Metarationalist Ephemera

For quite a while now, I have been thinking about what could constitute a realistic transitory system to reach anarcho-communism, while avoiding the need for the dictatorship/bloody revolution heralded by Marx as the easiest way to implement communism. Recent debates allowed me to develop what I believe to be such a system.

First off, laws would be revoked, and in their place a simple chart would be implemented, outlining clearly the basic rights and principles of the system. In a way, this could be compared to documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, albeit shorter and simpler; designed to act at the utmost fundamental level. At any time, no decision taken by an individual, a group or even the community may go against this chart.

Second, private property as we know it would be abolished and replaced by a much fairer usership-based principle much akin to the materialistic aspect of my privacy principle. In short, people would have a legal and moral imperative to respect what other people currently use for whatever reasons, or plan to use as part of the fulfilment of their daily basic needs. This “usership” cannot be transferred without the agreement of the user unless there is a consensus or near-consensus that the community requires you to do so, much like today’s property in an anarchist system.

What marks usership is the intentional inclusion of readily discernible personal data marking use of the objects or land. This cannot amount to “watermarks” and such as these do not indicate actual use of the object. In the case of a refrigerator, this could be regular cleaning and food inside; for a piece of land, flowers planted and well maintained grass.

Such standards would be defined by the community as a whole on a consensus-based paradigm to avoid abuse of static rules, prone to obsolescence. Such a decision-making process would be applied to all decisions relevant to the entire population, as we nowadays have the technology to achieve this.

People would be socio-geographically organised in cooperatives, each cooperative offering a specific set of services to the community. Note that products are never “offered” in a system without private property. The creation of the products is what is offered, the goods themselves merely being used by different people. Thus, what would be “offered” is the usership of the object, which however still remains “owned” by the community.

Cooperatives would decide of their own “private rules of conduct” within the cooperative. Goods and services would be divided in two categories: “essentials”, being defined here as constituents of the most generous lifestyle everyone could have equally with the community’s resources; “luxury”, referring here to non-vital goods (gold, supercomputers…) and services (SPAs, personal tailors…) that cannot realistically be distributed equally to everyone because of their non-abundance proportionally to the demand.

Luxury items and services would be distributed to cooperatives viewed the most favourably by their peers first. Everything but internal policies of each cooperative (yes, branding would still exist) would be decided by the community, as outlined above.

Note that although a single individual could technically constitute a “cooperative”, he/she would be unlikely to gain any luxury from this choice, as luxury would be distributed bi-proportionally: both the cooperative’s reputation and the number of people within it would be taken into account equally. For example, a single-person “cooperative” would receive the same amount of luxury as a single individual within a large cooperative with an identical reputation.

Money would be abolished as well as any standard of value for objects or services, save for the monthly evaluation of the social contribution of each cooperative by their peers. Thus, rare or “casual” services can only be bartered for other services, or luxury goods.

This hypothetical system could be referred to as consensus-driven, directly democratic, social-contribution-based collectivism, in… relatively simple terms.