u/Fun_Transportation50

The main issue with a collective system is that it forces equality of outcome over fairness of effort. If you are the person who contributed 40% of the actual value , through your unique skill, your invention of the furnace, or your harder labor , you lose your individual autonomy because the community gives you the same "one vote" as the person who contributed almost nothing.

Imagine four people operating a blast furnace. You built the furnace and do the most dangerous, skilled work (40% of the total effort). The other three do basic tasks (20% each). In a communist system, if those three people vote to use the metal for something you think is a waste, they win 3-to-1. Even though you did the most work, you have the least say in your own actions. You have lost the "front-row" control over your life because the majority can outvote your expertise and effort.
The Solution Is introduction of Proportion
A truly fair system would grant say-so based on proportion. If you did 40% of the work, you should own (that’s property right ) 40% of the "say" in what happens to the product. Basically 40 percent of the company , but how do you decide what "40% of the work" actually is?
You can’t just use "hours worked." Someone could spend 10 hours lifting a rock and putting it back down , that’s back-breaking work, but it’s useless.
The Market Solution: The only way to decide "value" without a government or a collective "voting" ( because that again equal say then proportional ,) is through the Market (The Invisible Hand). In a market, value is decided by how much others actually need what you produced. If people want your steel more than someone else's rock-lifting, your "proportion" of the wealth and say-so naturally goes up. Hence you can buy or shares

While markets today have their own unfairness, the goal of "proportion" is to ensure that your individual autonomy is protected by your own output. If you produce more for society, you should have more control over the property you helped create, rather than being forced into an "equal" system that ignores your actual contribution.

The fundamental flaw of a socialist society is that it destroys individual autonomy. Even though today’s system is not working properly , as seen by the extreme wealth of a few people , a socialist society will never be fair because it directly loses the link between effort and reward.

The only choice for a fair society is one where property is individualised to its proportion through markets , that is capitalism. ( individual have the right to private property and market decides capital deployment ) Therefore, to make a fair system, we utilize capitalism and then fix the market. That is the only way to achieve fairness, so we must fix the market. How we fix it is the next question, which is not the premise of this point.

I keep seeing this claim that anarchist communism “maximises individual freedom.” It sounds good, but it only works if you distort the meaning of freedom until it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Freedom of individual. It’s your ability to live your own life without being forced into things you didn’t agree to. The core of that is negative liberty the freedom to say no. No to demands, no to obligations, no to being used for someone else’s goals.

People confuse this with just being anti-state. But removing the state doesn’t remove coercion. It just removes one source of it. Coercion can still come from collectives, communes, or even just social pressure. If a group can override your choices, you’re not maximally free you’re just controlled in a different way.

If you are at the mercy of the mob, you are not individually free

Private property is not some random legal idea. It comes directly from human action. You act, you produce, you create , and that creates a direct connection between you and what you produced. Property rights exist to protect that.

If you make something, it’s yours. Simple.

And once that’s true, something important follows, consent becomes the only way anything changes hands. Property rights exist to protect what you produce, and only consent can transfer it to someone else.

That’s where real freedom shows up.

If you own what you produce, you can say no. You don’t have to give it up, you don’t have to accept bad deals, you don’t have to obey someone just to survive. You have independence.

That’s negative liberty in practice.

Now remove private property, and everything breaks. If “the collective” controls resources, then your access depends on them. Your ability to say no becomes conditional and divided between people and not your actions , hence giving them control of your actions , That’s not freedom.

And if you say “well there’s no state,” that still doesn’t fix it. Because if only consent is supposed to matter, then no one ,not the state, not a collective, not a mob ,should be able to impose on you at all.

Only consent should be able to change the life of another person.

That’s literally what a market is at its core: voluntary exchange. No one can take from you without agreement. No one can force terms on you. It’s all based on yes or no.

So if a system rejects private property and puts control in the hands of a group, it’s already broken that rule. It means someone else has a say over your life and your output.

You can’t claim to maximize individual liberty while removing the individual’s control over what they produce, and while making their choices dependent on others.

Being anti-state is not enough. Calling something “collective freedom” doesn’t make it individual freedom.

If you can’t truly say no, you’re not free.