Now that we’ve successfully increased the factionalism of the board by splitting from the tankies, the logical next step is to start arguing with ourselves. Possible topics include:
- Should personal property, as opposed to private property, rights continue to be respected? Is there any meaningful distinction between the two categories?
- Would volunteerism be enough to meet everyone’s needs, or is it okay to compel work sometimes?
- Are anprims even real?
Or another better topic idk I’m just a lib who loves internet fights
On the compelling work issue, how do you feel about the idea of creating incentive systems that encourage work but don't punish failure to work? Is that forced labor by another name?
i think the whole idea of what compulsion even is is going to change. social approval, accolades, socializing opportunities, educating people and talking them into shit!
and what work even is will change, when its not actively designed to cause misery. nobody actually wants to do nothing.
Personal property is fine. You can own the house you live in. If some weirdo decides it's their house and tries to start living in it and pushing you out, then that's a thing that the community should help to resolve.
I don't think uncoordinated volunteerism is enough to meet everyone's needs, we need some sort of incentive or another for people to do whatever labor ends up unpopular relative to its necessity. I don't think that needs to be compulsive, a purely incentive-based method is probably enough. I like the idea of using a market system for scarce/luxury goods for this purpose (not life-sustaining goods or the means of production), but I don't think that's the only way to do it.
I've gotten into some nasty arguments with post-civ/post-left/"Trying to convince people to do things is imperialism and the only moral option is to fuck off to the edge of society and do whatever I feel like" folks.
I like the idea of incentive systems to encourage cooperation. Like you said, some jobs are very necessary but unpleasant enough that absent an incentive they might not get done. I also think some sort of market system for luxury goods could be a good way to handle this issue.
I'll admit I worry about the personal property rights stuff. On the one hand, you ought to be able to lay claim to some things as your own and have a reasonable expectation of keeping them. On the other, the ultimate guarantor of property rights is violence. As you mentioned, if someone is refusing to leave your house, then the only way to remove him might be some sort of community effort to physically extract him. How and in what way these community rights-protecting institutions would be maintained and made accountable in an anarchist society is something I haven't really wrapped my head around.
Nice username.
Power is unavoidable, and inherently abusable. Narrowly defined institutions help, but any institution is going to try to grow its power. My best thought for how to prevent that is to make sure there's already another narrowly defined institution in charge of each of the natural directions for an institution to grow its power in. I don't know the best way to split up rights-protecting institutions, but since they have to employ violence they should be particularly finely chopped.
edit: Oh also it's important that the sort of situation where this is needed are very rare. Capitalism needs constant force to uphold private property laws that are actively preventing people from being able to live comfortably. But someone wanting to come steal your toothbrush is really weird. It'll happen (there are a lot of people, everything happens), but the scope of whatever system fixes it is limited, because it's a strange edge case of society. (And it's probably like... people who forcibly get someone to go home and then go fetch them a mental health expert.)
If some weirdo decides it’s their house
This seems like a weird way to frame property. Surely the community should have ways of equanimically sharing and using its resources, outside of just enforcing property rights. Like it would be fucked if some asshole decided to push a cancer patient out of a hospital bed because he want to sleep there now, but I assume wouldn't support the idea of private hospitals.
People couldn't privately own a house in say, Soviet Union, but it didn't mean that randos could do whatever in other people's homes.
How do they distinguish between general interpersonal/intra-communal/cross-communal cooperation and "Civilization"? Writing stuff down?
I don't have the time to read it all right now but from taking a glance that looks like an interesting write-up. Thanks for sharing!
- Ownership is foolish. If you have a hammer and your friend needs a hammer, you give them the hammer. If you need a hammer later, you ask someone for one. I own two hammers today and I have hammered three things in the last five years. If you need one, let me know. For the absurdist toothbrush case, no one wants to borrow your used toothbrush unless you've already gotten very intimate, anyway, so this is a non-issue.
- No one should work, period. Return to a life of play, pick wild fruits with your buds/lovers and feed each other. Read Against His-Story! Against Leviathan!
- Yes, but whatever meme conception you have of them is wrong. Anti/post-civ is a framework you must grapple with sooner than later unless you have an oracle telling you that global revolution is happening like next week.
Ownership is foolish
I generally share your position, but there is a thing that many people love having personal processions they would like to have instant access to and be able to use and modify in idiosyncratic ways. Things like books, furniture, musical instruments, bikes, computers, sporting equipment. Some of those things veers into the toothbrush territory, others can be fairly expensive and seem extremely shareable to most people who wouldn't care.
I'll remember to DM you if I ever need a hammer.
Anticiv is something I know exactly zero about, in all honesty. I certainly don't have any oracles, and even if I did, I suspect I might not be super thrilled with anything they had to say, so I'm open to learning more about the framework.
Drink deep! You don't really need to read all of them (or even all of any particular book), but there are good ideas to engage with in all of these. Decolonization of the mind is necessary for decolonization of the world.
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Personal property is stuff you actually use, as far as I'm concerned. No reason to touch it.
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I don't think anyone would need to be compelled to work. There will always be some people unwilling or unable to contribute, but those people are in such a small minority that it almost certainly won't be a problem. We wouldn't have got this far as a species if we weren't compelled to progress by our own feelings, regardless of external pressures.
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doubt it
A use-based system of property would be interesting. Maybe you've already heard of them, but there's some common law legal doctrines that tend to go in that direction. Adverse possession can be seen as serving a policy that unused property should be subject to redistribution, while wastage (though standing is usually limited to persons with present or future property interests in the given property) comes at the issue from the other end by punishing stupid or damaging use of property. Both doctrines are products of capitalist systems and reinforce capitalist incentives, but I wonder if they could be adopted into a more equitable body of personal property law, e.g. by declaring wastage a public nuisance and expanding possible plaintiffs to members of the public.
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