What if a person creates a new type of clothing that has high demand because it’s better than what exists before?
What if that person starts getting interest from other people who want the clothes and they try to trade currency (I’m not sure if in your communist system this exists, so consider other items people have or something) and then transactions start to happen?
What if the person gets so busy, he gets another person to help him with the trades in exchange for a fixed amount?
In which of these steps does it turn from “no one cares what you do with your own labor” to “give us your business or else”?
This simply wouldn’t happen because an anarchist society wouldn’t recognize intellectual property and so it would be trivial to just… make more of this kind of clothing. And no, there is no currency, and barter would be pointless as access to goods is common anyways.
This whole point to me signals a deeper (but common) misunderstanding as to what the point of it all is, though; there would be no incentive or reason for someone to act this way in any kind of postcapitalist society, because the assumptions you are making that even make this situation possible are false.
Labour is not a repulsive act that people have to be paid to do; for virtually any “job”, even the most repulsive, there are some people who are truly passionate about it. But in a society where doing said work is demanded under threat of starvation, any appeal it may have had is soured by the reality of this situation and it shifts from a fulfilling and desirable action to a repulsive one.
As an extra point that not all anarchists will agree with, increases in productivity thanks to automation and technological progress (often spearheaded not by corporate projects under NDA but by the open-source community and individual hackers, only to be commercialized by corporations) mean that the real quantity of work that needs to be performed to uphold humanity at a good standard of living is drastically less than the amount currently being performed. Capitalism is inefficient, both in that it doesn’t allocate resources where they’re productive (accumulation of capital) and because of work duplication and artificial barriers (tech and engineering firms keeping code/designs private or patented, industry keeping trade secrets, etc.)
tl;dr that scenario is impossible.
The thing is, there are jobs that need to be done but no one wants and there are jobs everyone wants but only few are needed/have the ability to do it.
Do you really believe that in a state where everything you need is provided enough people will be “passionate” about sewer maintenance?
The thought of enough people will be passionate about every job in order to fill the required number of positions in those jobs, when everything is provided whether they work or not, is simply a delusion.
People will volunteer to do the job because it is something they (and everyone) needs done. People won’t let their entire community collapse because people “didn’t want to do it”. But these unsavory jobs would theoretically also spark innovation to make the jobs more bearable and probably even unneeded. Better working conditions and more free time leaves time for people to do things like invent and think.
Goods are not the only form of incentive. The jobs that nobody wants to do would have more people doing them for less time. For example you can be a graphic designer for 1 year or work the sewer for 1 month.
We will do it because we benefit ourselves from having this infrastructure. Certainly the people who first conceived of these systems were passionate about sewer maintenance, no?
The difference is we will not need to coerce people into working 8 or 12 hour shifts, so we would also have more time to devote to other interests and become more well-rounded individuals than we are under capitalism. We see things like sewer maintenance as undesirable drudgery because of how that work manifests under our current system.
Yes I do. I have a job many consider repulsive, yet I’m very passionate about your mom.
Not everyone has to be passionate about it. You could devise a sort of lottery system for jobs that can’t be automated and suck, where everyone will have to do that job for a set amount of time. People do these jobs for 40 hours a week now because they know it’s necessary for their own survival, so I personally don’t feel like it’s far-fetched to think that people would okay with doing a certain job for way less time a week, knowing that in a few weeks or however long they’ll never have to do it anymore because their name is now gone from the lottery pool, because they know it’s necessary for the survival of society (and thus also themselves).
I’m not sure the problem is so trivial.
Long before the existence of IP, people who developed something new would keep their manufacturing process secret in order to prevent competition. Even today, sometimes they still do (in fact, the purpose of patents is to discourage trade secrets).
Now suppose someone invents a new medicine, or a new alloy, or a new machine, or a new algorithm, and refuses to tell anyone how it was made or how it works.
And suppose reverse engineering isn’t feasible. Maybe it’s too much work considering the value of the product (nobody is interested in reverse engineering your particular favorite shampoo). Or maybe the machine uses sufficiently strong encryption to prevent its reproduction. Or maybe there is some other obstacle.
Again, before modern capitalism these problems were the norm. If you wanted a very particular product, you often had no choice but to find a very particular provider.
As before, at what point does paying someone to help make such a product become exploitation?
You’re still missing a chore part of the point. In most/all of the world today and in history, when you make something new, your reward is dependent on stopping other people making or selling the same thing without paying you. It therefore makes sense to keep things secret. People don’t even always do that, though - if you look at GitHub or Thingiverse, you’ll see loads of people giving the right to use their intellectual property away for free. Reasons for that vary, but some are similar to how people would theoretically think under anarcho-communism. Some examples include:
- you’re annoyed that the previous best way to do something is crap, so you make a new one. The more people copying your design, the less the annoying old one gets used, and the less annoyed you are.
- working on interesting projects is interesting in and of itself and finishing annoying ones is satisfying, so when you don’t need a particular reward beyond that, there’s no reason not to share.
- you think your cool new thing will be even cooler if other people collaborate with you, and that’s easier if everyone shares their improvements.
As for things that aren’t generating intellectual property, and just involve doing labour, the idea is that there’ll be enough people upset by something not getting done that they’ll do it proactively. E.g. some people will want to take a look at the sewers once a week to check for blockages because they’re worried their drains might overflow of they don’t. It’s not too different to people volunteering to clean up community spaces today, except people wouldn’t have to do it on topa of a day job. If that gets too annoying, people will invent new tools to make it easier or totally automate it, whereas they’d have instead been inventing whatever their manager thought would please investors under the current system.
A cultural shift where nearly everyone agreed this was a good way to do things would be necessary, but it’s not like they’re aren’t examples of the same ideas working in the real world.
What if the person gets so busy, he gets another person to help him with the trades in exchange for a fixed amount?
If a person A, who already started a business, hires someone (Person B)to work for a fixed amount, than it is has to be only a share of what that person contributes. Otherwise, if the fixed amount is equal to contributing value of the person B, Person A would not gain anything and would not hire him in the first place. Ergo, from the value the worker, Person B, creates, Person A will take some funds for the development and maintenance of the production (material, rent, taxes etc.), and will keep a portion for himself. At that point, that is exploitation, because the Person B gets only a fraction of what he had earned due to the Person A.
Communists are a huge and diverse ideological group, therefore there are at least two different camps to this. Either you nationalize everything and run the economy from the planned position, therefore (through proxy), turning all companies into public property, or the other (my) camp, in which every worker who works at a business is, after a trial time, given the exactly same share as all other workers and has voting right in how the company is managed. Part of his pay still go for the maintenance and growth, but most goes to him as the owner of his own labor.
You missed the third camp. Anarcho-communists would hate both of these solutions.
Hate is a strong word. Also, I am very close to the anarchist line and have written down basicly exacly what happened in Rojava, Catalonia and other anarchist project. What do you think I got wrong?
