Only in an industry with grotesquely overextended operating costs could a film like Hulk take significant creative risks, gross a quarter-billion dollars, and still be regarded as box office poison. Even in an economy stacked against their audience awareness, comics properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Walking Dead have achieved multimedia success while remaining independently owned. Steadily decreasing capital costs for multimedia production could allow this to become the rule rather than the exception.

When asked by Equal Time for Freethought if the fact that “we have McDonald’s, we have Burger King, we have Arby’s; we’ve got a number of entities out there competing with our business” means the current market economy is fundamentally different than the overt chartered monopolies of the mercantilist age, Douglas Rushkoff replied that “McDonald’s and Burger King are essentially the same thing; in the long run the same class of speculators, of shareholders, who are running these companies. The problem is that it’s impossible for smaller, local entities — for people who actually do things, who create value in sustainable ways — to compete against them. And the worse the policies of these companies get, the harder it is actually for us to compete against them, because they get regulations put in place by government that actually cements their place in.”

Intellectual property law is similarly written to benefit big established players, concentrating monopoly rights to the backlog of ideas. A sequel to an adaptation of a character based on mythology owned by a corporation whose bread-and-butter is drawing on folklore exemplifies the funnel effect. It’s even explicitly noted in Jacobin that Marvel is “focused to an alarming degree on denying ownership rights to its content creators.”

Rushkoff notes that contrary to the view that due to economies of scale, “mass production and industry is somehow more efficient than local commerce, local creation of goods and services” in fact “[i]t’s only more efficient when you write laws that make it more efficient. So while big industry is certainly more efficient for, maybe, making microchips, or making things that you need big companies and thousands of people to do, it’s not more efficient to make oats that way, or corn that way; or any of the things that we can make and store locally for one another.” One of which is engaging sequential-art stories on paper. The small teams of writers and illustrators that produce individual comics stories issue-by-issue resemble the independent mom-and-pop diners that predominated before the subsidized rise of fast food chains. Rather than taking centralized production as given and reining in its worst aspects, removing the chokehold of distribution gatekeepers would allow a multitude of small-scale producers to connect directly with their audience.

Only in an industry with grotesquely overextended operating costs could a film like Hulk take significant creative risks, gross a quarter-billion dollars, and still be regarded as box office poison. Even in an economy stacked against their audience awareness, comics properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Walking Dead have achieved multimedia success while remaining independently owned. Steadily decreasing capital costs for multimedia production could allow this to become the rule rather than the exception.

In the early twentieth century, competition between local newspapers for readership produced comics masterpieces like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat. A Tuckerite competitive market would unleash that ferment on — to borrow an idea invented in those funny pages — Popeye’s spinach.

“The key word here is ‘most’. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or state capitalist property. It’s thus clearly possible to accept the libertarian critique of the state as valid and still advocate revolutionary economic transformation. Our ideal is freed markets and not the existing ‘marketplace’.”

Peter Frase writes:

Wilkinson notes that theoretically, libertarianism is “an argument against the possibility of legitimate government.” This makes it clearly incompatible with most socialist or social democratic attempts to democratize the market or expropriate the means of production. Yet nevertheless, “it’s crazily illogical to reason that the actually existing state is justified on liberal terms just because the libertarian critique of the state is false, and a legitimate liberal state is possible.”

The key word here is “most”. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or state capitalist property. It’s thus clearly possible to accept the libertarian critique of the state as valid and still advocate revolutionary economic transformation. Our ideal is freed markets and not the existing “marketplace”.

Will Wilkinson writes:

Liberals and socialists often accuse libertarians, not without justice, of acting as unwitting apologists for plutocracy. Many free-marketeers do have a bad habit of confusing our unjustifiably rigged political economy with a very different laissez faire ideal, and their defenses of the actually-existing “free enterprise system” really do redound to the benefit of those the system is rigged to enrich. Likewise, liberals do have a bad habit of confusing actual, nominally liberal states with a very different liberal ideal, and their defenses of the actual “liberal state” do tend to redound to the benefit of the insidiously illiberal segments of the state that cannot be justified or accounted for on almost any standard liberal theory of legitimacy. The point being that too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.

An excellent unwittingly left-libertarian sentiment. We libertarians will have an easier time making common cause with the left when we choose to acknowledge these truths. The Jacobin article above is a promising step in that direction. Let’s continue to make left-wing market anarchism visible, so we can see even more like it. I look forward to it.