This article, published on July 15, 2025, on the website of the Presidency of the Cuban government, reports on the response by Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, to controversial remarks a day earlier by the country’s Minister of Labor and Social Security, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera. On July 14, Feitó Cabrera told Cuba’s parliament that there are no beggars in Cuba, that the island’s beggars are faking poverty in search of easy money, and that those cleaning windshields on the streets or collecting rubbish from trash bins are actually collecting raw materials without paying taxes. Her televised remarks went viral on social media, causing an uproar by the public and government officials alike. Feitó Cabrera resigned her post on July 15.
No one would take your potatoes. Anything you grow or build by yourself is your own personal property that is yours to do with as you wish.
The grand idea of an Anarchist society is that if we collectively worked toward just meeting everyone’s basic needs, it would remove the ability for people to coerce others to work for them under threat of homelessness or starvation otherwise (our current arrangement in society).
This basic work to meet the essential needs of everyone, if mostly automated with the aid of machinery and computers, would realistically mean everyone would collectively only need to pitch in about 3 months of their time per year to maintain a reasonable standard of living, the rest of the year would be free time to do with as they please, to form cooperatives with people on equal footing, to spend time with family, to garden, or to create art.
This collective work could not be enforced with violence, coercion, or a state (as none would exist, ideally), otherwise it would quickly descend into authoritarianism. It would have to be taken up willingly by individual communities, and it is very likely they would do so once the benefits are made clear and they are not under the yolk of capitalism coercing them to worry about themselves above all, and instead begin to think on a collective as well as an individual scale. It would be a stark improvement in quality of life of 95% of the population, something unseen in history except briefly during the Spanish Revolution.
That is a pipe dream. What’s to keep me from coming over to your yard and taking your potatoes? I am a statist, we must have some form of control to keep assholes like me from taking your shit.
There would be no real incentive to take my potatoes, since you already have your needs being met.
But if you decided you wanted to steal my personal property anyway for giggles, especially under threat of violence, I would likely tell the neighbors or community we both live in what you’re doing, and you may be shunned from the community.
If you attempt to commit violence against me, I could defend myself, and call upon a community defense group to help, similar to how Rojava does it.
I think you’d be surprised how uncommon that sort of behavior would be under what would effectively be a semi-post scarcity society. A person living in anarchist Catalonia during the revolution described how odd it was after they abolished money, and people had the option of simply taking more than they needed. But he described how quickly people adapted to it, and began only taking what they needed, as they became assured they would be able to get more when they needed it, and didn’t want to deprive soneone else.
There’s quite a repository of archeological evidence that the style of society I’m describing was once the norm until fairly recently in human history, showing us that our current mode of existence, where dominance hierarchies and artificial scarcity rule, is not a deeply rooted or unchangeable aspect of human nature, but in fact an aberration from the norm.
You can read more on that aspect in the book The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Highly recommend it.
Humans are astonishingly cooperative with eachother in a post scarcity environment, but there have been few opportunities in the modern era for that to come out and flourish, as otherwise capitalism wouldn’t be able to perpetuate itself.
I’ll check it out. Pretty new book, which explains why I haven’t heard of it before