An answer to

this very good question.



This phrase got cut off at the end: "...clothing my uniqueness in an air of religiosity."

Two Communisms

Since October 9 is the anniversary of Che Guevara's execution/martyrdom (the word changes depending on what you think of him), I thought now would be a good time to share my opinion of communism.

Communism is the belief that all goods and services should be produced "by each according to his abilities" and distributed "to each according to his needs." Basically, it's the idea that your lot in life shouldn't depend on what others can get from you.

Now, I'm not a communist, though I could have made a good one. I do believe that your right to be left to enjoy your own life doesn't depend on what others can get from you - but this belief is individualism, not communism per se. There is a kind of communism that can be compatible with individualism, and there's another kind which isn't compatible with it at all. But before I go into these, let me further describe what communism is by saying what it is not.

Communism is not equal work, equal pay, nor equal work with equal pay. Some people can work longer and harder than others. Some have disabilities or obligations that make them unable to work as long, fast, or productively as others. Making everyone work the same amount of time is just not equitable.

Paying everyone equally isn't equitable either. Some people have greater needs than others. Some families have more kids. Some families have disabled members who require more attention. Paying every bread winner their "fair share" is really unfair to those with special needs.

In fact, payment has no place in communism. If your lot in life shouldn't depend on what you do for others, then your comfort shouldn't have to be earned. A communist would put it this way: if you can't make a living without selling your time and energy to someone else, then that isn't much different from slavery. In communism, there is no buying or selling of labor - or much of anything else, for that matter. And so, there's no place for money.

In communism there's no room for barter, either (or at least, the ways people meet their most basic needs can't include barter). Again, your life shouldn't depend on what you do for others. What you need for you to live should be available to you without condition. If you can't get those things without doing something for somebody else - without, so to speak, running after the carrot on the stick - then you're basically owned.

"To each according to his needs," then, has a very particular meaning: those things people need for a decent life should be available to everyone without condition - without buying, selling, renting, or any other market exchange.

Those of you on my end of the political spectrum are by now bouncing in your seats to strike down any hope of such a system "working." But rather than sneer that no such system could ever stay afloat, let's try to imagine how people would strive to meet each other's needs without market exchanges. (We wouldn't be productive thinkers without some imagination.) Anyway, whether a system "can work" is nowhere near as important to me as whether it can work morally. Whether communism can work morally is what I'll look at here.

Human life requires human labor. "To each according to his needs" can never happen without the things we ned being transformed from a crude state to a useful state (that is, produced) and taken to a place where we can use them. In other words, somebody has to make the stuff we need. The communist ideal is "from each according to his abilities." But how this phrase is interpretted matters a lot, and there are two very different ways to interpret it.

One kind of communism allows and encourages people to work on the things that they themselves judge useful to the community. "From each according to his ability" here also means "from each according to his own discretion." This system can be called voluntary communism.

It can also be called a Gift Economy, since the most important transactions in it would be freewill gifts and favors. People wouldn't be working for any reward in particular - if they do work for a reward that they've grown dependent on (for example, wages), then it's hard to tell that kind of obligation to work from all-out compulsion to work.

This kind of communism celebrates voluntarism in all its forms and eschews compulsion in all its forms. People would work, not for wages, or out of compulsion, or from any kind of "have to", but simply and completely out of love for their work.

Sound far out? Well, before brushing it off as a system that necessarily would devolve into diseased, starved druggies running naked through the tall grass, just look around and see all the other things people do for the mere love of it. People develop their skills at all sorts of tasks, just for the satisfaction that those tasks bring them. To think that a man can't similarly be motivated to do a task that's useful to other people is to have a view of humanity that's not just unfair to humans, but also inaccurate given the evidence.

I gawked when I heard that a family friend charged his daughter rent for living in the house she grew up in. I think most people would gawk too (until they learn she was an adult). Most people in our society look down on a parent charging his kids for the things he provides them. And when it comes to the basics - food, clothing, and shelter - most parents provide their kids these things for free, regardless of how low the kids scored on their tests or how crabby they've been. Just about every family in America, then, is a little commune (this is overlooking, of course, the grave power disparity between parent and child).

The power of gift extends beyond the bounds of love, and into anonymous, semi-anonymous, and very distant relationships. You all know by now that I love Wikipedia. It's democracy at its best - everyone has their say, and no one gets hurt. It's also a gift economy of information. In the few years that it's existed it has exploded into a loud bazaar where contributors share information out of the mere pleasure of making something that interests them more accessible to other people who would find it useful. No one pays a penny to use Wikipedia. And the vast majority of people who contribute to it aren't paid a penny, either. And yet, it thrives. The very fact that university professors forbid their students from citing it reveals how central it has become.

It's only a very small leap of faith (shall we call it a skip of faith?) to see how gift and mutual interest can work in producing and distributing tangible goods and services. Since February I've been volunteering at a nonprofit law office. Job experience and bragging rights aside, I really do think I can say that I do this for my own stimulation and for the satisfaction of knowing that I bettered someone's life.

An economy where people grow and give food for free and build and repair each others' houses and do other favors completely for free doesn't seem that distant in the future. The farmers, mechanics, grocers, handymen, scientists, and teachers can all survive and thrive on gift, so long as they're all paying it forward.

Let's suppose, now, that not enough people are paying it forward, or that not enough is being paid forward in the things that are most needed. According to voluntary communism, people are free to organize communal networks where needs are discussed and volunteers signed up. If not enough people volunteer for harvest, or if not enough people volunteer to reinforce the levees, then everybody's just going to have to make do.

There is another kind of communism which can take care of problems like these. Involuntary communism is what most people think of when they hear the C-word used perjoratively. It's the communism that makes red-blooded Americans wet their pants.

In this other kind of communism, if not enough people volunteer for harvest or to reinforce the levees, then people will be conscripted to do the task whether they want to or not. Here, "from each according to his ability" means "from each according to what he can be made to do."

There can be a variety of negative incentives to "encourage" people to work - they can be beaten into submission, they can be assigned a menial and brain-rotting job, or they can see the priviledges they enjoy equally with the others suspended by order of the authorities - whatever the "incentive", it's an offer you can't refuse, and looks more like a threat than a mere enticement.

This is the big red line between the two communisms. One relies on voluntary, unconditional gift and voluntary, unconditional favor; the other relies on compulsory gift and compulsory favor.

If voluntary cooperation isn't enough to meet the basic needs of every individual, then involuntary cooperation is needed. For involuntary cooperation to succeed, there needs to be some kind of master-slave relationship. If the master-slave relationship is unnecessary, then every goal of communal organization can be met through completely voluntary cooperation, and central planning and political authority would be unnecessary.

If the master-slave relationship is inherently immoral, as I tend to think it is, then any kind of social organization there is - be it capitalist, mutualist, syndicalist, or communist - cannot depend on it as a mode of production and still be moral.

Of course, different people have different definitions of slavery. But surely, someone who believes capitalism to be slavery must recognize that giving people offers they can't refuse in order to get them to do things they don't want to do is - well, pretty coercive.

If the goal is to eradicate all political and economic coercion, then there's a problem here. Involuntary communism proposes to eradicate political and economic coercion through some coercive political and economic relations. Maybe the involuntary communists envision a world where the severity and frequency of coercion is significantly less than it is right now. But a little slavery is still slavery, and to use it to bring about some less evil world is violently utilitarian.

I'm not going to put words into involuntary communists' mouths and speculate that their answer would be "well, it's not really coercive if you're free to leave the country." I respect them too much to think they're that nationalist. "You have the freedom to leave the country" sounds awfully close to "you have the freedom to get another job," and if they think that corporate structures and economic conditions are coercive, then they have to accept that political structures are too. Involuntary communists accept coercion as a legitimate way to get things done. Imagining otherwise is beating around the bush.

As I said, I am not a communist. I do dabble in communist theory, and some day I might indulge in a gift economy. I am sympathetic to voluntary (that is, anarchist) communism, because it condemns forcing people into things. I find that to be fully within the spirit of individualism, and I think voluntary communist arrangements can be totally legal in a libertarian society. Anarchist communism is even refreshing in the way it interprets freedom. If you haven't yet read Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work" that I linked quite a few paragraphs up, you really should. Yes, I linked the same webpage twice in the same blog post, because I think it's that fun to read.

Next time someone tells you they're a communist, ask them this one question: "Would you ever force me to work?" If they answer no, then you can predict that they're anarchist, and that they advocate a gift economy. If they answer yes, then you can predict that they're Marxist-Leninists or some other kind of authoritarian who advocate a slave economy without using the word "slave". If your predictions are wrong, then either they're confused about what they believe or they're in transition.

Common Land

Problems with privatization are depicted in Cromwell, the 1970 movie starring Richard Harris and Alec Guinness. In one scene, royal henchmen drive shepherds and cattle off a field and erect fences, all to the protest of Cromwell, who bellows "This is common land!" Certain fields and forrests in England at the time had been dedicated to public use, and were used by commoners to graze and hunt. By handing over to well-connected members of the nobility land that members of the general public depended on and had the legally-recognized and customary right to use, the King excluded people from using property which was considered theirs, and - through force - transferred control of a good from one set of owners to a new, illegitimate, owner. In short, privatization of common land robbed the general public of what was rightfully theirs.

I stand by "right wing" anarchists with the view that private infrastructure can be moral and would be more efficient than the provision of roads and utilities at prices below cost (that is, private infrastructure can make congestion and water shortages a thing of the past). But the morality and efficiency of private infrastructure doesn't mean that there shouldn't or wouldn't be any public property.

Roderick Long's essays on stateless public space, here and here, were two of the best things that happened to anarchist legal theory. He notes that public property can emerge through the uncoordinated efforts of the "unorganized public", without the actions of a government.

"Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms - not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day."

According to John Locke's theory of property, which many libertarian anarchists espouse, a formerly un-owned thing becomes owned by someone when they "take it out of the state of nature" by "mixing their labor with it". By picking fruit from un-owned trees, the fruit becomes the product of your own labor, and is yours to keep, give, exchange, and defend as yours. By planting on un-owned land, the land becomes yours, and any effort by someone else to use the land without your permission is an act of theft.

Long applies the labor theory of property to the lakeside village trail. "The cleared path is the product of labor - not any individual's labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned."

(The practice of armed guards stopping travelers on dirt roads and demanding "payment" in exchange for the "service" of safe passage should be recognized as the crime we intuitively think it is - armed robbery. This differs radically from the tolls that would be charged on tollways in a free market, where the roads would actually be maintained by the ones who legitimately own them, and where maintenance would be a service that one can legitimately demand payment for.)

"Since collectives, like individuals, can mix their labor with unowned resources to make those resources more useful to their purposes, collectives, too can claim property rights by homestead." And since this is a property right, violating it constitutes theft.

Fields and forrests on private land in the Los Altos hills are criss crossed by trails which are traditionally open to the general public. Supposing that these trails were cleared by the "unorganized public" before the land was demarkated, or that the space the trails occupy was voluntarily handed over for public use, these trails belong rightfully to the public. They go through private property, but the trails themselves are common land. By closing off trails that go through their own land, landowners deprive hikers of access to a good which is rightfully theirs. (Of course, this is supposing that the trails were homesteaded before the land was, or that the trails were voluntarily handed over for public use.)

The collective homesteading principle can be taken beyond trails and be applied to fields and forrests. Now, I don't recognize animal agriculture as a legitimate mode of production, so let's set aside grazing and hunting for now, and look at gathering.

I should say first that just picking an apple from a tree doesn't make the whole tree yours. But continually picking apples from that tree, in a way that excludes another's use of that tree, makes that tree yours to pick from. You don't have to plant an orchard to own apple trees. If you continually pick apples from certain trees, to the exclusion of others' use of those trees, then you homesteaded those trees.

Trees can be homesteaded collectively, too. If a group of people continually pick apples from trees, to the exclusion of other uses of those trees, then the trees belong to the group collectively for picking. If someone comes and chops down some apple trees, without the consent of everyone else, he's excluding other people's use of their "own" resource, and essentially commits theft against the unorganized public.

Fields and forrests that people freely roam to gather mushrooms, or dig up roots, or pick flowers, or get sap, or gather sticks, or get berries, or collect any other fruit of the earth, belong collectively to the people who keep the habit of using that land.

The tragedy of the commons is a problem for common land, but it doesn't have to be such a tragedy. For one thing, the unorganized public doesn't have to be so unorganized. If a people worry about too many men chopping down too many trees, they can agree to seasonal quotas and give each other incentives to abide by them.

Also, (and you already got hints to this earlier in this post) the very nature of commonly-owned land means that any use of it which denies others' access to it is an act of theft. If the apple trees belong to everybody for picking, then cutting some of them down effectively deprives other co-owners of the ability to use a resource that they too "own". Since it's theft, then members of the public have the right to prevent each other from doing it.

This would lead to different locales developing their own rules on who can take what and what can be done if someone breaks the rules. Since membership in these groups isn't going to be purely voluntary, these groups can become state-like. But I don't think they would count as states if they act within certain restraints. If they don't assume ownership over people's very bodies, then they would be very different from conventional states. And they definitely couldn't be states if the rules are determined by the people who actually use the land, and not by a group that just assumes ownership of it.

I was moved to write this after reading the Wikipedia article on Chief Joseph. It wasn't anything about him in particular that made me think about this - it was the idea of American Indians not appropriately transferring the land out of the state of nature. According to Locke and many other white men, the "savages" hadn't really made the land their own, and so didn't really own it. If people are just following buffalo herds, and not doing anything to the ground to make it useful in a way that a white man would recognize as useful, then the land they roam is still un-owned land, and whoever fences it off and tills it first is the legitimate first user.

I find such stringent criteria for "legitimate first user" to be unlibertarian. A free society has a diversity of lifestyles. If people aren't free to keep and use land without noticeably changing it, then they aren't free. And if people aren't free to keep land collectively, then they aren't free.

Collective homesteading poses a problem for both nationalization and privatization. Whether common land is taken by an "organized" public, or by a private entity, it is wrenched out of the hands of those who homesteaded it or inherited it from homesteaders. It is stolen either way.

Long writes that the rules for privatization can be left up to common law, but one rule that seems obvious to me is that the privatization of common land should require the consent of everyone who uses it. If it's sold off or given away against the consent of someone who actually uses it, and who inherited the right of that use from predecessors, then it's taken from an owner without the owner's consent - that is, it's stolen.

Though I believe in a free market in water, it's hard for me to imagine how a river would be privatized without stealing it from members of the unorganized public. Privatization would have to start, not with the privatization of rivers, but with the private construction of cisterns to collect and store water.

The same limits on privatization would apply to dirt roads formed by the unorganized public, and to roads that were paved through the chaotic cooperation of people all acting out of their mutual self-interest without direction from above. Privatizing these roads without unanimous consent of their users would be theft for reasons explained above.

Though many government roads were not created by the unorganized public, and though government roads are built and maintained with stolen money and probably on stolen land, they too should probably be treated as non-government common roads. In this essay on privatization, Rothbard writes: "Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State's act of aggression. These people then become the 'homesteaders' of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners." In the case of government roads, these rightful owners are all the members of the general public who use the roads and didn't work for the government. Privatizing a government road without stealing from somebody would seem as difficult as privatizing a river or a non-government common road without stealing from somebody - the rightful owners are most everyone who drives on them, and selling a road against the consent of a single driver who regularly uses that road would be depriving a fellow owner of the use of his "own" property.

Since they would still be public roads after they are taken out of government hands, they would still have the same problems that plague government roads (aka, congestion) and maybe more. For instance, not enough money might be contributed for repaving. But if uncoordinated effort and mutual self-interest can maintain Wikipedia, there's no reason people can't figure out how to make it work for roads. Big corporations can adopt whole stretches of highway, repave them, and line them with advertisements. And besides, when the potholes get big enough and numerous enough, and when rush hour gets long enough, the rich ones will be willing to spend money out of their own pockets to build monorails and tollways in the air or underground.