Anarchy 101: Archy, Property and the Possibility of An-archic Property

From Libertarian Labyrinth  by Shawn P. Wilbur

This is the first in a series of documents addressing the various questions surrounding the notion of property.

One key difficulty in providing a general account of basic anarchist theory is that, once a few basics have been established, it’s hard not to find yourself talking — or trying to talk — about everything all at once. Anarchists often get around this difficulty by relying instead on narrower accounts, where the general programs of particular anarchist tendencies take the place of a broad and general theory of anarchism as such.

An associated difficulty is that even the most inclusive general theory is likely to look like a program, particularly as it is being constructed. As we lack much really general theory, even the most successful attempts at inclusion or synthesis are likely to appear unorthodox in expression from just about every existing anarchist viewpoint. Historically, we have treated approaches like anarchism with adjectives and anarchist synthesis, which at least attempt to operate outside the sphere of rival anarchist tendencies, as if they were nothing but factions.

The early entries in this series have focused on some of the fundamental elements of archic order: authority, hierarchy, the category of crime and the polity-form as an organizational norm. It is necessary, since an-archy is a privative concept, defined by what it will do without, to begin with these elements that we can completely dispense with — and must completely dispense with, if we are to achieve anything like anarchy in social relations. And the suggestion in these early texts is that we can indeed declare ourselves “against all authority,” that we can expect to organize social relations without any recourse to social hierarchy, that we can dispense with legal order and the political organization of society.

To say that we can do without these elements — except as we need them for purposes of critique — is not, of course, to claim that anarchists have always chosen to draw such sharp lines around the concepts that they chose to build with — or even that we should in all circumstances. Historically, there have been occasions where rhetorical constructions like “the authority of the bootmaker” and appeals to “self-government” have provided openings to thinking about anarchy in contexts where those archic fundamentals have been naturalized. But it seems hard to deny that these provocations can themselves become normalized, losing their rhetorical power in the process — to the point where perhaps we forget to treat the image of Bakunin bowing to a cobbler as the provocation that it almost certainly was originally. So sometimes we have to at least take the time to make our approach clear and explicit.

In trying to put together a set of 21st-century documents worthy of the “Anarchy 101” label, the approach has been to try to find points of agreement between accepted dictionary definitions — using the Oxford English Dictionary (online edition) as a key reference in English — and the more specialized usages we find in the literature of anarchism. Part of the project is to suggest the extent to which anarchist usage has often been surprisingly orthodox. So when, for example, anarchists claim to be “against all authority,” it is not because they have “redefined the terms,” as is sometimes claimed, but perhaps instead because they have resisted the sort of informal redefinition that occurs within societies where “authority” is taken for granted.

Of course, not every examination will lead to such tidy results, as we will see when we turn our attention to the concept of property. At first glance, I suppose that property looks very much like archy. Both are persistent targets of anarchist critique. Both concepts are surrounded by vocabularies and patterns of usage that tend to naturalize certain social relations that anarchists are inclined to treat as optional and to be dispensed with in the kinds of societies to which we aspire.

There are, however, some important differences between the two concepts. 

The notion of archy, although implied by much anarchic critique, has only been specifically theorized occasionally in the anarchist literature. Perhaps this is not surprising, given the complexities of even its most basic sense, which, as Stephen Pearl Andrews put it, “curiously combines, in a subtle unity of meaning, the idea of origin or beginning, and hence of elementary principle, with that of government or rule.”

For the moment, let’s note this problem of “curious combination” and look at the concept of property.

When we give property its full range — when we explore its various senses and its connections to propriety, propreté, the various senses of the proper, etc. — we find ourselves on similar, or perhaps adjacent ground. According to the OED, a property is, among other things, “a distinctive, essential, or special quality; a peculiarity” or, in the context of Aristotelian philosophy, “a characteristic which is peculiar to a particular kind of thing, but is not part of its essence or definition.” Property, in the sense of proper-ness, as a characteristic of things, refers to a “quality of being proper or appropriate; fitness, fittingness, suitability” — and this is particularly so as we move toward the realm of possessions or belongings, where it is a characteristic of “things,” “appurtenances” and “adjuncts” in relation to persons.

Both archy and property are then broadly characteristic — in that they “serve to identify or to indicate the essential quality or nature of a person or thing” — but, if we were to make a distinction and clarification, in the specific context of the discussions that anarchists are accustomed to having about property, perhaps we would want to say that claims about archy appeal to what is presumably essential in a given person or thing, while property refers instead to qualities that are at least more incidental.

When I claim that the two concepts are rather different in character, what I want to suggest is that, in the context of any given person, thing or system of order, every incidental quality can be considered property or a property of the thing in question, while with regard to what I will very cautiously designate the “essence” of the thing, to speak of archy is already to make a claim about the nature of its essence, perhaps of the nature of essence in some more universal sense.

We are familiar, of course, with a range of kinds of property. Let’s acknowledge that in anarchist theory we are particularly concerned with property as it pertains to persons — and then that, among the possible properties of persons, we are particularly concerned with their possessions. Then let’s underline the fact that, in the context of the traditional entanglement that we have noted between the critiques of archy and property, the analyses have tended to focus even more narrowly on real or immovable property, land (or natural resources more generally) and other types of possessions likely to serve as capital within existing economic systems. But we also have to acknowledge that there are forms of property — “personal property,” for example — that are widely accepted as consistent with anarchy. And then it is necessary to note that, when it is a question of properties or of property in its purely descriptive senses, anarchist theory simply doesn’t have much to say.

Both concepts seem to include some degree of “combination,” but perhaps in one case we have mistaken a category for one of its elements, while in the other we have mistaken an element for the whole category. Or something like that…

As we have inherited the notion of archy (arche), it seems to refer to first principles, origins, essential qualities, but also to connect those notions to those of command, rule, etc. Archy is always to some extend hierarchy, which anarchists reject in favor of an-archy, defined primarily in terms of the absence of rulership — although figures like Proudhon have extended their critique to include all forms of absolutism. So, is an-archy then an absence of first principles, of origins, of essence, etc.? Let’s allow that to remain a bit of an open question and simply say that the existence anarchy and its an-archic alternatives would suggest some category embracing both, which is obscured by that “curious combination” of essence and authority in a single concept. We don’t need to come to an agreement about first principles and essences in order to disconnect that metaphysical stuff from the question of authority. Once that disconnection is accomplished, the choice between archic and anarchic accounts of what we’ll generally call the essential can be addressed — and the strategy of simply abandoning the language of authority, hierarchy, etc., when attempting to talk about anarchic relations, seems entirely viable.

The questions regarding property require, however, a slightly different sort of clarification. If we understand anarchy as consistently non-governmental, a-legal, etc., then we have a first reason to believe that property rights are going to be hard to formulate and defend in an anarchist analysis. We can then add the specific anarchist critiques — starting with works like Proudhon’s What is Property? — that seem to have struck down many of the existing rationales for recognizing the appropriation of exclusive individual property. If we assume a rather complete success for these critiques, we are still left to account for all of the senses of property that are not legal, governmental, rights-based, etc. — and those senses seem destined to come into play when we try to find means outside the scope of propertarianism to deal with the distribution, use, conservation, etc. of resources.

This sets up a distinction between archic property and various potential forms of an-archic property, by means of which we could address the various incidental qualities of persons, things, etc. in parallel with the distinction we’ve made regarding their essential qualities. In both cases, it is a question of expanding the scope of our analysis beyond the limits imposed by a naturalization of archic norms and institutions, while, at the same time, we explicitly identify those archic elements as options in series or assortments that also include an-archic alternatives. We close off the obviously paradoxical possibility of an-archic archies, in order to look for other ways to talk about the essential, and open up the possibility of an-archic forms of property, outside the realm of government, authority, hierarchy, rights, etc.

And maybe that’s enough for this first installment of the series on property. There is, of course, much more that needs to be addressed.



Anarchy 101: General Thoughts on Appropriation

This is the second in a series of documents addressing the various questions surrounding the notion of property.

Archic property is theft. — Let’s start with a very minor revision of Proudhon’s infamous judgment, clarifying that, having started to address property in its full range of meanings, we can specify a particular variety of property that is the natural object of anarchistic critique. We can then — after a few other preliminaries — review Proudhon’s arguments in What is Property? and incorporate the observations made in the post on “Archy, Property and the Possibility of An-archic Property” into critiques originally made on slightly different terms.

There are no particular problems created by this adjustment in terms. Proudhon wrestled with a number of different approaches to the rhetoric of property, wanting at first to “call different things by different names,” so as to avoid confusion. This led to the distinction between property and possession in What is Property? — although, even there, Proudhon struggled to be consistent, before finally abandoning the notion of possession in later works. Even in the “Preface” to the later editions of the work, where Proudhon defined property as “the sum of the abuses” [of property], he had begun to move toward the strategy of his later years, made explicit in 1853:

I will retain, with the common folk, these three words: religion, government, property, for reasons of which I am not the master, which partake of the general theory of Progress, and for that reason seem to me decisive: first, it is not my place to create new words for new things and I am forced to speak the common language; second, there is no progress without tradition, and the new order having for its immediate antecedents religion, government and property, it is convenient, in order to guarantee that very evolution, to preserve for the new institutions their patronymic names, in the phases of civilization, because there are never well-defined lines, and to attempt to accomplish the revolution at a leap would be beyond our means.

(See “New Things and Old Words in Proudhon’s Late Works” for a more extended discussion of the shift.)

In the same period, he was coming to think of most concepts as in some important sense indefinable. Their specification would require some organization of the varying senses into series or their incorporation into some explanatory narrative.

To incorporate the broad, inclusive sense of property proposed in the first installment of this particular series, nothing is necessary except to anticipate a shift in approach that was probably already underway in Proudhon’s thought. But we can arguably also make the adjustment by examining what is strongest in “classical” accounts of property rights — the archic property that is the most obvious object of anarchistic critique.

The most robust account of exclusive individual property and the most unobjectionable rationale for rights protecting individual appropriation is perhaps found in John Locke’s Second Treatise, where he provides the familiar account of “labor-mixing” as the method of just appropriation. It’s one of those texts that can be surprising to read, particularly if you are only familiar with nth-hand accounts from “Lockeans” more concerned with the defense of the ideology of propertarianism than with the philosophical nuances. The accounts starts with “God, who hath given the World to Men in common,” and then tries to work out a political system of individual property consistent with those beginnings. A key move comes in paragraph 27:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

Here is self-ownership in one of its simplest forms, presented as the fundamental premise that makes the ownership of external property not just possible, but a fairly obvious extension of the premise. There are, however, only a couple of ways to make things work. Either “property in one’s person” is the product of divine intention, a right granted by God, or else it is a logical axiom, with some sort of self-evident character. I’m not sure that Locke really chooses between those options or that his account of labor-mixing always incorporates the best available choices. We know that, in the end, he moved beyond this account to one friendlier to capitalistic relations. But there are elements of this first account that seem to me quite elegant — particularly when given a free and generous reading.

Let us say — no doubt both freely and generously — that the “property in one’s person” that forms the first and most important premise here is not ultimately a feature of some god’s intention, a bit of divine legislation, but is simply property in the most general sense of the term. When we begin to speak of persons, we are led to distinguish between the self and the non-self, then, because the self seems dependent on a continuing interaction with the non-self, to distinguish what is proper (in a variety of senses) to a given person, to respond to the possibility of conflict over resources with theories of just appropriation, etc. — a sequence that gradually takes us from a quality assumed “by definition” through various descriptive stages to questions of ethics, if not, for anarchists, to the potential questions regarding rights or law.

It is proper to the self to mix with the non-self — and the person is, at any given moment, the result of that ongoing process. When we find ourselves in circumstances that call for us to note, respect, challenge, etc. the limits of a given self, then we are in the realm of some kind of property, which need not become a matter of rights or law, but does probably commit us to some kind of broadly ethical concerns. That’s the framework for thinking about an-archic property.

(I have written about this topic on a number of occasions in the past. “Practicing the Encounter: Appropriation (and Ecology)” addresses some of this is just a bit more depth.)

Anarchists will, of course, be particularly interested in how to pursue this sort of analysis without recourse to archic, legal, governmental applications. In this respect, Locke’s account is useful to the degree that it establishes the general nature of an ethic of respect for property based in mutual respect for persons. Respect for other persons presumably entails respect for their ongoing mixing with the world around them. We can anticipate conflicts over the potential appropriation of particular scarce resources, resources situated in particular locations and combinations, etc. It is hard to imagine an ethic that would always steer us around difficult, perhaps impossible sorts of conflict, negotiation, compromise, etc. We can easily imagine solving some of these problems through the recognition of joint property, limited property, etc. But if we are going to try to work through all of these questions without recourse to legal and governmental means, it would be useful to have some guidelines for unilateral appropriation which, if not necessarily self-evident, would at least be hard to object to.

Locke gives us at least a interesting start in that direction. Here are the passages in which he introduces what we now call the main “proviso” in his theory:

32. But the chief matter of Property being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest: I think it is plain, that Property in that too is acquired as the former. As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. Nor will it invalidate his right to say, Every body else has an equal Title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the Consent of all his Fellow-Commoners, all Mankind. God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour, and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another had no Title to, nor could without injury take from him.

33. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his inclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No Body could think himself injur’d by the drinking of another Man, though he took a good Draught, who had a whole River of the same Water left him to quench his thirst. And the Case of Land and Water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

This is both delightfully clever and a bit underwhelming when we unpack it. Appropriation is unobjectionable when there is enough to go around. That’s the proviso that conditions the more famous proviso: “where there is enough for both,” meaning where there is enough for all. So perhaps we have a path by which we can move from the “by definition” to a practical ethic — and on to “rights,” if that was our sort of thing, since they too would be as unobjectionable as such things can be — or maybe there is no path at all, because there isn’t enough to go around.

Framed in those terms, it’s hard not to be struck by the fact that the defenders of property are likely to be the ones who deny that there is enough for all, while the critics of property would tend to take the opposite position. Modern propertarians often insist on the necessity of exclusive individual property precisely because of general conditions of scarcity that make leaving “enough, and as good” an impossible condition of appropriation. Even self-proclaimed “Lockeans” seldom embrace the conditions established by that proviso, which would seem to be the element that holds the theory of labor-mixing appropriation together.

Part of the problem is undoubtedly that this particular account is a product of its time. The question of “enough to go around” was probably easier to discuss in the 16th century, when “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of” involved simpler sorts of calculation. As the capacities of human labor have been multiplied by social and technological factors, the sort of subsistence model presented by Locke — an “occupancy and use” where the labor available to till, plant, improve, cultivate, etc. is expected to produce fruits suitable for more-or-less individual use — necessarily has to give way to models that can account for very different sorts of “individual” capacities. It is in the context of those amplified capacities that the question of “enough to go around” becomes not just a difficult question to answer, but perhaps a difficult question to even really formulate.

We’ve moved from a context in which the combined capacities of every individual person, each pursuing something like a subsistence through the cultivation of the land, are presumably insufficient to appropriate all of the land available to one in which, thanks to various kinds of amplification of what we are still likely to consider “individual” capacities, that is not so obviously the case. As a result, while we can take from Locke a general sense of what it would look like for appropriation to be unobjectionable, his model may not be practicable for us as modern individuals — at least without some significant alterations in the social context. 

Maybe we can draw a few more preliminary conclusions and then leave the return to What is Property? for the next installment.

When we look at what is perhaps the most compelling traditional argument for exclusive individual property, we find that the notion of property that it begins with seems to be broad and not necessarily archic in its assumptions or consequences. It is also fundamentally based in some kind of equity in possession, limited by a view of the world that assumes at least a rough balance between equitable possession and what seems to be a similarly equitable consumption, and ultimately seems to rest on the assumption that there is indeed “enough to go around.” Unfortunately, many of its most attractive elements seem based on material and social relations that are not the ones we experience in our own societies.

Given this last problem, it would certainly be fair to ask why we should spend so much time examining Locke’s account of appropriation. One key reason is that, frankly, anarchists have often given a lot less attention to questions of initial appropriation than they have to those relating to the use and abandonment of property. So, for example, the distinction between personal and private property often depends on the uses made of already appropriated materials, our objections to property in land revolve around absentee ownership, and so on… This is significantly not the case in What is Property? — where the first three chapters involve a systematic critique of most of the existing theories of just appropriation. 

Looking forward to the next installment of this series, we’ll try to work fairly quickly through that critique, with an eye to any openings that might still remain to an an-archic ethics of individual appropriation. That, together with some discussion of the larger sense of property in an ecological context, ought to start to get us back onto more practical terrain.

 

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/22/2025 - 19:13

Strongly disagree with the notion that Bakunin was just using a rhetorical device when he said anarchists aren't against all authority and that he bows before the authority of the shoemaker. Strongly believe he meant this literally. That a shoemaker having more knowledge than a non-shoemaker, and the non-shoemaker respecting this knowledge, are not forms of hierarchy or oppression or "archy." Anarchists are against authoritarianism as a social system but not every kind of authority in general. We don't need to project onto Bakunin when we disagree with him. We can just disagree with him and say what our own views are. Personally, I agree with him on this point about authority but not when he makes racist remarks about Inuit or Jews, for example.

humanispherian Fri, 05/23/2025 - 00:59

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

This is the strangest hill to die on, particularly since, if you take him literally, Bakunin said entirely contradictory things about authority, with nothing but a break in the manuscript separating them. Perhaps it is projection to imagine that he wasn't actually going to bow to cobblers, but imagining that he wasn't just completely contradictory and incoherent is an act of interpretive generosity that we probably shouldn't have to apologize for.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 06:35

In reply to by humanispherian

It would be incoherent and contradictory if you thought listening to and respecting the particular knowledge of other persons is a form of oppression. I think it's a condition of life. We are not a hive mind where we all know the same things. Learning from or being helped by other persons is not a form of oppression. Just like someone with food sharing that food with someone who has no food is not a form of oppression or hierarchy. Anarchy is not about absolute equality of conditions, it's about social equality, or equity, if you will, a social condition in which we try to meet people's needs and prevent hierarchical social structures. We will never become an amorphous blob. That's some other social theory, not anarchism.

humanispherian Fri, 05/23/2025 - 11:55

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

What Bakunin says, really on either side of the "authority of the bootmaker" bit, is that expertise is good, but should be in the hands of multiple experts, precisely so that nobody really has to bow to a cobbler — something doubly important since it is the comparison and testing of expertise that both protects the person hoping to benefit from it and the expert, since authority destroys expertise. That seems like a simple, consistently anarchistic perspective. And then when we broaden the picture, so that we see that most individuals are or could be expert at their own thing, it seems less and less useful to think of society as some complex, decentralized agglomeration of relationships in which people are always "bowing" to some authority. We can just all stop bowing and concentrate on the finer details of cooperation, mutual utilization or whatever our model for anarchic social interactions happens to be. No need for Procrustean beds.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 16:50

In reply to by humanispherian

No one here said anything about "always 'bowing' to some authority." There are more than just the two options in life of (1) never respecting or listening to anyone who knows something one doesn't already know or (2) always bowing to some authority. The vast majority of human existence has been neither of these. And there's nothing anarchistic about reducing life to this false binary.

humanispherian Sat, 05/24/2025 - 12:18

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

If you take the stuff in "God and the State" literally, then Bakunin said something about that — alongside a lot of other stuff that would just add up to a mess quite obviously horrible enough that we might be spared ever having to talk about Bakunin and shoemakers again.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/25/2025 - 08:26

In reply to by humanispherian

Yeah god forbid anyone ever learn anything from someone who knows more than them, that would be a real mess. Glad we are all born on the astral plane with full knowledge of the universe from the get go. This way we don't have to debate Bakunin, we're already born knowing everything he said and exactly what he meant. Anarchy means never having to grow as a person with the help of anyone else. Hive mind forever.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 07:05

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I don't give a fuck as far as noawadays Bakunin would be bowing to Temu as his shoemaker. Or would that be an actual local fair trade shoemaker for the bourgeoisie? So anarchists learning to make their own shoes are those making Bakunin look like a poser.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 07:25

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

You think Bakunin or today's anarchists should learn to make their own shoes without ever being instructed by anyone who already knows how, also refusing to read a book or watch a video tutorial on shoemaking? We should refuse to learn from others and start from scratch every time, because that would be submitting to oppression? Your "anarchy" is truly moronic then. Willful ignorance and time wasting.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 16:03

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"You think Bakunin or today's anarchists should learn to make their own shoes without ever being instructed by anyone who already knows how, also refusing to read a book or watch a video tutorial on shoemaking? "

1: Yes.

2: No. On the contrary, it's crucial to get educated and informed about anything when you're anarchist, as authoritarian sheep are those using crutches in their lives, provided by established institutions (No offense to people having to use actual crutches when physically needed). Also things like logic fallacies, myths, lies, disinfo, revisionism are all cheap tricks used by authoritarians to dominate - not just coercion- and that's where knowledge and logic get very useful.

Shortcut to learning everything from scratch all the time, is lift or recycle shit. Which is what anarchists tend to be into.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 20:09

I was going to try to score a new propeller-topped beanie to accompany this erudite, horse-drawn buggy with square wheels, never escapes its origins in wool-gathering idealist philosophy (market) exchange, but they were all out on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue!

Instead, let's cut to the chase with a more radical and useful take on the question:
"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. "

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 21:31

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

The problem with Marx, given his quote you use, is that individual labor, in the sense he thinks of it, does not exist, neither under capitalism nor communism (or at least shouldn't be individually remunerated under communism). In his first stage of communism, Marx advocated labor vouchers for personal use goods, which means commodity exchange would still exist, his claim it wouldn't is contradictory. Labor vouchers are themselves commodities that are exchanged for personal use commodities. The fact that the vouchers don't circulate like money doesn't mean commodity exchange isn't happening. Both Marx and Proudhon were wrong on this point, whereas Kropotkin was right (though he was wrong about other things.) Long past time to put Locke out to pasture.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Fri, 05/23/2025 - 21:57

I'm not sure that labor time vouchers would have been a function of commodity exchange, but I don't think we should use them after this social order is toppled. I think they would have been an extremely imperfect mechanism in attempting to make the leap to a post-market society at a point in time when the proles were still a numerical minority in even the most advanced capitalist countries. The material preconditions for an immediate leap to a fully realized post-market society, where wage labor and all forms of buying and selling are abolished, have now been fully developed by capitalism.

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 05/24/2025 - 07:59

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

According to Marx, a commodity doesn't need to have value, it just needs to be designated for exchange, for example, unworked land has no value but can be made into a commodity by being assigned a price and put on the market. Labor vouchers under first phase communism would be produced for the purpose of being exchanged for personal use commodities. The means of production would be communized but the means of subsistence would not. Means of production would not be exchanged, would not be commodities, but personal use commodities would be exchanged for labor vouchers tied to how long an individual person worked (a nonsense metric to base a social system on). It does not matter whether labor vouchers would have value or not. They would still be commodities exchanged for other commodities. Lockean bourgeois right would be maintained in Marx's first phase of communism. This is where Marx was wrong and Kropotkin was right.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Sat, 05/24/2025 - 20:31

I haven't read Kropotkin yet so you might be right. I think we need immediate full communization from the get-go when the reigning social order is toppled. Having a little bit of commodity relations is like having a little bit of Stage 4 cancer! And as people like the S.I. and Dauve have noted, communization is often integral to mass collective subversive action, and not simply a series of measures that will be put into place later.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/25/2025 - 17:01

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

You're wasting your time reading Kroppo. Short cut to inner-peace/external justice is to just become a small "c" christian and donate 10% of your wealth/wages to a charity. Thereby guilt all done and dusted.

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/25/2025 - 21:54

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Arctually, the "anarchist" is a product of the left side of Western civilization's foundational Christian conscience very close to Jesus's socially inspired precepts. Sharing and caring with its emphasis on connecting empathically with ones neighbours makes the sharing of property a duty. The percentage may be 10% or 100%, but the most important aspect of this exchange is that it does not follow a rank/gift/status relationship amongst the practioners within this compassion based marketplace. And not violence or seizure, but negotiations (haggling) is the name of the process.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/26/2025 - 06:41

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

No that's hippieism. And maybe ancom puritans.

There's no indication of rejection of violence inherent to anarchist dynamics, and not sure if compassion ain't just a manipulative cover for managing others non-violently. Love is essential! Tho compassion's not really love.

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