Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract: “We undertake to give you the use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with those you like for recreation, art, or science, according to the bent of your taste.
“Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in a group producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public health, transport, etc., is all we ask of you. For this work we guarantee to you all that these groups produce or will produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation, will receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely incapable of producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then live like an isolated man or like an invalid. If we are rich enough to give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to you. You are a man, and you have the right to live. But as you wish to live under special conditions, and leave the ranks, it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society, unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing necessary work for you.
“And lastly, if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions else where in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own.”
-Pëtr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
Ok so in that aspect it is similar to Ancap too in that they will help if they are able (rich enough) but otherwise pretty much the same thing. That was ACTUALLY the information I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to share that passage.
Alright, @bacchist, let me try to comprehend this. In a Communist society, the government would (ideally) redistribute goods in such a way that every man would be compensated according to his needs. Every man should then (ideally) work according to his ability, except there would be no actual economic incentive to do so.
As far as I understand it, the argument is as follows: Anarcho-Communism would eliminate the need for any incentive, since freedom of association would instead allow the rest of society to simply penalise those who are unproductive,
But it still doesn't explain how to determine what is needed. What if, hypothetically speaking, everyone decided to produce the exact same thing? How would it, for instance, be determined who should carry out the most strenuous manual labour?
If everyone is allowed to choose for themselves the work they want to do, then, surely, no-one would want to work harder than others. And if everyone chose the easiest job and simply produced the same thing, they would be unable to punish each other for being "unproductive".
Even though everyone would be forced to be productive (owing to freedom of association), it seems to me that – as @dwinblood pointed out – there would be a need for some sort of central planning to ensure that this productivity be put most efficiently to use.
According to communist theory, there would be no state. The end goal of communism is a stateless society. The problem is that the strategy used by a lot of communist movements historically has relied on seizing state control.
But I digress. Generally speaking, human beings are intelligent enough to realize that they need to have different people working on different tasks in order to accomplish the various needs of a society. These things can be worked out and agreed upon in a decentralized fashion.
If people can't be trusted to figure this out on their own, adding money to the mix isn't going to magically solve the problem.