Stephan,

Well, I don’t think I was denying that government benefits from inflation…. The claim that some companies also benefit, and do so at the expense of other economic actors, is hardly rivalrous with the claim that government benefits too. But it came up in this thread specifically in connection to a question about ways in which large corporations are subsidized; so it seems relevant to point out that early receipt of inflationary money-surges is one of those ways. The benefits which the state derives, while perhaps larger and certainly morally worse (since e.g. they pay for murdering Afghans and other noble projects), are somewhat less relevant to that particular topic of conversation, and hence less likely to get mentioned….

As for how “real” the “real advantage” is, well, it depends on the line of business you are in, and where you are in the queue. In any case the state does not simply print up money and use it to buy durable goods; rather, what happens is that one branch of government invents balance-sheet money, loans it out to banks in the Federal Reserve system, and then those banks turn around and purchase up a number of investments, very prominently including bonds from other branches of government. Then, downstream, the state uses that money to buy buildings, bombers, prison-camps, etc. The state gets these things for “free,” but not (directly) because of the invented balance-sheet money (which they have to pay back with interest), but rather because they can “pay it back” by taxing the rest of us. The bond-buyers essentially benefit (in part) by having one branch of government lay out artificially cheap financing by which they can buy into a share of tax farming from another branch of government. This is a rather different position to be in than your hypothetical builder. Unlike in a Greenbacker scheme, they are in fact upstream from state fiscal policy, not downstream from it, and the issue is not so much that their line of business would be less profitable as that it would simply be impossible. First recipients like Chase (say) essentially have no line of business at all except for the manipulation of sources of artificially easy credit, and have repeatedly shown that the main consequence of credit tightening up to reflect market realities is that they suffer from catastrophic cascading business failures, and would be bankrupt if not for literally trillions of dollars of assistance from both fiscal and monetary policy-makers.

Thanks! I hope you’ll enjoy.

The reference to the “inflation spigot” is a reference to the streams of fiat-currency purchasing power proceeding from central banks outward to their clients. The companies immediately at the spigot are almost all banks and financial corporations like CitiGroup, Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, et al. Those “near” the spigot are the companies that receive the most significant influx of loans and investment from the financiers who are right at the spigot. (So, for example, Fortune 500 companies as a group tend to be pretty close — due to their reliable access to, and constant dependence on, heavy external financing, institutional investment, and very big lines of cheap credit from big international banks. Capital-intensive heavy industry, for example. Smaller companies tend to be somewhat further away. Wage-workers and consumers tend to be furthest away (although bubble-money can always reach some segment of wage-workers — e.g., homeowners, during the mortgage-financing bubble — it comes at the expense of all the other segments, through ratcheted-up costs of living, relative declines in real wages and the purchasing power of savings, etc.).

Thanks Shawn!

Incidentally, when you've got the book, here's a fun exercise you can do at home: take the excerpts from General Idea of the Revolution in our book, and then take the excerpts in Iaian's big new reader, and put them next to each other, so you can see how often the bits that Iaian chose to omit are the parts that we chose to include, and how often the parts we chose to include are parts that Iaian chose to omit. Of course, in both cases we have the excuse that it is but one piece in a much larger collection, and at least in our case we had the the overarching task of trying to select and present some specific threads in Proudhon's writing -- not the whole tapestry -- and in particular those threads that were especially prominent in the conversation that the book is intended to introduce. But, the comparison is fun and probably instructive nevertheless.

(* When we prepared the excerpt, we explicitly set about making an excerpt that would try to present something like "the individualists' Proudhon," i.e., something representative of the thread in Proudhon's thought that Tucker and his correspondents most sympathized with and drew the most from; hence the explicit disclaimer in the Introduction about what's in the excerpt and what's not in the excerpt.)

Stephan:

I have not read your book yet but my criticisms of some left-libs was not meant to apply to your book …

O.K., fair enough. I had taken your comments about db0′s views as more directly aimed at the book because of the broader context of the discussion in this post, and the way that people were discussing different rhetorical strategies (“market-capitalism,” “capitalism” vs. “corporatism,” etc. etc. as alternatives to the “markets, not capitalism” approach of the book). It sounds like I jumped the gun on that, and if so, I apologize.

As for communists and fairness, well, I am not a communist, but I hardly think that anarchist communists have nothing to say that’s worth understanding (how much or little there is depends on how much they lean on the “anarchist” part, and how much they lean on the other); and in any case I do think that it’s quite as important to clearly understand the details of ideas you oppose as it is to clearly understand the details of ideas you feel more sympathy for. The best defenses of private property, as I see it, come from a clear understanding of what rival proposals offer, and what they threaten.

The logic, and it’s a ruling class logic, seems to be that if the productivity gains are attributable mainly to automation, then the income gains should rightly and justly accrue to capital rather than labor. I see no way out of this trap without some kind of “social dividend.”

I don’t know whether or not that claim about the source of productivity gains is true. But if it is true, then my view is that the decoupling is the result of the artificial choke-points on production that political privilege has enabled capitalists to monopolize; that without those choke-points they wouldn’t be able to extract the rents they extract, and the way out of the trap is a combination of (1) the elimination of those political privileges and the resulting monopolies; and (2) co-operative worker ownership of the means of production.

Sometimes it is used as a reason to bring back the social norms of the 1950′s, i.e. today’s job market is overcrowded BECAUSE of the influx of women into the workforce.

That’s an argument some people have made, sure, but it’s certainly not my argument… my whole point is that the alleged “prosperity,” as far as the numerical majority of the population was concerned, was a sham. Trying to reinstate the sham by bullying or forcing more women out of the paid workforce is more or less exactly the opposite of the upshot I take from all this. The problem as I see it is not the number of workers competing for a scarce supply of employment, but rather the system of violent political and economic privilege which has made livelihoods so scarce for working people in the first place. (In part, by making a decent livelihood so dependent on maintaining a relationship with a capitalist employer, rather than on your own labor or co-operation with your fellow workers.) Get rid of the enforced scarcity, and the competition won’t be a problem.

Sometimes the “managerial” character of that time period is framed as something from which we are now somehow liberated, free to pursue our livelihood through “entrepreneurship” instead of the rapidly disappearing economic phenomenon called employment. This is the tactic of people who frame things in terms of “security society” vs. “opportunity society.”

OK, but that’s not how I frame it. My whole point above was that the hyperbolic claims made on behalf of the “entrepreneurial,” “non-managerial” features of neoliberal economies are also a sham for everyone but a select few, just as the “prosperity” and “economic security” of post-WWII were shams for everyone but a select few — the shift from the 1950s (say) to the 1990s (say) was not a shift in the character of the underlying system, but just in its advertising slogans and its strategies for perpetuating itself. I’m all for entreprneurial rather than managerial economies (just as I’m all for prosperity rather than poverty), but the whole point is that what we’ve got right now is nothing like that, in spite of common claims to the contrary.

I respect that you are (I think) entrepreneurship-positive, but such framing is of course most likely coming from people advocating capitalism rather than markets.

Sure. That’s why I think it’s so essential to expose the differences between neoliberalism and genuinely freed markets. I just don’t think that a romanticized picture of the old Vital Center political economy is very useful for that purpose. Better to contrast it with more radical alternatives, not of a world in which people were (allegedly) better treated by corporations and more secure in their relationships with their bosses, but of a world without bosses, and a world where people’s shot at a decent living don’t depend upon how corporations treat them to begin with.

Stephan,

Thank you, by the way, for this (very generous) mention, and for the kind words about how we and our publisher are distributing the book (Minor Compositions does the same thing with everything they publish — part of the reason I am so glad that we have been able to work with them as a publisher). I know that you (not to mention others here) deeply disagree with a lot of what we argue, but I hope that folks here may find a lot of interest to raise some questions and provoke conversation in it, whatever side of those conversations they may be on.

You seem to think that the argument of the book is “people have used the word capitalism to mean nasty things, so we are not going to use the word ‘capitalism’ anymore, even though we advocate the same things that people used to call ‘capitalism.”” But that’s not the argument of the book. It is not primarily a book about political rhetoric. And the main point of the book is that market anarchists do not need to advocate all of the same things that people used to call “capitalism.” The point of a slogan like “Markets Not Capitalism” is that some of those things (individual ownership, free exchange, entrepreneurial discovery…) are worth defending, while others (the wage-labor system, the corporate economy) are not. It has often been claimed that the latter sort of thing is the inevitable or the natural result of the former sort of thing (both by people who intended to defend both markets and capitalism, and by people who intended to attack both markets and capitalism). But the argument of the book is that the underlying causal claim is wrong — that the wage-labor system, the corporate economy, etc. are not the result of free-market dynamics but rather of political privilege. And that freed markets could, or would naturally tend, to look quite different.

You also seem to think that the use of “capitalism” to refer to a free market economy is traditional meaning, and our use of it to refer to (for example) the wage-labor system is some “new” meaning we have assigned to it for dubious rhetorical purposes. But I don’t know what evidence you have for this philological claim. Certainly, you haven’t presented any of it here. Gary Chartier’s essay in Ch. 9 distinguishes three common historical and contemporary meanings of the term “capitalism” — capitalism-1, meaning simply the free market; capitalism-2, meaning state privileges to business; and capitalism-3, meaning economic and social domination of the employer class. The term “capitalisme” in French (and cognate terms “capitalism” in English and “Kapitalismus” in German) first started being used to describe a social or economic system in the early 19th century. When Louis Blanc wrote about “capitalisme” in the 1840s (in his Organisation du Travail) he said that it meant “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others,” and when Proudhon wrote about “capitalisme” in the 1860s (in his La Guerre et la Paix), he said that it meant “Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour.” Neither is clearly identical with capitalism-1. Blanc’s definition may be capitalism-2, or it may be capitalism-3, depending on what sort of “appropriation” and “exclusion” he has in mind. (Certainly, a lot of the appropriating and excluding that was going on in France in the 1840s had nothing to do with free markets and everything to do with state privilege.) Proudhon’s definition is simply capitalism-3. Now, maybe you think the word shifting in meaning from these early uses; lots of words do. “Silly” used to mean holy, and “snob” used to mean a member of the working class. The fact that a word was traditionally used one way is no argument for continuing to use it that way. But the claim that we are simply coining “new” terms because we don’t like what became of the “old” ones, and we are somehow too “lazy” to make our arguments according to the old usages, is misleading, under-argued, and completely uncharitable, not to mention being pretty close to completely the opposite of the actual history of the words involved.

Thanks for the kind words! I hope you'll enjoy it.

On "private ownership of the means of production," I think there's a potential difficulty there that the language tends to conceal. I don't know how much you'll agree at the end of the day, but this discussion may help explain why I don't think that p.o.o.t.m.o.p. formulations help much in laying out the view that we (left-wing market anarchists, I mean; YMMV) are trying to lay out.

My own view is that the parts of p.o.o.t.m.o.p. formulations that are worth defending are already contained in the meaning of "the market form;" freed markets are not just spaces for iterated exchange but also (I think) involve some background structure, including decentralized individual ownership of property (with no de jure limits on the extent or the kind of goods that can be amassed -- it's explicitly intended to include capital goods and land, among other things).

Does that help clarify?

Stephan,

Roderick didn’t say that we “merely oppose the word but not the substance.” He said that the “substance” we’re opposed to is not “capital accumulation,” but rather something else.