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Esperaux wrote

How would mutual banking help us abandon the workplace or move away from constant production for the sake of production?

Also communism being defined here as a mode of production of each according to their ability and each according to their need if anything is a necessity in moving away from overproduction and overindustrialization. The motivation for industry comes from the production of commodities for exchange on a market system. Markets by their nature necessitate constant growth and expansion. What can be commodified will be commodified.

I think we can both agree it's not enough to simply collectivize the workplace. The same economic forces would be in place that demand we engage in constant production, competitive self exploitation, and commodification. In the most practical sense this would involve forms of decommodification. For example when housing is squatted or a restaurant transformed into a place for people to eat freely.

On the critique of civilization it's really up to you personally. Feminism isn't necessarily just another anti-capitalism either although has its relations. Civilization itself is also a pretty broad term though tends to involve social stratification which at that point anarchism could be said to just be anticiv by default since the whole point is moving away from forms of social stratification anyways. Though that leads me to further be confused as to how mutual banking would challenge civilization. It's less that the anticiv position has to call itself communist and more that it seems that even the most primitivist variation of this position would effectively take on communistic lifestyles operating according to mutual aid.

I think part of "The Self-Abolition of the Proletariat As the End of the Capitalist World" can better address your question on how communism really distinguishes itself.

"A current and concrete example of an immediate communist measure; the looting of supermarkets in the south of Italy, one of the countries most afflicted by the “coronavirus crisis,” which was done by proletarians who are already in precarious situations and now desperate, given that, as they themselves say, “the problem is immediate, the children have to eat.” Why is it an immediate communist measure? Because, despite it not directly affecting the sphere of production (as on the other hand the recent wildcat strikes in the same country have indeed done), it eliminates by the deed the sacrosanct private property, the commodity, wage labor and money, and satisfies the common and basic needs of the proletarians and their families. The spontaneous, autonomous and anonymous networks of solidarity and mutual aid among proletarians, which have been created in these precise moments everywhere, are also a concrete communist practice. How can these kinds of measures be sustained over time an space? That’s another subject. On the other hand, it’s also possible to consider as an immediate communist measure the call for a “universal rent strike” (to not pay rent and to occupy empty homes for people that are homeless) from many countries of the world (Spain, France, Sweden, United Kingdom, USA, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, etc.)."

to essentially summarize, communism in the sense of "to each according to their ability, to each according to their own" or paraphrasing Kropotkin here in terms of "all is for all" distinguishes itself by actions such as these. A capitalist owned grocery store being turned into a worker owned grocery store for example doesn't change the fact it's still a grocery store. Communism would involve doing away with the grocery store.

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subrosa wrote

Fair. Sounds like we have enough 'common ground' in our rejection of grocery stores and workplaces. I'll respond to this tomorrow, sketch something out about mutual banking as an exercise to see where I would run into fresh questions of currency and whatnot. Probably worth a longer post. For now I'll just say that the looting example can just as easily be an illegalism, without any communism in mind. And similarly, that communists aren't alone in attacking and disregarding private property, nor in advocating for autonomy and networks of mutual aid and solidarity.

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subrosa wrote

Also, this thread is getting real narrow on mobile. Let's move.

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