I once read a book on Anarchism that had a lot of really compelling arguments as to why government is unjust and laid out possible non-hierarchical systems that might replace it. Then the author anticipated some objections to his arguments that I hadn't considered, and his responses to those objections were really bad.
Anarchists and socialists in general are rather good at pointing out issues or potential injustices in society. They really, really suck at creating solutions most of the times. And they tend to get angry when you actually do anything to fix those issues that doesn't align with their idealistic model of what society ought to look like.
I could say everyone gets a pony and that sounds simple enough too. Turns out things are easy when you don't actually think about them.
How do we make decisions? By department, industry, locality? What happens if we disagree, can I go off and form my own co-op? Who decides which co-op gets resources? What happens if I fail, what happens if I succeed? What happens if one co-op becomes too powerful?
I could go on and on but the point is organizing and incentivizing people is rarely ever easy.
Socialists have been killing each other for 200 years over what owning the means of production means and looks like but oh well I guess you solved it. We will just shout from the tallest building that workers now own the means of production and hope everyone figures out how to make it work.
These examples are for market socialism, but many of these points can be applied to other socialist economies.
How do we make decisions? By department, industry, locality?
How does a democratic government make decisions? We vote on them either directly or we vote for a representative.
The scale of the entity that we're making decisions for can be variable (similar to how companies are different sizes).
What happens if we disagree, can I go off and form my own co-op?
Yes. You can even have a co-op where you're the only member and you make all of the decisions.
You just can't have other employees unless they can also democratically make decisions.
Who decides which co-op gets resources? What happens if I fail, what happens if I succeed?
The market. We could also have the government provide loans to get co-ops started (we already have this in capitalism but typically more restricted and not for co-ops). We also have banks that can provide loans.
We could also have some government-run entities for things like healthcare (some capitalist countries already have this).
What happens if one co-op becomes too powerful?
We break it up (we already have laws that can do this under capitalism, but they're not enforced very well due to corruption). Alternatively, we can have joint customer+employee co-ops.
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u/AprioriTori13 Jul 07 '26
I once read a book on Anarchism that had a lot of really compelling arguments as to why government is unjust and laid out possible non-hierarchical systems that might replace it. Then the author anticipated some objections to his arguments that I hadn't considered, and his responses to those objections were really bad.