Now that we’ve successfully increased the factionalism of the board by splitting from the tankies, the logical next step is to start arguing with ourselves. Possible topics include:
- Should personal property, as opposed to private property, rights continue to be respected? Is there any meaningful distinction between the two categories?
- Would volunteerism be enough to meet everyone’s needs, or is it okay to compel work sometimes?
- Are anprims even real?
Or another better topic idk I’m just a lib who loves internet fights
Personal property is fine. You can own the house you live in. If some weirdo decides it's their house and tries to start living in it and pushing you out, then that's a thing that the community should help to resolve.
I don't think uncoordinated volunteerism is enough to meet everyone's needs, we need some sort of incentive or another for people to do whatever labor ends up unpopular relative to its necessity. I don't think that needs to be compulsive, a purely incentive-based method is probably enough. I like the idea of using a market system for scarce/luxury goods for this purpose (not life-sustaining goods or the means of production), but I don't think that's the only way to do it.
I've gotten into some nasty arguments with post-civ/post-left/"Trying to convince people to do things is imperialism and the only moral option is to fuck off to the edge of society and do whatever I feel like" folks.
I like the idea of incentive systems to encourage cooperation. Like you said, some jobs are very necessary but unpleasant enough that absent an incentive they might not get done. I also think some sort of market system for luxury goods could be a good way to handle this issue.
I'll admit I worry about the personal property rights stuff. On the one hand, you ought to be able to lay claim to some things as your own and have a reasonable expectation of keeping them. On the other, the ultimate guarantor of property rights is violence. As you mentioned, if someone is refusing to leave your house, then the only way to remove him might be some sort of community effort to physically extract him. How and in what way these community rights-protecting institutions would be maintained and made accountable in an anarchist society is something I haven't really wrapped my head around.
Nice username.
Power is unavoidable, and inherently abusable. Narrowly defined institutions help, but any institution is going to try to grow its power. My best thought for how to prevent that is to make sure there's already another narrowly defined institution in charge of each of the natural directions for an institution to grow its power in. I don't know the best way to split up rights-protecting institutions, but since they have to employ violence they should be particularly finely chopped.
edit: Oh also it's important that the sort of situation where this is needed are very rare. Capitalism needs constant force to uphold private property laws that are actively preventing people from being able to live comfortably. But someone wanting to come steal your toothbrush is really weird. It'll happen (there are a lot of people, everything happens), but the scope of whatever system fixes it is limited, because it's a strange edge case of society. (And it's probably like... people who forcibly get someone to go home and then go fetch them a mental health expert.)
This seems like a weird way to frame property. Surely the community should have ways of equanimically sharing and using its resources, outside of just enforcing property rights. Like it would be fucked if some asshole decided to push a cancer patient out of a hospital bed because he want to sleep there now, but I assume wouldn't support the idea of private hospitals.
People couldn't privately own a house in say, Soviet Union, but it didn't mean that randos could do whatever in other people's homes.