No one has sent you a bill. No one had to pay a price.
The meal was cooked because you’re hungry – not because someone needs to make money from it. Exactly the right amount was cooked for what will be eaten. No waste, no exclusion.
This isn’t a utopia, but everyday life.
In every family, in every shared flat, in every real community, provision works without prices and without a market.
But as soon as we open the front door, a completely different logic suddenly applies. Outside, the market reigns. And the market produces what brings profit – not what is needed.
It sends a pair of trousers halfway around the globe to exploit a few cents’ difference in wages. It allows food to be destroyed whilst people go hungry. It manufactures products that are designed to break so they can be replaced. Surplus here, scarcity there. Inefficiency at every level.
In the Global South, millions of people work for low wages so that consumption and growth in the Global North can be sustained. At the same time, vast sums are poured into weapons and wars, even though most people want peace, security and a good life for all.
Heatwaves, droughts and floods are on the rise. The oceans are warming, forests are burning, and several of the Earth’s ecological limits have already been exceeded. Although the dangers are well known, global greenhouse gas emissions are not decreasing.
We have a global problem with the market economy, which must be resolved in the short term and on a global scale.
Global digital networking can replace the market.
Large online platforms have long been connecting consumers, producers, warehousing and logistics in real time. Technically, it would be fundamentally possible for us to order products directly from producers – without the market acting as an intermediary.
The material prerequisites for a direct, demand-driven supply system are thus emerging right at the heart of today’s economy.
The crucial question is: what is actually stopping us from replacing the market with a direct supply system as early as tomorrow? Why do we have a functioning, fair and efficient demand-driven economy in our kitchens, yet a system outside our front doors that suffers from chronic overproduction and simultaneous undersupply?
The answer is as simple as it is far-reaching: the price.
Price as a systemic flaw in a global economy
But how do prices come about, and above all: how can we get rid of them?
The price of a product is made up of many components: raw material costs, wages, profits, taxes and duties. Ultimately, however, the origin of all material production lies in natural raw materials.
Nature itself demands no price for its use. Costs only arise because people must assert property claims over land, raw materials, means of production and infrastructure in order to be able to buy something with the proceeds.
The three reasons leading to the dominance of the market
Appropriation of raw materials provided free of charge by nature
The necessity of wages and profits
The price-based nature of economic products
These reasons are interdependent.
Companies must sell their products in order to pay wages.
Wages, profits and revenue from the sale of raw materials are needed to purchase the economy’s products.
If these reasons were to disappear simultaneously on a global scale, the economy could transition to direct provision based on actual need.
Production could be scaled back to what is truly necessary
This would reduce resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
Everyone would be provided for unconditionally
This transition must take place worldwide and at the same historical moment.
If only a few companies were to turn their goods into gifts, they would still have to pay for raw materials and wages. They would immediately become insolvent.
If only one region were to make the switch, production would migrate to where there are no wages and goods would be sold where the market still prevails.
That sounds radical – but it is merely the consequence of the fact that the global market has long been a single, interconnected organism.
And this step is neither utopian nor impossible.
Technically, production could continue unchanged for the time being. The modern economy operates via long-term supply chains, advance investments and well-established processes.
Entrepreneurs
Free yourselves from the scourge of growth and the market
The highest form of entrepreneurial freedom is to turn goods into gifts.
This would eliminate all three reasons for the market’s existence. Wages and profits, as well as revenue from the sale of raw materials, would no longer be necessary, because everyone would be provided for unconditionally.
What would change in everyday life?
This is precisely where we arrive at what we all already know from our families – only extended to the whole of society.
The trousers from next door:
Direct provision in the digital age
Imagine you need a new pair of trousers.
Today, you go to a large platform, search for the cheapest price and order a product that may well have been sewn under appalling conditions in Bangladesh and travelled thousands of kilometres.
In a direct supply system, things would be different. You specify your size, the colour and quality you want. A public, public-interest-oriented AI – which has long existed in technical terms – searches not for the cheapest, but for the ecologically and socially optimal supplier.
Perhaps a textile manufacturer fifty kilometres away that works with regional materials. The trousers are produced because you have requested them, not because a retailer is speculating on profit.
Prices no longer exist.
No market pressures, no competition. Only the utility value matters.
Responsibility that doesn’t end at the checkout
And now comes the crucial point:
Because you aren’t paying a price, you don’t have to buy your way out of responsibility either.
Your responsibility does not end at the checkout.
It extends all the way back along the trousers’ journey – to the cotton field, to the dye, to the seamstress working under fair conditions. Not because a government forces you to, but because the platform makes transparent what is currently hidden behind price tags.
And because all those involved – producers, seamstresses and you yourself – have a shared interest in closing the fabric loop, rather than outsourcing waste and misery.
Without the pressure to compete on price, products could finally be designed in a way that makes ecological and social sense: durable, repairable, fully recyclable.
Not because ‘people suddenly become good people’, but because the systemic pressure that has hitherto driven them towards destruction and waste is removed.
If a craftsman no longer has to fear being squeezed out by a low-cost supplier, he can do his work as he sees fit. If a seamstress no longer has to worry about her wages, she can work carefully and with dignity.
And if, as a consumer, you do not have to buy a pair of trousers but can request a garment you trust, which is part of a closed-loop system, then you will do so with a matter-of-factness that is priceless under today’s market economy conditions.
Coordination without competition:
What replaces the market
Social coordination does not disappear as a result.
Resources, production capacities and ecological limits must still be taken into account. But control no longer takes place via the blind mechanism of prices, which inevitably rewards the strong and excludes the weak, but via direct information, digital networking and democratic coordination.
It would be an economy that has finally come of age: no longer driven by an anonymous market, but a conscious shaper of the foundations of our shared lives.
From the anonymous market to a society based on solidarity
With the dissolution of market mediation, the relationship between people also changes.
When provision is no longer mediated through buying and selling, the cooperative nature of social production becomes clearly apparent.
We would then no longer receive the goods we need to live as the result of competition and exchange, but as part of a shared social provision. This changes not only the economy, but the entire social climate – away from competition and existential fear, towards mutual responsibility and solidarity.
The technology is ready. The digital infrastructure is in place. We are familiar with the social blueprints from our own homes.
What is missing is the courage to no longer treat the market as a law of nature, but as what it is:
a historically evolved, increasingly inefficient and destructive operating system that can be replaced by a better one.
The transition to direct provision is not a naive dream. It is the consistent application to society as a whole of what we have been practising in social reproduction for centuries. Lunch is ready – for everyone.
Let’s take the first step – let’s talk about freeing all goods from their prices, so that everything is accessible for free.
