Decentralized governments/leaders in small communties, decentralized power sources, decentralized market, currency and so on. On top, every community gets own decentralized social network.
If everything is completely decentralized then it essentially means that each person is providing for themselves… including basic services like water and waste processing. Centralizing these things makes sense, they’re more efficient when operated at scale, and there are significant benefits to task specialization. And frankly, you don’t want decentralized medical care - you want big, modern, well-funded hospitals with the latest technology, which means centralized locations and management.
Decentralizing services doesn’t make sense. Individual residence solar panels are substantially less productive than large-scale solar plants. Services like energy, water, medicine and waste handling should be concentrated and publicly funded - but then that means you need to collect public funds and then decide how to use them, and that means government. The larger the public project is that you want to build, the larger the government around it has to be.
Well, no, certainly there could be cooperation. But operating a complex entity like a hospital or a sewage processing plant requires proper organization and a permanent dedicated staff. I don’t see how you could do that in a decentralized way.
Parts of the communities interested in running a hospital can just band together and run a hospital. Decentralization doesn’t mean no organization, but the freedom to move between and form organizations. (Anarchist contexts would also say “just no hierarchical organization”.)
Sewage and stinky jobs are interesting problems. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full.html#text-amuse-label-seci413 offers a variety a solutions, including giving benefits to those who volunteer, community agreement on a rotation, etc.
You are making good points, but I’d say there is a point in “size” which no longer a centralised entity makes sense, and it must be divided in order to provide better, independent service.
Everything has a critical size. It would be terrible if there was a “hospital” city for an entire country instead of a hospital per X amount of citizens.
Or it would be terrible to power the entire world from a single power plant, for many absurd reasons.
Yea ofc there is allways a too big. But energy makes a lot more sense over a big area. Not in form of a big power plant, but in a big energy network. If it’s sunny in one region and they make a lot more power than they can use and at the same time a different region has a power shortage, because it’s a cloudy day it only makes sense to share the energy. The larger the skale of your network the more efficient is your energy production. Less recources get wasted.
Absolutely, a single hospital for an entire country would not work. But also, small clinics on every street corner would not work because none of them would be able to support more complex/expensive functions like surgical wards, FMRI or biochem labs. The hospital needs to be scaled so that it can support those things, but then it only makes sense for it to serve a larger community because it’s going to need a large staff and a substantial budget - so it needs to be at least locally centralized.
As you said, there’s a critical size.
You just described basic anarchism <3 though it may only work if currency is abolished
I feel like many forms of anarchism exist on a spectrum that contains communism as well. I’m not the most well read but I wonder if anarchism with some kind of currency can be established, or maybe just some kind of interim anarchism somehwere in that spectrum as the mode of production changes.
Decentralized governments: already a reality in most places, with a clear hierarchy (federal, state/province, city). Local communities aren’t always formed, but can coexist
Decentralized power sources: kinda there already? The thing is that it makes more sense economically to have a small number of big power plants than spread then thinly, especially due to industry needs that can be much larger than what residential lines typically transmit
Decentralized market: I mean, open fairs and small, corner markets are still a thing, no? Or what kind of market do you mean?
Decentralized currency: crypto kinda does that? There’s no central authority issuing whatever-coins. In more real-life terms, decentralized currency is deeply tied to local economy and you can look at history for how something like that used to work: small kingdoms almost always wanted to mint their own coins, then whenever conducting trade with external markets, some exchange rates would be set based on supply/demand.
How would you decentralize physical infrastructure like roads, rail, power lines, sewers etc.? Someone will need to be responsible for maintenance, and you can’t exactly switch out which sewer is connected to your house in case you’re unsatisfied with whoever is running that show. I’m imagining 20 identical roads running in parallel from A to B so people can choose which one to associate with. And a hundred different internets cramming the already limited electromagnetic spectrum we have because there’s no central authority to regulate them.
Everything is already decentralized if you think about. There is no central Earth government.
We may be thinking about what size we want communities to be. My answer is that it depends on the community. Climate change council? Probably needs to be a global community. Street cleaning? City level community. And so on.
