@Katsura: You are forced into the workplace, in some form, by the threat of starvation. That, itself, is unjust to most anarchists, who would require at a bare minimum that everyone be provided with the minimum standard of living irrespective of their ability to work (and sometimes even their willingness; this depends on the branch).
Unrestricted right of contract is generally a liberal idea, and not everyone is behind that.
![]()
If someone's truly unable to work, there are welfare programs and charities, enough to ensure that (in first world countries, anyway) actually dying of starvation is incredibly rare.
And if someone's just unwilling to work . . . well, they better hope we achieve a post-scarcity society sometime soon.
What's the alternate to the current employment system? How is it unjust to be rewarded for contributing to a greater society via working, and being punished if you decide not to?
If I chose to live in a city that gives me security (cops/army) and the ability to have better food/water/housing etc. than I could get myself or even in a small society, I should have to contribute. The bosses are contributing by making a product or service available to everyone else and paying people. I could just go have a lower quality of life by farming out in the country somewhere and not having to work, or I could choose a high quality of life in exchange for contributing.
You have to give up some rights to have rights.
The most edgy person on the Internet.Our civilization, as a whole, functions because majority of people work and contributes to the society in exchange for something else. Both employers and employees contribute, as the former create jobs, and the latter are able to meet demands of their employers and do what is expected from them in their position. If somebody complains that employers get higher cut from profits of the company, s/he should remember that they are ultimately in charge of managing their business, and have lot of responsibilities as well.
edited 30th May '13 2:21:23 AM by CaptainKatsura
My President is Funny Valentine.There are many types of anarchies. The most "fabled" is the utter lack of order and stability. But did you know that simply the lack of a dominant figure counts as an anarchy?
Communinal anarchies do exist, and they're hilariously the exact opposite of the chaos ridden concept. They're the rural areas, where the local individuals have more equality in power than one would expect, each relevant to the town's function, at the expense of personal freedom and self expression.
@Greenmantle: No, that's a socialist idea.
@Raven Wilder: Actually, right now, we easily have enough resources to provide everyone with a basic standard of living even if a fraction of the population opts out of the labor pool.
Kropotkin's suggestion, though, was that everyone be required to work 5 hours a day at necessary jobs if able, and if not a woman raising children, in return for access to communal supplies (food, clothing, shelter, needs of that nature). That was around 1900.
edited 30th May '13 10:17:30 AM by Ramidel
I bet we could get it down to 4 or even 3 a day, 5 days a week, with today's tech.
Part-time communism. Hmm.
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.I see. Well, it's an entirely different thing to decide things on an egalitarian community basis rather than a dictatorial top-down fashion. Yes, is not "total freedom", but the spectre of "absolute liberty" was always more of a classical liberal thing anyway (always coming down to "property rights" of course). People in power will always have the incentive to screw people over, that's an unavoidable fact. And most people in a hierarchy will be always be subordinates, and thus always most people will not have very much self-direction in it, and likewise most of the apples and milk will certainly go to the pigs in the farm. Now, it's just a fact of life that this sort of schism, this "war of all against all", will always sow discontent, alienation, and many many victims. And this problem only builds on itself, creating disaster after disaster.
edited 30th May '13 10:28:33 PM by CassidyTheDevil
Making communal decisions doesn't really work on a large scale, though. As a community gets larger, it will face more and more issues of greater and greater complexity, until it's beyond anyone's ability to keep track of them all. Eventually the community's gonna have to start delegating authority to specific individuals if it wants anything to get done.
For example, suppose Alice and Bob have gotten divorced, and Bob wants full custody of their child because Alice, he claims, is an abusive parent. In order to decide who keeps the child, evidence and testimony from both parties needs to be carefully examined. In a village of a few dozen people, it might make sense to gather everyone together and have the community as a whole decide who keeps the child. But in a country of over a hundred million? Even if you got every single person in the nation to listen to testimony from Bob, Alice, and any witnesses they might call, that's time when nothing else is being done in the entire country. And you can bet, as soon as that custody battle's over, a hundred more couples will be filing their own custody suits. Everyone could spend their entire lives doing nothing but reviewing custody suits, and they'd still never come close to being finished.
@ Cassidy: I've pointed out before that social censure is a way to keep down dissident voices, and even violently dispose of them. Current laws help mitigate that issue, but you can't have enforceable laws without some sort of hierarchy designed to enact those laws. Think of high school popularity contests, only applied to the entirety of a community that a dissident individual might not have the means or sufficient motive to leave. There's nothing in anarchy that can prevent popular people from accruing social power and influence, and that can lead to very dangerous situations. So yes. Communal whatsits can be bad, partly because they're insular and partly because decency is easy to ignore in the presence of the charismatic.
Anarchy has no practical or uniform way to protect against the worst parts of human nature.
And that applies even in an anarchical or a leaderless society.
Remember, a group can still be dictatorial against another part of the same group, even if there is no formal leadership. It cannot be dictatorship in the hands of one person, but it can be dictatorship in the hands of many.
edited 31st May '13 5:16:04 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnSo let's continue my custody suit example. Bob comes from a large extended family and is very popular with friends and co-workers. Alice is estranged from her family and has few friends that aren't also, first and foremost, Bob's friends. So when Bob claims Alice is an abusive mother and he deserves full custody of their child, he's got a lot of people ready to defend him, while Alice has hardly any. And since there's no objective authority figure to deal with this issue, Bob wins because he's got the bigger fan club.
Does that seem fair?
edited 31st May '13 5:57:46 PM by RavenWilder

Really, nobody is ever forced into that? Yeah, no. Another thing, almost everybody would prefer to not have a boss. It's simply not practical for most people. And it's flat out mathematically impossible for the majority of people to be employers.