anarchism and markets

(2017) by kevin carson – Anarchism and Markets – via kindle version from anarchist library – [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-anarchism-and-markets]

notes/quotes from 31 pgs:

3

Introduction

Anarchism, as Peter Kropotkin defined it in his 1910 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the advocacy of a stateless social order in which “harmony [is] obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to *any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of **needs and aspirations of a civilized being.” In such a society, “the ***voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a ****still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.” Market anarchism—a branch of the classical anarchist movement whose origins closely overlap with those of individualist anarchism—falls within this definition. [3] The latter was part of the radical wing of classical liberalism, and tended to a greater or lesser degree towards anti-capitalism. Classical liberalism and the socialist movement were both direct outgrowths of the Enlightenment, and the roots of individualist anarchism and market anarchism are heavily entangled in the early history of both movements.

*if only.. but to date.. we haven’t been able to let go enough to see/be that.. ie: sans any form of m\a\p

**and so.. we have no idea what legit needs are of legit free people.. ie: maté basic needs

***all to date.. have been voluntary compliance at best.. oi..

****only if we org around legit needs.. as infra

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

anarch\ism ness.. pëtr kropotkin

endnote 3: in using the term ‘market anarchism’ i am not referring to advocacy of a social order based primarily on business firms and the cash nexus.. but to assorted schools of *‘anarchism w/o adjectives‘ which accept **voluntary exchange as part of the mix.. i am quite open to the possibility that the majority of econ functions in such a society would actually be carried out in autarkic cohousing projects and other primary social units, communist collectives or ***gift econs

*kevin on anarchism w/o adj et al

oi.. **voluntary compliance at best.. if any form of m\a\p

***gift\ness et al.. and all the red flags

From the beginning, classical liberalism had a radical wing whose members— including figures like William Godwin and Thomas Paine—not only critiqued the economic power of the landed classes and chartered monopolists, but proposed land nationalization and other *radical land reforms as well.

*have we had/done anything legit radical to date?

Thousands upon thousands of working people belonged to reading and debating societies, where radical newspapers and pamphlets were discussed, as well as the works of thinkers like Paine and Cobbett.

*to me.. cancerous distraction.. as long as we’re all still in sea world.. all whalespeak

5

feels like reading a history book.. oi..

Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869)

6

This answer was hardly “easy” in the sense of serving as a facile defense of the capitalist social order, as Dobb implied; “really free trade,” as Hodgskin and the individualists saw it, would entail the abolition of most landlord rent and interest as well as profit on capital other than short-term entrepreneurial profit. A central theme of classical market anarchism was that capitalism cannot stand up to free market critique.

Hodgskin and the other radicals shared Ricardo’s understanding of profit and rent as deductions from a pool of exchange-value created by labor. They saw capitalism as a system of political economy in which the state intervened in the market on behalf of landlords, capitalists, and other monopolists to enforce the privileges by which they extracted rents from labor.

*Hodgskin made the crucial distinction between natural and artificial rights of property. Natural property rights are simply “a man’s right to the free use of his own mind and limbs, and to appropriate whatever he creates by his own labour.” By natural right of property, he meant “the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves.” This right, established by the “continual possession and use by one person of any one thing,” **was founded in nature. It resulted from the need of labor to satisfy human wants in the natural order of things as well as from the extension of individuality to that which the individual creates through his or her labor.

*all artificial

**i don’t think nature is into rights ness

7

Artificial rights, he said, concern “the power of throwing the necessity to labour off [one’s] own shoulders … by the appropriation of other men’s produce” and “[t]he power … possessed by idle men to appropriate the produce of labourer.” “Certain classes”—including the recipients of rent, profit, and taxes—“do not labour.” The slave-holders of the West Indies, the “landlords and fund holders of England … are all subsisted and supported, supplied with all their wealth, by the labour of the slaves in the West Indies, or of the toil-worn and half-starved slave-descended labourers of Europe.” ..“to give a greater quantity of labour to obtain it than nature requires,” and put the difference into the pockets of privileged classes

Law and governments are intended, and always have been intended, to establish and protect a right of property, different from that which … is ordained by nature…. [The law] exacts a revenue for the government,—it compels the payment of rent,—it enforces the giving of tithes, but it does not ensure to labour its produce and its reward.

In other words, the great object of law and of government has been and is, to establish and protect a violation of that natural right of property they are described in theory as being intended to guarantee.

Hodgskin’s language (including his reference to “continual possession and use” above) suggested an occupancy-and-use theory of land ownership. Cultivation as the basis of true ownership was implied by the tendency of land to revert to weeds if not used. “The mere landowner”—who does not labor—is fed “by violating the natural right of property.”

8

In fact it is a miserable delusion to call capital something saved.

What political economy conventionally referred to as the “labor fund,” and attributed to past abstention and accumulation, in fact resulted from the present division of labor and the cooperative distribution of its product. “Capital” is a term for a right of property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes these cooperative functions, and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor:”

Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share…. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence.

9

It is maintained … that labour is not productive, and, in fact, the labourer is not allowed to work, unless, in addition to replacing whatever he uses or consumes, and comfortably subsisting himself, his labour also gives a profit to the capitalist…; or unless his labour produces a great deal more … than will suffice for his own comfortable subsistence. Capitalists becoming the proprietors of all the wealth of the society … act on this principle, and never … will they suffer labourers to have the means of subsistence, unless they have a confident expectation that their labour will produce a profit over and above their own subsistence.

When capital equipment is owned by a class of rentiers separate from those who make it or use it, the owners may be said more accurately to impede production rather than “contribute” to it.… If there were only the makers and users of capital to share between them the produce of their co-operating labour, the only limit to productive labour would be, that it should obtain for them and their families a comfortable subsistence. But when in addition to this …, they must also produce as much more as satisfies the capitalist, this limit is much sooner reached. When the capitalist … will allow labourers neither to make nor use instruments, unless he obtains a profit over and above the subsistence of the labourer, it is plain that bounds are set to productive labour much within what Nature prescribes.

?

He developed the same theme in regard to land in The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted: “the labour which would be amply rewarded in cultivating all our waste lands, till every foot of the country became like the garden grounds about London, were all the produce of labour on those lands to be the reward of the labourer, cannot obtain from them a sufficiency to pay profit, tithes, rent, and taxes.”

Almost a hundred years before J.A. Hobson or John Maynard Keynes, Hodgskin remarked on the effect of privilege, which separates effort from reward, in the maldistribution of purchasing power: “The peasant, who produces so much corn, that his master is ruined by its reduced price, has not wherewithal to eat and cover himself.” And this in turn results in crises of overaccumulation and underconsumption:

10

The *wants of individuals which labour is intended to gratify, are the natural guide to their exertions. The instant they are compelled to **labour for others, this guide forsakes them, and their exertions are dictated by the greed and avarice, and false hopes of their masters….

*but the wants aren’t natural.. we all need detox first..

**already there because of missing pieces et al.. but labour for other whales is indeed.. how we spend our days

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)

The mutualist principle of “service for service, product for product, loan for loan, insurance for insurance, credit for credit, security for security, guarantee for guarantee” is an application of the legal principle of reciprocity to “the tasks of labor and to the good offices of free fraternity … On it depend all the mutualist institutions: mutual insurance, mutual credit, mutual aid, mutual education

won’t work if tit for tat ness.. won’t work if any form of m\a\p

mutual aid et al

11

Reciprocity is built into the normal functioning of a free market. When exchange is free and uncoerced, it is impossible for one party to benefit at the other’s expense.

exchange ness.. never (hasn’t been to date) free and uncoerced

14

Land is productive; but its productive forces are freely given by nature. They can contribute to exchange value only when the free gift of nature is monopolized. The landlord’s only “contribution” to value is that she sits atop the free gift without using it herself, and charges tribute for access to it. Or as Marx put it in volume 3 of Capital, “Land becomes personified in the landlord and … gets on its hind legs to demand, as an independent force, its share of the product created with its help.

Josiah Warren (1798–1874)

Warren viewed the central folly of New Harmony as the combination of interests, which could not succeed without an authoritarian government to enforce artificial harmony. Instead, he proposed “a system based on voluntary cooperation, but at no place rising above any individual within its structure.” In Warren’s own words, society

must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate. WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PERSONS OR INTERESTS OF OTHERS.

well.. kind of .. ie: maté trump law.. people telling other people what to do et al

15

Warren shared with Owen and Proudhon the belief that the lack of an equitable medium of exchange was central to the problem of poverty among the producing classes.

oi.. so not even kind of

marsh exchange law.. graeber exchange law.. et al

16

Ezra Heywood (1829–1893)

17

Poverty resulted from “the claim to own and sell what one has not earned” through rent, profit, and interest.

poverty from earn a living ness as well..

and asserts the free use of land to be the inalienable privilege of every human being

vs unauthorized home less ness et al.. oi

18

William Batchelder Greene (1819–1878) and Joshua King Ingalls (1816–1898)

19

On the other hand, “repeal our unreasonable land laws, half feudal and half civil, so that organized injustice can no longer have the land for its fulcrum, and you will find the lever money, now so weighty for wrong, to be the most serviceable and inoffensive of servants.”

oi.. any form of m\a\p as cancerous distraction.. as the death of us

20

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939)

22

Under Greene’s influence, Tucker saw the Money Monopoly as the most important of the Four Monopolies. This is how he envisioned the worker-friendly market, in the absence of that monopoly:

the thousands of people who are now deterred from going into business by the ruinously high rates which they must pay for capital with which to start and carry on business will find their difficulties removed…. Then will be seen an exemplification of the words of Richard Cobden that, when two laborers are after one employer, wages fall, but when two employers are after one laborer, wages rise. Labor will then be in a position to dictate its wages, and will thus secure its natural wage, its entire product.

if legit free no one needing wages/whatever for motivation ness.. aka: coercing ness et al

23

Joseph Labadie (1850–1933), Dyer Daniel Lum (1839–1893), and Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912)

25

De Cleyre was originally an individualist. By the mid-1890s, under the influence of her association with Dyer Lum, she moved toward a more Proudhonian mutualism. As a result of living in the Philadelphia ghetto at the time, and perhaps also as a result of her weak physical constitution, she “felt greater sympathy than Tucker for the immigrant, the worker, the poor.” However, Avrich denies Emma Goldman’s claim that de Cleyre later became an anarcho-communist. She believed until the end of her life that “the amount of administration required by Economic Communism would practically be a meddlesome government.”

yeah that

Although the *“Anarchism without adjectives” position (which de Cleyre shared with Dyer Lum) was originally developed by others, she became its most visible American exponent. In her article “Anarchism” (Free Society, 1901), she **criticized the dogmatists who believed that “no Anarchism is possible without [some] particular economic system as its guarantee.” She argued “that all these economic conceptions may be experimented with, and there is nothing un-Anarchistic about any of them until the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic arrangements they do not agree to.” She speculated that the various economic systems might be “advantageously tried in different localities.” In another article in 1907, she wrote that “***Liberty and experiment alone can determine the best forms of society..t

*kevin on anarchism w/o adj

**any form of m\a\p

***need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

26

Henry George, Jr. (1862–1916), Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943), and Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945)

Henry George, Jr. explained the derivation of the term “privilege” as private law or class legislation benefiting one group of individuals at the expense of another:

Now the word “privilege” means not a natural, but an artificial condition. Even its derivation shows that. It comes from the Latin privilegium, meaning an ordinance in favor of a person; and privilegium comes from privus, private, and lex or legem, a law. Hence, in its essence, the word “privilege” means a private law, a special ordinance or a usage equivalent to a grant or an immunity in favor of a particular person.

entitlement ness.. hardt/negri property law et al

The primary effect of privileges is to “empower their holders to appropriate, without compensation or adequate compensation, a large or small share of the produce of labor.” Privilege may be described, accordingly, as the use of law to enclose “natural opportunities” and charge for access to them.

enclosure.. language as control/enclosure.. all/any form of m\a\p

The state was simply the “organization of the political means.” The *state existed for an economic purpose, exploitation, which could not be achieved without force; but it presupposed the preexistence of the economic means, which had been **created by peaceful labor. ***The economic means to wealth were production and voluntary exchange. The political means were violent robbery.

*structural violence et al

**haven’t yet seen that to date.. need oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space

***no diff in these two sentences.. any form of m\a\p.. oi

Oppenheimer stipulated the contention of “bourgeois economics” that the division of society into “income-receiving classes and propertyless classes can only take place when all fertile lands have been occupied.” Equality would exist so long as free land did, since, “in Turgot’s phrase, ‘No well man will be willing to work for another, as long as he can take for himself as much land as he wants to cultivate.’ Where he differed was in his understanding of how the land had come to be completely appropriated. Were the natural right of property the basis of all appropriation, Oppenheimer argued, it would have been impossible for the land to become fully appropriated to the extent that it was necessary for laborers to pay rent for access to it. Rather, the land had been politically appropriated by conquest, so that even vacant and unimproved land could be held out of use by the artificial property titles of a ruling class unless labor was willing to pay for access to it.

Albert Jay Nock, a Georgist, was influenced by Oppenheimer’s view of the state. The state, he said,

originated in conquest and confiscation … It contemplated primarily the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another, and it concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was consistent with this primary intention … Its primary function … was … for the purpose of maintaining the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting class, and a propertyless dependent class.

Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State.

aka: all been in sea world since forever

28

Conclusion: Post-War Market Anarchism

29

Roderick Long, a professor of philosophy at Auburn University, began writing left-wing critiques of corporate capitalism from a Rothbardian economic perspective in the 1990s. Beginning with my pamphlet Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand in 2001, I attempted to revive an updated, more-or-less Tuckerite anarchist economic theory. Long and I, and a number of other similarly-minded thinkers who left Konkin’s Movement of the Libertarian Left over internal disputes, coalesced to form the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (ALL). Although the initial core of the group came from an anarcho-capitalist background influenced by Rothbard and Konkin, it included people from outside that tradition (I, for example, have never identified as an an-cap and consider myself a socialist). And the original core continued to be diluted by additional members from Georgist or social anarchist backgrounds, or followers of Elinor Ostrom. Finally, there is the Center for a Stateless Society, a left-wing market anarchist thinktank that grew directly out of the ALL circle. Although some of its core members, as with ALL, are from a Rothbardian and Konkinite background, even most of the Rothbardians have come to disavow their former anarcho-capitalist label, and others explicitly identify as socialists.

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