theory of an anarchist finance

The link wasn't as bad I as thought it was going to be, but I don't think you have the full grasp of what libertarian communism is - there can't be "exchange" in communism and neither will the unit of production be separate and competing enterprises.

Try this:

http://www.theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/how-socialism-can-organise-p...

There is more choice in free communism, both collective and individual, without money or any other medium of 'exchange' as in capitalism and all market based societies

Under communism, the products of labor will be freely available or it won't be communism.

Instead of exchange, we'll have democratically controlled distribution networks. They'll exist, as I see it, on local, regional, and international scales. All products will be turned over to these distribution networks who will then see that they're distributed according to need.

With most products, the goal will be to peg production to expected need. With some products and services, this could mean basically unlimited access. With others, they'll have to be rationing, based on a democratically decided and controlled rationing system.

That's not exchange, though. That's the abolition of markets and the implementation of a planned and rational distribution system. I don't see any room (and, indeed, any need) for money or trade within such a system.

Not an expert, but does it really matter if some fringe decides decides to use their own currency? Why would we need to prevent that? What's important is that it's not being enforced as some standard means of exchange and that production is oriented around meeting people's needs and not earning a profit.

What are the ''fringe'' and what are the ''margins''?? We are talking here about replacing an integrated global capitalism based on value production with an equally integrated global communist society of free access. No body is bothered about Joe 'exchanging' an old cd for their friends hand woven gloves based on their personal and individual qualitative assessment of their personal possessions without their being any equivalent quantitative measure. 'Alternative ' currencies are still money reflecting equivalent exchange between private owners which if developed at a social level would begin to undermine the common 'ownership' of both the system of production and distribution of goods and services that we would all be benefiting from. Why would any group of people wish to remove themselves from these benefits by separating themselves out within a smaller self-contained system of exchanging private property?

So, I don't necessarily think Zug (and correct me if I'm wrong here, Zug) is backing up you're point as strongly as you think. I think he's saying that if it's a fringe thing - like some historical reenactment shit - whatever. But, that's there's no reason for us, as anarchists, the promote alternative currencies or try to fit into our post-capitalist worldview. I image Zug would be just as concerned as anyone on here if a group tried to consciously reintroduce money into their local economy in any meaningful or sustained way.

Just on this, people wanting do something doesn't make it a good decision. So if after a successful revolution (in which money has successfully been abolished), some group wants to reintroduce money, I'm quite okay basically cutting them off from the benefits of the revolution. They can't tap into our communist distribution networks, get support and assistance from surrounding collective enterprises, etc. I suspect at that point, their little monetary experiment will come to an end.

In any case, I'm with Spikymike on this one as I don't think playing at capitalist social relations would be desirable or workable within a functioning communist society. Just like we can't go back to feudalism now, once we've abolished commodity production and exchange, money would cease to function as money. There'd be very little point to it.

It's useful to distinguish between exchange in the everyday sense, which would also include such activities as swapping possessions (e.g. irrespective of how much the objects in question are worth), which

IS NOT

the same thing as 'exchange' in the Marxian sense.

Maltesto, I think that you should try to understand what money is in capitalism. It is not merely a technology for exchange, but the naked face of our domination. That is, without capitalist relations of production in which the vast majority of people are divorced from the means of survival and therefore have to work for a living, money is simply not needed.

While I don't think that this is what you mean by saying we'd have money, the reaction you're getting is that money is really only needed in a system where things of social need are produced as commodities rather than directly for other people. If production is directly for consumption, there is really no need to have anything "equivalent" to exchange. In a communist society you'd go to a "store" (as in the old understanding of a store where things are stored rather than sold) and just take what you need.

Now for scarce commodities, I could see an argument for something similar to money, although not having the function of money today (interestingly, though as an aside, I think that the blockchain could be used to improve so-called labour notes/chits solutions). Then again, for scarce goods (like tickets to popular sporting events--sorry Nization there will be sports--or staying in a hotel room with incredible view etc.), I think a lottery would be the best solution.

The only place I could actually see money being used as something representing useful things is in computer games (then again, culture reflects society, so maybe there will be another system for digital loot in a communist society).

This is correct, but also not anal-retentive enough. Technically, what Marx is referring to is circulation, which is a form determination of pre-capitalist exchange/buying and selling. Exchange is technically swapping possessions as you say (materially, a changing of hands, as Marx describes it), buying and selling with money being a further determination (and a necessary historical and logical precondition), which when subsumed by capital becomes circulation, where the activity of products of labour changing hands occurring only to transform value from the commodity form into money and back again.

So based on this, yes we'd still have exchange in communist society, but the necessity of value appearing in its form would not be driving these exchanges. It would be driven by the human economy of need, desire, want.

And what coercion is, for that matter...

Sorry, I'm not much of a Marxist scholar/intellectual, yet at least (still getting through Capital), so bear with me. How would it undermine our economics? There could still be free access to the products of labor alongside some exchanging, if people really felt the need for that. If it's just on the fringe and has no relation to production and consumption then I don't see what the problem is.

Also, I know I'm talking about Communism (which is what I'm in favor of), but what about room for experimentation? What if some people want to try out some Market Socialist ideas or use remuneration/Collectivism like they did in Spain in some areas?

This passage by Guerin on Spain might be relevant:

'It appears that the units which applied the collectivist principle of day wages were more solid than the comparatively few which tried to establish complete communism too quickly, taking no account of the egoism still deeply rooted in human nature [...] In some villages where currency had been suppressed and the population helped itself from the common pool, production and consuming within the narrow limits of the collectives, the disadvantages of this paralyzing self-sufficiency made themselves felt, and individualism soon returned to the fore, causing the breakup of the community by the withdrawal of many former small farmers who had joined but did not have a really communist way of thinking.'

The question is, why should such a need arise in the first place? The way some people on this thread approach this issue seems to imply that they view markets as "opportunities" and exchange as the result of people taking those opportunities. This is also the standard bourgeois view (and I mean this in a descriptive way): people discover that they have different needs and that they can help each other out by catering to those needs. So someone who is better at making arrows than at hunting starts making arrows for a hunter, who, in turn, gives this person some meat. Everyone is better off now.

However, this has not been the case, historically, with how systematic exchange came about (i.e., the regular, everyday exchange that involves all kinds of products, including basic needs – what we call the circulation of commodities and money). The market in basic needs presupposes the separation of direct producers from the means of production – the exact opposite of what communist relations are about. Under such conditions, exchange is not merely the result of people "taking the opportunity", but the result of an imperative. You can't satisfy your needs unless you take part in circulation. So the person making arrows is in fact faced with the following alternative: either I die of hunger (in the extreme case), or I make myself useful for the people in the market and start making arrows for this fellow who's offering to give me something to eat.

So this separation involves impersonal coercion; the market here is an imperative, not an opportunity. And it is always based on the exclusion of people from satisfying their needs: unless you take part in the market (unless you produce for exchange), you can't satisfy your needs. The juridicial expression of this exclusion is private property.

If systematic exchange would somehow arise under communism, it would be a sure sign that things have taken a wrong turn.

Now, of course systematic exchange is not just any old exchange. On the most general level, some sort of exchange relations (where products of labor change hands) exist in all societies, including communism. Unless everyone is self-subsistent, there has to be some process of "exchange" in general. The circulation of commodities and money is a very specific historical form of this "general" exchange which is only fully developed in capitalism. But there can be cases of random exchange in other societies, which may have no relation to the underlying mode of production. For example, two primitive tribes randomly meet and exchange stuff (this often has a more symbolic than economic significance). Even if this is done repeatedly, it need not influence their way of life in any important way (although it could!).

Something like this could occur in a communist society without jeopardizing communist relations of production in any way. If upon visiting a friend I decide I like their handmade rug and offer them a picture I have drawn of them in exchange, it's not the counterrevolution.

But once we start talking about currency and finance (i.e., credit) – this presupposes a very different and much higher stage of development of exchange, namely commodity circulation. Credit, for example, arises out of the need of commodity producers to account for variations in production and circulation times of their products. Wheat takes time to grow, but the producer of wheat needs to eat (see?) in the meantime. So they buy their necessities not with currency, but with a promissory note. After they have processed and sold their wheat, they repay the debt and the note is destroyed. But depending on other conditions, like the extent of market relations, the promissory note itself can circulate, becoming, in fact, credit money. You can see here how a system of relations that are completely out of control of individual producers (and extremely crisis-prone, resulting in famines and more, as history has shown) develops spontaneously. We wouldn't want that in communism and I don't see why it should develop under such conditions unless something is already very wrong with the underlying relations of production. Of course people could still do it for fun, in a role-playing, "historical reenactment" kind of way.

So I think we would have to be extremely careful about these things. If commodity relations start to appear, something is going wrong, and the community would have to take steps (including repression) to abolish the conditions that have led to their appearance. So this is not about forbidding people to exchange, but about watching out for changes in social relations (for whichever reason, including, for example, natural catastrophes) that could lead to systematic exchange and acting against those conditions. In fact, this (in my view) is the number one task of workers' power from day one.

I've only skimmed the document linked to by the OP. To be frank, I think it is extremely brief for what it sets out to achieve, and full of unacknowledged presuppositions and confusions. But it seems like the author presupposes the continued existence of commodity production in a post-capitalist society, with separate "companies" run by their "communities" where "The only legitimate people are those who work directly with the assets or those who live in the accommodation". So it's more like a mutalist vision rather than communism, even though the author seems critical of mutualism.

OP then writes that "It is very hard to forbid commodity markets because cooperative companies and people will need to exchange goods". Well, duh! If you presuppose the conditions of commodity production, then it would indeed be hard to forbid commodity markets because they are the necessary result of those conditions.

By the way, a good critique of the "opportunity"-view of market is E. M. Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View.

As regards Spain, the experiments with labor notes and various forms of money and credit were all part of a "transition period" to communism, not of communism itself. It wasn't that people living under communism decided to experiment with money. The idea, rather, was that we want to get to communism, somehow, but the conditions of civil war and capitalist underdevelopment in our country, as well as the international situation don't allow us to do that immediately. Diego Abad de Santillán, the leading economist of the CNT, was quite clear about the need of such a period of transition (contrary to what other anarchists before him may have said about that). As a marxist I have no problem with that. Obviously one can't have free access to everything from day one and there will have to be all sorts of arrangements to cope with that. The important thing is that wherever possible, conditions of commodity production are strangled by the working class in power and communist relations of free production and access are gradually extended. (I think GIK's Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution is still the best attempt to discuss this, regardless of the various confused interpretations about "self-managed capitalism", which it most definitely is not, that surround it.)

They couldn't sell them because no one would buy them. Also they would have no state power to defend these things. And what could you buy with them, we couldn't be producing luxury yachts or whatever and what we didn't produce wouldn't be put onto the market. You presuppose, as far as I can see, that what is produced is automatically private property.

In a capitalist market the boat that a few hundred dockworkers produce belongs to whichever capitalist ordered it or can afford it, the workers don't have a say. In communism the workers would not won the boat but they would have probably thought of why they were bulilding it first, for example to transport people or useful things, or for pleasure or exploration. They wouldn't simply hand it over to some capitalist guy and if he tried to take it they would laugh him out of the room and there would be no cops, bailiffs, security guards to help him. He could get himself a gun but then the community would deal with that too.

Well, you say that "The only legitimate people are those who work directly with the assets or those who live in the accommodation." This seems to imply that the people involved in (i.e., working in) an enterprise have special rights over that enterprise vis-a-vis other people who work elsewhere or don't work anywhere. So regardless of the "common-property framework", this really would be a system of a division of labor based on private producers (these being the companies), which is the basis of commodity production.

You also say that "Cooperative companies are based on workers equality. They are all associates which share equally their margin. Thus, they can decide to set higher wages ex ante or to distribute margins ex post." Basically, what you're proposing is a commodity-money economy with wages and ownership titles (where workers of a compony all share in the profits of that company).

Or are these typos?

Well, given that you presuppose ("unofficial") money, credit (and banking) would sooner or later develop unless there are active measures against it. I would very much recommend reading this: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/bitcoin-finally-fair-money/

They collectively decide on a general plan that is continually readjusted. If we find out we need to extend the production of a good or start the production of a new good, the plan simply allocates more resources and labor time to that project. All of this can be done without money and "finance" (unless you think "finance" already existed in the Stone Age and that cavemen were deciding on how to "finance" the production of stone axes).

BTW, you seem to accept a lot of the standard bourgeois "wisdom". You say things like (I'm paraphrasing):

"People naturally want to exchange stuff, so there will have to be some sort of commodity exchange",

"People naturally make bets, hence there will have to be derivatives".

All of this is pretty facile, I'm sorry to say. And I don't really see the problem that you are trying to solve. "Investment" in the sense of allocating resources is perfectly possible without markets, money or "finance" . People have been doing that for thousands of years. At the end of your paper, you admit that markets and trading would only exist at the margins of a communist society. What role would they play, if (obviously) most of the investment decisions (apart from those at the margins) are done without them?

I don't think you are. See my first point in this post.

See, again you presuppose a division of labor based on private producers, where individual producers decide what, for whom and how much they will produce. This isn't communism. There are many reasons why the community (i.e., everyone) would want to be involved in deciding how work is organized in a particular workplace, and what is produced there.

Should that happen, that person would be dealt with in an exemplary way.

I should add that if someone did that,

a) as jef said, they would have trouble finding any buyers, since the society can just produce more of the same and distribute it according to need, thus circumventing this mean person's plan,

b) even if they found any buyers, what could they ask in exchange? Everything is already freely available, so what could they want? Well, perhaps they would want some "special favors" from the others, or have the others working for them as personal slaves or whatever,

c) This basically amounts to wanting to reinstitute exploitative relations, in which case I wouldn't mind if the perpetrator was treated in a very harsh way, so as to make an example out of them.

Just one little fact here: most resources are not limited, they appear as such because they are commodities. What is limited is the distribution of money, which is directly tied to capitalist social relations. Most important stuff like food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, medicine etc are produced in abundance today, heck food, clothing and housing are actually overproduced.

Your assumptions are incorrect because, and this is a problem all of us have to some degree, you are taking aspect of capitalist society as natural (as Jura also points out).

That's not communism.

Also, the issue with money isn't state backing. It's what money represents and the way it obscures and distorts and transforms the relationships of the social production process.

Why would they want to do that if their needs (and the necessary funds for future investment) are already covered by the plan? Why spend extra time at work?You see, getting out of work was the reason we fought for communism in the first place. Again, you presuppose motivations and actions that don't make much sense outside of capitalism.

If I remember correctly, the text also explains how credit relations spontaneously arise from monetary exchange. The point is that if you presuppose currency and circulation, credit relations are also implied (unless there are countermeasures to prevent their emergence).

But this is possible even without crypto-money. Moreover, why would people want to create a currency in communism, other than for entertainment purposes (like when playing Monopoly)? What's the point of that? (Please don't say that it's natural or that it's because resources are scarce. I agree with Khawaga, above, on resources. In an absolute sense, resources have been scarce in some sense ever since there were humans – in the sense that there is a physical limit to the land and water available on this planet etc. But not all societies have used markets to deal with that. Resources are also scarce for animals and they don't seem to be involved in derivatives trading.)

Continuing from wikipedia, "Finance can be broken into three different sub-categories: public finance, corporate finance and personal finance." So are you saying there will be "corporations" in your society? You see, this mode of arguing is quite childish. Wikipedia articles on these issues are usually informed by neoclassical economics which pretends that capital has always existed, that markets are natural etc. So obviously they have a definition of finance which is applicable even to primitive tribes. But that is a point of view completely alien to the one usually used here on libcom.

I haven't used a single ad hominem attack. If I say that the person A is stupid and show that what they're saying is wrong, then that's not an ad hominem attack. If I say that something is stupid because person A is saying that, then that's an ad hominem attack.

Of course exchange predates capitalism. But look at the historical evidence on the extent of exchange – what was exchanged, who was involved, what was the role of exchange in societies – and you'll see that up to some pretty recent times, monetary exchange was mostly marginal in the functioning of societies and that usually only a fraction of the people were actually involved in any trading.

No, it's not, not in my definition of finance. If I put a cake in the oven, forget about it, and the cake gets burnt, then I made a mistake and the cake is ruined, but I wouldn't say it's a finance issue.

I don't see how changing preferences have anything to do with this.

1. Assume that a person A steals the entire bread supply and wants to blackmail others into exchanging whatever for the bread.

What happens next is:

a) Persons B, C, D... still want bread (constant preferences), so the society produces more bread. Problem solved.

b) Persons B, C, D... no longer want bread (changed preferences). Problem solved, A now has a useless load of bread.

c) Persons B, C, D... still want bread, but there are no more resources to produce it (for whichever reason – although this is highly implausible, because the plan would have made sure that we can produce more bread after the current supply of bread is eaten, whoever had eaten it). We move to the next point.

2. Persons B, C, D offer to exchange with A. But A could have already gone to the warehouse and taken whatever they want. If they could do it with bread, why not anything else? Even if we assume limited resources – if A had wanted milk, they could have stolen the entire supply of milk as well (or at least taken as much as they really need). So they would have both bread and milk. And so on for any other products. So it's probably neither milk nor anything else that's available at the warehouse that A wants.

3. So I guess A wants "special favors" from B, C, D, or have them working as their personal slaves, or to become some sort of a warlord disposing of the entire product. What happens next is that a special committee arrives in town and strings A up on a lamppost for all to see. The bread, the milk, etc. are put back into the warehouse. Problem solved. And there was even a teachable moment, so I guess that's a Pareto improvement for everyone.

This is just too much...

Do you realize we are talking about a communist society which was only possible after a world revolution, including a world civil war, had taken place? Do you realize how many "underground markets" already had to have been crushed by repression (by the organized working class) even before we had arrived at this hypothetical situation?