How do you remove the profit motive? It seems pretty deeply embedded in people. Hell, I want to make profit when exchanging goods or services, and petroleum based products are often the cheapest option, leading to me outselling my non-polluting competitor. (I am assuming that in an anarchic society, people will be allowed to pursue profits and wealth, and thus commercial interests would still exist).
It would seem that anarchy would require a large shift in the way people think, and more to the point, to maintain that new way of thinking.
We're starting to go deep on this to the point where there are many various schools of thought in anarchy that would answer this question differently.
I am somewhere in the area of an anarcho-syndicalist/social libertarian. I see the concept of property as the root as most of our problems. To understand this, you have to understand a very important distinction between property and possession. A possession is something you claim ownership and control of that you personally relate to in your life. Something that you actually use and depend on or have an emotional connection with first-hand. Property something you claim ownership or control over that you do not have such a connection with. Something that is owned by one and rented by another would be considered the property of the person who owns it, but the possession or the person who lives in it.
I believe that society can function on possession alone, and that property is unnecessary and damaging to human relations. Without property there is no means by which a person can accumulate more than they need, and the concept of profit becomes meaningless.
Yes, it requires a huge shift in the way people think. Any form of anarchy requires a major cultural revolution. However, such revolutions have happened before. It happened when human beings discovered the secrets of agriculture and developed sedentary lifestyles, which further led into population centers, specialization, and so on into modernity. The way we live today is really completely UNnatural, as we have plenty of anthropological proof that the conceptual foundations that civilization functions on, such as property, are completely alien to indigenous ways of life, which as I mentioned before is how the first 98% of human history was lived. Civilization developed in certain ways according to changes in circumstances, not according to some fact of human nature.
And I believe we're in the midst of a drastic change in circumstances right now that may be as deeply uprooting as the drift away from hunter-gatherer life. I think it's all about communication. Our methods of social organization have always been limited by available forms and speed of communication. The advent of written language had drastic effects on the functioning of society, then again the printing press, and until a little over 100 years ago, written word on physical media was the pinnacle of our capability for distributing information. Civilization developed to process on functions of centralization because of these limitations. Information and decision-making ability was consolidated into hierarchies of authority, because limiting the flow of communication to strict social channels was the most efficient way we had to keep things organized and operating. Natural, memetic dispersion of information was incredibly slow and unreliable. All of the political and economic systems we've seen through history were algorithms for different styles of centralization.
Modern mass communications has rendered those previous limitations obsolete, and thus gives us the opportunity to completely reverse our organizational paradigms. Natural, memetic dispersion of information is near-instantaneous. Anything can be communicated to anyone anwhere, selectively or en-masse, at any moment. Infrastructure that filters information to the people who would find it most relevant and that helps people to make constructive social connections is becoming ever more sophisticated. Because of all this, de-centralized organizational structures are now more resilient and powerful than centralized ones.
Think of civilization as a computer, communications capability as the hardware, and socio-economic structures as operating systems. Our operating systems are all designed for hardware that is outdated. We have a supercomputer, but we're running Windows 3.1.