A huge sign outside a local tire store really irritated me a couple of weeks ago. Its large letters blared: “WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS.” I was tempted to get out of the car and demand that the owner tell me what he was actually doing besides displaying the sign, which probably didn’t cost much in money or effort. I suspected that posting the sign was the extent of his “support,” but I restrained myself and kept going.
I wonder if anyone ever asks the owner that question. Probably not. People seem to think that supporting the troops consists simply in displaying signs and bumper stickers, and perhaps suppressing negative thoughts about what those troops — including pilots — are doing in the far-flung locations to which the imperial ruling elite has dispatched them, That’s all you need to do to be a citizen in good standing of the Empire — that and pay your taxes on time. It’s funny because supporting the troops and declaring you support the troops don’t really seem to be the same thing.
I can imagine a conversation:
Troop supporter: I support the troops! Interlocutor: Okay, let’s see how you support the troops. Troop supporter: You just did. Interlocutor: I just did what? Troop supporter: You just saw me support the troops. Interlocutor: No I didn’t. I heard you say you support the troopers. Troop supporter: That’s right. Interlocutor: Okay, then. Let’s see how you support the troops. Troop supporter: You just did! Interlocutor: No I didn’t. All I saw was you saying you support the troops. I want to see you actually support the troops. Troop supporter: That’s how I support the troops. Interlocutor: To support means to assist. How does your empty declaration of support assist the troops? Troop supporter: Why don’t you support the troops? Don’t you love your country?
What’s strange is that demanding an end to the wars in which the troops are fighting, killing, and dying seems not to count as support. You’d think that the ultimate expression of support would be, “Bring them home now!” But that’s not how typical troop supporters see things. In fact, they think that’s the opposite of support — and even treason. Topsy-turvy.
While I believe their expressions of support are sincere, I also believe they haven’t thought things through. Good intentions aren’t enough. Their expressions in effect are only in support of the regime that moves the troops to dangerous spots on the map like pawns on a chessboard in the ruling elite’s geopolitical games.
I concede that opposing the wars — how many are there today? — is also little more than a declaration not backed by much action and therefore without immediate effect. However, I see a difference. To the extent that declarations of support for the troops reinforce the government’s militarism, it endangers those troops, and those not currently deployed — and that really doesn’t seem much like support. In my book, merely making the troops feel better about what they are doing (if that is indeed the effect) doesn’t count as actual support.
On the other hand, to the extent that antiwar declarations and public activities such as demonstrations change government policy for the better, the troops are that much closer to safety. That, I submit, would be of help to the troops.
So who really supports them: those who merely say they support them while refusing to criticize the militarism that imperils them, or those who vocally oppose militarism while trying to convince families, friends, neighbors, and total strangers to join them in opposition?
At some point during a discussion with an avowed troop supporter, the matter of morale may come up. “I support the troops but not necessarily the wars,” he might say. “We’ve got to keep the troops’ morale up while they are away from home serving our country.”
Why do we want their morale high while they are carrying out immoral orders — which does not serve the country but only the regime? Remember, American troops are fighting aggressive undeclared wars — in one manner or another — in more than half a dozen countries, roughly from Somalia up to Syria and over to Pakistan. Heaven knows where else the CIA (do their agents count as troops?) and special-ops forces are? American military personnel — including drone operators — routinely kill and injure noncombatants. As we know too well, even hospitals and wedding parties are bombed.
Perhaps if the troops’ morale was low, they’d refuse to do the immoral things they do, like raiding homes, operating killer drones, and flying bombers and gunships. Perhaps they’d like to know that some Americans disapprove of what they are doing. Some of the troops know that what they are doing is wrong. What about their morale?
I know: they’re just following orders. Does anyone still think that’s a valid excuse? One has no obligation to follow an immoral order.
To be fair, troop supporters may do more than merely express their views. They may send money to the Wounded Warrior Project or a similar organization. I guess that’s nice, but I can’t help thinking that for the mangled beneficiaries, the help comes a little late.
Where were their supporters before they were deployed to hell?
C4SS’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, recently appeared on Party Smasher to talk intellectual property. Some of the topics included big vs. little players in
the content industry, the use of IP to enclose common culture, and copyright
trolling as censorship. The interview is about 45 mins.
However small, Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Said title has made the country think seriously about the treatment, use and exportation of animals. Here, circuses are more known for majestic acrobats and aerial dancers. From marches against animal abuse to rumors that they may close down the zoos, the pura vida nation is well on its way to earning a gold star.
That said, there is another side to animal maltreatment that is not mentioned above. Many poachers still find their way into Costa Rica’s borders, harvesting turtle eggs from its plentiful coasts or simply using the country as a pass-thru to sell rare animals on the black market.
El Manantial is a macaw sanctuary located in the city of Puntarenas. While this sanctuary works with many injured or endangered birds, the majority have been confiscated by authorities — and not just macaws either. Other types of parrots, jaguars, tapirs and monkeys have also made their way into El Manantial post-confiscation. Other sanctuaries and refuges within Costa Rica include: The Costa Rica Animal Rescue Center, Sibu Sanctuary, the Sloth Sanctuary, Osa Wildlife Sanctuary and the Jaguar Rescue Center among many smaller projects.
Unfortunately, back in libertarian-land treatment of the article remained less serious, further proving my point that, by and large, libertarians have trouble grappling with the issue.
To quote the latter critic linked-to above:
As to humans v. non-human animals … God is sufficient an [sic] answer.
The runner up of the month was Roderick Long’s “Black Jurors Need Not Apply“, which was picked up 6 times. The St. Louis American ran it both in print and online. It was also picked up by Delaware Black, a news outlet that focuses on the African-American community.
Chad Nelson’s article “Animals Aren’t Property: Circus Edition” was picked up by the Costa Rica News, and while our relationship with them has been very productive, it was even more satisfying to see that the their editor took the time to expand on the piece and link it to Costa Rica’s issues with animal preservation. I encourage all to read it.
Month after month we’re getting better numbers and our writing is getting more visibility. I am personally quite happy with how we’ve managed to expand our media operation in the last few months.
Many thanks to Athena Roberts, Mike Godzina and Katrina Hafner for joining me to narrate these articles.
Other Projects
I recorded an interview with Kelly Vee, the first of three interviews with the C4SS interns. It needs some audio on my part re-recorded, but that will have to wait until I am back from vacation.
Athena Roberts recorded a fundraising piece for the Tor Node which will be added to the end of some podcasts in the future.
I made a post requesting volunteers, and so far, I have gotten 3 responses, 1 of which actually gave me sample audio, Michael Storm, whom I added to the media project group.
Analytics
Facebook: 4 Likes
YouTube: 2808 views in October, 3638 in September, 76,463 total
+39 net subscriptions in October, +16 net subscriptions in September, 1210 total Subscribers
$4.09 in October, $5.59 in September, $24.70 Lifetime Earnings
Stitcher Analytics were unavailable at the time I wrote this report.
These are the articles that are currently up for recording. No one has signed up for them yet, and I will not be around for the next week to prod people into doing so. If any of them go over a month old, I’ll replace them with the highest ranked article according to Feedly that was published in the last month. I actually don’t know how well Feedly tracks to actual raw number of page views, though I suspect it’s probably close. I would like to get that information if it is readily available though.
I will also definitely record all the articles from the Mutual Exchange series this month regardless of their ranking.
Other Projects
I will interview Benjamin Blowe when I get back from Mexico and TJ Scholl after that. These interviews should be completed and published in November.
The video montages did not come together like I wanted them to in October. In November, this should change. Expect at least two video montages next month.
What Will Be Done
Long term, I have a few goals:
Get more volunteers. Having readers is nice, but I want to find other people who can edit and put video montages together. Ideally, I want to move my role to being one of final approval and pressing the publish button.
I want to expand the number of interviews being done. My plan is to get to an average of 1 interview a week with each interview running about 30 minutes.
Improve outreach. Right now, videos are being posted in the same groups every time without a whole lot of thought about relevance other than the group being left-libertarian-ish. I’d like to drill down and start sharing to interest specific groups according to the article in question.
Improving analytics. This report will be far more spreadsheet based in the future.
What Can Be Done
Find me a co-coordinator. I spent around 40 hours doing Feed 44 related stuff in October. That’s a little lower than it will usually be because it was my first month and I had to wind down some other obligations I had. However, I probably won’t be able to spend more than 60 hours a month on Feed 44, and I suspect that in order to do this job really well, I would need to spend around 80 hours. So, I could probably use an assistant or co-coordinator of some kind. Obviously, I’m trying to get more volunteers and among them may arise the trusty sidekick I’ve always wanted, but in the meantime, I’m a Frodo without a Samwise.
How Folks Can Donate to C4SS
I already mentioned the Tor Node recording which will start appearing soon. Additionally, each interview will include a mention of the long list of places you can give us money. That’s all I have planned for now, but I’m open to suggestions.
I haven’t read Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter. I have seen a presentation by Caplan on the book, read numerous blog posts by him and have heard his argument restated by other libertarians. In my op-ed, I was going on my recollection of these secondary sources.
I recall Caplan making an argument about people having too much information. Particularly when it comes to decisions about voting. The rational thing to do in such a case is to simply aim for some sort of basic understanding. In other words, it makes rational sense to be, relatively speaking, ignorant.
But Caplan’s argument is slightly different from that argument. His argument is that voters don’t have to face the costs or consequences of their choices due to the low probability of influencing public policy. Thus, they are rationally irrational about their voting decisions. This, according to Caplan, leads to situations where politicians sometimes want to do the right thing. Unfortunately, in this scenario the right thing isn’t popular due to rational irrationality.
On the other hand, rational ignorance comes from the public choice theory school of thought. This economic-based school of thought discusses things like rent-seeking that affect how public policy is made. While Caplan lays the blame on the populace for the failures of democracy, public choice theorists often claim that rent-seeking and special interests tend to affect it more.
Both of these theories are not only similarly titled but are also often brought up in discussions of democracy and voting. Caplan himself discussed public choice theory somewhat recently, which is likely where my confusion stemmed from. It doesn’t help that he also specializes in public choice.
Regardless, for the sake of intellectual honesty, I wanted my mistake to be clear. And hopefully we can all learn a little something from it too. I have since edited my article to better reflect my renewed understanding of these concepts and hope that they are sufficient.
C4SS was awfully busy in the month of October tackling important and wide-ranging issues. Roderick Long reported on racial bias in America’s judicial system — particularly how it affects criminal defendants and jury composition. Jason Farrell discussed the contradiction-in-terms that is “libertarian” politicians, and why they fail to achieve success. I wrote on a subject seldom discussed in libertarian and anarchist circles: Animals.
C4SS also began its exciting new program, Mutual Exchange. As C4SS’s first Mutual Exchange Coordinator Cory Massimino put it, the program is “C4SS’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through exchange,” and that, “Mutual Exchange will explore many issues from a variety of perspectives.” October’s program, Do Free Markets Always Produce a Corporate Economy?, brought forth a lead essay from Kevin Carson, followed by responses from Derek Wall and Steven Horwitz. The program concluded with Carson’s rejoinders to Wall and Horwitz. Many thanks to the participants for all their hard work. We expect to have the symposium reproduced in print and e-book formats in short order.
When I look back on the month, I’m amazed at how much C4SS produced in such a short time. But we couldn’t do it without you, the reader, and your all-important financial contributions. We depend on you. Please help keep us going and growing by making a donation via Paypal, Patreon, or any of our other countless giving platforms:
I’ll be presenting on and facilitating a discussion of left-libertarianism Thursday, October 29th, for the OU Students for Liberty. The meeting will take place from 7 to 8 pm. The title of the conversation is, “What is Left-Libertarianism?”
It’ll be an introductory discussion exploring the group’s questions and ideas about left-libertarians. The discussion will rely heavily on audience participation but I’ll also deliver some questions and answers I wrote out myself.
These questions and answers will be published on C4SS soon and hopefully serve as another useful introduction to left-libertarianism.
The event will be taking place in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University — more specifically in Ellis Hall, Room 112.
The individualist anarchist tendency is alive and well. Markets Not Capitalism offers a window onto this tendency’s history and highlights its potential contribution to the global anticapitalist movement. We seek in this book to stimulate a thriving conversation among libertarians of all varieties, as well as those with other political commitments, about the most fruitful path toward human liberation. We are confident that individualist anarchist insights into the liberatory potential of markets without capitalism can enrich that conversation, and we encourage you to join it.
$18.00.
Introduction
Market anarchists believe in market exchange, not in economic privilege. They believe in free markets, not in capitalism. What makes them anarchists is their belief in a fully free and consensual society — a society in which order is achieved not through legal force or political government, but through free agreements and voluntary cooperation on a basis of equality. What makes them market anarchists is their recognition of free market exchange as a vital medium for peacefully anarchic social order. But the markets they envision are not like the privilege-riddled “markets” we see around us today. Markets laboring under government and capitalism are pervaded by persistent poverty, ecological destruction, radical inequalities of wealth, and concentrated power in the hands of corporations, bosses, and landlords. The consensus view is that exploitation — whether of human beings or of nature — is simply the natural result of markets left unleashed. The consensus view holds that private property, competitive pressure, and the profit motive must — whether for good or for ill — inevitably lead to capitalistic wage labor, to the concentration of wealth and social power in the hands of a select class, or to business practices based on growth at all costs and the devil take the hindmost.
Market anarchists dissent. They argue that economic privilege is a real and pervasive social problem, but that the problem is not a problem of private property, competition, or profits per se. It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed — deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist — reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence.
The Market Form
This book is intended as an extended introduction to the economic and social theory of left-wing market anarchism. Market anarchism is a radically individualist and anticapitalist social movement. Like other anarchists, market anarchists are radical advocates of individual liberty and mutual consent in every aspect of social life — thus rejecting all forms of domination and government as invasions against liberty and violations of human dignity. The market anarchists’ distinct contribution to anarchist thought is their analysis of the market form as a core component of a thoroughly free and equal society — their understanding of the revolutionary possibilities inherent in market relationships freed from government and capitalistic privilege, and their insights into the structures of political privilege and control that deform actually-existing markets and uphold exploitation in spite of the naturally equilibrating tendencies of market processes. Since they insist on so sharp a distinction between the market form as such and the economic features of actually-existing capitalism, it is important to carefully distinguish the key features of markets as market anarchists understand them. The social relationships that market anarchists explicitly defend, and hope to free from all forms of government control, are relationships based on:
ownership of property, especially decentralized individual ownership, not only of personal possessions but also of land, homes, natural resources, tools, and capital goods;
contract and voluntary exchange of goods and services, by individuals or groups, on the expectation of mutual benefit;
free competition among all buyers and sellers — in price, quality, and all other aspects of exchange — without ex ante restraints or burdensome barriers to entry;
entrepreneurial discovery, undertaken not only to compete in existing markets but also in order to discover and develop new opportunities for economic or social benefit; and
spontaneous order, recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force — in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large-scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans or explicit common blueprints for social or economic development.
Market anarchists do not limit ownership to possession, or to common or collective ownership, although they do not exclude these kinds of ownership either; they insist on the importance of contract and market exchange, and on profit-motivated free competition and entrepreneurship; and they not only tolerate but celebrate the unplanned, spontaneous coordination that Marxists deride as the “social anarchy of production.” But left-wing market anarchists are also radically anticapitalist, and they absolutely reject the belief — common to both the anti-market Left and the pro-capitalist Right — that these five features of the market form must entail a social order of bosses, landlords, centralized corporations, class exploitation, cut-throat business dealings, immiserated workers, structural poverty, or large-scale economic inequality. They insist, instead, on five distinctive claims about markets, freedom, and privilege:
The centrifugal tendency of markets: market anarchists see freed markets, under conditions of free competition, as tending to diffuse wealth and dissolve fortunes — with a centrifugal effect on incomes, property-titles, land, and access to capital — rather than concentrating it in the hands of a socioeconomic elite. Market anarchists recognize no de jure limits on the extent or kind of wealth that any one person might amass; but they believe that market and social realities will impose much more rigorous de facto pressures against massive inequalities of wealth than any de jure constraint could achieve.
The radical possibilities of market social activism: market anarchists also see freed markets as a space not only for profit-driven commerce, but also as spaces for social experimentation and hard-driving grassroots activism. They envision “market forces” as including not only the pursuit of narrowly financial gain or maximizing returns to investors, but also the appeal of solidarity, mutuality and sustainability. “Market processes” can — and ought to — include conscious, coordinated efforts to raise consciousness, change economic behavior, and address issues of economic equality and social justice through nonviolent direct action.
The rejection of statist-quo economic relations: market anarchists sharply distinguish between the defense of the market form and apologetics for actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions, since these distributions and divisions hardly emerged as the result of unfettered markets, but rather from the governed, regimented, and privilege-ridden markets that exist today; they see actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions as serious and genuine social problems, but not as problems with the market form itself; these are not market problems but ownership problems and coordination problems.
The regressiveness of regulation: market anarchists see coordination problems — problems with an unnatural, destructive, politically-imposed interruption of the free operation of exchange and competition — as the result of continuous, ongoing legal privilege for incumbent capitalists and other well-entrenched economic interests, imposed at the expense of small-scale competitors and the working class.
Dispossession and rectification: market anarchists see economic privilege as partly the result of serious ownership problems — problems with an unnatural, destructive, politically-imposed maldistribution of property titles — produced by the history of political dispossession and expropriation inflicted worldwide by means of war, colonialism, segregation, nationalization and kleptocracy. Markets are not viewed as being maximally free so long as they are darkened by the shadow of mass robbery or the denial of ownership; and they emphasize the importance of reasonable rectification of past injustices — including grassroots, anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal approaches to the “privatization” of state-controlled resources; processes for restitution to identifiable victims of injustice; and revolutionary expropriation of property fraudulently claimed by the state and state-entitled monopolists.
The Market Anarchist Tradition
Early anarchist thinkers such as Josiah Warren and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon emphasized the positive, socially harmonizing features of market relationships when they were conducted within a context of equality — with Proudhon, for example, writing that social revolution would abolish the “system of laws” and “principle of authority,” to replace them with the “system of contracts” [1].
Drawing on Warren’s and Proudhon’s use of contract and exchange for models of social mutuality, distinctive strands of market anarchism have emerged repeatedly within the broad anarchist tradition, punctuated by crises, collapses, interregnums and resurgences. The history is complex but it can be roughly divided into three major periods represented in this text — (i) a “first wave,” represented mainly by “individualist anarchists” and “mutualists” such as Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Dyer Lum, and occupying roughly the period from the American Civil War to 1917; [2] (ii) a “second wave,” coinciding with the radicalization of formerly pro-capitalist American libertarians and the resurgence of anarchism as a family of social movements during the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s; and (iii) a “third wave,” developing as a dissident strand within the anarchist milieu of the 1990s and the post-Seattle movement of the new millennium.
In spite of discontinuities and differences, each wave has typically revived the literature of the earlier waves and drawn explicitly on its themes; what has, in general, united them is their defense of market relationships and their particular emphasis on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the market form, when it is — to the extent that it is — liberated from legal and social institutions of privilege.
The anticapitalism of the “first wave” individualists was obvious to them and to many of their contemporaries. Benjamin Tucker famously argued that four monopolies, or clusters of state-guaranteed privileges, were responsible for the power of the corporate elite — the patent monopoly, the effective monopoly created by the state’s distribution of arbitrarily engrossed land to the politically favored and its protection of unjust land titles, the money and credit monopoly, and the monopolistic privileges conferred by tariffs. The economically powerful depended on these monopolies; eliminate them, and the power of the elite would dissolve.
Tucker was committed to the cause of justice for workers in conflict with contemporary capitalists and he clearly identified with the burgeoning socialist movement. But he argued against Marx and other socialists that market relationships could be fruitful and non-exploitative provided that the market-distorting privileges conferred by the four monopolies were eliminated.
The radicalism of Tucker and his compatriots and that of the strand of anarchism they birthed was arguably less apparent after the breaking of the first wave than it was to their contemporaries. Perhaps in part this is because of their disputes with representatives of other anarchist tendencies, whose criticisms of their views have influenced the perceptions of later anarchists. It is also, unavoidably, a consequence of the identification of many of their twentieth-century descendants with the right wing of the libertarian movement and thus as apologists for the corporate elite and its social dominance.
Though there were honorable exceptions, twentieth-century market-oriented libertarians frequently lionized corporate titans, ignored or rationalized the abuse of workers, and trivialized or embraced economic and social hierarchy. While many endorsed the critique of the state and of state-secured privilege offered by Tucker and his fellow individualists, they often overlooked or rejected the radical implications of the earlier individualists’ class-based analysis of structural injustice. There were, in short, few vocal enthusiasts for the individualists’ brand of anticapitalism in the early-to-mid-twentieth century.
The most radical fringe of the market-oriented strand of the libertarian movement — represented by thinkers like Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs — generally embraced, not the anticapitalist economics of individualism and mutualism, but a position its advocates described as “anarcho-capitalism.” The future free society they envisioned was a market society — but one in which market relationships were little changed from business as usual and the end of state control was imagined as freeing business to do much what it had been doing before, rather than unleashing competing forms of economic organization, which might radically transform market forms from the bottom up.
But in the “second wave” of the 1960s, the family of anarchist social movements — revived by antiauthoritarian and countercultural strands of the New Left — and the antiwar radicals among the libertarians began to rediscover and republish the works of the mutualists and the other individualists. “Anarcho-capitalists” such as Rothbard and Childs began to question libertarianism’s historical alliance with the Right, and to abandon defenses of big business and actually-existing capitalism in favor of a more consistent left-wing market anarchism. Perhaps the most visible and dramatic example was Karl Hess’s embrace of the New Left radicalism, and his abandonment of “capitalist” economics in favor of small-scale, community-based, non-capitalist markets. By 1975, the former Goldwater speechwriter declared, “I have lost my faith in capitalism” and “I resist this capitalist nation-state,” observing that he had “turn[ed] from the religion of capitalism.” [3]
The “second wave” was followed by a second trough, for anarchism broadly and market anarchism in particular. By the later 1970s and the 1980s, the anticapitalist tendency among market-oriented libertarians had largely dissipated or been shouted down by the mainstreaming pro-capitalist politics of well-funded “libertarian” institutions like the Cato Institute and the leadership of the Libertarian Party. But with the end of the Cold War, the realignment of longstanding political coalitions, and the public coming-out of a third wave anarchist movement in the 1990s, the intellectual, social stages were set for today’s resurgence of anticapitalist market anarchism.
By the beginning of twenty-first century, anticapitalist descendants of the individualists had grown in number, influence, and visibility. They shared the early individualists’ conviction that markets need not in principle be exploitative. At the same time, they elaborated and defended a distinctively libertarian version of class analysis that extended Tucker’s list of monopolies and highlighted the intersection of state-secured privilege with systematic past and ongoing dispossession and with a range of issues of ecology, culture, and interpersonal power relations. They emphasized the fact that, while genuinely liberated — freed — markets could be empowering, market transactions that occurred in contexts misshapen by past and ongoing injustice were, not surprisingly, debilitating and oppressive. But the problem, the new individualists (like their predecessors) insisted, lay not with markets but rather with capitalism — with social dominance by economic elites secured by the state. The solution, then, was the abolition of capitalism through the elimination of legal privileges, including the privileges required for the protection of title to stolen and engrossed assets.
The new individualists have been equally critical of explicitly statist conservatives and progressives and of market-oriented libertarians on the right who use the rhetoric of freedom to legitimate corporate privilege. Their aggressive criticism of this sort of “vulgar libertarianism” has emphasized that existing economic relationships are shot through with injustice from top to bottom and that calls for freedom can readily be used to mask attempts to preserve the freedom of elites to retain wealth acquired through state-tolerated or state-perpetrated violence and state-guaranteed privilege.
The Natural Habitat of the Market Anarchist
This book would not have been possible without the Internet. The reader of Markets Not Capitalism will quickly notice that many of the articles do not read quite like chapters in an ordinary book. Many of them are short. Many of them begin in the middle of a dialogue — one of the most frequent opening phrases is “In a recent issue of such-and-such, so-and-so said that…” The contemporary articles often originally appeared online, as posts to a weblog; they refer frequently to past posts or pre-existing discussions, and often criticize on or elaborate comments made by other authors in other venues. While the articles have been reformatted for print, many still read very distinctly like the blog posts that they once were.
But this is not merely an artifact of Internet-based social networks. The history of the individualist and mutualist tradition is largely a history of ephemeral publications, short-lived presses, self-published pamphlets, and small radical papers. The most famous is certainly Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (1881-1908), but also includes such publications as Hugh Pentecost’s Twentieth Century (1888-1898), as well as “second wave” market anarchist journals such as Left and Right (1965-1968) and Libertarian Forum (1969-1984). All these publications were short and published frequently; their articles were typically critical rather than comprehensive, idiosyncratic rather than technical in approach and tone. Long-standing, far-reaching debates between papers, correspondents, and the surrounding movement were constant sources of material; where a specific interlocutor was not available for some of these articles, the author might, as in de Cleyre and Slobodinsky’s “The Individualist and the Communist: A Dialogue,” go so far as to invent one. The most famous book-length work from the “first wave” — Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One (1893) — is simply a collection of short articles from Liberty, the majority of which are clearly themselves replies to questions and arguments posed by Liberty’s readers or fellow journal editors. The critical exchanges read very much like those one might encounter today on Blogger or WordPress sites — because, of course, today’s blog is merely a new technological form taken by the small, independent press.
The independent, dialogue-based small press has provided a natural habitat for market anarchist writing to flourish — whereas liberal and Marxist writing found their most distinctive habitats in declarations, manifestos, and intricate, comprehensive treatises. Why this might be the case is a large question, worth exploring far beyond what the limits of this preface might allow. However, it may be worth noting that market anarchism has more or less always emerged as a critical and experimental project — on the radical fringes of social movements (whether the Owenite movement, the freethought movement, the labor movement, the American market-oriented libertarian movement, or the counter-globalization movement and the associated social anarchist milieu).
Market anarchism aims to draw out social truths not by dogmatizing or laying down the law, but rather by allowing as far as possible for the free interplay of ideas and social forces, by looking for the unintended consequences of accepted ideas, by engagement in an open-ended process of experimentation and discovery that permits the constant testing of both ideas and institutions against competitors and bottom-line reality.
The revolutionary anarchist and mutualist Dyer D. Lum (1839-1893) wrote in “The Economics of Anarchy” that a defining feature of market anarchy was the “plasticity” of social and economic arrangements as opposed to the “rigidity” of either statist domination or communist economic schemes. The substance of market anarchist ideas has arguably shaped the form in which market anarchist writers feel most at home expressing them. Or perhaps, conversely, the form of the writing may even be what has often made the substance possible: it may be that market anarchist ideas most naturally take shape in the course of dialogue rather than disquisition, in the act of critical give-and-take rather than one-sided monologue. The value of spontaneity, exploratory engagement, and the rigors of the competitive test may be as essential to the formation of market anarchist ideas in writing as they are to the implementation of those ideas in the world at large.
If so, then these articles must be read with the awareness that they have, to a certain extent, been lifted out of their natural environment. There are longer, sustained treatments of the topics they address, but most articles were originally contributions to longstanding, ongoing projects, and took place in the course of wide-ranging debates. We have collected them in a printed anthology to do a service to the student, the researcher, and anyone else who is curious about alternative approaches in free market economics and anarchist social thought. But they are best understood not as identifying the end of the subject, or even really the beginning, but rather as offering an invitation to dive in in medias res, to see left-wing market anarchist ideas emerging from the dialogical process itself — and to participate in the ongoing conversation. …
Notes:
1. See “Organization of Economic Forces,” General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, ch. 3 (37-58), in this volume.
2. The exact differences between “individualists” and “mutualists” during the first wave were hardly ever cut and dried; many writers (such as Tucker) used each word at different times to refer to their own position. However, a few differences might be sketched between those who were most frequently called “individualists,” such as Tucker or Yarros, and those who were most frequently called “mutualists,” such as Dyer Lum, Clarence Swartz, or the European followers of Proudhon — in particular, that while both supported the emancipation of workers and ensuring that all workers had access to capital, the “mutualists” tended to emphasize the specific importance of worker-owned co-operatives and direct worker ownership over the means of production, while “individualists” tended to emphasize that under conditions of equal freedom, workers would settle on whatever arrangements of ownership made most sense under the circumstances.
Complicating matters, “mutualism” is now retrospectively used, in the twenty-first century, to refer to most anti-capitalist market anarchists, or specifically to those (like Kevin Carson) who differ from the so-called “Lockean” position on land ownership — who believe that land ownership can be based only on personal occupancy and use, ruling out absentee landlordship as undesirable and unworthy of legal protection. “Mutualists” in this sense of the term includes both those who were most frequently called “individualists” during the first wave (such as Tucker) and those who were most frequently called “mutualists” (such as Lum).
3. To be sure, while Hess’s social attitudes do not seem to have changed substantially after he made these statements, he became less wedded to the language of anti-capitalism; he published Capitalism for Kids: Growing Up to Be Your Own Boss in 1986. But there is no reason to doubt that what Hess meant by “capitalism” here was what contemporary left-wing market anarchists mean when they talk about peaceful, voluntary exchange in a genuinely freed market, rather than what he had rejected in 1975. Certainly, as the book’s sub-title suggests, he had no intention of steering young readers into careers as corporate drones.
“The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny. …
We, the Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.” —Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarchism and American Traditions
Last night, Chris Matthews reminded Hardball viewers that there “were” “conspiracy theory-types” who believed FDR lied America into WWII. It sounds as if Matthews has only heard about, not actually read, historical accounts which question the high school textbook version of events leading up to America’s entry into WWII.
I quote for him Ronald Radosh from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought [1967]:
Of all the secret measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration in 1941, none was more significant than the conferences with the British staff held between January and March. These led to agreement that the US Navy would convoy all transatlantic shipping, a step that violated the Neutrality Act. What made this agreement particularly reprehensible was that if the populace had known, it would undoubtedly have repudiated the President. Rather than announce and publicly state why he felt such acts were necessary, FDR “publicly took the position that he was against convoys because they meant shooting.” [citing TR Fehrenbach] These commitments could only have the final result of leading the United States into war. When Roosevelt ordered naval forces into the declared Nazi war zone beyond Greenland, it was inevitable that a clash would occur.
Sorry to disappoint, Chris. Presidents lying America into war didn’t start with Dubya.
“Anarchism rejects any form of the domination of the man by man, and no form of the exploitation of man by man, since it tackles all forms of authority:
Political authority: the State.
Economic authority: Property.
Moral authority: Fatherland, Religion, Family.
Legal authority: Courts, Laws and Police Force.
All the (authoritarian) social forces receive the vigorous and incisive blows that the anarchists attack them with. Anarchism, indeed, is against all oppressions, all constraints, it does not assign any limit to its action… From where do humanity’s sufferings come? … I put side the inherent suffering that arises from nature itself, but all the other sufferings, all the other pain has to due with bad social organization… Here is what the anarchist says to the oppressed, to the suffering ones.” — Sébastien Faure, The Revolutionary Forces
“Anarchism’s lone objective is to reach a point at which the belligerence of some humans against humanity, in whatever form, comes to a halt. And with this end point in mind, people must transcend themselves in the spirit of brother and sisterhood, so that each individual, drawing on natural ability, can develop freely.” — Gustav Landauer, Anarchism in Germany
There were 34 pickups, totalling almost 3 per op-ed — an excellent average (in August, by comparison, our work was cited and picked up a paltry 10 times);
If we’re talking sheer numbers, Kevin Carson’s “‘Peace Through Strength,’ And Other Lies” seems to have struck a chord: it was picked up 6 times during the month!
Now, we also continue to cultivate a good relationship with outlets such as CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, the Augusta Free Press, and a few others. As I stated last month, our focus is gradually shifting to online media, and I think our numbers from now on will start to reflect that.
One thing I should note: I’m settling on dates around the 10th of each month to publish our Media Coordinator report. That gives me more time to check if our pieces were republished and makes it less likely that we miss a pickup. Our late month reports didn’t work well for pieces published by the end of the month.
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Though I’m unfamiliar with the work of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, I was nonetheless pleased to see the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a non-government official. Other (unworthy) candidates this year included Angela Merkel, John Kerry and Javad Zarif.
In “War and Peace as States of Mind” (published in Marc Guttman’s excellent anthology Why Peace), Butler Shaffer hits the nail on the head:
Contrary to our politically directed thinking, peace is not just the absence of war, a condition to be turned on or off as suits the needs of nation-states in manipulating their respective populations. When promoters and conductors of the war system are Nobel Peace Prize recipients, it becomes evident that the popular meaning of the concept has become little more than a confused and contradictory strategy to be employed in fleeting service to the interests of coercive power structures.
