In June 2024, I wrote an article on anarcho-communist planning. René Berthier wrote a 63-page response (PDF) in October 2024 also citing my FAQ on anarchist economics. René's text gives valuable insights into the historical debates between collectivists and anarcho-communists and is worth a read if you are interested in this topic. While René is a proponent of Bakunin's collectivism and learning from the experiences gained in Spain 1936-39, I try to write about modern versions of anarcho-communism, mostly from a theoretical perspective.
As I think these debates have educational value, I'd like to react to some aspects of what René wrote in this short text. (Reading René's text is not required for understanding this response.)
Let me start with some notes on possible misunderstandings:
I'm not a fan of fighting over what some anarchists said a long time ago. I think we should focus on what flavors of anarchism work best today. Or, as Erich Mühsam put it in "Liberating Society From the State": "Thoughts do not become more correct because someone else has previously formulated them".
René criticizes my way of thinking and writing as theoretical and even dogmatic. He prefers gaining knowledge in an empirical way, e.g. by studying historical events. He notes "each generation is obliged to reinvent everything, which produces a real sense of annoyance" lamenting the fact that in his opinion new generations of anarchists did not learn enough about historic anarchism. Looking back at history can be interesting and a source of inspiration. However, for some cases that happened more than 50 years ago, I feel that our situation today is different and we need to adapt our ways of thinking to today's needs.
Anarchism is not a dictum but a diverse collection of many currents evolving over time. I mostly support Voline's idea of synthesis anarchism and I'm organized in a synthesist anarchist federation. I would say that for educational purposes (new generations of anarchists enter the movement all the time), it still makes sense to clearly and constructively state and discuss the differences and pros and cons of different anarchist currents. Not to be dogmatic about anarchist theory but to spark the discussion among anarchists about what we want to achieve, as a step towards the transformation into anarchist societies. This is usually the purpose of my texts. For practical purposes and organizing, I agree that we should go the synthesist way of respectfully working together and not insisting on pure doctrine.
On the question of how to learn about anarchism, I think we should acknowledge that it's good that various anarchists have various methods of thinking and gaining knowledge: while some get excited about people recounting their experiences of historical events, others like fiction (e.g. solarpunk) to spark their imagination, others gain experience by being part of anarchist groups, collectives, and communities, and again others can more easily be convinced by abstract theory. This diversity is in my opinion good and characteristic of anarchism. There is no need to call one or the other dogmatic.
René writes "In practice, the Spanish libertarians had developed effective and perfectly egalitarian systems to solve the problem of access to everyday consumption, based on vouchers, described in detail by Gaston Leval".
A quote from the Wikipedia page on Gaston Leval: He described the Aragonese collectives as the first mass experiment in the distribution of resources "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", with some villages using a local currency, while others had abolished money entirely.
Augustin Souchy wrote in With the Peasants of Aragon: The Conquest of Bread is on the table in the office. Joaquin Valiente, the organiser, took the book as his model. The teacher’s theories have been put into practice by the disciple with the complete approval of the town. He has his own ideas: libertarian communism including the abolition of money. The town has nothing to do with money which loses value. The money issued by the town is not a substitute for the money issued by the State. The new town money is not an instrument of inflation, but a medium of exchange. Bread, meat, olive oil and wine are distributed free of charge.
Robert Alexander notes in The Anarchists in the Spanish civil war (PDF): According to Peirats, José Prat and the anarchist communist school won out in that struggle. [...] But the different approaches of Bakunin and Kropotkin - the anarcho-syndicalism of the former and the communalist approach of the latter - had their impact principally on the Spanish urban and rural anarchist movements, respectively.
From what I understand, there existed a wide diversity of interpretations and implementations of anarchist ideas in Spain 1936-39. This diversity and coexistence of economic models is good and expected. While I enjoyed researching this a bit, I don't think it can or should be proven that one anarchist current won over the other, and I don't see a lot of value in this debate. I find it more fruitful to debate the pros and cons of money, vouchers, remuneration of work, or needs-based economics so that we know what we strive for and can prepare for the transformation while acknowledging that in praxis multiple approaches will coexist and evolve with gained experience.
René writes about the Zaragoza Congress in 1936 "The resolutions of the Zaragoza Congress expressed ignorance of the economic mechanisms of society and contempt for economic and social reality." and suspects that I might have similar intentions.
I'm not sure what exactly happened then, but if the anarcho-communists unfairly dominated the discourse, this should indeed be criticized. Domination of the discourse is not what I have in mind when I write about the coexistence of multiple economic systems. While I like the theoretical development of anarcho-communist ideas, imagining an anarcho-communist utopia, also in order to challenge my own ideas, I do think about the coexistence of multiple macro-level economic systems. As stated above, coexistence of multiple models is what happened in Spain and what will probably happen in future cases as well and what is the characteristic of anarchism anyway. Thus it's in my opinion important to think through possible modes of coexistence. Yes, there should not be multiple versions of the same infrastructure (e.g. water supply) implemented by each economic system. The economic systems would have to cooperate. These questions are challenging, interesting, and important at the same time.
René criticizes Kropotkin's way of describing organizational patterns with "free associations" as "very diluted" and "very vague and evasive", thinking that anarcho-communists would reject regional structures of industry federations as too authoritarian.
Maybe this misunderstanding is due to diverse uses of the term "free association" by diverse anarchists. For individualists, the term tends to mean the freedom to cooperate and stop cooperating at any time when the free association no longer feels right. I was always under the assumption that Kropotkin and anarcho-communists including myself meant long-term stable agreements which are maintained with responsibility. Kropotkin even uses railways as an example which can't function without responsible long-term agreements.
I think regional and even planetary anti-authoritarian organizational structures are necessary and feasible when it comes to organizing modern economies.
Some of René's comments about my criticism of markets might be due to different definitions. Markets are an information tool that allows the exchange of goods and thus distribution. René includes anarcho-communist distribution centers from which you can take what you need in this definition. I exclude them because there is no exchange, no quid-pro-quo logic happening in the anarcho-communist case of distribution based on need. Markets, in the sense of information tools allowing quid-pro-quo logic exchange, can be abolished by completely switching to distribution based on need.
I find the distinction of distribution based on need vs distribution in quid-pro-quo logic (e.g. based on work remuneration) quite important to discuss. In the FAQ I list multiple problems with markets including insufficient information and ableist participation requirements. I don't see how collectivist versions of markets would solve all those problems.
René considers "to each according to need" as subjective and thus not a basis for economic planning. He also writes that for industrial countries, two-thirds of society's resources are used for "collective needs" which would be globally the same. For those "collective needs" "to each according to his needs" would not apply. René then concludes "it makes the debate between supporters of collectivism and supporters of anarchist communism completely obsolete".
I disagree. While all humans need e.g. water, food, clothes, and housing, the amount of water and the type of food, clothes, and housing varies from region to region (depending e.g. on weather and culture) and from human to human (depending e.g. on body type and age). I consider all needs individual but I'm not worried about that concerning the ability to plan economies or to handle scarcity. The idea of defining "collective needs" that are supposed to be common for all people sounds paternalistic to me. Who am I to decide about the needs of other people? To decide which needs are valid and which are not? Are those talking about "collective" or "global" needs only thinking about "his needs" (men) and not her or their needs (including women and non-binary people)? Are people with needs that don't match the "collective needs" then invalid people?
René thinks applying the principle of distribution based on need leads to either bureaucracy, scarcity, or wasteful abundance in huge warehouses. In the FAQ I explained that distribution based on need should not be confused with "everyone gets whatever they desire without any delay" and how modern technology allows for a combination of production based on past consumption data and production on demand. This has a good probability of fulfilling most needs without massive warehouses and wastefulness.
I agree with René that almost nothing is completely free in the sense that most things require resources, at least time. I don't agree that we can measure the value of things in a single number, the price. In times of scarcity, communities, regions, and the planet will have to decide how to use scarce resources and how to distribute them. This is not an easy task but in my opinion, it becomes feasible using modern technology like real-time communication via the internet. Thus falling back to prices, markets, and work remuneration – which have clear drawbacks compared to distribution based on need is not required. If I understand René correctly ("No one is opposed to remuneration according to need") he is also in favor of distribution based on need if it turns out to be feasible in praxis. This remains to be proven.
Another advantage of anarcho-communism over collectivism is, in my opinion, that the "ideology" of "to each according to their needs" makes all types of needs, including those for care (reproductive work), first-class citizens of the economic planning process. In my opinion, anti-authoritarian drafts of future societies and economies need to answer the question of how they will handle care work. Care work should be explicitly considered in economic planning, as it does have some specific characteristics like requiring higher levels of reliability and sometimes not being transferable.
It might not be a coincidence that the 63 pages written by René do not mention care work. Let me quote a larger excerpt from his text in which he defends the idea of remuneration for work:
The principle “To each according to his labour” was not intended to exclude, in the literal sense, those who didn’t work: it was originally designed to exclude from the benefits of society those who – exploiters, social parasites – deliberately did not work. But anarchist-communists after Kropotkin will pretend that this formula was intended to exclude all proletarians who did not work, that is, who were not in production – children, wives, the elderly, the sick, etc. – which was obviously not the intention of the collectivists, as Bakunin says: “The old, the invalid, the sick, surrounded by care, respect and enjoying all their rights, both political and social, will be treated and maintained profusely at the expense of society.”
I find this problematic for multiple reasons: Equating work with production means explicitly excluding reproductive work. Care work stays invisible in this description and we have to assume that the idea is that "wives" continue to silently do this work. Comparing humans with parasites is in my opinion something to avoid. However, what I find most problematic is that all of the people listed in the quote will be "treated and maintained profusely at the expense of society". This makes them the exception from the norm and the passive dependent receivers of social benefits, which is degrading and ableist. In an anarcho-communist economy, they would be treated like any other human as we all have needs.
For these reasons, I still consider the debate about markets and remuneration of work between anarcho-communists and collectivists relevant today.
I don't want to explain the benefits of intersectional anarchism in detail here as others have already done that ("the smashing of any structured hierarchy can have a destabilizing effect on the rest, as the simple existence of any of these social divisions serves to naturalize the existence of all other hierarchies").
René writes that misogyny and racism can't be the foundations of capitalism because "[they] are characteristic not only of capitalist societies but also of societies whose essential determination is not capitalism". I disagree. A foundation is an underlying basis or principle. E.g. mathematics is the foundation of multiple fields of science. And misogyny and racism could be the foundation of multiple types of societies. I did not even write that racism and misogyny are the foundations of capitalism but that they "are not only part of the history of capitalism but are inherent to its system”. In the sense that capitalism benefits from and reproduces these forms of discrimination.
René rejects these ideas as "new inclusive-woke-self-flagellating fashion", later writing about a "mania" in the context of critical whiteness and "woke galaxy". "Woke" is now mostly used as a pejorative by people like Elon Musk. As anarchists, we can choose to create a different discourse.
Intersectionality and critical whiteness are not about self-flagellation but about being open to listening to how others experience hierarchies and structural discrimination, reflecting our privileges, and using these privileges as allies, fighting together in solidarity to end all forms of oppression. Some people experiencing discrimination based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, body norms, religion, age, ability to perform, poverty, ... realize that to end the form of oppression they are most affected by, they need to also fight capitalism. Anarchist intersectionality is about fighting this fight together, constructively, while still acknowledging our differences. Intersectional thinking also prevents us from proposing universal dogmatic solutions that are supposed to be the blueprint of utopia, the "right" way to life as imposed on all of us in a colonial fashion.
Also, I think it's important to be open towards new developments in anarchism especially when you are interested in an inter-generational exchange of knowledge and experiences between anarchists.
I would like to thank René Berthier for his extensive comments on my text. I hope this answer does not come across as disrespectful. My intention was to continue the debate on anarchist economics and I hope this text might spark some further educational debate between anarchists while working together in solidarity and synthetic federations in praxis.