How's this shit gonna function?

[Jawn Disease]

Here's my rough idea of how a modern anarchist society would function:

You would be a member of a housing council (your block, your apartment building); your work syndicate (neighborhood construction team, university history department, a factory, whatever); and any other organization or coalition you wish. Your housing council would send representatives to your neighborhood council, and your work syndicate would (usually) either be a part of, or send representatives to, several umbrella/parent syndicates. For example, if you're part of one factory's syndicate, it would be a member of the city's manufacturing syndicate, the city's public transit syndicate because you build bus parts, the goods distribution syndicate, etc etc. The large syndicates and neighborhood councils would send representatives to a city administrative council.

Your housing council makes sure that every member has a basic minimum of food and support; it deals with minor disturbances and conflicts; and provides a way to pool labour to get shit done.

Your work syndicate deals with the immediate running and maintenance of whatever industry or function it fulfills. It also provides you with support and benefits such as a membership with the public transit syndicate, technical and material support towards your housing council, etc.

Your neighborhood council is a forum in which housing councils can interact on issues that are larger than one block or building, for example, making sure that roads are fixed, transferring extra food to areas where it is needed, all that good stuff. It elects certain members to act as arbitrators (judges, juries, whatever) to settle larger disputes.

The umbrella syndicate interacts with other umbrella syndicates to provide its members with all services needed; elevator repairs, public transit, new desks, computers, earth-moving equipment, whatever. It elects certain members to act as arbitrators (judges, juries, whatever) to settle larger disputes.

The city administrative council is a forum in which umbrella syndicates and neighborhood councils interact with one another in order to make sure that anything needed anywhere gets done and is reciprocated. Need to build a new highway connecting several neighborhoods? Well, you'll need construction workers, vehicles, permission from several neighborhoods, earth-moving equipment, engineers, architects, and everything else -- all this will be provided by the different syndicates and councils.

How much formal representation you have as an individual depends on how many syndicates and councils you are a member of. Ideally, few would have one job. You'd be a member of several work syndicates, each sending representatives to several larger syndicates, plus a member of your housing council.

However, if you choose not to belong to any councils or syndicates, that's fine too. You'd independently create your own means of sustenance or trade your labour for the goods you need, perhaps traveling from town to town trading goods that are scarce for goods that are abundant.

The idea is that if you share everything in a rational way, you abolish the motive for 99% of 'crime'. The crime left over would be things like serial murder and serial rape, which frankly, even as an anarchist, I think can be easily dealt with by firing squad.

there's obviously a million more pages of detail, but that's about the gist of it.

Vive le revolution!

Please give me all the problems you can find with this admittedly limited model

[Zazaban]

Where would I, as I writer, be in all this?

[Jawn Disease]

You as a writer would be flat broke and starving with no sympathy.***

You as a community member who worked a garden, worked construction for your neighborhood, were a member of the English department syndicate of the university, were a bus driver for the public transit and volunteered as a cook for your housing council, while also writing books published (or not), would fit in very nicely.

Don't be lazy and you shall want not

I mean shit, you want anarchy and you also want other people to sustain you just for writing? Not going to happen buddy. What right do you have to the material products of someone else's labour? Writing is something that every human should be doing, not something that every human should 'pay' you to do.

***
Unless you are so amazing and intense that you can go independent and wherever you go people would feed you for free, which I'm not saying wouldn't happen, it's just unlikely since as far as I know you're not that amazing or that intense, or I probably would have heard of you

[Sylum]

You as a writer would be flat broke and starving with no sympathy.***

You as a community member who worked a garden, worked construction for your neighborhood, were a member of the English department syndicate of the university, were a bus driver for the public transit and volunteered as a cook for your housing council, while also writing books published (or not), would fit in very nicely.

Don't be lazy and you shall want not

I mean shit, you want anarchy and you also want other people to sustain you just for writing? Not going to happen buddy. What right do you have to the material products of someone else's labour? Writing is something that every human should be doing, not something that every human should 'pay' you to do.

***
Unless you are so amazing and intense that you can go independent and wherever you go people would feed you for free, which I'm not saying wouldn't happen, it's just unlikely since as far as I know you're not that amazing or that intense, or I probably would have heard of you

That's a bit harshly said, but I understand what you mean.
I'm sure artists would be contributing to their communities in other ways. It would be difficult to create 24/7.

I could imagine a writer helping to run a press/library/etc. in addition to contributing via their literature,

[Anarchological]

Imagine there's no countries ... and no religion, too. What could exist outside the politically correct boxes of authoritarian Church and State? We don't really know how this is going to function, but it has to be better than Tony Blairs and George Bushs and Military-Industrial complexes running the world. Are Church and State really necessary or are they just scams, confidence games? Anarchists shouild have a pretty good idea about that.

[Goebel]

Imagine there's no countries ... and no religion, too. What could exist outside the politically correct boxes of authoritarian Church and State? We don't really know how this is going to function, but it has to be better than Tony Blairs and George Bushs and Military-Industrial complexes running the world. Are Church and State really necessary or are they just scams, confidence games? Anarchists shouild have a pretty good idea about that.

I have to disagree with you on this one. We have a fairly good idea of how things would function in an anarchist system. There are also historical examples of anarchist society to look at. I recommend that you read "The Anarchist Collective: Workers Self-Management in The Spanish Revolution" by Sam Dolgoff.

[FirePirate]

Where would I, as I writer, be in all this?

A writer also produces a commodity that is beneficial to the community, like Newspaper articles, which any society would support just as long as they are informed about community wide issues.
Novel writers are also entertainers, like musicians, they could form one "umbrella".
Also, I agree with Jawn that writers don't just write all day, time spent not writing could be spent elsewhere, like volunteering by teaching at schools/colleges, etc.

[FirePirate]

This all looks a bit complicated; and seems to me that the individual got lost somewhere in between all the layers of each syndicate representation. If say a particular individual did not agree with planting a tree near his building because it would obstruct his scenic view (and he objects to this), would the housing syndicate continue with doing so?

I guess my question is how big a role does the indivdual play in a syndicate?

[michaeljl]

Where would I, as I writer, be in all this?

I am currently in the process of organizing a commune specifically for writers and intellectuals.

The idea is that we need a great deal of time to produce our poems, plays, research, prose, whatever.

It's pretty much impossible to work a wage slave job and have time to produce significant works of literature and research.

So basically, the idea is to make a collective initiative to keep us supplied with all the essentials of living so that we can spend as much time engaged in creativity as possible.

[AlexD]

I'm very attracted by certain aspects of this scheme. I especially like the idea that the more syndicates a person belongs to and the broader his engagement with society, the greater his influence on it. That's neat.

My main reservation is with how the day-to-day distribution of resources is controlled. How would a syndicate determine whether to make more or less of their thing. More importantly, how would the same syndicate decide whether it's fair for them to have to work harder to make even more of that one thing - based on how hard everyone else is working? How can you measure that? It only gets more complicated from there.

I can see two possibilities:

A) A fairly rigid system where production and consumption by syndicates and councils are carefully balanced and resistant to change.

B) Money. Cash is basically the right to say to people 'Not next month. Not tomorrow. Now.', provided you have earned it by obliging other people in the same way in the past. But even if you stripped our current financial system down to its most basic and least exploitative elements, you would still have horrible systemic problems.

I want to propose an alternative. You'd assume that everyone who puts work into society, whatever that work is, is entitled to full benefits. You'd set up a co-op, governed by representatives appointed from the syndicates, that redistributes stuff. Membership would be voluntary; the co-op would only survive as long as people use it.

Your syndicate's right to receive from the co-op would be solely dependent on what people take from you. Say you want to start a syndicate to make hammers. You register with the co-op. If you're lazy or inefficient, the co-op will always be running out of hammers. If you make shitty hammers that nobody wants, hammers will pile up. If you're doing it right, stockpiles will stay at a healthy level. The same standard would be applied, whether you make hammers, print books, or give your time as a skilled engineer. (In case you wondered, in the latter case you would agree to be 'on the clock' for a certain number of hours a week, and the 'stockpile' is the number of hours you stand idle.) If you need help to maintain a nice steady stockpile, the co-op can lend a hand and advise on improving, expanding or duplicating your operation. If you're beyond help, they'll kick you to the curb.

There's a quote from the anarchist novel The Dispossessed, which I can't quite find, but where the main character says something like: 'If there's work that nobody else can do, I claim the right to do it.' The ideal that I'm trying to work towards is that if someone wants to take the initiative and do something new, they don't have to A) negotiate with multiple elected assemblies, who may not approve of what they're trying to do; or B) raise capital. Everyone will be held to the same standard, which is: You are held to be of value to society as long as you make something that people want to use. We should be able to accommodate our friend the writer as well as manual workers and practical people. Prioritising professions and trades in terms of 'value' or 'rank' is one of the biggest iniquities of the capitalist system.