Free-market anarchism

Free-market anarchism,[1] or market anarchism,[2] also known as free-market anti-capitalism,[3] is the branch of anarchism that advocates a free-market economic system based on voluntary interactions without the involvement of the state. A form of individualist anarchism,[4] and libertarian socialism,[5] it is based on the economic theories of mutualism and individualist anarchism in the United States.[3]

"Freed market" redirects here. For the general economic concept, see Free market.
Market libertarian socialist mural in Queens
Part of a series on
Anarchism
Schools of thought
Methodology
  • Theory
  • Practice
People
Issues
History
Culture
Economics
By region
Lists
Related topics

Samuel Edward Konkin III's agorism is a strand of left-wing market anarchism that has been associated with left-libertarianism[6] in the United States,[7][8][9] with counter-economics being its means.[10] Anarcho-capitalism has also been referred to synonymously as free-market anarchism or market anarchism.[11][12][13] Anarcho-capitalists stress the legitimacy and priority of private property, without any distinction between personal property and productive property, describing it as an integral component of individual rights and a free-market economy. However, anarcho-capitalism is not considered as part of the anarchist movement because anarchism has historically been an anti-capitalist movement and anarchists reject that it is compatible with capitalism.[14][15][16][17]

Theory

Arguing that vast disparities in wealth and social influence result from the use of force and especially state power to steal and engross land and acquire and maintain special privileges, members of this thought typically urge the abolition of the state. They judge that in a stateless society the kinds of privileges secured by the state will be absent and injustices perpetrated or tolerated by the state can be rectified. These left-libertarians rejects "what critics call "atomistic individualism". With freed markets, they argue that "it is we collectively who decide who controls the means of production", leading to "a society in which free, voluntary, and peaceful cooperation ultimately controls the means of production for the good of all people".[18] According to libertarian scholar Sheldon Richman, left-libertarians "favor worker solidarity vis-à-vis bosses, support poor people's squatting on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be repealed before the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges may be exercised", seeing Walmart as a "symbol of corporate favoritism" which is "supported by highway subsidies and eminent domain", viewing "the fictive personhood of the limited-liability corporation with suspicion" and "doubt[ing] that Third World sweatshops would be the "best alternative" in the absence of government manipulation". These left-libertarians "tend to eschew electoral politics, having little confidence in strategies that work through the government. They prefer to develop alternative institutions and methods of working around the state".[3]

Drawing on the work of Murray Rothbard during his alliance with the left and on the thought of Karl Hess, some thinkers associated with market-oriented American libertarianism came increasingly to identify with the left on a range of issues, including opposition to war, to corporate oligopolies and to state-corporate partnerships as well as an affinity for cultural liberalism. One variety of this kind of libertarianism has been a resurgent mutualism, incorporating modern economic ideas such as marginal utility theory into mutualist theory. Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy helped to stimulate the growth of new-style mutualism, articulating a version of the labor theory of value incorporating ideas drawn from Austrian economics. Other market-oriented left-libertarians have declined to embrace mutualist views of real property while sharing the mutualist opposition to corporate hierarchies and wealth concentration.[19] Left-libertarians have placed particular emphasis on the articulation and defense of a libertarian theory of class and class conflict, although considerable work in this area has been performed by libertarians of other persuasions.[20]

Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles W. Johnson and others (echoing the language of Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Batchelder Greene, Thomas Hodgskin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker and Josiah Warren, among others) in maintaining that because of its heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seen by its proponents and by others as part of the socialist tradition and that market anarchists can and should call themselves socialists.[21]

Labor rights

Roderick T. Long is an advocate of "build[ing] worker solidarity. On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionization – but I'm not talking about the prevailing model of "business unions," [...] but real unions, the old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage".[3]

Property rights

Murray Rothbard stated that his interpretation of American individual anarchism influenced anarcho-capitalism.[22] Although anarcho-capitalism has been regarded by some as a form of individualist anarchism,[23][24] individualist anarchism is largely socialistic.[25] Rothbard argued that individualist anarchism is different from anarcho-capitalism and other capitalist theories due to the individualist anarchists retaining the labor theory of value and socialist doctrines.[26] Many writers deny that anarcho-capitalism is a form of anarchism at all,[27] or that capitalism itself is compatible with anarchism.[28]

See also

References
  1. Hoffman, John; Graham, Paul (2006). Introduction to Political Theory. p. 243.
  2. Long, Roderick T. (January 1, 2012). "Left-Libertarianism, Market Anarchism, Class Conflict and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice". Griffith Law Review. 21 (2): 413–431. doi:10.1080/10383441.2012.10854747. S2CID 143550988 – via Taylor and Francis+NEJM.
  3. Richman, Sheldon (3 February 2011). "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal". The American Conservative. ISSN 1540-966X. Retrieved 1 February 2023.
  4. Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.
  5. Carson, Kevin. "Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated". Center for a Stateless Society. "But there has always been a market-oriented strand of libertarian socialism that emphasizes voluntary cooperation between producers. And markets, properly understood, have always been about cooperation. As a commenter at Reason magazine's Hit&Run blog, remarking on Jesse Walker's link to the Kelly article, put it: "every trade is a cooperative act." In fact, it's a fairly common observation among market anarchists that genuinely free markets have the most legitimate claim to the label "socialism."
  6. "Anarchism". In Gaus, Gerald F.; D'Agostino, Fred, eds. (2012). The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. p. 227. "Later [left-libertarianism] became a term for the left or Konkinite wing of the free-market libertarian movement, and has since come to cover a range of pro-market but anti-capitalist positions, mostly individualist anarchist, including agorism and mutualism, often with an implication of sympathies (such as for radical feminism or the labor movement) not usually shared by anarcho-capitalists."
  7. "Interview With Samuel Edward Konkin III – Smashing the State for Fun and Profit Since 1969: An Interview With the Libertarian Icon Samuel Edward Konkin III (a.k.a. SEK3)". SPAZ.org. 2002. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  8. D'Amato, David S. (27 November 2018). "Black-Market Activism: Samuel Edward Konkin III and Agorism".
  9. Konkin III, Samuel Edward. An Agorist Primer (PDF). KoPubCo. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  10. "Counter-Economics: what it is, how it works" (PDF). Agorism.eu.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 27, 2022.
  11. Carrier, James G. (1997). Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture (1 ed.). Oxford: Berg. p. 107. ISBN 1-85973-149-X.
  12. Miller, G. Tyler; Paul, Ellen Frankel; Miller Jr., Fred D., eds. (1993). Liberalism and the Economic Order, Part 2. p. 115.
  13. Long, Roderick T.; Machan, Tibor R. (2016) [2008]. Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?. Ashgate.
  14. Meltzer, Albert (2000). Anarchism: Arguments For and Against. AK Press. p. 50. "The philosophy of "anarcho-capitalism" dreamed up by the "libertarian" New Right, has nothing to do with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement proper".
  15. Goodway, David (2006). Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 4. "'Libertarian' and 'libertarianism' are frequently employed by anarchists as synonyms for 'anarchist' and 'anarchism', largely as an attempt to distance themselves from the negative connotations of 'anarchy' and its derivatives. The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition".
  16. Marshall, Peter (2008). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial. p. 565. "In fact, few anarchists would accept the 'anarcho-capitalists' into the anarchist camp since they do not share a concern for economic equality and social justice, Their self-interested, calculating market men would be incapable of practising voluntary co-operation and mutual aid. Anarcho-capitalists, even if they do reject the State, might therefore best be called right-wing libertarians rather than anarchists".
  17. Newman, Saul (2010). The Politics of Postanarchism, Edinburgh University Press. p. 43. ISBN 0748634959. "It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism)".
  18. Richman, Sheldon (16 November 2014). "Free Market Socialism". Reason. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  19. See Long, Roderick T. (Winter 2006). "Land Locked: A Critique of Carson on Property Rights". Journal of Libertarian Studies. 20 (1): 87–95.
  20. Richman, Sheldon (13 July 2007). "Class Struggle Rightly Conceived". The Goal Is Freedom. Foundation for Economic Education; Nock, Albert Jay (1935). Our Enemy, the State; Oppenheimer, Franz (1997). The State. San Francisco: Fox; Palmer, Tom G. (2009). "Classical Liberalism, Marxism, and the Conflict of Classes: The Classical Liberal Theory of Class Conflict". Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute. pp. 255–276; Conger, Wally (2006). Agorist Class Theory: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis (PDF). Archived April 27, 2022, at the Wayback Machine; Walter E. Grinder and John Hagel, "Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision Making and Class Structure". Journal of Libertarian Studies 1.1 (1977): 59–79; David M. Hart, "The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer" (PhD diss., U of Cambridge, 1994); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis". Journal of Libertarian Studies 9.2 (1990): 79–93; Long, Roderick T. "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class". Social Philosophy and Policy 15.2 (Summer 1998): 303–349.
  21. See Gary Chartier, "Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism," "Free-Market Anti-Capitalism?" session, annual conference, Association of Private Enterprise Education (Cæsar's Palace, Las Vegas, NV, April 13, 2010); Gary Chartier, "Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace 'Anti-Capitalism'"; Gary Chartier, Socialist Ends, Market Means: Five Essays. Cp. Tucker, "Socialism."
  22. Miller, David, ed., et al. (1987). Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 290. ISBN 978-0-631-17944-3. "A student and disciple of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard combined the laissez-faire economics of his teacher with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the 19th century such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker."
  23. Bottomore, Tom (1991). "Anarchism". A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Reference. p. 21. ISBN 0-631-18082-6.
  24. See the following sources:
    • Alan and Trombley, Stephen (Eds.) Bullock, The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought, W. W. Norton & Co (1999), p. 30.
    • Barry, Norman. Modern Political Theory, 2000, Palgrave, p. 70.
    • Adams, Ian. Political Ideology Today, Manchester University Press (2002) ISBN 0-7190-6020-6, p. 135.
    • Grant, Moyra. Key Ideas in Politics, Nelson Thomas 2003 ISBN 0-7487-7096-8, p. 91.
    • Heider, Ulrike. Anarchism: Left, Right, and Green, City Lights, 1994. p. 3.
    • Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Abridged Paperback Edition (1996), p. 282.
    • Tormey, Simon. Anti-Capitalism, One World, 2004. pp. 118–119.
    • Raico, Ralph. Authentic German Liberalism of the 19th Century, École Polytechnique, Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée, Unité associée au CNRS, 2004.
    • Busky, Donald. Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey, Praeger/Greenwood (2000), p. 4.
    • Heywood, Andrew. Politics: Second Edition, Palgrave (2002), p. 61.
    • Offer, John. Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments, Routledge (UK) (2000), p. 243.
  25. Franks, Benjamin (August 2013). Freeden, Michael; Stears, Marc (eds.). "Anarchism". The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies. Oxford University Press: 385–404. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.013.0001.
  26. Rothbard, Murray. "Are Libertarians 'Anarchists'?". Lew Rockwell.com. Retrieved 1 April 2020.
  27. See the following sources:
    • K, David. "What is Anarchism?" Bastard Press (2005).
    • Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible, London: Fontana Press, 1992 (ISBN 0-00-686245-4) Chapter 38.
    • MacSaorsa, Iain. "Is 'anarcho' capitalism against the state?" Spunk Press (archive).
    • Wells, Sam. "Anarcho-Capitalism is Not Anarchism, and Political Competition is Not Economic Competition" Frontlines 1 (January 1979).
  28. See the following sources:
    • Peikoff, Leonard. 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand' Dutton Adult (1991) Chapter "Government".
    • Doyle, Kevin. 'Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias' New York: Lexington Books, (2002) pp. 447–448.
    • Sheehan, Seán M. 'Anarchism' Reaktion Books, 2003 p. 17.
    • Kelsen, Hans. The Communist Theory of Law. Wm. S. Hein Publishing (1988) p. 110.
    • Egbert. Tellegen, Maarten. Wolsink 'Society and Its Environment: an introduction' Routledge (1998) p. 64.
    • Jones, James 'The Merry Month of May' Akashic Books (2004) pp. 37–38.
    • Sparks, Chris. Isaacs, Stuart 'Political Theorists in Context' Routledge (2004) p. 238.
    • Bookchin, Murray. 'Post-Scarcity Anarchism' AK Press (2004) p. 37.
    • Berkman, Alexander. 'Life of an Anarchist' Seven Stories Press (2005) p. 268.

Bibliography
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.