This text was first published in the Organise-Magazin, a project of the Anarchist Federation in Britain.
Here we are, as members and friends of anarchist federations, of prefigurative anarchist structures, thinking about post-revolutionary societies and communities, while living in a reality of climate crisis and rising fascism. Rising temperatures and freezing social connections. Is this really a good time to think about future anarchist societies? Yes. Future anarchist societies are needed as a perspective out of this mess and yes, anarchist societies also work under harsh conditions and scarcity. This text describes some economic aspects. Yes, the economy is not the only thing that needs to change during a revolutionary transformation. However, it is one of those things we should figure out before if we want to avoid supply bottlenecks during and after the revolution.
The economy is about how and what to produce and how to distribute. Everyone is affected by this. Thus, there should be the possibility for everyone to be part of economic decisions. As anarchists, we want to distribute to each according to their needs. Basing an economy on needs is too complex, they told us. Needs are too subjective, they told us. The market and prices are the only solution for getting information on needs, they told us. Free markets are nicely decentralized, you anarchists should love that, they told us. Nope.
Anarchism is not only about freedom, it is about freedom and solidarity. About finding the balance between both. Markets, no matter how “free” or “social” they are, are missing the aspect of solidarity: The market logic requires active participants, “norm-humans”, who are able to work in a normative way, which will get them some coins, for which they can get the things they need in return. Market logic, is quid pro quo logic, exchanging one thing for another thing. Excluding those that don’t have the one thing, the coins in the first place. Excluding those who can’t work in a manner that is deemed acceptable to receive coins in exchange. Excluding those who work in areas for which you don’t even get coins, like most care work. Okay, these “non-norm” humans don’t get fully excluded, they get some solidarity coins from the state. Confirming that they are the exception from the norm, that they are dependent on the paternalistic kindness of others. This is an ableist exclusion mechanism. We should strive for a needs-based economy that does not need to define a norm. On top of that, prices are quite distorted and not a good representation of needs. Also, markets are unstable and chaotic, often leading to crashes. Markets are not “the only” solution. There are better ones. Calling something “the only” solution is a red flag, a warning sign for authoritarians, anyway.
Needs are subjective? Oh, yes, and they should be. We should not allow any institution to define what our needs are. Needs vary from region to region and from person to person. Needs need to be subjective and diverse. That’s nothing to fear and not too complex. Handling the complexity of the needs of everyone is not only what can be loved about anarchism but also what anarchism is perfectly capable of achieving. Anarchist bottom-up organization patterns are ideal for handling diverse needs and complexity. Without being chaotic, fickle, and prone to crisis like markets are and without being ignorant like authoritarian communist central planning.
So how exactly can needs-based anarchist economies that reject markets, money, and wages work? (The following ideas are not meant to be dogmatic, they can coexist next to other anti-authoritarian societies.) Let’s start bottom-up. When starting with individual people, we have to remember that while everyone has needs, some people might have difficulties expressing them. While some people might be able and willing to fulfill their own needs during the periods in their lives in which they are healthy, all of us require support doing so at least in the first years of our lives. Basing an economy on autonomous individuals means ignoring the need for care work. Let’s thus start from the basic unit of a community while not being dogmatic about it: Individuals can still live an isolated self-sufficient life, it’s just not for everyone.
In a community, most people know each other, understand the needs of others, and communicate face-to-face in case of conflicts. From an economics perspective, I envision three types of structures: There can be consumer councils discussing what is needed for a good life for everyone in the neighborhood. In production collectives, in which people interested in similar ways of working, come together to decide what they can produce or provide as a service. Coordination committees are called to action when the needs don’t match the available resources. A coordination committee is not an authority but a facilitator, it collects the required information, processes it to make it more understandable and accessible, mediates between consumer councils and production collectives, and suggests possible solutions, which can then be decided upon by everyone affected by it.
A community can quickly react to changing conditions and needs. Think of climate crisis catastrophes like flooding or forest fires as an example. A community can provide basic care infrastructure like community kitchens, and places where children and elderly people can thrive. A community can detect if the mental or physical health of members deteriorates and act on that. A community can act if someone starts over-using scarce resources or stops contributing to the production collectives. People will ask what’s going on, how the person is doing, if there are unmet needs or a conflict that needs to be resolved. In a community, there is some transparency. There might be some social pressure. There might also be some culture or common project that holds the community together. In case of unresolvable conflicts, people might decide to leave the community and look for another one that better fits their needs.
All of this can happen without any currency, markets, labor wages, or someone owning the means of production. At the community level, this is easy. Let’s now look at larger levels of the economy, in which local communities interact and cooperate in similar patterns as individuals interact on the local level.
While there might be self-sustained communities which produce everything they need, this model does not work for most of us. We want e.g. food, technology, and health care that can’t be provided by an isolated community because it involves complex production, supply chains, and specialization. Like a hospital shared by multiple local communities, a specialized regional health care facility, regional public transport, a regional food processing factory, or a continental electronics factory. Any structures at the larger-than-community-level, come with the danger of developing into power structures, bureaucracies, or technocracies. They should thus be transparent, only installed for a specific purpose, and dissolved when the purpose no longer exists or the structure is overstepping its space of action.
So how can this work without markets and without a central plan? Also considering that one element of freedom is planning security: The security of knowing that my needs and the needs of my community will be fulfilled today and in the future gives me the freedom to make plans of my own, to enjoy life without existential worries. This includes the security that we handle the environment in a sustainable way and counteract the climate crisis. This clearly needs supralocal structures. How do we achieve this planning security in an anarchist economy? With decentralized plans and long-term supply agreements.
Local communities reduce the complexity of the needs of the humans living in them by fulfilling many of them locally (e.g. care needs, some local food production, housing, basic education) and aggregating the needs that can’t be fulfilled on the local level so that they can be communicated to other communities. This aggregate of needs also gives the members of the community some privacy, as people outside of the community won’t need to know which individual consumes what. The aggregated community needs can be communicated via a transparent communication medium. Ideally, neighboring communities have resources to fulfill the need, e.g. agreeing to constantly deliver food or a service. Without expecting anything in return. If resources are not that plentiful, coordination committees can be instantiated to facilitate and meditate, similar to the local level. Still, the coordination committees don’t decide, those affected by the decision decide.
The fact that the means of production are not owned but used and maintained by those working with them, prevents producers of critical infrastructure from sliding into a pattern of favoritism where they decide whom to give the scarce resources. The transparency of the communication of needs and supply agreements allows for some insights into distributional justice.
And what about the bananas, you asked. Why would a banana-producing region agree to supply other regions without anything in return? Once the money logic is gone and the focus is more on the needs of the people and those of the environment, we might decide that importing food from far away should be reduced by various measures. Still, we would love some bananas from far away. The needs of the continent can be aggregated and communicated to the banana-producing regions. They will say how much of these needs they will be able to fulfill, agreeing on regular monthly deliveries. With nothing in return. They might have needs of their own, like e.g. volunteer workers for banana picking or other foods they can’t get locally or regionally. This is not an exchange logic, the needs are independent of each other. They might look at the transparent visualizations of distributional justice and if they feel like the fulfillment of needs and human happiness is unjustly distributed across the regions and continents, they might communicate this to a coordination committee as a conflict that should be resolved.
The decentralized planning will thus be a network of long-term agreements of deliveries, with the network being more dense in local areas, preferring local distribution over long-distance transport. Why do I emphasize long-term agreements? Aren’t needs and conditions changing? Yes, some aspects will change, like emergency support in regions affected by climate catastrophes, resources becoming scarce, production methods changing, needs evolving. However, without capitalist advertising and planned obsolescence, needs might not change as quickly as they do now. And with open collaborative research and transparency, production processes might also change less often. Planned changes can be transparently communicated in advance and plans and supply chains adjusted accordingly.
But what about scarcity, they asked. You need to have a unit to count in order to distribute fairly. Yes, for scarce resources it is good to track the distribution transparently. But money or some other universal unit of account does not help with that. It hides too many important details like the production conditions and the environmental impact. We need key figures that might vary from application area to application area that inform the interested people and coordination committees about everything relevant.
I won’t argue that the above-described anarcho-communist economic structures will work because they are “natural” (what is that anyway?), because they make sense from a computer science way of handling complexity, because they are effective according to some complex systems theory, or because they match the viable system model from organizational cybernetics. These theories might be reassuring and might give us some insights, but we need prefigurative praxis and concrete plans on how to organize the coming anarchist economies. Like Marie Goldsmith wrote in “The Issues of Tomorrow” in 1919: “La Voix du Peuple opened a column in which unions were invited to write what each one would do after the victory in order to ensure continuous production in their domain […] We can no longer just say that something is desirable, or even try to prove it: we must show practical measures which can be immediately put into practice with the means we have at our disposal.”