That's not it AT ALL.
He defines communism specifically as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.
What Graeber calls communism is what anthropologists technically refer to as "demand-sharing".
I refer you to Thomas Widlok's work on "demand-sharing" if you're interested in understanding what they're talking about.
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
Do you have any comment about Thomas Widlok's book?
Are you familiar with the concept of "demand-sharing" in anthropology?
Demand-sharing is kind of a literal translation of the old communist formula ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ into something that people do in their everyday lives.
It's similar to what the anarchist David Graeber calls "communism" which he views as a social relation and which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
Widlok documents this with lots and lots of evidence and theory in his book:
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The rationale that Kropotkin presents is very similar to the one the so-called "primitive communist"/ non-capitalist/anarchic societies like the Bushmen of Western Central Africa use to justify the communistic practices that anthropologists have termed "Demand-sharing".
Thomas Widlok's book Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing documents and theorizes these "demand-sharing" very well.
I would contend that this "demand-sharing" is basically the application of the old formula ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ to everyday life.
The anthropologist David Graeber has even outright dubbed this demand-sharing "everyday communism", as he defines it as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
David Graeber calls this demand-sharing "communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. (old communist formula) "
You can more about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing:
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
Sharing economy might help. It pretty much shows how ridiculous the whole "no one else in the world can ever use these resources" is. Keep in mind sharing economy is distinct from gift or exchange.
Here's a book on it https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
Communism is NOT a decentralized planned economy (the planned b*llshit is very annoying and comes from people with backgrounds in neoclassical economics).
A communist economy would consist of Commons, demand-sharing and gift-exchange systems.
Some insurrectionist anarchist would even say that communism implies of the abolition of the "economy".
Murray Bookchin presents three concepts of "usufruct, complementarity and the irreducible minimum" that he presents as guiding principles of a future society in his magnum opus "The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy":
https://libcom.org/library/ecology-freedom-murray-bookchin
Here's a short typology of various economic forms that might help you navigate this stuff:
Market-exchange is an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.
Noncommodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence.
Market exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.
Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.
In the famous book Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.
Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.
Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.
Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.
It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).
Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.
Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.
Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
David Graeber talks about this in his book Debt:
The main reason that we oppose market exchange is NOT because it does or does not lead to the "concentration of wealth".
Alienation? The objectification of human being and their relations and equating incommensurable qualities?
Have you ever heard of about alienation, commodity fetishism or reification (of the Marxist or Stirnerite kind)?
Also, as many thinkers ranging from Durkheim to Karl Polanyi to David Graeber, have pointed out again and again that markets as such, no just capitalism, were/are created through state violence.
I should also mention the long-period historian Fernand Braudel who thought that Capitalism is just the market eating itself (its internal logic of quantification and objectification developing to such an extent that it starts undermining itself).
Markets are quite dispensable as economic forms, as most of our economic interactions, even under capitalism, take place outside the market and operate according to non-market logics.
Most markets are heavily dependent on states defining writing and enforcing property laws and such (which they wouldn't exist without). Even the "free"-est markets like in the case of the Medieval Islamic marketplace (which would also not have lasted long without states and BTW the Islamic marketplace is the one liberals like Adam Smith indirectly based their philosophy on) depended on a lot of non-market interactions to even function:
people would share tea and food before partaking in market dealings and would offer each other gifts (give each a little free "extra") after each market dealing so as to build a base of trust.
In capitalism, state enforcement take the place of gift-exchange and sharing.
Here's a short typology of various economic forms that might help you navigate this stuff:
Market-exchange is an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.
Noncommodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence.
Market exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.
Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.
In the famous book Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.
Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.
Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.
Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.
It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).
Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.
Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.
Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
David Graeber talks about this in his book Debt:
> he's a Tuckerite. Completely false. Carson made it explicitly clear that his views did not change.
This is Completely false. Carson's views changed a lot after he incorporated into it the work of Elinor Ostrom on Commons, Michel Bauwens and P2P people, and some Autonomist Marxists.
He eclectically uses the work of anarchist-communists like Peter Kropotkin, Colin Ward, Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich.
He also uses the work of the (aforementioned) David Graeber.
He even incorporated some of the ideas of non-anarchist libertarian municipalist Murray Bookchin.
"Anarchist without adjectives" is a real historical school of thought, it's not just a word.
I must remind you that I said that he was "decent". I never said that he was right or that I agreed with him.
> You keep throwing this "disgusting" buzzwords around.
You're the one who's throwing buzzword.
You've repeated three times the bullshit myth about "voluntary exchange".
You whole ideology is based on old ahistorical and fictional stories about "markets" which you always speak about in abstract terms and never check to see or they work in reality, their history or their actual effects on people.
Other the simple fact that if you turn something like health into a commodity means that one's access to it is based on how much money one has instead of being based one one's need for it. That's already pretty disgusting and I haven't even mentioned the social effects markets have on people and their relations.
Markets as such, whether "free", "monopolized", blue or whatever are forms of impersonal domination.
(For their history, read the books mentioned above).
There are non-markets modalities we use that already exists ever under capitalism.
Here's a short summary of market and non-market forms:
Here's a little list of characteristics of 1.gift-exchange, 2.market-exchange 3. demand-sharing:
gift-exchange and market exchange:
Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.
In the famous book Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.
Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.
Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.
Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.
Demand-sharing:
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.
It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).
Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.
Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.
Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
No offense, but you seem to have a knowledge of communism that does not go beyond the level of a youtube video or Wikipedia entry (maybe not even that).
For a better understanding of what Marx means by "value", I think you should check out the relevant chapters of Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically while with re-reading Das Kapital:
https://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver
You seem to be hinting at Commons and Common-pool resources, so maybe you should take a look at the book:
Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism by Massimo de Angelis:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7
Since you're posting in Marxist sub, I'm going to give you a take Marx's Communism leaving (Peter Kropotkin's and the anarchists' communism aside):
Marx doesn't thinks of communism in terms of ownership form of the means of production but in terms of the (social) relations of production.
This is one of many of the difference he has with the latter Leninist bullshit.
Paresh Chattopadhyay talks about this at length in his work:
https://libcom.org/library/socialism-marx-early-bolshevism-chattopadhyay
Marx's Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=D06B95D8E25C74E8B16BEFB5C4B9C165
He talks about about "associated mode of production".
Speaking of wikipedia entries, here's one on that subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_%28communism_and_anarchism%29
I think you should also look into the concept of "demand-sharing", Thomas Widlok explain this concept in detail in his book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
What anthropologists call "demand-sharing" is a kind of an open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
The only book dedicated to this topic, that I'm aware of, is Thomas Widlok's recent book <em>Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing</em>.
First of all, your talk of "market failure" tells me that you probably beleive some neoclassical bullshit of one sort or another.
So I recommend you take a look at at Prof. Stephen A. Marglin's (author of the famous paper "What do Bosses do") book "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community":
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047228
Secondly, I should point out that Markets cannot exists with states.
This is something that David Graeber very brilliantly in his books (as did many people before him like Karl Polanyi, Emile Durkheim).
Here's a snippet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KUTdZAYcMg
The main way goods circulate in a anarchic society is through what anthropologists call "demand-sharing" (Kropotkin would call this "mutual aid").
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
This is the main way people stateless societies (in the past and presently like the Bushmen of Western Central Africa) interact economically.
The main way goods circulate in a communist stateless society is through what anthropologists call "demand-sharing" (Kropotkin would call this "mutual aid").
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing:
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
This is the main way people stateless societies (in the past and presently like the Bushmen of Western Central Africa) interact economically.
"Gifts and Commodities" by Chris A. Gregory is the main book on anything Gift related:
https://haubooks.org/gifts-and-commodities/
If you're coming from a more autonomist Marxist-oriented position, I recommend reading:
"Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism" - Massimo De Angelis:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7
You can also find of Massimo De Angelis' previous book on anti-capitalist theory, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, here:
http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
The main way goods circulate in a communist stateless society is through what anthropologists call "demand-sharing" (Kropotkin would call this "mutual aid").
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
This is the main way people stateless societies (in the past and presently like the Bushmen of Western Central Africa) interact economically.
"Gifts and Commodities" by Chris A. Gregory is the main book on anything Gift related:
https://haubooks.org/gifts-and-commodities/
If you're coming from a more autonomist Marxist-oriented position, I recommend reading:
"Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism" - Massimo De Angelis:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=961FEA9AF31094CA0280E0F92B353AF7
You can also find of Massimo De Angelis' previous book on anti-capitalist theory, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, here:
http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
After reading the latter section on anarchists in Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, I would say the most anarchic anarchists I've read are probably Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer.
I also would add that communism is best interpreted as a relation and a process rather as "a state of things".
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
I also highly recommend Graeber's first book "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value" and his other famous book on Debt.
You can find a PDF of the first book here:
https://monoskop.org/images/3/36/Graeber_David_Toward_an_Anthropological_Theory_of_Value.pdf
And links to the rest of his work here:
The point is that you seem to completely misunderstand and misrepresent the formula of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”. Again, the idiosyncratic way you seem to be interpreting this formula has nothing to do with what its originators, Marx, the anarchists or David Graeber's understanding of the principle.
“from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”, as David Graeber himself says in (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value), is :
"(An everyday principle of access and distribution, a matter of dis- positions and practices) in which specific individuals are bound together by such open-ended obligations, whether (as in the case of relations between affines) one-sided, or whether (as nowadays, he remarked, between husband and wife), both parties have equal rights to call on the other...No accounts need be kept because the relation is not treated as if it will ever end. (this is not saying that it won't)".
In Debt:
"Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common projet. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?"---even if they are working for Exxon Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them."
> the words "need" and "ability" could possibly have meaning without implying a measurement of some kind
Needs and abilities cannot ever be meaningfully "measured". (and in the situations mentioned above, the idea of "measuring" this stuff never even crosses the minds of people concerned).
This is ridiculous idea to begin with.
Again if you're just stuck on your idiosyncratic understanding of the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” then read Thomas Widlok's book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing", which talks about the same ideas using different terms.
(It also seem that you've never read what David Graeber wrote so I advise reading him before going on a tirade about this stuff, that you seem to have no grasp on).
> Reading back over my post it does seem like I knee-jerked about that one line at the beginning,
Yes and that is still what you seem to be doing.
You're starting with how you interpreted the phrase to mean, and you're completely ignoring what it means in communist literature or what David Graeber meant by that phrase here.
It's evident that you don't understand when you started talking about "measure", "fairness" and "equability", when in fact those notions not only have nothing to do with communism but in fact stand in complete opposition to it.
There's NO "measure" or "fairness" in communist relations ("measure", "fairness" and "equability" and even "reciprocity" are based in the logic of exchange and NOT communism).
As Thomas Widlok points out:
> Sharing does involve objects that are valued and desired but in contradistinction to gift-exchange it cannot be fully explained by a rule of reciprocity and in contradistinction to market exchange it cannot be fully explained in terms of values established through measuring objects against one another. Since demand sharing is its typical form, sharing is also inadequately described in terms of Western values of altruistic sharing. In fact, sharing events without demands are rather peculiar as they mark and underline the relation between giver and receiver and are therefore more appropriately considered as verging on gift-giving. Sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same; rather the value of equal allocation is more typically associated with situations of distribution. We may consider sharing to be tolerated scrounging but for the scrounging to be tolerated it has to build on a number of recognized modes of action and interaction. There are numerous pragmatic factors to do with the mode of relatedness, the modes of talking, and the bodily presence that influence when and what someone might receive as a share—or whether someone is allowed to take a share. It is therefore misleading to consider sharing to be any more a natural system than any other mode of transfer. It presupposes a cultural system similar to that of a system of communicating tubes wherein the flow in these communicating tubes is not automatic since the tubes need to be kept clear of obstacles and have to be actively constructed and maintained as the connections that make up the system. Both the construction of the system and its maintenance are complex cultural processes that allow us to speak of sharing as a cultural invention and innovation. The specificity of sharing is not that it distributes resources and transfers them from one to the other—sharing out—after all; this is also achieved through other forms of transfer. Its specificity is rather that it also constitutes sharing in, granting access to the flows of objects, their intrinsic goods, and their intrinsic value.
If David Graeber's use of the term communism distracts you from the point he's trying to make then I suggest you take a look at:
Thomas Widlok's book <em>Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing</em>, which expands on what Graeber talks about but uses less provocative terms.
Benkler's knoweldge of anything beyond the part of digital economy that he studies is embarrassingly superficial, and it certainly is not empirical.
Sharing has little to do with the "sharing" he seems to understand it.
Thomas Widlok's book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing"
Harvard Prof. Stephen Marlin's <em>The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community</em> deal with the fact that "Markets" have absolutely nothing to do with innovation, and in fact "markets" destroy the basic sociability on which innovation depends.
Also: Why the fuck are you quoting Ronald Coase, who is literally one of the fathers of neoliberalism and a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society?
Why don't you just go and cite another one of <em>The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism</em>.
Or again some of this nonsense:
https://newrepublic.com/article/143849/neo-neoliberalism
Are there really "anarchists" who believe in neoliberal and neoclassical (which are two different schools) economic bullshit?
Damn...did the debate really so bad that we're starting by accepting our opponents' beliefs as doctrine and truth?
Though I agree that this the "natural state" is bullshit (btw, the article have nothing to with "natural state") /u/MDesnivic is talking about the social system that the Bushmen of south Africa (who are the subject of this article) created.
Their economic is very interesting, I would recommend taking a look at Thomas Widlok's book <em>Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing</em>.
P.S:
Talking about Marxist modes of production, what do you think of our boy David Graeber's paper "Turning Modes of Production Inside Out, or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery":
Also:
As a self-proclaimed Marxist, what do you think of Marxist school of thought associated with Harry Cleaver and Massimo De Angelis?
Here's some of their stuff: Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically:
https://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver
Massimo De Angelis' The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital:
http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
(They also each came out with two others new books this year that I've yet to read).
First of all, that's not a dictionary nor does it deal with question of authority or hierarchy (the OP is not asking about "economics"), and secondly it's a terrible book with very uninformed takes on anarchism. At least two of the contributors (Albert-Hahnel) are not anarchist at all (they're anti-communist, in the anarchist sense of communism) and have very bad take on economics as they ground their theory on assumptions from neoclassical economics. Their model of postcapitalism is based on a Walrasian model of capitalism.
If you want to talk about anarchist economics I would rather direct you to:
Debt:The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.
Massimo de Angelis' The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital
Massimo de Angelis' <em>Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism</em>.
Crack Capitalism by John Holloway.
Thomas Widlok's Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing.
David Bollier: http://www.bollier.org/commons-resources/commons-bibliography
Edit:
On anarchist theory, there's very good books like:
Anarchism: A Documentary History Of Libertarian Ideas (Volumes 1, 2 & 3) edited by Robert Graham:
https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-documentary-history-libertarian-ideas-volume-1-2
Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory - Uri Gordon:
https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-alive-anti-authoritarian-politics-practice-theory-uri-gordon-0
Anarchy Works - Peter Gelderloos:
First of all, competition hinders innovation and capitalist corporation are planned command economies which function very much like miniature soviet-unions.
Most importantly: Where the hell do you get this idea that socialism has anything with economic planning? (you seem to even imply that you believe in the cliché b*llshit socialism=government does things)
As a communist I'm vehemently opposed to economic planning as am I to market.
I want to abolish the commodity-form, not to put under the direction of a planning board. That's just capitalism under an other name.
The planned b*llshit is very annoying and comes from people with backgrounds in neoclassical economics
A communist economy would consist of Commons, demand-sharing and gift-exchange systems.
Some insurrectionist anarchist would even say that communism implies of the abolition of the "economy".
Murray Bookchin presents three concepts of "usufruct, complementarity and the irreducible minimum" that he presents as guiding principles of a future society in his magnum opus "The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy":
https://libcom.org/library/ecology-freedom-murray-bookchin
Here's a short typology of various economic forms that might help you navigate this stuff:
Market-exchange is an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.
Noncommodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence.
Market exchange establishes objective quantitative relationships between the objects transacted, while gift exchange establishes personal qualitative relationships between the subjects transacting.
Gift exchange differs from barter or market exchange because the value of the gifts is judged qualitatively, not quantitatively as in the case of commodities. Gift-exchange is based on ‘the capacity for actors (agents, subjects) to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship’.
In the famous book Gifts and Commodities by Christopher A. Gregory (an economic anthropologist) suggests this is a general tendency.
Gift economies tend to personify objects. Commodity/market economies, do the opposite: they tend to treat human beings, or at least, aspects of human beings, like objects. The most obvious example is human labor: in modern economics we talk of “goods and services” as if human activity itself were something analogous to an object, which can be bought or sold in the same way as cheese, or tire-irons.
Gregory lays out a tidy set of oppositions. Gifts are transactions that are meant to create or effect “qualitative” relations between persons; they take place within a preexisting web of personal relations; therefore, even the objects involved have a tendency to take on the qualities of people.
Commodity exchange (market), on the other hand, is meant to establish a “quantitative” equivalence of value between objects; it should ideally be done quite impersonally; therefore, there is a tendency to treat even the human beings involved like things.
It's similar to what David Graeber calls "everyday communism", which he defines as:
"An open-ended agreement between two groups, or even two individuals, to provide for the other; within which, even access to one another’s possessions followed the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’."
(‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, the old communist formula, basically means if you have a need and I have the ability to meet that need, I do it.
Keeping count or reciprocating is very frowned upon in these sort of situations.
This sort of communism is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship.)
What characterizes a sharing context comparatively is that it extends the circle of people who can enjoy the good implicated in a resource, for instance accessing a certain resource such as water. In other words, sharing food or drink is an action done for its own sake, putting the good of nourishment in the place of any specific goals that may be derivative of the transfer of food items, for instance the attempt to create obligations for the future. In this understanding, sharing is not a manifestation of an altruistic move, putting the goals of others above one's own goals, but rather one of renouncing derivative goals altogether in the face of intrinsic goods—its intrinsic value if you will. In gift-giving contexts, by contrast, goals of various kinds (whether held jointly by the exchange partners or not, whether altruistic or egoistic) override the intrinsic good of whatever it is that is being provided.
It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).
Unlike what the economic fundamentalists would have you believe, sharing is not governed by either ecological need and pressure nor a diffuse notion of generosity and altruism. The ethnographic record shows that sharing takes place not only under conditions of scarcity, and that it typically takes the form of demand sharing rather than apparently generous gift-giving. In fact, a number of cultural conditions have to be in place for sharing to work. Unlike the case of exchange systems, these conditions are not formally institutionalized normative systems but, instead, complex systems of habitual practice. In the ethnographic cases (including those in capitalist societies), sharing works because people have a shared history of mutual involvements as kin, because they master numerous ways of initiating sharing through implicature and other forms of talk, and finally because they recognize the presence of others as the (often silent) demand that it constitutes toward those who have and who are in a position to give.
Many acts of sharing took place, and continue to take place, because they are initiated by the taker and social strategies are in place that decouple giving from receiving. Sharing may therefore take place (as said before) without the provider enacting and expressing charity. Often it takes place in a way that downgrades the act of giving as part of leveling any potential attempts of the giver to take political advantage from his or her economically advantaged position. Demand sharing not only inverts the sequence of action but also the tone of the transaction that is known as “charitable giving.” There is no sharing without a demand. The demand need not be uttered, and it need not be the demand of a specific interlocutor since it is a demand for provisioning that emerges as a consequence of moral role relationships or as incurred by a particular situation of copresence, as I would prefer to call it. We need to recognize that one’s mere bodily presence, underlined by addressing the other person in particular ways, is always a demand for being acknowledged as a partner, a personal being with legitimate needs. An appropriate definition of demand sharing is therefore much broader than the use of explicit demands such as “Give me . . .” leading to the appropriation of what one may think one is entitled to. The explicitness of the demand may differ and it may be entirely implicit very much like a “silent demand”. Humans are sufficiently able to put themselves into the situation of others to be able to know what the intrinsic goods of shared objects are for fellow humans without any demand being uttered.
Sharing is generally characterized by the preparedness to suspend measuring objects against one another (which means that sharing does not necessarily entail that everyone gets the same) in that situation and by the unwillingness to hang on to something in a particular situation.
You can understand this better about this by reading Thomas Widlok's recent book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
David Graeber talks about this in his book Debt:
First of all, you seem to be someone who's starting from a huge of set of ancap and free-market-ist philosophical presuppositions and schemes and wants in someway to fit anarchist, anti-capitalist and communist ideas into those schemes.
They won't fit.
Why not just abandon the ancap and market-based presuppositions and schemes and just start from scratch? Here what people like Kropotkin, Graeber and Widlok actually say, instead of what you wanted them to say.
To answer your question:
Please, and I repeat please, don't NOT use politically loaded term like "market" in completely ahistorical and idiocentric ways. If you want to actually talk with people, you can't do that.
The word "market" derived from the Latin mercatus, which meant the place of the commodity, the place where you engage in buying and selling,
Secondly:
Demand-sharing does NOT involve any form of reciprocity. Demand-sharing is NOT a gift and it doesn't involve any form of "generosity". Sharing is one-way transfers of good, not a two-way transfers.
Demand-sharing (or "communism") is something that already that exist in the here, is quite common (even under capitalism), in families, between friends, between colleagues and there's a little of it in every non-hostile relationship. When your start were feeding you and providing when you were a child, they were not expecting a "return".
And usually, as you know from practice, when someone in a family or in close group of friend, gets something, since he's expected to accept to grant access to that thing to his family members/friends on their demand (demand-sharing), everyone in that family/friend circles become "richer".
The question is expanding and connecting this social circles where sharing dominates so as to make communism/demand-sharing the dominant mode of transaction.
It's important to distinguish exchange, which is usually for “external” and strategic benefits such as having a network of partners, creating obligations for the future, etc. (gift-exchange) or and more impersonal and violent benefits when it comes to market-exchange – from sharing that entails the intrinsic goods of receiving a share (sharing out) and of being accepted as a member of the community of humans with recognized needs (sharing in).
Thomas Widlok explain this shit in detail in his book "Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
As for reciprocity, in market-exchanges reciprocity is often enforced through violence, (try to take something from a shop without paying and see how it take for a police baton to hit you), this what contract are usually about.
While in gift-exchange, it's based on trust and social pressure (you turn into a pariah and you don't give back).
It's very clear which one of the two is compatible with an anarchist outlook on stuff.
Since you mentioned economics, I suggest you take a look at Prof. Stephen A. Marglin's (author of the famous paper "What do Bosses do") book "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community":