this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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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
Agricultural productivity today is hundreds of times higher than in Emma Goldman’s time. Today, one farmer alone can farm many thousands of acres that would’ve taken thousands of people back then. The whole productivity argument has collapsed in light of modern automation technology.
Today we might collectivize schools and research and medicine and other labour-intensive service work which has heavily resisted automation, but mining and manufacturing and agriculture are just too highly automated for that. Except maybe fruit picking, but I’ll say no thanks to being a fruit picker! All power to them who want to be fruit-picker collective fruit farm farmers!
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.
It’s a misunderstanding that American companies only outsource manufacturing to China or Vietnam because of cheap labour. That may have been the original reason for outsourcing but now the truth is more complex: supply chains are over there, not here. The screw maker is down the street from the laptop case manufacturer, across the road from the LCD panel maker, right next to the circuit board maker and the battery maker. So now even if a company wants to move manufacturing back the US it’s extremely difficult because they have to move 20 factories at the same time, not just 1, and those factories are all owned by different companies who keep their processes secret for competitive reasons.
You might say that under anarchism there would be no more competition, only cooperation. But that’s wishful thinking! Humans are competitive by nature and I’ve seen even families break down over competitive disagreements about inheritance and the sharing of family resources. If even people who grew up as siblings can become enemies over these disputes, I fail to see how anarchism can solve them. Most arguments I’ve seen for anarchism just assume everyone is already on board with it. Markets don’t assume that, they assume competition and let the prices work themselves out.
Screw production is actually automated nowadays.