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Title: Why Work? Author: Anarchist Communist Group Date: 10th August 2018 Language: en Topics: work Source: Retrieved on 2020-06-05 from https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2018/08/10/why-work/
Why would people work in an anarchist society? If there was no link
between work and reward, why work?
The only way to answer this question is with another question. Why do we
accept money as payment for goods and services? Why can I go into a shop
and exchange paper, or some electronic numbers, for food, or water, or
use it to pay my rent?
The simple reason is because we all agree that it does. A shop allows me
to buy food off them because they know that they will be able to replace
the food and purchase the things that they want.
So why, in an anarchist society, would a builder build a house if they
already had one? Because the builder needs to eat food, so needs farmers
to go out and grow food, even if they have enough food themselves. Both
the farmer and the builder will need the doctors to heal even if the
doctor is healthy themselves.
In an anarchist society, everyone will work because everyone else will
work, much in the same way that everyone accepts currency because
everyone accepts currency.
It might be argued that unlike in a capitalist society, in the anarchist
society there is no link between an individual’s work and what services
and resources they can access, so there is an incentive to work poorly,
or at least to use as little energy as possible. However, in the
capitalist society there is no link between the social usefulness of an
individual’s work, and the rewards they get. A lot of people do social
harmful work and are rewarded significantly. Additionally, people are
not rewarded for the quality of their work, but rather for their ability
to manipulate the internal political economy of a work place or their
ability to create a monopoly. It’s also worth noting that right now most
people simply accept that their bosses and shareholders take a
significant percentage of the product of their labour despite the fact
that they have done no real work. If people will accept this idea, then
they will accept the idea that they should work to a high quality of
work for the good of their community and for mankind.
For all humanity to stop working would be collective suicide and people
are smart enough to realise this. We are not some sort of rationalistic
egoistical machine that has some bizarre inability to understand
collective action problems. Whilst it might be in our interests not to
work in the short run, it isn’t if we benefit for society in the medium
term.
Anarchists and communists have a slogan that sums up these ideas. The
idea: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their
need.”
This is a slogan, and shouldn’t be taken as dogma. Society shouldn’t be
organised simply to provide only what people “need,” but should meet as
many wants as possible, but equally no one should have to work
themselves to excess so that they can be said to be “giving according to
their ability.” I strongly expect that most anarchist communist
communities would aim to minimise the amount of work people had to
undertake.
Anarchist economics states that everyone should be able to access the
things they need and want and that no one should exploit the labour of
others. To answer the question at the start of this article, each would
work because they depend on others to work, and each would work well
because they would benefit from it at least as much as (actually
significantly more than) they benefit from working well under our
current economic system.