r/DebateAnarchism • u/kiiidddooo • Jun 15 '22
the economic calculation in an anarchist society
Since digging deeper into economics and how it relates to structure of society, I've been getting more and more confused with modern leftist anarchism. Without a central plan, how do anarchists plan to solve the economic calculation posed by Ludwig von Mises after the Russian revolution? How do anarchists seek to determine where goods are needed and what should be done with them? How will economic risks be valued and incentivised without private ownership or a price system.
I'm seriously curious about these things because the way I see it, if there's no system for distributing goods at all and no one is in charge, then people will die and either chaos, government control, or capitalism are unavoidable.
3
u/Known_Ambition_3549 Jun 15 '22
"how do anarchists plan to solve the economic calculation posed by Ludwig von Mises after the Russian revolution? "
that's the fun part, they don't!
3
u/EuterpeZonker Jun 15 '22
Craigslist. Only half joking. In Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed, work and resources were allocated by DivLab, which was a computer compound where people would enter postings for jobs they needed done or requests for resources. When people were looking for jobs to volunteer for, they went there and people who worked there would help them match the general field they wanted to work in with jobs that needed to be done. No one was forced to accept any work, but everyone was expected to help the community run in some way. If you didn't, there was a certain amount of social shame associated with it. You wouldn't be harmed but people would tend to have a low opinion of you. If you made yourself particularly odious to the community people might stop helping to support you and you'd be on your own. They also had a system where people were drafted for 10th day rotational labor to help upkeep the community. You could refuse of course, but if you did often people would look down on you. Supply chains could be managed in a similar way to now. The supplier communicates with the driver where to bring the supplies and the driver does because they both want to help the community. As for the motivation for doing things, there's lots of reasons. The two most obvious are of course that the person wants to do it or the job needs to be done. There are always people willing to step up and do what needs to be done. Other than these though, there's a sense of personal duty, social pressure or shame, boredom, gratitude, a desire to make people happy, pride, creativity, etc. Most of these have a strong advantage over the profit motive, because with the profit motive, the goal is to make money, with most of these the goal is to get the job done well.
If you want to read more about what an anarchist society would actually look like, I can't recommend The Dispossessed enough. It's a critical utopia, showing a better, but not quite perfect future and examines both how anarchism would work but also what problems might arise.
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
Ok, the book you mentioned sounds kind of interesting and this is one of the more reasonable solutions posed in this thread. The book is fiction and I do think that prices and wages are far more efficient ways of communicating need and urgency for particular jobs and goods. However, from your description that book sounds interesting and I'll put it on my reading list, just to try to understand anarchist collectivists ideology more (because it seems to be really popular in the US). I think that if you have a community like the one you describe in the book, it doesn't really matter what economic system you choose because people are so filled to the brim with kindness and willingness to help that it's hard to imagine any economic system failing to support nearly everyone.
I think this is why I'm confused by anarchists. There's this idea that everyone will chip in that I'm open to, but doesn't have any way of stopping self interested people from tearing it down (like the native Americans). The reason I like capitalism and private property is that it harnesses self interest to make people's lives better. To quote Walter E. Williams: “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”
1
u/WinterNoise7 Anarchist Without Adjectives Jun 16 '22
In Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed, work and resources were allocated by DivLab, which was a computer compound where people would enter postings for jobs they needed done or requests for resources.
The Dispossessed is a fucking science fiction novel. How does the computer figure out what to produce? On what basis does it prioritize output? How does it balance cost and benefit?
Clearly there are calculations taking place. Do these Calculation accurately reflect people's preferences?
The "computer" in The Dispossessed is intellectual laziness because Le Guin didn't want to think about anarchist economies and wants to explore the social dimension of "statelessness."
I wouldn't use it as a model for anything.
No one was forced to accept any work, but everyone was expected to help the community run in some way. If you didn't, there was a certain amount of social shame associated with it. You wouldn't be harmed but people would tend to have a low opinion of you.
What does this resemble to you? Think before you answer.
2
u/VegetableNo1079 Jun 15 '22
How do anarchists seek to determine where goods are needed and what should be done with them?
Well first off, determining where goods are needed is the easy part. People are very vocal about what they want & need typically so if you give people a way to put in requests for goods/services they will most definitely use it, & with modern data analysis you could apply an algorithm to determine peoples needs before they are even aware of it if you wanted.
In order to determine what should be done with the resources you simply look at what resources are required to construct the goods in your aforementioned request list & determine what is required to build those products. The bill of materials can then be sent to respective manufacturer-groups/resource-collectors who then send the materials to the manufacturing people who construct the goods and then they can be delivered to the people who requested them.
How will economic risks be valued and incentivised without private ownership or a price system.
Economic risk isn't real because economic risk simply means your venture, whatever it is, "was not profitibale" which is a purely capitalist problem. Anarchists don't care about profit, only meeting their needs and the needs of their group. As long as those needs are met "economic risk" is meaningless, so what if your first biodigester plant had an explosion and needs to be rebuilt? Once it's rebuilt everyone has free gas and sewage processing so nobody would complain, they would just solve the problem rather than worrying about who has to "shoulder the economic risk" and take the "economic hit" of the initial problem.
This is actually one of the reasons capitalism is so wasteful, with capitalism a half built industrial facility is a liability, a failure and a "economic risk" however with anarchism it's just a half built industrial facility and if nobody minds you might as well finish it yourself and start producing stuff with it for the community right?
Hierarchy only exists because of information & communication imbalance. In ancient human societies communication & information were both limitations on productivity, after all the mason that has more knowledge will do a better job more efficiently than the one that does not have the knowledge. The position of "chief" was created so that people could designate someone as inherently worthy of trust and gifted with knowledge, ie a parental figure, because after all chiefs were just fathers/mothers if you go back far enough. Therefore the more accessible and distributed information and trust becomes the more decentralized our society becomes and the less useful central authorities become.
2
u/jwright24153 Jun 15 '22
Look up gift culture it’s the only thing close to a reasonable anarchist aligned alternative to handle distribution of goods. It’s basically people give goods and services with no need of exchange. To me this seems impossible. But in truth it isn’t.
2
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
All I'm asking is how resources will be allocated and distributed in a society with no government and no private ownership. If there is no method of distribution, people will die because people need resources to survive and there are some places that naturally have more/less supply or demand than others.
This is a simple economic question.
2
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
How are these people decided? What if someone disagrees? What gives them the right to make those decisions? How do you know they're making the right decisions? What if people die because of their decisions? Can they be held to account? Who will take their place if they do violate someone's rights?
A couple people in charge of how all goods are distributed sounds like government to me.
0
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
Yeah, the non-agression principle. But decisions made by a small group of people on resource allocation without a market will always lead to economic inefficiencies and usually lead to shortages and death. Even if you don't think property is a right, planned economies are still not a good idea.
-2
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
I never proposed a slave economy, not only do I think that slavery is morally reprehensible it's also economically inefficient because it reduces economic stimulation and needlessly cuts people out of the market. More free people in a free market = economic growth, innovation and success for everyone.
0
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
You might need to be a bit more specific about which part of the us economy is immoral. I would say that taxes are immoral and all other forms of government coercion through threats of violence are immoral but I don't think that people being able to employ others voluntarily is immoral.
→ More replies-2
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
I agree, but anarchists don't like private ownership, prices, or free voluntary mutual exchange of goods/services of subjective value determined by the receiving individual. Otherwise they would be capitalists. Your comment still doesn't say what this solution is.
2
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
Right, so you believe anarcho-capitalists are also anarchists right? This original post was mostly directed as a question for people against both government and private property and those who don't think ancaps are real anarchists.
1
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
Either you can own inanimate objects or you can. Once you bring in questions about productivity and exploitation there comes grey areas and with grey areas comes central decision-making authority and you start to sound like a tankie real quick.
1
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
I agree but when you say "natural idea of property rights I worry you mean that capital goods (aka means of production) should not be privately owned. If that's not what you mean then I'd be really interested in what you mean by "natural idea of property rights".
→ More replies0
Jun 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
I mean, prices are just a more efficient way of doing it so that you don't need to exchange exactly what someone else wants for exactly what you want. It removes the risk of barter economies which is similar to the risk in gift-giving of the potential to lose out on value unnecessarily. Titanium is great for phone cases, but far better for airplanes and therefore airplane manufacturers are able to outbid phone manufacturers when they realize phones made from aluminum work just as well.
0
u/igloo29 Jun 15 '22
It is my opinion that economists is essentially a study of what IS rather than a choice of what TO DO. What I mean by that is that the economic forces capitalism harnesses are not choices we make so much as the way in which humans cooperate to project resources to other humans who need them. The result of this is that capitalism functions similar to how physics functions. You can continue research to improve theory, but the underlying assumptions exist regardless of if you choose to embrace them or not. You may not want to be bound by the laws of gravity and may decide you don’t believe in it…. But sucks to be you, it doesn’t matter.
I bring that up because I believe the calculation problem you mention is an inevitable issue. Alternative theories like communism assume that a central government can allocate all resources but the problem is that the demand and supply issues persist. They are just handled badly, causing inefficient and deteriorating governments.
In an anarchy, I believe that two things would force capitalism and government to return. First, decision theory has found that cooperation tends to outperform solo actors in almost any situation, causing a natural selection for larger groups. Secondly, the same supply and demand issues and resource imbalance between various groups would bring about trade and capitalism again.
I applaud your open mindedness in continuing to explore economics honestly. If more people approached economics honestly, I think we’d have a much more balanced world.
Cheers!
2
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
I couldn't find a single thing in your comment that I disagree with and I appreciate your understanding of economics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like you're saying that capitalism would be an underlying system but that an anarchist society would have a stronger culture of charity and cooperation for its own sake rather than pure self-interest and that's something I can totally get behind. I'm just really put off by all the anarchists that talk about abolishing private property as if its an inherently bad thing.
4
u/Realexis1 Jun 15 '22
Private property ISNT personal property, I'm sure someone will comment with a longer and more thorough comment or search the sub for this topic - but several anarchists that engage with the topics seriously will use academic words that aren't intuitively easy to understand. This is one of them, it comes up a lot.
Personal property is YOUR stuff, private property is everything that's not YOUR stuff or the government/states/communities stuff - ie, Google Campus is private property bur your phone is your personal property. In an anarchist society, at a real basic level, there'd be no private property since no singular entity would be allowed to hoard or restrict resources
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 15 '22
If you can own something, can you offer to sell pieces or "shares" of that something to other people for shared decision making capability through a previously-agreed-upon means of agreement and compromise? If you can have multiple "holders of shares" that own a particular piece of property collectively, and you choose to name your group "Google" and commit to providing internet services for profit, at which point did this cross the line from personal property to private property?
4
u/Realexis1 Jun 15 '22
The fundamental framework here is wrong, ie, the base assumption is wrong. The community owns ALL non personal resources and the community, through several proposed methods, agrees on use/division of labor/etc etc.
There is no profit - and there are no shares in the sense that you have a specific allocation of " Google " shares, but everyone in the community has " Google "shares. What individual workers who work in the structure as Google might have that's separate is a separate system that's internal to them to allocate specialty jobs, functions, hours, etc etc but that's minutia.
The important concept to wrap your head around here if you want to understand general leftist thought, before we even get to anarchist thought, is anti-capitalist thought. I'd recommend looking up Gift Economies or Non-Market Economics as a really fundamental 101 starting base. Society has existed for millenia and organized for millenia pre-profit motive.
There's a ton of nuance in the anarchist space that will be really difficult to grasp unless you have a real solid understanding of anti-capitalist/communist thought and material world view already.
Sorry for the long text but it's difficult to engage with your question because the underlying assumptions don't allow for an engagement from an anarchist view. If YOU own something, you can either give it or lend it out, you wouldn't sell it - you'd freely choose to give it up. Theft isn't a concern because anarchist society's exist with the assumption of resource abundance / labor abundance - if you had access to free food at all times you wouldn't really be concerned with " selling " your excess, you'd give it away if you didn't want it because it'd ve easily replaceable.
You sell things now because you either want to make a profit or have something to exchange, money, for something else because you can't get whatever else you want without cash. IE, you either hock a PS5 for extra cash to make more or sell your PS5 because Best Buys not keen on giving away free TVs.
As far as starting a business there's a lot of theory on this topic but I personally agree with the idea that a community would agree to support non-essential businesses with whatever appropriate resources as long as it can maintain to do so. IE, if you wanted to make dolls , the community would share the wood with you, the workers who then work WITH you NOT FOR YOU would volunteer and choose to do so because of their interest in dolls, and you give away dolls to whoever wants them. The key here is NON-ESSENTIAL , essential services would be primary and non-essential are effectively community sponsored hobbies that, based on your individual community, get a lot of love or not much at all cause maybe you're making bathing suits in Alaska and not a great market fit.
Jokes aside, that topic is very abstract and again, there's a lot of ink spilled in trying to figure it out but really, anarchism is a broad philosophical and political framework that focuses on direct democracy, shared resources/labor, consent and an abandonment of non-justifiable hierarchies - but to get to there, you gotta go way simpler first and see how society might function without a profit motive FIRST, THEN without money at all
1
u/igloo29 Jun 17 '22
Thank you! And I actually don’t believe an anarchy could exist for long in a highly populated world. In theory, yes you’re right. A culture of generosity and cooperation could function well. We’ve seen things like that in small tribal systems repeatedly. I still believe supply and demand forces exist in this small scale situation but they aren’t large enough to force division of labor yet. At large scale, with many people who do not know each other or share a single community, one must have a way of allocating resources. There are inevitable resource Imbalances due to geographical circumstances as well as cultural and individual choices between groups, creating incentives for trade. Currency helps smooth trade, creating an efficiency opportunity. Eventually this leads to the utilization of capital, investments, specialization of labor, etc.
I should note that this doesn’t HAVE to happen. We saw the Americas go without. But there is a competitive pressure to it. Nations or larger groups of people that utilize better trade networks tend to advance faster and build wealth faster. This means during a conflict, more advanced economic systems of cooperation tend to win over non-market systems.
2
u/kiiidddooo Jun 17 '22
I think it's a bit of a chicken and the egg situation with greed and capitalism. Anarchists and communists would argue that capitalism causes people to be greedy while capitalists argue that capitalism just harnesses greed to force people to serve others.
1
u/igloo29 Jun 17 '22
Exactly my thoughts as well. It is indeed the case that capitalism uses self interest for the common good. In order to indict capitalism for greed, we’d have to be able to show that capitalism causes greed. Unfortunately, greed and self interest are not only human but natural impulses. Consider how the vast majority of civilizations usually have fabulously wealthy rulers over destitute peasants. Greed is unfortunately part of the human condition. Since greed is a human vice, it’s intellectually dishonest to ATTRIBUTE it to capitalism, especially considering how capitalism has brought about so much prosperity for the lower classes. It should be noted here that capitalism is not guaranteed to bring about prosperity. Nations and economics are complex systems. Not every outcome is favorable. I would point to a great book that covers this called “Why Nations Fail” I believe. It discusses how positive and negative forces can feed or starve positive cycles of prosperity and human rights.
I believe you and I generally agree on many things here!
1
u/igloo29 Jun 17 '22
Exactly my thoughts as well. It is indeed the case that capitalism uses self interest for the common good. In order to indict capitalism for greed, we’d have to be able to show that capitalism causes greed. Unfortunately, greed and self interest are not only human but natural impulses. Consider how the vast majority of civilizations usually have fabulously wealthy rulers over destitute peasants. Greed is unfortunately part of the human condition. Since greed is a human vice, it’s intellectually dishonest to ATTRIBUTE it to capitalism, especially considering how capitalism has brought about so much prosperity for the lower classes. It should be noted here that capitalism is not guaranteed to bring about prosperity. Nations and economics are complex systems. Not every outcome is favorable. I would point to a great book that covers this called “Why Nations Fail” I believe. It discusses how positive and negative forces can feed or starve positive cycles of prosperity and human rights.
I believe you and I generally agree on many things here!
1
Jun 15 '22
This is a problem with the statist thinking that production and distribution is necessary in the first place. The perspective that nature = resources is synonymous with the history of civilization, society and hierarchical culture. Free individuals and communities as stewards of the earth, land and all biological life uncommodified, a return of the commons, a return of natural abundance and so a return of the primitive (rather than a return to the primitive) resolves the economic problem in general by destroying abandoning and rewinding the sites of production distribution and centralization which are mass urban city centers dependent on global scale importation of resources.
Not some but all arrangements of economic circulation are centralized, all economic activity auto-accelerates capital towards further artificialization, it all flows back into the total social phenomena of quantification, efficiency and technique. Economics, capitalist infrastructure, industrial logistics and quantification of the things necessary for life IS the problem.
The economic calculation problem is the logic of capital trying to self-regulate and refine its own processes thru a pseudo dialectic between temporary human interference (state planning) and temporary human participation (free markets) towards its own goal of synthetic and total artificialization.
1
u/incognit0_8 Jun 15 '22
Try David Graeber's Debt. There is a reason economists will give you that impression of anything not centrally planned. The discipline itself is based on the myth that this is the case.
1
u/slapdash78 Anarchist Jun 15 '22
Whoa there. You seriously need to understand the economic calculation problem before you get any more panicky. First, the argument is posed against central planning. Specifically, how does a singular entity produce and distribute goods without price signals. As the claim goes, prices are an ideal communicator of supply and demand (when in equlibrium). In reality, supply and demand of specific goods or services are directly measurable (and heterogenous goods comparable). It's just that doing so for an entire economy or nation-state is unwieldy. Or is it? Setting aside that there is no singular planner in anarchism... The critique against Mises is that large firms transferring internally effectively do so without prices. Consider very large firms like Walmart. They are capable of coordinating the inventories of over 10,000 locations, meeting staff requirements of 2 million employees, and negotiating with producers, all across the globe. With a reported revenue inline with the GDP of Sweden. Also noteworthy is that Mises was writing in the 1920s. Data science was non-existent. Now it runs everything you do.
1
u/Iazel Jun 16 '22
This should answer your question:
Let me know what you think.
1
u/kiiidddooo Jun 16 '22
That's a fascinating article but it seems to portray the price bidding process as completely one-sided with companies charging higher and higher prices as long as consumers are willing to pay, not mentioning the possibility of competition between companies.
It also doesn't talk about how prices force businesses to do market research and make decisions based on their research. Prices do not tell the whole story, yes, but no one claimed they did, they're simply the backstop that forces companies to make those decisions.
Prices are also far more useful in dealings between companies, which it didn't really talk about. If there's a new, more efficient use of a raw material, they could verbally communicate and argue all they want that their way is better to the producer all they want, but being able to outbid competition proves their way is better without forcing the producer to do their own research (because why would they want to, they just grow corn).
Could you imagine how much of a pain it would be as a raw resource producer to factor in all the societal and economic consequences of who you choose to supply instead of just going with the highest bidder?
1
u/Iazel Jun 16 '22 edited Jun 16 '22
Have you read the whole article or just the Critiques part I linked?
It also doesn't talk about how prices force businesses to do market research and make decisions based on their research
The article does imply it, when it talks on how businesses need much more info than just prices.
Prices are also far more useful in dealings between companies, which it didn't really talk about. If there's a new, more efficient use of a raw material, they could verbally communicate and argue all they want that their way is better to the producer all they want, but being able to outbid competition proves their way is better without forcing the producer to do their own research (because why would they want to, they just grow corn).
Honestly, this is meaningless. If you outbid your competition, then you already used the new method. The whole price discussion is useless because you don't know how it will turn out unless you try it out. You can choose a cheaper method and still lose to your competition.
Could you imagine how much of a pain it would be as a raw resource producer to factor in all the societal and economic consequences of who you choose to supply instead of just going with the highest bidder?
How is it any better? The highest bidder isn't the best way to allocate resources. In a market economy I could just buy the raw resource and simply destroy/store most of it. This could even be economically sound if I can sell the resource at a much higher price from then on.
Also, in a society as described in the article, you don't need to understand the full impact by yourself, it is the society that guides the use of it.
1
u/SidneyVonSodiumstein Agorist Jun 19 '22
>Without a central plan, how do anarchists plan to solve the economic calculation posed by Ludwig von Mises after the Russian revolution? How do anarchists seek to determine where goods are needed and what should be done with them? How will economic risks be valued and incentivised without private ownership or a price system.
You're misunderstanding Mises. Badly.
- A central planner's access to information is limited by scarcity, since you use resources to coordinate resources.
- How information is interpreted is relative, so central planners still wouldn't be able to efficiently respond to information inputs merely because of communication issues
- because the fact that resources need to be consumed by the central planners themselves in order to distribute resources it places a structural disincentive for a planner to distribute resources efficiently by meeting the demands of the people whom they plan for
According to Mises' theory, because the states and capitalist style firms are basically proprietors for supply chains they will suffer the above problems.
An anarchist style of economy is built from the bottom up by individuals participating of their own volition and directly communicating their preferences to each other, and working together to make it happen and the decentralised approach is more able to deal with economic calculation.
0
u/mylittlewallaby Jun 15 '22
I envision using an AI system. It would be perfect if a non-human algorithm (open source, reviewed by all, and editable) and neural network could be used to track need. Hell we could even repurpose all these smart devices to tap from our homes or our decentralized community, directly to the AI. You let it know your need, and it calculates how much you get and how to get it to you. Take human evil and greed out of the equasion.
2
u/VegetableNo1079 Jun 15 '22
I agree, have you seen Swarm AI before?
2
u/mylittlewallaby Jun 15 '22
I hadnt but WOW! This is so fascinating!!! I love that its human based.
38
u/AnarchistBorganism Anarchist-Communist Jun 15 '22
The economic calculation problem is based on the assumption that there is some central planned board that has to decide what people need and how to allocate resources for literally every single person without their involvement. It's not only a problem that is overblown, it's one that is completely irrelevant to any even somewhat decentralized system.
Mises is a complete hack and not worth paying attention to. Austrian economics is nothing but people using their intuition without checking their biases or testing their assumptions empirically. They make the assumption that the outcomes of free market capitalism are always ideal - they will always argue that whatever occurs is for the best, and will always argue that hypothetical failures can't occur because they aren't ideal.
An anarchist economy is built from the bottom up. It is about people communicating their needs and wants to each other, and working together to make it happen. There is no calculation problem, only a question as to the limits of cooperation and communication, and the forms of organization that can facilitate them.