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RE: So I encountered an Anarcho-Communist and this is my discussion/debate invitation...

in #anarchy8 years ago (edited)

I agree with you in the fact that you can have anarchocommunism under a anarchocapitalist system but not the other way around. But I wouldn't condense the interaction people have purely on contractual agreements. A contract translates to a system that will need to condense and codify. Life is not a bureaucracy. Life is chaotic and filled with relationships.

The angle I see it, especially under this platform is that property is not a thing, less so is intellectual property. In this two cases they are what build the social relationship amongst people. In this case what I am trying to argue is that the mode we are living under is not really capitalist at all--rather it is a gift exchange economy. The stuff I write and reply to are freely given, even if I do not make physical or crypto cash. What I see is the potentiality of making something and been rewarded in a different way: more views, more followers, etc.

(Anarcho-communism doesn't really need an apparatus, and I don't think it ever intended so. If it did what's the point of calling it anarchic? There can be some structure and order, it just has to come from the bottom up. If you cant find an order for people to mutually cooperate then it's not really anarchist society it's just chaos.)

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I'm not sure you could have anarcho-communism inside an anarcho-capitalist system.

Say some of the individuals in an anarcho-capitalst society decided to treat all their private property as public means of production and form an anarcho-communist group.
On the surface, it would seem that from the perspective of the capitalists and the free market, the communists could be considered a single entity. However, if you look at it from the communists perspective, they would be subject to control and limitations from the surrounding capitalist environment. Just to present a few issues:
They would have to uphold contracts with external actors. That means, they would have to collectively agree upon the contents of these contracts. They would need to implement some process to choose how their collective interests are represented towards these external actors.
They would be subject to the effects of the free market. As they would not control all available resources, they would have to import and export certain things. For example, if their collective territory did not contain any drinking water, their very existence would be dependent on the capitalist market.

So while I'm sure it would be possible to implement some of the anarcho-communist principles in a closed group within an anarcho-capitalist system, a lot of them would have to be significantly rethought to fit the environment, most likely to the point where it couldn't even be labeled anarcho-communism anymore.
But then again, this would be possible the other way around as well: you could form a group in an anarcho-communist system where members of the group respect each others private property, sign contracts, exchange goods through a free market and as a group (from their perspective, uphold the contract to) collectively take what they need and produce to their abilities. It's probably more obvious to you how this would be a mutilation of the inner group's principles.