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There has never been an anarchist "experiment" capable of sufficient coordination to produce modern (for its time) medicine, or the agricultural technology need
by mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
There has never been an anarchist "experiment" capable of sufficient coordination to produce modern (for its time) medicine, or the agricultural technology needed to feed current populations, or housing and infrastructure fitting of modern standards, and so on for many other goods and services we consider necessary to life today. Anarchism has almost sort of worked for a handful of small-scale, already-impovershed revolutionary/resistance groups, who can rely heavily on pre-existing infrastructure and some trade with capitalist or state communist industries, but there is little evidence to suggest it would be able to work on a meaningful scale. It also has a tendency (such as in Spain) to be co-opted by wannabe dictators anyway who simply establish oppresive state communist regimes regardless.
Soviet-style command economies are already notorious for being unable to match capitalist economies in terms of efficiency, due to the simple fact that it's far easier to use natural pricing (maybe with some interventionism) to reach equilibrium than equations and top-down production quotas. You can make an argument this could change with help from modern data science and machine learning but that's beside the point. With anarchism, you are taking all of the issues of soviet-style economies and making them even worse in that now each individual commune is responsible for coordinating with every other one it relies on. Even if you don't prevent natural currency systems from developing you still lose massive amounts of efficiency and still end up with inequality (due to resource, skill, etc. distributions being inherently different), though this time maybe you get lucky and the ienquality is between communes as opposed to being within them, between classes.
Also, there are practically no cases of lasting nonviolent anarchist revolutions. The haves tend to really not like giving up belongings and lifestyles to the have-nots when forced to. That's obviously not an argument against anarchism, though.
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoYou make interesting assumption that centralization is more efficient then decentralisation but if that was the case then soviet style economy should be more efficient than capitalist market. In capitalism you effectively have a bunch of corporations with internal command economy that trade with each other. In Anarchism hypothetical companies are much smaller so you don't have in efficiencies stemming from these long chains of command with a lot of beaurocracy. Anarchism didn't have opportunity to create bigger project because the tendency is violently repressed by rulers of the current world. It actually eliminates the lot of losses of efficency of current society like economic rents which are proved to be negative to economy, just currently capitalism has relatively extremely strong violence potential and great propaganda machine. This obviously makes Anarchism a very hard and ambitious project but to me its clear that it would be more efficient in creating societies with higher standard of living than what we have currently. Please consider that it can both have markets and currencies AND decentralised planning depending on what is better in specific situation.
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago[dead]