this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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I get the idea but there are several issues.
Intermediate products. For example I've used many automatic measuring microscopes, so if a block was 25mm +/- 1mm it would find the edge of both sides and calculate the distance between them and determine if part was good. These systems are very expensive (cheap ones could buy a car, expensive ones could buy a house). It's useful but I don't think anyone would make it without a benefit to them personally. Technically I could do the same with a drop gauge or even a ruler but wouldn't be as accurate or as fast. In a lot of cases you don't need that, for example making utensils like forks or spoons. But for example making gears in a transmission have as tight if not tighter tolerances.
Quanitity. Now let's make a house, yeah people might like the act of building. And we all agree houses are valuable, not monetarily but in shelter from weather and safety from animals and other humans. How many screws are in your house? If your answer is 3 digits you are wrong. Who is going to make all those screws? Now we are going to ignore machine screws which need a precise thread and just use wood screws. Do you think anyone's life dream is to make 10,000s of screws? If you find someone to make them, how are they going to feed their family over the months/years it will take them?
Quality. Going back to screws they need accurate threading and accurate heads. Without accurate heads a screwdriver won't work(think of removing a stripped screw) and without accurate threads it won't screw down or mate with the drilled hole. Who is going to verify that? If you "buy" 1000 screws and only 50 are usable what do you do? With no incentive to make good screws does the screw maker care? Who is going to verify the food you get is safe to eat?
Non-profit products. Let's say you love math. How are you going to survive? In history their were patrons who paid some of these people hoping there would be a reason in several years or decades. Some worked out, some didn't. But someone needed to say "yeah study how to solve that problem and I'll support you while you do". But they have limited resources too. In most cases these were basically investments hoping the end product would result in a net benefit. You can't survive with just math. You can't go into the woods and scream a theorum at a deer to get meat to feed your family. Now that math feeds into intermediate products which feed into final products which are valuable and that value gets distributed to all the earlier producers.
Yeah people like to make final products. Most people won't enjoy just sitting their useless. Some people like fixing/restoring stuff. But they use so so many stuff other people have done. Distribution is totally fucked up, granted. But for some people to do their dreams there are so many other people they rely on.
I'm gonna skip 1 and come back to it at the end
yes I think there are definitely people willing to do a simple task to create things everybody needs (screws) to make things, plenty of people. the people who produce food and need screws (all of the food producers) will feed the screw makers' families. they have a very obvious incentive to keep their screw makers alive even if we're being superficial in the way capitalism has trained us to be (in an anarchist/communist/socialist society we don't feed and house and heal people based on how useful they are. we give them what they need because they deserve it because they're people, their existence makes them valuable and worthy of the things they need)
no incentive to make good screws? what??? they're using those screws in their own house too!! you gotta be trolling tbh, what?? people making food will make sure it's safe to eat because they're eating it too!! in what universe is governmental oversight the only way to guarantee quality?
people deserve the things they need to have to exist, just by simple right of them existing. "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." there is more than enough food and housing in the world to feed and house everybody, the only reason we don't is the greed of the ruling class
ok back to 1, I think that people would still make these devices even if they owned the means of production but if they didn't that means that they were not valuable as the flow chart says
getting to part 2 I'm half convinced this is just trolling but I'll still post this in case it's not
Here’s the harder question that I haven’t seen satisfactorily answered by alternatives to markets:
How many screws should the screw-maker make?
With markets, the answer is that prices are the signal to make more/less screws. The screw-maker doesn’t need to know anything about the rest of society: when screw prices go up they make more screws. When they go down they make less.
Screws are not made by hand today, of course, they’re made by very large and expensive machines that can produce millions of screws per year. When the screw-maker wants to increase screw output but their machine is already at full capacity, they need to buy another machine (and perhaps even another building to house it). Needless to say, this is a very big decision that can’t be taken lightly, otherwise the screw-maker might go out of business.
In a non-market economy, how do decisions like this get made? The advantage of markets is that the decision-makers only need access to “local” information: that is, information about prices of screws and screw-making machines and other miscellaneous details related to the screw-making business. They don’t need to know how the entire economy works as a whole, something central planners do need to know if they’re going to decide for everyone how many screws need to be made.
This simple difference (information on a need to know basis) lets the screw-makers be experts at screw-making, and optimize their business in ways no central planning committee could ever hope to achieve.
They probably get asked every day for some screws. They are either capable to extrapolate this into a reasonable monthly goal or they ask for help from someone who is good at that. If they make a mistake and make not enough, than people who need screws will probably have to wait a little. And if they make to many, they can spend their time doing something else. Like where actually is the problem here? We dont need perfection in an anarchist society.
They could even create a guild or syndicate or something with other screwmakers to help each other out in materials, when one is unable to work, when a communities needs emergency screws etc.
And if screw making to meet everyones need is so shitty that nobody would want to do it, then everybody who is able to should do part of it and as a community think of a process that makes this possible and maybe even good by whatever metric they care about.
That may be fine in a village or a town or a small chain of towns, but I’m talking about the whole world. The screw-maker lives in China or Vietnam. They don’t speak English or even know which languages are spoken by their customers, yet they make screws used for building houses all over the world.
That’s the miracle of markets. There’s an old saying that “economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” It’s absolutely true, of course, but that’s really by design. Economists don’t concern themselves with the deep philosophical questions of human values. They’re mainly interested in answering the question “how much of X should be produced” and the theory of markets says that we don’t really know, but that the information flows through the communication of price information. In the absence of markets, this information needs to be replicated explicitly and the problem turns out to be way too complex.
Think about any manufactured object we use today, in the modern world: a car, a PC, a phone, a microwave, a dishwasher. These objects are made up of dozens to hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of parts, many of which are made by hundreds or even thousands of different companies connected together into supply chains that span countries and even continents.
No one at any of these companies actually knows how to do all the work of making everything that goes into the final product. None of them know how many of the parts will be needed in the future. All of them simply respond to changes in prices as they happen in real time, and fulfill orders from their direct customers (who may simply be middlemen).
It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle with millions of pieces being worked on by many people who don’t even know each other. No one knows what the final picture will look like. Everyone is simply focused on the connections between the pieces in their little corner of the puzzle. Trying to replicate this automatic process with one that’s explicitly designed and fully understood by the designers is extremely hard.
It’s like trying to replace entire forest ecosystems with one where all the plants are carefully planted by hand (like some giant garden). I think we’re smart enough to know we can’t do that without risking a catastrophic collapse.
Anarchism doesnt have that problem
But why tho? We dont need to exploit cheap labor in anarchism, so this sounds like an undesirable setup.
One of the goals of anarchism might be turning back globalism for unnecessary things while keeping those things that are benifitial for humans and as well as rest of the earth.
I say we can live without that.
Screw production is actually automated nowadays.