Richard D. Wolff

I've been thinking about how to build an economic system to replace capitalism and I've turned to the Proudhonian libertarian socialist inspired alternative commonly known as anarchosyndicalism or worker coops. A self-sufficient ecosystem of federated coops (of all kinds), could, if made incompatible and inimical to the capitalist system, replace it. However, even with socialized property, and socialized intellectual property, it is expected that some coops will produce more than others, and without a centralized or coercively regulated system, with a free system, some coops would outproduce others, have better marketing, location, or otherwise achieve competitive advantages that would then create inequalities. The best case scenario, means those inequalities are negligible, but those would likely be compounded by the effect it would have on the commodity prices, making coops that produce more, have cheaper products, which would then be favored by demand, and then this supply and demand dynamic could make a successful coop undermine and vanquish the competiton (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). This could, however, snowball into the concentration of wealth into an area that would then out-compete coops in other areas, creating regional inequalities, etc. Also, when commonly funded services (education, healthcare, security, justice, art, culture, banking, roads, etc) are accounted for, even if they are sustained by contributions proportional to production, some coops could potentially opt to lessen their contributions to counterbalance, achieve or pursue competitive advantages, thereby preventing such services from improving or even causing them to contract. Essentially, my fear is that market dynamics would eventually erode the basis of this anti-capitalist society. Is there a mechanism to avoid such a fate that doesn't fall into the trap of a bureaucratic distribution system?