But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism. Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions.9 Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can
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