[notch656a]

That all really sounds great, I just don't understand how it works without a lot of people just performing labor in the hopes others will do it and also do it for free. There aren't goods if people don't make them, and people have to have incentive to make them. We have a way of making sure people get value from what they put in, it is trade. Surely someone is gonna say "hey I made this widget so I would like to demand compensation for it." And someone else is going to say "I want that widget and I'm willing to compensate them for it." How are you going to get the masses to just make stuff and give it away? Personally I won't do it, except to maybe some charities I like or for the occasionally gesture of good will to someone I feel for. Guess people like me gotta be put in the gulag.

>Again, under an anarchist system you wouldn't need to pay to feed your family

Perhaps, but what if no one wishes to feed me for free voluntarily. Won't I be forced to either engage in trade, do everything myself, or take it by force? What if I want to spin up my PnP machine, make some boards, and trade it with somebody who's not down with the whole make stuff without money and hope it all works out. I'm not going to let you stop me, are you going to come kill me or what's going to happen?

My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios. The latter is basically what Rojava is in practice and kind of my experience with the Kurds in general who I would describe as basically very generous capitalists who just want to chill in the fucking mountains away from the 4 nasty governments surrounding them.

If you can keep it small like a family unit some communist like organization may stay together, although even families can have a hard time with it. You need the consent of everyone for that sort of thing to be non-coercive, and you may not be able to get it.

[beaconstudios]

Am important aspect of anarchism is community. Capitalism tends to atomise people, replacing community and cooperative relationships with work relationships and transactions. This erodes mutual trust and support, so without rebuilding communities I agree, you couldn't reasonably hope for cooperation and sharing. But people's attitudes are shaped by their environment, and with a greater sense of community and engagement, we are more willing to help each other out. I'm a lot more willing to lend or gift things to a friend or a neighbour than to somebody I don't know. Now, as you've rightly pointed out, that doesn't scale past Dunbar's number (the maximum number of people we can reasonably know personally), so the alternative to scaling this up is a democratic union-of-unions system where my community and your community both elect councils and delegates for coordinating with each other. That way the delegates can represent our communities' interests in a bottom-up fashion. Since there's no meaningful benefit to profit without a money system, we can support each other in a mutual/reciprocal fashion.

> Guess people like me gotta be put in the gulag.

Again, you're thinking of MLs. My primary value is decreasing human suffering and increasing preference fulfilment. Neither of those are fulfilled by senseless ideological violence.

> My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios.

I'd rather live under a social democratic capitalist society like I currently do than the USSR. Freedom is important - I want to increase it, not decrease it. There's plenty of room for democracy within anarchism, and anarchism is the original source of the term "libertarian" so yes I agree on the latter point - the main point of disagreement is whether capitalism can really be libertarian. I think that replacing a competitive, isolating economy with a cooperative sharing economy would be a positive thing for everybody.

I think the kurds are a good example of an incremental step in the right direction - their economy is more oriented towards sharing and cooperation, which is inherently a step away from capitalism because capitalism relies on individualistic trade negotiations rather than sharing.

Edit: I just thought, if you've watched the later seasons of The Walking Dead, the communities are a pretty good example of anarchist community, including the union-of-unions part.