Matt24 wrote:Now, the idea of simple possession sounds sort of incoherent. What defines "use"? Say I have three pairs of shoes. Does that mean I can't have them because I can't use them all at the same time? Or do I need to watch my TV all the time to claim it as my personal possession?
Anyone who's ever had roommates can understand how possessions work. At my house, we have different rooms, and certain personal affects that we can all claim as our own, but there are also things we share, like the oven, microwave, toilet, shower, refrigerator, etc. The point of possessions is that it doesn't require some legal code to work it out. Social conventions are perfectly fine for that purpose. Anarchists seek to extrapolate these kinds of relations to society in general.
Cooperatives are a benign form of business and they're a socialist dream. However, their negative aspect is that they stifle investment in technology, as they do not want to replace labour with capital.
The idea of "investing" in technology is a rather capitalist notion. Innovation is a natural outgrowth of the inherent creative capacities of humans. People
enjoy being creative, and that creativity is stifled by jobs that force people to be cogs in the machine. As anarchists, we seek a society which frees people to pursue their creative passions.
Moreover, it's difficult for them to survive when the economy is not doing well, for example, and they have to lay off workers (or produce less, and approach losses or minimal profit). So although I strongly support them, I doubt cooperatives can get big enough or drive economic growth, even if capitalists allowed them to.
The problem is that you're looking at co-ops within the context of capitalism. I'm talking about have an economy that is itself cooperative, not one based on profit. Things like economic downturns and layoffs would be obsolete ideas within such an economy.
This is also a nice idea, but it really depends on how well a community gets on. I can see it happening in a village or small neighbourhood, but would it work in cities, where people hardly know each other?
Part of the thrust of capitalism has been to isolate people from each other more and more. Part of the work of revolutionaries is counteract this and connect people with one another. The Black Panthers managed to do this brilliantly back in their heyday, with community policing and free breakfast programs. So yes, the current system is very much stacked against such cooperation, but that is precisely what we seek to fight against.
Which gets me back to my earlier question in reply to the user "Voluntarism": how would this service be maintained? After all, participants of the group need to make a living off it, otherwise not many would be interested in wasting their time with those activities.
No, they don't need to be reimbursed if they actually live in these communities. All they have to do is have an interest in their community's safety. Plenty of neighborhood watch programs already exist, and they are comprised of volunteers. And as I mentioned, this would be in combination with addressing the root causes of crime, so there would be less violence to worry about.
Now regarding justice, as I've pointed out the difficulties in really achieving equality and protecting "possessions", I do not believe there would be no violence. I'm no Hobbes, but one has to admit that man is conflictive (either by nature, or by life in society, but that's a different issue).
I don't claim that violence would be abolished once and for all. That'd be silly. But it'd be equally silly to ignore the social factors that increase violence, such as socioeconomic inequality.
Furthermore, to assert my point; even if equality were achieved, this does not mean man will keep to his new egalitarian economic position. The way I see it, any man driven by desires or passions could spend his/her income on something superflous; be part of an accident (say a fire, an earthquake); or he/she could damage a personal possession. And inequality would arise again, however unfrequent, and would lead to generations of men on a "lower economic scale" (because of the vicious circle of poverty) unless somebody came out in their rescue, which wouldn't happen since there would be no State.
See, you're still thinking in terms of capitalist property relations. Anarchists seek to create a society based on
mutual aid. As Kropotkin meticulously documented, mutual aid was the original form of exchange in human societies, and has continued to play some role in all human societies even when it is de-emphasized compared to other forms of exchange. While some anarchists advocate outright abolishing money and replacing it with mutual aid, there can also be community credit systems that operate on the basis of mutual aid, as was the case in many Medieval towns. When we speak of equality, we don't mean that everyone will literally have the same amount of stuff at any one time, but rather that the goods of society will circulate in an egalitarian manner. We seek to abolish a society based on accumulation and replace it with one based on mutual aid. Toward that end, we seek to overthrow the violent power of the state, which makes the current system of accumulation possible in the first place.