Markets would be abolished in anarchist society by simply not having them. Markets are a top down mechanism of logistical distribution. They must be built to exist in practice. Anarchist societies can abolish markets by simply not practicing market logic. They are not a natural phenomenon despite what libertarian capitalist brains say.

If you actually read the literature that calls markets “natural” or posits some kind of natural tendency for them to form, it reads very much like the idea of the WAAAAGH in WH40K Orks. Orks have a magical power which is essentially “The Secret”, by thinking something works a specific way Orks through their communal latent psychic abilities change the world to be that way. The more Orks, and the more unified and stronger their belief, the more true something is in reality around them. They are a belief society.

Markets are sold in this way in capitalist states. The idea is even if the market is not a physical place or a device, demand exists in the minds of people. That’s a really fucking silly jump in logic from “wanting things” to “commodity form” (the essence of what a market is, a widget with supply and demand that follows capitalist economic rules). Just because people want things doesn’t mean the commodity form is “natural” or “inevitable”.

Anarchist economics is about building resilient voluntary communal economic cells and trading between them based on needs. This is difficult for a couple of reasons:

1. It is “inefficient” by classic economic understandings, but that is the essential trade off of economics something can be resilient or it can be efficient but it cannot actually be both because economic resiliency is the idea that over production of certain resources is key to maintaining economic function due to disruptions in other areas of the economy.

2. Voluntarism essentially means you cannot use the power of the state to take/enforce unfair agreements (or even mild compromises) which are essential to running large markets. If a bar of Lindt chocolate sells for $20 in the states, the farmer who farms the cocoa would never voluntarily agree to only $0.25 of it’s price, they simply do because they have no other choice. This is difficult in a modern world because it essentially undercuts the treatlerism of modern life / advanced economies. Essentially you can’t have all the treats your heart desires by design unless you can repay treats in kind.

3. Trade can be built on several different ways inside economic units and between them, one commune can be a gift economy, another could simply barter, a third can use Bakunin bucks (labor vouchers), some would use actual money. Anarchists have a hard time integrating into the global trade system historically simply because they do not want to issue currency, even if they end up doing it. Maknovischinia used regional currencies and eventually had to mint it’s own for use in trade with non-anarchist countries.

4. Anarchist horrizontalism is hard, and slow. It requires time to convince people, time to develop capacity, time to develop trust and relations. The main difference between communists and anarchists in this regard is that communists have traditionally thought they can bring to heel the social inventions of the nation-state, market, industrialization, and wage-labor relations to compete with capitalism, while anarchists have typically rejected these forms unless they could be recreated in a voluntary way. Communists essentially think they can use these tools to build out a prosperous society and then in software terms “pay off the tech debt”, but historically that has yet to be proven. Anarchists build slow and mindfully in comparison because for anarchists typically the anarchist social relation is more important in the long run than material conditions, since the social relation is actually what prevents exploitation (both Marxist and non-Marxist sense).

5. Because of #3 and #4 this has knock on effects on society especially in Western Nations that people are simply ingrained in. Supermarkets and global cuisine would cease to exist, seasonal and regional cuisine would be necessary to take their place. Likewise equipment would be difficult to procure until it can be made locally. In order to develop these industrial capacities communities may opt to purchase these goods through communal savings programs.

6. Until there are anarchist communities that have not just the anarchist economic orientation but the wealth to trade on the global market, it will be tough to develop without succumbing to the temptation of using coercive social/economic forms. Some communities may be luckier than others in what they can expropriate / scavenge that already exists. The reality is that it simply depends on the goal of the communities. If it’s buying iPads being a poorer community is hard mode, but if it’s being fair to one another being a poorer community is actually easier because you have more time to build the social relations and cultural attitudes to prevent becoming richer from adversely affecting your community through individuals hoarding, jealousy, etc. Communities with abundant resources regardless of goals are hard mode because teaching people anarchist social relations and developing an anarchist culture would be extremely difficult if the people you’re working with are Western treatlers.

A good example of Anarchist societies working with global capital markets is the Zapatistas coffee/durable goods trade which can be found at https://schoolsforchiapas.org/ in their “Solidarity Store” which is pay what you want but with a price floor. You can learn more about Zapatista Coffee Coops here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_coffee_cooperatives. They’ve been incredibly successful at their mission despite wrecking from the Mexican government over taxes which essentially closed down Mut-vitz, but Mut-vitz proved the model was a successful way to create an international anarchist trade enterprise.

Bump for interesting question

Actually curious to see the responses here, I am far more familiar with Marxist answers to this question.

I haven’t explicitly studied cybernetics, but I’ve studied distributed systems and decentralization a bit and something that struck me is just how much more complicated the systems tend to be once you involve asynchronous communication. And then once you remove centralized things like supervisor nodes with the ability to spawn and despawn other nodes, it’s more complicated still.

Full disclosure: I am an ML, but I want to share notes on an article that I think both anarchists and Marxists may find thought-provoking. The article critiques both traditions while exploring how complexity science and cybernetics can help address a shared challenge: scale. While anarchism has historically excelled at small-scale communal organization, it struggles with large-scale coordination. Conversely, Marxist central planning has historically managed scale but often at the cost of rigid hierarchies that failed to handle complexity dynamically. The article proposes a synthesis—decentralized computational planning—that avoids state coercion while moving beyond markets.

It offers (loving) critiques of both anarchism and 20th century communism, so I will make everyone mad at me by posting it.

From my own ML perspective, I recognize the historical role of centralized planning in resisting imperialism (e.g., USSR’s industrialization). However, the article critiques both anarchist localism and the centralization of Marxist states, emphasizing decentralized computational tools as an alternative. Despite tactical differences (e.g., transitional state structures) between MLs and Anarchists, there are common goals that we can focus on with this article: abolishing profit, expanding worker autonomy, and using technology for collective liberation.

Also, feel free to offer criticisms of this article. This is just one article I’m aware of that I enjoyed, but neither it nor I have the whole picture. I’m open to the possibility that I’m way off-base here.

The paper is The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, found here, or here.

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The article highlights anarchism’s strength at the small scale:

The anarchist movement has a huge accumulated historical experience on how to run such local community initiatives… There is little doubt that anarchism works on what I will refer to as ‘the small scale.’

However, it acknowledges a common critique:

Historically, one of the main forms of criticism leveled against anarchism has been that it does not provide a convincing theory of how a decentralized, non-hierarchical form of organization can be scaled up to work efficiently on ‘the large scale.’

Large-scale structures—such as transportation, healthcare, food supply chains, and knowledge distribution—cannot be handled solely at the local level. The article argues that anarchism must move beyond the comfort zone of small communities and engage with complex, multi-layered networks to function at large scale. Likewise, communists can learn a thing or two to avoid ossified state planning that fails to be adaptive and complex.

For the purpose of this brief essay, I only want to discuss some aspects of the scale problem under some simplifying assumptions that I feel confident about when I try to envision the structure of an anarchist society (or at least one I would feel comfortable living in). So I am going to start by assuming that what happens at the “small scales" is established in the form of a network of communes, cooperatives, and collectives, which are run on anarcho-communist forms of organization, and I will consider the question of how to introduce large scale structures over this network.

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The article discusses historical experiments like the Soviet cybernetic OGAS project and Chile’s Cybersyn, both of which sought decentralized computational planning. It then draws from complexity science, referencing Kolmogorov complexity, integrated information theory, and other measures to explore how an economic system could self-organize without markets or hierarchical control.

The goal is to get anarchists and communists to think of how we can approach designing non-hierarchical scalable systems. There is also a discussion of current projects such as Holochain, P2P networks, etc., as well as instruments which we need to develop in order handle the complexity of production and distribution and replace markets.

The dynamics of profit in markets is not a law of nature: it is implemented artificially via a machinery consisting of several instruments such as currencies, systems of credit and debt, etc. In a similar way, if we want to implement a dynamics of integrated informational complexity optimization, we need to devise the appropriate instruments that will implement it.

The author proposes that anarchism is fundamentally about self-organization in complex networks. They discuss various measures of complexity, such as Kolmogorov complexity and effective complexity, and suggest that maximizing integrated informational complexity could provide a viable alternative to market mechanisms. The later section can get rather technical, but it’s worth it.

To create these complex networks, we need our own instruments.

• There are **instruments of connectedness ** that need to be developed (and are being developed) that enable real-time feedback, communication, and coordination.
• As well as **instruments of complexity ** which increase the effective complexity of a network and drive innovation (open-access knowledge, ways to share resources).

And in addition to instruments, there is discussion of the framework of multi-layer networks - a way to model dynamic networks. Scaling anarcho-communism requires not just a network of cooperatives but interconnected networks that facilitate different forms of sharing (e.g., information, resources, labor).

The process of growth to larger scales is based on network structures connecting them… what one really needs are multiple interconnected networks that describe different forms of sharing… Not only this makes it possible to describe different networking structures that simultaneously exist, that represent different forms of sharing, but it also allows for a description of how each of these layers changes over time in a dynamical way.

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All in all, I found the article interesting and thought it worth sharing. It shifts the focus of the debate away form centralization vs decentralization in the abstract and toward thinking about concrete tools for self-organizing large-scale economic systems. It doesn’t resolve all differences between Anarchists and MLs, but it invites us both to engage with some ideas in cybernetics and complexity science in order to build alternatives to capitalism.