Smokeskin asked me to start a thread explaining anarcho-communism, and the assumptions made in the post requesting it deserve some attention. But I got an opener first: I spend a lot of time online debating the finer points of how one person or another's particular definition of ostensibly left-libertarian socialism/anarchism/anarcho-whatever manages to be authoritarian when sifted through the "is there unjustified authority/kyriarchy in this view?" and to start I'll just say: some people take Ajita Kesakambali, Pūraṇa Kassapa, Sañjaya Belaṭṭhaputta and other Cārvāka skeptics that followed them (along with Pyrrho and Anaxarchus, who ultimately probably got their ideas from the Cārvāka skeptics advising Alexander during his military buffoonery East of Babylon) way less seriously than they should when it comes to their own views. I'd say the Buddha or the Mahavira too, but really for Buddhism only the later thinkers Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva (also likely influenced by Cārvāka methodology/argumentation) and for Jainism only one particular aspect of Mahavira's teachings (namely Anekāntavāda's twin beauties of Syādvāda and Nayavāda) have bearing on the kind of radical skepticism I think is required to really build from the basics. Sextus Empiricus builds on this thinking as well, in his own way. Praxis needs theory and theory needs praxis, but the Western Academy teaches us to do everything in isolation. The assumption about specialization resisting vast scales, for example, is a hold over from 19th and early 20th century political economy and political science that had as rote that when you went tabula rasa, the slate's blankness carried with it the tacit assumption of distribution costs. We don't live in a world where that's the case anymore, and largely haven't seen the advent of the technologies that could have made the internet possible in the late 60s/early 70s. If you haven't, I recommend giving some consideration to John Markoff's [i]What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry[/i] for some details on this, and how a few greedy authoritarian capitalist idiots with too much influence and a few techno-phobic authoritarian hippies with too much influence stymied free distributed progress at a few key moments in computing's history right as a bunch of hippies in communes across America were about to be the seeds for a far more egalitarian and people-centric start (and very likely, a more crypto-centric start), to what would eventually be an hierarchical academy/military project "trickled down", as it were, to the masses. Not to say we haven't made strides since the BBS days, but my point is that the assumptions in place today (service costs, for example), were on the cusp of being irrelevancies in the 70s before unjustified authority of individual personalities in early computing and the counter-culture movement caused a collapse. It wasn't about the tech, or what was possible, or what people were willing to do for free, it was about a change in assumptions to keep it in line with archaic points of view that supported pre-existing unjustified authorities across authoritarian economics as a whole (sort of a feedback loop, one that could only be exploded with liberty-centric thinking, i.e. not listening to charismatic Luddite hippy personalities or greedy top-down capitalist tightfists about what possibilities mean to a truly liberatory vision for a society or a technology). But let's break it down point for point:

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You need to make a thread about anarcho-communism. I really don't understand how it would work, unless you're just talking small enclaves of likeminded people. I can see how you could go from private to personal property as in many other anarchist schools, but beyond that you lost me. I can also see some people using labor economy (though a traditional economy is likely to coexist), but I can't grok a gift economy working on a wide scale in a specialized society.

[b]Point 1:[/b] Because I mentioned that my variety of libertarianism is the original coinage, the anti-authoritarian libertarianism of anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, it was assumed that my stance is anarcho-communist. However, like a lot of left-libertarians, the fact that I agree that liberty opposes authority does not make me a member of the particular school of thought that Déjacque belongs to. Libertarian socialists and libertarian communists (the latter of whom fairly cogently argue that one could call Déjacque a libertarian communist, given his critiques of Proudhon's mutualism and coinage of the term libertarian, but it's a contentious points for anarcho-communists and lib-coms alike who draw lines in the sand, and largely a ridiculous pissing contest, so I'll leave it at this bracketed aside), along with many anarchists who don't like to label themselves anti-anything but whose anti-authoritarianism can best be expressed with their positive, constructive criticisms of what kinds of authority can be justified from the standpoint of being "pro-liberty" in the sense of Déjacque. Hence the many leftist critiques of American right-libertarianism as oxymoronic, given that the liberties asked for include (just as one example in a sea of hypocrisy) "free" markets, i.e. the freedom for someone to be a boss. The freedom for a king to continue being a king is not liberty, but authority, and it's fairly clear how incompatible it would be to argue for a king's "liberty" to oppose the liberty of a mass of people, however much that king may profit from it or however much it could be argued his freedom of rule might (if he [i]happened[/i] to be beneficent) benefit his countryman as much as the abstraction of his country on the world stage (in practice, the latter is more often what tended to benefit, because that benefits the king in the foreign relations realpolitik of authoritarian states more than attempting to have everyone in the nation's lives improved). From a socialist/anarchist perspective (and from a communist perspective, although authoritarian communists like Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, etc muddy the waters for people unfamiliar with 20th/21st century post-Marxist communist critiques of authoritarianism that often fall within Déjacque's definition of libertarian), giving a boss the "freedom" in a market to hire people under the wage system and have "freedom" to run his corner of the wage system however he wants varies only by degree from the unjustified authority of a king. Still unjustified authority. Same as the unjustified authority of the authoritarian communists from Lenin onwards. Veteran of the Russian Revolution and anarchist G.P. Maximov's [i]The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution[/i] is instructive on why Marxists who go back to Lenin and say, "Stalin fucked it up, but Lenin was [b]great[/b]!" are complete morons with no knowledge of history (or closet authoritarians). To give an example of bosslessness in the heart of capitalism from my personal life: at an office job, one week our direct report supervisor, their supervisor, the manager of our department and our manager's boss, as well as two out of the three other supervisors under the manager all became severely sick. A few were only gone for a week, some (including the manager and the manager's direct report) were sick for a month. The one supervisor was looking after what the company considered to be the more important departments, and we were left to our own devices from necessity. We were given auto-approves for things we normally had to go above ourselves for, and our efficiency increased in the week we were completely alone above every department in the company. It was noted, however, that we talked too much by people from other departments who came through our area during that week. We increased profits, reduced time between calls we took drastically, churned through more work, finished up every dangling department project that was "in the red" (their company slang for "should've been done weeks ago" and began and then finished work on the projects that had been assigned in the week prior (a speed of project completion never achieved before in the history of the company), and all while we were basically goofing off in between calls and doing the between call banter that our supervisor and supervisor's supervisor crapped down our throats about when they were in the office. Interestingly, I stumbled across this interview on Monday, the subject of which is the bleeding edge of big data/scientific analysis of social interaction (the pet term here is "social physics")/application of big data and social physics in capitalist economic relations with Professor Alex Pentland, who actually endorses some frighteningly authoritarian solutions to things because of his own un-analyzed tabula rasa(s), so don't take this as an endorsement of everything he says: http://www.wnyc.org/story/social-physics-how-good-ideas-spread/ But if you listen to this, it sounds like not only is his research that reveals that co-workers who "waste time" (from the perspective of the corporate world) talking amongst themselves and otherwise being "unproductive" to a degree the top-down capitalist world is not comfortable with become [b]more productive workers[/b] very compatible with my own experience of being without bosses (Pentland doesn't make that mental connection in his research or in this interview) but the research is not even [b]new[/b] (the host mentions precursor studies regarding more industrial workplaces that happened decades ago), and the managers and bosses are referred to as the "gatekeepers" of these ideas. Imagine what kind of efficiency increases, just from the perspective of a top-down authoritarian capitalist organization's profit margins, would have came out of letting their employees interact with natural social creativity across all sectors of an economy! Pentland is arguing the bosses need to stop doing the only thing they seem to do in the workplace, based on his intrusive big data conclusions that were inferred by rational anarchists in the 19th century. Again, Pentland's tabula rasa(s) are far from blank (or else the slates' materials are something he doesn't realize look less like slate and more like the tanned hide of human agency, slain with arrows of tacit disrespect for that agency), but it's interesting that more and more, the academy finds itself accidentally confirming what those on the left have been shouting from amongst the oppressed on the bottom of unjustified hierarchies for years...but again, not quite skeptical enough to see that no bosses means effective self-organizing. This even with the historical example of horizontal, leaderless workplaces of anarcho-syndicalist workers in Catalonia and Aragon pre-Franco and their mind-blowing productivity increases, or the productivity increases of the leaderless Soviets that were torpedo'd by sending representatives of the authoritarian bureaucracy in Moscow to restore worker relations to "bosses over workers" that they had fought so hard to change...but anyway, enough digression here. Basic thesis buried in my rambling: anarcho-communism isn't necessarily the answer. Any given flavour of anarchism, socialism or communism aren't necessarily going to be the answer. Endless divisions and factionalism on the left aren't necessarily the answer (although a fertile ground of ideas can generate answers, done right, so I'm not knocking the diversity of the left, just the antagonistic way it tends to manifest). But the answers seem to be found in not taking a vocal stance of liberty that actually endorses unjustified authority, and being skeptical of any authority until it can justify itself. I haven't ever seen anything that justifies the authority of the wage system or bosses sufficiently to defeat previously and currently existing counter-examples of human economic and political organization. [b]Point 2:[/b] Small enclaves of like-minded people are exactly what the internet enables on a global scale. I already went into it under Point 1, but we've had the tech and the ability to do this since the late 60s/early 70s. I, for one, would totally volunteer to run a node for free! Not everyone would do that, but not everyone orients themselves towards liberty these days. Since I've already gone into some detail on that, I'll leave Point 2 as is and open it to questions. [b]Point 3:[/b] The private property/personal property distinction is, to me, still a question of whether authority can be justified. To leave the property example for a minute, say you round a corner and see an old man grab a child and yank the child out of view into an alley. You run up, and before you have a chance to yell at the old man holding the sobbing child tight against him, someone runs up from the other direction and says, "That was amazing, I caught that all on my phone! You saved her life!" and the old man says, "Of course, she's my granddaughter." From your angle, you just saw something that had the potential of being a very serious misuse of adult authority, perhaps leading to something no one could justify under any circumstances, like violence or even sexual violence. But as the person with the cell phone can show you, from another angle it is clear that a grandparent walking with his granddaughter saw that she was going to follow a dropped marble into traffic and yanked her back from being hit by a vehicle that, because human perception and mental processing often occludes important information when you zero in on one thing. Clearly, he could justify his authority in that moment. We'll assume for the sake of argument that the grandpa exercising this authority is the person from whom I ganked and slightly modified the example, Noam Chomsky, so it is very likely that he respects the autonomy of his grandchildren and rarely exercises any kind of authority that has not been submitted to a rigorous test of justification. A grandparent yelling judgemental things about how their grandchild can and can't dress based on outmoded ideas of a gender binary and fears of sexualities that exist outside of their own heterosexuality? Beating said kid? These are questions of justification that have different answers from different grandpas, and different answers from different societies. When you leave the individual and go society to society, some clear ideas about stances towards authority vs. liberty are usually drawn by just about anyone, but when you zoom in to the individual within that person's nation, it can be a divisive issue. I'd argue that angry grandpa is completely unjustified whether it's just yelling or a beating. I think people who disagree with that have ideas of family that include some pretty archaic views of people as property implicit in their un-analyzed "tabula rasa" they write their opinions on. Now, human beings are not any other human being's property (unless you're an Uzbekistani cotton producer selling to H&M's suppliers prior to 2013, to give a modern example of still existing slavery that may adorn anyone you know wearing cotton H&M products purchased almost any time in H&M's history as a company outside of the last couple of years, just in case you don't think capitalism has authoritarian consequences even outside of banks, energy conglomerates and/or weapons R&D), but to extend the test of whether authority is justified or not from the muddy waters of authority over people (or clear waters if you're a bit more liberty-centric and respectful of human agency), property seems a bit less muddy. Can someone justify their authority over your personal collection of love letters from your life-long lover and partner? Probably not, unless maybe it's said partner on their way out of your life. Now if you have a garage that doubles as a workshop, and you have tons of tools, but you're the only one in your household using those tools, what's the muddying of the waters about tools that aren't currently in use? Why not label the tools you're using and leave the garage door open? This isn't an abstract question though, I've had friends where not just one person in a communal household but almost the entire household use the tools in the garage, but they still went around to their neighbours and let them know that tools without post-it notes on them were free for use, you just had to take a post-it and leave a note where the tool was with your name and contact info, and how long you estimate you need it for (this is in the days before the proliferation of free registration websites for tool swapping, community garden sharing and so on that make this [i]even easier[/i] today). Some people muddy the waters with, I feel, an unjustified authority over their tools. One could justify it by saying that someone might break and not replace a tool, but in the two instances where my friends' communal household had a neighbour damage a tool, they quickly replaced it. I'm not saying everyone would do that, but then again, not everyone has the same liberty-centric ideas about how to relate to other human beings. Then you're talking about at what rate will idea penetration achieve critical mass, and I have no idea when that'll be any more than Kant or Leibniz had any idea what exact year most kids in school would be taught science and mathematics more advanced than anything being taught in the universities of their day... [b]Point 4:[/b] Labor economies vs. gift economies vs. "traditional" top-down authoritarian economies, I feel, are sort of a moot point. What we should be doing is self-organizing without the top-down metrics and then figuring out what that looks like one step at a time. Will that be rough? Sure. Rougher than the effect our minority world has on the majority world (social work courses have drilled first/third and developed/developing out of me), as evidenced by the widespread slavery in the majority world needed to manage no slavery in the minority world? Absolutely not. People just don't want the responsibility of actual freedom for everyone. The level of irresponsibility and laziness required to maintain our bloated wealth on the backs of economies annexed by and controlled by our economies? Not freedom. Free markets? We see what happens when those happen, because they are enforced in the majority world by minority world free market ideologues, whether state actors or corporate actors. I'm not saying government regulation is the answer, because government regulation of authoritarian economics just displaces the inequalities out of sight in the hopes that a populace won't care about it if it's far enough from home. There should be no unelected political authoritarians, whether dukes, lords, barons, tyrants, dictators, fascists, emperors, kings, military rule, whatever. There should also be no unelected economic authoritarians, whether supervisors, managers, bosses, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, Presidents, VPs, Chairmen of the Board(s) (or other Board Members), whatever. People should be able to, from the bottom-up, decide for their own community what is best for their community, and then network with other like-minded communities to figure out where to go from there when it comes to redistributing things for free to the areas most in need of (for example) food, medical aid, raw materials for the construction of safe shelter, etc. It's not that it's impossible, it's that different localities will inevitably have different problems and different solutions. Those solutions do not need to be authoritarian, that's all I'm saying. I think that people are attached to tacit assumptions about what authority is justified without having actually critically addressed whether that authority is actually justified, in short. I hope I've shown a little peek into why I think that, even though (like anything) it's largely subjective based on my subjective opinion that liberty trumps authority every time, and the artificial meaning (as we live in a universe without meaning) which I inject into left-libertarianism that amounts to an aesthetic appreciation of living in a world where what I find beautiful in human diversity and the interaction of that diversity flourishes creatively and freely with respect for each individual aspect of that diversity enshrined in bottom-up respect for liberty rather than top-down imposed authority. I also might just read too much and think too much. Questions? Comments? Critiques? I know I ramble a lot, so I apologize if this was confusing to pick through. I've been simultaneously listening to an EP AP, making breakfast and writing this, so I also apologize for any spelling/grammar errors the red lines didn't catch as I was writing.