socialists themselves regularly claim that rich people are greedy and choose to harm others for profit even when they don't need the money.
This is yet another example of socialists making up an opposition to be smug about, and completely failing to actually defend their own viewpoints.
In anarchist Spain when whole cities abolished hierarchies, ownership and even money, and workers voted on how to operate factories and when and how they worked (some had each worker decide when they wanted to come in themselves), those factories had better rendements than they did under capitalism. Which is why they were destroyed when Franco took back those cities, he couldn't let the proof that capitalism isn't the best system stand.
Given my long experience with how socialists (and anarchists) misrepresent their own achievements and actions, I doubt this claim without very strong evidence.
At best, this is cherry-picking a single example in very specific circumstances and assuming it's universally applicable, and assuming "more output" is the only way to measure the worth of a system.
Not to mention how many - maybe most - Socialists explicitly want more government power, not anarchism. They also rarely want to abolish money, they want the government to take money from rich people. Including guerrillatech.
Also, isn’t Franco widely called a fascist?
How can they have “no hierarchies” if they have the power to enforce the lack of hierarchies?
And a few seconds' Googling indicates that Spain was in a Depression before the period started.
> It is impossible to understand the economics of the Spanish Civil War without realizing that in 1936, Spain remained in the midst of the international Great Depression.
>... Yet if we entertain the notion that the numbers are accurate, there is indeed an interesting pattern. When the workers actually had control, output declined 30 to 40 percent below its previous depressed level. When the workers' control was largely fictitious, production sometimes increased by 20 percent - albeit 20 percent above the level of the depression. The urban workers who actually had control had no incentive to tap into the vast unemployed resources; doing so would merely dilute the value of each worker's share. In contrast, the Anarchist militants who ran the agricultural collectives had no reason to keep resources idle; they weren't really paying the peasants anyway, so why not make use of as many of them as possible?
> Kelsey notes that women and even elderly farmers toiled in the fields under Anarchist rule. "Throughout the collectives many people were working harder and longer than before. The large number of men who had gone to man the front-lines meant that others, including women and older people, were needed to assist with much of the work. Many writers found that contrary to this being resented people were ready and willing to work extra hours and that, as at Graus, pensions were actually looked upon as something of an insult, older workers demanding the right to give their labour as everyone else."[124] An alternative explanation for the same facts is that the Anarchist leaders terrorized as many people as possible to work in the fields, and that the victims were too frightened to inform Anarchist journalists of the real story.
> An overwhelming body of evidence from a wide variety of sources confirms that when the workers really controlled their factories, capitalism merely changed it form; it did not cease to exist.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/how_the_economy.html
>Anarcho-socialists often point to the Spanish Civil War as a wonderfully informative social experiment. They’re right, but only because the facts proved their theories horribly wrong.
Reds and blatantly slanted misinformation that makes them look good and attacks capitalism. Name a more iconic duo.