When universal and unrestricted, competition means the most perfect peace and the truest co-operation; for then it becomes simply a test of forces resulting in their most advantageous utilization. As soon as the demand for labor begins to exceed the supply, making it an easy matter for every one to get work at wages equal to his product, it is for the interest of all (including his immediate competitors) that the best man should win; which is another way of saying that, where freedom prevails, competition and co-operation are identical.

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Benjamin Tucker argued that if individuals were allowed to freely mobilize their own credit, to borrow, and to issue currencies outside of the State’s system, they could break the chains of bondage that held them in thrall to the capitalist system. With monopoly control of currency, credit, and banking in general, bankers could as a practical matter tax us for the privilege of living, making us substantively not much more than serfs paying tribute to titled overlords. Tucker and his fellow individualist anarchists therefore argued for the absolute most open competition and freest markets in money and banking. It was not the existence of competition that had subjected working people to the whims of monopoly, but its absence. “The Anarchists,” Tucker wrote, “are the extreme free traders; and they, to a man, favor free trade in money,—most of them, in fact, recognizing it as a necessary condition of free trade in products.” The panic of ‘08 demonstrated that the Federal Reserve does not exist to restrain and stabilize financial markets, but to capacitate exploitation by “Too Big to Fail” banks. Indeed, nothing could reveal less of a concern for economic inequality. When the federal government began deciding which banks it would save at the expense of taxpayers and consumers, some were more equal than others. It is the preservation of Wall Street privilege that truly concerns the Fed and the federal government.

The naive belief that the Federal Reserve System could reduce inequality rests on a profound ignorance of economics, politics, and history. Considered from a political perspective, the Federal Reserve System is a tool of elite interests, controlled at all times by a tiny but disproportionately powerful group of bankers no less subject to self interest or the influence of pressure groups than anyone else. To begin with, it is not at all clear that we should believe this small group behind the Fed to be more concerned about inequality than anyone else. What’s more, even assuming they are (for some reason) more concerned about inequality than the general population, it is even less clear that they could do anything about it without far-reaching unintended consequences. In any event, the Fed’s true economic purpose, contrary to statist misinformation, is and always was to concentrate power in an influential group of well-connected favorites, the Wall Street banks who stand to be bailed out at the next inevitable crisis. Given the Fed’s sordid history, such political and economic consequences are a matter of course. After all, it was organized financial interests that led the drive for a new national banking system, for an institution that would protect them from risk, with Progressive Era intellectuals gladly granting their stamp of approval.

Still, “increasing the supply of low-cost credit” sounds innocuous enough, and indeed individualist anarchists like Tucker predicted that such would be the outcome of allowing free banking. Other advocates of free banking (i.e., its right-libertarian advocates) have made contrastive predictions. Ultimately we can’t be certain of anyone’s predictions about genuine freedom of competition and exchange in banking, what it would look like, or its results. To believe that we could know beforehand what would happen is the most arrogant and ridiculous conceit, the kind that leads to coercive, centralized economic planning in the first place. Importantly, the State is unlike the market in any case. The State’s “supply of low-cost credit” is simply printed out of thin air, with nothing ceded or sacrificed. The free, mutual banking of anarchists like Tucker and William Batchelder Greene made land and all kinds of other property the basis for money, creating credit secured by that property just as a mortgage lien secures a home loan. As Greene wrote in Mutual Banking:

Ships and houses that are insured, machinery, in short, any thing that may be sold under the hammer, may be made the basis of mutual money. Mutual banking opens the way to no monopoly; for it simply elevates every species of property to the rank which has hitherto been exclusively occupied by gold and silver. It may be well (we think it will be necessary) to begin with real estate: we do not say it would be well to end there!

Unlike in the home loan examples of the present, however, such relationships in a freed market would be equitable, made between parties of relatively equal bargaining power. With competition between services, currencies and prices for credit (i.e., interest rates), and with no Federal Reserve System to guarantee bailouts, quantitative easing purchases, and the like, no financial institution could grow “Too Big to Fail.” Libertarian anarchists may disagree on the question of what exactly it is that defines money: Is specie money, or is credit/debt money? The author submits that we go forth and allow the voluntary exchanges and cooperative projects of free and independent people to decide that question. If it is individual choice that we really care about as anarchists and libertarians, then it seems counterproductive and even utterly strange that we ought to insist on, for example, gold or silver money.

In banking as in economics generally, the fundamental question asks which arrangement in is more likely to give us the results of fairness and stability that at least in theory we all desire. Is it a networked system in which decision making power is distributed and free agents compete without anyone benefiting from special privilege? Or is it a system in which competition is outlawed from the start and decision-making power is extremely concentrated in a very small group of politically appointed bankers, to whom still other bankers on Wall Street have privileged access? If we believe that laws are akin to magic, that politicians are omniscient in crafting them, and that bureaucrats are perfectly altruistic in their implementations of them, then perhaps we might consider the latter system. The fatal flaw in the narrative, though, is that the State has been the handmaid of the rich since its birth in conquest and plunder. As Albert Jay Nock taught, the State’s “primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another.” Under capitalism, that exploitation is made possible by the State’s interventions to grant capitalists privileged access to the land and other shared natural resources, to the most remunerative professions, to ideas and technology (through absurd “intellectual property” laws), and to the distribution of money and credit, among many, many others. To believe that the State ought to intercede on behalf of the poor and working classes misunderstands both the State itself, as an actual historical phenomenon, and the capabilities and poor and working class people themselves. Well-meaning people on the mainstream, statist left must come to understand that workers and the less fortunate do not need the State’s help. We just need the State to stop intervening on behalf of the interests of capital. Tucker thought that we ought to start with banking, that this money most hobbled the self-directed activities of working people; perhaps he was right.

Mr. Dickinson regrettably takes it as a given that libertarianism is merely a thin ideological vindication of big business, with all its abuses and ruination of the natural environment. Such a flagrant misunderstanding is rather embarrassing considering both the breadth of libertarianism’s ideas and its history, and the fact that Dickinson took the time to write a lengthy article that is in part a denunciation of libertarianism. We might’ve expected a more careful and knowledgeable treatment of the subject if this kind of hit piece weren’t so commonplace among mainstream liberal outfits.

Had Dickinson committed himself to digging just a bit deeper into libertarianism and, for example, its opposition to economic regulations, he likely would have noticed a trend among actual libertarians as opposed to the straw men and caricatures set up by boring, monotonous smears. In and of itself libertarianism — including its individualistic and free market varieties — holds no brief for rich elites and has always incorporated forceful critiques of big business and entrenched economic ruling classes. Only the desperately and chronically unimaginative and uninformed could seriously mistake existing capitalism in any of its historical stages for a free market. Early nineteenth century radical liberals such as Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer established a thoroughgoing theory of class and class conflict, a philosophy they called Industrialisme which challenged the State’s system of intervention on behalf of elites. Comte and Dunoyer understood that genuine freedom of competition and exchange, without government involvement, would actually effect a great change in favor of productive, working people. In their day, there was none of Dickinson’s delusion that the government apparatus is some kind of populist charitable institution; they knew their history and it all demonstrated, as it still does, that government force and aggression are almost always used to line the pockets of the politically connected. Comte wrote of the “subordination that subjected the laboring men to the idle and devouring men, and which gave to the latter the means of existing without producing anything, or of living nobly.” None of this subordination had anything to do with mutually beneficial exchange, which these radical liberals regarded as the proper basis for a free and fair society.

All of this is to say nothing of later free market libertarians such as Benjamin Tucker who went so far as to identify their completely unregulated, stateless free market with socialism. These radicals saw that the State’s regulations, laws, licenses, and permits in fact acted to consolidate power in the hands of great, monopolistic trusts. The dominance and market power of these large entities, combined with the government’s theft of the land and preclusion of self-sufficiency, allowed the “captains of industry” to acquire wage labor at an extortionate reduced price. It will no doubt come as a surprise to Dickinson that a committed socialist and class warrior like Benjamin Tucker would agree wholeheartedly with Charles Koch’s claim that supporters of regulation are being “hoodwinked.” But Dickinson might not be so surprised should he decide to consider the historical relationship between the interests and prerogatives of capital and those of the State more closely. Like Comte and Dunoyer, Tucker would have treated as laughably absurd the notion that our political overlords would want to hobble the rich. Attacking the “band of licensed robbers called capitalists,” Benjamin Tucker nevertheless advocated consistent free market competition of just the kind that so worries Dickinson.

Still, we might forgive Dickinson for being confused. After all, there is all the difference in the world between the kind of free market defended by Comte, Dunoyer, and Tucker, and the corporate capitalism that has made Koch Industries a multibillion dollar company. The great capitalists of today are themselves rather confused when it comes to the economic ideas to which they subscribe. When it suits them, they conflate today’s system of multinational corporatism, the deeply statist successor of feudalism and mercantilism, with the real free market system outlined by radical libertarians, but never yet observed in reality. Tucker and others thus frequently called attention to “the bourgeoisie’s appeal to liberty and its infidelity thereto.” Insofar as we give credence to the ridiculous myth that these two irreconcilable systems are one and the same, we can agree to some extent with Dickinson’s philosophically muddled piece. Dickinson begins to hit rather closer to the mark near the close of his article, where he writes that “in the real world, Koch Industries has used its political might to beat back … market-based mechanisms.” “In fact,” Dickinson observes, “it appears the very essence of the Koch business model is to exploit breakdowns in the free market.” So which is it? Are the Koch brothers attempting to skirt the requirements of a free market in order to get away with environmental and economic murder? Or are they creatures of the free market, their billions its proximate result?

To speak to the beliefs which men hold within their hearts is neither practicable nor especially useful in considering questions of political economy. Armchair psychology aside, however, it is a great deal easier to judge global corporate capitalism against the standards clearly delineated again and again by real life libertarians such as we have considered here. Those standards as our rubric, it is clear beyond dispute that in fact global corporate capitalism is a system instituted by the total state, riddled with anticompetitive privileges and profoundly hostile to poor and working people and to the environment. A free market means, among other things, carrying your own costs and thus paying for the destruction you bring to the natural world. Where that kind of free market is in effect, no additional or ancillary regulations are necessary. Where such a system is not actually in effect, no additional or ancillary regulations will be sufficient, and will more likely act as cost barriers to foreclose just the kind of competition we need to rein back the economically powerful. Mainstream liberals ought to reconsider libertarianism in the light of its left-wing roots. They might just be surprised by what they find, walking away disillusioned with politics and the State as the routes to fairness, justice and equality.

Now, Socialism wants to change all this. Socialism says that what’s one man’s meat must no longer be another’s poison; that no man shall be able to add to his riches except by labor; that in adding to his riches by labor alone no man makes another man poorer; that on the contrary every man thus adding to his riches makes every other man richer; that increase and concentration of wealth through labor tend to increase, cheapen, and vary production; that every increase of capital in the hands of the laborer tends, in the absence of legal monopoly, to put more products, better products, cheaper products, and a greater variety of products within the reach of every man who works; and that thi fact means the physical, mental, and moral perfecting of mankind, and the realization of human fraternity. Is that not glorious? Shall a word that means all that be cast aside simply because some have tried to wed it with authority? By no means.

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CNBC describes the Corporate Perception Indicator as “a far-reaching survey of business executives and the general population from 25 markets,” “research firm Penn Schoen Berland survey[ing] 25,012 individuals and 1,816 business executives.” The results of the survey show quite unsurprisingly that the general public associates government with words like “corruption,” “lies,” “incompetence,” and “thieves.” As for big business, the words that came to the minds of those surveyed included, again, “corruption” and “thieves,” also “monopoly” and “power.” Interestingly, overall perceptions of both corporations and government appear to be largely negative. In American political discourse, the political right is characterized by a perceptible overpraise of business, devoted to a view of corporations that sees them as essentially free market actors, “creators” and “doers” that give us progress and innovation. Even if this is not true of everyone on the American right, certainly such sentiments are important to the right’s narrative on free markets. The right looks on government, in contrast, as the bungling and inept meddler attempting to hold back our industrious and our productive, the supporter of the lazy and parasitic who would rather live on the government dole than work for a living.

On the left, corporations are perceived as putting profits above people, as willing to do anything to suck more and more of the world’s natural wealth into the hands of a grasping, extravagant one percent. Government, on the other hand, is treated as the agent of “the greater good” or “the public good,” a kind of benevolent, altruistic mother to us all.

In the United States, people who identify themselves as free marketers or libertarians are much more likely to align with the former of these competing narratives, the right’s assertion that the corporation is the home of the movers and the shakers, the creative and energetic champions of free enterprise. This relationship between self-identified libertarians and the American right helps explain the broader anarchist movement’s pardonable reluctance to accept individualist or market anarchists as the genuine article. Further, hostility toward communism has a long history in individualist anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker’s frequent denunciations, yet certainly preceding them.[1]

We may observe at this juncture that both the right and the left share the historically and empirically ridiculous theory that government and corporate power are locked in an eternal war. But it is a great politico-economic myth that governments and large corporations operate at variance with one another, that one must align herself in her political commitments with one or the other, never both, never neither. For left wing individualists, surveys which demonstrate dissatisfaction with and negative attitudes toward both actually make perfect sense. That big business should be associated with greed and governments with corruption is hardly astonishing or remarkable. Further, these results underline the problem with seeing corporate power and government power as rivals, rather than seeing them much more accurately as codependent partners in crime, mutually reinforcing components parts of a larger phenomenon we might call a ruling class or power elite.

We needn’t risk the cognitive dissonance that comes with treating the State as the great restraint upon the socially destructive avarice of multinational corporations. For we find, whenever we bother to look, that elites in the business community regularly work with the public sector to create conditions accommodating to monopolism. The ideal of free and open competition, however championed in corporate press releases and political campaigning, is nowhere to be found and indeed never has been. Thus do market anarchists prosecute our laissez faire critique of capitalism. We come from an older tradition of American libertarians, radicals who contemned capitalism as much as any communist, but understood the importance of individual rights and mutually beneficial trade.

It is interesting to witness anarchist communists and syndicalists develop strict, exclusionary criteria for anarchism, particularly insofar as the arguable father of our doctrine, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was neither, his mutualism containing many market-friendly if not outright pro-market elements. No less important for anarchism as it developed in America is Josiah Warren, whose first forays into anarchist thought antedate Proudhon. If market or individualist anarchism represents a form of “pseudo-intellectualism,” then some of the anarchist tradition’s brightest lights must apparently be relegated to the dustbin of history. Granting that opposition to not only political but also economic authority is a necessary condition for the true anarchist, individualists like Warren (and his followers such as Benjamin Tucker) more than qualify.

Whether our communist and syndicalist comrades admit it or not, free market ideas figured prominently in fledgling anarchist thought, regarded as perfectly consistent with and a natural outgrowth of, to quote Warren, “the absolute right of supreme individuality.” Considering Warren as an example, many contemporary anarchists may not know that anarchist luminary Peter Kropotkin acknowledged Warren as an inspiration and, in the words of Crispin Sartwell, “a precursor of (and influence on?) Proudhon.” In discussing Warren’s legacy, Sartwell observes one of the major, continuing tensions between the individualist and communist strains of anarchism, the debate on “lifestyle anarchism.” Sartwell argues, quite correctly in the author’s view, that Warren “belongs squarely in what is called by its opponents ‘lifestyle anarchism’: that strain concerned with creating alternatives within the interstices in the existing system rather than arming to overthrow it.” “Peaceful Revolutionist” that he was, Warren emphasized experiments in the creation of practical alternatives to dominant economic and social modalities. To Warren, the whole of life was open to and the subject of reform. This holistic approach, the universality of his critique of the existing state of affairs, he likely inherited from Robert Owen, even while dispensing with other aspects of Owenite thinking. Indeed, Warren’s departure from Owen and his ideas offers us an illuminative proxy for the tensions and debates that still divide individualist from communist elements within anarchism. Warren worried about the overwhelming of the individual within combinations and, paraphrasing Sartwell, imposed a priori schemes. Communists often tend to see the undisciplined “lifestylism” of Warren-type experimentation as essentially bourgeois, outside of or ancillary to genuine class struggle.

Discussing early figures in anarchism such as Warren opens opportunities to reflect on the similarities that unite all anarchists. We can pause to wonder what someone with Warren’s breadth of interests and hopes for reform might think of twenty-first century problems and perceptions thereof.

As all anarchists understand, politics is at bottom conquest, spoliation and rape. Everything else, everything peaceful, voluntary and consensual is something different, throwing the distinction between the “politics means” and the “economic means” once again into sharp relief. The economic means to wealth is defined by the normal, even obvious standards we refer to in interactions with merchants, our friends, and family, the mutually beneficial guidelines we use to cooperate and trade with coequals. The political means, by contrast, is the acquisition of wealth by aggression, by forcible extraction through systematic privilege. The State, being the organization with a monopoly on the legal use of force, is the wellspring of such privilege. As Josiah Warren pointed out in Equitable Commerce:

Theorists have told us that laws and governments are made for the security of person and property; but it must be evident to most minds, that they never have, never will accomplish this professed object; although they have had the world at their control for thousands of years, they have brought it to a worse condition than that in which they found it, in spite of immense improvements in mechanism, division of labor, and other elements of civilization to aid them. On the contrary, under the plausible pretext of securing person and property, they have spread wholesale destruction, famine, and wretchedness in every frightful form over all parts of the earth, where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more blood, committed more murders, tortures, and other frightful crimes in the struggles against each other for the privilege of governing, than society ever would or could have suffered in the total absence of all government whatever.

A deep, principled loathing of both big business and government unites all anarchists. Confronted with the alarming realities of the present moment, its authoritarian repressions and economic maladies, anarchists ought to help one another in peaceful projects to build a freer, better world. Data such as those contained in the Corporate Perception Indicator survey show a world fully primed for our anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist critiques. It falls upon us to communicate our message, to do the constructive work of inaugurating a new order.

[1] Relatedly, in True Civilization, Josiah Warren wrote, “What is called conservatism has all the time been entirely right in its objections to communism, and in insisting on individual ownership and individual responsibilities both of which communism annihilates; conservatism has also shown wisdom in its aversion to sudden and great changes, for none have been devised that contained the elements of success.”

Some might say that the common element for all these variants of socialism was a belief in the labor theory of value. But it may be more precise to say that the comment element was more general: namely, that workers were cheated by the reigning system. That need not commit one to the labor theory. (On the relationship between cost of production and price in Austrian economics, see my “Value, Cost, Marginal Utility, and Böhm-Bawerk.“) In fact, Austrian economics contains an implicit exploitation theory, which was made explicit by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. As I wrote in “Austrian Exploitation Theory“:

Böhm-Bawerk was merely applying the more general exploitation theory held by free-market thinkers at least back to Adam Smith: Monopolies and oligopolies (suppressed competition) harm consumers and workers through higher prices and lower wages. For Smith monopoly was essentially the result of government privilege. This largely has been the view of later Austrians, also.

This should be uncontroversial. In the corporate state, government privilege restricts competition among employers in a variety of ways and — just as important, if not more so — forecloses or raises the cost of self-employment and other alternatives to traditional wage labor. So worker bargaining power is reduced. The difference between what workers would have made in a freed market and what they actually make represents systemic exploitation.

I’m not saying that libertarians should call themselves socialists today. That would not communicate well. But this semantic history has its value.

La ricerca della Federal Reserve sconcerterà sicuramente chi, a sinistra come a destra, considera erroneamente gli Stati Uniti “la patria della libertà”, il luogo ideale per le opportunità, dove chiunque può fare progressi con un minimo di dedizione. Certo, però, i dati sembrano mostrare una realtà molto diversa da questi rosei fraintendimenti, una realtà in cui le connessioni tra le élite, nel business come in politica, assicurano che i ricchi diventino più ricchi e i poveri più poveri.

Davanti ad uno spettacolo così desolante dell’economia e della struttura di classe americana, quelle persone sinceramente turbate dalla crescita della disuguaglianza fanno presto a dare la colpa al “libero mercato” e alla concorrenza selvaggia che mette il profitto al di sopra della persona. Ma cosa è veramente un libero mercato, e se oggi ne possediamo uno, sono due domande separate a cui dobbiamo rispondere se vogliamo analizzare la questione della disuguaglianza in America. La sinistra americana sarebbe stupita ad apprendere che nella tradizione radicale socialista si trova tutto un genere di libertari contro lo stato e a favore del libero mercato.

Ammettendo che mercati e concorrenza di per sé siano parte del problema sociale da risolvere, la sinistra si mette in posizione di svantaggio da sola, capitolando alla falsa credenza secondo cui la classe di potere capitalista ha semplicemente vinto. Dopotutto, è il ragionamento, se è vero che abbiamo un genuino libero mercato qui e ora, cosa possiamo obbiettare?

La maggior parte dei nemici del capitalismo, dunque, condivide lo stesso mito propagandato dai peggiori apologisti dell’attuale capitalismo con le sue numerose disuguaglianze. Entrambi sostengono che il mondo economico attuale è essenzialmente di libero mercato. Anarchici sostenitori del mercato come Ezra Heywood e Benjamin Tucker non credevano a queste falsità. Non credevano che il lavoro non potesse competere con il capitale quando i due si sfidano su un piano equo.

Piuttosto, dicevano, le caratteristiche più comuni, più inique del capitalismo erano in realtà il frutto avvelenato di profonde offese, generalmente accettate, ai principi del libero mercato. Togliete gli aiuti che lo stato concede alle grandi imprese, i molteplici privilegi che limitano l’azione dei lavoratori, e allora un genuino scambio volontario, una genuina cooperazione dissolverà il capitalismo come lo conosciamo oggi.

Come dice Ezra Heywood in The Great Strike, “La sopravvivenza del più forte è un bene inevitabile; davanti ai lavoratori i capitalisti sono impotenti, a meno che lo stato… non intervenga a dar loro una mano ad afferrare e tosare le vittime. Il vecchio appello dei dispotismi, che la libertà rappresenta insicurezza, ricompare adesso sotto forma di concetto sbagliato secondo cui la concorrenza è un male per i lavoratori.”

Heywood dà una lezione alla sinistra americana contemporanea: Il capitalismo è un sistema basato sul furto della terra, norme che impediscono la concorrenza, monopolio della proprietà intellettuale e grosse regalie alle grandi imprese sotto forma di aiuti e contratti governativi. Cos’è, allora, tutto questo gran parlare di “libero mercato”?

L’anarchia di mercato è una forma di decentramento, un socialismo libertario che vede nello scambio volontario e nella cooperazione la soluzione alla disuguaglianza diffusa con cui oggi lottiamo. Politici e amministratori delegati preferirebbero mantenere l’attuale sistema americano; loro dipendono dal sistema e il sistema dipende da loro. A noialtri, a differenza delle élite politiche ed economiche, non dispiace lavorare per vivere; noi non chiediamo privilegi particolari; vogliamo solo essere lasciati in pace, liberi di realizzare le nostre idee e perseguire i nostri obiettivi. È questo genere di libero mercato che offre una via d’uscita dall’attuale iniquità, non il rafforzamento di quest’ultima.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

In treating the relationship between inequality and injustice, it is important to note that we individualist anarchists ultimately have no problem with the mere fact of income inequality per se. That is, some people should make more money than others, based on factors including the amount of time these people dedicate to toil, their level of skill, and the disagreeableness of the work in question. As Laurance Labadie put it, “In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered.” Or else as Henry Appleton put it in the pages of Liberty, anarchism’s “central idea is the direct antipodes of levelling.” What we do propose, however, is to destroy all sources of income that are not based on work of any kind (be it intellectual work or physical—never mind that the line between even these is practically exceedingly difficult to draw)[1], to prevent capitalists form using aggression in the form of privilege to draw what is akin to a tax from labor.

The individualist anarchists often compared rent, interest, and profit to taxation. Whether we agree with them ends up turning to a large extent upon speculation as to the results and relations that a genuine free market would yield. Since we agree that we don’t have such a free market in the present moment, we may disagree as to whether today’s idle rich could continue their lucrative moneymaking schemes absent the State and the many monopolistic privileges it grants them. Thus when we argue with John Beverley Robinson that equality is “a cold mathematical fact” which naturally and ineluctably results from “the hypothesis of free production and exchange,” we are indeed contending at the very least that the widest inequalities of today are the proximate products of privilege—even if not all inequalities are such. The location of the line, again, is impossible to pinpoint. Individualist anarchists, of course, would allow the market to locate it, and have always followed Benjamin Tucker in making liberty the top priority. The point is that we see existing disparities of wealth as hints that something is profoundly wrong—that disparities of political power are in fact at play, with politics not economics claiming responsibility for the capitalistic economic forms of the present.

But then what do individualist anarchists mean by our opposition to capitalism? First, I freely admit that insofar as I defined the word “capitalism” in the way that you do, I would adopt it as a statement of my own economic views. Capitalism as “the condition in which no-one is prevented from justly acquiring or justly using wealth” is a system hardly to be objected to by any thoroughgoing libertarian anarchist. But free market champions like Tucker and Heywood did not define capitalism in such a favorable way, and my C4SS colleagues have set forth several very good reasons why definitions that equate free markets and capitalism probably ought to be avoided.

I would rather join the individualist anarchists in defining “capitalism as a system of privilege, exploitation, accumulation without limit, theft, abuse, and wage slavery, all supported by the coercive authority of the state.”[2] We must remember also that Franz Oppenheimer shared many fundamental economic views with the individualist anarchists and railed against “the idea of using a human being as a labor motor.” Oppenheimer regarded many of capitalism’s most basic elements—for instance, the taking of rent on real property—as products not of the “economic means,” but of the “political means.” This is, I think, the real crux of the disagreement here at issue: To what extents do the relationships and inequalities of capitalism rely on the coercive interventions of the State? Can landlords obtain their rents without land monopoly? Can bankers obtain their interest streams without arbitrary privileges that preclude competition? Can the great manufacturers and retailers obtain their profits without using legal and regulatory means to prevent competitors from cutting in on their margins? Similarly, could they pay so little in wages if the State did not rule out so many natural opportunities? I believe that the answer to all the foregoing questions is approximately “no,” and thus that many if not most of today’s lauded capitalists are Mr. Lock’s Takers, Robbers, Shirkers, and Raiders. This is not to suggest that they are engaged in some conscious conspiracy, only that they are the principal beneficiaries of a system that institutes legal monopoly and therefore allows privilege-holders to accumulate ever more wealth without working.

I’ll stop here, since I’ve run on far too long, but I hope that my comments here shed light on my piece and on the individualist anarchist opposition to capitalism. Thank you again to Mr. Lock for reading and commenting.

[1] As Benjamin Tucker wrote, “If the men who oppose wages—that is, the purchase and sale of labor—were capable of analyzing their thought and feelings, they would see that what really excites their anger is not the fact that labor is bought and sold, but the fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labor, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labor by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labor, and that, but for the privilege, would be enjoyed by all gratuitously.”

[2] Feel free to visit my site www.individualistanarchist.com for more on this.

É interessante notar que a carreira de Tucker na política radical continuava enquanto ele trabalhava para publicações mais convencionais. Em 1943, num artigo para o The New England Quarterly, Charles A. Madison observava “o respeito mútuo entre Tucker e seus empregadores” no Daily Globe, apesar da defesa determinada de Tucker do anarquismo em uma época que testemunhava campanha de “intensidade histérica” contra esse pensamento. É inegavelmente difícil imaginar um jornal de qualquer tamanho ou reputação que abrigasse alguém abertamente anarquista hoje em dia no seu corpo editorial. Apesar das pretensões atuais de abertura e liberalidade, é quase certo que a elite intelectual e literária atualmente impede críticas e questionamentos a suas ortodoxias preferidas e às políticas do status quo muito mais do os letrados da segunda metade do século 19. Tucker foi respeitado por seus colegas do Globe por não menos que onze anos, até mesmo quando ele passou a se envolver ainda mais no ativismo radical, desde sua ajuda a Ezra Heywood com a publicação de The Word até a edição de seu próprio Radical Review. Mais tarde, após começar a publicação do Liberty, Tucker trabalhou como editor para a Engineering Magazine em Nova York, “se recusando a escrever artigos que pudessem comprometer seus princípios anarquistas”.[3]

Na primeira edição de Liberty em 1881, Tucker anunciava a raison d’être do jornal e suas visões políticas e econômicas ao escrever que “o monopólio e os privilegiados devem ser destruídos, as oportunidades devem ser fornecidas e a competição estimulada”. Ainda assim, como Proudhon, de quem Tucker tirou tantas ideias sobre a moeda e a reforma bancária, Tucker defendia que os vários arranjos econômicos a que se opunha deveriam “permanecer livres e voluntários para todos”. Com os portões da competição abertos para todos e as “forças perturbadoras”[4] dos privilegiados abolidas, essas formas de exploração se tornariam, de acordo com ele, praticamente impossíveis: “Se o poder de usura fosse estendido a todos os homens”, como Tucker alegava que deveria, “a usura devoraria a si própria, por sua natureza”. O papel do estado, assim, era o de isolar os poucos detentores privilegiados do capital, que vivem “luxuosamente com o suor do trabalho de seus escravos artificiais”, dos efeitos salutares da competição.

A coerência de Tucker e sua habilidade em expor os absurdos dos poderes político e econômico têm muito a ensinar ao movimento libertário atual. Se estivesse vivo hoje em dia, Tucker veria privilégios, subsídios corporativos e interferências à liberdade em todo lugar. Os relacionamentos econômicos atuais não são mais naturais ou inevitáveis que as condições da velha escravidão, embora seus apologistas insistam que sua própria existência seja prova de sua justeza. Tucker era um economista político visionário porque imaginava que as coisas podiam ser diferentes, denunciando as explicações improvisadas dos economistas liberais e desafiando-os a levar suas ideias liberais — que cresciam em popularidade — a seus limites lógicos. “O anarquismo genuíno é consistente com o manchesterismo”, dizia ele em uma citação famosa. Para Tucker, a política e a economia eram inseparáveis, as questões de uma necessariamente tinham implicações sobre a outra; ele considerava o capitalismo um sistema de exploração criado pelo estado — ou seja, pela agressão ou pela força contra o indivíduo soberano. As ideias políticas trabalhistas de Tucker, porém, eram ainda distintas — e talvez diferentes das ideias atuais do movimento trabalhador radical — porque rejeitavam os capitalistas sem advogar a propriedade ou organização coletiva do capital, identificavam a exploração sem condenar a competição e defendiam os trabalhadores sem necessariamente denunciar os trustes (ou “combinações industriais”), tendo uma relação tépida com os sindicatos.

Tucker argumentava que os esforços para obstruir ou proibir qualquer tipo de combinação ou associação voluntária eram tentativas autoritárias de exercer controle, intoleráveis ao anarquismo, não importando suas boas intenções. Ele não via nada de essencial ou necessariamente errado com a venda do trabalho em troca de um salário — chegando ao ponto de alegar que o anarquismo socialista não “pretendia abolir salários, mas garantir para todo assalariado seu salário integral”. O socialismo de Tucker era diretamente baseado na noção de que o trabalho deveria ser pago com seu produto completo; o fato de que o trabalho não era pago era, efetivamente, todo o problema. A propriedade governamental dos meios de produção defendida pelo socialismo de estado não era uma forma de atingir esse objetivo, mas era simplesmente uma nova forma de escravização parecida com a antiga. Em última análise, o estado seria sempre uma instituição composta pela classe dominante e a serviço dessa classe.

A economia de Tucker, além disso, rejeitava distinções fáceis e superficiais, como, por exemplo, a diferenciação arbitrária e não-sistemática entre o capital e o produto[5] e, como observado acima, entre política e economia. Qualquer consideração integral do “problema industrial” não poderia depender simplesmente de uma análise das leis das trocas, como se essas leis operassem em um vácuo, independentemente das realidades legais e políticas. Como uma das maiores influências de Tucker escreveu, a “economia política, até hoje, tem sido pouco mais que uma série de engenhosas tentativas de reconciliar as prerrogativas de classe e o arbitrário controle capitalista com os princípios das trocas”. O erro central da economia política burguesa na época de Tucker é idêntico ao erro principal do libertarianismo atual — sua ignorância crítica da existência de inúmeras e constantes violações dos princípios de livre mercado que são expostos. Tanto na época quanto atualmente, os economistas de livre mercado afirmam que que as questões políticas e econômicas devem ser tratadas em conjunto e que os direitos econômicos são direitos políticos para, logo em seguida, mudarem de ideia e passarem a discutir as condições econômicas e os relacionamentos atuais como se fosse consequências legítimas de trocas e formas de propriedade de mercado.

A precisão analítica de Benjamin Tucker não era sujeita tão facilmente a confusões a ponto de permitir que ele fosse ludibriado pelos defensores do capitalismo e pensasse que os relacionamentos de livre mercado seriam similares aos relacionamentos dentro do capitalismo. Tucker não acreditava que a sujeição acachapante dos muitos pobres aos poucos abastados proprietários havia surgido a partir de um laissez faire verdadeiramente livre. Como observa “An Anarchist FAQ”, “embora uma anarquia individualista fosse ser um sistema de mercado, não seria um sistema capitalista”. Tucker nunca recuou de sua defesa da competição ou viu necessidade de diluí-la. Ele também nunca admitiu que a exploração era possível sem agressão ou invasão, ou aceitou que o comércio equitativo e a justiça para o trabalhador só poderiam ser alcançados através de reformas legislativas. Sua total ausência de fé em qualquer reforma legal ou governamental às vezes criava um abismo entre as ideias de seu jornal Liberty e o resto do movimento trabalhador, embora ele sempre reconhecesse que o anarquismo e o socialismo fossem “exércitos que se sobrepõem”. De fato, Tucker oferecia o que eu ainda considero a melhor definição do socialismo — ou talvez como a melhor versão do socialismo —, “a crença de que o próximo passo mais importante para o progresso é uma mudança no ambiente do homem de forma que sejam abolidos todos os privilégios que os detentores da riqueza possuem, retirando assim seu poder antissocial para compelir o pagamento de tributos”. Tucker, portanto, não presumia posições necessárias contra alvos populares do movimento trabalhador como o trabalho assalariado ou mesmo os grandes trustes. Alegava que, contanto que o princípio anarquista da igual liberdade fosse sempre observado, “não faria diferença se os homens trabalhassem para si mesmo, se fossem empregados ou empregassem os outros”. A riqueza sem o trabalho — ou seja, a renda, os juros e os lucros — eram os fenômenos econômicos a que os anarquistas deveriam se opor e eles, segundo Tucker, dependiam sempre da agressão.

É um tanto irônico que as escolas de livre mercado que mais alto trombeteiam o individualismo metodológico e sejam as mais céticas ao empirismo desprezem até mesmo a menor das possibilidades de que a completa liberdade de trocas e comércio não leve a um ambiente que seja reconhecível como capitalista. Dado que a economia existente está muito longe de um mercado verdadeiramente livre, nós devemos nos perguntar o que os deixa tão certos de que os anarquistas individualistas como Tucker eram apenas néscios economicamente ignorantes. Não precisamos depender de qualquer teoria do valor-trabalho para concluir com segurança que as desigualdades e concentrações de riqueza dependem principalmente dos privilégios legais a que os portadores do estandarte do laissez faire afirmam se opor. Os anarquistas individualistas, além disso, entendiam a importância teórica da utilidade marginal muito bem, como já observei em outra ocasião. Ao contrário da caricatura de sua visão, a teoria do valor-trabalho que articulavam era perfeitamente reconciliável com a teoria subjetiva do valor e pretendia explicar algo diferente e mais abrangente do que a simples proposição de que tudo vale apenas o que alguém está disposto a pagar — o que, evidentemente, é impossível refutar. A crítica importante e substantiva contida na economia política de Tucker é descartada com frequência por depender de uma falácia econômica já desacreditada, sem considerar seus muitos argumentos e implicações. A coerência de princípios era uma das preocupações principais de Benjamin Tucker e do jornal Liberty e é algo que recai sobre os individualistas de esquerda e membros do C4SS hoje em dia. Tucker sugeria que a “anarquia pode ser definida como a posse da liberdade por libertários — isto é, por aqueles que conhecem o significado da liberdade”. Essa questão, o significado da liberdade, é o que nós, enquanto anarquistas, tentamos responder. Para muitos, a vida e o trabalho de Benjamin Tucker têm sido o norte dessa jornada, uma referência e inspiração perene.

Notas:

[1] Martin Blatt, “Ezra Heywood & Benjamin Tucker.”

[2] Em uma edição de 1887 de Liberty, Tucker escreveu “[Graças] ao coronel Greene, leio a discussão de Proudhon com [Frédéric] Bastiat sobre a questão dos juros e seu famoso O que é a propriedade? e grande foi minha surpresa ao encontrar dentro desses trabalhos, mas apresentados em termos muito diferentes, ideias idênticas às que eu já havia aprendido com Josiah Warren e que, desenvolvidas independentemente por esses dois homens, serão tão fundamentais em mudanças sociais futuras quanto foi a lei da gravidade em todas as revoluções das ciências físicas que se seguiram à sua descoberta — refiro-me, naturalmente, às ideias de liberdade e equidade.”

[3] Wendy McElroy, “Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, and Individualist Anarchism.” Nota de rodapé 6.

[4] John Beverley Robinson, Economics of Liberty.

[5] “Proudhon ridicularizava a distinção entre o capital e o produto. Mantinha que capital e produção não diferentes tipos de riqueza, mas apenas condições alternativas ou funções da mesma riqueza; que toda a riqueza passa por transformações incessantes de capital a produto e de produto de volta a capital, em um processo interminável; que o capital e produto são termos puramente sociais; que o que é produto para um homem imediatamente se torna capital para outro, e vice versa; se existisse apenas uma pessoa no mundo, toda a riqueza, para ele, seria ao mesmo tempo capital e produto (…)” — Benjamin R. Tucker.

A pesquisa do Fed sem dúvida será desconcertante tanto para aqueles da esquerda e da direita que incorretamente consideram os Estados Unidos a “terra da liberdade”, um lugar de oportunidades em que qualquer pessoa pode chegar a seus objetivos com um pouco de trabalho árduo. De fato, os dados parecem mostrar uma realidade muito diferente dessa percepção rósea, uma realidade em que as conexões entre as elites empresariais e o mundo político garantem que os ricos se tornem mais ricos e os pobres mais pobres.

Quando se deparam com esse cenário desolador das estruturas de classe e econômicas americanas, aqueles que realmente se perturbam com a desigualdade de renda tendem a rapidamente culpar o “livre mercado” e a competição desenfreada que colocam os lucros acima das pessoas. Mas o que o livre mercado realmente é e se temos um em vigência atualmente são questões separadas que devemos analisar para explicar a desigualdade americana. A esquerda pode se surpreender ao ver que a tradição radical socialista inclui toda uma espécie de libertários antiestado e pró-livre mercado.

Ao conceder que mercados e a competição, em si, sejam parte do problema social a ser resolvido, a esquerda desnecessariamente se coloca em posição de desvantagem, cedendo à crença falsa de que a elite dominante capitalista chegou a sua posição de maneira justa. Afinal, se estamos sob um livre mercado genuíno, o que poderíamos contestar?

A maioria dos anticapitalistas, assim, compartilha um mito fundador com os piores apologistas do capitalismo inexistente e de suas inúmeras desigualdades. Ambos os grupos mantêm que as economias atuais são essencialmente livres. Anarquistas de mercado como Ezra Heywood e Benjamin Tucker não acreditavam nessa inverdade — de que o trabalho não seria capaz de competir com o capital em um ambiente de igualdade e justiça.

Ao contrário, argumentavam eles, as características mais comuns e desiguais do capitalismo eram, na verdade, frutos envenenados e afrontas a princípios de livre mercado geralmente aceitos. Remova as muletas do estado aos grandes negócios e os muitos privilégios que debilitam os trabalhadores e as trocas verdadeiramente voluntárias e a cooperação dissolveriam o capitalismo que conhecemos.

Como escreveu Ezra Heywood em The Great Strike: “A ‘sobrevivência do mais apto’ é beneficamente inevitável; o capitalista é impotente contra o trabalho, a não ser que o estado (…) interfira para ajudá-lo a capturar e depenar suas vítimas. O velho argumento do despotismo de que a liberdade é insegura reaparece na ideia incorreta de que a competição é hostil ao trabalhador.”

Heywood dava uma lição à esquerda americana contemporânea: de que o capítalismo é um sistema de roubos de terra, de barreiras regulatórias e legais à competição, de monopólios de propriedade intelectual e de subvenção aos grandes negócios na forma de subsídios diretos e contratos governamentais. Onde fica o “livre mercado” no meio disso tudo?

O anarquismo de mercado é uma forma de descentralismo, um socialismo libertário que vê as trocas voluntárias e a cooperação como soluções para a ampla desigualdade contra a qual lutamos atualmente. Políticos e executivos gostam do sistema que temos nos Estados Unidos; dependem dele e o sistema depende desses indivíduos. O resto de nós, ao contrário das elites políticas econômicas, não se importa em trabalhar para viver e não está pedindo privilégios legais. Nós só desejamos a liberdade para perseguir projetos e alcançar nossos próprios objetivos. Esse tipo de livre mercado oferece uma saída para as desigualdades atuais, não um incentivo a elas.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.