Opting out of communism?

[Deity]

So the answer here that most everyone should be agreeing upon is yes you can opt out, however it is extremely unlikely that you will succeed it getting workers to give up their nice lives for a shitty one.

[melvin]

you can't really opt out of any world economic system.

also, how would you go about bringing back prices? start growing food and charging for it when it is available for free, and expect people to buy it instead of get it for free? that's not how, uh....markets work.

[Dear Leader]

Look at all those guys that want feudalism back.

[Rugged Collectivist]

reminds me of a story when some libertarian shithead wanted to try some libertarian dream society and decided to create a new country on some island off some african country. they put up a flag in the middle of the small island. ended with the soldiers of said african country coming there and playing the anthem of said african country on a boombox while lowering the libertarian flag.

Please please please please find a video/article about this for me to watch/read.

[Vercingetorix]

I would love it if this happened. Seriously.

I'd be bringing surplus to starving ancaps and then selling it to them at inflated prices.

Of course, their whole system would break down when we flood their economy with cheap goods, crashing the value of any money.

If everything is free, you can't actually sell anything, they'd have to close their borders. Postcapitalist goods would have to be banned. I.e. protectionism.

The only way I see this actually happening is if they set out to colonize another planet, a la Bioshock.

They'd be welcome to try if I was the person making the decisions, but I doubt they'd be successful.

[o well this is ok I guess]

If any sizable chunk decided that they didn't wish to exist within the communist society they would throw off the workings of said society and therefore would cause it to become unstable.

Its an impossible stage to reach because without the state forcing everyone to participate, socialism would just disintegrate into markets. So in a world without a state a communist society couldn't stop people from leaving, but also couldn't afford for them to.

You'll have to elaborate, bub.

[Rugged Collectivist]

The only way I see this actually happening is if they set out to colonize another planet, a la Bioshock.

They'd be welcome to try if I was the person making the decisions, but I doubt they'd be successful.

If humanity ever develops the ability to colonize a second planet, it would be a travesty if we let it fall into ancap hands.

[human strike]

Sure, the ancaps can opt out, but who would work for them?

[Blake's Baby]

I think we should dump them on Easter Island to set up their An-Cap utopia (Easter Islans produces nothing the rest of the world needs and therefore we can do without it); then we could go back ten years later, bury the corpses, and continue as if nothing had happened.

[Fourth Internationalist]

I think we should dump them on Easter Island to set up their An-Cap utopia (Easter Islans produces nothing the rest of the world needs and therefore we can do without it); then we could go back ten years later, bury the corpses, and continue as if nothing had happened.

Or scientists could go study how cavemen lived. It won't be exactly similar, but we can probably get some data to help research on the subject.

[Blake's Baby]

An-Caps would be unable to function as a Stone Age society. They'd have none of the necessary skills, and to be fair, most An-Caps are from the US and parts of Northern Europe that are very unlike Easter Island ecologically; so even if they could kill and skin a moose by quoting von Mises at it, they'd have no luck doing that in their new home where there aren't any moose.

Also, they're likely to be quite violent and I wouldn't want them to be able to steal the chopper the anthropologists came in on.

I would think that some of them might be able to last a few years with luck. But really, I'd expect 80% would be dead within 6 months as they all tried to enslave each other or argued about what sort of currency to adopt.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

My opinion is pretty much similar to everyone else's.

I mean, I don't know WHY a person would want to opt out of socialism, considering most of their material needs would no longer be an object of concern, and they could lead a life of comfort and leisure with only some hours of labor.

But I also believe that individual freedom is a big part of socialism, so if you want to go off somewhere and start your own community somewhere, be my guest.

Just don't expect anyone else to follow you.

[liberlict]

Private property is denied in a communist society. For an-cap society to set up somewhere they are going to have to claim some property. This is defined as theft according to communism. So really, the answer has to be 'no', doesn't it?

I suppose the community could democratically agree to give these wacky individualists some land or an island to get going.

[tuwix]

For an-cap society to set up somewhere they are going to have to claim some property.

Firstly, communism is not going to elminate all property, but only that which is in its orginnal meaning. Communism is not going to eliminate presonal property.

Secondly, anarcho-capitalism is impossible because state is only thing that protects private property. And Marx wasn't the first who noticed that. It's noticed bt capitalism lovers because Adam Smith has noticed it too.

[Sea]

How about we all try to understand what communism is first, before we "opt out" of it?

[robbo203]

How about we all try to understand what communism is first, before we "opt out" of it?

Indeed. If we are talking about communism in its full sense we are referring to a society in which goods and services are made freely available for individuals to take according to their own self defined needs and where these goods and services are provided or produced on a purely voluntary basis. This is literally what is meant by "from each according to ability to each according to need" - a moneyless, classless stateless community in whch the "means of producing wealth " (not personal possessions as such) are owned in common - by everyone.

Logically, when you think about it, common ownership precludesall quid pro quo economic exchange and hence exchange related phenomena such as money, prices , markets, wages, profit, interest etc etc

Here's the problem that the An-caps face - how is their little anarcho-capitalist utopia going to function within a larger enveloping envrionment from which all forms of quid pro quo exchanges have been eliminated? For instance, capitalism presupposes production for a market - commodity production. Well , ask yourself this - why would anybody want to buy some good when they could get it completely gratis from the local distribution point? There is no way a price system can compete with a free access system. The latter would win every time, hands down! The irony of all this is that capitalist market is supposedly founded upon our inclination to pursue what is in our self interest (think of Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand) . How in that case could it be in your interests to buy something when you could get it for free?

So the very institution of the market would be unsustainable anywhere in an an environment of communist free access. The question might also be asked where one might get the means of exchange from - money - in order to effect market purchases given that people in a communist society would no longer be working for wages but on a purely voluntary basis, giving according to their ability.

It might be argued that individuals could return to bartering goods but this is no real answer either for several reasons.

1) Barter is not what capitalism is about and an-caps resorting to this as a solution would have implicitly acknowleged the futlity of trying to resurrect capitalist relations of prpduction within a communist universe

2) Barter presupposes small scale and still largely inidividualised prpductive forces whereas production today is social and globalised. Even the most simple item you can think of - say, a ballpoint pen - literally involves the direct and indirect labour of millions of workers acorss the world to produce

3) There still remains that most daunting obstacle - how can any rival system effectively compete against a system of free access? Barter will fare no better than a small scale capitalist enclave since why should individuals barter goods when they could them for free?


You might want to argue that a communist system of free access and voluntary labour is not viable but that is another argument altogther (though I for one do not accept it). What you cannot reasonably maintain is that given the existence of a fully communist system of society that it is possible to have within it small enclaves of residual or resurrected capitalism. This is where the comparison with feudalism breaks down when it was indeed possible for capitalist relations to develop within the interstices of a largely feudalistic economy. Feudalism was a class system based on private property and moreover one in which the character of production was far from fully socialised.

Communism in that respect will be a completely different ball game.

[liberlict]

Firstly, communism is not going to elminate all property, but only that which is in its orginnal meaning. Communism is not going to eliminate presonal property.

Secondly, anarcho-capitalism is impossible because state is only thing that protects private property. And Marx wasn't the first who noticed that. It's noticed bt capitalism lovers because Adam Smith has noticed it too.

By property I meant specifically land. A capitalist community would need some sort of legal entitlement to some land. And this can't exist when everything is owned collectively. Even if communists decided to allow renegade capitalists to have some land, it would still be subject to communists changing their mind.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I can see a secure future post-capitalist society give those who want to engage in what would a historical re-enactment some land, possibly an island for their hobby. It would be just the thing for young people to visit on a school field trip. They could ask the inhabitants about such historical oddities as "money", "wage labor" etc. They could take home a nice certificate declaring that they are the proud owners of "bitcoins" -- what ever those were -- as a souvenir.

(Damn I seem to remember a sf short story with something like this as a premise. Ring a bell with anyone else?)

[RedBen]

if in a hypothetical "communist" society someone wishes to break with communism and be a capitalist, they would first have to convince enough people that slaving away for that individual would somehow benefit the said worker more than the freedom of communism. i would expect the proletariat to rise up against the forces who would seek to exploit them. the self liberated would not allow themselves to be again enslaved by a capitalist system. in my opinion this "dilemma" answers itself.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Communism is an economic system. 'Opting' out is impossible.

I challenge these fools to try and see if they can 'opt out' of the capitalist economic system without first using it's utilities. They can't, and even if they somehow did find a way to survive (I don't see anyone but groups like bushmen, amazon and Inuit tribes in the most remote regions of the world being able to 'break' from the economic system without first utilising it), they would be completely and utterly at the mercy of international capital. For example: if the place they were living on happened to be on top of a giant oil reservoir, then all the protests in the world will not stop petroleum-linked companies from removing them.

Opting out of communism would be a stupid decision, anyway. These lolbertarians fail to realise that the whole 'barriers to entry' shit they complain about so much begins with the development of capitalism.