Note that the site is in archived, read-only mode. You can browse and read, but posting is disabled.
Welcome to Anarchy101 Q&A, where you can ask questions and receive answers about anarchism, from anarchists.

Note that the site is in archived, read-only mode. You can browse and read, but posting is disabled.

Categories

–6 votes
As long as the workers continue to produce we can give them free passes to the store and dispense with the crapitalist and their dollars.

We have to have workers, we don't have to have the system that has been built to insure that the ruling class eats the most from the pie while producing nothing but parasitical progeny.

The true value of a worker's work is one share of all the work done in the world.
By accounting for this work under crapitalism the worker creates $100 worth of goods for $40, or less, in wages.
If the worker was given a free pass to order from the net, or take from the shelves, whatever she needs to continue producing we can cut out the jobs that produce nothing and put those people to work decreasing the average needed from the whole.
The work should be divided, imo, among those between the ages of 20 and 45.
The young should prepare for their productive years by acquiring the knowledge needed to excel in their chosen profession, and the aged do whatever they want.
If they want to continue in some productive manner, fine, if they want to retire to a beach somewhere, that is also ok.

Can you tell me why this won't work if properly managed in the change over from here to there?
by (320 points)
"if properly managed..."

hmm - why does that make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end?
Maybe because it suggests hierarchy, and because it buys into the reformist mentality of "oh but it could work if only we did it better/the way we're supposed to", not to mention that it's just one example of this question's repeated attempts to rationalize human beings, desires and behaviours into a coherent system that can visualised, and managed.  It makes all my hair stand on end.

Edit:
Just to clarify (because the above could come across as quite aggressive), I'm not condemning the asking of this question.  The only stupid questions are insincere questions.
freeborn, what makes "passes" any different from company scrip, or money?
who is the "we" that has to have workers?
who does the managing you seem so fond of?
@clodbuster, your hackles are up because you have been raised in a matrix of forced management, why do you do what your dad tells you to do, because he will get loud and scary if you don't,....it is one of nearly everybody's earliest lessons.

Properly managed would have to flow from a voluntary agreement as to what properly is defined to be,....I would suggest the overabundance of goods as meeting the requirement of properly managed,...

@Yosemite, we have been forced into a box by the forced indoctrination of those that come before us, violence is not only accepted as a means to one's ends, it is often seen as preferable, and as such colors nearly everything we look at, I call it one of the lenses put on us as children.
Until we can take off those lenses and see clearly we suffer from their skewed representation of reality.

@dot, we must not look as hours as merely a substitute for dollars, the tit for tat trades that are crapitalism is not the goal, the goal is an objective measure of our production, I have suggested hours though some other measure may work better, it's use is to insure that we have produced more than we have consumed.
A tit for tat trade would just alter the nomenclature and not the nature of crapitalism.
The workers that worked today make the shelves full for tomorrow, they can do this in the absence of an accounting department balancing the books.  What we must have is a reason for them to continue to produce the goods.

We is all of us, those of us that want to continue having consumer goods in the absence of an economic system that enslaves us.

The managers would have to come from the people doing the work.
Some people cannot get others to work for them, some people naturally inspire others to greatness, these are the people that would float up the structure to the position of trusted leader.
They would have no iron fist to order anything, though when one accepts that some people will willingly follow anyone rather than think for themselves it will be an ever ongoing struggle to stop the corruptive nature of fame and it's attendant power to influence the masses.

The properly managed I referred to was to help overcome the short term shortages that would be inevitable when going from a scarcity management system to an abundance system.  When people of today are given free reign to take what they want they will naturally over consume, this is what must be accounted for and managed.
I asked some relateq questions here: http://www.anarchy101.org/9031/how-does-anarcho-communism-distribute-goods and am not gonna repeat them.

A couple other things though, what of us that don't want to continue to have consumer goods? What if your consumer goods are based on extracting raw materials from where I live?

What do you ean by, and how do you define "greatness"?

Who determines "proper management"? DO these same folks decide who is over consuming and needs to be "accounted for and managed"?
having already lived for over 45 years, i plan to head to the beach
apart from my critical questions, thanks for answering stuff here from what seems to be a more sympathetic to anarcho-communist perspective. I think this site (like most similar sites) tends to become an echo chamber around the shared assumptions of the most prominent contributors. Anarchy shouldn't be about that, and you are engaging in ways (un-trollish) that other folks haven't. I really hope that you continue to share, even when I am critical of what you share.
Thanks for the kind words, ingrate, they have been few and far between, but then I am struggling to bring communism to a crapitalist audience and craptialism has had millennias to groom the mutton.

If you don't want consumer goods then you would need work very little.  You only have to account for what you take from the work of others, if you take little then you are on the hook for little.
As for needing minerals from where you live, this would require some consensus, you could gum up the works for a time, but you cannot block every mine forever.  I would presume that in the absence of crapital restraints, ie, technological costs needed to produce environmentally sustainable minerals, that all mining would go green.  The extra work that it costs to not pollute would not have to be pried from/accounted for by a crapitalist trying to pilfer enough to get his whore a new tennis bracelet, but only by the man hours needed to do the work.
I would propose that we just wait for you to go away, then mine whatever we needed.  I would also look to the moon and whatever other space resources that could be accessed.  Imagine what space x would look like with budgets not limited by dollars but by man hours and their abilties.

Greatness will have to be defined individually, some people think that hitler was great because he culled the inferiors from the genetics of the European jews, while others think the bushes and cheny are great, though I repeat myself.

Each individual would have to determine what proper management was, and to what degree they want to contribute to the mis-management.
Since it will be necessary to be very open with production numbers this can all be managed publicly on the internet.
Each geographic area would not want to be labeled a parasite on china(or whomever else produced to an excess) so they would work to make themselves self sufficient.

@baanarchist, I would too, but there will be plenty needed from us to get generation y back into production.
I would think that with all the out of work salesmen, accountants, tax attorneys, cops, soldiers, and politicians the average number of hours would not exceed 30 per week.
Freeborn, i don't have the desire to get anyone "back into production".

regarding work, i focus my energy on food, water, shelter, and a little bit of warmth and electricity. other than that, i feel content to live off the rest of the scraps that industrial society has already created - maintaining or reconfiguring or re-using whatever i can in co-operation with others around me. obviously, i don't live entirely this way today, as (like everyone else alive now) i've lived all my life in a monetized, industrialized, hierarchical society...but i try to keep moving in that direction, and continue to reduce how often i use money.

i find myself rooting for the miners to stop mining, the trucks to stop trucking, and the walmart distribution system to fall apart...or at least for all those things to gradually slow down, including "production". the seas and land and the air look pretty sick from all that production...on top of what it does to the people doing the producing (and consuming).

i desire a way of living that doesn't view the world in terms of  production and consumption, professions and "retirement".

edited: grammar and to add a few thoughts
pardon me for quoting myself:
it seems to me that the most practical anarchists are the least visionary; imagination suffers when people try to figure out steps for how to get from where we are now, to where we want to be.
what kind of anarchist one is probably depends a lot on whether one thinks that creativity is more helpful than practicality or vice versa.

http://anarchy101.org/6902/what-form-of-government-you-envision-after-the-state-smashed#a6906
@baanarchist, I would agree that getting somebody back into wage slavery is not a desirable thing to do, but I would like to continue having cars and tvs and toilet paper and food, and this requires a division of productive labor to provide efficiently.
I agree that down consuming is desirable, but the facts are we have to have industry if we want more than what the local land provides, ie, concrete blocks, sheet rock, solar cells, etc, that is what my plan tries to address in an anarchic manner.

@dot, we can't really predict what society will look like without men with guns telling us how to live, the human race hasn't lived that way, outside a number of years in the frontier days of the west, in 1000's of years.
aaaaaarrrrrrgh.
"without men with guns telling us how to live,...outside a number of years in the frontier days..."

-  Shit, lass/lad, i do like you.  You rake up the muck, raise a stink, and you make people _think_.  And you usually raise interesting points;  but unfortunately wrapped in an inflammatory comment (the typical method of discourse online these days) that can obscure the point you were trying to make.  This space has somehow evolved a quieter style of argument; and i think you are trying, by consciousness or by not, to acclimatize.  I hope you will take your time, and we all learn to agree to disagree, we benefit from breadth of argument; unfortunately, others have argued similarly to you, flamed out and went away mad.
but i digress  -

... outside of the us cavalry, various bands of gunmen hired as mercenary militia during the cattlemen's range wars, bands of thugs hired by the railroad companys to do their dirty work, the fucking Pinkerton's (a pox upon their sulfur-blasted souls), the american legion and various 'veterans' associations, etc...
And firearms have only been effective for a couple centuries...
Your point about coercion by violence and threat is spot-on, though more often involving a pointy stick; your example (popular in some circles im sure) ignores millenia of resistance, rebellion, and the interesting bits around the edges of collapsing civilisations/empires (dozens of both).

I'll leave you with a rhetorical - you say you need industry if you wish to have a certain level of consumable products, fair enough.  But what need that industry look like?  The hyper-automated factories of japan, filled with gleaming robotics, are fed by hundreds of thousands of cottage machine shops staffed by three or four members of an extended family who live in the small apartments over the shop floor.  A machine lathe can be a robot-fed automated instrument of mass-production, or an old lawnmower engine block with a faceplate bolted on; a smelting furnace can burn a hundred tons of ore, or lab model that holds a bare cubic foot; glassworks and brick kilns stretch out a quarter mile of molten hell, while hobbyists tuck their kilns in the corner of their garage.
Please don't respond, just reflect on the idea - what does 'industry' have to look like in your vision of society?  and what could it adapt to with increasing levels of anarchy and/or conservation?
I'm with you, clodbuster, history has only had revolvers and repeaters for 150 years, pointy sticks and edged metal have pushed folks around much longer, and as long as bullies have pushed the braver among us pushed back.

Perhaps I should have referenced the fur hunters and not the sodbusters, but the fact remains, for a time a person could live without nosy neighbors forcing their ideals on them in the west of amerika.

I don't intentionally inflame folks, I just have a lot of passion and call them as I see them.  
If you choose to react with anger, that really isn't under my control,...

I hope to be here as long as I can still get responses, I'm notorious for the last word.

How industry will evolve is not for me to decide, I would predict everything being local again due to distribution costs, both in terms of the labor required and the pollution created.  I would further surmise that once people are aware of how their consumption increases labor on somebody, perhaps themselves, then they will naturally consume less.  Material goods don't bring happiness, happiness is homemade, you either make your own or live without it.  Not everybody is involved in production today and that ratio will decrease as robots and 3d printers proliferate, add in the war machine that will end when violence is not acceptable as a means to an end and the average production needed from each individual will shrink even more.  I would propose that this extra labor needed to fill the shelves today will move to more advanced research areas needed to decrease the need of labor even more.  Leisure will be at a maximum under what I propose, just imagine how much productive labor goes into taxes and war that will be freed up by throwing off the ruling parasites that produce nothing except privileged progeny.

I am male.
I use the name because it lets girls tell their boyfriends that they are at angel's without creating animosity, at least until they've met me,....
I also use it because angels are messengers, and I have a message,....we have to have work, we don't have to have dollars.
I got it in jail as a derogatory but I adopted it to take away it's power as one.

Please log in or register to answer this question.

...