After all, why should it take money to make money? Arguably, anyone with the principle of parsimony and a willingness to work hard ought to be able to make money. To get at the basic truth contained within it, we should consider the phrase at its most literal, boiled down to the abstract principle it is meant to illustrate. Put simply, the notion that “it takes money to make money” is just the claim that wealth is able to reproduce itself without work — that rubbing two coins together will make them mate.

Seeing this principle at work, 19th century libertarians such as Benjamin Tucker regarded capitalism as a system of privilege that “gives idle capital the power of increase.” Tucker challenged the capitalist myth that the great fortunes of his day were purely and simply the result of the virtues of hard work and saving. Far more often, capitalists’ riches were a product of “cleverness in procuring from the government a privilege” through which competition could be prevented. Such deep-rooted, systematic suppressions of competition consolidated wealth in the hands of the few.

Today’s market anarchists argue that these free market critiques of capitalism remain relevant, perhaps more than ever given, for example, the role of intellectual property in the global economy. A genuine free market transaction is positive-sum, a benefit to both exchanging parties. Conversely, exchanges in capitalism are zero-sum, one party benefiting at the expense of the other. The latter system is one of exploitative exchange, based on systematic bargaining power imbalances instituted by the State.

While markets exist in capitalism, they are not its defining feature, which is rather monopolism. The fundamental principle of capitalism is indeed quite simple: use the coercive power of governmental authority to monopolize everything of value, compelling workers to labor for whatever bosses deem appropriate. To call such a system a “free market” is to commit oneself to the most obviously absurd fiction, to use language to obfuscate the true, statist nature of capitalism.

Among free market libertarians, much turns on whether unbridled, voluntary exchanges will lead to the “power of increase” that worried Tucker. Many believe that genuine free markets will in fact allow and result in such a power, and they tend to equate free markets with capitalism. For many of us, however, Tucker was right in seeing true laissez faire as a kind of socialism, a way out of the exploitations of capitalism.

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.

What, then, is this system called “capitalism”? It can’t be the free market because we have no free market. Today the hand of government is all over the economy — from money and banking to transportation to manufacturing to agriculture to insurance to basic research to world trade. If the meaning of a concept consists in how it is used (there’s no platonic form to be divined), “capitalism” can’t mean “the free market.” Rather it designates a system in which the means of production are de jure privately owned. Left open is the question of government intervention. Thus the phrases “free-market capitalism” and “laissez-faire capitalism” are typically not seen as redundant and the phrases “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism” are not seen as contradictions. If without controversy “capitalism” can take the qualifiers “free-market” and “state,” that tells us something.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

The Fed survey will no doubt disconcert those on both the left and the right who mistakenly regard the United States as “the land of the free,” home of opportunity where anyone can get ahead with a little hard work. Indeed, the data seem to show a reality very different from that rosy misconception, a reality in which connections between elites in the business and political worlds ensure that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

Presented with such a bleak vision of American economic and class structures, those genuinely unsettled by growing wealth inequality are often quick to blame “the free market,” cutthroat competition that puts profits above people. But what a free market actually is and whether we have one today are themselves separate questions which we must address in order to analyze American inequality. The American left may be surprised to learn that the radical socialist tradition includes a whole species of anti-state, free market libertarians.

By conceding that markets and competition in themselves are part of the social problem to be solved, the left needlessly disadvantages itself, capitulating to the misbelief that the capitalist ruling class has simply won the day fair and square. After all, if in the here and now we really do have a genuine free market, to what can we really object?

Most anti-capitalists thus share a foundational myth with the worst apologists for existing capitalism and its many inequalities. Both groups maintain that the economies of today are essentially free markets. Market anarchists like Ezra Heywood and Benjamin Tucker did not believe this untruth — that labor could not hope to compete with capital where the two met on fair and level playing field.

Rather, they argued that the most common and inequitable features of capitalism were in fact the poisonous fruits of profound affronts to generally accepted free market principles. Remove the state’s aids to big business, the manifold privileges handicapping working people, and true voluntary exchange and cooperation would dissolve capitalism as we know it.

As Ezra Heywood wrote in The Great Strike, “The ‘survival of the fittest’ is beneficently inevitable; the capitalist is powerless against labor, unless the State … steps in, and helps him catch and fleece his victims. The old plea of despotism, that liberty is unsafe, reappears now in the mistaken notion that competition is hostile to labor.”

Heywood offered a lesson for the contemporary American left: That capitalism is a system of land theft, legal and regulatory bars to competition, intellectual property monopolies and huge handouts to big business in the forms of subsidies and government contracts. What, then, is all this talk about “the free market?”

Market anarchism is a form of decentralism, a libertarian socialism that sees voluntary exchange and cooperation as solutions to the widespread inequality we struggle with today. Politicians and CEOs rather like the system we have in the United States; they depend on it, and it depends on them. The rest of us, quite unlike political and economic elites, don’t mind working for a living, aren’t asking for special legal privileges, and just want to be left free to undertake our own projects and pursue our own goals. That kind of free market offers an exit from present day inequalities, not an encouragement to them.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Alle Radici della Disuguaglianza: Libero Mercato o Stato?.

It bears remarking that Tucker carried on his career in radical polemics all while working as an editor for mainstream publications. In a 1943 article in The New England Quarterly, Charles A. Madison noted “the mutual respect between Tucker and his employers” at Boston’s Daily Globe despite Tucker’s determined advocacy of anarchism during a time which witnessed opposition to the idea at a “hysterical intensity.” It is undeniably difficult to imagine a newspaper of any considerable size or reputation housing an open anarchist in its editorial staff today. Notwithstanding the present day’s pretensions to openness and liberality, it seems almost certain that today’s literary and intellectual elite screens its pet orthodoxies and status quo politics from questioning and criticism far more devoutly than did the literati of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Tucker enjoyed the respect of his Globe colleagues for no less than eleven years, even as he plunged ever more deeply into the world of radical politics, from aiding Ezra Heywood in the publication of The Word to issuing his own Radical Review. Later, after he had commenced publication of Liberty, Tucker worked as an editor for Engineering Magazine in New York City, “refus[ing] to write articles that might compromise his anarchist principles.”[3]

In the very first issue of Liberty in 1881, Tucker enunciated the periodical’s raison d’être and its prescription in politics and economics, writing, “Monopoly and privileged must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged.” Still, like Proudhon, from whom Tucker took so many ideas on currency and banking reform, Tucker held that the usurious economic arrangements he opposed ought to, in Proudhon’s words, “remain free and voluntary for all.” The gates of competition thrown open to all and the “disturbing forces”[4] of privileged abolished, these embodiments of exploitation would, he argued, become practically impossible. “[I]f the power to take usury were extended to all men,” as Tucker argued it should be, “usury would devour itself, in its very nature.” The role of the state, then, was to insulate the privileged few holders of capital, who live in “luxury on the toil of their artificially-created slaves,” from the salutary effects of competition.

Tucker’s consistency and his deft ability to expose the absurdities of both political and economic power have much to teach today’s liberty movement. Were he alive today, Tucker would see privilege, corporate welfare, and insults to liberty everywhere he looked. No more natural or inevitable are today’s dominant economic relationships than were the conditions of old-time slavery, though apologists for both would insist that the mere fact of their existence proved their justness. Tucker was a visionary political economist in that he imagined things could be different, debunking the “just so” stories of liberal economists and daring to push their liberal ideas—which had so grown in popularity—to their logical limits. “[G]enuine Anarchism,” he famously said, “is consistent Manchesterism.” For Tucker politics and economics were inseparable, the questions of one necessarily implicating the other; he regarded capitalism as a system of exploitation created by the state, that is, by aggression or force against the sovereign individual. Tucker’s labor politics, though, are distinctive—and perhaps distinguishable from the ideas of today’s radical labor movement—insofar as he rebuked capitalists without advocating collective ownership or organization of capital, identified exploitation without condemning competition, and championed workingmen without necessarily denouncing trusts (or “industrial combinations”) and while remaining lukewarm on labor unions.

Tucker argued that efforts to obstruct or outlaw any kind of voluntary combination or association were simply authoritarian attempts at control, intolerable to anarchism regardless of any underlying good intentions. He saw nothing essentially or necessarily wrong with the sale of one’s labor for a wage—indeed going so far as to argue that proper Anarchistic Socialism did not attempt “to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and to secure to every man his whole wages.” Tucker’s socialism was straightforwardly based upon the notion that labor should be paid with its full product; the fact that labor was not paid was indeed the whole problem. State socialism’s government ownership of the means of production was no way to accomplish this end, but was simply a new form of enslavement much the same as the old. Ultimately the state would always be an institution by and for a plutocratic ruling class.

Tucker’s economics furthermore eschewed facile and superficial distinctions, such as, for example, the arbitrary and unsystematic differentiation between capital and product[5] and, as noted above, between economics and politics. Any thoroughgoing consideration of “the industrial problem” could not rely simply on an analysis of the laws of exchange alone, as if those laws operated in a vacuum, detached from the realities of law and policy. As one of Tucker’s key influences, Joshua King Ingalls wrote, “Political economy has thus far been little more than a series of ingenious attempts to reconcile class prerogative and arbitrary capitalistic control with the principles of exchange.” The central error of bourgeois political economy in Tucker’s day is identical to contemporary libertarianism’s chief mistake—its critical oversight of the countless and constant contraventions of just those free market principles being espoused. Then and now, liberal or free market political economists will maintain that political and economic questions must be treated together, that economic rights are political rights, only to turn around and discuss existing economic conditions and relationships as if they are purely the consequence of legitimate market exchanges and property forms.

The analytical precision of Benjamin Tucker was not so easily confused as to allow him to be duped by defenders of capitalism, to convince him that free market relationships would be much the same as capitalistic relationships. Tucker could not believe that the mortifying subjection of the penniless many to the prosperous and propertied few developed from undiluted laissez faire. As “An Anarchist FAQ” observes, “While an Individualist Anarchy would be a market system, it would not be a capitalist one.” Tucker never retreated from his defenses of competition or saw a need to water them down. Nor did he ever admit that exploitation was possible without aggression or invasion, or accept that equitable commerce and justice for the worker could only be accomplished through legislative reforms. His total lack of faith in any legal or governmental nostrum at times put a gulf between the ideas of his Liberty and the rest of the labor movement, though he always acknowledged his individualist anarchism and socialism as being “armies that overlap.” Indeed, Tucker offered what this author still regards as the best definition of socialism, or perhaps the definition of socialism at its best, as “the belief that the next important step in progress is a change in man’s environment of an economic character that shall include the abolition of every privilege whereby the holder of wealth acquires an anti-social power to compel tribute.” Tucker therefore assumed no necessary or principled stance against popular labor movement whipping boys such as, for instance, wage labor or even large trusts. He argued that insofar as the anarchist principle of equal liberty is undeviatingly observed, “it will make no difference whether men work for themselves, or are employed, or employ others.” Drawing an income without working—i.e., rent, interest, and profit—was the economic phenomenon to be opposed by anarchists, and this, Tucker argued, depended upon aggression always.

It is rather ironic that the free market schools which trumpet methodological individualism most boldly and are most skeptical of empirics deride even the faintest possibility that complete freedom of exchange might not lead to an environment that is recognizably capitalist. Given their concession that the existing economy is indeed far removed from a true free market, one wonders what makes them so sure that individualist anarchists such as Tucker were economically nescient quacks. We needn’t rely on any labor theory of value to safely conclude that existing wealth inequalities and concentrations depend pivotally on just the kinds of coercive legal privilege to which the flag-bearers of laissez faire profess opposition. The individualist anarchists, moreover, understood the theoretical importance of marginal utility quite well, as has been noted elsewhere. Unlike the caricature of their view, their labor theory of value, such as they articulated it, was perfectly reconcilable with the subjective theory of value and attempted to explain something different from and more than the simple proposition that everything is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it—which fact is, of course, impossible to rebut. The important and substantive critique contained in Benjamin Tucker’s political economy is too often summarily dismissed as relying on a discredited economic fallacy, without due cogitation on its many arguments and implications. The burden of principled consistency fell to Benjamin Tucker and Liberty as it falls to left wing individualists and C4SS today. Tucker suggest that “Anarchy may be defined as the possession of liberty by libertarians,—that is by those who know what liberty means.” That question, the meaning of liberty, is what we as anarchists are attempting to puzzle out. For so many, the life and work of Benjamin Tucker has been the lodestar in that odyssey, ever an inspiration and point of reference.

Notes:

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

[2] In an 1887 issue of Liberty, Tucker wrote, “[T]hanks to Colonel Greene, I read Proudhon’s discussion with [Frédéric] Bastiat on the question of interest, and then the famous ‘What is Property?’ and great indeed was my astonishment at finding in them, but presented in very different terms, the identical ideas which I had already learned from Josiah Warren, and which, evolved by these two men independently, will be as fundamental in whatever social changes henceforth come over the world as has been the law of gravitation in all the revolutions of physical science which have followed its discovery,—I mean, of course, the ideas of Liberty and Equity.”

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

[4] John Beverley Robinson, Economics of Liberty.

[5] “Proudhon scoffed at the distinction between capital and product. He maintained that capital and product are not different kinds of wealth, but simply alternate conditions or functions of the same wealth; that all wealth undergoes an incessant transformation from capital into product and from product back into capital, the process repeating itself interminably; that capital and product are purely social terms; that what is product to one man immediately becomes capital to another, and vice versa; that if there were but one person in the world, all wealth would be to him at once capital and product . . . .” – Benjamin R. Tucker

Why am I an Anarchist? That is the question which the editor of The Twentieth Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other than an Anarchist, I am sure I should have no difficulty in disputing the argument. And does not this very fact, after all, furnish in itself the best of all reasons why I should be an Anarchist – namely, the impossibility of discovering any good reason for being anything else? To show the invalidity of the claims of State Socialism, Nationalism, Communism, Single-taxism, the prevailing capitalism, and all the numerous forms of Archism existing or proposed, is at the same blow to show the validity of the claims of Anarchism. Archism once denied, only Anarchism can be affirmed. That is a matter of logic.

But evidently the present demand upon me is not to be met satisfactorily in this way. The error and puerility of State Socialism and all the despotisms to which it is akin have been repeatedly and effectively shown in many ways and in many places. There is no reason why I should traverse this ground with the readers of the Twentieth Century, even though it is all sufficient for proof of Anarchism. Something positive is wanted, I suppose.

Well, then, to start with the broadest generalization. I am an Anarchist because Anarchism and the philosophy of Anarchism are conducive to my own happiness. “Oh, yes, if that were the case, of course we should all be Anarchists,” the Archists will shout with one voice – at least all that are emancipated from religious and ethical superstitions – “but you beg the question; we deny that Anarchism is conducive to our happiness.”

Do you, my friends? Really, I don’t believe you when you say so; or, to put it more courteously, I don’t believe you will say so when you once understand Anarchism.

For what are the conditions of happiness? Of perfect happiness, many. But the primal and main conditions are few and simple. Are they not liberty and material prosperity? Is it not essential to the happiness of every developed being that he and those around him should be free, and that he and those around him should know no anxiety regarding the satisfaction of their material needs? It seems idle to deny it, and, in the event of denial, it would seem equally idle to argue it. No amount of evidence that human happiness has increased with human liberty would convince a man incapable of appreciating the value of liberty without reinforcement by induction. And to all but such a man it is also self-evident that of these two conditions – liberty and wealth – the former takes precedence as a factor in the production of happiness. It would be but a poor apology for happiness that either factor alone could give, if it could not produce nor be accompanied by the other; but, on the whole, much liberty and little wealth would be preferable to much wealth and little liberty. The complaint of Archistic Socialists that the Anarchists are bourgeois is true to this extent and no further – that, great as is their detestation for a bourgeois society, they prefer its partial liberty to the complete slavery of State Socialism. For one, I certainly can look with more pleasure – no, les pain – upon the present seething, surging struggle, in which some are up and some are down, some falling and some rising, some rich and many poor, but none completely fettered or altogether hopeless of as better future, than I could upon Mr. Thaddeus Wakeman’s ideal, uniform, and miserable community of teamy, placid, and slavish oxen. [Online editor’s note: Thaddeus Burr Wakeman (1834-1913), leading American Positivist. – RTL]

To repeat, then, I do not believe that many of the Archists can be brought to say in so many words that liberty is not the prime condition of happiness, and in that case they cannot deny that Anarchism, which is but another name for liberty, is conducive to happiness. This being true, I have not begged the question and I have already established my case. Nothing is more needed to justify my Anarchistic creed. Even if some form of Archism could be devised that would create infinite wealth, and distribute it with perfect equity (pardon the absurd hypothesis of a distribution of the infinite), still the fact that in itself it is a denial of the prime condition of happiness, would compel its rejection and the acceptance of its sole alternative, Anarchism.

But, though this is enough, it is not all. It is enough for justification, but not enough for inspiration. The happiness possible in any society that does not improve upon the present in the matter of the distribution of wealth, can hardly be described as beatific. No prospect can be positively alluring that does not promise both requisites of happiness – liberty and wealth. Now, Anarchism does promise both. In fact, it promises the second as the result of the first, and happiness as the result of both.

This brings us into the sphere of economics. Will liberty abundantly produce and equitably distribute wealth? That is the remaining question to consider. And certainly it cannot be adequately treated in a single article in the Twentieth Century. A few generalizations are permissable [sic] at most.

What causes the inequitable distribution of wealth? “Competition,” cry the State Socialists. And if they are right, then, indeed, we are in a bad box, for we shall, in that case, never be able to get wealth without sacrificing liberty, and liberty we must have, whether or no. But, luckily, they are not right. It is not competition, but monopoly, that deprives labor of its product. Wages, inheritance, gifts, and gambling aside, every process by which me acquire wealth, rests upon a monopoly, a prohibition, a denial of liberty. Interest and rent of buildings rest on the banking monopoly, the prohibition of competition in finance, the denial of the liberty to issue currency; ground rent rests on the land monopoly, the denial of the liberty to use vacant land; profits in excess of wages rest upon the tariff and patent monopolies, the prohibition or limitation of competition in the industries and arts. There is but one exception, and that a comparatively trivial one; I refer to economic rent as distinguished from monopolistic rent. This does not rest upon a denial of liberty; it is one of nature’s inequalities. It probably will remain with us always. Complete liberty will very much lessen it; of that I have no doubt. But I do not ever expect it to ever reach the vanishing point to which Mr. M’Cready looks forward so confidently. At the worst, however, it will be a small matter, no more worth consideration in comparison with liberty than the slight disparity that will always exist in consequence of inequalities of skill.

If, then, all these methods of extortion from labor rest upon denials of liberty, plainly the remedy consists in the realization of liberty. Destroy the banking monopoly, establish freedom in finance, and down will go interest on money through the beneficent influence of competition. Capital will be set free, business will flourish, new enterprises will start, labor will be in demand, and gradually the wages of labor will rise to a level with its product. And it is the same with the other monopolies. Abolish the tariffs, issue no patents[,] take down the bars from unoccupied land, and labor will straightway rush in and take possession of its own. Then mankind will live in freedom and in comfort.

That is what I want to see; that is what I love to think of. And because anarchism will give this state of things, I am an Anarchist. To assert that it will is not to prove it; that I know. But neither can it be disproved by mere denial. I am waiting for some one to show me by history, fact, or logic that men have social wants superior to liberty and wealth or that any form of Archism will secure them these wants. Until then the foundations of my political and economic creed will remain as I have outlined them in this brief article.

Still, many people measure an economy’s health in terms of employment, a phenomenon economist Bryan Caplan calls “make-work bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor.”

And there are obvious economic benefits to conserving labor. Suppose Kevin Carson is right that 3-D printers will create a homebrew industrial revolution, allowing individuals and small shops to produce modern consumer goods at incredibly low costs and with very little requisite labor. This would likely eliminate plenty of jobs in both manufacturing and sales, as people move to creating goods at low cost in their homes or neighborhoods. But while there would be fewer jobs, people would be much better off. They would have more stuff at lower costs, and likely more freedom to choose what to do with their time.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

We market anarchists get our name from the fact that, unlike libertarian communists, syndicalists and other explicitly non-market anarchists, we see voluntary market exchange as one perfectly valid way of organizing economic life. But that doesn’t mean that the cash nexus will be the predominant form of organization in a stateless society. Indeed, as David Graeber has shown in Debt, the cash nexus becomes the dominant way of organizing economic life only in societies based on military conquest and slavery.

As anarchists we envision as society in which all functions are organized, in Kropotkin’s words, 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.” This includes markets. It also includes social and gift economies, peer production and horizontal networks of all kinds.

The commons may be the most efficient way of organizing some economic functions. This is probably true of non-renewable resources like minerals, and the kinds of renewable common pool resources like forest, pasture and fisheries that Elinor Ostrom devoted her career to studying. It is certainly true of information, which is infinitely replicable at zero marginal cost.

Markets are best suited to the sphere of production and distribution involving goods which are replicable, but only at a cost in effort. But even within this sphere of goods produced by human labor which are in elastic supply, goods and services which are most suited to small-scale production might very well be organized outside the cash nexus, through various primary social organizations: Lodges and friendly societies, extended family or multi-family compounds and cohousing projects, neighborhood associations, intentional communities, and other social units for pooling income, costs and risks.

Money pricing is most likely to be the preferable option in cases involving production inputs (for example micro-processors) which require expensive production facilities and large market areas, and other goods that are distributed over long distances or involve comparative anonymity (like forms of production that require more expensive machinery and a distribution network covering an entire town).

Even in the case of production for the cash nexus, in a genuinely free society without artificial property rights, artificial scarcities, monopolies and other privileges enforced by the state, we can expect cooperative and self-managed forms of production to be much more common than at present, and to take place in an atmosphere where most workers have the option to retire on the commons for some time and refuse work offers not to their liking (as did English peasants before Enclosure, who could take agricultural wage labor or leave it and subsist on the commons).

Also, it’s important to remember that money exchange will take place in a context where banks no longer have a state-granted monopoly on the issue of credit and the medium of exchange.

Market anarchists, like all anarchists, start from the assumption of ordinary people encountering each other as equals, and deciding without coercion how best to work together to meet their mutual needs. This may be by exchanging the products of their labor, by producing cooperatively or by sharing. The main thing, as anarchist David Graeber has argued, is that whatever forms of organization emerge will do so through an open-ended process of interaction among equals, in which no party can call on armed force to compel others to obey their will.

Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of “anti-capitalism.” To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses. Then, I offer some reasons for using “capitalism” as a label for some of the social arrangements to which freed-market advocates should object.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Tomorrow’s software will diagnose your diseases, write your news stories, and even drive your car. When even high-skill “knowledge workers” are at risk of being replaced by machines, what human jobs will be left? Politics, perhaps—and, of course, entrepreneurship and management. The rich will get richer, in other words, and the rest of us will be left behind.

It’s a common scenario, and one that’s utterly wrong headed. Although Oremus appeals to Keynes’ prediction of technological unemployment, the irony is that Keynes thought that was a good thing. Keynes predicted an economy of increasing abundance and leisure in his grandchildren’s time, in which the average work week was fifteen hours.

Instead, as Nathan Schneider points out (“Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?” Vice, Aug. 5), US government policy since FDR’s time has been to promote “full employment” at a standard 40-hr week. Both major parties, in their public rhetoric, are all about “jobs, jobs, jobs!”

This fixation on creating more work is what Bastiat, in the 19th century, called “Sisyphism” (after the lucky man in Hell who was fully employed rolling a giant rock up a hill for all eternity). We see the same ideological assumptions, as Mike Masnick argues in the same article where I got the Bastiat reference (“New Report Challenges The Whole ‘IP Intensive Industries Are Doing Well Because Of Strong IP’ Myth,” Techdirt, Aug. 8), displayed in arguments that strong “intellectual property” law is necessary for creating “jobs” and guaranteeing income for creators.

The idea is that we either impose artificial inefficiencies on technologies of abundance in order to increase the amount of labor (“jobs!”) required to produce a given standard of living, or we enclose those technologies to make their output artificially expensive so that everyone has to work longer hours to pay for them, so the increased price can go to paying wages for all those people running on conveyor belts and rat wheels. Make sense?

Either way, it amounts to hobbling the efficiency of new technology so that everyone has to work longer and harder than necessary in order to meet their needs. This approach is both Schumpeterian and Hamiltonian. Schumpeter saw the large corporation as “progressive” even when large size wasn’t technically necessary for efficient production because, with its monopoly power, it could afford to fund expensive R&D and pass the cost on to consumers via cost-plus markup and administered pricing (basically like a regulated monopoly or Pentagon contractor). Mid-20th century liberalism, essentially a managerialist ideology that lionized large, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations, extended this approach: the giant corporation could afford to pay high wages and maintain an employer-based welfare state, and still collect a guaranteed profit, because of its monopoly power.

Modern Hamiltonianism seeks to prevent price implosion from radical technological improvements in efficiency, and instead to guarantee inflated demands for both capital and labor — by imposing artificial inefficiency when necessary — so that returns on venture capital and full-time employment both remain stable.

The most egregious example is Jaron Lanier’s argument that every bit of content anyone produces on the Web should be under strong copyright, so everyone can get paid for everything. But why stop there? Why not monetize the entire economy and force it into the cash nexus? Turn every single thing anybody does into a “job,” so that members of a household get paid wages for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, or vacuuming the living room. We could increase the nominal work week to 100 hours and per capita income to $100,000. That way, nobody would be able to obtain anything outside the cash nexus. They’d have to have a source of paid income to get the money to pay for anything they consumed — even a beer out of the fridge.

Ironically, that’s the strategy European colonial powers used in Africa and the rest of the Third World to force native populations into the wage labor market and make it impossible to subsist comfortably without wage employment. They imposed a head tax that could only be paid in money, which meant that people who had been previously feeding, clothing and sheltering themselves in the customary economy were forced to go to work for wages (working for European colonial overseers who had appropriated their land, of course) in order to pay the tax.

It’s utterly stupid. The whole point of the economy is not “jobs,” but consumption. The point of human effort itself is consumption. The less effort required to produce a unit of consumption, the better. When a self-employed subsistence farmer figures out a way to produce the food she consumes with half as many hours of labor as before, she doesn’t lament having “less work.” That’s because she internalizes all the benefits of her increased productivity. And when people are free to internalize both all the costs and all the benefits of increased productivity, so that improvements in efficiency are translated directly into lower prices or shorter working hours, they have an incentive to be more productive and work less.

The problem arises, not from the increased efficiency, but from the larger structure of power relations in which the increase in efficiency takes place. When artificial land titles, monopolies, cartels and “intellectual property” are used by corporations to enclose increased productivity as a source of rents, instead of letting them be socialized by free competition and diffusion of technique, we no longer internalize the fruits of technological advance in the form of lower prices and leisure. We get technological unemployment.

But technological unemployment and the rich getting richer are symptoms, not of the progress itself, but of the capitalistic framework of state-enforced artificial property rights and privilege within which it takes place. The economic ruling classes act through their state to intervene in the economy, to erect toll-gates and impede free market competition, so we have to work harder and longer than necessary in order to feed them in addition to ourselves. So let’s not get rid of the technology. Let’s get rid of the capitalists and their state that rob us of its full fruits.