A discussion on Anarchist economics can be found on our central Facebook group here.
* Economic Autarky (from the National-Anarchist Movement manifesto)
* Free Markets vs. Capitalism
* War on Revolution! The Counter Economics of National-Anarchism
Markets Not Capitalism
by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson
by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson
Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not
economic privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend
a distinctive response to the challenges of ending global capitalism and
achieving social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop up
capitalists. Massive concentrations of wealth, rigid economic hierarchies, and
unsustainable modes of production are not the results of the market form, but
of markets deformed and rigged by a network of state-secured controls and
privileges to the business class. This book explores the gap between radically
freed markets and the capitalist-controlled markets that prevail today. The
contributors argue that structural poverty can be abolished by liberating
market exchange from state capitalist privilege. It explains how liberating
market exchange from state capitalist privilege can abolish structural poverty,
help working people take control over the conditions of their labor, and
redistribute wealth and social power. Featuring discussions of socialism,
capitalism, markets, ownership, labor struggle, grassroots privatization,
intellectual property, health care, racism, sexism, and environmental issues,
this unique collection brings together classic essays by leading figures in the
anarchist tradition, including Proudhon and Voltairine de Cleyre, and such
contemporary innovators as Kevin Carson and Roderick Long. It introduces an
eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian
socialism and market anarchism.
The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economic
by Anthony J. Nocella
by Anthony J. Nocella
The only crisis of capitalism is "capitalism
itself." Let's toss credit default swaps, bailouts, environmental
externalities and, while we're at it, private ownership of production in the
dustbin of history. "The Accumulation of Freedom" brings together economists,
historians, theorists, and activists for a first-of-its-kind study of anarchist
economics. The editors aren't trying to subvert the notion of economics--they
accept the standard definition, but reject the notion that capitalism or
central planning are acceptable ways to organize economic life.Contributors
include Robin Hahnel, Iain McKay, Marie Trigona, Chris Spannos, Ernesto
Aguilar, Uri Gordon, and more.
"This book addresses a broadening interest in anarchism - as both theory and politics - in the wake of the deepening economic and social crisis in the United States and elsewhere. It is a very timely collection of articles that boldly confronts the urgent need for a fundamental alternative to the existing bankrupt power structure." - Carl Boggs, author of Imperial Delusions
"The Accumulation of Freedom is meant to be a departure point for contemporary discussions about anarchist economics, and it easily lives up to the task. It is highly recommended reading! Whether it brings us closer to an anarchist economy is a rhetorical question, because that's not what a book can do. But does it help develop ideas that can get us there? Without doubt." - Gabriel Kuhn, Alpine Anarchist Productions
"Given the vast overburden of tomes delineating every theoretical nuance of 'free market,' mixed, and marxian economies, material addressing anarchist alternatives has always been rendered conspicuous by its absence. Accumulation of Freedom fills the void rather neatly, providing a broadly-framed and accessible survey of this crucially important field." - Ward Churchill, author
"This book addresses a broadening interest in anarchism - as both theory and politics - in the wake of the deepening economic and social crisis in the United States and elsewhere. It is a very timely collection of articles that boldly confronts the urgent need for a fundamental alternative to the existing bankrupt power structure." - Carl Boggs, author of Imperial Delusions
"The Accumulation of Freedom is meant to be a departure point for contemporary discussions about anarchist economics, and it easily lives up to the task. It is highly recommended reading! Whether it brings us closer to an anarchist economy is a rhetorical question, because that's not what a book can do. But does it help develop ideas that can get us there? Without doubt." - Gabriel Kuhn, Alpine Anarchist Productions
"Given the vast overburden of tomes delineating every theoretical nuance of 'free market,' mixed, and marxian economies, material addressing anarchist alternatives has always been rendered conspicuous by its absence. Accumulation of Freedom fills the void rather neatly, providing a broadly-framed and accessible survey of this crucially important field." - Ward Churchill, author
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
by Kevin A. Cartson
This book is an attempt to revive individualist anarchist
political economy, to incorporate the useful developments of the last hundred
years, and to make it relevant to the problems of the twenty-first century. We
hope this work will go at least part of the way to providing a new theoretical
and practical foundation for free market socialist economics.
Review of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:
Move over Karl, Anarchism Is Back!
Move over Karl, Anarchism Is Back!
Anarchists tend to look embarrassed when the subject of
economics comes up. Or we mumble something about Proudhon and then sheepishly
borrow ideas from Karl Marx. It has always struck me as ironic that anarchism
began largely as an economic theory, think only of Josiah Warren, Proudhon and
Tucker, but then abandoned the field to the Marxists. A specifically
anarchistic approach to economic analysis has lain dormant for the last 130
years. However, with the publication of Kevin A. Carson’s STUDIES IN MUTUALIST
POLITICAL ECONOMY this period of dormancy has finally come to an end.
Carson starts off by critiquing post-classical economists
such as the Marginalists, Marxists, and Austrians. But his critique is not a
simple dismissal of these views, but is dialectical in form. What stands up
after analysis, no matter what the school of economics, is incorporated into
his anarchist synthesis. Without too much exaggeration, Carson has
produced our Das Capital.
He begins his analysis with an examination of Adam Smith and
David Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value (hereafter LTV) and what was done to it
by later economists. Early 19C economics was based upon the LTV resulting in a
“revolutionary assault on entrenched power”. However, by mid-century the LTV
was rejected by the new schools of Marginalist and Austrian economists. As a
result economics degenerated into “an apology for… the large corporations.” The
reason for this change of direction is fairly well known. The LTV shows that
only labor can produce value, and thus exposes the capitalist and landlord as
parasites. In order to intellectually defend the exploiting classes, the LTV
had to be marginalized. (Sorry I couldn’t resist)
The chief critic of the LTV was the Austrian, Bohm-Bawerk,
who built a straw man version of the theory to knock down. According to BB, the
LTV didn’t hold in many instances – such as the value of antiques or rare
paintings, and never exactly in other situations. Furthermore, the capitalist
too created value by investing the capital which had accrued through his
’abstinence’. Landlords produced value through the use of their land. But
Classical economists like Ricardo and Smith admitted the issue of scarcity of
certain goods. The LTV only applied to items that could be freely reproduced.
Due to the fluctuations in the supply and demand of these goods, there could
never be an exact correlation between price and value. For Carson, the
complaint about inexactitude “made as much sense as saying the law of gravity
was invalidated… by air resistance…”
Carson then re-establishes the LTV not only through its
Smithian-Ricardian base but also, with the irony of the dialectic, by using
certain Marginalist and Austrian concepts. For Smith, labor was a plainly a
’hardship’. As such, the LTV has a “subjective basis” rooted in “common sense”
and “the same a priori understanding of human behavior from which
BB’s disciple Von Mises derived his ’praxeology’.” In essence, human beings
maximize utility and minimize disutility. “The expenditure of labor is an
absolute cost regardless of the quantity… the opportunity cost of labor… is
non-labor.” “It is the disutility of labor and the need to persuade the worker
to bring his services to the production process, unique among all the ’factors
of production’, that creates value.”
There is a major difference between the situation of the
laborer and the landlord-capitalist. Labor requires a “positive expenditure of
effort”, ’abstinence’ and rent have to do with setting charges for access to
something. Labor is an absolute sacrifice, abstinence, is at best,
a relative one. The worker must work, someone with capital
has a choice whether to not work or to invest. “The ’value’ created by
capitalists and landlords is simply a monopoly price paid to their owners.”
Furthermore, the Marginalists and Austrian critics of the LTV treated property
relations as given. How did that pool of investment capital really come
about ? How indeed, did the landlord get the land he rents ? The lack
of property and capital that forces the worker to sell himself to a capitalist
is best explained not through economic theory, but through history.
The facts of history are clear, the peasants were
dispossessed through coercion and state intervention, transforming them into
landless laborers and enforcing a situation of unequal exchange on the labor
market. Carson goes into great detail about this process in the succeeding
chapter, but first he turns his critical eye to the Marxist version of the
development of capitalism. Marx was ambiguous on the role of coercion as a
factor. Engels, on the other hand, was a market absolutist. Wage labor was
“purely economic” and there was “no robbery or force or state involved” in the
primitive accumulation of capital.
Marxist refusal to admit the statist origins of capitalism
are political in origin. Engels was attempting to defeat Eugene Duhring’s
version of socialism. Earlier on, the project was to trash Proudhon and the
Ricardian socialist Hodgskin. All three of these thinkers saw capitalism as
rooted in, and perpetuated by, statism and violence. The one aspect the Marxist
and non-marxist socialists did agree on, is that for capitalism to exist,
workers must be separated from the means of production. Carson’s recipe for a
Free Market ? 1. steal the producing classes land. 2. terrorize the former
owners so they won’t organize any opposition. 3. convince them this situation
is a natural result of the Free Market.
Let’s now look at those facts of history. Proudhon was
right, “property is theft”. The so-called right to peasant land was a
feudal legal fiction established by the Norman conquest. However, the first
real mass expropriation and eviction of peasants did not occur until the
seizure of Church lands by Henry VIII. More than 10% of the peasantry were
reduced to landless laborers by this action and were terrorized by the brutal
Poor Laws enacted about the same time. Legal changes in the 17th Century
converted the limited feudal right into private property right and the
remaining peasants became tenents pure and simple. These were then dispossessed
over the next two centuries by a series of Enclosure Acts.
The new-found capitalist landowners loved the Enclosure
Acts, and not just for the property it gave them. The workers, lacking land,
were no longer independent. Independence was a situation their masters
considered “one of the greatest of evils.” Peasant communal land ownership (the
traditional form) was considered “a dangerous centre of indiscipline.”
This evil system was imposed overseas and in this manner the
so-called world market came about. Ireland was the dress rehearsal for the
robbery, enslavement and genocidal murder of native people everywhere. The
first slaves were the Celtic peoples, shipped out to die like flies in the cane
fields of Barbados. Indeed, “America was built on slave labor.” The world
market was established by the European navies who protected the slavers, forced
weaker countries to buy European goods and crushed any competition. State
intervention shut out foreign competition, even going so far as in the case of
Indian textiles, to destroy an entire industry and impoverish this populous
nation. Force was used wherever the European conqueror went. The method was
always the same ; convert free peasants into cheap laborers who were then
usually worked to death. As for hunters and gatherers ? Extermination. After
you read this chapter, you come away thinking that these people had nothing on
Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.
Capitalism was brought into existence by a land-owning
aristocracy which transformed itself into a capitalist class when the old
Medieval system broke up. From the centuries of looting and pillage by this
class, came the investment capital of the Industrial Revolution. In the United
States, long held up as a pillar of Free Enterprise, capitalist industrial
development began as a result of mercantilism, slavery and the investments of
landlords, who got their land from the government, who in turn stole it from
the Native People. As Carson says, “capitalism has never been established by a
free market” and “free market capitalism is an oxymoron.”
One major failing of Marxism, most especially vulgar
Marxism, has been the failure to recognize the political causes of capitalism,
and to reduce the social and the political to mere out-growths of economic
forces. Marxism thus becomes an apologist for tyranny. “Parasitism was not
necessary for progress.” State socialists and capitalist apologists (such as
most so-called free market libertarians) alike, “for nearly identical reasons”
have a common interest in maintaining the myth of 19th Century laissez faire.
The vast and cruel “subsidy of history” is what lay the
groundwork for Monopoly Capitalism as it developed in the late 19th Century. At
this point Carson introduces Benjamin Tucker’s analysis of monopoly. Patents,
tariffs, the currency and banking monopolies all were forms of state-sponsored
parasitism that gave rise to the giant corporations. Tucker’s “Four Monopolies”
have to be coupled with land-grants, cheap loans and gifts, eminent domain (by
which the state could steal your land for its corporate buddies) and a hundred
and one other forms of subsidy and corporate welfare.
The problem for corporate monopoly capitalism is its
fragility, its tendency to go into crisis. One root cause of crisis is the
tendency to produce more than can be profitably sold. This is exacerbated by
state subsidies which create a more capital-intensive form of economy than
would exist in a genuine market. In order to maintain demand and profitability,
the state steps in with even more subsidy and also the welfare state to keep underclass
docile. There is “snowballing irrationality as the state’s intervention further
destabilizes the system, requiring yet further state intervention.” The
snowballing eventually leads to the fiscal crisis of the state, which began in
the 1960’s.
State monopoly capitalism introduces technologies and
methods which deeply harm society, replacing older more appropriate methods and
technologies. Think of urban sprawl, over-dependence on petroleum and the auto,
bureaucratization and so-called professionalism, as but a few examples. By
pushing for ever greater size, ever greater inefficiency results. Corporations
have all the problems of a Stalinist planned economy – a fundamental
irrationalism. The only reason things work at all is that workers ignore the directions
from above.
The fiscal crisis of the state combined with the resulting
social breakdown due to capitalist irrationality gave rise to the neo-liberal
reaction. Over the last 25 years the state has worked to shift wealth from
consumption to investment as a prop for the corporate system. This action
brings with it a contradiction, as the system depends on mass consumption at a
profitable level to deal with the problem of over-production.
The final chapter entitled “Ends and Means” discusses
Carson’s alternative to capitalism. The capitalist system should be replaced
with voluntary associations ; an economy of worker co-ops, mutualist
associations, and syndicalist unions, based on the commons, free exchange and
usufruct principles. The state abolished and replaced by a federation of
communities.
Carson’s revolution would be gradual and is marked by the
development of a “dual power situation”. This requires the building of an
“alternative social infrastructure” giving rise of forms of “social-counter
power” such as syndicalist unions, coops, tenant unions, mutualist societies,
“cop watch” groups and libertarian municipalist movements. Such a development
is a form of “prefigurative politics”, by which people try as much as possible
by their actions to live the revolution now. The distinction between reform and
revolution is thus “mainly one of emphasis”. The groundwork for the “final”
revolution has to be laid beforehand and this is the task of the alternative
social structure.
The modern or Corporate State, is vastly more intrusive than
it’s 19th Century version, and thus presents a problem for anarchists.
(Consider that in many countries 20% or more of the population depend upon the
state for employment or survival.) Even Benjamin Tucker saw the need for a “staged
abolition of the state” so not to give rise to a dangerous situation.
Therefore, it is necessary to have a “strategic position” visa vis the state.
“It is not enough to oppose any and all statism… without any conception of how
particular examples of statism fit into the overall system of power.” As a
result, the dismantling of the state must occur “in the right order” and to do
so in the wrong way is to court disaster. The proper sequence would be to first
eliminate all state measures which support and give rise to capitalist and
bureaucratic power. With the exploitation of labor abolished, any social
welfare still needed could be handled by mutual aid societies.
The Corporate State will fall. First, through its
own internal contradictions and secondly from outside ; “from a host of
movements whose only common denominator is a dislike of the centralized state
and corporate capitalism.” Carson sees a need to build broad-based ad hoc
coalitions, but his “political strategy” is not electoral. (More like the
movement which brought down East German Stalinism, perhaps.) Nor is dismantling
the state the primary function of the revolutionary-evolutionary movement. The
“political” movement should exist only to get rid of those forces which stop us
from pursuing our primary activity – building the new free society.
Carson is a mutualist and offers a mutualist alternative to
capitalism. The other schools of anarchist thought shouldn’t ignore his work
because of this. In a voluntary society, people can live as they wish,
providing they don’t coerce or exploit others. Thus, in a mutualist economy
anyone who wanted could live according to, say, the principles of libertarian
communism. Carson’s analysis can also be adapted to all forms of anarchism. The
most important aspect of this book, the one that should overshadow other
differences, is that the economic analysis of exploitation and capitalism has
been placed on a solid anarchist basis. We need no longer play second fiddle to
the Marxists.
(Source) Translations for this article: Portuguese, Afaste-se, Karl, o Anarquismo Está de Volta!
Resilient Communities: Society After State Capitalism
By Kevin Carson
“For centuries, as described by Pyotr Kropotkin and
other thinkers, the institutions of civil society have been crowded out or
actively suppressed by the state. As the state capitalist system reaches its
limits and the state exhausts its capacity to prop up the system further, we
can expect a revival of civil society—a Great Thaw in which all the human
capacities for voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, atrophied for so long,
will revive and flourish. Past examples and current experiments in creating
resilient local communities are especially promising building blocks for a
post-corporate society.” (PDF)
This “ready to print” version of Resilient Communities was
created by Invisible Molotov. Invisible
MolotoV (Purpose) is a market anarchist zine distro & publishing house.
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