Reddit reviews The Dispossessed

Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!

I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."

There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.

But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.

The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.

Ahh, there's where we disagree then.

Have you read The Dispossessed? Amazing fiction book about an anarchist society.

I was sympathetic with anarchism for a long time, but my sympathies were broken when I read about the starvation in Somalia. There was no national government to organise buying food from other countries or redistribution and rationing as other countries do.

Absolute freedom means freedom to starve, and sometimes it's good to have a 'paternal' state. It's now my opinion that a social democratic state government is superior to anarchism. Of course, that form of government has a whole load of failings as well, but starvation due to a lack of coordination tends not to be one of them.

You really need to read The Dispossessed.