this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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How would a stateless society enforce contracts?
What kind of contracts do you expecting within a moneyless system?
There's no rule that says an anarchist society needs to be moneyless.
You need to understand that money became much more than a tool facilitate trade. Nowadays it's become a way of consolidating power and controlling resources, which amplifies inequality. When you say:
That's not exactly the full truth. Getting rid of money right this instant would be a logistical nightmare. But there are already so many things we don't need money for it's hysterical. Being an anarchist today means you question authority constantly to either deem it legitimate or not. In todays age money is a great tool for you to hoard resources and otherwise wealth. So the question for us is not "How fast can we get rid of money" but rather "What kind of system can we implement in order to make money practically useless."
Edit: In other words, lets say you have 100 Dollars, you decide "I wanna buy some bread." You stumble upon a commune that eliminated money entirely and traded based on need. You see two people are actively trading bread and fruits... with no profit incentive whatsoever. Just kind of trading because "ehh, I have enough apples for myself, here you go." Wont that interaction make you completely question those 100 bucks that you planned to use?
I'm afraid it goes a lot deepr than that.
It has always been about controlling resources - labour being the most important one of them, of course. An anarchist society will also have to wrestle with the control of these very same resources - that is not optional. If it doesn't, it's existence will be fleeting. How these resources will be controlled, though, is optional.
There are only two possible ways I can see of getting rid of currency - it's either through the use of centralised violence (ie, the power of a state), or the complete collapse of industrial civilisation. Both of these options will only be temporarily effective at banishing it, though.
Does this hypothetical society you propose use any industrially produced goods to maintain itself?
ArIf so... do you imagine those industrially produced goods to be the result of a barter economy?
No and no. Since I took food as an example I'll use that because we all need food and it's the most important product that needs to be addressed. The way we produce today industrially is 1) centralized, 2) profit-driven, and 3) heavily dependent on exploitative labor and fossil fuels. In contrast, the model I’m proposing would decentralize food production, it would be very emphatic on local autonomy, and be organized around mutual aid and shared responsibility rather than trade or barter.
Instead of massive monoculture farms and supply chains thousands of miles long, food would be grown close to where people live - through networks of community gardens, small-scale permaculture farms, and cooperative distribution. The tools and materials needed, (yes, even some that are industrially produced) could be made in worker-run, federated workshops where production is democratically planned and prioritized based on need, not market demand.
So no, it’s not barter. It’s not trade. The example that I tried to give was not fully "you give me X, I give you Y." (I know, I did a shit job of explaining it) It’s a gift-based, need-based economy rooted in reciprocity (what we already see in disaster response and indigenous food sovereignty projects). It’s about building systems where everyone has access to what they need without having to earn it or bargain for it.
True, but food is also the easiest one. Food sovereignty is not the only kind of sovereignty an anarchist society would require in order to be viable. There is also energy sovereignty, mineral resource sovereignty, technological sovereignity and more - and I rarely see anarchists engaging with those... perhaps because they are not as easily dealt with as food sovereignty.
Monoculture farming has more to do with colonialism than profiteering - the latter is merely the method preferred by imperialist and sub-imperialist states to ensure the accrued power and privilege resulting from it stays with those land-owning elites who support the status quo. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with monoculture - certain things will simply be better cultivated that way, even in a decolonised society. Democratised food systems would be nice, though.
This is unavoidable if you intend on having any kind of industrialised society. You can't expect an anarchist farming community to also build and design it's own agricultural machinery - and that doesn't even take into account the raw materials needed for production.
This would make trade inevitable. Not all crops can be grown everywhere - and that means people will inevitably start trading for the things that aren't locally available to them. That is, unless you violently prevent them from doing so - but doing that also means your revolution has already failed.
Let's be clear - this...
...does not food sovereignty make. When it comes to food production, an anarchist society is going to need far, far more sophisticated and better-supported food production infrastructure than what you are imagining.
I have no interest in a society where the height of technology is only the machinery necessary to produce a spade. In order to be viable, an anarchist society won't just need workshops - it will require factories and large-scale industrial complexes, supported by well-established (and extremely large) scientific and technological institutions. Only a relatively small amount of all of this can happen in a localised matter - even in a fully-democratised and socialised society (which is what an anarchist society would have to be).
You did a shit job of explaining it because you don't understand it well enough - just like Einstein famously said. I would go further than that - I'd also say you also don't understand the world in which this proposed economic system would function well enough.
You know, there was this absolute doomer - Mark Fisher - who opined that imagining the end of the world was easier than imagining the end of capitalism. I disagree - imagining the end of capitalism is not so hard... as long as you stop obsessing over replacing capitalism and begin understanding that a post-capitalist society will, instead, be built on top of a capitalist society. Ie, a historical process that actually has precedent.
This comment got me to look up if AFAQ had a section on this and it turns out it did:
No, but that's the one I support.
Are you for real? Do you think work will cease to exist? Monetary compensation isn't the only thing that can be exchanged for work/art/etc.
We already have all sorts of contracts that don't involve money directly. Marriage is a contract, and that wouldn't just cease to exist.
People are selfish and greedy. There needs to be something to try to prevent and/or punish that. And literal force/violence is the only thing that can ever do it. Without it, there will always be people who abuse it.
So what happens is the person with the biggest gun/stick/army/etc. wins the dispute. Every time.
That's how you end up with feudalism. How come libertarians always need to personally re-learn every mistake and lesson we've already learned the hard way? It is literally currently destroying the US government.
Learn some history and we don't have to repeat the same mistakes again and again.
Your proof of this?
Is this a joke?
If I needed a butt for my jokes I'd be talking to liberals.
Proof, please.
People aren't selfish or greedy. People are ambitious and in the current society those people are raised to believe that to be the best you have to be selfish and greedy. They aren't traits you are born with, they are learned.
But anarchy still is the best way to deal with greedy people as any kind of hierarchy will just allow the greedy people to get to the top. Hierarchies don't punish the greedy, they elevate them to the highest positions in society as those that aren't concerned with other peoples well being can always find a way to gain authority over them.
Anarchy has that something. You can counter abuse without being abusive yourself. We can build social structures that prevent greed without hierarchy. The solution isn't to give some people a monopoly on violence because that position will always attract the most violent. It's to build a social networks that sees problems before they happen and provides support. Punishment isn't a productive method of preventing harm. It's vengeance, not prevention.
What is currently destroying the US isn't libertarianism, it's bad education, mass media manipulation and a bunch of people following orders.
OK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina
This is just so naive.
You can name like the only two or three times that you believe this worked, but they are all very small scale made up of people who share the ideology, and WANT to be a part of that kind of society.
You show those communities to certain types of people, and they see dollar signs and opportunities for exploitation.
That's what humans are. You need to accept this.
Yeah and if they try and exploit them they'll be told to fuck off. Any anarchic group capable of holding their own against external forces, will also be capable of resisting exploitation from internal ones.
If by this you mean some humans are inherently greedy and selfish: No! Never! I would rather die than accept that every person cannot be kind.
With what? A militia? And when those people have more resources than your anarchist collective, and there's no state apparatus to turn to, what happens then?
I look forward to our future Warring States period
There's the naivete... There is a difference between "a person can be kind," and "there are lot of awful, selfish, avaricious people". The latter group might be capable of showing kindness, but that doesn't really mean anything.
Fuck this. I'm out. Disengage(https://wiki.dbzer0.com/divisions-by-zero/the-disengage-rule). Hope someone else has the energy to explain this to you.
What kind of enforcement would a "marriage contract" need in a moneyless society?
Greedy selfish people can't abuse a system that doesn't allow accumulation of wealth.
Sidenote that this is an anarchist space and while we tolerate such some debate, we don't have to tolerate your shitty attitude. Check the sidebar.
Possessions will still exist. Divorcing couples need to divide stuff too, not just money.
There's also the whole thing about the custody of children... What happens when a father decides the judge (or whomever makes the ruling in your utopia) is wrong about giving full custody of a child to the mother, and decides to take the child (something that already happens all of the time in the US and elsewhere) and disappear?
Does the mom just throw her hands up and say, "oh well. Guess I'll have to make another"?
Does the father get to keep the child simply because he's the bigger (like physically bigger) person of the two, and can physically prevent the mother from seeing the child?
Violence (either the implied threat, or literal straight up violence) is ultimately the only thing keeping any sort of contractual law from completely disintegrating.
The best solution we've found so far is a social contract where everyone agrees to cede some of their freedom in return for security and stability. We allow "the state" to have a monopoly on violence.
It's obviously far from perfect, but as long as you have an educated and informed public, it's possible (yet very difficult) to maintain.
When you take that away, you end up with feudalism.
None of these is about "contracts" but about crime. you're just unfamiliar with how anarchists would deal with it, but I assure you, we've thought about it. Go educate yourself on the anarchist FAQ or something and once again, check the sidebar. This is not the space for Marxist debate pervertry.
Divorce and custody of children is crime? Huh.
I don't need to read a sidebar, I've read plenty of books by anarchist thinkers.
Disengage
The way it worked for millennia in societies without a powerful state –
by shunning the contract breakers in your community.
Just extraordinarily naive.