Couldn’t he have just whistled it?

Lorraine: Of course I'm aware that's advertised-as-free-market not principled-free-market. Surely you're aware that mentions of the free market in the former context far outnumber the latter.

No doubt, but when people associate crazy and contradictory things with a label (*), I think it helps to point out that they are contradictory, and to encourage people to get clearer on the terms that they use.

(*) A fate in which the label "free markets" is not alone; for example, I just read a news story in which I was informed that the Republican candidate for Senate in my state is "practically an Anarchist" (!)).

Lorraine: I'd describe the ideological agenda of the World Bank/IMF not as free market or free trade but 'separation of economy and state.' ... But I think it's an accurate description of what these institutions are trying to force on the human race.

That seems like a very odd description of institutions whose activities consist of governments loaning money to other governments so that the latter set of governments can then transfer it to large corporations, including both local capitalists and MNCs, along with all kinds of government land seizures and government-backed monopoly concessions. Whatever that may be (and it's a lot of things), it's certainly not a separation of economy and state.

Lorraine: The result is of course obvious to all left tendencies; a market economy in which capital has practically friction-free mobility, while the mobility of labor remains very tightly constrained. I'm not ready to attribute all the unfairness built into the actually-existing market economy to the deck being stacked in favor of capital over labor, or to statist manipulations in general, ...

Well, O.K., I don't disagree with you about any of that. (Of course, as an Anarchist I think the statist stacking of the deck is really, really important. But I don't think it's the end of story.) However, I don't think my point had much to do with any of that. It was simply that it seems like there are important points at which your views happen to overlap with the views of professed free-marketeers -- not only the views of mutualists/free-market anti-capitalists like me, but also even with the views of creepy conventionally pro-capitalist smaller-government types. The point is not that you have the same reasons for coming to those conclusions, or that you should like or even want to associate yourself with the latter. It's that it would be strangely self-limiting to swear off an important position (like, say, opposition to the IMF/World Bank, or support for decriminalizing immigration) simply because your views happen to overlap, on that particular point, with folks who you "tribally" feel uncomfortable with. Presumably they like breathing, too, but that's not a reason to give up on it.

Lorraine: ... partly because it's a big leap of faith, and partly, admittedly, because of my tribal distaste for certain parties who would be (arguably) vindicated by such a finding.

Well, um, O.K., that's perhaps an explanation for why you might hesitate to come to a particular conclusion, but is it a good reason for you to do so?

... For my own reference, by "scientific" here do you mean anything stronger than "systematic" or "methodical"? If so, what else do you mean? In any case: do

Lorraine: And I'm considerably more uncomfortable about being on the 'free-market' side of any issue.

Really? Isn't that a really self-limiting sort of position to take? I mean, the free market position, even from the most vulgar capitalist sorts of pseudo-free-market small-governmentalist "libertarians," include opposition to government bail-outs for failing capitalist banks, opposition to politicized neoliberal government loans and "development" projects by the IMF and World Bank, principled opposition to the Drug War, support for free immigration, support for the complete decriminalization of sex workers, etc. etc. Do you let that stop you, or make you feel uncomfortable, with coming out against bailouts, or for immigrant rights? If so, why? If not, isn't that a good example of letting your own commitments drive your politics, rather than accidental overlaps or associations with free-market thinking?

Organism and RadGeek: Both of you are appealing to the belief that we are judged by the company we keep.

Maybe that's how we are judged, but I don't think that's what I was appealing to. People who take my (traditional Anarchist) use of the word "libertarian" to mean that I'm on some kind of Libertarian Party tip; they just haven't been educated about what the word "libertarian" means, and so they think I'm talking about a different kind of company than the company I actually do keep. (Remember, I came to this market Anarchist gig through social Anarchism, and the folks I hang out with are generally fellow (A)s or other radical leftists -- not LPers.) Of course, the word "libertarian" is what throws folks off; but there's a reason why the common usage of the word has become so confused, and I have reasons for wanting to stick to something like the traditional Anarchist usage of the word, and to disabuse people of those confusions insofar as I can.

Same deal for "Anarchist," except that the associations people have with that aren't so much systematically wrong, as just completely random and out of left field. Some people think it means I'm a punk rock scenester (I'm not, although I got nothing agin' 'em), or a Black Blocker (ditto); others seem to think that it means I'm a primitivist; others that I'm some kind of hermit opposed to human society as such; others that I'm basically one step away from being in an al-Qaeda sleeper cell; others that I'm a closet Marxist-Leninist; others that I'm five steps to the Right of Sarah Palin or some kind of closet corporate-fascist; etc. etc. etc. Typically, they look at the word "Anarchy" and they see in it, not "the company I keep," but whatever political outcome they happen to fear the most, and take that to be what I'm for.

The solution, I think, is not to avoid the label, but to make productive use of the confusion that it provokes -- by taking it as a "teachable moment," if I may apologize for the pat phrase, and just give the quickest pitch I can about the difference between lawlessness and disorder, and why I, as an Anarchist, am not looking to replace order with violence, but rather to undermine a violent coercive order, and build up an alternative, consensual social order in its place.

**dbzer0:** > the first is that I do not expect that in a society where valid alternatives exist outside of rent and wage-slavery, anyone would willingly choose to lose his freedom under them Come on, man, this is obviously stacking the deck. My point was that hiring out the use of capital that somebody else owns is not the same thing as "wage slavery." You then come back and tell me that nobody would choose to be a wage slave without her options being artificially constrained. Well, O.K., but how is that a reply to what I said? > you are not an equal to your boss, no matter how much you stretch this I didn't say that you were "an equal to your boss." What I said is that the fact that, under present conditions, capitalists can act as *bosses*, and demand that people who labor on capital must act as *employees*, is an artefact of the coercive social context in which those exchanges occur. In a context where people don't generally rely on these kind of relationships, and aren't forced into depending on them for survival, things may be different in the occasional circumstances where it *does* seem likely to be useful. Of course, much as I expected, your reply is that there are *no* conditions under which it would be useful. This strikes me as a failure of imagination, not a failure of the theories. Can't you think of any case in which, in a free and happy republic of labor, you might still need to use land or capital *temporarily*, without wanting to take on the costs and responsibilities involved in full ownership? You can't think of a case in which you might want to, say, rent out a room in a town that you're only going to be in for a couple months (even though you could, presumably, buy the room, or erect your own lean-to on a vacant lot just down the street, or ask for a room down at the local communal worker's dormitory, or whatever)? Or think of any way to enter into that sort of relationship without being dominated? Really? > the relations of a market are never between equals. Someone always needs something more than the other and therefore is in a more subservient position Has it occurred to you that *two* things change hands in a quid-pro-quo market exchange? When the exchange between Jones and Smith is a free one, it happens because Jones needs what Smith has more than she needs what she already has, and because Smith needs what Jones has more than she needs what *she* already has. So I have all these tomatoes I just picked from my garden, and I can't use them all (in any case, the marginal tomato is a lot less valuable to me than the first 20 tomatoes that were already sitting in my fruit bowl). On the other hand, my neighbor has some cilantro and I need cilantro in order to make salsa. She needs the cilantro a lot less than she needs tomatoes. So each of is is in a position of needing something more than the other, and each of us in a position of needing something less than the other; which allows us to enter into a mutual exchange where we each get something out of the relationship. Are the actual exchanges that occur in marketplaces today very much like this happy, simple story? No, they're not. The answer has nothing to do with the act of market exchange per se, and everything to do with the political economy of capitalism. As for the the linked post is insulting, uncharitable to the people you are supposedly replying to in it, and, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to this conversation, except insofar as it's another example of your repeated efforts to interpret Market Anarchist views as uncharitably as possible. Certainly, I don't know what a series of complaints about people who reply to anticapitalist arguments with "It's libertarian if no fraud or violence is involved" is supposed to have to do with this conversation (neither William nor I said anything of the sort). Nor grousing about how people who aren't convinced by dbzer0's declaratory judgment that, say, "crypto-feudalism" or "widespread wage-slavery" *are* "very possible authoritarian results of propertarian markets" must be dishonestly playing both sides of the fence. Really? Perhaps the real counterparts of your unnamed, unquoted interlocutors value *both* free markets and anti-capitalism, for independent reasons, and are trying to work out the best ways to interconnect those commitments with each other rather than subordinating one goal to the other. In any case, if somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, first, to say that under those conditions market exchanges *maybe might* turn out to be authoritarian, then you've misunderstood the meaning of the word "possible." (The claim isn't that any set of conditions *guarantee* libertarian relationships in a marketplace, it's that they make them *possible*.) If somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, second, to act as if they are now just unwilling or unable to bring themselves to considering alternative, non-market-mediated forms of social relationships, then that's walloping on an obvious strawman. Saying that commercial exchanges can be O.K. is not the same thing as saying that they are universally desirable in every field of life, let alone that they are rationally mandatory, or just identical with libertarianism, or what have you. And neither William nor I has said anything like the latter. If you got complaints with the voluntaryists or the less critical agorists, fine, whatever, but what do they have to do with this discussion? I'm not on that tip.

**dbzer0:** > the first is that I do not expect that in a society where valid alternatives exist outside of rent and wage-slavery, anyone would willingly choose to lose his freedom under them Come on, man, this is obviously stacking the deck. My point was that hiring out the use of capital that somebody else owns is not the same thing as "wage slavery." You then come back and tell me that nobody would choose to be a wage slave without her options being artificially constrained. Well, O.K., but how is that a reply to what I said? > you are not an equal to your boss, no matter how much you stretch this I didn't say that you were "an equal to your boss." What I said is that the fact that, under present conditions, capitalists can act as *bosses*, and demand that people who labor on capital must act as *employees*, is an artefact of the coercive social context in which those exchanges occur. In a context where people don't generally rely on these kind of relationships, and aren't forced into depending on them for survival, things may be different in the occasional circumstances where it *does* seem likely to be useful. Of course, much as I expected, your reply is that there are *no* conditions under which it would be useful. This strikes me as a failure of imagination, not a failure of the theories. Can't you think of any case in which, in a free and happy republic of labor, you might still need to use land or capital *temporarily*, without wanting to take on the costs and responsibilities involved in full ownership? You can't think of a case in which you might want to, say, rent out a room in a town that you're only going to be in for a couple months (even though you could, presumably, buy the room, or erect your own lean-to on a vacant lot just down the street, or ask for a room down at the local communal worker's dormitory, or whatever)? Or think of any way to enter into that sort of relationship without being dominated? Really? > the relations of a market are never between equals. Someone always needs something more than the other and therefore is in a more subservient position Has it occurred to you that *two* things change hands in a quid-pro-quo market exchange? When the exchange between Jones and Smith is a free one, it happens because Jones needs what Smith has more than she needs what she already has, and because Smith needs what Jones has more than she needs what *she* already has. So I have all these tomatoes I just picked from my garden, and I can't use them all (in any case, the marginal tomato is a lot less valuable to me than the first 20 tomatoes that were already sitting in my fruit bowl). On the other hand, my neighbor has some cilantro and I need cilantro in order to make salsa. She needs the cilantro a lot less than she needs tomatoes. So each of is is in a position of needing something more than the other, and each of us in a position of needing something less than the other; which allows us to enter into a mutual exchange where we each get something out of the relationship. Are the actual exchanges that occur in marketplaces today very much like this happy, simple story? No, they're not. The answer has nothing to do with the act of market exchange per se, and everything to do with the political economy of capitalism. As for the the linked post is insulting, uncharitable to the people you are supposedly replying to in it, and, as far as I can tell, irrelevant to this conversation, except insofar as it's another example of your repeated efforts to interpret Market Anarchist views as uncharitably as possible. Certainly, I don't know what a series of complaints about people who reply to anticapitalist arguments with "It's libertarian if no fraud or violence is involved" is supposed to have to do with this conversation (neither William nor I said anything of the sort). Nor grousing about how people who aren't convinced by dbzer0's declaratory judgment that, say, "crypto-feudalism" or "widespread wage-slavery" *are* "very possible authoritarian results of propertarian markets" must be dishonestly playing both sides of the fence. Really? Perhaps the real counterparts of your unnamed, unquoted interlocutors value *both* free markets and anti-capitalism, for independent reasons, and are trying to work out the best ways to interconnect those commitments with each other rather than subordinating one goal to the other. In any case, if somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, first, to say that under those conditions market exchanges *maybe might* turn out to be authoritarian, then you've misunderstood the meaning of the word "possible." (The claim isn't that any set of conditions *guarantee* libertarian relationships in a marketplace, it's that they make them *possible*.) If somebody says "It is *possible* for market exchanges to be a libertarian social relationship under the right conditions" and your reply to them is, second, to act as if they are now just unwilling or unable to bring themselves to considering alternative, non-market-mediated forms of social relationships, then that's walloping on an obvious strawman. Saying that commercial exchanges can be O.K. is not the same thing as saying that they are universally desirable in every field of life, let alone that they are rationally mandatory, or just identical with libertarianism, or what have you. And neither William nor I has said anything like the latter. If you got complaints with the voluntaryists or the less critical agorists, fine, whatever, but what do they have to do with this discussion? I'm not on that tip.

**dbzer0:** > I call all money that is earned by labour (i.e. all money you earn by selling the surplus value you create) "wage" and all money earned by the fact that you are the owner of capital, "profit". You can call it whatever you want, but since you were responding it to William, isn't it also important to figure out what *he* means when *he* says "profit"? However you may use the words, he may be including social relationships that exist outside the context of current, actually existing, state regimented, plutocratically sustained boss/wage-laborer hierarchies. (Indeed, you might be able to glean the fact that he is including these by the fact that he mentions them in the comment you were replying to.) I don't think that the issue here is *purely* definitional. There is no doubt something that you and William disagree on. But the question is what it is and why. If you're imagining that the argument here is over something like "wage-slavery and rent" as it is in this modern world, you're probably mistaken about where the ball lies. If there's an argument here, it's an argument about what to say about renting out the use of land or capital in a society where people are not *artificially forced into being dependent* on it by political violence or other forms of interpersonal domination. To act as if the use of the word "profit" instantly transports us out of that social context, and into the context of a world in which these kind of exchanges happen only in the context of politically-enforced wage-slavery and land monopoly, strikes me decidedly uncharitable to your conversation partner here. > You're in fact telling me that in a free society, there would by necessity be no bosses or landlords. Well, no, the "by necessity" is something you added, not something I said. I don't think there are a lot of "by necessities" in a free society -- that's what it means for the society to be free. What I'm saying is that the rigid social context, in which all life-sustaining work *has* to be paying work, and all paying work *has* to be work for a capitalist, and your home *has* to be either rented from a landlord or mortgaged to a banker, etc., is the result of political coercion. A free society would have little of that; it might even have none of that; but if we're talking about rent or wage-labor, there are three separate questions: (1) whether or not it would be categorically eliminated; (2) whether or not the *predominance* of those forms of exchange would be undermined and overwhelmed by more autonomous alternatives; and (3) whether or not *dependence* on that kind of exchange would be undermined and dissolved. What I was saying had to do with (2) and (3); it didn't have much to do with (1). (My interest is not to burn out rent or profits from capital concentration wherever they might possibly occur; it's to change the social and economic context in which exchanges are occurring, from a context of supplication and command, to a context of exchanges of value among equals.) > I think that trying to use the LTV as a normative proposition is unworkable. I agree with you that normative versions of the LTV are not especially workable, either as theories about the ethics of exchange, or as practical guidance about how people should conduct themselves. Insofar as I have any interest in the LTV, it's in suitably qualified Tuckerite versions of it. (Which is an explanatory theory, but a rather different kind from the Marxian kind of theory that you seem to be advocating.) > If the issue is again one of definitions, then shouldn't it be up to the one offering the criticism (in this case William) to make sure he's arguing against the concepts as I'm using them? If you're the only one that he's arguing with, sure, but you're not, so the question of whose usage he needs to track gets rather more complicated. In any case, the reason I mention it is to raise an alert, not to try to offer an answer to the question. If you're going to be arguing about "whether the LTV applies at all," you're going to need to take some account of the amount of disagreement historically over what the LTV even means, or what it's supposed to do. (What it would mean for Marx's LTV to "apply" is very different from what it would mean for Tucker's. And Tucker's own views about what the LTV meant changed and developed over time.) Simply insisting that you have the real meaning of the thing in hand, that it's not a goddamned X and it is Y instead, is probably going to be a lot less helpful than trying to figure out what your conversation partner means when *he* says that it doesn't work. Particularly when part of his point may have something to do with the general haziness of the concepts involved, and people's tendency to mix up different notions of labor value, some more useful and others much less, when they try to apply the LTV to real world problems of life.

**dbzer0:** > I call all money that is earned by labour (i.e. all money you earn by selling the surplus value you create) "wage" and all money earned by the fact that you are the owner of capital, "profit". You can call it whatever you want, but since you were responding it to William, isn't it also important to figure out what *he* means when *he* says "profit"? However you may use the words, he may be including social relationships that exist outside the context of current, actually existing, state regimented, plutocratically sustained boss/wage-laborer hierarchies. (Indeed, you might be able to glean the fact that he is including these by the fact that he mentions them in the comment you were replying to.) I don't think that the issue here is *purely* definitional. There is no doubt something that you and William disagree on. But the question is what it is and why. If you're imagining that the argument here is over something like "wage-slavery and rent" as it is in this modern world, you're probably mistaken about where the ball lies. If there's an argument here, it's an argument about what to say about renting out the use of land or capital in a society where people are not *artificially forced into being dependent* on it by political violence or other forms of interpersonal domination. To act as if the use of the word "profit" instantly transports us out of that social context, and into the context of a world in which these kind of exchanges happen only in the context of politically-enforced wage-slavery and land monopoly, strikes me decidedly uncharitable to your conversation partner here. > You're in fact telling me that in a free society, there would by necessity be no bosses or landlords. Well, no, the "by necessity" is something you added, not something I said. I don't think there are a lot of "by necessities" in a free society -- that's what it means for the society to be free. What I'm saying is that the rigid social context, in which all life-sustaining work *has* to be paying work, and all paying work *has* to be work for a capitalist, and your home *has* to be either rented from a landlord or mortgaged to a banker, etc., is the result of political coercion. A free society would have little of that; it might even have none of that; but if we're talking about rent or wage-labor, there are three separate questions: (1) whether or not it would be categorically eliminated; (2) whether or not the *predominance* of those forms of exchange would be undermined and overwhelmed by more autonomous alternatives; and (3) whether or not *dependence* on that kind of exchange would be undermined and dissolved. What I was saying had to do with (2) and (3); it didn't have much to do with (1). (My interest is not to burn out rent or profits from capital concentration wherever they might possibly occur; it's to change the social and economic context in which exchanges are occurring, from a context of supplication and command, to a context of exchanges of value among equals.) > I think that trying to use the LTV as a normative proposition is unworkable. I agree with you that normative versions of the LTV are not especially workable, either as theories about the ethics of exchange, or as practical guidance about how people should conduct themselves. Insofar as I have any interest in the LTV, it's in suitably qualified Tuckerite versions of it. (Which is an explanatory theory, but a rather different kind from the Marxian kind of theory that you seem to be advocating.) > If the issue is again one of definitions, then shouldn't it be up to the one offering the criticism (in this case William) to make sure he's arguing against the concepts as I'm using them? If you're the only one that he's arguing with, sure, but you're not, so the question of whose usage he needs to track gets rather more complicated. In any case, the reason I mention it is to raise an alert, not to try to offer an answer to the question. If you're going to be arguing about "whether the LTV applies at all," you're going to need to take some account of the amount of disagreement historically over what the LTV even means, or what it's supposed to do. (What it would mean for Marx's LTV to "apply" is very different from what it would mean for Tucker's. And Tucker's own views about what the LTV meant changed and developed over time.) Simply insisting that you have the real meaning of the thing in hand, that it's not a goddamned X and it is Y instead, is probably going to be a lot less helpful than trying to figure out what your conversation partner means when *he* says that it doesn't work. Particularly when part of his point may have something to do with the general haziness of the concepts involved, and people's tendency to mix up different notions of labor value, some more useful and others much less, when they try to apply the LTV to real world problems of life.

Organism,

I reach, man, but isn't that going to be a problem with any set of terms that you use to describe yourself? Part of the reason a lot of us stick the "left" on the front there because if I just go by "libertarian" a lot of people will think that I'm going in for some kind of Ron Paul, or (worse!) Bob Barr bullshit. When I go by "Anarchist" (what I usually go by), people think all kinds of crazy things -- the label tends to be like a kind of political Rorschach test. Usually driven by whatever political outcome they fear the most. Of course, you can argue them out of these sorts of reactions to the terms "libertarian" or "Anarchist." But presumably you could also argue them out of the same sort of reaction to "Left." (I just start talking about the divergence between state socialism and the anti-authoritarian Left -- Proudhon, Tucker, Bakunin, various strands in the anti-war, black liberation, and feminist movements, etc. etc. -- which may convince them or may not, but at least will get them to start thinking about the premises that they started off with.)