this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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My opinion is that any large-scale functioning economic system must be inherently hierarchical. The system described is too loose; people do not often enough willingly cooperate and hold themselves to agreements if they are not forced to do so, and thus anything that requires large-scale, inter-community cooperation will be much more difficult to achieve.
I do not even need to look at the details; any decentralised, anarchist structure will not be able to uphold the modern world's standard of living. Our modern lives rely on large-scale cooperation and that cooperation must be efficient. There must be laws and a centralised body able to coerce others to follow them against their will. There must be contracts and bodies to enforce them even when one of the parties doesn't want to uphold their end of the bargain. The more decentralised a system is, the harder it is to uphold order on a large scale. That's why international geopolitics is so chaotic.
The system described works if and only if you're content with a much simpler lifestyle and a much smaller world for each of its participants. You're not going to develop the Internet under this system. You might get close-knit communes where everyone's needs are satisfied, and you might call that a success, but everyone's expectations might be different.
Cooperation by force is inherintly unstable. As soon as the deal is unfair, which is pretty much guranteed if it is by force, the moment the misstreated party can exit it, it will. This becomes a problem as soon as the enviroment for a larger group changes and a lot of people can exit unfair deals.
So in the real world sueing somebody is pretty rarer. The real punishment is a bad reputation and as soon as you have one, you are in trouble, because people are not going to cooperate with you anymore. The only way you can cheat and get away with it is by force and the only way that works, if there is a forced hierachy, with some having access to force, whereas others do not.
I would say something like the internet, which is run on free software and using standards a lot of people just agree on freely, is a perfect example of how these typey of systems can work. Most of the development was done by small groups and people just adopted it, because it was usefull.
I don't think you understand what the nature of coercion is.
Think of a futures contract: I agree to buy something from you for some price at a later date. But when that date approaches, I decide the deal is no longer in my favour, so I decide not to do it. There is nobody able to coerce my compliance.
Suppose you sign a deal with a company to buy a product with a 5-year warranty. The product breaks after three years but the company refuses to honour the warranty. There is no regulatory agency to force their compliance. Even more, if the problem gets big enough, they can close the company, secretly move the assets and start back up again. There is no government apparatus powerful enough to stop this if the company is willing to devote enough resources to keep it secret. Remember the United Fruit Company? The one that overthrew Central American governments and created literal banana republics? They're now called Chiquita, and you can still find (and probably have bought) many of their products in grocery stores everywhere!
"Reputation" is worthless in the corporate world. You can suppress a million small complaints. Word-of-mouth marketing is utterly powerless against large syndicated PR campaigns. In the real world, Wells Fargo opened millions of fraudulent accounts in their customers' names to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. They gained a bad reputation but people still kept using their services. What stopped them was when the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a billion-dollar fine and took legal action against them. The idea that reputation and the free market alone will keep people honest is completely unfounded, and this is the folly of any "anarchist" system.
Or consider an insurance company. A hurricane comes through and wipes out a hundred thousand policyholders' houses that the insurance company must now pay out on. 100,000 × $50,000 = $5,000,000,000. Hmm. Maybe just better to hire a PR firm for a million dollars and default on all the policies. Or even just close up shop and distribute the assets to shareholders.
So then nobody gets insurance.
The Internet wouldn't have developed under an anarchist system. Think of just the process of manufacturing a computer. All the different parts come from every part of the world. The computer chips come from Taiwan, the parts are then assembled in China, plastics from Vietnam, engineered by people in the United States. Suppose you need to deliver finished computers to someone in Germany. Think of all the procedural hurdles you'd have to go through, and then think of how many more interactions you'd have to make under your proposed system. The more interactions, the higher the cost. The higher the cost, the less profitable it is. Oh, and don't forget you can't do shit if anyone you sign a contract with backs out at the last minute. It's not impossible, but the increased difficulty will make the administrative burden so high it'll be unprofitable.
You shouldn't be taking that for granted, but asking "why do they come from different countries?".
The answer? For historical reasons - because that's where capital found cheap labour with a tolerable infrastructure and convenient legislation at a certain time period.
If the goal is to imagine an anarchist society, Taiwan is not the memory factory of the world, and China isn't the consumer electronics factory of the world. It's perfectly feasible to make microchips everywhere and assemble them into systems too.
If the world being imagined doesn't favour (via laws that protect investment) investing huge sums of money overseas - outsourcing won't happen.
As for computers, the first programmable computer existed in ancient Greece (as a toy, of course). You could program a robot's driving movements using knotted rope. :) Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer in the 1800s, which Ada Lovelace wrote the first programs for. Alas, it didn't work - due to the limits of Victorian era manufacturing. Konrad Zuse designed computers using relays, and they worked. Computers are a thing that sooner or later appear, once need for automation and capability to manufacture components has arisen. Networking computers doesn't take an anarchist or hierarchist to figure out - it takes an engineer and coder to figure out.
Without postulating that in anarchy, engineers don't exist, mathematics doesn't exist, or coders won't exist once engineers build programmable computers... it's on very thin ice to say that an Internet can't exist.
And what makes governments trustworthy? In the real world democracies tend to do a much better job at being trustworthy then dictatorships. That is due to being controlled by the people by regular votes. The more direct democracy is allowed the more trustworthy the organization becomes. So it is no wonder that capitalist companies, which are in many cases very close to dictatroships, behave as badly as they do and you feel that you need the protection from a more democratic institution. Lets not even pretend that in countries like China or Vietnam judges can not be bought. It is rather simply trust that the other company makes good on its promise as it is long term benefital for both of them to do so.
Which is why the idea of anarcho-syndicalism is to form small scale units producing something and acting as a political organization called syndicates. Those can be joined freely and are organized in a democratic fashion. To get even bigger, those syndicates then send representatives to other syndicates to form federations. Those are made up of all sorts of syndicates working together with free agreement between each other. This also allows for enforcing the agreements between the syndicates as, if one is broken other syndicates will kick your syndicate out of the federation or a lot of them, will just treat them differently as punishment. It depends on the situation obviously.
The key here is to avoid having a proper hierachy, but use free and open deals between the different syndicates, but due to the mass of it, it becomes hard to fully ignore your free contracts. So reputation would absolutly matter.
The internet is a great example of how in free systems, might makes right. Google has been and is currently changing open systems to proprietary ones, and forcing their will upon millions of smaller internet sites. Without a centralized governing body, everyone is powerless to stop them.
It should be noted that anarcho-syndicalism is the only flavour of anarchism that has needed to supply anarchist units fighting a war (Spanish Civil War), and to raise foreign currency by exporting what it could, during a time of economic trouble - and it could do that.
Their system? Representatives from different plants regularly convened, discussed the inputs and outputs of their production, made agreements and resolved disputes. There was a market, a more transparent market than capitalism can provide - and the actors on this market had a democratic mandate from workers. Sometimes they traded for money, sometimes they exchanged services or goods for other services or other goods... sometimes they simply helped each other out (a step that's ridiculously hard to perform in capitalism).
However, there was also a government in the background - fighting on the same side as anarchists, with no power to spare for cracking down on syndicalism until much later.
I wish I knew what they did when some plant became indebted to another or failed its promises. I don't know if historians have written about it.
As for scaling - yes, transparency and trust don't scale infinitely. If the partner in a deal is distant in some way (geographically, politically, otherwise), one may not want to discuss everything with them. Thus, when a syndicalist company trades with a non-syndicalist company, they probably don't show their cards.
P.S.
A note about communications: the Barcelona telephone exchange continued to operate under anarchist control in the aforementioned situation. If they needed capacitors, resistors, lamps, speakers, relays or wire, I'm sure some other worker-controlled company could make those. Of course, Internet was not a thing back in the 1930-ties.
BBS-es and FidoNet existed on top of the telephone network before the Internet became a thing. BBS-es were largely amateur run dial-in servers and there was no central authority to steer their development. Fidonet was a standard, but nobody with authority stood behind it. Of course, its users were mostly DIY technology enthusiasts and weren't moving money, so much of the problems we encounter on the Internet (scams, ads, DRM, etc) were unknown of. Fidonet was not a "well run network", however - since long distance call rates placed a burden on node operators and even caused infighting.
Radio amateurs set their standards and started global communication without a central authority, states regulated their activity (with permits and punishments for violations) only later.
I very much doubt if we'd not have an Internet on an anarchist planet. I think we'd have a different Internet.