anarchy means without a ruler, so I assume majority rule/voting is also unacceptable. That leaves us with consensus as a political model. So I am assuming that cities will have to go, same for big factories with more than 50 people.
consensus is minority rule (in extreme one person vetoing hundreds) , which is far more autocratic than majority votes. this is why afaik no anarchist pre-60s gave it the time of day, especially in actual revolutionary attempts like ukraine, spain etc.
Anarchism doesn't necessitate consensus at all. It is, as said, a product of the post-60's era, and the liberal influence on anarchism that occured then which brought that in.
In most cases, it would be majority rule which would be used. For anarchists, the point is that consensus is desirable, but reality determines that that isn't always possible, or practical.
Anarchist society would like: Self-managed industry - "Factory Committees", workers councils/syndicates, etc - , abolishment of the state in favour of egalitarian structures, etc. Can't really be arsed going into much more depth than that.
"Anarchism is the belief that through social revolution, the current form of government is to be replaced with self-managing community collectives, united through delegation and federation. Running things at the lowest possible level, anarchists, like socialists, agree with the notion of ‘bottom up’ but are wary of the 'up' part. Underpinning this society would be principles of interconnectedness & solidarity, egalitarianism, volunteerism/free association, sustainability, respect, liberty & co-operation. Systems of production and distribution would be managed by their participants. Through mutual aid, communities would aim to provide the resources necessary for all to develop as fully as possible their faculties, as well as to fully encourage creativity, expression and contribution. All would belong and have a direct impact in the community through a platform of direct/participatory democracy, creating a level of social cohesion and custom that would eliminate the necessity for authoritarian/oppressive institutions."
I myself do not have a problem with as much decentralisation and autonomy in production as possible. It is not just a ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ position but as much a purely practical one.
I would have no wish or desire, nor I should I, for instance to participate in a decision on street lighting plans in some town in Peru or whatever. Some decisions however will be felt as effecting everyone, lets say seal hunting, killing animals for their fur or turning butterfly sanctuaries into speedway circuits or an airport or something.
Ultimately there will have to be a mechanism whereby some decisions or general policy will have to be taken by everybody. It will in fact be impossible for anything but a small number of decisions to be taken democratically by everybody, or the majority, as there will be too many of them and we will be spending all our time voting.
So it will have to be decentralised.
Even with majoritarian decisions it will in my opinion be necessary or inevitable to take into consideration the strongly held views of a minority. I may well prefer to do something one way rather than another but vote the other way to appease the more strongly held convictions of others for the sake of harmony. It is nothing more than how we behave in groups or families.
In free access socialism democratic decisions or the dreaded ‘state’ would only effect production or how and what we produced. Choices about how much we consume or where and how much we work would be personal or individual ones, unlike in Anarchist Parecon.
There has been an interesting alternative proposed for democratic decision making called ‘Demarchy’ a review of which appeared in Social Anarchism, Number 21, 1995-96, pp. 18-51.
.
I have not read it for a while but a summary might be;
“Demarchy is based on random selection of individuals to serve in decision-making groups which deal with particular functions or services, such as roads or education. Forget the state and forget bureaucracies. In a full-fledged demarchy, all this is replaced by a network of groups whose members are randomly selected, each of which deals with a particular function in a particular area.”
I actually came up with the proposition on independently on my own only to be informed that the idea had been kicking around for a while.
Thus, this is how I put it on our list.
"
The theory of statistical sampling is well established and is based
on mathematical fundamental first principals not on empirical
evidence ie it is true. Ignoring people lying and not responding
etc. a sample of 5000 people randomly selected from a population of
say 50 million in a yes /no issue there will be a 99% chance that
the (%) voting figures (of the sample or poll) will be within +/-2%
of how the total population would have responded.
Ballpark figures and it is probably better than that .
The history of exit poll data discussed at length on this election
fraud issue, despite the major potential problem of lying and the
actual one of non response/participation in the order of 50%, has a
really impressive record. Non participation is an important issue as
a poll will then only tell you what people who are prepared to
answer a poll are thinking. In opinion polls normally in excess of
60% refuse to respond.
This is a shocking thing to say but it is true, there is no need for
200 million people to vote as a poll of 20,000 (properly organised
under correct criteria) will give you exactly the same result every
time. Science uses this principal all the time it is embedded in the
theory of experimentation. We wouldn't have (to have a) lying and non
participation problem in our system in a secret (or non secret) poll.
(On a complex issue like nuclear power where everyone could not
possibly spend their time in understanding all the complex and
technical information they would need to make a `rational' decision )
In the democratic process why couldn't we do it on a jury type
system but with big juries . If there is a complex subject to be
decided we get the experts to provide reports etc and argue amongst
themselves and get a Jury of 10,000 ordinary people randomly
selected to go through all the evidence.
The stats people would tell us what sample size was needed to
achieve levels confidence required etc. You could put all sorts of
safe guards in if you wanted, the ability to cancel the decision if
a majority and (or) over 30% ? of a plebiscite voted against it .
You could also (democratically) skew the sample population to
balance local versus global interests etc. A delegate or executive
committee could (perhaps) just pass these Jury votes on the nod or
not, or whatever.
In practice most if not all would just go through or the jury
investigation be repeated or expanded.
You could even be given (everyone) the option to vote on every
single issue or just tick one box that says " I agree with all jury
decisions unless stated otherwise" or a non vote would be considered
a yes to the jury vote.
If you had a voting population of 30,000,000 and jury of 3,000 we
could make 10,000 decisions a year by each person only having to
vote once.
What goes onto the agenda is another issue. The required sample size
(of the poll) as a % of the population drops dramatically as the
population size increases eg with 10 million you might need 1,000
whereas as for 100 million you would need 5,000.
Even at a local level , lets say a constituency of 50,000, we could
have weekly "parliaments" of say 1000 randomly selected constituents
voting on resolutions put forward by another body. That way I
wouldn't have to spend more than 2% of mine time voting which would
be too much for me but close
enough to 0%."
I don't see how you can equate anarchy with small D. democracy (majority rule without elected decision-makers). We all know that in this situation minorities end up being ruled by majorities and often times facing severe repression.
I agree with you about consensus in community situations. I have known an authoritarian personality that openly admitted he blocks until he gets his way. I guess I was referring to anarchy as a situation where there is a group of people that are on the same page without coercion.
I think the best we can do is go with majority and super majority rule at the workplace and neighborhood /regional level, but have a framework where minorities are able to leave and there are many choices of communities, each with its own emphasis, values, style of doing things. And also situations where the minority does not have to go along with the majority. I'm thinking of a sales tax on products that are not necessary and the revenue goes into a controversial program, although they are regressive and that still deals with money.
I never understand these sort of weird 'direct democray'' ideas that seem to srping forth from anarchism whenever the subject of production isbrought up. Production isn't ''decided'' upon, its planned out as a response to market demand. Thus a chain of burger bars would be run by their staff who would have detailed lists of all the profucts they used in a day, a week a month and so on, would relay this information to a central depot whose staff would dispatch deliveries and make orders to factories accordingly. The factory and depot between them would look at data for previous months and produce goods accordingly to meet the demand previusly shown with some surplus. I don;t see why we need a ''neighbourhood meeting'' or any meeting outside the workplaces involved to decide how many thousands of curly and non-curly fries you might be making.
The community would only be voting on a number of issues that affected them as a community such us say the location of various public amenities and so on or the location of a sewage plant or stuff like that. However, while we might all have a vote in a town to decide where the plant is, you don;t all have a vote on what bacteria and chemicals should be used to treat the sewage, simply because most of us are not qualified to do so, that decision would be made by the workers at the plant with the consultation perhaps of a few university science labs. The idea that we would spend all our time voting on every minor issue is one that as people have noted on this thread, comes out of post-60's liberal notions of consensus and referendums, its generqall idea couched in terms of abstract principles and is most definitely not a problem basd on any real practical concerns of everyday life.
Diverse. So diverse in fact that even to imagine one anarchist model or society is hopefully foolish. This is good because it means there'll be space for me to get away from people who want to practice consensus decision-making, from people who want "demarchy", from people who want things to go on pretty much as before, from people who decide that the food of the new society will be pot noodles and that actually factories are a really good idea.
Personally I hope the world might become big again (as opposed to "it's a small world") with a new flowering of bioregional cultures and a generalised healthy suspicion of anyone from as far away as the next big city who decides that they really are the world's greatest expert in agricultural techniques or whatever.
Two more things about this: I don't believe that this kind of world would necessarily involve an abandonment of appropriate high technology - there's not much that's useful that can't be done on a small scale with good networking, and secondly, the moment some townie technocrat decides that things must be improved out in the provinces you find yourself nearing the moment of decision for this new "anarchist society"...... there's going to be blood on the carpet and people who started off calling themselves anarchists or libertarian communists are going to end up being jacobins or bolsheviks......... oh plus a few of them are going to end up dead trying to get me to fill out their fucking paperwork.
I don't see how you can equate anarchy with small D. democracy (majority rule without elected decision-makers). We all know that in this situation minorities end up being ruled by majorities and often times facing severe repression.
Do you have any specfic examples of this? Not getting your own way does not constitute "repression".
Diverse. So diverse in fact that even to imagine one anarchist model or society is hopefully foolish. This is good because it means there'll be space for me to get away from people who want to practice consensus decision-making, from people who want "demarchy", from people who want things to go on pretty much as before, from people who decide that the food of the new society will be pot noodles and that actually factories are a really good idea.
:roll: When it comes to say making hyperdermic needles, or cartons of orange juice or shoes or computers or railway track what methods of production do you imagine we should use other than factories and assembly line based workshops?
If you don't like pot noode then don;t eat it, products will only ever be produced if their is a demand for them whaever society we live in,
I agree with you about consensus in community situations. I have known an authoritarian personality that openly admitted he blocks until he gets his way.
I hav e been involved in a group that had a similar personality, we ended moving to consensus minus one. It was basically either that or to fracture the group. Other groups I have been involved in have had in their constitution a three quarter majority on any impass that couldn't be over come after three attempts. Consensus is fine and all good as long as all parties are willing to use it wisely if not, if groups still want to use it then they have to be willing compromise.
When it comes to say making hyperdermic needles, or cartons of orange juice or shoes or computers or railway track what methods of production do you imagine we should use other than factories and assembly line based workshops?
If you don't like pot noode then don;t eat it, products will only ever be produced if their is a demand for them whaever society we live in,
That was a really poorly thought out, not to say knee-jerk response, so don't roll your condescending eyes at me! As it happens hyperdermic needles, like a lot of surgical equipment, are not made in huge dark satanic mills and lend themselves very nicely to small workshop based production. The best shoes are known to be hand-made - better for your feet, better for the environment and better for the folks that make them. Computers can very readily be assembled in small workshops and the components can be made in the same way by skilled crafts people. Railway track can be produced in relatively small steelworks shared by a few areas - there is no need and has been no need for half a century or more for steel mills on hundreds of acres with thousands of workers. As for orange juice - well if you want it in cartons, the tetra pack revolution means that juice is best packaged like that on site by the growers, or at most in local co-operatives operated by folks who most definitely do not need to be full time oj packers. None of this is my imagination, what seems to be the product of your fevered imagination is that people would want to go on working in factories and being de-skilled by the production line in order to put juice on your table wherever in the world you live.... here's an idea for you: why not drink the juice of a fruit local to your home?
Now, all that said, my post was about diversity. I did not say "thou shalt not do this or thou shalt not do that" I said that I would be able to avoid the kinds of things I find undesirable if we lived in a diverse world. I won't be eating any pot noodles, don't worry, but more than that I would very much like to live in a community I imagine would be quite different from your ideal home...... good, I guess you'd agree..... I don't want to look at your rolling eyes across a town meeting every Wednesday night thank you very much..... so what do we need? Diversity. Then you can fuck off and work in a factory and wear crap shoes made by people who hate their machines, eat pot noodles, live in a house next to a gigantic steel mill and wonder why, despite the fact that we've had our bloody revolution, everyone's still miserable, the environment is still going down the toilet and nothing, but nothing gets done on time.
I never understand these sort of weird 'direct democray'' ideas that seem to srping forth from anarchism whenever the subject of production isbrought up. Production isn't ''decided'' upon, its planned out as a response to market demand. Thus a chain of burger bars would be run by their staff who would have detailed lists of all the profucts they used in a day, a week a month and so on, would relay this information to a central depot whose staff would dispatch deliveries and make orders to factories accordingly. The factory and depot between them would look at data for previous months and produce goods accordingly to meet the demand previusly shown with some surplus. I don;t see why we need a ''neighbourhood meeting'' or any meeting outside the workplaces involved to decide how many thousands of curly and non-curly fries you might be making.
should we include some red pepper in the hamburger?? Should we switch to soy burgers have a lighter impact on Prairie ecology? How big should the burgers be?? lots of decisions to be made by someone.
And let's have a vote on whether or not to beat up our Pakistani classmate because he looks different than us.
And let's have a vote on whether or not to beat up our Pakistani classmate because he looks different than us.
that's a red herring which isn't going to help what could be an interesting discussion. if a majority of people want to engage in ethnic violence the particular formal decision-making arrangements are the least of your worries.
As it happens hyperdermic needles, like a lot of surgical equipment, are not made in huge dark satanic mills
er, no, they're made in large specialised factories under sterile conditions, y'know, so patients don't die of infections and so on. how on earth can the production, appropriate labelling and aseptic packaging of the ~150 million hypodermic needles used every year in the UK alone lend itself well to "small workshop based production"?
as for people not wanting to do boring and deskilled work, i would imagine that whilst many things like the above example would have to be produced in factories on production lines of sorts, people wouldn't be bound to the same repetitive task over and over again. they'd have experience of all the different parts of the production process as far as possible and be involved in planning and innovation to whatever extent they could or wanted to. that way people would get to have a far deeper understanding of why what they're doing is important and hopefully end up giving a shit about it rather than hating it due to being confined to the same deskilled and, by itself, meaningless task. there are limits, and some things cannot be contributed to by everyone, e.g. things that require in-depth knowledge or expertise, but overall workplaces would aim to involve all workers in as skilled and interesting work as possible. yeah?
Wtf is that attitude supposed to be about? I do understand why surgical equipment needs to be sterile & I said small workshop I did not say garden shed.
You are missing the point, completely missing the point. I have been talking about diversity. I tell you right here and now that I do not want to find out "where I am this week" from a fucking colour-coded wall chart that has emerged from some well-meaning fucking committee that purports to represent the interests of several hundred, several thousand or several tens of thousands of workers...... a workplace does not have agency, it cannot aim to do anything..... people do that! Do you understand? I don't want to have a "far deeper understanding" inculcated in me by some fucking workplace merry-go-round, I dream of a different kind of life. And I am not alone.
You may think that you have imagined or even designed an anarchist society, but if so, you have not even begun to take into account the ways in which people will live, love and work if and when a free society comes into existence. I tell you again diversity is the quality I am looking for, diversity that reflects the rich diversity of humanity, the inventiveness of humanity, the wondrous diversity of planet Earth. It may seem easy to tut and dismiss the idea that an advanced medical science and technology could be maintained through networks of small workshops and local cottage hospitals; I guess it would have been easy to dismiss the idea that a computer built in someone's garage would transform the world, or that eventually printing would be a technology available in tens of millions of homes worldwide.
Anyway, the wonderful thing about living in a diverse society would be that I wouldn't have to put up with you explaining how obvious this is or that is, how working class means this, or labour theory of value means that; I wouldn't have to put up with you, and here's the pay-off, you wouldn't have to put up with me. There'd be space for us both and people even more eccentric besides........ the bad thing would be that when your bastardised futurist-industrial society didn't actually work, or fucked-up big time, you'd probably blame the folks who lived differently, instead of admitting that maybe, just maybe, they'd had some reasonable ideas all along.
Actually it is not necessarily a ‘good’ idea to squeeze orange juice at the point of production, for example in Brazil, and directly pack it off there. Although that is done to some extent for the local market. What they mainly do for the European market is concentrate the juice in Brazil, by about six fold, in a process that is more efficient than you might expect and ship it over as a concentrate to be diluted again in Europe and packed off.
This actually is a ‘cost’ saving as you don’t have the ‘expense’ of shipping ‘water’ half way around the world and you need less ships, fuel and human effort.
The issue of whether or not we would have small scale and ‘interesting’ production methods as opposed to large scale is again another policy issue that would need to be decided somehow.
There are economies of scale in manufacturing, in the amount of effort required to make things and in the amount of effort required to make the machines that make things.
The balance between spending longer making something in a more pleasurable way, or less making it in a less enjoyable way is something else that would that would need to be worked out.
Working in factories, I have done it most of my life, does not have to be a pain in the arse. Even boring jobs can be interesting if you are allowed to move around and don’t feel stuck in them.
When it comes to majority decision making it is not about the majority imposing its will on a majority and forcing it to live the way the majority wants it to out of spite or something.
If the majority don’t want loud music blaring out until midnight that would not have to mean that there would have to be a blanket ban on late night parties or something. They would just need to arrange things so the two communities would live in different areas.
The issue only becomes critical when the wishes of the majority unavoidably impinge on a minority, and vice versa. Short of conflict resolution by trial by combat the only other solution is by majority voting. This of course cuts both ways and you could be in the minority on one issue and in the majority on another.
It is, in a ‘society’ anyway, an issue of the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the minority, which is what we have now.
‘Townie types’ may want to ban fox hunting and badger baiting which country folk, as a minority, may enjoy immensely.
I don’t think it would be a good idea to allow experts to decide things as they may have an agenda of their own. The role of the experts would be to provide technical realistic options that would be decided by the community who would be allowed and seek second opinions.
Dave - Orange juice: I find it questionable whether orange juice, concentrated or not, should be transported to Europe from Brazil and I wonder whether it wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot better for Brazilian people to see to their own calorie needs through sustainable land use rather than to be seeing to the juice needs of Europeans who arguably could be choosing to drink apple juice and citrus juices from the Mediterranean region in season instead.
And no, scale and speed of production do not come down each to a "policy" decision, at least I am strongly suggesting that they should not and could not. In a diverse and free society these decisions should be taken at the appropriate level - bio-regional perhaps, commune or "village" ideally, perhaps in some cases even household. This is what I mean by diversity in this case...... no global or continental decisions should be taken about how to make shoes in every town and thus there will be places that reflect more my vision than the large-scale industrial visions of others. In time perhaps no-one will want to play global commodity games or eat stuff out of season because they can't be arsed to understand their own land and climate.
I would like to raise the issue with regard to the decision-making side of this debate about proximity to the matter in hand. Decision-making must of course include consideration of all of those upon whom the decision will impinge, but the greatest weight in any decision-making process, should arguably rest with those closest to the point of action.
Here is an example: Do we ask a city of millions to cut down on water use and install a comprehensive rainwater harvesting system that would cover most if not all of its adjusted needs or do we take the cheaper and faster option of flooding a distant valley to make another reservoir for the city even though the relative handful of villagers in the valley are stubbornly opposed to the scheme?
Who exactly decides what "society" comprises? If I say that I am not part of your society - I am not a counter-revolutionary understand - I just want to be left alone with my fellow valley-dwellers, or in my stubbornly craft-based neighbourhood or village, who decides to enroll me in your "society" for the sake of making me comply with your policy decisions? Without a willingness to tolerate diversity, we are nothing but fucking bolsheviks.
And no, scale and speed of production do not come down each to a "policy" decision, at least I am strongly suggesting that they should not and could not. In a diverse and free society these decisions should be taken at the appropriate level - bio-regional perhaps, commune or "village" ideally, perhaps in some cases even household. This is what I mean by diversity in this case...... no global or continental decisions should be taken about how to make shoes in every town and thus there will be places that reflect more my vision than the large-scale industrial visions of others.
But would it be possible to maintain an advanced society based on "village" decision making, if that is your ideal? It would be impossible for the village to locally manufacture everything it needs, mine the raw materials etc. And cities aren't going to disappear. There would have to be interlinking for purposes of survival, and for a decent quality of life. Though villages could isolate themselves if they wanted to, I don't see what they'd have to gain by doing so.
I also don't see what is wrong with factories if they are socialised and the workers within it are able to access all stages in production and management, positions are rotated, representatives are elected etc. Surely the difference between a workshop and a factory is one of scale if they are fully socialised. The way that Jenni's question about how to solve real problems of high demand without mass production was met with a moral argument about human diversity is strange. Its not like anyone's seriously proposing that every decision about how to run every town is going to involve everyone in the world or the continent. But there would have to be democratic methods of distributing goods between regions, transporting materials and parts around for manufacture etc. That this might involve recallable, rotating committees of delegates and other such arrangements doesnt strike me as contrary to anarchism, but integral to it functioning. Its not like anarchists propose creating a power vacuum, or on the other hand some universal world government that would destroy "diversity" and issue colour-coded charts to every workplace.
And I don't know about you, but I always think dropping loads of f-bombs in conversations between comrades always seems to weaken the argument.
Well "f-bombs" made me smile. I swear in these forums as I swear in everyday conversation. Do forgive me.
Okay, I said nothing about isolation. I said nothing about village autarky. I am a communist anarchist and I believe in confederation of communities to create an economy based on production for need. I don't believe anything I have written up to now contradicts that.
I do believe that questions of scale and ethos in production matter fundamentally and if you socialise a shit-hole it remains a shit-hole..... oh sorry was that an s-bomb? Fuck..... Now this isn't really central to what I want to get across, which has to do with diversity, but I fervently believe that we could change the way the economy looks and feels much more profoundly than just socialising factories, moreover I think that that would be for the better. An economy of small production units, I believe, would offer the best chances to let people be happy in their work, produce quality stuff of whatever sort, ensure radically democratic management and ecological sustainability. You may choose not to believe that, you're welcome to your view. There are plenty of people who don't want to live and work in your utopia, who will want to have a go at making their own.
Now the question was, what would an anarchist society look like? I merely suggested that it's not so easy to envisage one set of solutions for anarchist societies because I believe that diversity would be essential if we were to have anything recognisably anarchist. You might not see the problem with this or that prescription but that is not an answer to the problems that other people see or the way other people want to live or make the revolution real.
As for Jenni's question, come on, it was less a question than a thinly veiled suggestion that I'm some primitivist who doesn't realise that people can get infections from dirty needles. Jenni might as well have suggested that my ideas on healthcare stretched to trepanning and not a whole lot else.
Its not like anarchists propose creating a power vacuum, or on the other hand some universal world government that would destroy "diversity" and issue colour-coded charts to every workplace
Well I should hope not, in which case you agree with my central point and I won't expect to see you outside my workshop in a tank telling me that it really is time to be more rational about my methods of production.
As for Jenni's question, come on, it was less a question than a thinly veiled suggestion that I'm some primitivist who doesn't realise that people can get infections from dirty needles. Jenni might as well have suggested that my ideas on healthcare stretched to trepanning and not a whole lot else.
ah c'mon now it wasn't that bad. a bit sarcastic at worst. seriously though do you really think it'd be easier, more desirable or space efficient to produce 150 million needles (not counting all the other medical equipment such factories produce today) each year in a network of many small workshops, all requiring identical and stringent sterilisation procedures and so on, than to do this in a couple of larger factories which would, presumably, (a) make worker collaboration easier and give people access to many parts of several complicated production processes and (b) make standardised aseptic techniques easier to enforce since it's all concentrated in a couple of workplaces...?
As Django said nobody here is about killing diversity. it's just that when you think of the enormity of the task of production on a scale that is socially necessary and desirable, mass production is still going to be necessary for many things. I don't think that "if you socialise a shit-hole it's still a shit-hole" is true. Workplaces are shit today because the people who work there have no say and no control over the tasks they spend their lives doing, not because whatever production process they're part of is inherently pointless or boring.
(Edit: of course, many workers today do perform work which is socially pointless and just produces value for capital. I was referring to people who produce things that would still be necessary after the rev'.)
Ariege, you said village based production was the "ideal" earlier, i was only responding to that.
I broadly agree with Jenni. A factory is only a location with a lot of equipment and productive capacity, I don't see that because a complex is large its automatically a "shithole". its not like we're saying that changing the nature of work isn't central to the revolutionary project. There's no reason a large-scale facility can't operate in a way that involves workers at every stage, under their control, a completely different ethos to the capitalist factory. Workers would change the fabric of the place accordingly. This is why I suggested the difference between workshops and facories was one of scale. I think overturning commodity production and capital, and producing for need is a pretty radical change in the approach to human activity.
I don't see where you're getting the idea that people are advocating just taking over the capitalist economy and working it as it is. As Jenni says, this is unviable. A huge amount of work in the west is socially useless, and doesnt even produce surplus value for capital. So fundamental change is vital.
Though I'm also an anarchist communist, I'm not pushing a utopia, just what I see as a sensible way of running society which is consistent with people's interests.
Just to make my position clear, although I am no primitivist either I do have some sympathy with or am against the idea that an ideal society or the path to human ‘happiness’ lies with the consumption of mass produced crap. And that the path to human contentment is by having more toys and Humvees to play with. That is to say nothing of the ecology argument, trashing of butterfly habitats and sustainable production etc.
That is my position and not the WSM’s.
Therefore I can understand how people in your position can feel passionately about it.
Perhaps, unfortunately there are two arguments being conflated together here one is the mechanism of how we decide to do things or produce stuff. The other is about what those decisions should be.
I presume you would not wish to impose your ideas on others.
Then there is the other thing that you mentioned about being forced to enroll in the majority decided society. In my vision people will be free to enter into and participate in the ‘majority’ decided production process or not as all work will be voluntary. If you don’t like any of the colour coded work time-tables well you can not bother with any of them.
Unlike in a labour voucher kind of systems there will be no material penalty for not doing so. People who wish to live in wigwams in the woods will just as free to walk into town and pick up their weekly supply of Carlsberg special brew or whatever as anybody else.
Equally their children when they fall ill will have full access to the handicraft made CAT scanners or whatever else medical science and mass production can offer.
If a ‘minority’ wish to engage in handicraft industries then they will be free to do so. Perhaps these kind of people may set a seminal and practical example for the rest of us futurists about the meaning of life etc and we may join you.
Free access socialism and a democratic, voluntary and co-operative society would remove the structures and incentives for groups, classes or even individuals to oppress and intimidate others.
I guess what we have had here is a debate polarised through the lens of a forum, and I have probably played more than my full part in that process. I am passionate about these issues and I think that for once I find myself part of a broad and well recognised Anarchist tradition. It will come as no surprise to people that Kropotkin, Bookchin and Colin Ward all influenced the development of my Anarchism.
Jenni, let me put it this way, I am sure that needles or any surgical supplies could be produced to the exacting standards required without huge factories, in workplaces small enough that everyone felt an important part of the team and employed fulfilling skills everyday; where they could make a relatively rapid transition from the workplace to the outside - sterile conditions taken into account of course - and could see the workshop as a human-scaled part of their community rather than the local monster dominating the community. It may be that large scale plants would need to remain in place for a long time after dramatic social change, but I do believe that the transition to a more intimate scale wherever and whenever possible is the best path to take. Just to reiterate, I do believe in diversity, in a different society I'd make the arguments for a different, craft-based if you like, production across the board, I wouldn't make bombs to sabotage big workplaces full of contented workers who just thought that my ideas wouldn't work. As Dave says, one advantage of trying different techniques in a free society would be that over time we could see which worked best and probably reach the most sensible of compromises.
The same arguments could be adduced with regard to all presently mass produced essentials. It may be that pressing need requires mass production to continue provisionally - no sane person is going to shut down the tent factories during a refugee crisis..... "oh I'm sorry your handmade tents will be ready next month." Nevertheless, in the end I'd want the factory gone.... turn it into a dance hall and make better tents using better materials and ten thousand locally developed solutions to suit local people and local conditions.
Okay Django, you see I don't believe that a factory is just a location. In just the same way I don't believe that an economy can be expressed as a series of equations and I don't believe that class is the only crucial consideration with regard to revolutionary change. The places people work and live alter the conditions of life, make certain problems more or less likely, affect us as human beings.... an architectural style can increase hierarchical tendencies, affect health and happiness, empower or disempower; a production system can facilitate learning or effectively put a stop to it. I see quite a lot of evidence on this site that people's thinking stops with taking over the means of production..... there's a comment above about minimal change, the thread about retirement the other day was, to say the least, a little pedestrian..... I worry. It's not like you and I seem so far removed from one another, it's just that I believe that soon enough a free society would have to seek an architecture and scale of everyday life that reflected its values and not the values of a past age; I repeat this is not just an aesthetic argument, but rather one based on practicality and desire.
Dave, you're a little bit easier on blaggers than I'd be frankly. I might give them some brewing kit and the wherewithal to grow barley, I'd certainly argue against giving them special brew! It seems to me that you would have little problem if local areas wanted to explore their own ways of both making decisions and organising production. For me massive decentralisation and local diversity is an essential bulwark of liberty, but also a crucial reflection of the differences between people and bioregions. It simply doesn't make sense producing one kind of roof-bearing assembly in a giant factory when areas have different amounts and kinds of precipitation, not to mention different vernacular styles.... the same can be said of clothes, of crops, of shoes, of boats, of tools and everything else. It wasn't just quaint primitivism that produced the huge diversity of tool patterns in the past, or the range of local costumes, or the range of boats in coastal regions of the British Isles. Conditions vary, people vary, available materials vary. Efficiency needs must take account of ecology and don't be telling me that it makes sense to ship bricks from some vast brickyard in a clay region to a place where stone is readily abundant or somewhere where bale building is the ideal housing solution.
So, again, what will an Anarchist society look like? Diverse. My corner of the new world will in all likelihood look very different to yours and that will be a good thing reflecting the rich variation of human thought, creativity and desire and the innumerable bioregions of Earth. I believe strongly that only such diversity will ensure liberty.
When it comes to say making hyperdermic needles, or cartons of orange juice or shoes or computers or railway track what methods of production do you imagine we should use other than factories and assembly line based workshops?
If you don't like pot noode then don;t eat it, products will only ever be produced if their is a demand for them whaever society we live in,
That was a really poorly thought out, not to say knee-jerk response, so don't roll your condescending eyes at me! As it happens hyperdermic needles, like a lot of surgical equipment, are not made in huge dark satanic mills and lend themselves very nicely to small workshop based production.
Nope, as jenni has pointed out this is untrue
The best shoes are known to be hand-made - better for your feet, better for the environment and better for the folks that make them.
Quite clearly this is balls firstly we're not talking about luxury shoes, we're talking about the 15 odd billion pairs of shoes that would need to be produced to shoe the worlds population. Secondly looking at the textile industry in general do you honestly think going back to workshop based hand sewn equipment across the board is at all feasible when you consider demand. l
Let alone the fact that a lot of the worst abuses in textile industries take place when the garments leave the factory supply chain (which is at least monitored to some degree and has some form of health and safety standards) and get shifted off to small sweat shops where hand stithcing is done often employing child labour and the like.
None of this is my imagination, what seems to be the product of your fevered imagination is that people would want to go on working in factories and being de-skilled by the production line in order to put juice on your table wherever in the world you live.... here's an idea for you: why not drink the juice of a fruit local to your home?
See personally i wouldn;t care if i had to work on a production line, or sweep the streets or do a bit of cleaning, thats life, i've done some of those jobs in the past and tbh someof them are probably more fulfilling than the shit I do now. The point is that in an anarchist society you;d be working a lot less hours a year, and you'd get to do a wide range of jobs. Maintaining factory production means that you can use the minimum amount of labour to get the maximum amount of production, thats generally a good thing unless you really want to work longer hours. I mean all your talk of small workshops and so on just means i'd have to work a 7 hour day instead of a four hour one, hardly a fantastic solution to the worlds problems.
I mean basically your ''alternative'' amounts to working longer hours, hand sewing all your clothes and living in some hippy eco camp in some backwards ass rural pat of the world and only consuming local produce,...your not really selling this to me here.
workplaces small enough that everyone felt an important part of the team and employed fulfilling skills everyday
scale is a distraction to the point at hand. i've done data entry in a small pharmacy, which was the most boring, repetitive, fordist job i've had. And i've worked in a large factory on a line as part of a small largely autonomous team with tasks rotated among us etc which was considerably less dull. So it's possible to have lots of teams co-operating under one roof or separate ones; we're dealing with a qualitative distinction not a quantitative one.
when people say factories will still exist, they are not saying a capitalist division of labour will. if production is democratically controlled and we no longer have to compete with each other in the market, production is no longer ruled by value (i.e. the drive to minimise labour time expended). of course we may still want to minimise labour time, but we will weigh this against the enjoyment of the work, safety considerations, ecological impact on our communities etc. there is no single answer to whether people would rather put in 2 hours on a fairly fordist production line or 8 hours in a craft workshop (perhaps enjoying their labour more).
You could also argue that craft production traps people in one line of work forever, with longer days too, whereas deskilled/highly automated production maybe more boring, but you need to do much less of it and can much more easily change jobs/workplaces. again, the answers to these kind of trade-offs are by no means singular or knowable in advance. if this is what you mean by diversity, i don't disagree, although with cantdo i'd tend to say it's too utopian to think all necessary work can be rendered enjoyable so minimising the time spent doing it would seem like a good idea.
another thing i'd like to mention is the idea that "communism means the destruction of the firm" (gilles dauvé). to a certain extent, capitalist production does point beyond itself in this respect. consider a capitalist firm using 'pull production' (as advocated by cantdo on this thread, building in response to demand rather than speculatively stockpiling stuff), internally each stage of production feeds the next in reponse to demand, i.e. 'need' without recourse to commodity/money relations (it tends to be accounted in terms of units first and foremost).
the fact the first stage of production has to buy in inputs reflects not some essential fact of production, but the (for these purposes) arbitrary division of capital amongst different capitalists. if ownership of the means of production is socialised, there's no reason for these arbitrary divisions to exist, and different parts of the production process can co-operate as necessary, abolishing the firm as such (therefore i would see fetishising small craft workshops as backwards-looking, even if communist human-scale production teams might incorporate elements of craft production with regard to making work less boring).
Just to reiterate, I do believe in diversity, in a different society I'd make the arguments for a different, craft-based if you like, production across the board, I wouldn't make bombs to sabotage big workplaces full of contented workers who just thought that my ideas wouldn't work. As Dave says, one advantage of trying different techniques in a free society would be that over time we could see which worked best and probably reach the most sensible of compromises...Nevertheless, in the end I'd want the factory gone.... turn it into a dance hall and make better tents using better materials and ten thousand locally developed solutions to suit local people and local conditions.
Against all my instincts, this is an incongrous support for the utopian solutionism expressed by Ariege.
cantdocartwheels
I never understand these sort of weird 'direct democracy'' ideas that seem to srping forth from anarchism whenever the subject of production isbrought up. Production isn't ''decided'' upon, its planned out as a response to market demand. Thus a chain of burger bars would be run by their staff who would have detailed lists of all the profucts they used in a day, a week a month and so on, would relay this information to a central depot whose staff would dispatch deliveries and make orders to factories accordingly. The factory and depot between them would look at data for previous months and produce goods accordingly to meet the demand previusly shown with some surplus. I don;t see why we need a ''neighbourhood meeting'' or any meeting outside the workplaces involved to decide how many thousands of curly and non-curly fries you might be making.
Joseph K.
i mean i spend a large part of my non-working life involved in "mind-numbing" consumer activities (drink/drugs/clubs/clothes...), and i don't think they make me less likely to struggle over material conditions etc. I don't really see what's wrong with them per se either, but that's probably another discussion.
I’m guessing here but the reasoning, I think, behind Libcom’s line on this is to disassociate itself from the anarchists’ critique of commodity fetishism because it wants to avoid if at all possible criticising the proletariat’s perceived consumerism, which is taken as a given, and its possessions as an objective index of need. It seems from these statements that Libcom does not accept that the social relation is expressed through its products but that things have an objectively given use-value. It is here that a lifestylist residue reappears in the fetishised appreciation of the thing which is severed from and eclipses the conditions of its manufacture.
From this it is a small step to imagine communism as the continuing production of the same objects via the same processes, where everything is the same but branded differently. Because of its critique of anarchism, Libcom’s version of communism is stripped of anything that might indicate a break with capital. Instead it proposes that we will reproduce the same set of conditions but less capitalistically – as if the social relation existed independently of the conditions. If this is not political reformism, it still has a pragmatic-reformist sheen; social reformism perhaps.
The thinking goes something like: ‘we need to sell our idea of a communist society, we cannot attack capital at the level of alienation or commodification because the proletariat has passed into the stage of total subsumption and identifies wholly with its role and with its possessions (oh get me another shirt, get me another tie, get me another wollen). Therefore, the only option is to attack the critique of commodity fetishism as ‘lifestylist’ and propose to the workers a governmental solution on the level of ‘everything is going to be the same but you will be in charge’. In this form of self-management populism the capitalist relation is represented as an external constraint rather than as integral to our existence at the level of activity, values, roles. The communist critique implies the proposed abolition of Value, Labour and Class as they are embodied in real existence and not in some abstract realm – this would necessarily involve an attempt at the total transformation of our lives, where we cannot overcome our addictions/adhesions we must at least subject them to critique.
One thing is certain, the proposals put forward by Libcom within this discussion are not communism nor will they abolish either class or capital as both of these are reproduced in turn from the activity and relations which produce and pursue them as an end in themselves. The class struggle will continue upon the territories that Joseph K refuses to engage: where dead labour guarantees existence and where activity is expressed in terms of alienated labour. There can be no communist factories as there can be no communist state or communist prison or communist police force, army etc. There can be no communist capitalism.
The arguments Joseph K puts forward exist somewhere within the spectrum of capitalist politics where liberal investments in the liberating potentials of dead labour, sprinkled with utilitarian/malthusian calculations concerning the optimum shoeing of 7 billion workhorses (as if human existence is captured at the magnitude of ‘billions’), crunch up against simple workerist sentimentality, ‘See personally i wouldn;t care if i had to work on a production line, or sweep the streets or do a bit of cleaning, thats life, i've done some of those jobs in the past and tbh someof them are probably more fulfilling than the shit I do now.’ This sort of VSO all-hands-to-the-deck-and-help-those-poor-people-out is really only capitalist productivism with a human face.
I’m guessing here but the reasoning, I think, behind Libcom’s line on this is to disassociate itself from the anarchists’ critique of commodity fetishism because it wants to avoid if at all possible criticising the proletariat’s perceived consumerism...
i've split my response to fort-da game here as it' doesn't seem to address what an anarchist society would look like, but rather how 'Libcom's hivemind is apparently capitalist.
I mean basically your ''alternative'' amounts to working longer hours, hand sewing all your clothes and living in some hippy eco camp in some backwards ass rural pat of the world and only consuming local produce,...your not really selling this to me here.
This is not about what I have been saying at all, it's about what you have wanted to see in it. I don't believe that it's about working longer hours, I never mentioned hand sewing, I am no hippy and backwards is all in the eye of the beholder. As for local produce, I don't see what's so negative about that but then you're the guy who doesn't care what work he does, I guess you don't care what shit you eat either...... maybe if you could live on an anarchist space station and breath air out of a tin you'd be really happy.
Well, in any event, you're not engaging with me you're engaging with big fat straw men. Your assertions about what can and cannot be done in relatively small workplaces are just that and in any event fortunately you are unlikely to be some commissar for industry so people will do what free people do, which is experiment, find their own solutions and defy the predictions of authoritarians and technocrats.
Joseph K:
scale is a distraction to the point at hand
Well I don't quite agree with this. It is plain that scale can perfectly well be beside the point; tyranny, boredom and exploitation are all very possible on a small scale, I never suggested otherwise. However, that is not to say that a human scale, or to be more exact, an appropriate scale for the people, the environment and the activity in each case, would not be highly advantageous in the construction and day-to-day functioning of an anarchist society. I will once again add the reminder that I am not saying that all the world should adopt one solution, that diversity is what I want, but for me,. seeking a scale on which we will preserve and enhance skill and fulfillment, and which will facilitate face-to-face relations both within workplaces and between workplaces and communities seems an obvious and desirable aim.
So I'll try to make myself clearer: I would like to live in a community, perfectly at home with appropriate high technology, in which no-one is reduced to the level of a machine operative by the scale of their workplace, in which wherever possible jobs maintain and promote skills, I would say in which there exists a craft ethos. Now none of this excludes automation to a high degree, or the use of the most sophisticated technologies, what it implies I hope, is that workers will master their machines, know them, build them, understand them, manage them rather than the contrary. Workers will work at the pace they have built into their workshops, not at the speed the production lines force on them. I would also like to note that I would indeed like to live in a community more concerned with quality than quantity, more interested in the possibilities of producing a linen shirt that could last a lifetime than making sure that everyone could have a wardrobe full of new shirts that will last them a year or two..... now if that makes me an ascetic, so be it, I happen to like good boots and linen shirts.
of course we may still want to minimise labour time, but we will weigh this against the enjoyment of the work, safety considerations, ecological impact on our communities etc. there is no single answer to whether people would rather put in 2 hours on a fairly fordist production line or 8 hours in a craft workshop (perhaps enjoying their labour more).
Perhaps we'd like to optimise labour time. The crucial thing is that perhaps what we'd really like is a world full of possibilties in which not only each industry found a scale conducive to good work, but in which each region and finally each community found a scale for each activity best suited to its unique capacities and needs. Now in that kind of world Cantdo could probably find somewhere to lean on his broom for two hours a day and I might be able to split my time between a nice little walled veggie garden producing local food and a furniture workshop making wooden chairs and tables to last generations.
I do believe that in time pretty much all necessary work can be rendered enjoyable or rewarding (sitting by the bed of someone who's dying probably shouldn't be too much fun - but maybe it shouldn't be thought of as work) and I've done a fair range of work in my life to date. Now whether this position is utopian or not only the future - or one possible, probably fairly unlikely future - will tell. I believe in the capacities of free people to surmount technical challenges, to make the necessary rewarding and fulfilling. It would be interesting to discuss this on a job by job basis, perhaps a little frivolous but interesting.
I gave the criticism that my posts have come in for some thought this afternoon and I think that in fact it does have to do with this fear of asceticism, or worries about criticising consumerism and mass production. Now frankly I don't really have the savvy to join the other thread - I don't speak marxian - but it does seem to me that there is a risk of throwing at least one baby out with the bathwater if any suggestion like the ones I have made (incidental to my desire for diversity) is treated as if it is the ranting of some primitivist or one of the hair shirt brigade. I'm neither of those things. I do recognise the probable need - ecological if nothing else - for limits to consumption and I don't believe that that makes me a misanthropic green. These things are nuanced you know, and if I'm dismissed as a hippy or a primo then some valid arguments might be lost..... I'm a communist anarchist and if any of us live long enough to see the world turn in our direction I will not lay down my arms to see another homogenizing tidal wave engulf the world just because the alternative seems a little utopian.
Well I don't quite agree with this. It is plain that scale can perfectly well be beside the point; tyranny, boredom and exploitation are all very possible on a small scale, I never suggested otherwise. However, that is not to say that a human scale, or to be more exact, an appropriate scale for the people, the environment and the activity in each case, would not be highly advantageous in the construction and day-to-day functioning of an anarchist society.
But what is a "human scale"? Are you describing some kind of modular architecture, the physical size of spaces? Whats an "appropriate size"? I don't see how this constitutes an argument in favor of small workplaces. I mean, it would make sense to group facilities in one place to economise and reduce work, share energy and waste disposal functions, recycling, conserve heat, manage noise etc. For instance, if you have toolworking and engineering expertise in one place, and machinery, it would make sense to to build a facility to produce all the tools needed by the area there, rather than reproducing the effort in every place. Or in a more complex operation, like building train engines, we'd have to have as many of the functions in one place as possible in one large facility to avoid transporting the parts around that have been made elsewhere. Otherwise you'd have to have small shops all over the place specialising in different parts of the process. I don't see what would be alienating about working i such a place when you'd get access to all parts of the design and building process and would learn about it in depth. I think it'd be pretty awesome actually. You could call it a large workshop if you want, but its clearly a factory.
As for face-to-face communication, while this might be desirable, real time communications do save time and are very useful in the workplace. For decision making in the workers councils then face to face communication is necessary, but i don't see why you'd have to be face to face with everyone you're working with all the time.
Ariege
I gave the criticism that my posts have come in for some thought this afternoon and I think that in fact it does have to do with this fear of asceticism, or worries about criticising consumerism and mass production. Now frankly I don't really have the savvy to join the other thread - I don't speak marxian - but it does seem to me that there is a risk of throwing at least one baby out with the bathwater if any suggestion like the ones I have made (incidental to my desire for diversity) is treated as if it is the ranting of some primitivist or one of the hair shirt brigade. I'm neither of those things. I do recognise the probable need - ecological if nothing else - for limits to consumption and I don't believe that that makes me a misanthropic green.
I certainly have no worries about criticizing the way in which capitalism alienates us from the production of our social environment, which we have to buy back. But I think the only way to fix that is revolution, and moralising about "consumerism" usually leads to rubbish politics, all the way from Adbusters to Crimethinc. As for mass production, I simply see no reason why this is incompatable with communism, and i haven't seen any arguments to lead me to believe otherwise. Producing the things society needs using labour saving technology to mean that theres less work to be done makes perfect sense. As for asceticism, there's nothing revolutionary about that. If there aren't drug-fuelled orgies in communism then we've failed.
I think lots of the criticisms of your posts have been down to people objecting to suggestion that them thinking large industry is possible in an anarchist society is the same as uncritically taking over the capitalist economy.
I guess you don't care what shit you eat either...... maybe if you could live on an anarchist space station and breath air out of a tin you'd be really happy.
I think an anarchist space exploration program would be balls-to-wall awesome ;)
The problem is Django that you and I come from very different backgrounds, have clearly read very different stuff, know very different people and want very different things. It's marvelous in a way that we have both come to the conclusion that what's needed is a revolution and afterward a free society. It only matters to me when you start assuming that everyone everywhere is going to want to produce things in the way that you think is most sensible and presumably make decisions in the way that you think is most sensible. Although I can perhaps be accused of being utopian in some ways, the idea, the assumption running throughout this thread, not just in your stuff, that we might have one "anarchist society" is not only completely barmy, it's got "made in cloud cuckoo land" printed all over it. Whether you or any of your comrades like it or not, free people will shape the future economy and it will work in myriad different ways that none of us expect.
I don't really see why you think it's so great to have all the expertise in one place under one roof. What? Are you planning to do away with telephones? The internet? Universities? Books? You use the example of train engines but when the UK finally got around to putting light railway systems in some of its cities much of the gear was made in Italy, a country renowned for its relatively small workplaces - workshops even. But once again I remind you that I'm not telling you how you'll work after the revolution, or how your hometown will be organised; I am not promulgating some universal law of production - which if you ask me in this thread seems to amount to the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and an economics A level. All I have been doing all along is saying that in a diverse world we'll be able to do stuff in lots of different ways - I'd prefer small craft-based industry and believe that responsible use of technology will allow us to do pretty much everything in small production units. Evidently your vision differs from mine.
It is certainly not a question of moralising about consumerism. I apologise if it came across like that. My observation is that consumerism fucks people up and contributes in many ways to fucking other things up as well. Now I don't see how that is moralising, I'm not condemning people for living in the shit we're all mired in. What I am saying is that in a different world perhaps people would consume less stuff, use stuff more wisely, make stuff that will last and make stuff that they really care about. You think a space program would be a nice adjunct to an anarchist society, I think that's completely fucking insane - oh and definitely something worth sabotaging however small a minority I'm in; I think that a shirt good enough to last for decades and maybe even my lifetime would be very cool indeed, you think that makes me what? A subscriber to rubbish politics?
Listen, have your drug-fueled orgies, work in your factories, work not at all if that's what you think will make you happy. But if I were to end up amongst the kind of people and in the kind of community I would hope to, I imagine you're not going to do any of it near me.... okay, so that's the great thing about diversity.... you can go on forever about how other people don't know how to produce things efficiently and we'll have our train engines just the same.
You really know nothing about me Ariege, please don't make assumptions.
It only matters to me when you start assuming that everyone everywhere is going to want to produce things in the way that you think is most sensible and presumably make decisions in the way that you think is most sensible. Although I can perhaps be accused of being utopian in some ways, the idea, the assumption running throughout this thread, not just in your stuff, that we might have one "anarchist society" is not only completely barmy, it's got "made in cloud cuckoo land" printed all over it.
This is ridiculous. No one has said this. In fact, people have said repeatedly that your worries about diversity are ill founded, and that no-one is advocating doing away with it and instituting some world government. If you think the idea of a society is "barmy" then I'm puzzled about why you bothered contributing in the first place.
Whether you or any of your comrades like it or not, free people will shape the future economy and it will work in myriad different ways that none of us expect.I don't really see why you think it's so great to have all the expertise in one place under one roof. What? Are you planning to do away with telephones? The internet? Universities? Books? You use the example of train engines but when the UK finally got around to putting light railway systems in some of its cities much of the gear was made in Italy, a country renowned for its relatively small workplaces - workshops even.
Again, no-one has said anything about free people not shaping their economy. In fact, its your attitude that "factories" are inherently bad, alienating etc which sets a prescription on any future form of organising society. All anyone else has said is that they could be useful in allowing us to do certain things, but would look very different to anything in existence today. No, I'm not "planning" to get rid of anything, as I said before, I think such attitudes and fetishising face to face contact with people is silly, which is why I'm critical of your idea of promoting workplaces where we can only have a face to face relation with each other. But I'm sure you've found in every job that you've done, whenever you've wanted to learn something complex, its been far more useful to have someone who knows what they're doing show you than to pore through manuals. That is elementary. But why build two facilities doing much the same thing in one town than one larger one which combines functions. I think its bizarre that you think people won't make their own lives easier by grouping functions together in one facility - thats far more prescriptive and anti-pragmatic than anything anyone else has said. Also, its interesting that you of all people are arguing against me by using an anachronistic model of early capitalist production! Importing gears from Italy? I take it you're not volunteering to build the cargo ships in a small workshop.
But once again I remind you that I'm not telling you how you'll work after the revolution, or how your hometown will be organised; I am not promulgating some universal law of production - which if you ask me in this thread seems to amount to the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and an economics A level. All I have been doing all along is saying that in a diverse world we'll be able to do stuff in lots of different ways - I'd prefer small craft-based industry and believe that responsible use of technology will allow us to do pretty much everything in small production units. Evidently your vision differs from mine.
You can continue "reminding" people to do something they're not when you stop doing it yourself. You've yet to give a reason why people would want to prescribe the size of their workplaces when it might mean more hours, more duplication, more transport and distribution work etc. In lots of cases smaller workplaces would make sense, in lots of cases bigger ones would. But no-one in disagreeing with you has advocated a universal law of production, and what Marx has to do with any of this is beyond me.
Listen, have your drug-fueled orgies, work in your factories, work not at all if that's what you think will make you happy. But if I were to end up amongst the kind of people and in the kind of community I would hope to, I imagine you're not going to do any of it near me.... okay, so that's the great thing about diversity.... you can go on forever about how other people don't know how to produce things efficiently and we'll have our train engines just the same.
What are you on about? All thats been happening is that examples have been given to say that people might decide in a number of cases to use different arrangements than religiously limiting the size of their workplaces. If you read the post, which you obviously haven't, you'd see I didn't say that "we'll have our train engines the same", but described a radically different process of producing large machines than which exists today. If you think that train engines today are produced in factories where workers access "all parts of the design and building process" and run them democratically then you are on a completely different planet. Or, you might have a political objection to trains.
You really know nothing about me Ariege, please don't make assumptions
You don't know that I don't know anything about you Django..... I might be your next door neighbour. I was only meaning to point out that we seem to be coming from very different perspectives. I'm sorry if I offended you, although I didn't see you jumping to my defence when Cantdo said I was a hippy who wanted us all to live in an eco-camp.
The question was "What would an Anarchist society look like?" I answered that for me diversity was essential. I of course have ideas about what kind of community I'd like to live in and how I believe things might be best produced.
Still, thank you all for setting me straight., especially thanks to you Django for helping me understand the world and for all of you for bringing me closer to a grasp of the way things work and the things people really need. I shall go away now and see if I can't apply all of this Libcom-harvested wisdom to escape the web of delusion I have spun around my life.
I'd be perfectly happy to have a discussion with you about these things if my views weren't misrepresented. I can understand why you'd be irritated about being called a primitivist by others for the same reasons. You said you wanted a diverse society, but that you'd like it to have no factories. Others said they advocated a diverse society too, but that large facilities would likely be useful and desirable, and that there is no essential "factory" to reject. Thats nothing to get upset about.
I dunno about this 'small is better' thing tbh, economies of scale are a reality in most cases, technology is at the point - or rapidly reaching it - where unless it is a highly skilled occupation there is no absolute necessity for anything but minimal human intervention in most productive processes. It's arguable that western capitalism has partly shifted over into otherwise pointless service jobs and public sector roles for precisely this reason (alongside the outsourcing thing) - it finds it difficult, with labour-intensive industry no longer required, to justify the continuation of a logically obsolete economic structure, so looks for 'brain' roles.
Really though, the fact that capitalism has a tendency to overwork and alienate human labour in factories/offices where it is cheaper than machine-production does not really have a bearing on the organisation of post-revolutionary society.
While you might get a slightly better shoe if it's hand-made (and I'd dispute this as an ongoing inevitability), the production of said shoe in a factory, being less labour intensive, frees up more people to pursue their own priorities - which should be the ultimate aim of any societal change. You'd probably still get cobblers - as a hobby, working at their own speed and to standards that are usually impossible to achieve in a set work environment.
Can people stop saying that individuals would be allowed to choose not to work and yet live off the fruits of other' labour? That sounds shit. Actually it sounds a bit like class society. From each according to ability, comrades.
Can people stop saying that individuals would be allowed to choose not to work and yet live off the fruits of other' labour? That sounds shit. Actually it sounds a bit like class society. From each according to ability, comrades.
Can people stop saying that individuals would be allowed to choose not to work and yet live off the fruits of other' labour? That sounds shit. Actually it sounds a bit like class society. From each according to ability, comrades.
Why are you averse to this idea?
because as jess says it's effectively a class society. we already have a class of people who fit this description, they're called capitalists. surely we don't want a parasitical class in communism either. 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' means just that! obviously if people have an actual reason why they can't work they wouldn't lose out, but for people who just can't be bothered to have access to everything society produces isn't fair. especially since there will be so much less work to do in communism; there'd really be no excuse not to do your bit.
I mean basically your ''alternative'' amounts to working longer hours, hand sewing all your clothes and living in some hippy eco camp in some backwards ass rural pat of the world and only consuming local produce,...your not really selling this to me here.
This is not about what I have been saying at all, it's about what you have wanted to see in it. I don't believe that it's about working longer hours, I never mentioned hand sewing,
You just went on one about the best shoes being ''hand made'' how exactly do you imagine they were going to be doing the stitching, i mean do you seriously think we could clothe the worlds population using craft production?
And again, a factory is a process that minimises labour and maximises product, if you reject that then it goes without saying that you are wanting people to work longer hours.
One of the most recent scandals regarding abuses in the textile industry was this one http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/23/primark.children in which the clothes were taken out of the factories, and large chunks of the production were done in workshops by hand using child labour and with workers working far longer hours than they should have been doing acccording to health and safety standards in the factories. I hardly see how those kids would have appreciated that the goods they were making were hand made, and in the real world of mass produced goods for a market of billions, thats what ''hand making'' all those goods is going to involve; basically long hours and poor conditions.
Perhaps we'd like to optimise labour time. The crucial thing is that perhaps what we'd really like is a world full of possibilties in which not only each industry found a scale conducive to good work, but in which each region and finally each community found a scale for each activity best suited to its unique capacities and needs. Now in that kind of world Cantdo could probably find somewhere to lean on his broom for two hours a day and I might be able to split my time between a nice little walled veggie garden producing local food and a furniture workshop making wooden chairs and tables to last generations.
So basically you don;t want to work anywhere outside your garden and your shed and we're supposed to respect that because its 'diverse'. Do you not see a slight problem with this sort of relativism.
Seriously like say you do spend all your time in your hippie garden and then it turns out that theres a bit of a labour shortage in one sector and they need people to help with the harvest on a larger industrial farm or say they need rubbish collectors, warehouse workers, industrial cleaners or hospital porters, and they put out adverts in the local area detailing the work that needs doing, (maybe your details come up on a databse as having some free time so you get a letter delivered who knows) would you do some shifts or refuse because those all involve working in ''factories'' and ''industry''.
And again, a factory is a process that minimises labour and maximises product, if you reject that then it goes without saying that you are wanting people to work longer hours.
Did the imposition of the factory system result in people working less?
Seriously like say you do spend all your time in your hippie garden and then it turns out that theres a bit of a labour shortage in one sector and they need people to help with the harvest on a larger industrial farm or say they need rubbish collectors, warehouse workers, industrial cleaners or hospital porters, and they put out adverts in the local area detailing the work that needs doing, (maybe your details come up on a databse as having some free time so you get a letter delivered who knows) would you do some shifts or refuse because those all involve working in ''factories'' and ''industry''.
Comrade, perhaps we could build camps to send people who refused to work in factories. We could call them work camps, and the people in them could be kept there and compelled to work until their attitude changed and they went to the factory on their own.
Did the imposition of the factory system result in people working less?
this has little to do with a division of labour per se, and everything to do with the social relations of production. see my comments on production no longer ruled by value above.
Comrade, perhaps we could build camps to send people who refused to work in factories. We could call them work camps, and the people in them could be kept there and compelled to work until their attitude changed and they went to the factory on their own.
yoshomon
And thankfully y'all have made clear that there will also be communist prisons, so we could send particularly unproductive people to those.
gulag straw man and amalgam argument, how intellectually honest :roll:
And again, a factory is a process that minimises labour and maximises product, if you reject that then it goes without saying that you are wanting people to work longer hours.
Did the imposition of the factory system result in people working less?
Thats a complete and deliberate misrepresentation of cantdos' point, its obvious that there would be a difference between production in an anarchist society and under capitalism; in a factory system under capitalism work is obviously not fairly shared; a certain number of people are worked to the bone while huge numbers of unemployed are kept on the outside to remind them that if they dont want to work 60-70 hours a week there are plenty of desperate people out there who will. This situation would clearly not be the case in the type of society we're envisioning.
Interestingly to me, train production came up earlier in this thread... Im kind of reluctant to enter into debate with anyone who seriously thinks trains or any major part thereof can be built in some type of cottage industry, after the revolution I will be refusing to drive any trains that have not been built in a proper engineering works.
Did the imposition of the factory system result in people working less?
Oh for fucks sake do you think standards of living are higher now or in 1800? The current population could not be supported with a high standard of living for 6 billion people on the basis of the craft prodction and agricultural methods that existed in 1800.
Comrade, perhaps we could build camps to send people who refused to work in factories. We could call them work camps, and the people in them could be kept there and compelled to work until their attitude changed and they went to the factory on their own.
Not really, one would hope society would have checks and balances to deal with people who refused to contribute and who had no good reason for not doing so, ranging from socially stigmatising the culprits to administering some form ot rationing that limited what someone who chose to refuse to work could receive and what they could participate in. Probably the anarchist equivalemt of the dole i'd assume. Obviously you probably wouldn;t have to work in a factory generally because most factories are increasingly highly automated and so the number of people working in them is relatively small, but unless you had health reasons, or care responsibilities or another good reason then i'd assume you would be expected to do some of the ''dirty work'' in society. And like I said in my post that oculd be anything from being a hospital porter to working in a warehouse.
Stigmatising people who don;t work in a capitalist society is wrong because work is not done for the common good, you do not benefit from it, hours are long and conditions dehumanising. In an anarchist society where those inequalities and stigma are removed, what excuse do you have to not work and expect to receive the benefits of other peoples labour?
And thankfully y'all have made clear that there will also be communist prisons, so we could send particularly unproductive people to those.
Well this is another point. What do you propose we do wth rapists and the like in a communist society? Dangerous people obviously need to be detained, and I think it would be disengenuous and newspeak-ish to call that place of detainment anything other than a prison.
As for unproductive people, consider this scenario: we have a revolution, and all the previously ruling class people decide they don't want to work.
As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process -- as fixed capital. But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour -- of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself -- which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital.
Part VII. Revenues and their Sources
Chapter 48. The Trinity Formula
In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase.
Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
Well I think it's fairly clear what Dave B is saying, he's just reiterating that the reason for advocating mass production in factories (albeit massively differently organised, as mentioned 6 million times before here) is that it means we can produce as much of the stuff we need relatively efficiently and get on with having a life outside of production. It's true that under communism work will be more enjoyable anyway for reasons already mentioned - working with your mates to produce something that's been decided democratically to be useful and necessary, the trade-off between reducing hours worked and maximising fun had working them - but at the end of the day the best fucking thing about communism is going to be having all this incredible technology to hand that was once used to maximise profit and often make labour more boring and isolated, that has been transformed to meet the material needs of all. I mean workers theorized, invented, created and operated this technology: the only reason it is not amazing to them under capitalism is that it doesn't exist to meet their needs; it exists to meet the needs of capital. Under communism the world will be our lobster and the factories will be full of ever more advanced machinery and technology designed to make our lives easier. And hell if you're worried that reducing labour time via machinery/factories/technology is going to make work less interesting or somehow maintain alienation, we can invent a few new hobbies/go to the pub/play Guitar Hero in our hours of spare time to make up for it.
also;
In an anarchist society where those inequalities and stigma are removed, what excuse do you have to not work and expect to receive the benefits of other peoples labour?
Would be good to have an answer to this from daniel brennan, yoshomon or others, i'm interested in how you justify this. Stigma etc might well do the trick, and I would imagine this would be the first action taken in any case, but it's entirely feasible that some people will just refuse to contribute despite social pressure and then without some way of getting people to pull their weight, we have a problem.
it's entirely feasible that some people will just refuse to contribute despite social pressure and then without some way of getting people to pull their weight, we have a problem.
Well if people refuse for no good reason to contribute theres no cause to stigmatize, imprison, maltreat or coerce them; if they dont contribute according to ability, their needs shouldnt be catered for, which would be up to them.
I didn't mean we should imprison maltreat or coerce them, but I don't see a problem with using social pressure to encourage people to work. Since it'd be in their interests to do their share anyway. I see your point though, "no compulsion to work, but no duty towards those who will not work" is fair enough. (whoever said that..)
Well I think it's fairly clear what Dave B is saying, he's just reiterating that the reason for advocating mass production in factories (albeit massively differently organised, as mentioned 6 million times before here) is that it means we can produce as much of the stuff we need relatively efficiently and get on with having a life outside of production. It's true that under communism work will be more enjoyable anyway for reasons already mentioned - working with your mates to produce something that's been decided democratically to be useful and necessary, the trade-off between reducing hours worked and maximising fun had working them -
Thanks for that, Jenni , that is exactly what I meant.
As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process -- as fixed capital. But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour -- of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself -- which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital.
. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital..
Nope reading the whole quote Marx is discussing the idea that increased automation in production would make labour an accesory to production; a thesis which marx questioned in his 19th century speculation and something that in the last century has been proven largely to be incorrect. In short in a capitalist society the needs and means of production are subjugated to capitals need to to accumulate and impose work discipline thus its logical to deduce that under capitalism robotism or full automation is virtually impossible. If anything this aptly demonstartes that an anarchist/socialist society would develop the means of production and utilise their full potential to maximise leisure time, whereas a capitalist society wouldn't since capitalisms aim is to maximise profits. In short what you've just quoted is part of a debate whose logical conclusion would seem to run entirely counter to your primitivist musings and as billj points out what you've quoted most definitely is not some sort of transhistorical rant about ''the machine''.
what you've just quoted is part of a debate whose logical conclusion would seem to run entirely counter to your primitivist musings and as billj points out what you've quoted most definitely is not some sort of transhistorical rant about ''the machine''.
Anti-civilisation marxist, is his preferred title. :)
I know its just ridiculous. Worst idea since decaffinated coffee. .
Well I think it's fairly clear what Dave B is saying, he's just reiterating that the reason for advocating mass production in factories (albeit massively differently organised, as mentioned 6 million times before here) is that it means we can produce as much of the stuff we need relatively efficiently and get on with having a life outside of production. It's true that under communism work will be more enjoyable anyway for reasons already mentioned - working with your mates to produce something that's been decided democratically to be useful and necessary, the trade-off between reducing hours worked and maximising fun had working them
Sounds good to me, having worked in plenty of factories before, I'd be happy to do twelve to twenty hours a week, even of repetative tasks, and no anti-civ nutcase has got a right to stop me.
If needs be I dare say Feds would take action against elements that threatened the continuity of useful production.
There are not many examples of what Karl and Fred thought that a Communist society would look like. Later, in rejecting the ‘idealism’ of others they would have been exposed to double standards in doing so. Although Engels came pretty close to a prescription in Ante Duhring in part III, socialism I think.
Perhaps their early ideas were best revealed in Fred’s “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence” from 1844. There is an interesting letter as a preamble to this below;
The Teutons are all still very muddled about the practicability of communism; to dispose of this absurdity I intend to write a short pamphlet showing that communism has already been put into practice and describing in popular terms how this is at present being done in England and America. [12] The thing will take me three days or so, and should prove very enlightening for these fellows. I’ve already observed this when talking to people here.
Down to work, then, and quickly into print! Convey my greetings to Ewerbeck, Bakunin, Guerrier and the rest, not forgetting your wife, and write very soon to tell me all the news. If this letter reaches you safely and unopened, send your reply under sealed cover to F. W. Struecker and Co., Elberfeld, with the address written in as commercial a hand as possible; otherwise, to any of the other addresses I gave Ewerbeck. I shall be curious to know whether the postal sleuth-hounds are deceived by the ladylike appearance of this letter.
The first people to set up a society on the basis of community of goods in America, indeed in the whole world, were the so-called Shakers. These people are a distinct sect who have the strangest religious beliefs, do not marry and allow no intercourse between the sexes, and these are not their only peculiarities of this kind. But this does not concern us here. The sect of the Shakers originated some seventy years ago. Its founders were poor people who united in order to live together in brotherly love and community of goods and to worship their God in their own way. Although their religious views and particularly the prohibition on marriage deterred many, they nevertheless attracted support and now have ten large communities, each of which is between three and eight hundred members strong. Each of these communities is a fine, well laid-out town, with dwelling houses, factories, workshops, assembly buildings and barns; they have flower and vegetable gardens, fruit trees, woods, vineyards, meadows and arable land in abundance; then, livestock of all kinds, horses and beef-cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry, in excess of their needs, and of the very best breeds. Their granaries are always full of corn, their store-rooms full of clothing materials, so that an English traveller who visited them said he could not understand why these people still worked, when after all they possessed an abundance of everything; unless it was that they worked simply as a pastime, having nothing else to do.
Amongst these people no one is obliged to work against his will, and no one seeks work in vain. They have no poor-houses and infirmaries, having not a single person poor and destitute, nor any abandoned widows and orphans; all their needs are met and they need fear no want. In their ten towns there is not a single gendarme or police officer, no judge, lawyer or soldier, no prison or penitentiary; and yet there is proper order in all their affairs. The laws of the land are not for them and as far as they are concerned could just as well be abolished and nobody would notice any difference for they are the most peaceable citizens and have never yielded a single criminal for the prisons. They enjoy, as we said, the most absolute community of goods and have no trade and no money among themselves. One of these towns, Pleasant Hill near Lexington in the State of Kentucky, was visited last year by an English traveller named Finch, who gives the following description of it.
“Pleasant Hill consists of a great number of large, handsome hewn stone and brick houses, manufactories, workshops, farm buildings, all in the neatest order, some of the best in Kentucky; the Shaker farm-land was easily known by the fine stone wall fences by which it was enclosed, and by its superior cultivation; a great number of fat cows and sheep were grazing in the fields, and numerous fat swine were picking up fallen fruit in the orchards. The Shakers possess nearly four thousand acres of land here, of which about two-thirds is under cultivation. This colony was commenced by a single family about the year 1806; others joined afterwards and they gradually increased in numbers; some brought a little capital and others none at all. They had many difficulties to contend with, and suffered many privations at the first, being generally very poor persons; but by diligence, economy and temperance, they have overcome all and now have a great abundance of everything and owe nothing to any man.
This Society consists at present of about three hundred individuals, out of which some fifty to sixty are children under sixteen years of age. They have no masters — no servants; far less do they have slaves; they are free, wealthy and happy. They have two schools, a Boys’ and a Girls’ School, in which are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and the principles of their religion; they do not teach science to the children as they believe science is not necessary to salvation. As they tolerate no marriages, they would inevitably die out, if new members were not always joining them; but although the prohibition on marriage deters many thousands and many of their best members leave again for that reason, so many new members nevertheless still come that their number constantly increases. They rear livestock and variously cultivate the fields, and themselves produce flax, wool and silk, spinning and weaving them in their own manufactories. What they produce in excess of their needs they sell or exchange amongst their neighbours. They generally labour from sunrise to sunset. The board of trustees keeps all the books and accounts in a public office, and the books are open for all members to see, as often as they choose. They not themselves how wealthy they are, as they never take account of their stock; they are satisfied to know that all they have is their own, for they are in debt to no one. All they do is to make out a list of the debts their neighbours have with them once a year.
The Church is divided into five families (divisions) of from forty to eighty in each; each family has a separate domestic establishment and lives together in a large, handsome mansion; and all get every article required, and as much as they want from the common stores of the Society, and without any payment. A deacon is appointed to each family, whose business is to see that all are provided with every thing they want, and to anticipate their wants as far as possible. They all clothe in Quaker-fashion — plain, clean and neat; they have a great variety of articles of food and all of the very best description.
If a new member seeks admission, he must, according to the laws of the Society, give up every thing he has to the community and is never allowed to claim it back, even if he leaves; nevertheless it is their practice to give back to each as much as he brought in. If a person leaves who has brought in no capital, he is not allowed by the laws to claim any thing for services either, as he has been fed and clothed at general expense whilst he was working; nevertheless it is their custom in this case too to make parting presents to every person if they leave in a kind and proper manner.
“Their government is established in the manner of the first Christians. There is a male and a female minister in each Society, and each has an assistant. These four . . ters are the highest power in the whole Society and decide all cases of contention. There are also two elders in each family of the Society, with two assistants and a deacon or administrator. The property of the Society is vested in the board of trustees, which consists of three persons, oversees the whole establishment, directs labour and carries on transactions with neighbours. They have no power to buy or sell any land without the consent of the Society. There are of course also foremen and managers in each department of labour; however they have made it a rule that no commands are ever given by any one, but all are to be persuaded by kindness.” [Finch, Letter V, The New Moral World, Feb. 10, 1844]
Now it's my impression that small scale workshops in an anarchist society could do a lot better than this.....
Oh Jenni you were so sure of yourself:
er, no, they're made in large specialised factories under sterile conditions, y'know, so patients don't die of infections and so on. how on earth can the production, appropriate labelling and aseptic packaging of the ~150 million hypodermic needles used every year in the UK alone lend itself well to "small workshop based production"?
So, bye again everyone. I'm going now I may be some time.
Now it's my impression that small scale workshops in an anarchist society could do a lot better than this......
Nope, Its precisely because they are small scale workshops that this shit happens. Its not the 19th century so in most states employment laws exist that prevent large factories from employing children and that give workers some paper thin protection in terms of wages, hours and conditions. Hence these large factories often outsource the shittier work to small workshops where conditions are obviously going to be a lot worse since they;ll be located not in major cities but in backwards rural shitholes where class relations still have semi-feudal elements and where unemployment and poverty are higher. Workshops are less mechanised and the only way they can keep up in terms of volume of production is by hyper exploitation of the workforce, hence they employ children and refugees and anyone else who will work for a pittance and make them work absurdy long hours in unsafe conditions.
Also those workshops make scissors and scalpels and seem to be small sub-contractors making the most basic equipment. Not exactly the best example of an industry making modern hi tech equipment on an industrial scale is it afterall I somewhat doubt we're talking monomolecular surgical scalpels here.
An anarchist society would, by it's very nature, change and adapt to new situations, advances in technology, production advances etc. Those who say the scale of production units would be downsized have been watching too much of the Good Life.
The way to ensure high quality production with mininum human effort and a low level of error is to do it on a large and repeatable scale. Where the major change will occur is in how WHAT we produce is determined. Hopefully gone will be the culture of producing disposable crap which is designed to have a short lifespan in order to keep people coming back to buy more.
We will hopefully produce what individuals in a society need to have a fullfilling and rewarding life. This means increased use of technology to solve the real problems that people face rather than a dumbing down of technology. Pushing human achievement beyond what capitalism is capable of, so that all our labour and effort go towards positive and socially beneficial projects rather than towards serving the needs of a few.
Oh and Derry City FC will win the UEFA Champions League under the management of a players and supporters council.
Anarchism doesn't necessitate consensus at all. It is, as said, a product of the post-60's era, and the liberal influence on anarchism that occured then which brought that in.
In most cases, it would be majority rule which would be used.
Isn't majority rule without consensus an utilitarian hell? But more importantly, will we still have ipods in an anarchist society?
she was talking specifically about hypodermic needles, the article you linked is not.
Actually I did imply that I meant all sterile equipment, so I stand partially corrected. However, since these aren't sterile conditions, I assume they are shipped off to somewhere else to be sterilized, then off to somewhere else to be packaged, depending on where these parts of the production process are the most profitable. Much in the same way that t-shirts are made, dyed and printed upon in different places around the planet. So, whilst you might be right that these are indeed surgical instruments being made in small workshops, they are hardly favourable conditions to be drawn upon for an idea of how things would work under communism, and I still maintain that the large-ish factory model is more likely to
I
(a) make worker collaboration easier and give people access to many parts of several complicated production processes and (b) make standardised aseptic techniques easier to enforce
and as such should be more attractive to communists than maintaining small scale, spread out workshop based production that in a society run according to need and not profit would simply make the process inefficient.
I suspect that there is a bit of mythology talked about the evils of the big factory system. Even though it is never made totally clear by the opponents what constitutes a big factory and what is the ideal size, composition or function of a small workshop.
I have worked in the past in what might be regarded as a large factory that employed about 2000 people. Although it may not have been as big or typical enough to be a big factory. It was a food factory that was broken down into discrete units or workshops based on product type. So much so that the workers in one area or workshop might as well as worked on the other side of the planet as far as the workers in another section was concerned.
In fact you wouldn’t have known the others were there if you didn’t share the same canteen and all walked out of the same gate at the end of a shift. I was a bit unusual as I worked in the ‘tea house’ that made loose tea and Typhoo tea bags and in one of the biscuit ‘factories’ that made chocolate chip cookies and Cadbury’s chocolate fingers.
I mention that as a personal seminal example as to what happens to ‘greed’ in a world of abundance. The factory owners and managers understood ‘greed’, by experience probably, well enough to allow the workers to consume as much of the product as they desired whilst they were there.
Smuggling stuff out was a different matter of course.
By the way it takes on average about four weeks to get sick of chocolate biscuits when they are free and about 15 years to recover your appetite for them once you have to start pay for them.
Eventually I went down on my knees and begged to be transferred as the smell of chocolate was beginning to make me wretch.
I was sent to the ‘tea house’, and at first to the ‘blending room’ which was a different world. There was about 50 people who worked in the blending room per shift producing a product that was passed on to the packing house.
There was a sense of community or a ‘small’ workshop kind of thing even if the stuff was only being passed onto ‘another’ place next door. Again, I then moved into the packing house were there was another ‘community’ and in fact some people who had worked there for years had no idea what went on in the blending house and had never even bothered to go into it.
I work in a smaller place now but that is still broken down into sections, teams or communities. I think that most big factories are just discrete and to some extent ‘autonomous’ albeit integrated workshops located in one geographical place.
In fact I think technology is driving things more and more in that direction.
I have never found the big factory system boring and in itself oppressive unless of course you are locked into a small part of it.
Hello everyone, my Name's Ken and i hope to provide some of thetheoretical answers you are seeking, I see that the usual overthinking of the moneyless society is happening on this thread, and would encourage you all to open your minds to what should be a very simple evolution.
We currently have technologies, and skills to produce everything our hearts desire. What we don't have is the universal will to be able to produce these products and services in large enough quantities to enable every single person on the planet to benefit from them.
We all like to think of ourselves and our tastes as unique, to ourselves. This is inaccurate. There are a range of goods and services we all need in order to survive and be comfortable and safe on this planet. We all need shelter, food, drinks, healthcare, transport and access to social and communal activitities and facilities. We all need clothing.
Let's concentrate on the basics. What level of quality should we aim for without the constraints of money? Simple answer - the best we can produce for ourselves at that time. Why would we knowingly produce substandard, or shoddy goods when there is no extra profit in it?
So with the above in mind, our immediate mission would be to provide all these services, from wherever we have the resources to produce them. The evolution would be in producing these goods and services better, faster and more regularly.
Once this evolution begins, the world and all its resources will become the shared responsibility of all mankind to care for and use. There should be no mechanism in existence for 'trading' goods or skills. This is an all for one and one for all deal. If we can learn the simple lesson that we own nothing, but have access to everything, then we can progress at warp speed.
I have many more answers to what ails us. We really have to try to stop overthinking and overarguing these problems, and just get on with getting this thing started and overcoming obstacles as they arise. We have the technology and common sense to overcome anything in a moneyless society.
What about making work FUN? What about using the agencies and skills already in place to facilitate and organise our future, rather than committees, who will almost certainly not have the skills and knowledge required to make the very BEST decisions. Obviously local knowledge and conditions will be taken into consideration when the decisions are taken to build or plant in a specific area. But the actual decisions should be made by the acknowledged experts in whatever field is required for that particular project.
Does this sound like common sense? because that is what this whole area of discussion should be based on. Not pre-formed, half baked ideas which have already failed. This is a NEW start for us. All we have to do is grasp the humanity of it and do whatever we need to do to, to make it happen.
To be honest, it's impossible to see the future from the present. You can project images which may be accurate but to be honest in all those films such as Back to the Future and Blade Runner I see no flying cars and no prospects of them around for a while, do you?
This site is pretty intersting regarding the topic.
I have a bit of a problem with the use of the word "work".
If "working hours" and necessary labor intensity decrease with the progress of automation and thus people have more time for other stuff outside "work", wouldn't the distinction between "worker" and "non-worker" in relation to labor input be relatively marginal compared to that under capitalism?
I think it will be, if we strive for this futurist ideal, making it a non-issue whether some people here and there decide not to "work".
But first and foremost, I am a bit confused about what constitutes "work" in the vocabulary of those that used it here. Is it purely a productive activity or is it defined by being "for the general benefit"?
My point is that if we abolish Value, it will become difficult to differentiate what "work" actually is, making the term redundant in my opinion.
"Non-Workers" (for a lack of a better term, let's say "leeches") would only become a problem if the needs of the people are not met or if some people feel exploited, but then again, wouldn't we suppose that after The Revolution we'd have people you can actually reason with instead of having to force them to do stuff? And if we suppose an abolition of the division of labor, wouldn't "work" therefore be a natural, organic state of being, making the distinction between "work" and "non-work" even more difficult?
Wondering what to do with the "non-worker" is making assumptions about a future we don't even know. The whole question is, to me, saturated with capitalist modes of thinking.
Oh, I just realised this thread was last commented on in 2009.. So I guess I resurrected it!
My thoughts are what would a civilisation with no government look like? How would it function? etc. Would there still be a military? Plus, will money itself be abolished. I guess this is all a bit speculative as we base our vision upon the present combined with personal ideals.
My thoughts are what would a civilisation with no government look like? How would it function? etc. Would there still be a military? Plus, will money itself be abolished. I guess this is all a bit speculative as we base our vision upon the present combined with personal ideals.
Well... that depends on what kind of society you have in mind when you talk of "civ but no government".
Under 'anarcho-capitalism', no government, but still military (defense agencies), money, wage slavery, and all that jazz we have now. In a way, each corporation would be its own state though. The AC's definition of freedom simply cannot stand up under scrutiny, that's why they're largely disregarded.
Since we're on a communist board, no to all. No money, no wage labor, no military. Unless you count loose militias, which is in no way the same as an institutionalized third-party military power like defense agencies under 'anarcho-capitalism'.
If we go by Morton Fried's definition of civilization as a system "with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments", we'll effectively have abolished that as well in a communist society.
Anarchist societies would look like a bunch of communes which each have their unique ways of functioning and self governing. In a sense, I think we already have this sort of configuration, but its actual unfolding is constipated by the bourgeois tyranny over production, and whatever. Because the commune is at root merely a community, it is just that communities in our bourgeois civilization are... tyrannized, subdued to an alienating power... they are proletarian. But clearly anarchist communes, which are microscopic societies, can exist under the bourgeois order, and they can develop their own power set against state power... and, if they want, they can buy guns, and form a militia. Ha ha ha! Or they can study the mysteries of the universe and fight power with the greater power of love... it all depends on one's taste
Anarchist societies would look like a bunch of communes which each have their unique ways of functioning and self governing. In a sense, I think we already have this sort of configuration, but its actual unfolding is constipated by the bourgeois tyranny over production, and whatever.
I don't think so. We have quite a ways to go.
I guess this is somewhat true in rural areas where most people know each other well (at least that is my limited first-hand experience), though that does not hold true in urban or metropolitan areas, where people have little in common and are just faceless strangers to one another.
Not that this is necessary for a commune to function per se I think, but society is too atomized right now for it to work. That in itself may be the "bourgeois tyranny", but it has more to do with the philosophy of 'survival of the fittest' instead of mutual aid that is underlying in our society.
Now, on the possible existence of communes 'develop[ing] their own power set', that is indeed true but some may see this as essentially futile because it lacks strength.
Yes preceisely the bourgeois philosophy which upholds self-centered atomization, justifies it, can only be widely perpetuated insofar as the ruling class has the power which keeps society subjected to it. Because once the gigantic alienating and dehumanizing power begins to break down, people will have a shroud lifted from them and be able to begin to look at each other as real live....human beings...
Idk this might sound kinda dumb but i thought the answer to this question was obvious. Theres a broad agency organizing production labor for needs. Dwellings, water, waste, food, and power, etc. There are regular 'assignments' of work in these sectors for every citizen. Ofcourse, you dont have to do it, but both the social pressure and said labor being the backbone of our society, it will be an obvious choice. Ofcourse there will be those actively enrolling in those sectors, so said assignments dont need to be constant. Other than that, what exactly need be debated? Shoes? Sure. Theres a fuckton thats gotta change before this stuff is even possible or probable.
Well this is libcom.org so lets go with the anarcho-communist society, and we'll ignore post-civ for now
Resources would be distributed according to need, and green technology would likely be at the forefront. Everyone in society would have a house with solar windows and solar panels on their roof. The existence of smoke stalks would be eliminated. There would be wind turbines and tidal energy created everywhere. Noone would "own" a forest, and so the forests would thrive like they havent in a very long time. Cutting down trees would not happen nearly as often as it does now, as money would be eliminated. You would see people on the streets engaging in activities they find fun and self-fulfilling, rather than being forced to engage in work. Architecture would be designed to best combat the regions local natural disasters, such as buildings being built in Florida to repel heavy winds. There would be no money, and instead people would engage in mutual aid and gift giving. Social classes would not exist, everyone would be on an equal level and everyone treated like a human, rather than a cog in a machine. Anything that effects a person would be voted on by the people effected by it. For instance if a random city were to be hit by a category 5 hurricane, the people effected would decide if they should rebuild, or just move away from the region. Everything would be based on direct democracy, rather than representative. There would be no borders, meaning people would be able to freely and voluntarily move where they please, meaning you'd likely see people of all shapes, sizes, colors, cultures, sexes, genders, etc all around you, moreso than we see today. If a man from africa were to want to immigrate to where the former nation of china was previously, he would be free to do so without restriction.
Now if we're in a post-civ world, things would look a bit different. We wouldnt have many "workshops" or "factories", instead we would engage in scavenging the ruins of our old society for to recycle materials, and putting them to better use. Using old broken pieces of glass to make a cooker, finding some old thrown about leather to sew a new jacket for a friend, etc. etc.
TL;DR an anarcho-communist / libertarian communist society would be very very satisfying to everyone, where we would all feel welcome, and truly, TRULY free
Cute, fluffy, with red and
Cute, fluffy, with red and black stripes.
Hopefully, not all that
Hopefully, not all that different. I dont want to live in a cave or a hole in the ground or any of that shit.
anarchy means without a
anarchy means without a ruler, so I assume majority rule/voting is also unacceptable. That leaves us with consensus as a political model. So I am assuming that cities will have to go, same for big factories with more than 50 people.
consensus is minority rule
consensus is minority rule (in extreme one person vetoing hundreds) , which is far more autocratic than majority votes. this is why afaik no anarchist pre-60s gave it the time of day, especially in actual revolutionary attempts like ukraine, spain etc.
Anarchism doesn't
Anarchism doesn't necessitate consensus at all. It is, as said, a product of the post-60's era, and the liberal influence on anarchism that occured then which brought that in.
In most cases, it would be majority rule which would be used. For anarchists, the point is that consensus is desirable, but reality determines that that isn't always possible, or practical.
Anarchist society would like: Self-managed industry - "Factory Committees", workers councils/syndicates, etc - , abolishment of the state in favour of egalitarian structures, etc. Can't really be arsed going into much more depth than that.
"Anarchism is the belief
"Anarchism is the belief that through social revolution, the current form of government is to be replaced with self-managing community collectives, united through delegation and federation. Running things at the lowest possible level, anarchists, like socialists, agree with the notion of ‘bottom up’ but are wary of the 'up' part. Underpinning this society would be principles of interconnectedness & solidarity, egalitarianism, volunteerism/free association, sustainability, respect, liberty & co-operation. Systems of production and distribution would be managed by their participants. Through mutual aid, communities would aim to provide the resources necessary for all to develop as fully as possible their faculties, as well as to fully encourage creativity, expression and contribution. All would belong and have a direct impact in the community through a platform of direct/participatory democracy, creating a level of social cohesion and custom that would eliminate the necessity for authoritarian/oppressive institutions."
Thoughts?
I myself do not have a
I myself do not have a problem with as much decentralisation and autonomy in production as possible. It is not just a ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ position but as much a purely practical one.
I would have no wish or desire, nor I should I, for instance to participate in a decision on street lighting plans in some town in Peru or whatever. Some decisions however will be felt as effecting everyone, lets say seal hunting, killing animals for their fur or turning butterfly sanctuaries into speedway circuits or an airport or something.
Ultimately there will have to be a mechanism whereby some decisions or general policy will have to be taken by everybody. It will in fact be impossible for anything but a small number of decisions to be taken democratically by everybody, or the majority, as there will be too many of them and we will be spending all our time voting.
So it will have to be decentralised.
Even with majoritarian decisions it will in my opinion be necessary or inevitable to take into consideration the strongly held views of a minority. I may well prefer to do something one way rather than another but vote the other way to appease the more strongly held convictions of others for the sake of harmony. It is nothing more than how we behave in groups or families.
In free access socialism democratic decisions or the dreaded ‘state’ would only effect production or how and what we produced. Choices about how much we consume or where and how much we work would be personal or individual ones, unlike in Anarchist Parecon.
There has been an interesting alternative proposed for democratic decision making called ‘Demarchy’ a review of which appeared in Social Anarchism, Number 21, 1995-96, pp. 18-51.
.
I have not read it for a while but a summary might be;
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/95sa.html
I actually came up with the proposition on independently on my own only to be informed that the idea had been kicking around for a while.
Thus, this is how I put it on our list.
"
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/34108
Hopefully different enough
Hopefully different enough that it would be beyond our ability to recall the former society's existence.
I don't see how you can
I don't see how you can equate anarchy with small D. democracy (majority rule without elected decision-makers). We all know that in this situation minorities end up being ruled by majorities and often times facing severe repression.
I agree with you about consensus in community situations. I have known an authoritarian personality that openly admitted he blocks until he gets his way. I guess I was referring to anarchy as a situation where there is a group of people that are on the same page without coercion.
I think the best we can do is go with majority and super majority rule at the workplace and neighborhood /regional level, but have a framework where minorities are able to leave and there are many choices of communities, each with its own emphasis, values, style of doing things. And also situations where the minority does not have to go along with the majority. I'm thinking of a sales tax on products that are not necessary and the revenue goes into a controversial program, although they are regressive and that still deals with money.
I never understand these
I never understand these sort of weird 'direct democray'' ideas that seem to srping forth from anarchism whenever the subject of production isbrought up. Production isn't ''decided'' upon, its planned out as a response to market demand. Thus a chain of burger bars would be run by their staff who would have detailed lists of all the profucts they used in a day, a week a month and so on, would relay this information to a central depot whose staff would dispatch deliveries and make orders to factories accordingly. The factory and depot between them would look at data for previous months and produce goods accordingly to meet the demand previusly shown with some surplus. I don;t see why we need a ''neighbourhood meeting'' or any meeting outside the workplaces involved to decide how many thousands of curly and non-curly fries you might be making.
The community would only be voting on a number of issues that affected them as a community such us say the location of various public amenities and so on or the location of a sewage plant or stuff like that. However, while we might all have a vote in a town to decide where the plant is, you don;t all have a vote on what bacteria and chemicals should be used to treat the sewage, simply because most of us are not qualified to do so, that decision would be made by the workers at the plant with the consultation perhaps of a few university science labs. The idea that we would spend all our time voting on every minor issue is one that as people have noted on this thread, comes out of post-60's liberal notions of consensus and referendums, its generqall idea couched in terms of abstract principles and is most definitely not a problem basd on any real practical concerns of everyday life.
Diverse. So diverse in fact
Diverse. So diverse in fact that even to imagine one anarchist model or society is hopefully foolish. This is good because it means there'll be space for me to get away from people who want to practice consensus decision-making, from people who want "demarchy", from people who want things to go on pretty much as before, from people who decide that the food of the new society will be pot noodles and that actually factories are a really good idea.
Personally I hope the world might become big again (as opposed to "it's a small world") with a new flowering of bioregional cultures and a generalised healthy suspicion of anyone from as far away as the next big city who decides that they really are the world's greatest expert in agricultural techniques or whatever.
Two more things about this: I don't believe that this kind of world would necessarily involve an abandonment of appropriate high technology - there's not much that's useful that can't be done on a small scale with good networking, and secondly, the moment some townie technocrat decides that things must be improved out in the provinces you find yourself nearing the moment of decision for this new "anarchist society"...... there's going to be blood on the carpet and people who started off calling themselves anarchists or libertarian communists are going to end up being jacobins or bolsheviks......... oh plus a few of them are going to end up dead trying to get me to fill out their fucking paperwork.
woundedhobo wrote: I don't
woundedhobo
Do you have any specfic examples of this? Not getting your own way does not constitute "repression".
Quote: Diverse. So diverse
:roll: When it comes to say making hyperdermic needles, or cartons of orange juice or shoes or computers or railway track what methods of production do you imagine we should use other than factories and assembly line based workshops?
If you don't like pot noode then don;t eat it, products will only ever be produced if their is a demand for them whaever society we live in,
woundedhobo wrote: I agree
woundedhobo
I hav e been involved in a group that had a similar personality, we ended moving to consensus minus one. It was basically either that or to fracture the group. Other groups I have been involved in have had in their constitution a three quarter majority on any impass that couldn't be over come after three attempts. Consensus is fine and all good as long as all parties are willing to use it wisely if not, if groups still want to use it then they have to be willing compromise.
Edit: weird double post
Edit: weird double post
Quote: When it comes to say
That was a really poorly thought out, not to say knee-jerk response, so don't roll your condescending eyes at me! As it happens hyperdermic needles, like a lot of surgical equipment, are not made in huge dark satanic mills and lend themselves very nicely to small workshop based production. The best shoes are known to be hand-made - better for your feet, better for the environment and better for the folks that make them. Computers can very readily be assembled in small workshops and the components can be made in the same way by skilled crafts people. Railway track can be produced in relatively small steelworks shared by a few areas - there is no need and has been no need for half a century or more for steel mills on hundreds of acres with thousands of workers. As for orange juice - well if you want it in cartons, the tetra pack revolution means that juice is best packaged like that on site by the growers, or at most in local co-operatives operated by folks who most definitely do not need to be full time oj packers. None of this is my imagination, what seems to be the product of your fevered imagination is that people would want to go on working in factories and being de-skilled by the production line in order to put juice on your table wherever in the world you live.... here's an idea for you: why not drink the juice of a fruit local to your home?
Now, all that said, my post was about diversity. I did not say "thou shalt not do this or thou shalt not do that" I said that I would be able to avoid the kinds of things I find undesirable if we lived in a diverse world. I won't be eating any pot noodles, don't worry, but more than that I would very much like to live in a community I imagine would be quite different from your ideal home...... good, I guess you'd agree..... I don't want to look at your rolling eyes across a town meeting every Wednesday night thank you very much..... so what do we need? Diversity. Then you can fuck off and work in a factory and wear crap shoes made by people who hate their machines, eat pot noodles, live in a house next to a gigantic steel mill and wonder why, despite the fact that we've had our bloody revolution, everyone's still miserable, the environment is still going down the toilet and nothing, but nothing gets done on time.
Quote: I never understand
should we include some red pepper in the hamburger?? Should we switch to soy burgers have a lighter impact on Prairie ecology? How big should the burgers be?? lots of decisions to be made by someone.
And let's have a vote on whether or not to beat up our Pakistani classmate because he looks different than us.
woundedhobo wrote: And let's
woundedhobo
that's a red herring which isn't going to help what could be an interesting discussion. if a majority of people want to engage in ethnic violence the particular formal decision-making arrangements are the least of your worries.
woundedhobo WTF are you
woundedhobo WTF are you talking about?
I'm talking about majority
I'm talking about majority vote democracy.
Quote: As it happens
er, no, they're made in large specialised factories under sterile conditions, y'know, so patients don't die of infections and so on. how on earth can the production, appropriate labelling and aseptic packaging of the ~150 million hypodermic needles used every year in the UK alone lend itself well to "small workshop based production"?
as for people not wanting to do boring and deskilled work, i would imagine that whilst many things like the above example would have to be produced in factories on production lines of sorts, people wouldn't be bound to the same repetitive task over and over again. they'd have experience of all the different parts of the production process as far as possible and be involved in planning and innovation to whatever extent they could or wanted to. that way people would get to have a far deeper understanding of why what they're doing is important and hopefully end up giving a shit about it rather than hating it due to being confined to the same deskilled and, by itself, meaningless task. there are limits, and some things cannot be contributed to by everyone, e.g. things that require in-depth knowledge or expertise, but overall workplaces would aim to involve all workers in as skilled and interesting work as possible. yeah?
Wtf is that attitude
Wtf is that attitude supposed to be about? I do understand why surgical equipment needs to be sterile & I said small workshop I did not say garden shed.
You are missing the point, completely missing the point. I have been talking about diversity. I tell you right here and now that I do not want to find out "where I am this week" from a fucking colour-coded wall chart that has emerged from some well-meaning fucking committee that purports to represent the interests of several hundred, several thousand or several tens of thousands of workers...... a workplace does not have agency, it cannot aim to do anything..... people do that! Do you understand? I don't want to have a "far deeper understanding" inculcated in me by some fucking workplace merry-go-round, I dream of a different kind of life. And I am not alone.
You may think that you have imagined or even designed an anarchist society, but if so, you have not even begun to take into account the ways in which people will live, love and work if and when a free society comes into existence. I tell you again diversity is the quality I am looking for, diversity that reflects the rich diversity of humanity, the inventiveness of humanity, the wondrous diversity of planet Earth. It may seem easy to tut and dismiss the idea that an advanced medical science and technology could be maintained through networks of small workshops and local cottage hospitals; I guess it would have been easy to dismiss the idea that a computer built in someone's garage would transform the world, or that eventually printing would be a technology available in tens of millions of homes worldwide.
Anyway, the wonderful thing about living in a diverse society would be that I wouldn't have to put up with you explaining how obvious this is or that is, how working class means this, or labour theory of value means that; I wouldn't have to put up with you, and here's the pay-off, you wouldn't have to put up with me. There'd be space for us both and people even more eccentric besides........ the bad thing would be that when your bastardised futurist-industrial society didn't actually work, or fucked-up big time, you'd probably blame the folks who lived differently, instead of admitting that maybe, just maybe, they'd had some reasonable ideas all along.
On Orange Juice
On Orange Juice first;
Actually it is not necessarily a ‘good’ idea to squeeze orange juice at the point of production, for example in Brazil, and directly pack it off there. Although that is done to some extent for the local market. What they mainly do for the European market is concentrate the juice in Brazil, by about six fold, in a process that is more efficient than you might expect and ship it over as a concentrate to be diluted again in Europe and packed off.
This actually is a ‘cost’ saving as you don’t have the ‘expense’ of shipping ‘water’ half way around the world and you need less ships, fuel and human effort.
The issue of whether or not we would have small scale and ‘interesting’ production methods as opposed to large scale is again another policy issue that would need to be decided somehow.
There are economies of scale in manufacturing, in the amount of effort required to make things and in the amount of effort required to make the machines that make things.
The balance between spending longer making something in a more pleasurable way, or less making it in a less enjoyable way is something else that would that would need to be worked out.
Working in factories, I have done it most of my life, does not have to be a pain in the arse. Even boring jobs can be interesting if you are allowed to move around and don’t feel stuck in them.
When it comes to majority decision making it is not about the majority imposing its will on a majority and forcing it to live the way the majority wants it to out of spite or something.
If the majority don’t want loud music blaring out until midnight that would not have to mean that there would have to be a blanket ban on late night parties or something. They would just need to arrange things so the two communities would live in different areas.
The issue only becomes critical when the wishes of the majority unavoidably impinge on a minority, and vice versa. Short of conflict resolution by trial by combat the only other solution is by majority voting. This of course cuts both ways and you could be in the minority on one issue and in the majority on another.
It is, in a ‘society’ anyway, an issue of the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the minority, which is what we have now.
‘Townie types’ may want to ban fox hunting and badger baiting which country folk, as a minority, may enjoy immensely.
I don’t think it would be a good idea to allow experts to decide things as they may have an agenda of their own. The role of the experts would be to provide technical realistic options that would be decided by the community who would be allowed and seek second opinions.
Dave - Orange juice: I find
Dave - Orange juice: I find it questionable whether orange juice, concentrated or not, should be transported to Europe from Brazil and I wonder whether it wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot better for Brazilian people to see to their own calorie needs through sustainable land use rather than to be seeing to the juice needs of Europeans who arguably could be choosing to drink apple juice and citrus juices from the Mediterranean region in season instead.
And no, scale and speed of production do not come down each to a "policy" decision, at least I am strongly suggesting that they should not and could not. In a diverse and free society these decisions should be taken at the appropriate level - bio-regional perhaps, commune or "village" ideally, perhaps in some cases even household. This is what I mean by diversity in this case...... no global or continental decisions should be taken about how to make shoes in every town and thus there will be places that reflect more my vision than the large-scale industrial visions of others. In time perhaps no-one will want to play global commodity games or eat stuff out of season because they can't be arsed to understand their own land and climate.
I would like to raise the issue with regard to the decision-making side of this debate about proximity to the matter in hand. Decision-making must of course include consideration of all of those upon whom the decision will impinge, but the greatest weight in any decision-making process, should arguably rest with those closest to the point of action.
Here is an example: Do we ask a city of millions to cut down on water use and install a comprehensive rainwater harvesting system that would cover most if not all of its adjusted needs or do we take the cheaper and faster option of flooding a distant valley to make another reservoir for the city even though the relative handful of villagers in the valley are stubbornly opposed to the scheme?
Who exactly decides what "society" comprises? If I say that I am not part of your society - I am not a counter-revolutionary understand - I just want to be left alone with my fellow valley-dwellers, or in my stubbornly craft-based neighbourhood or village, who decides to enroll me in your "society" for the sake of making me comply with your policy decisions? Without a willingness to tolerate diversity, we are nothing but fucking bolsheviks.
Ariege wrote: And no, scale
Ariege
But would it be possible to maintain an advanced society based on "village" decision making, if that is your ideal? It would be impossible for the village to locally manufacture everything it needs, mine the raw materials etc. And cities aren't going to disappear. There would have to be interlinking for purposes of survival, and for a decent quality of life. Though villages could isolate themselves if they wanted to, I don't see what they'd have to gain by doing so.
I also don't see what is wrong with factories if they are socialised and the workers within it are able to access all stages in production and management, positions are rotated, representatives are elected etc. Surely the difference between a workshop and a factory is one of scale if they are fully socialised. The way that Jenni's question about how to solve real problems of high demand without mass production was met with a moral argument about human diversity is strange. Its not like anyone's seriously proposing that every decision about how to run every town is going to involve everyone in the world or the continent. But there would have to be democratic methods of distributing goods between regions, transporting materials and parts around for manufacture etc. That this might involve recallable, rotating committees of delegates and other such arrangements doesnt strike me as contrary to anarchism, but integral to it functioning. Its not like anarchists propose creating a power vacuum, or on the other hand some universal world government that would destroy "diversity" and issue colour-coded charts to every workplace.
And I don't know about you, but I always think dropping loads of f-bombs in conversations between comrades always seems to weaken the argument.
Well "f-bombs" made me
Well "f-bombs" made me smile. I swear in these forums as I swear in everyday conversation. Do forgive me.
Okay, I said nothing about isolation. I said nothing about village autarky. I am a communist anarchist and I believe in confederation of communities to create an economy based on production for need. I don't believe anything I have written up to now contradicts that.
I do believe that questions of scale and ethos in production matter fundamentally and if you socialise a shit-hole it remains a shit-hole..... oh sorry was that an s-bomb? Fuck..... Now this isn't really central to what I want to get across, which has to do with diversity, but I fervently believe that we could change the way the economy looks and feels much more profoundly than just socialising factories, moreover I think that that would be for the better. An economy of small production units, I believe, would offer the best chances to let people be happy in their work, produce quality stuff of whatever sort, ensure radically democratic management and ecological sustainability. You may choose not to believe that, you're welcome to your view. There are plenty of people who don't want to live and work in your utopia, who will want to have a go at making their own.
Now the question was, what would an anarchist society look like? I merely suggested that it's not so easy to envisage one set of solutions for anarchist societies because I believe that diversity would be essential if we were to have anything recognisably anarchist. You might not see the problem with this or that prescription but that is not an answer to the problems that other people see or the way other people want to live or make the revolution real.
As for Jenni's question, come on, it was less a question than a thinly veiled suggestion that I'm some primitivist who doesn't realise that people can get infections from dirty needles. Jenni might as well have suggested that my ideas on healthcare stretched to trepanning and not a whole lot else.
Well I should hope not, in which case you agree with my central point and I won't expect to see you outside my workshop in a tank telling me that it really is time to be more rational about my methods of production.
Quote: As for Jenni's
ah c'mon now it wasn't that bad. a bit sarcastic at worst. seriously though do you really think it'd be easier, more desirable or space efficient to produce 150 million needles (not counting all the other medical equipment such factories produce today) each year in a network of many small workshops, all requiring identical and stringent sterilisation procedures and so on, than to do this in a couple of larger factories which would, presumably, (a) make worker collaboration easier and give people access to many parts of several complicated production processes and (b) make standardised aseptic techniques easier to enforce since it's all concentrated in a couple of workplaces...?
As Django said nobody here is about killing diversity. it's just that when you think of the enormity of the task of production on a scale that is socially necessary and desirable, mass production is still going to be necessary for many things. I don't think that "if you socialise a shit-hole it's still a shit-hole" is true. Workplaces are shit today because the people who work there have no say and no control over the tasks they spend their lives doing, not because whatever production process they're part of is inherently pointless or boring.
(Edit: of course, many workers today do perform work which is socially pointless and just produces value for capital. I was referring to people who produce things that would still be necessary after the rev'.)
Ariege, you said village
Ariege, you said village based production was the "ideal" earlier, i was only responding to that.
I broadly agree with Jenni. A factory is only a location with a lot of equipment and productive capacity, I don't see that because a complex is large its automatically a "shithole". its not like we're saying that changing the nature of work isn't central to the revolutionary project. There's no reason a large-scale facility can't operate in a way that involves workers at every stage, under their control, a completely different ethos to the capitalist factory. Workers would change the fabric of the place accordingly. This is why I suggested the difference between workshops and facories was one of scale. I think overturning commodity production and capital, and producing for need is a pretty radical change in the approach to human activity.
I don't see where you're getting the idea that people are advocating just taking over the capitalist economy and working it as it is. As Jenni says, this is unviable. A huge amount of work in the west is socially useless, and doesnt even produce surplus value for capital. So fundamental change is vital.
Though I'm also an anarchist communist, I'm not pushing a utopia, just what I see as a sensible way of running society which is consistent with people's interests.
Hi Ariege Just to make my
Hi Ariege
Just to make my position clear, although I am no primitivist either I do have some sympathy with or am against the idea that an ideal society or the path to human ‘happiness’ lies with the consumption of mass produced crap. And that the path to human contentment is by having more toys and Humvees to play with. That is to say nothing of the ecology argument, trashing of butterfly habitats and sustainable production etc.
That is my position and not the WSM’s.
Therefore I can understand how people in your position can feel passionately about it.
Perhaps, unfortunately there are two arguments being conflated together here one is the mechanism of how we decide to do things or produce stuff. The other is about what those decisions should be.
I presume you would not wish to impose your ideas on others.
Then there is the other thing that you mentioned about being forced to enroll in the majority decided society. In my vision people will be free to enter into and participate in the ‘majority’ decided production process or not as all work will be voluntary. If you don’t like any of the colour coded work time-tables well you can not bother with any of them.
Unlike in a labour voucher kind of systems there will be no material penalty for not doing so. People who wish to live in wigwams in the woods will just as free to walk into town and pick up their weekly supply of Carlsberg special brew or whatever as anybody else.
Equally their children when they fall ill will have full access to the handicraft made CAT scanners or whatever else medical science and mass production can offer.
If a ‘minority’ wish to engage in handicraft industries then they will be free to do so. Perhaps these kind of people may set a seminal and practical example for the rest of us futurists about the meaning of life etc and we may join you.
Free access socialism and a democratic, voluntary and co-operative society would remove the structures and incentives for groups, classes or even individuals to oppress and intimidate others.
I guess what we have had
I guess what we have had here is a debate polarised through the lens of a forum, and I have probably played more than my full part in that process. I am passionate about these issues and I think that for once I find myself part of a broad and well recognised Anarchist tradition. It will come as no surprise to people that Kropotkin, Bookchin and Colin Ward all influenced the development of my Anarchism.
Jenni, let me put it this way, I am sure that needles or any surgical supplies could be produced to the exacting standards required without huge factories, in workplaces small enough that everyone felt an important part of the team and employed fulfilling skills everyday; where they could make a relatively rapid transition from the workplace to the outside - sterile conditions taken into account of course - and could see the workshop as a human-scaled part of their community rather than the local monster dominating the community. It may be that large scale plants would need to remain in place for a long time after dramatic social change, but I do believe that the transition to a more intimate scale wherever and whenever possible is the best path to take. Just to reiterate, I do believe in diversity, in a different society I'd make the arguments for a different, craft-based if you like, production across the board, I wouldn't make bombs to sabotage big workplaces full of contented workers who just thought that my ideas wouldn't work. As Dave says, one advantage of trying different techniques in a free society would be that over time we could see which worked best and probably reach the most sensible of compromises.
The same arguments could be adduced with regard to all presently mass produced essentials. It may be that pressing need requires mass production to continue provisionally - no sane person is going to shut down the tent factories during a refugee crisis..... "oh I'm sorry your handmade tents will be ready next month." Nevertheless, in the end I'd want the factory gone.... turn it into a dance hall and make better tents using better materials and ten thousand locally developed solutions to suit local people and local conditions.
Okay Django, you see I don't believe that a factory is just a location. In just the same way I don't believe that an economy can be expressed as a series of equations and I don't believe that class is the only crucial consideration with regard to revolutionary change. The places people work and live alter the conditions of life, make certain problems more or less likely, affect us as human beings.... an architectural style can increase hierarchical tendencies, affect health and happiness, empower or disempower; a production system can facilitate learning or effectively put a stop to it. I see quite a lot of evidence on this site that people's thinking stops with taking over the means of production..... there's a comment above about minimal change, the thread about retirement the other day was, to say the least, a little pedestrian..... I worry. It's not like you and I seem so far removed from one another, it's just that I believe that soon enough a free society would have to seek an architecture and scale of everyday life that reflected its values and not the values of a past age; I repeat this is not just an aesthetic argument, but rather one based on practicality and desire.
Dave, you're a little bit easier on blaggers than I'd be frankly. I might give them some brewing kit and the wherewithal to grow barley, I'd certainly argue against giving them special brew! It seems to me that you would have little problem if local areas wanted to explore their own ways of both making decisions and organising production. For me massive decentralisation and local diversity is an essential bulwark of liberty, but also a crucial reflection of the differences between people and bioregions. It simply doesn't make sense producing one kind of roof-bearing assembly in a giant factory when areas have different amounts and kinds of precipitation, not to mention different vernacular styles.... the same can be said of clothes, of crops, of shoes, of boats, of tools and everything else. It wasn't just quaint primitivism that produced the huge diversity of tool patterns in the past, or the range of local costumes, or the range of boats in coastal regions of the British Isles. Conditions vary, people vary, available materials vary. Efficiency needs must take account of ecology and don't be telling me that it makes sense to ship bricks from some vast brickyard in a clay region to a place where stone is readily abundant or somewhere where bale building is the ideal housing solution.
So, again, what will an Anarchist society look like? Diverse. My corner of the new world will in all likelihood look very different to yours and that will be a good thing reflecting the rich variation of human thought, creativity and desire and the innumerable bioregions of Earth. I believe strongly that only such diversity will ensure liberty.
Ariege wrote: Quote: When
Ariege
Nope, as jenni has pointed out this is untrue
Quite clearly this is balls firstly we're not talking about luxury shoes, we're talking about the 15 odd billion pairs of shoes that would need to be produced to shoe the worlds population. Secondly looking at the textile industry in general do you honestly think going back to workshop based hand sewn equipment across the board is at all feasible when you consider demand. l
Let alone the fact that a lot of the worst abuses in textile industries take place when the garments leave the factory supply chain (which is at least monitored to some degree and has some form of health and safety standards) and get shifted off to small sweat shops where hand stithcing is done often employing child labour and the like.
See personally i wouldn;t care if i had to work on a production line, or sweep the streets or do a bit of cleaning, thats life, i've done some of those jobs in the past and tbh someof them are probably more fulfilling than the shit I do now. The point is that in an anarchist society you;d be working a lot less hours a year, and you'd get to do a wide range of jobs. Maintaining factory production means that you can use the minimum amount of labour to get the maximum amount of production, thats generally a good thing unless you really want to work longer hours. I mean all your talk of small workshops and so on just means i'd have to work a 7 hour day instead of a four hour one, hardly a fantastic solution to the worlds problems.
I mean basically your ''alternative'' amounts to working longer hours, hand sewing all your clothes and living in some hippy eco camp in some backwards ass rural pat of the world and only consuming local produce,...your not really selling this to me here.
Ariege wrote: workplaces
Ariege
scale is a distraction to the point at hand. i've done data entry in a small pharmacy, which was the most boring, repetitive, fordist job i've had. And i've worked in a large factory on a line as part of a small largely autonomous team with tasks rotated among us etc which was considerably less dull. So it's possible to have lots of teams co-operating under one roof or separate ones; we're dealing with a qualitative distinction not a quantitative one.
when people say factories will still exist, they are not saying a capitalist division of labour will. if production is democratically controlled and we no longer have to compete with each other in the market, production is no longer ruled by value (i.e. the drive to minimise labour time expended). of course we may still want to minimise labour time, but we will weigh this against the enjoyment of the work, safety considerations, ecological impact on our communities etc. there is no single answer to whether people would rather put in 2 hours on a fairly fordist production line or 8 hours in a craft workshop (perhaps enjoying their labour more).
You could also argue that craft production traps people in one line of work forever, with longer days too, whereas deskilled/highly automated production maybe more boring, but you need to do much less of it and can much more easily change jobs/workplaces. again, the answers to these kind of trade-offs are by no means singular or knowable in advance. if this is what you mean by diversity, i don't disagree, although with cantdo i'd tend to say it's too utopian to think all necessary work can be rendered enjoyable so minimising the time spent doing it would seem like a good idea.
best libcom thread i've seen
best libcom thread i've seen for a while. 4 out of 5 stars :rb: :rb: :rb: :rb:
another thing i'd like to
another thing i'd like to mention is the idea that "communism means the destruction of the firm" (gilles dauvé). to a certain extent, capitalist production does point beyond itself in this respect. consider a capitalist firm using 'pull production' (as advocated by cantdo on this thread, building in response to demand rather than speculatively stockpiling stuff), internally each stage of production feeds the next in reponse to demand, i.e. 'need' without recourse to commodity/money relations (it tends to be accounted in terms of units first and foremost).
the fact the first stage of production has to buy in inputs reflects not some essential fact of production, but the (for these purposes) arbitrary division of capital amongst different capitalists. if ownership of the means of production is socialised, there's no reason for these arbitrary divisions to exist, and different parts of the production process can co-operate as necessary, abolishing the firm as such (therefore i would see fetishising small craft workshops as backwards-looking, even if communist human-scale production teams might incorporate elements of craft production with regard to making work less boring).
lol, i said "communist
lol, i said "communist human-scale production teams." humour me.
Ariege wrote: Just to
Ariege
Against all my instincts, this is an incongrous support for the utopian solutionism expressed by Ariege.
cantdocartwheels
Joseph K.
I’m guessing here but the reasoning, I think, behind Libcom’s line on this is to disassociate itself from the anarchists’ critique of commodity fetishism because it wants to avoid if at all possible criticising the proletariat’s perceived consumerism, which is taken as a given, and its possessions as an objective index of need. It seems from these statements that Libcom does not accept that the social relation is expressed through its products but that things have an objectively given use-value. It is here that a lifestylist residue reappears in the fetishised appreciation of the thing which is severed from and eclipses the conditions of its manufacture.
From this it is a small step to imagine communism as the continuing production of the same objects via the same processes, where everything is the same but branded differently. Because of its critique of anarchism, Libcom’s version of communism is stripped of anything that might indicate a break with capital. Instead it proposes that we will reproduce the same set of conditions but less capitalistically – as if the social relation existed independently of the conditions. If this is not political reformism, it still has a pragmatic-reformist sheen; social reformism perhaps.
The thinking goes something like: ‘we need to sell our idea of a communist society, we cannot attack capital at the level of alienation or commodification because the proletariat has passed into the stage of total subsumption and identifies wholly with its role and with its possessions (oh get me another shirt, get me another tie, get me another wollen). Therefore, the only option is to attack the critique of commodity fetishism as ‘lifestylist’ and propose to the workers a governmental solution on the level of ‘everything is going to be the same but you will be in charge’. In this form of self-management populism the capitalist relation is represented as an external constraint rather than as integral to our existence at the level of activity, values, roles. The communist critique implies the proposed abolition of Value, Labour and Class as they are embodied in real existence and not in some abstract realm – this would necessarily involve an attempt at the total transformation of our lives, where we cannot overcome our addictions/adhesions we must at least subject them to critique.
One thing is certain, the proposals put forward by Libcom within this discussion are not communism nor will they abolish either class or capital as both of these are reproduced in turn from the activity and relations which produce and pursue them as an end in themselves. The class struggle will continue upon the territories that Joseph K refuses to engage: where dead labour guarantees existence and where activity is expressed in terms of alienated labour. There can be no communist factories as there can be no communist state or communist prison or communist police force, army etc. There can be no communist capitalism.
The arguments Joseph K puts forward exist somewhere within the spectrum of capitalist politics where liberal investments in the liberating potentials of dead labour, sprinkled with utilitarian/malthusian calculations concerning the optimum shoeing of 7 billion workhorses (as if human existence is captured at the magnitude of ‘billions’), crunch up against simple workerist sentimentality, ‘See personally i wouldn;t care if i had to work on a production line, or sweep the streets or do a bit of cleaning, thats life, i've done some of those jobs in the past and tbh someof them are probably more fulfilling than the shit I do now.’ This sort of VSO all-hands-to-the-deck-and-help-those-poor-people-out is really only capitalist productivism with a human face.
Zazaban wrote: Simply, how
Zazaban
fort-da game wrote: I’m
fort-da game
i've split my response to fort-da game here as it' doesn't seem to address what an anarchist society would look like, but rather how 'Libcom's hivemind is apparently capitalist.
Cantdo: you finally show
Cantdo: you finally show your true colours:
This is not about what I have been saying at all, it's about what you have wanted to see in it. I don't believe that it's about working longer hours, I never mentioned hand sewing, I am no hippy and backwards is all in the eye of the beholder. As for local produce, I don't see what's so negative about that but then you're the guy who doesn't care what work he does, I guess you don't care what shit you eat either...... maybe if you could live on an anarchist space station and breath air out of a tin you'd be really happy.
Well, in any event, you're not engaging with me you're engaging with big fat straw men. Your assertions about what can and cannot be done in relatively small workplaces are just that and in any event fortunately you are unlikely to be some commissar for industry so people will do what free people do, which is experiment, find their own solutions and defy the predictions of authoritarians and technocrats.
Joseph K:
Well I don't quite agree with this. It is plain that scale can perfectly well be beside the point; tyranny, boredom and exploitation are all very possible on a small scale, I never suggested otherwise. However, that is not to say that a human scale, or to be more exact, an appropriate scale for the people, the environment and the activity in each case, would not be highly advantageous in the construction and day-to-day functioning of an anarchist society. I will once again add the reminder that I am not saying that all the world should adopt one solution, that diversity is what I want, but for me,. seeking a scale on which we will preserve and enhance skill and fulfillment, and which will facilitate face-to-face relations both within workplaces and between workplaces and communities seems an obvious and desirable aim.
So I'll try to make myself clearer: I would like to live in a community, perfectly at home with appropriate high technology, in which no-one is reduced to the level of a machine operative by the scale of their workplace, in which wherever possible jobs maintain and promote skills, I would say in which there exists a craft ethos. Now none of this excludes automation to a high degree, or the use of the most sophisticated technologies, what it implies I hope, is that workers will master their machines, know them, build them, understand them, manage them rather than the contrary. Workers will work at the pace they have built into their workshops, not at the speed the production lines force on them. I would also like to note that I would indeed like to live in a community more concerned with quality than quantity, more interested in the possibilities of producing a linen shirt that could last a lifetime than making sure that everyone could have a wardrobe full of new shirts that will last them a year or two..... now if that makes me an ascetic, so be it, I happen to like good boots and linen shirts.
Perhaps we'd like to optimise labour time. The crucial thing is that perhaps what we'd really like is a world full of possibilties in which not only each industry found a scale conducive to good work, but in which each region and finally each community found a scale for each activity best suited to its unique capacities and needs. Now in that kind of world Cantdo could probably find somewhere to lean on his broom for two hours a day and I might be able to split my time between a nice little walled veggie garden producing local food and a furniture workshop making wooden chairs and tables to last generations.
I do believe that in time pretty much all necessary work can be rendered enjoyable or rewarding (sitting by the bed of someone who's dying probably shouldn't be too much fun - but maybe it shouldn't be thought of as work) and I've done a fair range of work in my life to date. Now whether this position is utopian or not only the future - or one possible, probably fairly unlikely future - will tell. I believe in the capacities of free people to surmount technical challenges, to make the necessary rewarding and fulfilling. It would be interesting to discuss this on a job by job basis, perhaps a little frivolous but interesting.
I gave the criticism that my posts have come in for some thought this afternoon and I think that in fact it does have to do with this fear of asceticism, or worries about criticising consumerism and mass production. Now frankly I don't really have the savvy to join the other thread - I don't speak marxian - but it does seem to me that there is a risk of throwing at least one baby out with the bathwater if any suggestion like the ones I have made (incidental to my desire for diversity) is treated as if it is the ranting of some primitivist or one of the hair shirt brigade. I'm neither of those things. I do recognise the probable need - ecological if nothing else - for limits to consumption and I don't believe that that makes me a misanthropic green. These things are nuanced you know, and if I'm dismissed as a hippy or a primo then some valid arguments might be lost..... I'm a communist anarchist and if any of us live long enough to see the world turn in our direction I will not lay down my arms to see another homogenizing tidal wave engulf the world just because the alternative seems a little utopian.
Ariege wrote: Well I don't
Ariege
But what is a "human scale"? Are you describing some kind of modular architecture, the physical size of spaces? Whats an "appropriate size"? I don't see how this constitutes an argument in favor of small workplaces. I mean, it would make sense to group facilities in one place to economise and reduce work, share energy and waste disposal functions, recycling, conserve heat, manage noise etc. For instance, if you have toolworking and engineering expertise in one place, and machinery, it would make sense to to build a facility to produce all the tools needed by the area there, rather than reproducing the effort in every place. Or in a more complex operation, like building train engines, we'd have to have as many of the functions in one place as possible in one large facility to avoid transporting the parts around that have been made elsewhere. Otherwise you'd have to have small shops all over the place specialising in different parts of the process. I don't see what would be alienating about working i such a place when you'd get access to all parts of the design and building process and would learn about it in depth. I think it'd be pretty awesome actually. You could call it a large workshop if you want, but its clearly a factory.
As for face-to-face communication, while this might be desirable, real time communications do save time and are very useful in the workplace. For decision making in the workers councils then face to face communication is necessary, but i don't see why you'd have to be face to face with everyone you're working with all the time.
Ariege
I certainly have no worries about criticizing the way in which capitalism alienates us from the production of our social environment, which we have to buy back. But I think the only way to fix that is revolution, and moralising about "consumerism" usually leads to rubbish politics, all the way from Adbusters to Crimethinc. As for mass production, I simply see no reason why this is incompatable with communism, and i haven't seen any arguments to lead me to believe otherwise. Producing the things society needs using labour saving technology to mean that theres less work to be done makes perfect sense. As for asceticism, there's nothing revolutionary about that. If there aren't drug-fuelled orgies in communism then we've failed.
I think lots of the criticisms of your posts have been down to people objecting to suggestion that them thinking large industry is possible in an anarchist society is the same as uncritically taking over the capitalist economy.
I think an anarchist space exploration program would be balls-to-wall awesome ;)
The problem is Django that
The problem is Django that you and I come from very different backgrounds, have clearly read very different stuff, know very different people and want very different things. It's marvelous in a way that we have both come to the conclusion that what's needed is a revolution and afterward a free society. It only matters to me when you start assuming that everyone everywhere is going to want to produce things in the way that you think is most sensible and presumably make decisions in the way that you think is most sensible. Although I can perhaps be accused of being utopian in some ways, the idea, the assumption running throughout this thread, not just in your stuff, that we might have one "anarchist society" is not only completely barmy, it's got "made in cloud cuckoo land" printed all over it. Whether you or any of your comrades like it or not, free people will shape the future economy and it will work in myriad different ways that none of us expect.
I don't really see why you think it's so great to have all the expertise in one place under one roof. What? Are you planning to do away with telephones? The internet? Universities? Books? You use the example of train engines but when the UK finally got around to putting light railway systems in some of its cities much of the gear was made in Italy, a country renowned for its relatively small workplaces - workshops even. But once again I remind you that I'm not telling you how you'll work after the revolution, or how your hometown will be organised; I am not promulgating some universal law of production - which if you ask me in this thread seems to amount to the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and an economics A level. All I have been doing all along is saying that in a diverse world we'll be able to do stuff in lots of different ways - I'd prefer small craft-based industry and believe that responsible use of technology will allow us to do pretty much everything in small production units. Evidently your vision differs from mine.
It is certainly not a question of moralising about consumerism. I apologise if it came across like that. My observation is that consumerism fucks people up and contributes in many ways to fucking other things up as well. Now I don't see how that is moralising, I'm not condemning people for living in the shit we're all mired in. What I am saying is that in a different world perhaps people would consume less stuff, use stuff more wisely, make stuff that will last and make stuff that they really care about. You think a space program would be a nice adjunct to an anarchist society, I think that's completely fucking insane - oh and definitely something worth sabotaging however small a minority I'm in; I think that a shirt good enough to last for decades and maybe even my lifetime would be very cool indeed, you think that makes me what? A subscriber to rubbish politics?
Listen, have your drug-fueled orgies, work in your factories, work not at all if that's what you think will make you happy. But if I were to end up amongst the kind of people and in the kind of community I would hope to, I imagine you're not going to do any of it near me.... okay, so that's the great thing about diversity.... you can go on forever about how other people don't know how to produce things efficiently and we'll have our train engines just the same.
You really know nothing
You really know nothing about me Ariege, please don't make assumptions.
This is ridiculous. No one has said this. In fact, people have said repeatedly that your worries about diversity are ill founded, and that no-one is advocating doing away with it and instituting some world government. If you think the idea of a society is "barmy" then I'm puzzled about why you bothered contributing in the first place.
Again, no-one has said anything about free people not shaping their economy. In fact, its your attitude that "factories" are inherently bad, alienating etc which sets a prescription on any future form of organising society. All anyone else has said is that they could be useful in allowing us to do certain things, but would look very different to anything in existence today. No, I'm not "planning" to get rid of anything, as I said before, I think such attitudes and fetishising face to face contact with people is silly, which is why I'm critical of your idea of promoting workplaces where we can only have a face to face relation with each other. But I'm sure you've found in every job that you've done, whenever you've wanted to learn something complex, its been far more useful to have someone who knows what they're doing show you than to pore through manuals. That is elementary. But why build two facilities doing much the same thing in one town than one larger one which combines functions. I think its bizarre that you think people won't make their own lives easier by grouping functions together in one facility - thats far more prescriptive and anti-pragmatic than anything anyone else has said. Also, its interesting that you of all people are arguing against me by using an anachronistic model of early capitalist production! Importing gears from Italy? I take it you're not volunteering to build the cargo ships in a small workshop.
You can continue "reminding" people to do something they're not when you stop doing it yourself. You've yet to give a reason why people would want to prescribe the size of their workplaces when it might mean more hours, more duplication, more transport and distribution work etc. In lots of cases smaller workplaces would make sense, in lots of cases bigger ones would. But no-one in disagreeing with you has advocated a universal law of production, and what Marx has to do with any of this is beyond me.
What are you on about? All thats been happening is that examples have been given to say that people might decide in a number of cases to use different arrangements than religiously limiting the size of their workplaces. If you read the post, which you obviously haven't, you'd see I didn't say that "we'll have our train engines the same", but described a radically different process of producing large machines than which exists today. If you think that train engines today are produced in factories where workers access "all parts of the design and building process" and run them democratically then you are on a completely different planet. Or, you might have a political objection to trains.
Quote: You really know
You don't know that I don't know anything about you Django..... I might be your next door neighbour. I was only meaning to point out that we seem to be coming from very different perspectives. I'm sorry if I offended you, although I didn't see you jumping to my defence when Cantdo said I was a hippy who wanted us all to live in an eco-camp.
The question was "What would an Anarchist society look like?" I answered that for me diversity was essential. I of course have ideas about what kind of community I'd like to live in and how I believe things might be best produced.
Still, thank you all for setting me straight., especially thanks to you Django for helping me understand the world and for all of you for bringing me closer to a grasp of the way things work and the things people really need. I shall go away now and see if I can't apply all of this Libcom-harvested wisdom to escape the web of delusion I have spun around my life.
I'd be perfectly happy to
I'd be perfectly happy to have a discussion with you about these things if my views weren't misrepresented. I can understand why you'd be irritated about being called a primitivist by others for the same reasons. You said you wanted a diverse society, but that you'd like it to have no factories. Others said they advocated a diverse society too, but that large facilities would likely be useful and desirable, and that there is no essential "factory" to reject. Thats nothing to get upset about.
I dunno about this 'small is
I dunno about this 'small is better' thing tbh, economies of scale are a reality in most cases, technology is at the point - or rapidly reaching it - where unless it is a highly skilled occupation there is no absolute necessity for anything but minimal human intervention in most productive processes. It's arguable that western capitalism has partly shifted over into otherwise pointless service jobs and public sector roles for precisely this reason (alongside the outsourcing thing) - it finds it difficult, with labour-intensive industry no longer required, to justify the continuation of a logically obsolete economic structure, so looks for 'brain' roles.
Really though, the fact that capitalism has a tendency to overwork and alienate human labour in factories/offices where it is cheaper than machine-production does not really have a bearing on the organisation of post-revolutionary society.
While you might get a slightly better shoe if it's hand-made (and I'd dispute this as an ongoing inevitability), the production of said shoe in a factory, being less labour intensive, frees up more people to pursue their own priorities - which should be the ultimate aim of any societal change. You'd probably still get cobblers - as a hobby, working at their own speed and to standards that are usually impossible to achieve in a set work environment.
Can people stop saying that
Can people stop saying that individuals would be allowed to choose not to work and yet live off the fruits of other' labour? That sounds shit. Actually it sounds a bit like class society. From each according to ability, comrades.
Jess wrote: Can people stop
Jess
Why are you averse to this idea?
Daniel Brennan wrote: Jess
Daniel Brennan
because as jess says it's effectively a class society. we already have a class of people who fit this description, they're called capitalists. surely we don't want a parasitical class in communism either. 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' means just that! obviously if people have an actual reason why they can't work they wouldn't lose out, but for people who just can't be bothered to have access to everything society produces isn't fair. especially since there will be so much less work to do in communism; there'd really be no excuse not to do your bit.
Ariege wrote: Cantdo: you
Ariege
You just went on one about the best shoes being ''hand made'' how exactly do you imagine they were going to be doing the stitching, i mean do you seriously think we could clothe the worlds population using craft production?
And again, a factory is a process that minimises labour and maximises product, if you reject that then it goes without saying that you are wanting people to work longer hours.
One of the most recent scandals regarding abuses in the textile industry was this one http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/23/primark.children in which the clothes were taken out of the factories, and large chunks of the production were done in workshops by hand using child labour and with workers working far longer hours than they should have been doing acccording to health and safety standards in the factories. I hardly see how those kids would have appreciated that the goods they were making were hand made, and in the real world of mass produced goods for a market of billions, thats what ''hand making'' all those goods is going to involve; basically long hours and poor conditions.
So basically you don;t want to work anywhere outside your garden and your shed and we're supposed to respect that because its 'diverse'. Do you not see a slight problem with this sort of relativism.
Seriously like say you do spend all your time in your hippie garden and then it turns out that theres a bit of a labour shortage in one sector and they need people to help with the harvest on a larger industrial farm or say they need rubbish collectors, warehouse workers, industrial cleaners or hospital porters, and they put out adverts in the local area detailing the work that needs doing, (maybe your details come up on a databse as having some free time so you get a letter delivered who knows) would you do some shifts or refuse because those all involve working in ''factories'' and ''industry''.
Quote: And again, a factory
Did the imposition of the factory system result in people working less?
Comrade, perhaps we could build camps to send people who refused to work in factories. We could call them work camps, and the people in them could be kept there and compelled to work until their attitude changed and they went to the factory on their own.
And thankfully y'all have
And thankfully y'all have made clear that there will also be communist prisons, so we could send particularly unproductive people to those.
yoshomon wrote: Did the
yoshomon
this has little to do with a division of labour per se, and everything to do with the social relations of production. see my comments on production no longer ruled by value above.
yoshomon wrote: Comrade,
yoshomon
yoshomon
gulag straw man and amalgam argument, how intellectually honest :roll:
let's try and keep this constructive yeah?
yoshomon wrote: Quote: And
yoshomon
Thats a complete and deliberate misrepresentation of cantdos' point, its obvious that there would be a difference between production in an anarchist society and under capitalism; in a factory system under capitalism work is obviously not fairly shared; a certain number of people are worked to the bone while huge numbers of unemployed are kept on the outside to remind them that if they dont want to work 60-70 hours a week there are plenty of desperate people out there who will. This situation would clearly not be the case in the type of society we're envisioning.
Interestingly to me, train production came up earlier in this thread... Im kind of reluctant to enter into debate with anyone who seriously thinks trains or any major part thereof can be built in some type of cottage industry, after the revolution I will be refusing to drive any trains that have not been built in a proper engineering works.
How small would these
How small would these cottage industries have to be before they became satisfactorily ‘small’?
I work in a factory that employs less than 200 people, split over three almost cottage sized shifts. Everybody knows everyone else, perhaps too well.
However we do turn out 20 tonnes of product per person per week, when reasonably busy.
Although to be fair, it is highly automated with plenty of robots doing the boring jobs.
Quote: Did the imposition of
Oh for fucks sake do you think standards of living are higher now or in 1800? The current population could not be supported with a high standard of living for 6 billion people on the basis of the craft prodction and agricultural methods that existed in 1800.
Not really, one would hope society would have checks and balances to deal with people who refused to contribute and who had no good reason for not doing so, ranging from socially stigmatising the culprits to administering some form ot rationing that limited what someone who chose to refuse to work could receive and what they could participate in. Probably the anarchist equivalemt of the dole i'd assume. Obviously you probably wouldn;t have to work in a factory generally because most factories are increasingly highly automated and so the number of people working in them is relatively small, but unless you had health reasons, or care responsibilities or another good reason then i'd assume you would be expected to do some of the ''dirty work'' in society. And like I said in my post that oculd be anything from being a hospital porter to working in a warehouse.
Stigmatising people who don;t work in a capitalist society is wrong because work is not done for the common good, you do not benefit from it, hours are long and conditions dehumanising. In an anarchist society where those inequalities and stigma are removed, what excuse do you have to not work and expect to receive the benefits of other peoples labour?
yoshomon wrote: And
yoshomon
Well this is another point. What do you propose we do wth rapists and the like in a communist society? Dangerous people obviously need to be detained, and I think it would be disengenuous and newspeak-ish to call that place of detainment anything other than a prison.
As for unproductive people, consider this scenario: we have a revolution, and all the previously ruling class people decide they don't want to work.
who decides the holiday pay
who decides the holiday pay under anarchism.
Marx in Chapter 13 of the
Marx in Chapter 13 of the Grundrisse:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm#p690
Capital Vol. III Part VII.
Capital Vol. III
Part VII. Revenues and their Sources
Chapter 48. The Trinity Formula
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm
Dave B, is your quote meant
Dave B, is your quote meant as a defense of factories?
Perhaps, for a start, the
Perhaps, for a start, the both of you could explain what you are trying to say? :roll:
Well I think it's fairly
Well I think it's fairly clear what Dave B is saying, he's just reiterating that the reason for advocating mass production in factories (albeit massively differently organised, as mentioned 6 million times before here) is that it means we can produce as much of the stuff we need relatively efficiently and get on with having a life outside of production. It's true that under communism work will be more enjoyable anyway for reasons already mentioned - working with your mates to produce something that's been decided democratically to be useful and necessary, the trade-off between reducing hours worked and maximising fun had working them - but at the end of the day the best fucking thing about communism is going to be having all this incredible technology to hand that was once used to maximise profit and often make labour more boring and isolated, that has been transformed to meet the material needs of all. I mean workers theorized, invented, created and operated this technology: the only reason it is not amazing to them under capitalism is that it doesn't exist to meet their needs; it exists to meet the needs of capital. Under communism the world will be our lobster and the factories will be full of ever more advanced machinery and technology designed to make our lives easier. And hell if you're worried that reducing labour time via machinery/factories/technology is going to make work less interesting or somehow maintain alienation, we can invent a few new hobbies/go to the pub/play Guitar Hero in our hours of spare time to make up for it.
also;
Would be good to have an answer to this from daniel brennan, yoshomon or others, i'm interested in how you justify this. Stigma etc might well do the trick, and I would imagine this would be the first action taken in any case, but it's entirely feasible that some people will just refuse to contribute despite social pressure and then without some way of getting people to pull their weight, we have a problem.
Jenni wrote: it's entirely
Jenni
Well if people refuse for no good reason to contribute theres no cause to stigmatize, imprison, maltreat or coerce them; if they dont contribute according to ability, their needs shouldnt be catered for, which would be up to them.
I didn't mean we should
I didn't mean we should imprison maltreat or coerce them, but I don't see a problem with using social pressure to encourage people to work. Since it'd be in their interests to do their share anyway. I see your point though, "no compulsion to work, but no duty towards those who will not work" is fair enough. (whoever said that..)
Anyone who knows me in real
Anyone who knows me in real life knows Im not as tolerant as my last post made out.
Jenni wrote: Well I think
Jenni
Thanks for that, Jenni , that is exactly what I meant.
yoshomon wrote: Marx in
yoshomon
I think it's pretty clear here that Marx is talking about capitalism -- it's not some transhistorical/ontological statement about machinery as such.
yoshomon wrote: . In
yoshomon
Nope reading the whole quote Marx is discussing the idea that increased automation in production would make labour an accesory to production; a thesis which marx questioned in his 19th century speculation and something that in the last century has been proven largely to be incorrect. In short in a capitalist society the needs and means of production are subjugated to capitals need to to accumulate and impose work discipline thus its logical to deduce that under capitalism robotism or full automation is virtually impossible. If anything this aptly demonstartes that an anarchist/socialist society would develop the means of production and utilise their full potential to maximise leisure time, whereas a capitalist society wouldn't since capitalisms aim is to maximise profits. In short what you've just quoted is part of a debate whose logical conclusion would seem to run entirely counter to your primitivist musings and as billj points out what you've quoted most definitely is not some sort of transhistorical rant about ''the machine''.
weeler
weeler
I know its just ridiculous. Worst idea since decaffinated coffee. .
Quote: Well I think it's
Sounds good to me, having worked in plenty of factories before, I'd be happy to do twelve to twenty hours a week, even of repetative tasks, and no anti-civ nutcase has got a right to stop me.
If needs be I dare say Feds would take action against elements that threatened the continuity of useful production.
There are not many examples
There are not many examples of what Karl and Fred thought that a Communist society would look like. Later, in rejecting the ‘idealism’ of others they would have been exposed to double standards in doing so. Although Engels came pretty close to a prescription in Ante Duhring in part III, socialism I think.
Perhaps their early ideas were best revealed in Fred’s “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence” from 1844. There is an interesting letter as a preamble to this below;
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_10_01.htm#n12
And the thing itself;
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/10/15.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/soc
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/08/nhs-instruments-child-labour
Now it's my impression that small scale workshops in an anarchist society could do a lot better than this.....
Oh Jenni you were so sure of yourself:
So, bye again everyone. I'm going now I may be some time.
Ariege
Ariege
Nope, Its precisely because they are small scale workshops that this shit happens. Its not the 19th century so in most states employment laws exist that prevent large factories from employing children and that give workers some paper thin protection in terms of wages, hours and conditions. Hence these large factories often outsource the shittier work to small workshops where conditions are obviously going to be a lot worse since they;ll be located not in major cities but in backwards rural shitholes where class relations still have semi-feudal elements and where unemployment and poverty are higher. Workshops are less mechanised and the only way they can keep up in terms of volume of production is by hyper exploitation of the workforce, hence they employ children and refugees and anyone else who will work for a pittance and make them work absurdy long hours in unsafe conditions.
Also those workshops make scissors and scalpels and seem to be small sub-contractors making the most basic equipment. Not exactly the best example of an industry making modern hi tech equipment on an industrial scale is it afterall I somewhat doubt we're talking monomolecular surgical scalpels here.
Ariege wrote: Oh Jenni you
Ariege
she was talking specifically about hypodermic needles, the article you linked is not.
Ariege
with 'refutations' like that, tis no wonder.
An anarchist society would,
An anarchist society would, by it's very nature, change and adapt to new situations, advances in technology, production advances etc. Those who say the scale of production units would be downsized have been watching too much of the Good Life.
The way to ensure high quality production with mininum human effort and a low level of error is to do it on a large and repeatable scale. Where the major change will occur is in how WHAT we produce is determined. Hopefully gone will be the culture of producing disposable crap which is designed to have a short lifespan in order to keep people coming back to buy more.
We will hopefully produce what individuals in a society need to have a fullfilling and rewarding life. This means increased use of technology to solve the real problems that people face rather than a dumbing down of technology. Pushing human achievement beyond what capitalism is capable of, so that all our labour and effort go towards positive and socially beneficial projects rather than towards serving the needs of a few.
Oh and Derry City FC will win the UEFA Champions League under the management of a players and supporters council.
anarcho_and_peace
anarcho_and_peace
Isn't majority rule without consensus an utilitarian hell? But more importantly, will we still have ipods in an anarchist society?
Vlad336 wrote: But more
Vlad336
Yes.
I'm personally liking the idea of the adhocracy.
Vlad 336 wrote: But more
Vlad 336
yeah, but without the built-in obsolescence, which would disappear along with every other distortion of use by the need to circulate commodities.
Joseph K. wrote: Ariege
Joseph K.
Actually I did imply that I meant all sterile equipment, so I stand partially corrected. However, since these aren't sterile conditions, I assume they are shipped off to somewhere else to be sterilized, then off to somewhere else to be packaged, depending on where these parts of the production process are the most profitable. Much in the same way that t-shirts are made, dyed and printed upon in different places around the planet. So, whilst you might be right that these are indeed surgical instruments being made in small workshops, they are hardly favourable conditions to be drawn upon for an idea of how things would work under communism, and I still maintain that the large-ish factory model is more likely to
I
and as such should be more attractive to communists than maintaining small scale, spread out workshop based production that in a society run according to need and not profit would simply make the process inefficient.
The factory system I suspect
The factory system
I suspect that there is a bit of mythology talked about the evils of the big factory system. Even though it is never made totally clear by the opponents what constitutes a big factory and what is the ideal size, composition or function of a small workshop.
I have worked in the past in what might be regarded as a large factory that employed about 2000 people. Although it may not have been as big or typical enough to be a big factory. It was a food factory that was broken down into discrete units or workshops based on product type. So much so that the workers in one area or workshop might as well as worked on the other side of the planet as far as the workers in another section was concerned.
In fact you wouldn’t have known the others were there if you didn’t share the same canteen and all walked out of the same gate at the end of a shift. I was a bit unusual as I worked in the ‘tea house’ that made loose tea and Typhoo tea bags and in one of the biscuit ‘factories’ that made chocolate chip cookies and Cadbury’s chocolate fingers.
I mention that as a personal seminal example as to what happens to ‘greed’ in a world of abundance. The factory owners and managers understood ‘greed’, by experience probably, well enough to allow the workers to consume as much of the product as they desired whilst they were there.
Smuggling stuff out was a different matter of course.
By the way it takes on average about four weeks to get sick of chocolate biscuits when they are free and about 15 years to recover your appetite for them once you have to start pay for them.
Eventually I went down on my knees and begged to be transferred as the smell of chocolate was beginning to make me wretch.
I was sent to the ‘tea house’, and at first to the ‘blending room’ which was a different world. There was about 50 people who worked in the blending room per shift producing a product that was passed on to the packing house.
There was a sense of community or a ‘small’ workshop kind of thing even if the stuff was only being passed onto ‘another’ place next door. Again, I then moved into the packing house were there was another ‘community’ and in fact some people who had worked there for years had no idea what went on in the blending house and had never even bothered to go into it.
I work in a smaller place now but that is still broken down into sections, teams or communities. I think that most big factories are just discrete and to some extent ‘autonomous’ albeit integrated workshops located in one geographical place.
In fact I think technology is driving things more and more in that direction.
I have never found the big factory system boring and in itself oppressive unless of course you are locked into a small part of it.
Hello everyone, my Name's Ken
Hello everyone, my Name's Ken and i hope to provide some of thetheoretical answers you are seeking, I see that the usual overthinking of the moneyless society is happening on this thread, and would encourage you all to open your minds to what should be a very simple evolution.
We currently have technologies, and skills to produce everything our hearts desire. What we don't have is the universal will to be able to produce these products and services in large enough quantities to enable every single person on the planet to benefit from them.
We all like to think of ourselves and our tastes as unique, to ourselves. This is inaccurate. There are a range of goods and services we all need in order to survive and be comfortable and safe on this planet. We all need shelter, food, drinks, healthcare, transport and access to social and communal activitities and facilities. We all need clothing.
Let's concentrate on the basics. What level of quality should we aim for without the constraints of money? Simple answer - the best we can produce for ourselves at that time. Why would we knowingly produce substandard, or shoddy goods when there is no extra profit in it?
So with the above in mind, our immediate mission would be to provide all these services, from wherever we have the resources to produce them. The evolution would be in producing these goods and services better, faster and more regularly.
Once this evolution begins, the world and all its resources will become the shared responsibility of all mankind to care for and use. There should be no mechanism in existence for 'trading' goods or skills. This is an all for one and one for all deal. If we can learn the simple lesson that we own nothing, but have access to everything, then we can progress at warp speed.
I have many more answers to what ails us. We really have to try to stop overthinking and overarguing these problems, and just get on with getting this thing started and overcoming obstacles as they arise. We have the technology and common sense to overcome anything in a moneyless society.
What about making work FUN? What about using the agencies and skills already in place to facilitate and organise our future, rather than committees, who will almost certainly not have the skills and knowledge required to make the very BEST decisions. Obviously local knowledge and conditions will be taken into consideration when the decisions are taken to build or plant in a specific area. But the actual decisions should be made by the acknowledged experts in whatever field is required for that particular project.
Does this sound like common sense? because that is what this whole area of discussion should be based on. Not pre-formed, half baked ideas which have already failed. This is a NEW start for us. All we have to do is grasp the humanity of it and do whatever we need to do to, to make it happen.
Respect to all
Ken
To be honest, it's impossible
To be honest, it's impossible to see the future from the present. You can project images which may be accurate but to be honest in all those films such as Back to the Future and Blade Runner I see no flying cars and no prospects of them around for a while, do you?
This site is pretty intersting regarding the topic.
http://dbzer0.com/blog/what-would-an-anarchist-society-look-like
Whew, old thread... I have a
Whew, old thread...
I have a bit of a problem with the use of the word "work".
If "working hours" and necessary labor intensity decrease with the progress of automation and thus people have more time for other stuff outside "work", wouldn't the distinction between "worker" and "non-worker" in relation to labor input be relatively marginal compared to that under capitalism?
I think it will be, if we strive for this futurist ideal, making it a non-issue whether some people here and there decide not to "work".
But first and foremost, I am a bit confused about what constitutes "work" in the vocabulary of those that used it here. Is it purely a productive activity or is it defined by being "for the general benefit"?
My point is that if we abolish Value, it will become difficult to differentiate what "work" actually is, making the term redundant in my opinion.
"Non-Workers" (for a lack of a better term, let's say "leeches") would only become a problem if the needs of the people are not met or if some people feel exploited, but then again, wouldn't we suppose that after The Revolution we'd have people you can actually reason with instead of having to force them to do stuff? And if we suppose an abolition of the division of labor, wouldn't "work" therefore be a natural, organic state of being, making the distinction between "work" and "non-work" even more difficult?
Wondering what to do with the "non-worker" is making assumptions about a future we don't even know. The whole question is, to me, saturated with capitalist modes of thinking.
(I'm new here, go easy on me)
Oh, I just realised this
Oh, I just realised this thread was last commented on in 2009.. So I guess I resurrected it!
My thoughts are what would a civilisation with no government look like? How would it function? etc. Would there still be a military? Plus, will money itself be abolished. I guess this is all a bit speculative as we base our vision upon the present combined with personal ideals.
orthodoxyproxy wrote: My
orthodoxyproxy
Well... that depends on what kind of society you have in mind when you talk of "civ but no government".
Under 'anarcho-capitalism', no government, but still military (defense agencies), money, wage slavery, and all that jazz we have now. In a way, each corporation would be its own state though. The AC's definition of freedom simply cannot stand up under scrutiny, that's why they're largely disregarded.
Since we're on a communist board, no to all. No money, no wage labor, no military. Unless you count loose militias, which is in no way the same as an institutionalized third-party military power like defense agencies under 'anarcho-capitalism'.
If we go by Morton Fried's definition of civilization as a system "with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments", we'll effectively have abolished that as well in a communist society.
Anarchist societies would
Anarchist societies would look like a bunch of communes which each have their unique ways of functioning and self governing. In a sense, I think we already have this sort of configuration, but its actual unfolding is constipated by the bourgeois tyranny over production, and whatever. Because the commune is at root merely a community, it is just that communities in our bourgeois civilization are... tyrannized, subdued to an alienating power... they are proletarian. But clearly anarchist communes, which are microscopic societies, can exist under the bourgeois order, and they can develop their own power set against state power... and, if they want, they can buy guns, and form a militia. Ha ha ha! Or they can study the mysteries of the universe and fight power with the greater power of love... it all depends on one's taste
Are you related to the user
Are you related to the user 'brown spaghetti'? :)
I don't think so. We have quite a ways to go.
I guess this is somewhat true in rural areas where most people know each other well (at least that is my limited first-hand experience), though that does not hold true in urban or metropolitan areas, where people have little in common and are just faceless strangers to one another.
Not that this is necessary for a commune to function per se I think, but society is too atomized right now for it to work. That in itself may be the "bourgeois tyranny", but it has more to do with the philosophy of 'survival of the fittest' instead of mutual aid that is underlying in our society.
Now, on the possible existence of communes 'develop[ing] their own power set', that is indeed true but some may see this as essentially futile because it lacks strength.
Yes preceisely the bourgeois
Yes preceisely the bourgeois philosophy which upholds self-centered atomization, justifies it, can only be widely perpetuated insofar as the ruling class has the power which keeps society subjected to it. Because once the gigantic alienating and dehumanizing power begins to break down, people will have a shroud lifted from them and be able to begin to look at each other as real live....human beings...
Idk this might sound kinda
Idk this might sound kinda dumb but i thought the answer to this question was obvious. Theres a broad agency organizing production labor for needs. Dwellings, water, waste, food, and power, etc. There are regular 'assignments' of work in these sectors for every citizen. Ofcourse, you dont have to do it, but both the social pressure and said labor being the backbone of our society, it will be an obvious choice. Ofcourse there will be those actively enrolling in those sectors, so said assignments dont need to be constant. Other than that, what exactly need be debated? Shoes? Sure. Theres a fuckton thats gotta change before this stuff is even possible or probable.
Just FYI Thunaraz, you're
Just FYI Thunaraz, you're responding to a thread that ended almost 7 years ago. Many of the posters from this thread do not come here anymore.
Well this is libcom.org so
Well this is libcom.org so lets go with the anarcho-communist society, and we'll ignore post-civ for now
Resources would be distributed according to need, and green technology would likely be at the forefront. Everyone in society would have a house with solar windows and solar panels on their roof. The existence of smoke stalks would be eliminated. There would be wind turbines and tidal energy created everywhere. Noone would "own" a forest, and so the forests would thrive like they havent in a very long time. Cutting down trees would not happen nearly as often as it does now, as money would be eliminated. You would see people on the streets engaging in activities they find fun and self-fulfilling, rather than being forced to engage in work. Architecture would be designed to best combat the regions local natural disasters, such as buildings being built in Florida to repel heavy winds. There would be no money, and instead people would engage in mutual aid and gift giving. Social classes would not exist, everyone would be on an equal level and everyone treated like a human, rather than a cog in a machine. Anything that effects a person would be voted on by the people effected by it. For instance if a random city were to be hit by a category 5 hurricane, the people effected would decide if they should rebuild, or just move away from the region. Everything would be based on direct democracy, rather than representative. There would be no borders, meaning people would be able to freely and voluntarily move where they please, meaning you'd likely see people of all shapes, sizes, colors, cultures, sexes, genders, etc all around you, moreso than we see today. If a man from africa were to want to immigrate to where the former nation of china was previously, he would be free to do so without restriction.
Now if we're in a post-civ world, things would look a bit different. We wouldnt have many "workshops" or "factories", instead we would engage in scavenging the ruins of our old society for to recycle materials, and putting them to better use. Using old broken pieces of glass to make a cooker, finding some old thrown about leather to sew a new jacket for a friend, etc. etc.
TL;DR an anarcho-communist / libertarian communist society would be very very satisfying to everyone, where we would all feel welcome, and truly, TRULY free
Khawaga wrote: Just FYI
Khawaga
I'm a bit scatterbrained, i'm afraid