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Concept
Free association of producers
Summary
Free association, also known as free association of producers, is a relationship among individuals where there is no state, social class, hierarchy, or private ownership of means of production. Once private property is abolished (distinctly not personal property), individuals are no longer deprived of access to means of production, thus enabling them to freely associate without social constraint to produce and reproduce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their individual and creative needs and desires. The term is used by anarchists and Marxists and is often considered a defining feature of a fully developed communist society.
Anarchists argue that the free association must rise immediately in the struggle of the proletariat for a new society and against the ruling class. They promote a social revolution to immediately abolish the state, private property and classes. They identify the state as the main guarantor of private property through the repressive apparatus such as the police or courts, hence the abolition of the state is their main target. Regarding free association, there is a difference between collectivist anarchists and anarcho-communists. The collectivist anarchists (such as Mikhail Bakunin) argued that free association is to function as the maxim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his deeds". In contraposition, the anarcho-communists (such as Peter Kropotkin, Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta) argue that free association should operate as the maxim "to each according to his needs". Anarcho-communists argue that remuneration according to work performed require that the individuals involved were subjected to a body above them to compare the various works in order to pay them and that this body would necessarily be a state or ruling class and could even bring back wage slavery, the very thing against which anarchists are fighting. They also argue that if any work is done, it is necessary and important that there is no quantitative aspect to comparate between them and that everything that is produced involves something essential to the contribution of all past and contemporary generations as a whole.
Official source
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