kropotkin goes on at length about how communist scrip of whatever kind runs the risk of duplicating money problems and so on and i am on board for the most part, but:
how is his proposed system of volunteer-labor for specialized goods and wants ultimately different? if you want a telescope you go talk to the people who do telescopes and trade some quantity of free time in their service until you have done a telescopes worth of service for the local astronomical society or whatever. seems reasonable.
im sick. i have a precious few useful hours each day and not anywhere near the ten he presumes people should be able to contribute to communal and personal endeavors. i would become/remain impoverished due to sickness. for someone like me, if this custom does not acknowledge or recognize disability fluently, does it not run the risk of replicating exactly the problems he lays at the feet of statists? he scoffs at the idea of an eight-hour labor note issued by an authority, but anyone who has been sick and ignored recognizes the ability for any person with a resource to fill that role. decentralizing and informalizing a labor currency (he proposes 5 hour "half days" as a unit of measure) still creates avenues for social tension to create prejudicial lack even if nobody can, strictly, oppress through accumulation.
i do not think, given the rest of the text dealing with the disposition of sick people and especially his shockingly modern disavowal of laziness in contrast with very european and timely views on other subjects, that kropotkin himself would think that people who cannot should be denied their telescopes. but i do think that this can become an implicit means-testing for social participation when faced with people like me who have perhaps two "productive" hours a day, if that. i have met enough shitty anarchists who regard my life as an unfortunate contrivance to be swallowed up by the wild just like the cities we should abandon (etc) to believe that this reading is uncommon in our nazi-poisoned psychic well, unfortunately
