Whenever I hear Anarchists talk about a future world economy, they always talk about a bartering economy. So what would a bartering economy look like? Why is this the anarchists’ model for a future economy? Is this the same as what the Marxists view as a future worker’s economy?
First of all, a bartering economy would essentially mean that everyone would produce whatever they wanted to produce, or knew to produce, and they would then trade these things with other producers for things they needed. So if I made computers, I would barter may computers for your shoes, or our neighbor’s clothes, or some other neighbor’s food stuffs, etc.
In theory, this would replace money, which should, as the anarchists see it, create a more egalitarian society.
So why do the anarchists see this as the economic ideal? Because for them, the principal of absolute freedom of the individual is their starting point for formulating all political concepts. Absolute freedom for the individual means the individual would have their own workplace, produce whatever they produce, and then deal with other absolutely free individuals to trade their products for other products. But the central point is that for anarchists, the complete freedom of the individual informs all of their other concepts.
Originally, anarchism came from the peasant and artisan classes. It came from the classes of people that were accustomed to “being their own boss,” producing their own goods, and then dealing with other people as necessary. The peasants and artisan’s of earlier centuries were economically annihilated with the growth industrial capitalism and the capitalist’s ability to steal peasant land and undercut artisans through mass production.
The peasants and artisans wanted to return, back in time, to an idealized era where there were no big capitalists and instead there were only the mini-capitalists that were able to more easily compete with one another. The inability of the smaller peasants and artisans to compete with the capitalists drove them to become workers for the capitalists. The longing to return to a position of being their own boss, of owning their own means of production, of working for themselves was the initial seed of anarchism.
It is also important to point out, that complete freedom is also what the capitalists want. They want the complete freedom to exploit, oppress, wage war, destroy unions, increase hours, increase work tempo, lower wages, eliminate benefits, transfer jobs overseas, etc. The big capitalists of today were the small capitalists of yesterday. The difference is that, through cunning, luck, theft, and other means these particular capitalists were able to out-compete their rivals and grow into the multinational corporations that we know today.
The capitalists just use different wording for complete freedom and autonomy. They call it “open markets” or “free market capitalism.” Today, it is also usually called “neo-liberalism.”
So would a bartering economy be the solution to today’s crisis? Does a society of individual producers cure the issue of capitalism? Isn’t a society of autonomous producers exactly how capitalism started in the first place? A bartering economy is an economy where individual producers are active in an unplanned economy where there may or may not be a demand for their products. Or at best, where worker’s participate in cooperatives, but must still compete with other cooperatives or individual producers.
Bartering, while perhaps less destructive than today’s financial economy, is still about one producer trying to trade for more than they necessarily deserve from the person they are bartering with. This is because a bartering economy is still an economy of scarcity as no individual producer is guaranteed their basic needs like food, housing, clothing, education, etc. Hence, the need to barter for those goods.
Just like in the modern capitalist economy, some will be better at bartering than others. Slowly, some will begin to accumulate more and more wealth while others will lose more and more of their wealth until they are forced to work for others to sell their labor power. Then we are right back at capitalism. In essence, a bartering economy is just a primitive form of capitalism, before the big capitalists emerge.
So then what do the Marxists offer in contrast to a bartering economy? Instead of looking backward in time toward a romanticized time of autonomous production, the Marxists argue for a democratically planned economy. For Marxists, “freedom” is not a timeless principal, but a political tool reflecting the interests of specific classes at specific times in history. At one point, freedom represented the interests of peasants and artisans. At another time, it represented the interests of the bourgeoisie.
For Marxists, materialism is the basis for our analysis and solutions to the problems that we face today. For us, the development of capitalism lead to the development of the working class. The working class, because it must work cooperatively within the work place, is also the most democratic class. Unlike the peasant that owned their own land, or the artisan that owned their own workshop, workers work in factories, hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc. that they must work with other proletarians to maintain. So for the working class, the solution is to network the various workplaces of the world, locally, nationally, and internationally to create a democratically planned economy.
Democratically planning what to produce, where to produce it, how to produce it, and how to distribute the products is the only way to eliminate the anarchy of an unplanned market economy based on speculative, and competitive, production.
Marxists are not interested in the complete freedom of the individual to starve or become rich through exploitation. Marxists are concerned with the collective ownership of society by the working class, as a class, which can only share and work the collectively owned workplaces and materials through democratic decision making.
History has shown that the working class is capable of developing organs of direct democracy through workplace councils. These workplace councils are democratic bodies that determine how a workplace will be run. These are the embryo of a political body that can reflect the interests of the working class through direct democracy and can be networked at larger and broader levels.
A democratically planned economy is the Marxist forward-looking alternative to the backward-looking bartering economy of the Anarchists.
speeches no one will ever hear 