Revolution, and the role of money in Anarchy

[falce e martello]

First question: how would an anarchist revolution look like?
Would it be violent or non-violent? How would private property and the state disappear after the revolution?

And question no. 2: would there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society? I believe not, since I read many times on this forum that in anarchy everything would be free for everyone; but then what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?

These are serious questions, so please don't make fun of me as I'm still in a learning phase.

[The Idler]

Whether a revolution is violent or not often depends on whether the opponents of revolution are willing to use violence to try and stop it. Also whether revolutionaries are willing to use self-defence.
The state would wither away into an administration of things and private property having no state to prop it up would disappear too.
You wouldn't need money to mediate distribution of resources at that point and I'm sure the collective efforts of the rest of society could perform all the useful work needed to keep everyone including the more idle in comfortable existence.

[ckaihatsu]

[W]ould there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society? I believe not, since I read many times on this forum that in anarchy everything would be free for everyone; but then what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?


The adversarial arguments used most often against the revolutionary case tend to project the following implicit assumptions:

- That all social value is reducible to realtime, one-to-one forms of 'service' labor, as what a *butler* would do. This kind of economic assumption is leveraged to produce the anxiety in others that if even just a *few* people wind up being 'slackers', relative to everyone else, then the entire 'social net' would face a crisis of value, and of value-supply.

What's conveniently *ignored* in this mindset / worldview is that many of our daily conveniences derive from *machinery* and *objects*, the labor for which was performed long ago, while each item used is merely a duplicate along with millions of others, thanks to the use of industrial mass-production techniques. So in this way social value is in *inverse* to the effort performed, since the labor provided for the production of each (duplicate) item is in actuality a *fraction* of its resulting usefulness to the end user. (Consider a mass-produced chair, for example.)

- Another assumption is that all 'services' / value to society can be reduced to rudimentary, butler-like kinds of *activity* -- that all societal transactions are made up of this genre of 'personal-service' kind of work, so that anyone who *doesn't* do this kind of work is then not-contributing value to the larger society.

What's disregarded from this assumption is that 'services' encompasses increasingly-complex types of work, especially those kinds that require extended learning, training, and/or expertise. Perhaps those who are simply 'receiving' rudimentary-type services, as for the execution of their daily routines, are then 'freed' to devote more of their waking hours to more-complex activities that produce different *kinds* of social value. (Anyone in an area of cultural production would fit appropriately here.)

Given a materially-leveraged mass production of basic items and automated services in abundance for everyone, the term 'parasite' could no longer conceivably apply to *anyone*, because, in that context, the existence of even a *large* number / proportion of people just living and not doing anything particularly socially valuable would not even *affect* the availability of options or potentialities for life-directions for everyone else, due to the overwhelming abundance of everything considered 'socially necessary'. (It would only be if someone was wantonly, willfully *destructive*, or if society, for whatever situational reality, decided that more-inclusive efforts were needed, that people could conceivably be socially sanctioned in regards to their activity, or lack thereof.)

I've come to the determination that a post-capitalist social order *would* need the utility and flexibility of a money-like vehicle, but such could *not*, by definition, facilitate commodity-production:





[If] simple basics like ham and yogurt couldn't be readily produced by the communistic gift economy, and were 'scarce' in relation to actual mass demand, they *would* be considered 'luxury goods' in economic terms, and would be *discretionary* in terms of public consumption.

Such a situation would *encourage* liberated-labor -- such as it would be -- to 'step up' to supply its labor for the production of ham and yogurt, because the scarcity and mass demand would encourage others to put in their own labor to earn labor credits, to provide increasing rates of labor credits to those who would be able to produce the much-demanded ham and yogurt. (Note that the ham and yogurt goods themselves would never be 'bought' or 'sold', because the labor credits are only used in regard to labor-*hours* worked, and *not* for exchangeability with any goods, because that would be commodity production.)

This kind of liberated-production assumes that the means of production have been *liberated* and collectivized, so there wouldn't be any need for any kind of finance or capital-based 'ownership' there.


(See my blog entry.)

[Redistribute the Rep]

And question no. 2: would there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society? I believe not, since I read many times on this forum that in anarchy everything would be free for everyone; but then what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?

Well, there's hundreds of theories on motivation, actually motivation is an entire field of psychology, and secondary motivators like money are only a small part of it, so I'm not really qualified to know exactly what will prevent you from being a parasite. I will say though that there is a growing body of evidence in the field to suggest not only that intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic motivators (like money), but also that extrinsic motivators can even decrease your internal desire to do something (the overjustification effect).

If the ground is littered with trash around your neighborhood and you like it clean, you will be motivated to pick it up, much like how you clean your house without monetary compensation. Simple as that.

[cyu]

Whether a revolution is violent or not often depends on whether the opponents of revolution are willing to use violence to try and stop it. Also whether revolutionaries are willing to use self-defence.

Yep, imagine if you believed in self-defence and walked around all day with a rifle on your back. Is your day going to be violent or non-violent? That would depend on what your day is like. If you were attacked, then it would be violent. If you weren't attacked, it would be non-violent. If you were the type to protect the lives of others, and you saw someone else being attacked, that would also affect how violent your day would be.


How would private property and the state disappear after the revolution?

If you prefer http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-take/ then employees would show up at work (like normal), except they stop listening to their employers. They assume control of their workplace themselves. If you prefer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed then basically you just take and use what you want. If there's no concept of property, one person can't really hold that much anyway. After you put something down, someone else could just pick it up. The only reason one person can "own" vast amounts of "property" under capitalism is because the police enforce their control.


would there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society?

I used to think yes, and devised various methods of ensuring everyone got similar amounts of economic "votes" to determine economic resource allocation. I thought gift economies were just wishful-thinking fantasies. That was before I read The Dispossessed though - which described what basically amounts to a gift economy, and I thought hey, this could actually work.


what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?

It's all about what you do with your time. Time is like your "salary" and it is up to you how to spend it. You are free to spend your time sitting around all day on a rock, but you would probably find that pretty boring (although I'm sure there are people who would choose that). What would you do with your time instead, and why would you do something else? Does society affect what you choose to do with your time? If someone you were attracted to was doing X, would you go join them even if you didn't really enjoy X? How much of what people currently do with their "leisure" time is manipulated by advertisers? What if that advertising disappeared? What if other things were advertised?

[tuwix]

First question: how would an anarchist revolution look like?
Would it be violent or non-violent? How would private property and the state disappear after the revolution?

And question no. 2: would there be a sort of monetary system in an anarchist society? I believe not, since I read many times on this forum that in anarchy everything would be free for everyone; but then what prevents me into becoming an absolute parasite for the society?

These are serious questions, so please don't make fun of me as I'm still in a learning phase.

All your questions have an answer depending on anarchist tendency. All tendencies would abolish a private property although mutualists wouldn't call it that way. Anarcho-communists would want to abolish money immediately that could have fatal effects to the economy. Let's be honest: some people work for money only and for nothing else. And there are many of them. And the rest of anarchists would like to organize a society according to own tendency. Mutualists and collectivists would want to convert all workplaces into cooperatives and syndicalists would want a power for the workplace's union.