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.”

Because of this reflex revulsion at the mere mention of libertarianism, experience has inclined me to describing my politics as “left wing individualism.” This characterization, I have found, invites questions rather than angry diatribes, preparing the ground for a fruitful conversation as opposed to a futile debate. I borrow the phrasing “left wing individualism” from Eunice Minette Schuster, who made “A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism” the subtitle of her dissertation, Native American Anarchism. Schuster’s book follows Native American Anarchism from its nascent, prototypical forms to its blossoming as a distinct and fully realized philosophical system and movement. Her study is important insofar as it illumes a strain of political philosophy that can seem confusing and oxymoronic within the context of today’s mainstream political debates.

The individualist anarchists that Schuster discusses in the section of her book that treats anarchism in its “mature” state were both extreme individualists and socialists, architects of a project which we at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) undertake to continue today. As advocates of unhampered freedom of competition, property rights, and the sovereignty of the individual, individualist anarchists are a part of the history of the contemporary libertarian movement. At the same time, like C4SS today, this group opposed capitalism and regarded socialism as, in the words of radical reformer Ezra Heywood, “the great anti-theft movement” of their day. Unlike today’s free market libertarians, who often demonize the poor as welfare receiving “takers,” thinkers like Benjamin Tucker, Ezra Heywood, and Josiah Warren (just to name a few) saw the rich as the true idle, freeloading class, the beneficiaries of privileges that allowed them to game the system and put a stop to real market competition.

These early libertarians saw that freedom and competition work for all the reasons that are familiar to us today: division and specialization of labor, the massive amounts of information distilled in prices, and accordingly the folly of attempting to plan the economy through the greatest monopoly of them all, the state. They argued that genuine competition in a free market is the best, surest way to ensure that labor is paid with its full product, that is, to solve what was then often called the Labor Question; this made them socialists, even if they fit uncomfortably with much of the socialist movement. Their fit with the liberal advocates of free trade and competition — the political economists — was no less uncomfortable, finding the individualist anarchists constantly compelled to school the economists in their own doctrine, to point out the errors and inconsistencies that characterized so much of what passed as defenses of free trade.

The individualist anarchists were sticklers about consistency; if labor was made to come under the law of competition, of supply and demand, then so too should capital. As Schuster points out, the “scientific anarchism” of people like Benjamin Tucker thus “did not appeal to the Capitalist because it demanded not ‘rugged individualism’ but universal individualism” (emphasis added). Because the individualists regarded them as the proximate results of coercive privilege, rent, interest, and profit — the “trinity of usury” — were treated as akin to taxes, allowing the owners of capital the stolen difference between prices under a regime of privilege and prices as they would be under true, open competition. Market competition, therefore, was not the enemy but the friend of the workingman. The argument of market anarchism is simple: If we are to insist that everyone is entitled to whatever he can obtain in a free market, then at least we ought to try having a free market. And a free market cannot tolerate some of the most common historical features of capitalism: aggressive land theft on a massive scale, arbitrary regulatory and licensure systems that function as high cost barriers to market entry and preclude opportunities for self-employment, various direct and indirect subsidies that redistribute wealth to connected firms, and a government-created system of financial laws and institutions which produces the Wall Street cartel we have today. It turns out, then, that capitalism doesn’t quite square with what libertarians really want when we endorse free markets. We’re not as close to a free market system as even many libertarians like to pretend. It is not a matter of making a few tweaks and free market reforms here and there, of privatizing a few governmental monopolies and deregulating a few industries. Rather to get there from here would mean a thoroughgoing, systematic departure from the capitalistic tyranny we have and have had for a long time, a system which indeed is the direct successor of statist systems before from feudalism to mercantilism.

Anarchists such as Warren and Tucker understood this and spent their lives declaiming against an inequitable, capitalistic status quo that systematically disadvantages working people. And notwithstanding the all too eager efforts to consign them to the political right — even to write them out of the anarchist tradition — they belong (if anywhere) on the left, as Schuster understood. Epitomizing the gross misunderstanding of individualist anarchism among left wing academics, historian David DeLeon, in his book The American as Anarchist, labels Benjamin Tucker a “right libertarian” and amazingly names Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as ideological successors. Elsewhere in the book, DeLeon offhandedly classifies Voltairine de Cleyre, whose escapades in anarchism do not lend themselves to any easy pigeonholing, as simply an “Anarcho-Communist.” No less concerning is his incredible claim that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman were all right libertarians. If one dedicated to the professional study of these figures and their movements can so deeply misinterpret the picture, it is no wonder that individualist anarchism should confuse the mainstream layperson’s political mind.

Calling myself a “left wing individualist” is one of the things I do to help reintroduce the individualist anarchism of the nineteenth century, a tradition that balances the individual and community in a way that is desperately needed in a world dominated by centralized power. The libertarian movement itself, moreover, ought not be so quick to dismiss anarchists such as Tucker as economically illiterate relics of a bygone age. After all, any consideration of how economic relationships would look in a genuine free market is in the nature of pure speculation. Libertarians who believe those relationships would look very much like they do today are seriously lacking in imagination and cannot fathom the depth of the change that real respect for individual sovereignty would bring about.

“As free marketers, decentralists and individualists, we occupy a corner of the libertarian movement. At the same time, as critics of wealth inequality and champions of the poor and working classes, we find ourselves within today’s anti-capitalist movements for economic justice. Given the most commonly repeated terms of debate, the false dichotomies bleated on cable news and opinion pages day after day, these commitments may seem to present a contradiction. Free marketers are regarded as defenders of a plutocratic economic status quo, with the state cast as bulwark against cutthroat competition and protector of the little guy.”

[e]l dinamismo inherente de los mercados competitivos está reduciendo tanto los costos de muchos bienes y servicios, que se están haciendo casi gratuitos, muy abundantes, y por lo tanto cada vez menos sujetos a las fuerzas del mercado.

Los argumentos de Rifkin sobre cómo las reducciones de costo marginal afectan a las relaciones económicas, me recuerdan al anarquista estadounidense Josiah Warren. Inventor y promotor de reformas sociales radicales, Warren sostuvo que el costo es el límite equitativo de los precios, y que la competencia legítima eliminaría los flujos de renta, intereses, y ganancias de los privilegiados. Su obra influyó en una generación de radicales que veían en la competencia la manera de resolver los problemas económicos de la época.

Este grupo de anarquistas norteamericanos decimonónicos asaltó al capitalismo de una manera que podría sorprender a sus críticos contemporáneos: atacándolo por la izquierda, pero usando argumentos de libre mercado. Para estos anarquistas de mercado, era cierto que el capitalismo representaba un sistema de privilegios y explotación, que era un sucesor de los sistemas económicos anteriores, como el feudalismo y el mercantilismo. Pero en lugar de confundir las nociones de capitalismo y libre mercado, estos archi-individualistas vieron el remedio para las relaciones depredadores y usureras del capitalismo en la verdadera liberación de las relaciones económicas: en el genuino intercambio voluntario, la competencia abierta, y la abolición de los privilegios especiales.

Este grupo de anarquistas del laissez faire eran de la idea de que “el poder de aumento” de los capitalistas, su habilidad para generar un ingreso sin tener que trabajar, se derivaba de lo que ellos llamaban “legislación de clase” – barreras políticas a la competencia real que le daban una ventaja injusta a los empleadores. Continuando con esta línea de pensamiento, los anarquistas de mercado de hoy en día ven el poder coercitivo del gobierno como la principal fuerza que sesga las relaciones económicas a favor de las élites con influencia política.

Como partidarios del libre mercado, decentralistas e individualistas, ocupamos una esquina del movimiento libertario. Al mismo tiempo, como críticos de la desigualdad de la riqueza y defensores de las clases pobres y trabajadoras, nos encontramos dentro de los movimientos anticapitalistas contemporáneos que promueven la justicia económica. Dados los términos bajo los que comúnmente se desarrolla el debate político, los balidos repletos de falsas dicotomías que predominan en las noticias por cable y los artículos de opinión de todos los días, estos compromisos pueden parecer ser contradictorios. Los partidarios del libre mercado suelen ser presentados como defensores de un orden económico plutocrático, y el estado como baluarte contra la competencia feroz y protector de la gente de a pie.

Pero este relato interpreta erróneamente el papel histórico del Estado en el sistema económico, posicionándolo en un conflicto con el capital que en realidad nunca ha existido. De hecho, las élites políticas y económicas siempre han cooperado. La cultura de “puerta giratoria” de Washington pone de manifiesto esta historia de poder y colusión, con la colocación de ejecutivos corporativos en importantes puestos burocráticos del gobierno federal, y viceversa.

Rifkin tiene razón de ver la “cada vez más actual realidad de una economía marginal de costo cero” como amenaza para el capitalismo. Las nuevas tecnologías nos permiten encontrar una ruta alternativa (parafraseando la famosa expresión sobre Internet) para eludir los impedimentos al intercambio que siempre han sido la fuente de poder monopólico del capital. El sueño de Warren, “Costo como Límite del Precio”, — o por lo menos algo muy parecido — está constantemente convirtiéndose en una posibilidad cada vez más real.

Artículo original publicado por David D’Amato el 18 de marzo de 2014.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.

“O dinamismo inerente aos mercados competitivos está diminuindo tanto os custos que muitos bens e serviços estão se tornando quase gratuitos, abundantes e não mais sujeitos às forças de mercado.”

Os argumentos de Rifkin a respeito das reduções dos custos marginais e seus efeitos sobre os relacionamentos econômicos me lembram do anarquista Josiah Warren. Inventor e defensor de profundas mudanças sociais, Warren alegava que o custo é limite equitativo do preço e que a concorrência eliminaria a renda, os juros e os lucros dos privilegiados. Seu trabalho influenciou uma geração de radicais que viam na competição do mercado uma forma de solucionar os problemas econômicos de sua época.

Esses anarquistas americanos do século 19 que atacavam o capitalismo de uma forma que pode ser surpreendente a críticos contemporâneos, de uma perspectiva de esquerda, porém com argumentos em favor do livre mercado. Para esses anarquistas de mercado, era verdade que o capitalismo representava um sistema de privilégios e exploração — um sucessor de estruturas econômicas anteriores como o feudalismo e o mercantilismo. Ao invés de associar o capitalismo a mercados livres, porém, esses arqui-individualistas viam que o remédio para as relações predatórias e usurárias predominantes no capitalismo era uma genuina liberação da economia: o estabelecimento de reais trocas voluntárias, a abertura à competição e a abolição de privilégios.

Tratava-se de um grupo de anarquistas pró-mercado que argumentava que o poder dos capitalistas, sua capacidade de ter rendimentos sem trabalho, advinha do que chamavam de “legislação de classe” — barreiras políticas à competição que davam aos empregadores uma vantagem injusta. Nessa mesma linha de pensamento, os anarquistas de mercado contemporâneos veem o poder coercitivo do estado como a força que desequilibra as relações econômicas em favor das elites com influência política.

Como livre-mercadistas, descentralistas e individualistas, nós ocupamos um cantinho do movimento libertário. Ao mesmo tempo, como críticos da desigualdade de riquezas e defensores dos pobres e das classes trabalhadoras, nos encontramos dentro dos movimentos atuais anti-capitalistas em prol da justiça econômica. Dados os termos mais repetidos do debate e as falsas dicotomias propagandeadas nos canais de notícias e nas colunas opinativas de revistas, esses valores podem parecer contraditórios. Aqueles que defendem o livre mercado são considerados defensores do status quo plutocrático, numa visão que coloca o estado como principal defesa contra a competição desenfreada e como defensor dos menos favorecidos.

Trata-se, porém, de um ponto de vista equivocado a respeito do papel histórico do estado dentro do sistema econômico, que o coloca em um conflito contra o capital que nunca existiu. De fato, as elites políticas e econômicas sempre trabalharam juntas. A cultura dominante em Washington, a capital americana, mostra essa história de poder e conluio claramente — a todo momento, executivos se transformam em burocratas a serviço do governo federal e vice versa.

Rifkin está certo ao perceber “a realidade assustadora de uma economia de custo marginal zero” como uma ameaça ao capitalismo. As novas tecnologias realmente permite que nós utilizemos rotas alternativas para evitar os obstáculos às trocas que sempre foram a fonte do poder monopolista do capital. O sonho de Warren de que o “custo seria o limite do preço” — ou, pelo menos, algo bem próximo disso — se torna cada vez mais uma possibilidade real.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

“[t]he inherent dynamism of competitive markets is bringing costs so far down that many goods and services are becoming nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.”

Rifkin’s arguments about how reductions in marginal cost affect economic relationships remind me of American anarchist Josiah Warren. An inventor and advocate of sweeping social reform, Warren contended that cost is the equitable limit of price and that legitimate competition would erase the rent, interest and profit streams of the privileged. His work influenced a generation of radicals who looked to competition to solve the economic problems of the day.

This group of nineteenth century American anarchists assailed capitalism in a manner that may surprise its contemporary critics, attacking it from the left, but using free market arguments. For these market anarchists, it was true that capitalism represented a system of privilege and exploitation, a successor to earlier economic frameworks like feudalism and mercantilism. Instead of conflating capitalism and free markets, however, these arch-individualists saw the remedy to capitalism’s predatory, usurious relationships in a genuine freeing of economic relations: True voluntary exchange, open competition and the abolition of special privilege.

This group of laissez faire anarchists argued that capitalists’ “power of increase,” their ability to take an income without actually working, came from what they labeled “class legislation” — political barriers to real competition that gave employers unfair advantage. Continuing this strain of thought, today’s market anarchists see coercive governmental power as skewing economic relationships in favor of elites with political clout.

As free marketers, decentralists and individualists, we occupy a corner of the libertarian movement. At the same time, as critics of wealth inequality and champions of the poor and working classes, we find ourselves within today’s anti-capitalist movements for economic justice. Given the most commonly repeated terms of debate, the false dichotomies bleated on cable news and opinion pages day after day, these commitments may seem to present a contradiction. Free marketers are regarded as defenders of a plutocratic economic status quo, with the state cast as bulwark against cutthroat competition and protector of the little guy.

But this story misapprehends the historical role of the state in the economic system, placing it in a conflict with capital that has never actually existed. Indeed, political and economic elites have always and at all times worked together. The revolving door culture of Washington bears out this story of power and collusion, finding business executives into bureaucratic roles in the federal government and vice versa.

Rifkin is right to see the “creeping reality of a zero-marginal-cost economy” as a threat to capitalism. New technologies truly allow us to route around (to reference the famous expression about the Internet) the impediments to exchange that have always been the source of capital’s monopolistic power. Warren’s dream, “Cost the Limit of Price,” — or at least something very close — is all the time becoming more and more of a possibility.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A nova economia e o princípio dos custos.
• Spanish, La Nueva Economía y el Principio del Costo.