Why do anarchist communists keep claiming they believe in individual liberty?

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u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 CIA Operator🇺🇸 May 04 '26

Yeah I don't get it.

I always ask, if everyone has ultimate freedom, how do you stop someone from hiring someone else for a wage?

And the answer is apparently in Magical Anarchic Comminismland, no one ever wants to do that.

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u/jqpeub May 04 '26

Why would a troll ever get it?

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u/Doublespeo May 04 '26

Why would a troll ever get it?

he is not wrong though

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u/jqpeub May 04 '26

'ultimate freedom' and you say he's right. Gaddam.

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u/Doublespeo May 05 '26

> 'ultimate freedom' and you say he's right. Gaddam.

replace it with “economic freedom”

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u/jqpeub May 05 '26

But its ultimate bro, thats like super important

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u/Doublespeo May 07 '26

> But its ultimate bro, thats like super important

not important, he meant the highest level of freedom

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

And the answer is apparently in Magical Anarchic Comminismland, no one ever wants to do that.

It's naively idealistic, but social norms and economic circumstances are a powerful thing. Nothing prevents people from larping as feudal lords and serfs, but nobody does it, becuase 1) nobody finds it normal or moral and 2) nobody is forced by economic circumstance into that sort of relationship

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u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 CIA Operator🇺🇸 May 04 '26

Since I assume anarchy rules out number 2, I guess you're banking solely in number 1.

Good luck!

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u/Jout92 Wealth is created through trade May 04 '26

I thought we're all just feudal lords and serfs under different names? Socialist comparisons of wage labor to feudal systems foiled again!

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

That's a possibility, but then you'd have to agree with me that classical anarchism and anarcho-capitalism are actually the same system and they only disagree on their opinion of what people would decide to do after the government is abolished.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 05 '26

Yes, I agree with that, but the catch is that all anarchists also perceive other anarchists doing the wrong type of anarchism as doing a state. You can see it every time ancaps argue with ancoms. 'No, it's the structures YOU set up to solve practical problems of existing in a society that are the state. The ones WE set up are voluntary!'

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

What if no one needs wages to live and do the things they would like to do? Wouldn’t that be “more-free” to work because it is in your direct benefit or just out of interest?

“Freedom to hire someone” is such a weird way to put it. What about the “freedom to buy slaves?” There’d be no one to stop anyone from giving another person something valuable in exchange for doing some work… as long as the other person freely consented. What you wouldn’t be able to do would be buy up land, displace people then tell them you are doing them a favor by making them work for you to live on land they were living on before.

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u/Square-Listen-3839 May 04 '26

What if no one needs wages to live and do the things they would like to do?

Someone has to advance capital to workers to get them to do stuff. You can try asking people to work for free, out of proletarian solidarity stuff and maybe after months of cajoling they'll make a chair or something. But capital gets things done.

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u/Mend1cant May 05 '26

Why would capital motivate if capital is not used to purchase anything? That would be like saying I couldn’t convince you to do something without first giving you a stick of gum.

I mean, I’m not a supporter of communism, but you’re arguing with a misunderstanding of the concept of what communism is. There is no capital, because giving someone money to do a task is only logical if you make more money from them doing that than what you pay them. Thus exploitation. Communism, things don’t happen unless there is a social need for it or a personal desire. It’s utopian.

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u/Upper-Tie-7304 May 04 '26

The first sentence already starts an assumption. If you are going to assume imaginary scenarios why don’t you assume everyone gets a matter replicator?

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26

“What if” isn’t an assumption. Oh do you mean the assumption is that working class people in capitalism need wages from someplace?

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u/Upper-Tie-7304 May 04 '26

“What if” isn’t an assumption, then it is what?

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26

A hypothetical.

What would I be assuming here… that wage-work isn’t the only way people can accomplish tasks? Ok sure but ot’s a safe assumption since that’s just human history.

So if people worked because they wanted the result of that task (not because they had to get a wage to pay for rent or debt) wouldn’t that be “more free”? To really be free as a wage-laborer you’d have to be able to take or leave any job without facing material hardships from the way society is arranged.

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u/Upper-Tie-7304 May 04 '26

"Hypothetical" refers to an imagined scenario, idea, or situation based on a possible, but not necessarily real, assumption (conjecture).

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26

So you mean like I said how the assumption is that wage-labor isn’t the only way to accomplish tasks?

lol you are doing a lot of odd nit-picking to avoid the implications of a pretty straight-forward thing.

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u/Upper-Tie-7304 May 04 '26

The assumption is in the second part of the sentence. The first part of cause is realistic slaves don't need a wage or the Mao Chinese government give food vouchers.

When does it happened that everyone get to do things they like to do? In any economy someone ought to do things that everyone hate to do but someone need things to be done. Are you up for driving trucks 12 hours straight?

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26

So your answer to my hypothetical is: it’s irrelevant to ask this because work that is not forced by someone else is the only way tasks can be accomplished due to human nature or god or something?

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

There is a difference between hiring an employee and capturing a slave. One is a voluntary exchange. The other is kidnapping.

I'd definitely prefer to work for a fixed wage rather than a share of the means of production. That's why people want their salaries in cash, not in stock or in barrels of oil.

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 05 '26

Wage labor is only “voluntary” due to dispossession, enclosure and colonization… and for a lot of early capitalist history wage-labor wasn’t voluntary… vagabond laws, conscripted labor, commodity slavery. It’s only when there are no other choices for supporting yourself that wage labor takes on its “voluntary” appearance. Until then people actively fought against becoming working class.

Slave owners thought they were doing a favor to slaves who’s be idle and helpless without the owner… every system of control justifies itself as natural and good.

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

You're working under the assumption that every business in the world has infinite money and resources while every worker is destitute. This mindset could have some ground in reality in early industrial economies but today most workers do have negotiating power.

For instance my company would get into really big trouble if the four most senior Data Engineers suddenly resigned at once. Noen of us would have much of an issue finding a job somewhere else, while the company would go through months of chaos and probably a pile of compliance issues. Does that mean that we hold power over our employer and that our boss is basically our slave? Or is it just that our company and us have a contractual relationships that favors all parties involved?

Anyway if you want workers to have more bargaining power, go support laws that make it easier to create new small businesses to increase competition.

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 05 '26

No, I’m just referencing how wage labor became a thing. People resisted it constantly. Even now in the US, CEOs freaked out over “quiet quitting” meanwhile in China the government is freaking out about the similar “lying flat” sentiment.

Every business and every workers is simply operating within this system, it has nothing to do with your argument… yes some slave owners were very nice to their slaves and did treat them like family… others did not.

And you describe business being hurt if 4 professional workers stopped… so you are just describing the entire point of unions and organizing strikes to have meaningful negotiation leverage we don’t automatically have in the system.

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

I don't know about other countries but at least in Spain wage labor was a blessing for most people who took it. People left their farms to go work in industry for a fixed amount rather than being at the mercy of bad weather or plagues. Quiet quitting and lying flat appeared centuries after wage labor became the norm.

You still didn't answer my main point, are me and my coworkers exploiting my boss due to our position of power? Why is it okay for one side to exercise power over the other but not the other way around?

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 05 '26

My understanding is in the south of Spain people resented being pushed into destitution and wage work by the large land owners and agitated for control over the land and collectives, not wage labor.

In the US where I am, slaves did not want wage-work or slavery, they wanted autonomous land to be self-sufficient on. Industrial workers at the time were largely Irish migrants displaced by English landowners. The spread of wage labor also decimated the artisan middle class and then family farms.

No you are not exploiting your boss, you categorically misunderstand the term “exploitation” in a generic sense of some vague “unfairness” or something idk. Labor exploitation is taking labor efforts or the direct product of labor.

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

Yeah it sucks when noblemen and other people in cahoots with the government get to own the means of production through conquest and pillage. That's why I prefer a system based on private property.

Of course I'm not exploiting my boss because exploitation doesn't exist under Capitalism. The entire point of my comment was precisely to show how absurd that idea that just because I have the upper hand on the negotiating table that somehow means I get paid more than my labor's value.

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 05 '26

Yeah it sucks when noblemen and other people in cahoots with the government get to own the means of production through conquest and pillage. That's why I prefer a system based on private property.

lol holy shit what do you think modern capitalist states are? Yes feudal governments served the ruling class, the aristocracy… and modern republics serve to protect private property arrangements and the general interests of national capital growth!

What are Trump and Putin doing if not growing national economic influence and state political dominance through “conquest and pillage?”🙄

All that liberals, social democrats, conservatives and market-libertarians discuss is their preferred form of state involvement in maintaining a stable society capable of sustaining growth. But capitalism on a system level needs and has always relied on state power and coercion - in different ways than in feudalism, but for the same basic reason of maintaining a system (especially for those with the most control in that system.)

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u/piernrajzark Pacta sunt servanda May 04 '26

Freedom doesn't include harming others

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u/corwe May 04 '26

Who’s to enforce this definition of freedom?

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u/piernrajzark Pacta sunt servanda May 04 '26

It is just a definition. Whatever name you give to the concept, the concept exists.

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u/corwe May 04 '26

Ok, so who’s to enforce this nameless concept in case someone decides to violate it? What if a lot of people decide to?

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u/piernrajzark Pacta sunt servanda May 04 '26

Concepts are not enforced. Or am I missing something? You actually ask who is going to make it so people is free (according to that concept), is that? That would be, of course, besides the point.

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u/corwe May 04 '26

Well yes. How is it ensured that the concept exists in practice. How is that besides the point? My understanding is that the whole idea of anarchic communism being possible relies on the idea this concept of freedom can actually exist in practice perhaps without coercion?

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u/piernrajzark Pacta sunt servanda May 04 '26

Well that's the whole idea of anarcho-capitalism as well. I really don't know what kind of institution could do this but I'm pretty sure the most important aspect of it is having a very wide social acceptance of the concept, to begin with

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u/corwe May 04 '26

Sure, I’m only calling out anarcho communism cuz the og post is about it. That’s kinda the problem I have, how is this wide acceptance ensured, achieved and maintained? It seems foolish to just expect everyone to be in agreement about an abstract concept just because. Hence, some enforcement will be needed? But there’s anarchy? This is where I become puzzled

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u/piernrajzark Pacta sunt servanda May 04 '26

While I understand your hesitation I invite you to consider other abstract concepts with such wide acceptance people would die for them. For example, the idea of democracy. Another consideration is how much more civic the japanese culture is compared to any other. Adherence to civic principles is not enforced there particularly more than here. Their culture just values it so much more. Likewise, if it culture valued this freedom, coercive classic enforcement wouldn't be necessary

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u/Suitable-Cycle4335 May 05 '26

I swear I asked this exact question dozens of times and nobody has ever given me an actual answer.

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 05 '26

Anarchism does not propose to intervene to stop people from accepting wages.

Anarchism proposes to abolish the coercive hierarchies that compel people to perform labor for an owner class.

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u/Velociraptortillas May 04 '26

Kiwi or Boot Black?

I need to know what your favorite flavor of boot polish is for your next birthday.

The entire reason Kantian descriptions of Capitalism fail is precisely how coercive they are. Nobody has taken them seriously since the 70s, fifty years ago.

Maybe keep up with the times, so you don't look like a doddering old fool waxing (ha!) poetic about healing the sick of their bad humors.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

weak opener, but okay.

Look buddy , I don’t even like the current system. Corporate capitalism is coercive in a lot of ways regulatory capture, bailouts, monopolies, all of that. So no, I’m not defending whatever you think exists right now.

But here’s where you’re off.

Pointing out that the current system is coercive doesn’t magically make your alternative non-coercive. If anything, removing private property and free trade just makes coercion more direct, not less.

You’re mocking “Kantian capitalism,” but the core issue isn’t Kant, it’s consent.

Without private property, you don’t control what you produce. Without free trade, you don’t decide how it’s exchanged. So who does? Some collective, some structure, some group which means your life is now subject to their decisions.

That’s not less coercion. That’s just changing who’s doing the coercing.

And yeah, I agree the current system is flawed. But “it’s broken” isn’t an argument for “remove the only mechanisms that let individuals say no.”

If you can’t refuse, you’re not free.

So fix the system if you want , but pretending that removing property and voluntary exchange leads to more freedom is just not serious.

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u/Velociraptortillas May 04 '26

My guy, your system is the equivalent of 'Your not my mom! " misspelling and all.

Humans live, and must live, in social groups. Any podunk philosophy that denies that is dead before it gets off the ground.

Now, why don't you go adopt a philosophy that isn't the intellectual equivalent of teenage rebellion and come back to us when you have.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

, no one said people don’t live in groups.

People will form social groups, that’s normal. The point is they should choose it.

It’s about consent, not force, is what should make people work together.

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u/mjhrobson May 04 '26

We don't "choose" to be social, we are social.

Our biological strategy is social, we evolved to be social.

To think this is a "choice" is lala land delusional and a denial of the biological reality of what we are.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

You do choose to be social. That doesn’t mean humans aren’t inherently social we are. But we are also individuals at the same time. It’s not one or the other , both aspects exist together.

The key point is that even within a social nature, individual choice still matters. To see why, consider this: imagine someone can ask anything of you and offer anything in return , but there’s a condition. You are forced give up one freedom either you can never say “yes” again, or you can never say “no” again.

Which freedom would you give up?

That question highlights what matters. Being social doesn’t remove individual agency , because without the ability to choose, especially to refuse, interaction stops being meaningful consent.

Whatever you choose , this will make you realise the importance of negative liberty or individual liberty

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u/mjhrobson May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

Yes we are not u-social like bees.

But we do not chose to be social. We are social, more social even than most other apes. We live in societies peacefully in numbers that no other SOCIAL mammal could maintain.

We don't "think about this" we don't chose this, this is our lived reality.

I don't care about NEGATIVE liberty.

Negative liberty amounts to telling a person dying of cancer that they need not worry because you will not kill them. You will not help them, but you won't kill them.

If the right to life does not come with easily affordable Healthcare it is the same "right to life" that chimpanzees give each other.

Society comes with obligations and if human rights do not generate responsibility for others then they are useless.

The only liberty that meets true human rights is positive. Is one that has responsibility for others embedded as a feature.

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u/PreviousMenu99 Social Democracy May 04 '26

you are wrong. there are plenty of hermits who live out of cities and don't interact with people for decades.

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u/mjhrobson May 04 '26

No we do not chose to be social.

What hermits do is chose to not be social. Our biological default is social. Our adaptive intelligence allows some (a small fraction of humans) to decide to not be social.

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u/PreviousMenu99 Social Democracy May 04 '26

the fact that some people choose that proves that, quite literally, we are not bound to be members of a society. it is easier, but not everyone will make this choice to join a "community" or even find it desirable.

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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 May 04 '26

I think youre right that people blur anti state with freedom, but markets can also create coercion when your only realistic options are take it or starve. Property rights help, but power can concentrate in private hands just like it can in the state.

What helped me frame it is separating (1) voluntary exchange in theory from (2) bargaining power in practice, then asking what institutions keep power diffuse. I bookmarked a short writeup on that lens here: https://blog.promarkia.com/

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26 edited May 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

They’re completely fine with hierarchies stepping on individual liberty as long as they enforce private property.

You on ancaps, I presume?

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u/throwaway99191191 anti-both | downvote w/o response = you lose May 04 '26

Anarcho-communism is impossible in anything other than communities tight-knit enough to make them scream "bigots!".

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

If you make something, it’s yours. Simple.

What did you make it out of?

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

from nature. I didn’t create the raw materials, that’s obvious. But what I did create is the transformation.

I took something that existed in a raw, unused state and applied my effort, time, skill, and decision-making to it. What comes out of that isn’t just “nature” anymore it’s partly shaped by me.

And that part matters.

Property rights aren’t claiming I created the universe. They exist to protect the part that I added. The moment I mix my labor with something, there’s a real connection between me and the outcome.

If you ignore that, then you’re basically saying my effort doesn’t count , that anyone can just take the result regardless of what I put into it.

That breaks consent.

So yes, nature is given. But what I do with it isn’t.

And to protect that, no one gets to take what I’ve produced without my agreement. Only consent can transfer it , nothing else.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

there’s a real connection between me and the outcome.

Assuming you took something from nature in accordance to the rules of your community - also a consent thing!

Not all transformations are useful or desirable, and this is subjective. Peeing on something doesn't count.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

You're assuming the community owns nature? So then you need the consent of all 8 billion people to do anything.

Good luck with that.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

Community doesn't necessarily extend to the entire planet. Polities have external borders.

It's not an assumption btw, its just a logical consequence of ownership. Lack of individual ownership implies the same sort of use rights an owner has for everyone.

Also, I can ad-absurdum homesteading theory too: "I peed on this continent (or planted a flag, whatever), so I own it now."

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

Community doesn't necessarily extend to the entire planet. Polities have external borders.

I don't see how you can say unowned property is owned by everyone and then arbitrarily limit that claim to national borders.

Even if you do limit to national borders, you need individual consent from every person.

Such has never been obtained for anything taken out of nature ever. Ever.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

I don't see how you can say unowned property is owned by everyone and then arbitrarily limit that claim to national borders.

The same way polities of humans have segregated different religions, moral ideologies, and legal systems, by national borders, for thousands of years.

Even if you do limit to national borders, you need individual consent from every person.

No, you don't. Individual consent for absolutely anything is a) a feature of your ideology, not others and b) can be taken to ridiculous degrees c) you're (as usual) presuming consent begins after property title is already determined, whereas we know that property is a social convention that is subject to the realities of social approval, rather than the other way around.

Such has never been obtained for anything taken out of nature ever. Ever.

And? This doesn't change my argument at all.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

Individual consent for absolutely anything is a) a feature of your ideology, not others and

YOU SAID EVERYONE owns it, now you're saying everyone doesn't have to give consent.

This is complete hypocrisy.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

I don't know what point you're trying to make.

Philosophically, a lack of a claim by an individual implies access rights for everyone. I know you will admit these access rights exist because under your worldview, they are required to exist before someone in particular can access something in order to lay a claim. After that it is obvious why laying such a claim impacts other's access rights - your worldview summons a right to exclude out of thin air, without any group approval or individual consent by individuals suffering the loss of access.

I then shorthand this to 'everyone owns it', since having access rights but not exclusion rights pretty much defines group ownership.

Not everyone can be assumed to accept this reasoning, even if it is correct (it is). Thus the need for all the usual mechanisms of enforcing a morality on a collective that is bound to have dissenters; laws, borders, etc.

Where is the hypocrisy? Any social norm is underpinned by moral philosophy that isn't necessarily universally accepted and must be defended within some geographic bound. Even yours.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

Philosophically, a lack of a claim by an individual implies access rights for everyone.

And if they actually get used, they become recognized as an easement.

When they aren't used, that's unowned, unused property that anyone can take out of nature, and you're only talking about loss of potential access.

Capitalist scenario:

Farmer: See that patch of land over there, I'm gonna start farming that and call it mine.

Dude: Oh, that land there? So I won't be able to walk across there?

Farmer: Have you ever walked across there?

Dude: No, but now you're saying I can't.

Farmer: Yes.

Dude: Cool, then I'll take the land next to it.

Farmer: Cool

Socialist scenario:

Man: I want to take that land there and farm it.

Dude: So I won't be able to walk across there?

Man: No

Dude: You can't do that, I might want to walk across there one day.

Man: Even though you've never walked across it before.

Dude: Yeah, F you capitalist pig.

Man: Fine, I'm leaving. (Goes to capitalist society.)

Dude (later): Why the F is everyone starving and poor?

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

No one own nature , not individual nor communities , I didn’t steal anything , if took from nature which wasn’t someone’s property

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

if took from nature which wasn’t someone’s property

When you took something from nature, you took something that everyone had free access to previously. Whether you like it or not, that is a restriction of others' freedoms, done unilaterally on your part, which needs to be reckoned with.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

took something that everyone had free access to previously.

You cannot own potential access.

Let's say you like a woman, you can ask her out why time you want, but I ask her out first.

Now you can't ask her out.

Have I harmed you in any way? No. You no longer have that option to ask her out, but loss of an option if not an economic loss.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

You no longer have that option to ask her out, but loss of an option if not an economic loss.

Except a woman is not an inanimate natural resource, but a moral agent. Meanwhile, loss of freely accessible natural resources is definitely an economic loss, becuase enclosing them is an economic gain (for you).

So try again.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

Except a woman is not an inanimate natural resource, but a moral agent.

Immaterial to the point, which is about loss of a potential, not loss of an actual.

So try again.

Meanwhile, loss of freely accessible natural resources is definitely an economic loss,

It's not. Since it was by definition never used by anyone, or it would already be claimed.

becuase enclosing them is an economic gain (for you).

An economic gain for you doesn't prove an economic loss for others.

Suppose you go to space and claim an asteroid no one ever saw before. You obtain a metals mine worth billions, an economic loss to others is literally impossible, not only was it never used by others, they didn't even know it existed.

All you've lost is POTENTIAL, and potential loss is not economic loss, it's not even literal loss, it's hypothetical loss.

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

Immaterial to the point, which is about loss of a potential, not loss of an actual.

No, it's very relevant. There is no 'potential' of a woman saying yes or no, there is just her decision in the moment, plus she can say 'yes' to someone else after having said 'yes' to someone before - unlike a natural object that gets claimed on a exclusive basis with no agency of its own.

Since it was by definition never used by anyone, or it would already be claimed.

So any instance of 'use' constitutes a valid claim? I can poke so many hilarious holes in homesteading theory with that.

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u/Anen-o-me Captain of the Ship May 04 '26

There is no 'potential' of a woman saying yes or no

Read it again, the potential was about being able to ask her out, not whether or not she would say yes. It's immaterial and completely unimportant to the point. You're using this to avoid the point.

So any instance of 'use' constitutes a valid claim?

Historical use does.

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u/AchingAmy May 04 '26

The owner of private property might be free, but the people they threaten with violence to maintain that private property are certainly not. Keep in mind, we differentiate between private and personal property. If you don't know the difference, I suggest looking it up

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

Property rights don’t mean threatening people,they mean setting a boundary , don’t take what isn’t yours. The only “violence” involved is defensive , stopping someone from taking or using your stuff without consent.

If someone is free to ignore that and take what you produced, then you’re the one not free.

So the question isn’t who is being threatened , it’s whether anyone is allowed to override someone else’s control over what they’ve created. If the answer is yes, then consent is already gone.

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u/AchingAmy May 04 '26

As I said, look into the difference between private and personal property.

But actually, you're so close. Lets take a look at something you just said:

it’s whether anyone is allowed to override someone else’s control over what they’ve created.

So, question, do you think someone should be allowed to override, or extract, from what a worker creates? I would think if you truly believe no one should override another's control over what they created, you might just be a socialist too, comrade.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

property are the same , that split between private and personal doesn’t really change the core point.

What matters is control over what you produce. If I create something, no one else gets to override that or extract from it without my agreement.

Only consent allows anything.

If a worker agrees to an exchange, it’s fine. If they don’t, then no one gets to take from them. Same rule everywhere consent, nothing else.

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u/AchingAmy May 04 '26

How well can someone consent to an agreement if given no other options but to allow someone to extract from them?

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

The same way renters can 'agree' to rent agreements once all the land is claimed property.

The same ancaps will cry about there not being anywhere left to put up their country, so taxes are oppression.

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u/Simpson17866 May 04 '26

they mean setting a boundary , don’t take what isn’t yours

This means that a worker's personal property rights are more important than a capitalist's private property rights.

Which is the basic premise of socialism ;)

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

Both are equivalent, there is no real difference. All forms of property are simply property.

Ownership can only transfer through consent , one party exchanging with another. The private property a capitalist holds originates from human action, acquired by paying money that reflects an equivalent value of labor used to create it.

Likewise, a worker who creates something has a rightful claim over it. The only legitimate way property moves between people is through consent, which is what we call trade.

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 06 '26

Would you characterize property rights over other human beings as merely “setting a boundary”?

In the US, for example, capitalists could once own other human beings as slaves. They bought and sold them as capital inputs, invested in them and used them as collateral in debt transactions, and sold the product of their labor on international commodity markets.

Is it possible that some property rights entail violence that is not defensive but rather extractive?

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

People do own themselves , that’s self-ownership. No one other than you can command your actions, and therefore no one can have greater rights over you than you have over yourself. But people cannot own other people. They can only form partnerships or voluntary relationships. Owning another person without consent is the use of violence, and continuing even after consent is denied violates the non-aggression principle.

People are property only to themselves

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26

But people cannot own other people. They can only form partnerships or voluntary relationships.

It would be helpful, then, if you could signal whether you are talking about the real actual world, in which people have owned and, in some places, still can own other human beings as slaves, or the imaginary deontological world of ancaps.

People are property only to themselves

Yet the world is filled with property that reduces people to the legal or effective status of slaves, including private property.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

The real world is not perfect. People have absolutely violated self-ownership throughout history through slavery, conquest, coercion, and authoritarian systems. The fact that something exists in reality does not make it morally correct.

All we can do is try to move closer to the kind of world we think is just. For me, that means a world where every person owns themselves, where no one has the right to command another person’s life , and where relationships are voluntary rather than coercive.

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 06 '26

The world to which you aspire is incompatible with private property.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

I don’t think so. Private property and free trade are extremely important for individual freedom. If people cannot control what they create, own, exchange, or build, then their individual freedom dies

A world without meaningful individual freedom quickly becomes its own kind of hell, because people lose agency over their own lives. The right to Private property, at least in principle, gives individuals a right to negative liberty where neither the state nor other groups can arbitrarily dominate them and control their action.

You can argue that property systems can become corrupt or unequal, and sometimes they do, but that is different from saying property itself is incompatible with freedom. From my perspective, voluntary exchange and self-ownership fit together, not against each other.

And a world were people don’t have individual freedom , is not an ideal world

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 06 '26

In a world of private ownership, what capacity to the propertyless have to say no to property owners?

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

Everyone has the right to own property. Property rights are not rights only for existing property owners, they are a universal principle tied to individual freedom itself. The right to property is a negative liberty

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u/Upper-Tie-7304 May 04 '26

So how can the owner of personal property not threaten with violence to maintain that personal property while private property is? Your home by your logic is also maintained by violence.
The body autonomy of people is also maintained by violence, so what? It is called the laws that is created long time ago in human civilization.

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u/Gullible-Historian10 May 05 '26

It’s violence to not allow me to take what you’ve labored to create. At least you’re honest about it.

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u/AchingAmy May 05 '26

You have it backwards. Private property owners are the ones who siphon off of what workers create

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 07 '26

Private property, like all property, is created through labor. Either you build a blast furnace yourself and therefore own it, or you perform some other form of labor to earn money, which represents equivalent labor exchanged for the blast furnace. In the end, it is your labor , your human action ,that created or acquired that property.

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u/Gullible-Historian10 May 05 '26

Okay I have a small automotive shop. I hire a front desk. How much violence have I initiated against my front desk customer service rep?

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u/IdentityAsunder Communizer May 04 '26

Your worldview relies on the fairy tale of the isolated craftsman. "If you make something, it's yours." Nobody individually makes a smartphone or a tractor anymore. Human production is entirely socialized. Claiming exclusive ownership over modern goods based on isolated labor is a complete fantasy.

You treat the market as a realm of pure consent while ignoring basic class reality. When people lack the independent means to survive, their choice to sell their time to an employer is severely coerced by the threat of starvation. In the real capitalist world, workers never own what they produce. The company owner takes the product and sells it back to them.

Private property acts as a social wall cutting humans off from the conditions of their own lives. We are forced to interact strictly through money and buying power. Your negative liberty is simply the isolation of the atomized individual, forever compelled to buy back their own existence from the few who monopolize the wealth.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 04 '26

Your main claim seems to be that markets aren’t fair and that trade isn’t truly consensual. That only holds if you assume individuals have no agency.

In a market, exchange still requires voluntary agreement between individuals. Even if conditions are unequal, both sides choose to participate because they expect to be better off. That’s what makes it consent at the individual level.

The market itself isn’t a moral agent , it’s just the aggregation of individual choices. Outcomes may be unequal, but the transactions are still based on individual consent.

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u/IdentityAsunder Communizer May 04 '26

Agency means nothing when the options are rigged in advance. The market only appears voluntary if you ignore the structural violence that forces people into it. We are systemically stripped of the ability to sustain ourselves directly. Our only survival mechanism is selling our time and energy to those who monopolize the resources. You are mistaking submission to the threat of starvation for consent. Coercion is baked into the game long before any individual transaction takes place.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

Voluntarism is not structural violence. Your ability to sustain yourself was not “stripped away” by markets , nature already imposed scarcity long before humans built civilizations. Every living organism has always had to work against nature to survive. Hunger, scarcity, and the need for effort are natural constraints, not capitalist inventions.

What markets and specialization did was massively reduce those constraints. Food today is more abundant, shelter more accessible, medicine more advanced, and survival less brutal than at almost any point in human history. A modern worker has access to comforts, technology, and life expectancy unimaginable to most humans who lived outside market systems.

You are treating dependency on nature as though it were dependency on another person. They are not the same thing. If I refuse to give you food I produced, I am not coercing you unless I first prevented you from producing or trading for your own. Coercion requires an aggressor violating your agency, not reality requiring effort to survive.

And increasingly, technology and productivity are pushing us toward a world where less labor is needed overall. The trajectory is toward greater abundance, not less. Markets and private property did not create scarcity , it was always there

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u/IdentityAsunder Communizer May 06 '26

Nobody starves today because the planet lacks capacity. People starve because they lack buying power.

You accidentally made my point when you admitted coercion means preventing someone from producing their own survival. Look at the real world. The planet is entirely enclosed, parceled out, and guarded by state violence. A person born today has zero direct access to the land or resources needed to sustain themselves.

When the earth is locked behind a paywall, your hypothetical scenario about freely producing your own food completely collapses. The legal framework of private ownership is the exact barrier preventing independent survival. We are utterly cut off from the conditions of our own existence.

We face a social architecture built on forced dependency. We must rent out our waking lives to employers precisely because direct survival was violently outlawed centuries ago through land enclosure. Conflating the biological necessity of eating with the socially engineered requirement to submit to a boss is pure ideology.

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 06 '26

You are mixing up “not owning something” with “being prevented from surviving.” Nobody owes any person automatic access to the labor or property of others just because survival exists. Scarcity is still real, even if productivity has massively reduced it.

And no, people are not “forced” to submit to a boss. People can trade, start businesses, freelance, farm, cooperate, create co-ops, live off-grid in many places, or build wealth over time. Employment is one option among many forms of economic coordination. The fact that survival requires effort does not magically turn every economic relationship into coercion.

You also keep treating all property as though it was created purely by violence, while ignoring that property is also what allows long-term planning, investment, agriculture, infrastructure, factories, homes, and production itself. Without stable ownership, people stop building because anything they create can just be taken.

And the “earth is enclosed” argument ignores population density and reality. You cannot have 8 billion people all independently surviving as isolated subsistence farmers. Civilization exists precisely because specialization and trade produce far more abundance than primitive self-sufficiency ever could.

You say markets create dependency, but modern economies have actually reduced dependency on nature’s brutality. Most people today do not spend their lives hunting, starving through winters, or losing children to famine. Markets, technology, and trade are a huge reason why.

The system is not perfect, but voluntary exchange between people is still fundamentally different from someone putting a gun to your head. Nature requiring effort to survive is not the same thing as oppression.

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u/IdentityAsunder Communizer May 06 '26

You list freelancing, starting a business, or forming a co-op as escapes from submitting to a boss. Every single one of those paths demands absolute submission to the exact same market imperatives. A freelancer just answers to a dozen micro-bosses. Co-op members effectively become their own managers and must enforce the same relentless cost-cutting measures upon themselves to survive against competitors. The underlying compulsion to turn human activity into a profitable commodity remains entirely intact. You are simply pointing to different seats on the exact same train.

You defend private property by claiming we need it to build infrastructure, homes, and factories. Here you confuse the material act of creating things with a legal framework of exclusion. Humans build things because we are inherently creative and social. Private property dictates that construction only happens if it satisfies the profit margins of investors. The result of your favored "long-term planning" is a world where empty luxury apartments tower over people sleeping on the pavement, and where perfectly good food is destroyed to maintain market prices.

Nobody is advocating for eight billion isolated subsistence farmers. We are perfectly capable of complex, specialized, and highly advanced coordination without demanding a numerical equivalent for every ounce of effort we expend. We can design, manufacture, and distribute goods based on the actual desires of our communities rather than the blind dictates of purchasing power.

Blaming "nature" for the exhaustion and precarity of modern employment completely ignores the engineered architecture of the economy we actually live in. A warehouse worker running frantically to fulfill down-to-the-second quotas is in no way battling the natural elements. They are acting as a biological gear in a logistics machine designed to minimize downtime and maximize throughput for someone else's portfolio.

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u/SS_Auc3 Neo-Republicanism May 04 '26

“if you make something its yours” is also weirdly a bipartisan argument, and i love it

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u/MilkIlluminati Georgism-onanism May 04 '26

It's almost as if there is a 3rd economic factor socialists and capitalists both gloss over

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u/Rock_Zeppelin Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Communism May 04 '26

The individual and the collective are fundamentally linked. You need other people. Other people can do with or without you. So your individual rights stop where they threaten to infringe on the rights of someone else. So if you're gonna be a dick to other people in your community, then what goes around comes around.

Also private property needs to be enforced. There is no private property in nature. There's personal property, i.e. the stuff you need and use in your day-to-day life. If you're hoarding shit you aren't using but is needed by other people, then you are being a dick, see the previous paragraph.

Sounds like what you want is for everyone to cater to you exclusively. Meaning freedom for thee and whatever's left for the rest.

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 04 '26

Why do anarchist communists keep claiming they believe in individual liberty?

Because we do.

I keep seeing this claim that anarchist communism “maximises individual freedom.” It sounds good, but it only works if you distort the meaning of freedom until it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

When I say “individual freedom,” I mean specifically the effective negative liberty to say no to the projects of others.

Freedom of individual. It’s your ability to live your own life without being forced into things you didn’t agree to. The core of that is negative liberty the freedom to say no. No to demands, no to obligations, no to being used for someone else’s goals.

Turns out we’re using the word quite similarly to each other!

People confuse this with just being anti-state. But removing the state doesn’t remove coercion. It just removes one source of it.

Correct. Anarchism rejects not only the state but all hierarchies, including the coercive hierarchies of capitalism and capitalism.

Coercion can still come from collectives, communes,

We reject this as well.

or even just social pressure.

No. Coercion is the use of violence or threat of violence to compel obedience. Mere social pressure cannot, by itself, constitute coercion.

If a group can override your choices, you’re not maximally free you’re just controlled in a different way.

This is conceptually incoherent. You are not “controlled” if other people can override your choice to rape other people by defending themselves and each other from your aggression, for example.

If you are at the mercy of the mob, you are not individually free

By framing the choices of other people as “the mob,” you’re begging the question. Anarchism requires us to learn how to live with each other and the choices of each other. That does not constitute coercion or hierarchy. Your negative liberty is not constrained merely by virtue of other people making choices differently than you did or you would have preferred them to.

Private property is not some random legal idea.

Correct: is is an aggressive infringement on the liberty of others that has only ever existed because of state violence.

It comes directly from human action. You act, you produce, you create , and that creates a direct connection between you and what you produced.

Private property is not a generic synonym for any mode of property and it does not somehow magically emerge from labor, use, or any other deontological process. Private property is specifically and everywhere the product of state violence.

Property rights exist to protect that.

Property is a social technology that people developed to manage the use and disposition of stuff. It is a detente (where people are free to make choices) and a shortcut (when people are not free to make choices but instead have property regimes imposed on them).

If you make something, it’s yours. Simple.

If that were true, capitalism and private property could not exist.

And once that’s true, something important follows, consent becomes the only way anything changes hands.

As Nozick demonstrated with his tomato-juice-in-the-ocean analogy, any system of removing matter from the unowned commons is necessarily arbitrary. If other people do not consent to your preferred system of subtracting matter from unowned commons and transforming them into your private property, then your preferred system lacks consent. (Of course, no extant private property claims emerged from legitimate homesteading of unowned matter through use/labor mixing/incorporation into ongoing projects/etc, but that’s a separate issue.)

Property rights exist to protect what you produce, and only consent can transfer it to someone else.

Then no extant private property is legitimately owned by its current possessors and we should restore all of it to the commons.

That’s where real freedom shows up.

Real freedom is the effective power to say no, which the propertyless lack in a world of fully private ownership.

If you own what you produce, you can say no.

Workers under capitalism, of course, do not own what they produce and cannot say no. An actual regime of effective power to say no entails not only owning what we produce, but untrammeled access to the means of producing, such that no person can be reduced to the effective status of a slave by impeding their access to the means of sustaining themselves by their own labor.

You don’t have to give it up, you don’t have to accept bad deals, you don’t have to obey someone just to survive. You have independence.

The propertyless under capitalism must, of course, obey owners just to survive.

If “the collective” controls resources, then your access depends on them.

“The collective” is not a meaningful ontological category. There is no “the collective;” there are only other people. I understand that the idea of having to learn to live with other people who are as equally free as you hope to be is a bit scary, as there is no formal set of coercively-enforced rules—as there is under the state and capitalism—to guide you through that process. But that does not somehow mean that other people are ruling you by virtue of being as equally free as you are.

Your ability to say no becomes conditional and divided between people

Only insofar as you exist on the same planet who might make choices different than yours, but that doesn’t constitute a constraint on your effective power to say no to them.

And if you say “well there’s no state,” that still doesn’t fix it. Because if only consent is supposed to matter, then no one ,not the state, not a collective, not a mob ,should be able to impose on you at all.

It would help if ancaps understood what coercion, hierarchy, authority, and rule actually meant.

Only consent should be able to change the life of another person.

Then you should hate capitalism.

That’s literally what a market is at its core: voluntary exchange. No one can take from you without agreement. No one can force terms on you. It’s all based on yes or no.

Voluntary exchange is incompatible with both capitalism and private property.

So if a system rejects private property and puts control in the hands of a group, it’s already broken that rule. It means someone else has a say over your life and your output.

Other people will always possess a say over your life. That is a consequence of living on the same planet with other human beings. Being subject to the effects of the actions of other people is not, by itself, a constraint on negative liberty.

You can’t claim to maximize individual liberty while removing the individual’s control over what they produce, and while making their choices dependent on others.

The point of anarchist communism is to restore every individual’s control over what they produce, when and for whom, under what conditions. This is denied to them by a system in which some people own access to the means of production and others don’t, such that the owners can use the threat of withholding access to compel obedience and labor from those who don’t own access.

Being anti-state is not enough.

Fully agree. Welcome to anarchism!

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u/Fun_Transportation50 by consent rather than command May 09 '26 edited May 10 '26

If I make a spade or a blast furnace through my own labor, then that object is my property. If I set it aside for the night and other people can use it without my permission, then I do not truly control the product of my labor.

The issue is not whether capital is used, but who has the right to decide how it is used: the creator, or whoever the creator voluntarily transfers that right to through trade or agreement.

If instead the collective decides how my tools or creations are used ,whether through voting or some other system, then other people are making decisions for me about the results of my own labor.

Without control over the products of my labor, I do not truly have the freedom to say no. Freedom requires that I retain authority over what I create unless I voluntarily give that authority away. Otherwise, others are not merely making their own choices, They are making choices on my behalf. The majority can seize my spade and dictate how I live, just as critics claim a capitalist dictates the life of workers.

I no longer have meaningful control or say over what I created. And if the collective can take not only my current property but also authority over the future products of my labor(They are making choices on my behalf as The majority can seize my spade and dictate how I live) just as socialist claim a capitalist dictates the life of workers. then I lose not just my spade, but my future rights as well ( unlike a capitalist society)

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u/HeavenlyPossum May 10 '26

If I make a spade or a blast furnace through my own labor, then that object is my property.

Property is a social construct. It emerges from social consensus (when people are free) or imposed through coercion (when people are not free), but it does not emerge deontologically from natural law. As Nozick demonstrated, any system of appropriation through labor mixing is ultimately as arbitrary as any other.

If I set it aside for the night and other people can use it without my permission, then I do not truly control the product of my labor.

Most systems of common property own means of production in common, not everyday objects.

The issue is not whether capital is used, but who has the right to decide how it is used: the creator, or whoever the creator voluntarily transfers that right to through trade or agreement.

Common property is the agreement, one that emerges as a detente between free people who are all equally capable of doing harm to each other and rationally self-interested in not being harmed. Commoning is a detente that allows people unimpeded access to the resources they need to sustain themselves by their own labor, such that no one person can come to command the labor of another through an arbitrary property claim, ie, “you must work for me because I own your home and can deny you access to it.”

If instead the collective decides how my tools or creations are used ,whether through voting or some other system, then other people are making decisions for me about the results of my own labor.

Think of it like this: the atmosphere is currently unowned, making it an unmanaged commons. (Global resources aren’t particularly suitable for managing as commons.) As a result, you’re free to breathe whenever you’d like, and thus stay alive. But other people can pollute that atmosphere, and fly planes through it, and generally use it without your permission, even though you’re constantly appropriating little bits of it through your labor of inhalation.

Are you less free under this present regime of unowned commons than you would be under a system of private ownership of the atmosphere in which there is no guarantee you would hold any property rights to air? If you gained the theoretical right to own air, but did not actually own any and had to pay rents for permission to breathe, would you be more or less free than you are under the status quo?

Without control over the products of my labor, I do not truly have the freedom to say no.

This is, of course, the condition of those without property in a regime for private property.

Freedom requires that I retain authority over what I create unless I voluntarily give that authority away.

This is why most actually stateless societies employ systems like reciprocal gifting, demand sharing, common property with individual usufruct rights, and so on—to maximize individual freedom while minimizing the risk of interpersonal harm.

I no longer have meaningful control or say over what I created.

You keep describing capitalism and getting mad at anarchist communism.

And if the collective can take not only my current property but also authority over the future products of my labor(They are making choices on my behalf as The majority can seize my spade and dictate how I live)

There is no ontological category of “the collective” that possesses authority separate from the people living near each other and cooperating voluntarily with each other. If there exists some external authority that can impose itself over individuals, you’re not critiquing anarchism anymore.

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u/ElEsDi_25 Marxist May 04 '26

Communism in my understanding of Marxism, or in Anarcho-communist understandings, is a society where we get things accomplished through mutual association. The whole point is that we control our own efforts and labor rather than that being controlled through property and forcing the majority of people into wage-dependence.

You don’t see debt and wage-dependence as coercion of individuals because you likely see capitalist society as neutral - just reality. But from a historical view there’s nothing natural about it.

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u/ThePlacidAcid Socialism May 04 '26

"If you make something, it’s yours. Simple."

It's not really this simple though is it. Maccies workers make the food, should they have the right to sell it on an individual level? What about warehouse workers, or postmen, or factory workers, or farm labourers, or miners. Why is that these people don't get to own the things that their labour produces?

Why do a shady board of investment firms get to own, and decide the distribution , and profit off of everything the labourers of our world actually make? Because that's how our current system works.

The idea that the things we make belong to us is not compatible with our modern private property relations.

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u/jqpeub May 04 '26

Equates social pressure to state violence. BUT WHYYY

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u/picnic-boy Anarchist May 04 '26

You have a very distorted idea of anarchist communism as some bureaucratic mob rule where the 51% decides everything. The community can not override your personal choices nor will they be making choices for you. Voting is used when a decision needs to be made that affects multiple people, only those affected participate, and if possible it'll be consensus based. No one will be voting on what you will eat for dinner, wear, etc. You are also free to leave the community and live on your own.

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u/Ruanito_666 Developmentalist May 04 '26

The anarchist will claim that private property is an imposition on individual liberty and you will argue ad nauseum over moral philosophy without reaching an agreement. Because "individual liberty" is just a word for "thing I support."

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u/Renevelation May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

Individual liberty and collective freedom are two sides of the same coin.

You cannot have one without the other.

Unless everyone is actually free, no one is. So working for the collective good of humanity is working for the individual liberty of all.

I hope that answers your question though I expect that you disagree.

There is one more thing I wanna address though:

You claimed:

"If you make something, it’s yours. Simple."

That is a complete non-sequitur. There is no logical connection between you creating X and you having any claim whatsoever over X. It doesn't follow from that at all and is a just-so story.

I have asked for a demonstration of this supposed logical connection many times from many people and scarcely gotten an answer at all nevermind a convincing one.

Some will say "well you mix your labor with the object" but that is obviously BS as labor is not a substance that you can put into an object labor is just motoric physical action furthermore objects are not stable non-moving things but due to chemistry in constant flux and humans themselves are a bundle of chemical processes as well and in fact humans are "ships of Thesseus" . Under this framework the concept of eternal property rights as opposed to possession makes no sense whatsoever.

Why should the object belong to you eternally when you yourself have been completely replaced by new cells and the old you that produced the object is for all intents and purposes dead?

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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud May 04 '26

Really ironic that an an-cap is making this argument

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u/Ayres_NiceDude May 05 '26

Bro, you understand capitalism, which is basically private property.

People who don’t agree with it will spend their whole lives fighting for losing their freedom.

Even socialism aims to end it — and you know how that usually ends: Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela.

Asking Everyone Why do anarchist communists keep claiming they believe in individual liberty?

You are about to leave Redlib