Ancom is an ideology based on the premise that individualism spoils people. A person owes too much to society and therefore must take it into account. It may be necessary to seize public resources for one’s own benefit because without this, the existence of the individual is impossible; however, the prosperity of society is primary, and then it shares with people from the common pot. Therefore, for ancoms, any separation of property from society to a specific individual must be justified.
Usually, they distinguish a category such as personal property and define it as things used for consumption rather than production. Personal property is halal, private property is haram. Clearly, this definition relies more on tradition and suffers from many flaws. I would rather suggest a slightly different criterion. It is appropriate to treat items as personal property if their use by an individual seriously reduces the attractiveness of their use for other individuals. For example, a handkerchief, a toothbrush, or socks are more appropriately personal property after the very first act of use, whereas while they lie untouched in a warehouse, they are, of course, public. A cup, for instance, might be personal property in some places and public in others; this is already a matter of local tradition. I also find it more comfortable to use a personal computer rather than configuring a public one every time as I prefer. Although, to a certain extent, the issue is solved by personal accounts on a public computer.
An anarcho-communist society can afford more personal property the wealthier it is as a whole.
Left-libertarianism is an ideology that does not encroach upon individualism as seriously. The interests of the individual are primary. But a person still owes too much to society and must take it into account. Nevertheless, due to the primacy of individual interests, for left-libertarians, any separation of property from the individual to society must be justified.
Usually, they distinguish a category such as public goods and define them as positive effects of human activity for which it is extremely difficult to ensure exclusive access. Due to this characteristic, public goods are difficult to monetize; therefore, they are presumably underproduced relative to easily monetizable market private goods. Thus, for left-libertarians, the production of public goods is a fairly strong justification for forcibly separating private property in favor of society.
Unfortunately, as soon as the production of a public good begins to be provided forcibly, it triggers a positive feedback loop, since the producer of the public good is now interested in producing as much of it as possible and demanding as large a budget as possible for it. And suddenly, the impoverished Soviet Union finds itself ahead of the entire planet in the field of ballet.
I do not know how left-libertarianism solves the problem of “when to stop forced redistribution in favor of society.” In my view, the absence of a clear boundary criterion is precisely what makes this ideology stillborn.
I will note that an ancap has such a boundary condition. When does an ancap decide that he has shared enough with society and no longer intends to? When he wants to. He treated passers-by to rakia, received enough respect, and then went home, happy, to finish the leftovers.
Yesterday I took part in mini-debates on the subject, where in my opening statement I expressed an interesting thought that I hadn’t encountered in other sources before, so I’ll post it here, unedited.
The state exists in people’s minds: exactly where all ideas exist. Similarly, all ideas about how society should be organized exist in people’s minds. Therefore, the only way to overcome the state is to instill in people a complete conviction that this crap is not needed.
It is far more interesting what ideas can replace the idea of the necessity of the state. In small communities where everyone is more or less acquainted, relationships are more often built on various collectivist values—it’s more convenient. In families, communist relations usually dominate. Similarly, communist relations prove quite natural for anarchic communities as long as they remain modest in size—even if that society shares ancap ideas. Ancaps give free public lectures, donate to each other for various projects, and volunteer so much it’s mind-boggling. Where, one might ask, is the cold world of pure profit, the maximization of profit, and other purely theoretical constructs? It’s all cooperation and the joy of joint creativity. Therefore, paradoxically, ancaps develop a strange doublethink in themselves, where the market is supposed to settle things, but for some reason, mutual aid does.
As a community grows, ancaps naturally need to mature, learn how to make money by satisfying market demand, and establish coordination between specialized organizations—but, of course, bypassing state restrictions. The world of ancom, warm and cozy, falters when scaling in the face of complex division of labor, competition, and other things unpleasant to a child’s mind. Ancom is already felt within small communities today, and therefore seems utterly real. Ancap can be traced in individual phenomena, such as the world of cryptocurrencies, black markets, and the like. A certain level of abstract thinking is required to see in this the engine of the future world order.
So I see nothing particularly terrible in the fact that people begin their acquaintance with anarchy specifically with anarcho-communism. The wider the movement becomes, the further it will move away from its original ideals and approach ancap. Many ideological ancaps started as communists. The most famous example is, of course, Hoppe. Examples of the reverse transition are hardly observed. Therefore, I wish for this community, without losing harmony with the real world, to eventually master the entire aesthetic of capitalist relations as truly just.
In a chibi version, ancap inevitably looks like a gift economy, i.e., ancom
Imagine the following situation. You are the director of the “Ancapistan” insurance company, which governs a certain territory. I am the speaker for the “Ancomistan” commune (we have no leader, but I am usually entrusted with conducting meetings and going on diplomatic trips on behalf of the commune), which also owns a certain territory. We share a common water border on a lake. Ancapistan is on the right bank of the lake, and Ancomistan is on the left. Almost the entire coastline of Ancapistan, except for a single shipping port, belongs to one private individual who uses the water for his chemical plants. You supply us with fertilizers and complex machinery, and we supply you with agricultural products, timber, and metals.
Then, at one fine moment, the aforementioned private individual begins to delay the replacement of filters, and many toxic substances enter the water. Since we share a common lake, several dozen people in Ancomistan (the lake is our only external water resource, whereas you also have a river on your territory) drink water from this lake, and all of them perish. And here is where it gets interesting. In Ancomistan, negligence resulting in grave consequences is punished by 15-20 years of hard labor for the benefit of the commune or by death by hanging. In Ancapistan, it is punished only by compensating the victims for damages. I hold a meeting where I raise the question of how to assess the damages for compensation. 5% of the communards suggest taking money and placing it in the commune’s account at the bank for international trade, 10% suggest sending the private individual to 15-20 years of hard labor, and 85% suggest the gallows, given the cynicism of valuing lives in money. In the end, the commune issues a death sentence and instructs me to send an extradition request. You offer to compensate for the damages, but I show you the paper with the commune’s resolution and continue to insist on extradition. Upon receiving a refusal, I state that in this case, the commune will completely stop supplying resources to Ancapistan and stop buying from it. If we sever trade relations, Ancapistan will lose one of its markets for selling and buying resources. Besides Ancomistan, the only other raw material territories nearby are in Anprimistan. You can sell finished products to them, but due to their poverty, they will not buy your products at the high price we pay. Also, due to the higher complexity of resource extraction, they will not sell you resources at the low price Ancomistan provides.
Ancomistan itself will simply drill water wells and sign a trade contract with Transgumistan, which sells and buys products at almost the same price but is located slightly further away than Ancapistan. As a result, you will have an economic crisis, while our standard of living will practically remain unchanged. Question: will you extradite the private individual to Ancomistan and thereby violate the NAP regarding him, or will you lose one of your markets for buying and selling resources and find yourself in a deep crisis?
Ancom-kun (question accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00023397 BTC)
Thank you for this long and interesting story, which demonstrates the problems a territorial commune may face. Fortunately, Ancapistan is merely an insurance company. We insure lives, real estate, transport, risks of industrial disasters, and so on. The fact that an insured enterprise failed to change filters on time and we did not find out about it (although non-compliance with technical regulations by the insured party is grounds for terminating the contract or revising the premium size due to increased risk) means only one thing: our employee was negligent or was bribed by the insured enterprise. Naturally, this means we fire our agent and revise our own regulations to prevent this from happening again. We also refuse to pay insurance to the insured company and sue it for fraud—they did not perform the procedures required by the regulations but did not inform us, thereby saving on insurance premiums. If other clients approach us for insurance due to the lake pollution (for example, fishermen or travel agencies whose activities are affected), we will have to pay them premiums, after which we will file claims against the enterprise for reimbursement of our losses.
Additionally, it seems we insured the life of the enterprise owner. This contract remains in effect, and we are obliged to prevent attempts on his life within the limit of expenses agreed upon by the insurance premium. So, we either take him under protection or provide him with a comfortable shelter and give him the opportunity to safely negotiate with Ancomistan to settle the claims.
Furthermore, Ancomistan takes a principled stand and insists on executing the businessman who offended them, refusing all his offers of financial compensation, even the transfer of the plant to the commune’s ownership. Therefore, the businessman continues to stay in the shelter and manage the plant from there. When the time comes to renew the insurance contract, we face a dilemma: either refuse the renewal or set an exorbitant price, because we are effectively acting not as an insurer, but as a security company. In the end, we reach an agreement: he continues to pay the bills, and we continue to protect him.
After this, Ancomistan begins to blackmail our other clients, threatening them with the termination of contracts if we do not hand over the criminal. We realize that further protection is impractical and finally terminate the contract with him. The former client, not being a fool, immediately signs a contract with another security company operating in the middle of nowhere, and they organize his evacuation. Then, being physically several thousand kilometers away from the vengeful commune, he continues negotiations with them, because he does not wish to wake up one fine day with an ice pick in his head. But his negotiating position becomes stronger, as it is more difficult for the commune in this situation to pressure his new security company. Therefore, most likely, after some time, you will reach some compromise with him.
The question of your sanctions against my insurance company remains. We protected our client within the framework of the contract, and as for what “extradition” is, we don’t understand it at all, because in our language it is called “kidnapping.” Refusing to protect is one thing, but kidnapping a person and handing them over to some bandits for subsequent execution is something entirely different. Nevertheless, we bear part of the responsibility to the commune because we poorly monitored our agent who was tasked with overseeing the compliance of technical regulations for our client. We offer Ancomistan compensation, and since there is no question of direct guilt in this case, we will most likely reach an agreement. After this, I have a claim against our former employee, but that is a completely different story.
On the left-anarchist channel Prometheus, the analysis of an overview article on libertarianism from the LPR website continues. Once again, the focus is on the non-aggression principle. The article under discussion simply explains what this principle is and indicates that it pertains to ethics. It is implied that the mechanisms for implementing this ethical principle are also ethical, meaning reputational. Naturally, the opponent notes that an ethical principle is an extremely shaky foundation for building a society.
Next, there are many reflections on how, in the author’s opinion, a libertarian society should ensure compliance with the aforementioned principle. Naturally, private military companies are mentioned—heaven forbid—and it is then quite logically pointed out that if they are hired by end clients for aggressive operations against competitors, everything will degenerate into the right of the strongest, and subsequently into the reinstallment of the state. Logistic problems are also pointed out, as a result of which each territory would be “protected” by its own security forces, and deploying security forces from a foreign territory would prove to be a costly endeavor.
What nuances did the author fail to consider?
Firstly, for some reason, he considers a situation in which certain private military companies have a monopoly on violence and contrasts them with classical anarchy, based on universal armament and voluntary territorial militias. But under free market conditions, anyone who wishes has the right to arm themselves, not just licensed companies, so potential lawlessness will be countered not by a powerless crowd, but by armed people.
Secondly, the insurance principle of the functioning of any rights enforcement companies is completely ignored. A situation in which a person hires thug-bodyguards is marginal. Much more often, a person simply buys insurance, and if they are attacked and suffer damage, it is an insurance event, and they can expect a payout from the company. This removes logistic problems (the insurance company has its own agreements with various local security groups for rapid response to serious insurance events, and for minor ones, it simply pays out the insurance and doesn’t sweat it). I won’t recount the script of my video on ancap; I just recommend watching it.
However, the fact that all these questions surfaced during the analysis of the article on libertarianism can safely be attributed to the article’s shortcomings. I hope someone from the LPR editorial staff considers this high-quality feedback from an ideologically kindred organization and uses it to improve the material.
Taking this opportunity, I will also announce that our next video will be entirely dedicated to the non-aggression principle. The video is currently being filmed. I hope we will also be able to resolve some of the left-wing audience’s questions regarding this principle.
Regarding yesterday’s note on comparing Bitcoin with low-inflation fiat, I received a detailed response. In short, it postulates the importance of stable prices when using a currency as a medium of exchange. To ensure this, a decentralized cryptocurrency fiat is proposed: a crypto whose emission parameters are set by a vote of the currency holders.
To this, I can briefly respond: if anything is a fundamental property of prices, it is their variability. Price carries information about the relative need for goods for specific buyers at a specific moment. If you want the price of a specific good, expressed in a specific currency, to remain unchanged, your only option is to peg the exchange rate of that currency to the value of that good—effectively backing the currency with the commodity. There is no problem with creating a Bitcoin sidechain, freezing a certain amount of Bitcoins, and pegging the tokens issued against them, for example, to oil. That’s it; now one barrel of, say, Brent costs one token. Always. You just have to monitor the collateral size, because if oil becomes significantly more expensive in Bitcoins, the collateral will have to be increased. At the same time, when buying some aluminum or grain with “oilcoins,” you will inevitably encounter price changes.
But all of this has nothing to do with direct democracy, because you can never predict in advance what emission parameters the holders of your crypto-fiat will set. Perhaps they won’t want stable prices for some basket of consumer goods, but will simply take advantage of the fact that the emitter always profits from emission—and issue more tokens to quickly buy up Bitcoins with them. Or do you intend to build a managed democracy and prevent holders from acting so unsightly?
After logically poking at the boundary conditions of the two principles (if a person belongs to themselves, they should be entitled to sell themselves, and may also be stripped of themselves by court decision; as for the application of the non-aggression principle, everything boils down to the definition of aggression, which is subjective, and one cannot build stable orders on such a shaky foundation), they point out that left-anarchism has a solution. As a solution, that same direct democracy is proposed: all orders are established by all members of society.
Here I can only point out that a society of total direct democracy would require some criteria for who to include in the set of voters for each specific issue. Where is the line that, once crossed, a person loses the right to vote on a certain topic because it does not concern them? If there is no such line, we get a society where everyone is obliged to ask everyone’s permission for everything—a legal absurdity worse than the city of Morlow from Interstate 60. I hope to see an answer in the following parts of the review (in the article I analyzed, there is no such answer).
The image of legal absurdity—may it haunt you as well
Lately in Russia, it has become very simple to understand who possesses political agency. They are the ones the state fights against. If the state is not fighting someone, it means they are either completely under control or staying out of sight: the Russian state seems to have completely forgotten how to tolerate those who conduct noticeable independent activities.
By this criterion, it is difficult to deny political agency to the Russian anarcho-communists of Narodnaya Samoborona: they are actively persecuted, and most of their activities are forced to take place under the mask of anonymity, but if anyone is caught, it is almost always criminal charges, torture, and other trash.
I tried to examine their platform to understand how promising these guys are as allies and how dangerous they are as enemies. On the movement’s website, it is presented as a rather voluminous text. It consists of four parts; I will go through them.
This section describes how ancoms view the modern world order and its main problems. It discusses the division of labor between countries: raw material providers, industrial nations, sources of labor migrants — and the post-industrial peak of the food chain, for which all the above categories of countries toil. It is pointed out that as wealth grows in industrial countries, production must be moved to places where cheap labor still exists. It is also mentioned that the social democracy of first-world countries is a fragile compromise between power and society, maintained only through the exploitation of the rest of the world. Countries that generate problems, according to the author, fight to raise their status within this system, rather than to change the system itself. Finally, it is explained that escaping the system within a single country is impossible, because isolation from the world economy condemns a country to barbarism and poverty.
I will note that the description is generally quite correct, while the analysis is conducted in terms of almost Marxism; and although the growth of welfare in developing countries is noted, the beneficial role of the market is ignored, as is the fact that the described distribution of countries according to their place in the global division of labor correlates best with the level of economic freedom in those countries.
This section provides a historical overview of the emergence of modern types of states, stating that modern states are a product of capitalism. It discusses the growth of inequality and globalization as a logical result of the functioning of capitalism. Examples are used to explain that the state is not required for the self-organization of society, but is needed only to legitimize plunder. It is stated that all forms of state organization fail to fully account for the interests of people, and therefore there is no need to try to improve the state; it must be abolished. It also discusses the dangers of new platform-type businesses, which, in exchange for their services, place a person in a serious state of dependence on them.
I will note that the historical analysis overlooks the fact that capitalism appeared not thanks to, but despite the state: the old aristocracy was quite satisfied with total stability, and only the military efficiency of capitalism forced the state to make concessions and restructure. I also consider it important to mention that the basis of capitalism is not so much wage labor as the possibility of replacing labor with capital — it is this that increases labor productivity and, subsequently, its price.
This section describes a wonderful humanity of the future, representing a federation of direct-democracy poleis — something like the Athenian League from Themistocles to Pericles, but without a hegemon polis, and with robots instead of slaves. Instead of the market, decentralized planning should be the basis of the economy, with the collection of requests from consumers and their aggregation in automated production management systems. The problem of corruption in management and distribution is solved by frequent rotation, full involvement of citizens in the process, and where possible, the replacement of elections for positions with a lottery. To simplify distribution, comprehensive prosumerization is envisioned, where people use 3D printers and similar tools rather than ordering a finished product. Money and private property are abolished.
I will note that the author is clearly more familiar with history than with economic theory, and perhaps his views on planning will change somewhat after becoming acquainted with the impossibility theorem of economic calculation under socialism. Also completely overlooked is the factor of the lack of natural motivation for innovations, and especially for their implementation, within a planned economy. Finally, it would be good to understand to what extent the factor of the tyranny of the majority is overcome in the new society, when direct democracy tramples human freedom, forcing the individual to submit to the collective on issues that do not actually directly concern the collective. These aspects are not analyzed in the text at all.
In the final and most extensive part, the methods for building a new society are discussed. It is stated that one should not search for a permanent revolutionary class; instead, it is more important to find those with whom there is a commonality of interests. The possibility of reforming the system is categorically denied, and the necessity of its collapse is postulated. Direct action is recognized as the best way to accustom people to anarchist doctrine — the transmission of the practice of self-organization to solve various tasks through direct experience and personal example. It is pointed out that although social revolution is the only possible way to transition to a new society, it is fraught with the emergence of a revolutionary dictatorship, through which the state inevitably revives. It is also shown that early ancom societies will be forced during the transition period to operate within the global market economy — which, in turn, can easily turn any cooperative into an ordinary capitalist enterprise; therefore, once started, one must not stop but finish off capitalism worldwide.
The prospects for Russia to become the flagship of the transition to a new society are seen by the author as extremely low, so a long period of underground activity with a gradual growth of the activist network is predicted. It is stated that it is important to create not large leadership structures, but a network of small groups with maximum participant involvement and an emphasis on passing experience from veterans to neophytes. The author suggests approaching violent actions with extreme caution, as they can both inspire supporters and lead to the destruction of cells and even networks due to the reaction of the state security apparatus. Pro-state paramilitaries are indicated as a suitable target for training and demonstrating combat capabilities, as the state will not step in for them. Finally, advice on conspiracy and psychological preparation is given.
The section ends with an ellipsis: the author lists many dangers, points out that none of the previously practiced paths is capable of leading to victory on its own, and that the movement will remain marginal for a long time.
I really liked this chapter, where the author finally moves from the shaky ground of theory to things he clearly understands well and weighs all dangers quite soberly.
Summary
For me, it was important to understand what these ancoms hate more: the state or private property. If it is the former, then we are on the same path for now. If the latter, then it is better to leave them to themselves and not touch them first, while being ready to respond harshly to violence. Fortunately, it seems there is more common sense in them than outdated political-economic ideas, and the obvious bandit that the state is appears to them as a more priority target than well-meaning but mistaken guys like us, the ancaps: they are nonetheless more ready to persuade us than to kill us.
Therefore, I would like to suggest the unknown author of the text discussed above, or any other sufficiently authoritative ancom, to return the favor and analyze the libertarian platform for strengths and weaknesses, inconsistencies, prospects for alliance, and so on. As a basis for analysis, I suggest using the text on libertarianism from the Libertarian Party website — it is detailed enough, yet relatively compact, and has the advantage of being a more or less official document, which my articles, for example, are not.
And after both sides are convinced that there is a minimum understanding between them, it will be possible to consider the possibilities for cooperation.
