Full disclosure: I am an ML, but I want to share notes on an article that I think both anarchists and Marxists may find thought-provoking. The article critiques both traditions while exploring how complexity science and cybernetics can help address a shared challenge: scale. While anarchism has historically excelled at small-scale communal organization, it struggles with large-scale coordination. Conversely, Marxist central planning has historically managed scale but often at the cost of rigid hierarchies that failed to handle complexity dynamically. The article proposes a synthesis—decentralized computational planning—that avoids state coercion while moving beyond markets.

It offers (loving) critiques of both anarchism and 20th century communism, so I will make everyone mad at me by posting it.

From my own ML perspective, I recognize the historical role of centralized planning in resisting imperialism (e.g., USSR’s industrialization). However, the article critiques both anarchist localism and the centralization of Marxist states, emphasizing decentralized computational tools as an alternative. Despite tactical differences (e.g., transitional state structures) between MLs and Anarchists, there are common goals that we can focus on with this article: abolishing profit, expanding worker autonomy, and using technology for collective liberation.

Also, feel free to offer criticisms of this article. This is just one article I’m aware of that I enjoyed, but neither it nor I have the whole picture. I’m open to the possibility that I’m way off-base here.

The paper is The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, found here, or here.

---

The article highlights anarchism’s strength at the small scale:

The anarchist movement has a huge accumulated historical experience on how to run such local community initiatives… There is little doubt that anarchism works on what I will refer to as ‘the small scale.’

However, it acknowledges a common critique:

Historically, one of the main forms of criticism leveled against anarchism has been that it does not provide a convincing theory of how a decentralized, non-hierarchical form of organization can be scaled up to work efficiently on ‘the large scale.’

Large-scale structures—such as transportation, healthcare, food supply chains, and knowledge distribution—cannot be handled solely at the local level. The article argues that anarchism must move beyond the comfort zone of small communities and engage with complex, multi-layered networks to function at large scale. Likewise, communists can learn a thing or two to avoid ossified state planning that fails to be adaptive and complex.

For the purpose of this brief essay, I only want to discuss some aspects of the scale problem under some simplifying assumptions that I feel confident about when I try to envision the structure of an anarchist society (or at least one I would feel comfortable living in). So I am going to start by assuming that what happens at the “small scales" is established in the form of a network of communes, cooperatives, and collectives, which are run on anarcho-communist forms of organization, and I will consider the question of how to introduce large scale structures over this network.

---

The article discusses historical experiments like the Soviet cybernetic OGAS project and Chile’s Cybersyn, both of which sought decentralized computational planning. It then draws from complexity science, referencing Kolmogorov complexity, integrated information theory, and other measures to explore how an economic system could self-organize without markets or hierarchical control.

The goal is to get anarchists and communists to think of how we can approach designing non-hierarchical scalable systems. There is also a discussion of current projects such as Holochain, P2P networks, etc., as well as instruments which we need to develop in order handle the complexity of production and distribution and replace markets.

The dynamics of profit in markets is not a law of nature: it is implemented artificially via a machinery consisting of several instruments such as currencies, systems of credit and debt, etc. In a similar way, if we want to implement a dynamics of integrated informational complexity optimization, we need to devise the appropriate instruments that will implement it.

The author proposes that anarchism is fundamentally about self-organization in complex networks. They discuss various measures of complexity, such as Kolmogorov complexity and effective complexity, and suggest that maximizing integrated informational complexity could provide a viable alternative to market mechanisms. The later section can get rather technical, but it’s worth it.

To create these complex networks, we need our own instruments.

• There are **instruments of connectedness ** that need to be developed (and are being developed) that enable real-time feedback, communication, and coordination.
• As well as **instruments of complexity ** which increase the effective complexity of a network and drive innovation (open-access knowledge, ways to share resources).

And in addition to instruments, there is discussion of the framework of multi-layer networks - a way to model dynamic networks. Scaling anarcho-communism requires not just a network of cooperatives but interconnected networks that facilitate different forms of sharing (e.g., information, resources, labor).

The process of growth to larger scales is based on network structures connecting them… what one really needs are multiple interconnected networks that describe different forms of sharing… Not only this makes it possible to describe different networking structures that simultaneously exist, that represent different forms of sharing, but it also allows for a description of how each of these layers changes over time in a dynamical way.

---

All in all, I found the article interesting and thought it worth sharing. It shifts the focus of the debate away form centralization vs decentralization in the abstract and toward thinking about concrete tools for self-organizing large-scale economic systems. It doesn’t resolve all differences between Anarchists and MLs, but it invites us both to engage with some ideas in cybernetics and complexity science in order to build alternatives to capitalism.