More important than opposition to the current system is the prefiguration of an anarchic one. So much online discourse is about attacking, a lot less is about building. I drew this to remind myself and others that confronting the state is only a part of the puzzle and building new systems without it is also important.
Licence (as always): CC-0, No rights reserved.
You need to understand that money became much more than a tool facilitate trade. Nowadays it’s become a way of consolidating power and controlling resources, which amplifies inequality. When you say:
That’s not exactly the full truth. Getting rid of money right this instant would be a logistical nightmare. But there are already so many things we don’t need money for it’s hysterical. Being an anarchist today means you question authority constantly to either deem it legitimate or not. In todays age money is a great tool for you to hoard resources and otherwise wealth. So the question for us is not “How fast can we get rid of money” but rather “What kind of system can we implement in order to make money practically useless.”
Edit: In other words, lets say you have 100 Dollars, you decide “I wanna buy some bread.” You stumble upon a commune that eliminated money entirely and traded based on need. You see two people are actively trading bread and fruits… with no profit incentive whatsoever. Just kind of trading because “ehh, I have enough apples for myself, here you go.” Wont that interaction make you completely question those 100 bucks that you planned to use?
I’m afraid it goes a lot deepr than that.
It has always been about controlling resources - labour being the most important one of them, of course. An anarchist society will also have to wrestle with the control of these very same resources - that is not optional. If it doesn’t, it’s existence will be fleeting. How these resources will be controlled, though, is optional.
There are only two possible ways I can see of getting rid of currency - it’s either through the use of centralised violence (ie, the power of a state), or the complete collapse of industrial civilisation. Both of these options will only be temporarily effective at banishing it, though.
Does this hypothetical society you propose use any industrially produced goods to maintain itself?
ArIf so… do you imagine those industrially produced goods to be the result of a barter economy?
No and no. Since I took food as an example I’ll use that because we all need food and it’s the most important product that needs to be addressed. The way we produce today industrially is 1) centralized, 2) profit-driven, and 3) heavily dependent on exploitative labor and fossil fuels. In contrast, the model I’m proposing would decentralize food production, it would be very emphatic on local autonomy, and be organized around mutual aid and shared responsibility rather than trade or barter.
Instead of massive monoculture farms and supply chains thousands of miles long, food would be grown close to where people live - through networks of community gardens, small-scale permaculture farms, and cooperative distribution. The tools and materials needed, (yes, even some that are industrially produced) could be made in worker-run, federated workshops where production is democratically planned and prioritized based on need, not market demand.
So no, it’s not barter. It’s not trade. The example that I tried to give was not fully “you give me X, I give you Y.” (I know, I did a shit job of explaining it) It’s a gift-based, need-based economy rooted in reciprocity (what we already see in disaster response and indigenous food sovereignty projects). It’s about building systems where everyone has access to what they need without having to earn it or bargain for it.
True, but food is also the easiest one. Food sovereignty is not the only kind of sovereignty an anarchist society would require in order to be viable. There is also energy sovereignty, mineral resource sovereignty, technological sovereignity and more - and I rarely see anarchists engaging with those… perhaps because they are not as easily dealt with as food sovereignty.
Monoculture farming has more to do with colonialism than profiteering - the latter is merely the method preferred by imperialist and sub-imperialist states to ensure the accrued power and privilege resulting from it stays with those land-owning elites who support the status quo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with monoculture - certain things will simply be better cultivated that way, even in a decolonised society. Democratised food systems would be nice, though.
This is unavoidable if you intend on having any kind of industrialised society. You can’t expect an anarchist farming community to also build and design it’s own agricultural machinery - and that doesn’t even take into account the raw materials needed for production.
This would make trade inevitable. Not all crops can be grown everywhere - and that means people will inevitably start trading for the things that aren’t locally available to them. That is, unless you violently prevent them from doing so - but doing that also means your revolution has already failed.
Let’s be clear - this…
…does not food sovereignty make. When it comes to food production, an anarchist society is going to need far, far more sophisticated and better-supported food production infrastructure than what you are imagining.
I have no interest in a society where the height of technology is only the machinery necessary to produce a spade. In order to be viable, an anarchist society won’t just need workshops - it will require factories and large-scale industrial complexes, supported by well-established (and extremely large) scientific and technological institutions. Only a relatively small amount of all of this can happen in a localised matter - even in a fully-democratised and socialised society (which is what an anarchist society would have to be).
You did a shit job of explaining it because you don’t understand it well enough - just like Einstein famously said. I would go further than that - I’d also say you also don’t understand the world in which this proposed economic system would function well enough.
You know, there was this absolute doomer - Mark Fisher - who opined that imagining the end of the world was easier than imagining the end of capitalism. I disagree - imagining the end of capitalism is not so hard… as long as you stop obsessing over replacing capitalism and begin understanding that a post-capitalist society will, instead, be built on top of a capitalist society. Ie, a historical process that actually has precedent.
This comment got me to look up if AFAQ had a section on this and it turns out it did:
I remember reading through this all more than a decade ago… I had my quibbles with it back then, but in general there’s a lot of good stuff in there.
Now… take a look at all the anarchist “influencers” on youtube, or just the generalised discourse you see in anarchist online spaces - and tell me if you see the disconnect.
neither the youtubers nor us online anarchist can provide a solution to this problem. To solve this problem you need people with experience of heavy industry alongside environmental experts to coordinate using self-managed principles. A bunch of propagandists (which is what we are) do not have enough understanding to create and maintain these processes. Our job is to get people to collectivize and start thinking critically of authority so they would be empowered to create an environment where they can do everything they already do without someone constantly looking over their shoulders.
Essentially: Leave the job of figuring out how to do things to the people. Or as AFAQ put: Is there a blueprint for anarchist society? https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci2
I also saw your comment earlier in the thread that was on the same topic:
When talking about anarchy the only thing we can talk about is what it mustn’t be. Because “what it is” is something that only be answered during the process after all of the different voices come together to build something. Or to use a quote from that AFAQ paragraph: “revolution should not only be made for the people’s sake; it should also be made by the people.” [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 141]
As anarchists we cannot build anything individually. Only after we have collectively come together and figured out how to work together can we look back and describe what we have made. When we say “organize” we don’t have anything specific in mind because that would go against the ethos of self-determination. No anarchist worthy of the name should have a concrete idea of what anarchy looks like. Sure you can have approximations and speculation but you cannot say with certainty what it is your building because that would require you to be able to read the minds of everyone contributing.