Anarchist economics

[ontheyslay]

In an anarcho-communist society, how does investment occur? Say, if a group of people want to start a business, what do they have to do to get a syndicate started? I know money doesn't exist, so what do they invest into the syndicate/cooperative? How does it all take shape I guess is what I am wondering.

Also, if someone wants to leave the syndicate how do they recoup some of their investment? If anyone can clear this up for me, I would greatly appreciate it!

[F9]

Investment?There is no investment.As you said there are no money, no values, nothing.

If people want to start a business, if their is space available, and its not wanted by others to do something else, they go ahead and start it by themselves, and of course ask for help from the community for anything.If a place, building or land, is wanted by say 3 groups of people, which all cant found their "business" anywhere else than the particular place all the others want, community will decide what is more needed for the time, to go ahead and make it.
Of course tries will continue to make the other 2 find a place somewhere also asap.

As if someone goes away from the community(i prefer this word, than "syndicate") s/he is free to go, but in anw, there cant be any investments, because as i said earlier, there are none money, nor values.


Fuserg9:star:

[whore]

not only no money or investment, no business either.

anarchist communism is just plain old good communism with an anarchist social organisation (i.e. no shit).

now, if you want other sorts of anarchist economic systems, collectivism, mutuaiism etc, i suggest you head to oi and do a search. but, cause you specifically said communism, you question doesn't make sense.

---

how would it work then, for a group of people to start a manifacuring organisation? well, if they know what tehy are doin, they just go and get the stuff from the store, set it up and go. (perhaps asking for help if they aren't sure how to use all the tools, of if they need help moving stuff).

if they don't know what they are doing, they ask for help before hand, and anyone interested can rock up and help out.

because information in an anarchist-communist society will be freely available, you can just go and ask the nearest engineer questions (or look them up on the net).

communism is a very different system to capitalism.

[Robocommie]

One question I have in regards to anarcho-communism, how does this kind of society protect itself from invasion? What's to stop another community from forming a league to dominate other communities?

[Die Rote Fahne]

One question I have in regards to anarcho-communism, how does this kind of society protect itself from invasion? What's to stop another community from forming a league to dominate other communities?

It's really a collective effort. Like the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists who fought in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

[Robocommie]

It's really a collective effort. Like the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists who fought in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

Didn't they lose the war?

[Tablo]

Didn't they lose the war?
They lost the war because of the back stabbing Soviets. It also didn't help that Franco had support from Italy and Germany.

And they defend themselves with a true people's army. One made of volunteers that can at any time leave the front.

[Robocommie]

Hm. I'm skeptical, I have to be honest that when it comes down to political philosophy I tend to like you anarchists more, and I seem to get along with anarchists in general better. But as I said, I'm skeptical because I feel there's a lot a central government can offer in terms of a united front, both for defense and for cooperative economic development.

[Comrade_Stalin]

Hm. I'm skeptical, I have to be honest that when it comes down to political philosophy I tend to like you anarchists more, and I seem to get along with anarchists in general better. But as I said, I'm skeptical because I feel there's a lot a central government can offer in terms of a united front, both for defense and for cooperative economic development.

Well that is a good point. An case study would be if the commune de paris would still be around if they had a central goverment.

[robbo203]

One question I have in regards to anarcho-communism, how does this kind of society protect itself from invasion? What's to stop another community from forming a league to dominate other communities?


You are projecting into communism the kind of systemic pressues and circumstasnces that really pertain to capitalism. You have to start from the core features of communism and infer outwards.

We are talking about a radically different kind of economy in which everyone has free access to goods and services and voluntarily contributes to the production of these things, There is therefore no political leverage that one group or individual could exercise over another.

Given that, what is point of one community trying to dominate another when we all have a mutual interest in seeing that needs of everyone are catered for and when we will recognise and acknowlege of mutual interdendce in a way that it is simply not possible in this dog-eat-dog capitalist system we live in?

[syndicat]

robbo is only giving one interpretation of communism...the interpretation favored by the Socialist Party of Great Britain which is not an anarchist organization. not all social anarchists agree that libertarian socialism/communism is a moneyless society.

now, as to investment, investment must exist in any possible society. to understand this, consider all the things we produce for each other in the course of a given year. many of these things are goods or services that individuals consume. but in the course of producing these things, we are wearing out means of production. if we don't replace the means of production we won't be able to produce things in the future. so the effort we make to build our capacity for producing goods and services is what investment is. this includes education, building up skills and knowledge useful for production, because that is also part of our capacity to produce. so we can invest in people, not just in equipment.

libertarian socialists/communists conceive of the land and means of production being owned in common by everyone. this means that a worker production organization has only a use right to its means of production. moreover, since a market economy is inconsistent with communism, we don't envision the worker self-management organization gaining revenue from sale of products.

however, I would say that it is a matter of justice that everyone who does work to produce what we want thereby earns a share of the total social product. in other words, I would envision that the economy is divided into two sectors.

one sector would be the sector that produces public goods. these are things that we want for everyone. for example sidewalks, the workings of the public transit system, at least an average level of water and electric power allowance for your house, health care, education, child care.

so we can call this the "free sector." These are things the entire community makes decisions about providing and they are provided at public expense.

but there is also a sector that produces items where there are differences of taste and not everyone wants the same thing. in this case the individual allowance that each person has enables them to select what they want among these things. they have a limited allowance or consumption credit but they can use it on whichever items in the personal consumption sector they want.

Okay, now what are the conditions of a worker production organization continuing to have its use right to its means of production? It must be socially accountable. The means of production are socially owned. What we can do is look at the benefit they provide...and prices provide a way to measure this...and also the costs. And as long as the ratio between benefits and costs is roughly similar to other worker production organizations, we can say they are doing what they need to do to keep their means of production.

So, how does a new group get formed? In this case we can imagine a group who are proposing to produce some new product. As long as they can get enough support from community organizations and individuals who want the product, they should be alloted means of production to start up production.

[Robocommie]

You are projecting into communism the kind of systemic pressues and circumstasnces that really pertain to capitalism. You have to start from the core features of communism and infer outwards.

We are talking about a radically different kind of economy in which everyone has free access to goods and services and voluntarily contributes to the production of these things, There is therefore no political leverage that one group or individual could exercise over another.

Given that, what is point of one community trying to dominate another when we all have a mutual interest in seeing that needs of everyone are catered for and when we will recognise and acknowlege of mutual interdendce in a way that it is simply not possible in this dog-eat-dog capitalist system we live in?

I think you're missing my point, I'm not referring to one community dominating another through politics or economics, I'm referring to warlords or even leagues of other communes forming that will, through militant conquest, subjugate other communes. Without a central enforcement body, like a government, how could such a society be regulated?

[syndicat]

you seem to be supposing that there would be no government or governance structure throughout the revolutionary territory. this is not the case. from a social anarchist or libertarian socialist point of view, the masses would need to consolidate a form of popular power throughout the revolutionary territory. any disputes between particular communities or regions would be adjudicated through this overarching goverance system. but I'm not talking about a state, or top down government apparatus. I'm referring to things like a congress of delegates from throughout the revolutionary area, and a coordinating committee accountable to the various base communities and congresses.

[Robocommie]

you seem to be supposing that there would be no government or governance structure throughout the revolutionary territory. this is not the case. from a social anarchist or libertarian socialist point of view, the masses would need to consolidate a form of popular power throughout the revolutionary territory. any disputes between particular communities or regions would be adjudicated through this overarching goverance system. but I'm not talking about a state, or top down government apparatus. I'm referring to things like a congress of delegates from throughout the revolutionary area, and a coordinating committee accountable to the various base communities and congresses.

Just how many institutions of governance would this overarching system have? Would there be agencies, bureaus, regulatory committees?

[ZeroNowhere]

not all social anarchists agree that libertarian socialism/communism is a moneyless society.
Yes, they do. If an anarchist supports the existence of exchange-value under anarchism, they're a reformist anarchist. At least, generally I take 'social anarchist' to mean more or less socialist anarchists, I may be wrong, in which case I apologize.


We are talking about a radically different kind of economy in which everyone has free access to goods and services and voluntarily contributes to the production of these thingsWhy is it that you always equate this to communism, even while admitting that labour credits would be compatible with it?


One question I have in regards to anarcho-communism, how does this kind of society protect itself from invasion?There are probably lots of ways, I don't see that it's impossible to have some form of centralized defence force without any authority anarchists would qualify as 'unjust'. Could you perhaps clarify what problems you can find here?


What's to stop another community from forming a league to dominate other communities?It's probably worth mentioning that communism doesn't necessarily mean the end of war, but rather than war can be ended. Other than that, I think syndicat's response was probably sufficient.

I think Mike Lepore put this well here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../showpost.php?p=1286126&postcount=2):


You don't have to start out producing millions of units. You make a few thousand prototypes and measure how rapidly consumers take them from the store. Whether the individuals whose job is to develop new products (chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc.) can decide on their own to submit the requision to the manufacturing line, or whether some degree of management signoff is also needed, will be society's policy choice.

From that point on, it shouldn't be the workers' choice whether or not they want to make them. It should be part of their job requirements to make the quantity needed to keep the orders filled. You can choose your career, but, within each career, you have to do the job that was socially planned. If you don't, you get no credit for showing up at work and you have no income.

You can't have the problem of investing in a new product. If all socially owned industries are subdepartments of one organization, resources would come from interdepartment transfers, not investment. The number of people needed in each department would fluctuate when something new is invented, but then the problem becomes one of how to attract more people to work in the sectors where they are needed most, not a problem of investments.All in all, socialism is social control of production, and, in a loose sense, 'the economy', so that if somebody wants to start producing something, this will be proposed and discussed, and a decision made as to whether to work on it at the moment or not. For example, at the moment we'd have to see how much is required to eradicate poverty (by which I mean building decent hospitals and living quarters, getting a good water supply going, building nuclear power plants, etc), and other such challenges, as well as keeping up production for other purposes (food for people who aren't already poor, etc), before deciding on what working hours would be necessary (they would probably be shorter due to jobs which relied on capitalism for their use being junked, unemployment no longer holding any advantages, etc, certainly for quite a few people in poorer nations, but I can't say anything for sure about others, as production would also probably need to increase), what new things should be produced (usefulness vs. cost in labour and such), etc.

For an example of the opposite to some extent, consider the current crisis: It's not even a rule of people so much as a rule of things. People are suffering from it, from capitalists ('suffering' being used loosely, at least) to workers, but mostly people are still trying to understand it, let alone solve it. I recently saw a child ask an adult why nobody could solve the crisis by just making everything alright again or something, and the response was, well, "It's complicated." Andrew Kliman's put forward a convincing case (here (http://akliman.squarespace.com/persistent-fall/), and in abbreviated form in speeches and such also on the 'Crisis Intervention' section of the site) that it is due to a low rate of profit, as it has made no sustained recovery since the 70s, and what is necessary is a destruction of capital values sufficient to cause a boom, as was achieved by the combination of the Great Depression and Second World War (of course, it wouldn't have to be quite as catastrophic, but nonetheless probably pretty bad). This wouldn't even benefit the current capitalists, and certainly not the workers; indeed, it also means that by struggling for higher wages precisely when capitalists will be most keen for them to fall, they will be reducing the rate of profit, and hence weakening rather than strengthening the economy.Of course, the majority of the fall in the rate of profit has nothing to do with wage rises, which haven't been particularly significant, but this is another example of production being out of the hands of the majority of producers, as well as the capitalists. For that matter, US government intervention in the current crisis has been, as Kliman has often stressed, not on behalf of private interests, but of the system itself. So basically, communism is abolishing this 'rule of things', and taking production, and indeed life, back under human control. I felt it was worth making this point, as it is significant here.


"If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?"-Karl Marx.