solution to industry killing the ecosystem is not to make industry more 'democratic'. Industry with a smiley face painted on is still a giant fucking boulder crushing everything in its path. It's like everyone is on acid or something and I'm the only one who can't share your high because I'm numb to its effects.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

It's like everyone is on acid or something and I'm the only one who can't share your high because I'm numb to its effects.

I mean this is a very elitist perspective...

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ziq OP wrote

You're being smug and intellectually dishonest and that really doesn't warrant any response other than 'fuck off'.

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