Hierarchy and anarcho-capitalism

'the post scarcity anarchist delusion' - you mean communism?

in a sense, yes. some communists are more sensible, and i am open to the possibility of a post-scarcity future, but if the revolution occurred tomorrow, outside of in very small communities, post-scarcity would be merely a dream. it's foolish to assume a large scale society could function without money, at least in the form of vouchers, like in the Spanish Revolution, at least at this point in time. maybe ideas like the Venus Project could work one day, but the reality is that there are scarce items in the world and in a larger society, currency would be necessary to properly allocate them. mutual aid works by itself for small societies, such as the kibbutzim, and i fully advocate mutual aid in a larger society as well, but mutual aid alone in a large society simply wouldn't cut the mustard.

Yes i know what you mean, its a pretty pointless line of arguement. If i go down to maccy d's and buy a hamburger, there is a pretty clear difference between me and the mcdonalds board of executives.

Nope, going through some tedious bureaucracy to get your transaction approved is not 'unhierarchical', it is in fact imposing more tiers of hiearchy on society than the small transaction would have done in the first place..

This is a comminist website. Most people who post on here are members of anarchist/communist organisations where we give our time freely and are not paid for our labours. Likewise you are not paid for posting your arguement on here, you do it because you beleive in a better society.
I'm not really sure what brand of social democracy you are recommending. I'm assuming you are advocating some sort of universal wage from which people can pay out money to individual contractors who for some unknown reason don;t get a universal wage for their labour. No doubt you will need a large bureaucracy to regulate the payment of such a wage according to hours done and so forth along with aformentioned banks, and regulatory bodies to prevent black markets and other forms of profiteering. As you can see this forms the bulwark of a state.

As libertarian communists we would simply say that painters and decoraters would operate in a collective. If an individual, collective or tenants group wanted buildings painted they would simply contact the collective and the labour would get done.
What exactly would the problem be?

Wish I could get a job

Because Rothbard was an intellectual quack. A fraud. As is "anarcho" capitalism.

Wow. Generally, people want communism (a lovely post-scarcity egalitarian future) but not revolution (a horrible messy business in which many people will die and there's a lot of confusion).

If you get rid of the communism part, what you're advocating is that we have a revolution in order to make things exactly the same as they already are. If we don't abolish money and such idiocies as 'independent contractors', 'mutual aid banks', being 'paid for the labour they put in' and what 'the consumer pays for the service' then, quite honestly, I can't see the point.

right, but there is also a clear distinction between you as the McDonald's customer and the person who hires an independent contractor for their labor, making that person slave for them.

it wouldn't be a 'tedious bureacracy'. it would simply work like this: because we live in a day and age where money can be handled electronically, people would have money that is deleted upon transaction by simply swiping a card. all money could be handled electronically and so people would be free to trade amongst each other and because money would be handled electronically, it would need to go through a bank which would be run collectively by the community surrounding it by people who work within the bank on a completely voluntary basis (as in no official employment, they simply work for the betterment of self and community) and are given money to directly represent their labor. anyone who wants a say in the operation of these banks would be allowed a say at meetings if they so wish. the intervention of such institutions in a transaction would be to ensure that 1. no non-labor profit is being made, and 2. inflation is prevented. mutual aid and simple barter would still be staples of the economy and would be unhindered by this system and work through collectives would be encouraged over trade. i am simply creating a system in which trade would be possible while also negating the capitalist argument that the employee/employer relationship in non-hierarchical. this system would obviously be specifically meant for a larger scale society. i assume that most libertarian communists are proponents of smaller societies. that is fine, but there is nothing wrong with a larger society either if it can be constructed well and maintained properly.

absolutely. it is simply friendly banter. i figured that we are all libertarian socialists at root, so why not share my opinion? we may differ slightly, but the basis of our ideology is the same. i'm not getting upset.

i am a libertarian socialist. beyond that i don't really have a label for the system i promote. i am coming up with my own concepts as i go and discussing them on boards such as this one helps me strengthen my ideas. i posted above about the ideas i promote. basically what i am doing is looking at things differently; people produce and what they produce they may take immediately or they may surrender it in exchange for currency in order to purchase other goods. the goods that they purchase must be scarce in order to carry a price and so, for example, water would be given away for free as long as it is not a scarce item. the reason i propose this trade system is because if one decides after a while that they do not want something that they purchased, they can trade what they purchased in exchange for money, so it would basically work as a return.

no problem with this, and i advocate this as well, but what about individuals who appreciate working on their own? this is where i find communism often falls short. i propose a method to allow people to work independently and yet and still work within a libertarian socialist society without any conflict.

would you not agree that liberty precedes equality? should an individual not be free to work independently?

i should first state that i would want a post-scarcity society, but i am also being a realist: if we are to achieve a post-scarcity society, we must figure out first how to produce all or most products in society beyond the demand of society. i would be more than intrigued to hear the methods by which this would be achieved if you would care to elaborate. until then, however, i am conceptualizing a society that would have things in place to ensure that in the case of scarcity, if it does occur, we would have a proper allocation system.

revolution doesn't require blood. i hold to Produhon's definition of the word:

"When our ideas on any subject, material, intellectual, or social, undergo a thorough change in consequence of new observations, I call that movement of the mind REVOLUTION. If the ideas are simply extended or modified, there is only PROGRESS. Thus the system of Ptolemy was a step in astronomical progress, that of Copernicus was a revolution. So, in 1789, there was struggle and progress; revolution there was none. An examination of the reforms which were attempted proves this."

not at all. i just have yet to hear a proper plan to ensure that scarcity will disappear in any future society and so in my plans i add ideas that will assure proper allocation in the face of scarcity. i am open to possibilities however.

what is so bad about these things as long as they are controlled properly (by the people, for the people)? what alternative is there to "being paid for the labor one puts in" that is superior?

Its not slavery, its just a job that needs doing. If I have basic essentials that need doing on my house that i am physically incapable of doing myself, like a window or ceiling being repaired, one would expect society as a whole to fulfll those needs in the same way you'd expect other collectives to run hospitals or to organise rubbish colection and so forth.
I don;t think i'm making a binman 'slave' for me any more than i think the disabled clients i look after (or would normally do if i wasn;t temporarily on the dole atm) are making me slave for them, its just a job that needs doing.
Its the very fact that your ideas are tied to a notion of wages, private property and value that makes you see such labour as ''slaving for someone''. For example take the admittedly slightly crude analogy of washing up, if i wash the plates and you dry them you aren;t 'slaving' for me, you are doing one task and i'm doing another.

No libertarian communists aren;t proponents of ''smaller societies''. We don;t beleive in 'barter' either, we beleive simply in production of goods according to 'need' which is defined by effective demand for goods.
Your mutualist bank set up is frankly a bunch of cobblers. I would assume that most 'non basic'' goods and services still have a price, so either a) these prices are artificially fixed by a state or b) these prices are allowed to fluctuate in accordance with trade or 'barter' and the ups and downs of the market. Unless your argueing that goods, services and houses don;t have price, in which case why would anyone want to earn wages of any sort?
More to the point, in this set up of yours how are the wages of most of the workforce determined? Are they determined by the market price of goods and services or are they all paid by this small entirely voluntary mutualist bank? Which definitely isn't bureaucratic and has no administration or secruty checks to avoid fraud and doesn;t extend credit to new enterprises.

Your missing the point, i wasnt saying you were getting upset. I was saying we are communists not simply because of a vision of a better future but because thats how we operate organisationally today in that we don't get a wage for our political activities.

So you have a welfare state which provides for the basics while the rest of the economy is a capitalist one, the name your looking for is social democracy.

Communism is a society where people work less hours and have free acess to all goods If some anti-social weirdo wants in the face of said generaly better conditions to work 40 hours a week and get paid for it then they're an idiot and I don;t see why the res of society should cater to their stubborn foolishness.

Nope, if someones a scab then i wouldn;t respect their right to ''work independently''.

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is so vastly superior that it can't even begin to see far enough behind itself to realise that it exists in the same universe as what you said, which is also known as 'a fair day's work for a fair day's pay' and is a nonsense.

We cannot be 'paid for the labour we put in'. We live in a society that encompases the whole world and that means not everyone is able to do immediately productive labour. Children, the elderly, the infirm, must all be supported, and so must all the people (teachers, doctors, nurses and all those other people who don't actually produce but do contribute to the quality of life) who look after them; also firefighters, coastguards and anyone else who currently has a 'safety' role but doesn't directly 'produce' ie turn 'stuff' into 'wealth'.

So millions of (worldwide, at least a couple of billion) people do not actually contribute to direct production and therefore they aren't expanding social wealth. They cannot be 'paid for the labour they put in' because their labour doesn't generate any wealth ie money ie pay.

Unless of course we 'take it' from those who do produce it, eg miners, farmers, people who attatch widgets to doobries. So to pay teachers and nurses, one must tax miners and widget-doobryizers. This means, in order to pay the people who don't make anything for the 'labour they put in' we must pay the people who do create the wealth less than the amount that is 'the labour they put in'.

Unless we total all the labour that everyone puts in and total the number of people who put it in and the amount of time they all put in and say well that's 56 billion dollars divided by 23 trillion hours so each hour is worth a 20th of a cent and if you worked 3,000 hours you should get $1.50 a year. Now, a loaf of bread takes 9 people 45 minutes to make but the transport of the goods uses...

And then of course there's the idea of saving social wealth for future social investment. Bricks are not the same as sandwiches, they don't go rotten after a couple of days. You might have them lying around for a while. Do the brickmakers only get paid when the bricks are used? Or does society advance them their wages (from someone else's labour, who must then be paid less) to tide them over?

This is called the 'why money is fucking stupid and needs to be abolished day one of the revelution no question nohow not even speculation about working time vouchers or chitties nor nowt it's all shite' theory. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than the idea of money after the revolution.