RE: When Anarchists Aren't Really Anarchists: Understanding the AnCom World View
Cool summary.
Something I've never been able to figure out from people who identify as "AnCom" (maybe you can answer on their behalf?) is:
Say I build a conveyor belt (the "means of production"), and Bob and Sally and whoever come by and use it. Eventually I pay them to make certain things. This is a problem? And it should be stopped? And what's the mechanism to stop it?
If this is "okay" in the sense that they wouldn't want to force us to stop behaving this way, then they're voluntaryists. (Even if they vaguely would prefer there weren't people building things on a conveyor belt.)
Personally I could see myself opting in to some sort of commune, along the lines of what you mentioned at the beginning. I suspect we may end up living in groups or tribes or communities of whatever manageable amount of people, and within that we share resources. But still trade and are "capitalistic" and don't blindly share with people from outside the group.
So often I like some of the things AnComs talk about (and like i.e. I think not having wage labor would generally be a natural function of a voluntary world -- it will be much more about building and creating), but I don't get the way they consider voluntaryists to be their bitter enemy or something.
It makes me less into wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt and emphasize the good when they almost never have the same attitude. Voluntaryists seem to trigger them, for some reason.
At the end of the day it shouldn't be that controversial to think that violence is bad :p I can understand why statists disagree, but I don't get why people who claim to be anarchist could have any beef with this.
I think a self-described ancom would answer that as soon as you built the conveyor belt, it became communal property. Whether that is because you (as a true believer in the principle of not owning the means of production) ceded it to the workers, or because some democratic resource-allocation advisory board members came by to confiscate it, would depend on the ancom. Another possibility is that guilt and cultural conditioning would be the motivating factor. In an ancom society that was sufficiently established and had been operating for a few generations, people might be culturally ingrained with the idea that property ownership is evil, and therefore the thought would not occur to them to keep the conveyor belt for themselves. (If you haven't read The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin, it does a good job of carrying out a thorough thought experiment with regards to the multi-generational left-anarchist society. The society in the book is something of a mix between anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism.)
I think I can explain it. Whereas ancaps generally consider anarchism to be more-or-less synonymous with voluntaryism, ancoms do not. To them, anarchism is the "logical" outcome of Marxist communism. They consider themselves communists first, and anarchists second. In fact, there is a growing trend among them to self-label as "communist anarchists" in an attempt to put the most important descriptor first. In order to reach the anarchism, they have to go through revolution and seizing the means of production and eliminating their philosophical detractors and a bunch of other steps that could not feasibly be done in a voluntary way. Also, they object to voluntaryism on the grounds that it is predicated on the concepts of self-ownership, which they believe to be impracticable, and property rights, which they believe to be unjust.
That makes sense. And then whatever I do to claim ownership on the property is me initiating the violence on the collective.
Their issue then, I think, is that it's totally subjective when specifically something can be identified as "conveyor belt" or whatever would qualify as communal property.
(When I have a wooden peg, it's fine. Maybe I can build it into a table. Maybe I can put rubber on top of it. When exactly it becomes a conveyor belt seems completely arbitrary.)
Like at the end of the day it just seems so inside out that I'd have "my" property and then as I do things with it, somewhere along the way it morphs into no longer mine because of what exactly I did with it.
That makes sense too and sheds a lot of light on their attitude.
It's always weird to me how anyone could be opposed to voluntarism, like how could that possibly grind your gears.
I guess it makes sense tho, like if you see radical force as the only way to get the outcome you want, you'd have to be.
I think often they probably project the issues in the world today onto "capitalism" and "freedom" (when really it's a function of statism/violence), and so that's how they end up with this backwards view that they need to be violent and coercive in order to make things peaceful and egalitarian.
Really they should just shun the violence that currently exists.
Thanks for your answer.