I think it’s important to remember three things when you come across people online trying to argue against anarchists ideas with economics.
First, that economics does not describe the world as it is. It describes a hypothetical world of infinite land and infinite resources, with limited corruption and basically no propaganda effect. These people have essentially spent their lives learning all the nuance of D&D rules, and it’s important to remember that it really doesn’t matter how much money a +1 enchantment costs, because it isn’t real.
Second, anything they say about economics and how they think the world works is 100% irrelevant to a discussion of how the world *should* work. The current motivations for a rich person to open a factory are irrelevant to a discussion of a just society. The current arrangement of housing is irrelevant when discussing how a just world would function. The current arrangement of farming is irrelevant to How food should be grown and distributed. Every argument they make about the current world is simply saying “it can’t be any other way because that isn’t how it works now” which is a bit if an ought-is problem
The economists i know in my personal lives are some of the most ignorant, sheltered people I’ve ever met. They know fucking everything about economic theory and basically nothing about anything else in the world.
Lastly, the world is not infinite. Both current neoliberal economics and Marxist theory generally fail to take into account that we are running out of resources quickly. We reach earth overshoot 60% of the way through the year, we’re eating into our global resource savings in a major way, and we’re going to be globally bankrupt of most resources very soon. All their theory doesn’t matter because the current world is completely and utterly fucked, capitalism is fucked, consumerism is fucked, And most likely 80% of the people alive are fucked. If we don’t suddenly pull space resource extraction out of our assess in the next 15 years everything will collapse, and there’s basically zero chance of that happening.
The world as we know it is actually ending pretty soon, one way or another, and there’s just no point in arguing with the priests of the capitalist death cult when they clearly got it wrong already.