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RE: Fire in the hole!! - Anarcho Capitalism / Communism - debate/discussion Part 2 - after many comments
There is a difference. You said people could take what they want or need. So even someone lazy can take what they need. They can't really do that in an ancap society.
EDIT: It is not even necessarily that they are lazy. They simply may have other interests they think are more important to them. In an Ancap society the importance is being able to pay for food, etc. You are responsible for yourself.
-Pëtr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
Ok so in that aspect it is similar to Ancap too in that they will help if they are able (rich enough) but otherwise pretty much the same thing. That was ACTUALLY the information I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to share that passage.
Alright, @bacchist, let me try to comprehend this. In a Communist society, the government would (ideally) redistribute goods in such a way that every man would be compensated according to his needs. Every man should then (ideally) work according to his ability, except there would be no actual economic incentive to do so.
As far as I understand it, the argument is as follows: Anarcho-Communism would eliminate the need for any incentive, since freedom of association would instead allow the rest of society to simply penalise those who are unproductive,
But it still doesn't explain how to determine what is needed. What if, hypothetically speaking, everyone decided to produce the exact same thing? How would it, for instance, be determined who should carry out the most strenuous manual labour?
If everyone is allowed to choose for themselves the work they want to do, then, surely, no-one would want to work harder than others. And if everyone chose the easiest job and simply produced the same thing, they would be unable to punish each other for being "unproductive".
Even though everyone would be forced to be productive (owing to freedom of association), it seems to me that – as @dwinblood pointed out – there would be a need for some sort of central planning to ensure that this productivity be put most efficiently to use.
According to communist theory, there would be no state. The end goal of communism is a stateless society. The problem is that the strategy used by a lot of communist movements historically has relied on seizing state control.
But I digress. Generally speaking, human beings are intelligent enough to realize that they need to have different people working on different tasks in order to accomplish the various needs of a society. These things can be worked out and agreed upon in a decentralized fashion.
If people can't be trusted to figure this out on their own, adding money to the mix isn't going to magically solve the problem.