I dislike the term human resources but can't think of a better way to describe the concept right now...
I was thinking about the absolute basket case the Tories, and New Labour before them, have made of British services and infrastructure. I've been to the local doctor's surgery a few times recently and the complete chaos that is NHS organisation was completely laid bare. I don't use the trains but know plenty of people that do and they same the same of the rail. Privatisation has completely atomised and antagonised the whole infrastructure of our public services. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
My question, and one that has always bugged me, is basically how would a future fedarative Anarchist society deal with antagonisms between different collectives who may well have conflicting visions of the production and delivery of products and services (things which are still going to be very much in demand post Capitalism).
One of the things that always made sense about Statist Socialism was the "understanding" that in order to overcome these antagonisms (at least in the short term whilst society reconstitutes and reconfigures itself in the wake of a revolution) there would need to be some "neutral" arbiter (i.e - a workers state) that could coordinate and in some cases override or compel certain groups to not work a three day week, for example a group that happened to live and produce in an area abundant with the conditions and resources necessary for water purification because, damn it, we need clean water over here - we're working our asses off to provide you with good healthy food and stuff etc.
This is a very important problem, and I'd say it doesn't really have a solution. Rather, it goes to show why the traditional libertarian notion of an anarchist society – a network of autonomous, self-managed communes of producers, which establish links with other such communes through some unspecified mechanisms of "mutual help" – is a non-starter. As argued by Bordiguists, communism will require "a harmonious planetary planning of production and distribution of use values according to real social needs". This means that different production hubs (which can no longer be described as enterprises) will not be run and controlled exclusively by those who work in them according to their whims, but rather by society as a whole according to an agreed-upon plan.
(Interestingly, Bordiga was not a state socialist in the sense of believing that this social control of production on a planetary scale would require the continued existence of the state. He did believe, however, that it would be exercised in a centralized manner by some sort of meritocratic – and therefore unelected and unaccountable – "social brain". In this respect, his position is obviously vulnerable to even the most basic anarchist criticism, but the points he raised in his critique of enterprise socialism still stand.)