Comment 28299

By LL (registered) - website | Posted January 24, 2009 at 22:40:53

In all fairness, one of your comments warrants a serious response:

"Without private property, there is no incentive to work hard or take risks.">>

I often get the "people won't work" thing from even from open-minded people when I propose a social anarchist position. It's a reasonable concern, given the crass behaviours we see in this culture every day. But dont forget about all the voluntary labour people do - not just anti-poverty work and activism, but even mundane things like recreational sports. Think of all the voluntary work that goes into this website. As far as technology goes, somehow I think a lot of inventors were after more humanistic forms of satisfaction than just money.

New findings in social psychology don't necessarily support the assumption that people are motivated primarily by penuniary reward. Recently I was reading about Self Determination Theory, by Deci & Ryan, which has found that people tend to be more intrinsically motivated. I'm not claiming to be an authority in social psychology. But like I said, the assumptions behind capitalist economics are far from indesputible.

Also, we're not talking about taking away your house or your bike or any other personal possessions, nor immediately eliminating money or renumeration for work. Quite the contrary. It's private control over the means of production that we are challenging. Right now, most people are not rewarded fully for the hard work that they do. That's why "in the USA, the top 1 percent of households own more than half of all the country's total assets and enjoy more income than the bottom 40 percent combined."

It's high time people organized to directly challenge that injustice.

LL believes that the problems of the city reflect deeper social contradictions

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