A Conversation with an Anarcho-Communist

He answers the burning question: will we have video games in the commune??

Welcome to the CHH Conversations series- I’m aiming to do one a week, detailing a person (or people) who belong to an interesting group which is either part of the current zeitgeist, typically unheard, or just something I find super interesting. Note that my interviewing someone doesn’t mean I agree with them or approve of what they say—in fact, I may strongly disagree with many of the people I interview! I do, however, appreciate that anyone gave me any amount of their time, so be nice.

Meet Ryan, a 33-year-old hotel front desk worker. He’s an anarcho-communist, which is a mix of anarchism and communism. The image above is a DALLE rendering of his physical features as he described himself to me. I wanted to ask him some questions about his political leanings, and he kindly agreed to speak with me.

Okay so first of all: how would you describe anarcho-communism to your average middle-aged median voter who hasn’t read any theory?

A philosophy to abolish the unjustified social hierarchies such as ableism/racism/sexism/transphobia/homophobia and unjustified economic hierarchies such as the boss over the worker and the landlord over the tenant. The nation state inherently is a tool to protect these hierarchies and needs to be dismantled along with capitalism. Anarchism is “without rulers” not “without rules” and communism means “freedom from economic exploitation” not a dictatorship.

How did you personally get into anarcho-communism?

My first encounter with it was through music from bands like Rise Against, NOFX, and Rage Against the Machine in high school but I didn’t have much an understanding beyond “government bad, corporations bad”. When I got into my early 20s I read and learned more about capitalism and ideas to replace it with a more just system. Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Emma Goldman were the writers that really got me to understand these ideas along with Marx’s Labor Theory of Value.

A lot of people hear about authoritarian regimes like the USSR- or even know people who lived through it- and conclude that a lack of freedom is necessary for a communist society. Obviously anarcho-communism isn’t authoritarian. How would you expect to prevent people from, say, starting their own for-profit business or becoming a landlord, in an anarcho-communist society?

Yes, anarcho-communism is extremely critical of these “communist party run states” because they simply replace the role of the capitalists and landlords with often unelected bureaucrats and party officials. I believe in an anarcho-communist society the “businesses” we know today would be more like Union-run cooperatives. All management decisions could be voted on by the workers or they could elect a leader to handle duties that would normally be done by a manager such as keeping track of inventory or ordering supplies from another union coop. Landlords would be groundskeepers for tenant unions, their job would be maintaining the homes the flow of money could stay the same but it would be a more level field between the tenants and those that would like to maintain homes for others.

To prevent people from wanting to exploit others would simply be a boycott. Why work for someone else and have the full value of your labor withheld from you when you could do that job in a union co-op where you get to have a say on important matters?

Obviously there will still be disagreements over what compensation should look like for different jobs, but without the profit being extracted from the workers to the capitalists the workers will have more resources to put into the business or take home themselves since now there isn’t someone doing little to no work who takes the lions share.

So I think another thing people might be mistaken about is they think that fun luxuries like video games wouldn’t exist in such a society. So what would an anarcho-communist video game production company look like?

Right now in a capitalist society we actually have unpaid modders for PC games and people that work for nothing more than donations to make emulation software to the ire of the video game companies. We even have a very capitalist company called Valve Software that have a nearly non-hierarchical workplace where every developer, artist, designer, and programmer is able to work on whichever project they want or feel their skills are best suited.

Luxury items that currently only exist for the ruling class such as expensive cars, private jets, and mega yachts likely won’t exist, or if they do they would be collectively owned in some way. I think the current existence of these super luxury items shows that we have the wealth, resources, and productivity to meet the needs of everybody, it’s just that capitalism incentivizes meeting the desires of those with extreme wealth over meeting the needs of those without any. Everybody will still be free to have personal property, but if that property is extremely wasteful or unsustainable for the community they might not be able to get the resources they need to maintain it.

Obviously in our current society, anarcho-communism isn’t one of the major political parties and it’s unlikely to wind up being our country’s form of government. Is there anything you do politically to steer society in this direction even if it won’t be all the way? Is there any American politician you like or consider “close enough?”

Yeah the cause of anarcho-communism is definitely an uphill struggle but it’s the ideal that matters to me. I think the things that can be done immediately is supporting and joining labor unions or worker co-ops whenever possible and confronting bigotry whenever possible. As far as political candidates, Dr. Cornell West seems to have many ideals that coincide with myself and anarcho-communist friends of mine, specifically his criticisms of the US Imperialism around the world and racism here at home, I’ll admit I don’t know a whole lot about his “non-Marxist socialism” but I do know he is deeply critical of capitalism and supports worker rights.

Within anarchism there is a debate about “electoralism” or voting in state and national elections. The anti-electoralists argue that engaging in the current political process is consenting to be ruled by puppets bought and paid by the capitalist class that will never truly have the best interest of workers in mind if it makes the capitalists lose one cent. Voting for a candidate who goes on to win and then do horrible things like fund a genocide is not a good feeling because it feels like those that elected them partly responsible for it as well.

On the other hand, I feel like it should be a more case-by-case basis and I think we can use the current electoral system to signal that we need change by voting for a far left third party presidential candidate. Things such as local elections and state/city measures, referendums, or propositions are the closest to what an anarchocommunist society would rely on to make decisions so personally I think it would be pretty silly to abstain from voting on those.