None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.
That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc.
This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not.
If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure.
And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out.
There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't.
Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
> I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate
Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices.
> Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital.
> Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds.
> It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey!
Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
With that in mind, consider what would happen today if you were to claim some random empty house as your own, posted a sign to that effect outside, and started to shoot any "trespassers". That would be murder - and the law would come down on you. Same thing would happen in this hypothetical society if someone tried to do what you describe.
(The issue of how a fully anarchist society would deal with murder in the first place is a separate and complicated one. I can't really speak for them; my own take is that anarchism is a kind of political asymptote - an unachievable utopia that the realistically-possible ideal society would trend towards as its cultural underpinnings evolve to make it more viable. In this day and age, something like Bookchin's libertarian municipalism appears to be empirically viable.)