Freedom to bear arms under Libertarian Communism?

This is probably where we disagree, actually. I believe that consciousness is about realizing and analyzing how historical processes have decided cultural shifts, but then acting consciously to change them. The individual realization of their social place and how they are empowered or disempowered to act is the beginning of consciousness. Self-awareness and cooperative praxis through direct action is the process. Whether or not that calls for a certain institution or not depends on the situation.

So who do you think should decide?

If having a gun is a privilege then surely you have to ask yourself why people want it. Now if I decide I want a bicycle of my own then it is up to my community to decide if that's ok, depending on availability and need. The fact that I feel like wandering around with a deadly weapon is not something I would consider to be a privilege worth allowing. If there is a risk of attack then easy access to weapons, even to the point of carrying them is fine.

that is a possible problem, not sure what the argument here is though. We should all be allowed to have guns in case our commune makes a bad decision about them?

The aim of post-revolutionary decision-making is to achieve the best life for everbody. So unless carrying a gun can be justified then it shouldn't really be allowed, this isn't authoritarianism though, it's simply expecting people to justify wanting something. I'm not necessarily advocating banning them, just that I don't think they're a good idea. Same as vulnerable people probably wouldn't have overdose levels of drugs in their homes if it could be avoided.

This is how language forms but it isn't how we use it politically. We do defined terms so that we all know what we're talking about. For example if in my commune we were allowed guns for 'acceptable reasons' then we would have a list of those reasons and how they were come up with and how we could bypass them if necessary. (say if a freak migration of wolves were on our doorstep and we'd only put down bears as a reason).
One of the first things a good group needs to do is to have a meeting about meetings. What things mean and how they will be dicussed etc. The defintion of language is necessary to make it accurate and this is not a limit to freedom, it is a defence of it. Current laws are designed to be vague so that expensive lawyers can see people go free so the police can break laws when they feel free. So for example you are not allowed to kill someone unless there is a valid reason, and then we would define what valid meant and we would also define kill. The presence of rules is not authoritarian, the imposition of them for the benefit of the authorities is. So if my commune arms certain people and not others so that they can intimidate people then that is a problem. If it decides that Charlton Heston will have to make do with a water pistol unless he's actually out hunting food for us then that's fine as long as we're all under broadly the same rules. I'd make exceptions, for example I'd rather not have anyone having guns stored in the home, but I'd be especially concerned with children, teenagers, the depressed, people dealing with major problems etc. So for example if someone's partner had just died I'd probably think it best they didn't have a gun in case they get drunk and blow their head off. Small risk but as the benefits of having a gun aside from some notion of liberty aren't really clear it seems fine to me.

It's not a decision any more than deciding who should be able to have shoes or a guitar. The basis of my argument is that we should have a healthy gun-culture, where guns are not feared nor viewed as toys that go boom.

If this entire discussion were about the "freedom to bear guitars," or "freedom to bear hammers," I'm not sure it would have gone the same way. The reasons people view guns differently are obvious: people either fear guns or view them childishly. My entire point has been that we need to demystify them.

Isn't communism post-scarcity? Why should bicycles be so heavily regulated in a society where, supposedly, the means of production are available to all who wish to use them? And your assertion that such questions are only answerable by your community is exactly the thing that could lead to a reinvented class structure. For the millionth time, why should communism be so bare-bones that a democratic assembly can guarantee any rights to some and not others while demanding equal labor from all, and how does such a process not potentially justify a class system?

In the case of guns you're either going to have to face one of two realities. Either there will have to be a class of people that are authorized to carry arms for protection of the community (we call them police these days) or you'll have to empower people to defend themselves as much as possible and within reason to the extent they wish to defend themselves. Obviously, people who feel safe without arms or do not wish to carry don't have to.

Replace the word gun with anything else. "unless carrying a balloon can be justified then it shouldn't really be allowed," "unless carrying a vibrating dildo can be justified then it shouldn't really be allowed," "unless carrying a gameboy can be justified then it shouldn't really be allowed," "unless carrying a novelty Russian winter hat can be justified then it shouldn't really be allowed."

Now rethink your question.

And my question to you is why do you care what I keep in my house? I could have a gun in that drawer, or I could have a dildo. I wasn't exactly thinking of you in either case.

My point, as stated above, is that this is not a question of politics. Apparently activity outside of a meeting boggles the mind.

people being empower to defend themselves is not the same as individual weapon ownership.

and why is it that people are only talking about small arms and not there full range of weapons? why are artillery, rocket launchers etc ignored?

I would argue that arms other than small arms do not serve a purpose outside of killing people, sabotage, or destruction of infrastructure. The same is not true of small arms.

all of which are useful for defence

...of communities against other collective forces, rather than small arms which are useful for individuals, which is why individuals should be allowed small arms rather than machinery they most likely cannot operate alone.

Q.E.D.

Who decides that 'the same is not true of small arms'? Each individual, or the community?

Who decides which 'arms' constitute 'small arms which are useful for individuals'? Each individual, or the community?

Who decides whether 'individuals should be allowed small arms'? Each individual, or the community?

"LBird, who decides whether you personally have the right to have a guitar or a hammer? Your democratic commune, of which you are a voting member, or you yourself, as an individual?"

LBird: 'My commune'.

If my comrades have a reason which convinces them to prohibit the right to bear guitars or hammers, even after I've exercised my democratic right to argue the opposite, then I'll accept it is an acceptable reason.

We don't bear guitars or hammers. We are Communists, not individualists.

I still really think its a simple case of people being free to create and sustain communties where cultures and values are shared. Some communities will inevitably emerge where individual gun ownership is widespread and safe. Others will inevitably emerge where individual gun ownership will be frowned upon and devalued. Whether this is considered by some to be a trivial issue around which to develop communities or not is irrelevant. People will go off and form there own communities regardless of what others think is trivial.

Personally I would advocate a complete eradication of tools whose sole purpose is for killing, but since that is highly unlikely to be adopted as a universal agreement (considering their efficiencing for use in hunting combined with peoples love of meat) then gun ownership seems like an unfortunately inevitable although not necessarily necessary evil.

The problem wih this kind of hypothetical is they always seems to get bogged down by the habitual tendency to forget that libcom will never be a libertarian community. It will be libertarian communities. We all know the arguments against centralisation and agree with them. The outcome of this will always be distinct communties who will inevitably differ on varying issues like this.

People will seek out and invest in relationships and communities with people who share things that they value greatly. For some it might just be a vibe/sense of humour/ style of communicating and social approach to everyday life. For others it might come down to the method of organisation they value most highly and communalise surrounding that. Others again might be motivated by issues concerning some practical application of ethical or moral values which may or may not include gun ownership. Etc etc...

But, as a Communist, I'm not against 'centralisation', LaForce, as long as everybody affected by the decisions of a 'central' authority has a vote in its decisions.

I can think of many issues that our Communist society will have to address on the global scale, for example, the world environment.

And I think all 'libertarian communities' (by which I presume you mean communes) will federate into higher-level communes, to deal with issues that simultaneously affect multiple communes. Issues will have to be addressed at the suitable level.

Federation, in some sense, means centralisation, as compared with decision-making by individual communes.

FWIW, I think that this issue of 'individual communes' is an extension of the 'individual person' debate.

On world issues, issues affecting all humanity, 'who decides'?

My answer? The democratic world-level commune. 'We' decide.

If my post-scarcity commune decides that I can no longer keep a hammer in my house to continue maintaining it, or if it's even a question, then I'd say there's a lack of consciousness to the point of not even being able to speak of class consciousness. And I would say the same of arms, my clothes, and my books.

LBird, it seems as though you are still content with a commune being able to recreate class society with no base-line of consciousness or critieria around what it means to be able to exercise democracy in a libertarian or communist way. Since you are fine with labor being robbed of its product so long as its by a process you approve, I can only assume that, no, you are not a communist at all.

Thanks for answering my reasonable question, Birthday Pony.

When in doubt, whip out Murray Bookchin. His 'Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism - An Unbridgeable Chasm' gets to the nub of this debate (as far as I'm concerned) from the social anarchist point of view. And it's a great read.

LBird, what I've been trying to show you is the absurdity of your canned answer, "the commune will decide," and how the alternative is not necessarily "the individual will decide."

Now, will most public things be decided by democratic assemblies? My thought is yes, they probably will. But if we're trying to build a class consciousness, then there are some things that will be more or less decided without formal assemblies, and there are some questions that would be absurd to ask in the context of a class conscious society.

Imagine this scenario:
LBird: workers, farmers, proletarians all! You have destroyed the capitalist infrastructure with your tools! You have fought the capitalist death squads with your arms! Come now! Place all of them into the collective stockpile and go through weeks of meetings before we decide whether or not you may have them back in order to fix that leaky roof!

If communism is post-scarcity, if we take countless anarcho-communists' statements to be true that there is more than enough collective wealth in the world to provide for those who want yet the barrier to achieving this is private property, then I see no good reason to take tools, means of production, that are (literally) already in the hands of workers and put them into a collective stockpile of a reified relationship manifested in a commune unless it is the commune's aim to control production much the same way the capitalist state controls production rather than letting the workers on the ground decide what to do with their tools as they have them, federate where they need, and achieve by their own collective will fulfillment of the statement "from each according to ability, to each according to need."

I have answered your questions, countless times, and said just as many that each situation is unique and may or may not call for a certain process. I have no reason to believe that answering the same question over and over again will serve to help this discussion in any way. In fact, I'd be willing to bet you're just waiting for a response so you may pick out words you don't like, hastily tie them to individualism, and then call me a bourgeois individualist. I would not put it past you to take this paragraph here as evidence of my individualism, and I also won't say that doing so will result in you looking any smarter than you did when you decided "free association" in the Lacan thread was a theory of bourgeois individualism.

Since you have claimed to know people's positions better than they know them, I am not sure why you are on this forum. And at that, I am not sure why you are concerned with class-consciousness at all. You have the game figured out. And surely, you are so infinitely wise as to be able to make any and all decisions regarding a potential commune unilaterally. Yet here you are.

Since I am refusing to play your game of individualist boogey-man, I'd rather you address the question I have raised to you multiple times now, that you have not answered. If you don't want to, that's fine. I'll take a refusal to answer as an admission that you are okay with communes recreating class society and robbing labor of its product.

As a libertarian communist I am against the kind of organisation that provides an opportunity for either centralised beaurocracies or majority rules to effect peoples ability to behave in whatever ways they choose as long as those behaviours do not effect others peoples ability to do so.

Their are reasonable limits to this I understand. An example might be where someone says "that persons homosexuality affects my ability to be happy because I am unhappy as long as there are homosexuals in the world". In these circumstances I believe the freedom should always rest with the positive rather than the negative; ie with the person who desires to act, rather than the desire of someone else for them not to act.

Questions of freedom should always favour the positive unless these freedoms effect the physical, emotional or spiritual freedoms of others. The environmental issue is easily covered by this. Non sustainable development/behaviour/industry/practice that has negative environmental impacts not only effect the freedoms of people now but people yet to be born. I sincerely believe that with a sufficient culture of education within the kind of cooperative social dynamic that a truly libertarian communist framework would provide would foster an understanding of the kind of environmental issues you described.

Global democracy should not so much be a matter of edict creation, but of opinion gauging. Not to create a law that will be enforced "officially" but to discover a consensus about whether or not a proposed action is considered to impinge on the physical, emotional or spiritual freedoms of others. From this people will be able to discover not only how overwhelming feeling is against an action, but also to discover areas or communities that are not against this.

In a libertarian communist framework the kind of responsible, conscious and active humans that will be produced under such conditions will be far less likely to need the kind of majority rule advocated by "democracy", and will be far more likely to accept the responsibility for acting directly to create the kind of communities they want without the kind of authority and/or validation seeking that is congruous with centralised and beaurocrartic "government".

This is too abstract. Guitars are different from guns and its only flagrant flippancy that allows this mode of argumentation to work. If my community out-laws guns, thats fair enough, if they outlaw guitars, you can get fucked.

to further elucidate. We cannot just 'accept it is an acceptable reason', that is a tautology. How and Why is it acceptable. If some goons decide guitars (or decks, lets say) are not accept, they better have a damn good reason*, otherwise I am going to start instigating the next revolution against this insanity. It sounds like the obscenity of the soviet union (and any other representation of 'the people have spoken') all over again.

Not picking on you LBird, but remember when I said that 'democracy' was not a simple transparent concept that we all agree [sic] on. This sort of stuff is exactly what I was talking about!

* I would argue that this reason would be a lot more difficult than the anti-gun reason.

Whatever argument you make in favour of specific freedoms, LBird's point still stands: some kind of acceptable majority has to agree with you! They either have to agree with you in principle that freedoms concerning private behaviour generally are sacrosanct, or just agree with you about the specific private behaviour you're interested in. If they do not agree, there is a conflict, and it won't be resolved by throwing toys out of prams. It might be resolved by persuasion. The political benefit of organising the human race along communist lines is all the members of the commune get a say. As things are now, they don't.

Pragmatically, what commune is going to ban guitars?! If such things happen post-revolution then the revolution will have failed and the human race will have shown itself to be a waste of space. A wholly positive outcome was never guaranteed, just a much fairer outcome than what we will get otherwise. And even then, you can go and find a better commune that isn't full of primitivists. And ask yourself, what the hell were you doing with them anyway?

I'm not sure how, seeing as Bookchin supported free association (in the political, not Lacanian sense). And the line I've been harping on is based on the quote from Bookchin around the 8:30 marker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrSxCmVpC84&feature=related

Or something along those lines...

Beyond that, in the same documentary you can see Bookchin speak at a Libertarian Party event and claim to feel as though he's in better company. While there are times I understand what he's saying there, I'm not sure I ever agree with it. Bookchin had some good thoughts though. I guess I'm just not sure how he's relevant to this discussion.

This is exactly what I have been getting at. The how and why of the gun discussion has not been sufficiently discussed, while appeals to the god-like authority of the commune above all else has. Process is not enough.

OK Pikel, taking your points on board, my last two posts were a bit short, but I think your two paragraphs highlight the internal 'democratic' contradiction we are dealing with rather than supersede it.

Point 1. A decision has to be made. Paragraph 2. Might be more difficult than first imagined. (the toys out of prams versus persuasion argument). I personally like to throw my toys out of my pram (as I think most people do) while enacting a long processes of collection deliberation, decision making and, perhaps, persuasion. My problem is with the lack of conceptual/political/ethical rigour that allows one to compare guns to guitars.

I know, on the one hand you can say, 'hey arbs, don't pick on LBird' or 'it was just an off the cuff example'. But I actually think the off the cuff example highlights some very basic problems. The first being the definition of 'democracy' (the 51%, the 99%, the 'electorate' or whatever) the second being this whole abstract 'what we would do after the revolution' stuff that I have been trying to problematize.

My favorite off the cuff example is still the vibrating dildo.

Commune member: um, yes, so the next order of business. I would like to check out three vibrating dildos from the stockpile for a, uh, educational seminar with some friends tonight.

Commune chair: hmm, and what exactly is the nature of this seminar? We'll need details to assure that you are qualified to wield a vibrating dildo.

I believe if a vibrating dildo goes off accidentally it is very unlikely to kill someone.

It's a simple political question, isn't it, mate? 'Who decides?'

The refusal of those that I've characterised on this thread as 'individualist' to answer this basic question of political organisation speaks volumes.

As I don't really think that they are in favour of 'dictators' or 'professional parties', I'm forced to the conclusion that they regard the 'individual' as sovereign.

Of course, it's still open to them to explain, for them, 'who decides?'

They don't seem to realise that any statement or assertion that they make can be met with the same question.

This is the closest BP has got to a democratic Communist political position. If this is now a general answer, we could start to talk about what our democratic mechanisms would look like. For example, what constitute 'most public things' and what don't.

Wow, your libertarian communist future sounds pretty hellish. Does the commune also get to decide whether you prefer to sleep with men or women, or are there, dare I say it, individual freedoms which are immune from regulation?

EDIT: Or books. Since we are talking about the commune deciding what to allow people access to in terms of objects, what about books or reading material? Can the commune, in your view, "democratically" ban certain works of literature?

It sounds a lot less hellish than 7,000,000,000 individuals doing as each pleases, mate, subject to no social rules!

In a nutshell, ‘yes’.

In a nutshell, ‘yes’.

Or are you going to allow, in your individualist hellhole, paedophiles to freely publish child bondage, rape, mutilation and murder ‘literature’ (as they self-define it)?

Underlying all the posters on this thread who object to democracy is the unspoken (conservative philosophical) stance that the ‘mass’ are stupid, and will freely choose to do harmful things: ‘re-introduce class society’, ‘force people to sleep with a sex they don’t fancy’, ‘ban The Beano’, etc., etc.

It’s time for Tastybrain, Birthday Pony, et al, to explain both why they are opposed to democracy as a method for proletarian decision-making, and why they assume that the class conscious proletariat, having carried through a successful revolution and come to consciousness of their position in nature, will take the politically and socially regressive steps that they have given above as examples of their worries.

Fear of 'democracy and the mob' is part of conservative philosophy, and is not ‘libertarian’, and is certainly not Communist.

Interjecting very briefly Lbird, I hope that you were answering 'yes' to the excerpt of Tastybrain's post which I bolded. I don't mean this as an insult, but your response can be construed as rather ambiguous.

I don't feel this would take place an on international level post-revolution, but this is one of those 'what if' scenarios that I argued out on a previous thread. Communes, at whatever level, do not have the right to regulate one's sexuality as long as it does not pose a risk to others.

Well, who, for you, decides what counts as 'individual freedoms', no.25?

Each individual or the democratic commune? Or some other entity?