Individualist societies still have many services that do not measure individual consumption or contribution to society before use
Communist tendencies can be seen in all individualist societies, and In all the services of this nature, the tendency is not to measure the individual consumption. Say one wants to travel eight hundred miles, and another five hundred. These are personal requirements. There is no sufficient reason why one should pay twice as much as the other because their needs are twice as great.
Moreover, there is a tendency, though still a weak one, to consider the needs of the individual, irrespective of their past or possible services to the community. This is because generosity without expectation for reward is intrensically rewarding. We are beginning to think of society as a whole, each part of which is so intimately bound up with the others that a service rendered to one is a service rendered to all. When you go into a public library, the librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book, they even come to your assistance if you do not know how to manage the catalogue.
In the same way, passengers of a ship do not ask credentials from the crew of a sinking ship; rather, they simply launch their raft and risk their lives in the raging waves, and sometimes perish, all to save people who they do not even know. And why do they need to know them? They are human beings, and they need our aid – that is enough. Thus we find a tendency, eminently communistic, springing up on all sides, and in various guises, in the very heart of theoretically individualist societies.
Suppose that one of our great cities, so individualistic today, were visited tomorrow by some calamity. That same selfish city would decide that the first needs to satisfy were those of the children and the aged. Without asking what services they had rendered, or were likely to render to society, it would first of all feed them. Then the combatants would be cared for, irrespective of the courage or the intelligence which each had displayed, and thousands of people would outvie each other in unselfish devotion to the wounded. This tendency exists, and is felt as soon as the most pressing needs of each are satisfied, and in proportion as the productive power of the society increases. It becomes an active force every time a great idea manifests in everyday life.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 3. Anarchist communism (p. 75).