[Editors Note: This essay is part of BHL's Symposium on Left-Libertarianism. Click on the link to see the other essays.]

Left-libertarians are sometimes known to stick on distinctions and the definitions of words. We contest commonly understood definitions of political ‘rightism’ and ‘leftism;’ we question the terms used in conventional economic debates over ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism,’ ‘free trade agreements,’ ‘intellectual property,’ ‘privatization’ and ‘private ownership’ of the means of production. We have been known to do funny things with verb tenses when it comes to ‘freed’ markets; we brandish subscripts and three-way distinctionsat the drop of a hat. Most famously left-wing market anarchists insist that we defend ‘free markets’ but not ‘capitalism’ – insisting that these are not synonyms, and drawing a sharp analytic distinction between the market form of exchange, and conventionally capitalist patterns of economic ownership and social control.

There are some interesting discussions to be had about that distinction; but to-day I’d like to expand on a distinction sometimes left out in discussing distinctions between the “markets” that left-libertarians defend and the “capitalism” that we condemn – two different senses that are often jammed together within the first half of that distinction – within the concept of market relationships. The distinction between the two is crucial, and both advocates and critics of market economics have neglected it much too often: when we talk about “markets,” and “free markets” especially, there are really two different definitions we might be working with – one broad, and one narrow.

What is “a market,” ultimately? It is a set of human relationships. And it is a notion with a certain history and familiar examples. But in modern social and economic debates, “market” has taken on meanings far beyond any concrete marketplace. What has been abstracted away, and what has been held as essential? The kind of relationships we are likely to have in mind varies, depending on which elements of marketplaces we have chosen to focus on – in particular, whether we focus (1) on the elements of individual choice, negotiated contracts and free competition; or (2) on the elements of quid pro quo exchange and commercial relationships.

Focusing on (1) gives us a concept of markets as free exchange. When market anarchists talk about markets, or especially about “the market,” we often mean the sum of all voluntary exchanges – and when we speak of freed markets, we mean the discussion to encompass any economic order based – to the extent that it is based – on respect for individual property, consensual exchange, freedom of association, and entrepreneurial discovery. So to say that something ought to be “left up to the market” is simply to say that it should be handled as a matter of choice and negotiated agreements among free individuals, rather than by coercive government.

Focusing on (2) gives us quite a different concept, markets as the cash nexus. We often use the term “market” to refer to a particular form of acquiring and exchanging property, and the institutions that go along with it – to refer, specifically, to commerce and for-profit business, typically mediated by currency or by financial instruments that are denominated in units of currency. Whereas free exchange is a matter of the background conditions behind economic and social agreements (that it is mutually consensual, not coerced), the cash nexus is a matter of the terms of the agreements themselves – of agreeing to conduct matters on a paying basis, in a relatively impersonal quid-pro-quo exchange.

Now one of the central points of free market economics is that “markets” in these two senses are positively interrelated. When they take place within the context of a system of free exchange, there can be a positive, even essential role for social relationships that are based on the cash nexus – producing, investing, buying and selling at market prices – in the sustaining and flourishing of a free society. But while linked, they are distinct. Markets taken broadly – as free exchange – can include cash-nexus relationships – but also much more. Free exchange may, in fact, include many features that compete with, limit, transform, or even undermine impersonal cash-nexus relationships in particular domains. Family sharing is part of a free market; charity is part of a free market; gifts are part of a free market; informal exchange and barter are part of a free market. In a freed market there would be nothing to outlaw the features of business as usual in our actually-existing economy – wage labor, rent, formalized business organizations, corporate insurance, corporate finance and the like would all be available as theoretically possible market outcomes.

But so would alternative arrangements for making a living – including many arrangements that clearly have nothing to do with business as usual or capitalism as we know it: worker and consumer co-ops, community free clinics and mutual aid medical coverage are examples of voluntary exchange; so are wildcat, voluntary labor unions. So are consensual communes, narrower or broader experiments with gift economies, and other alternatives to prevailing corporate capitalism. This broad definition of markets is so broad that you might suggestively describe a fully free market, in this sense, as the space of maximal consensually-sustained social experimentation.

But while the freedom and growth of spaces for economic and social experimentation is always something to be desired and defended from a libertarian standpoint, the value of a cash nexus, in economic and social relationships, depends entirely on the social context within which it is embedded. Free-market anticapitalists have pointed out the central role that “pro-business” government intervention has played in shaping our daily encounters with bills and business, livelihoods and labor, commodities and consumption. Political privileges to corporate business models, government monopolies and captive markets are deeply entrenched, centrally positioned, pervasive in the actually-existing corporate economy, and overwhelming in scale. Moreover, interlocking government interventions systematically act to restrain, crowd out, bulldoze or simply outlaw less hierarchical, less commercial, grassroots or informal-sector alternatives to corporate-dominated rigged markets for daily needs, whether in making a living, or in housing, or health care, or access to credit, or mutual aid, insurance and crisis relief.

These deep, structural features of the economy shove us into labor, housing and financial markets on artificially desperate terms; they deform the markets we are pushed into through an intense concentration of resources in the hands of the privileged, without the fallback of small-scale enterprise and grassroots alternatives that might otherwise prove far more attractive. Left-libertarians insist on the importance of this point because in discussions of market economics it is so easily missed, mistaken simply as business as usual and everyday life in a market economy. But when it is missed, people who oppose the worst inequities of the rigged-market system too easily blame the inequities on the freedom, or unregulated character, of market institutions; while those who wish to stand up for freed markets find themselves on the defensive, trying to defend indefensible institutions when they should be pointing out that their worst features are the product of market constraints.

When leftists complain about commercialism gone mad, about the looming presence of bosses and landlords and debts in our day-to-day lives, about the crises that workers face every month just to pay the rent or the medical bills, we must realize that they are talking about real social evils, which arise from markets in one sense, but not in another. They are talking, specifically, about what the cash nexus is made into by political privileges and government monopolies, when competing alternatives among businesses, and competing alternatives to conventional business models, have been paralyzed, crowded out, or simply outlawed by the actions of the corporate state. And they are talking about social relationships that libertarians need not, and should not, waste any energy on defending. Whatever positive and liberating roles cash-nexus relationships may have in the context of free exchange – and it is important that they have many – they can just as easily become instruments of alienation and exploitation when forced on unwilling participants, in areas of their life where they don’t need or want them, through the immediate or indirect effects of government force and rigged markets.

Suppose we grant, for argument’s sake, the modest explanatory claim about the dominant players in the capitalist economy – from the business practices of Fortune 500 corporations, to our daily confrontations with employers, landlords or financial corporations. Their size, competitive dominance, and much of their everyday business practices, are substantially the result of the subsidies they receive, the structural privileges they enjoy, and the political constraints on competing businesses, or more informal, less commercial alternatives to their business just as such – competitors who might check them, unseat them, or simply dissolve the need for them in the first place. In an age of multitrillion-dollar bank bailouts, it is not hard to accept that much of actually-existing fortunes and business as usual in the corporate economy as we know it – specifically including much of the abusive power condemned by critics on the Left – are not the result of serving willing customers or ruthlessness in market competition; they are to a great extent the product of exploiting political constraints forged by the alliance of interests between big government and big business.

Even if you accept this explanatory claim, you may may still wonder why left-libertarians insist as confidently that we do that uncontrolled economic competition will not only alter the position of these incumbents, perhaps with some ceteris paribus tendency towards less concentrated wealth and less corporate or businesslike arrangements in economic life – but will positively and qualitatively transform the economic landscape. Left-libertarians are radicals and typically quite optimistic that from fully liberated market processes will naturally emerge the grassroots, alternative economies that they favor, with qualitative social shifts away from (among other things) wage-labor, landlordism, corporate ownership, large firms and to some significant extent corporate commerce as a whole. This is a strong claim, stronger than the explanatory claim alone – call it the bold predictive claim – not only about ceteris paribus tendencies, but about the prospects for mutualistic economies to arise from freed market processes, and to bring about the greater economic equality, social equality, cultural progress, and ecological sustainability that left-libertarians promise to achieve through libertarian means.

Of course, as I have argued at length, there is a straightforward case for a possibility claim that they might arise. A “market economy” in the broad sense need not be an economy dominated by cash nexus relationships, and people might choose to adopt any number of radical experiments. And as as left-libertarians have repeatedly pointed out, the empirical fact that a qualitatively different economy hasn’t yet arisen cannot be explained simply by the dynamics of free markets – we don’t have a free market, and the actually-existing dominant model is (as we have granted) dominant precisely because of the regressive redistribution of wealth and the political constraints that state capitalism has imposed.

The boldness of the bold predictive claim comes, I’d argue, from the combination of two distinct elements of the left-libertarian position. The first – the economic tendency claim – involves a cluster of empirical observations and theoretical developments in economics. It is, really, not so much a single critical claim or a unified theory, as a sort of research programme for a mutualistic market economics, drawing attention to a number of areas for study and discussion. If the modest explanatory claim demonstrates some ceteris paribus tendency towards a weaker and more unstable position for corporations, and towards greater roles for anti-capitalist, non-commercial, informal-sector or independent alternatives, then the stronger economic tendency claim would draw attention to factors affecting the strength of the tendency, and the strength or weakness of countervailing factors that might keep ceteris from staying paribus after all. Areas it marks out for attention include principal-agent problems and knowledge problems in large organizations or hierarchical relationships; the assumption of risk, time horizons, transaction costs and other factors in conventional corporate forms and also in alternative, non-corporate models of ownership, management and financing; the possible shifts in risk tolerance, consumption spending, or interest in social capital under conditions of greater freedom and less precarious material conditions; and many other questions for detailed empirical research that I can only hint at within the scope of this essay.

But in addition to the empirical research programme the economic tendency claim suggests, left-libertarians also defend a second, normative claim, drawing on the possibility of less hierarchical, less formalized, and less commercialized social relationships, and the desirability of conscious, concerted, campaigns of stateless social activism to bring about the social conditions we value. Left-libertarians do not only suggest that employers, management hierarchies, or conventional commercial enterprises will tend to face certain ready-made economic difficulties and instabilities in a freed market; we aim to make ourselves and our neighborhoods more difficult to deal with, by consciously organizing and becoming the alternatives we hope to see emerge. Our leftism is not a research programme only, but an activist manifesto.

The shape of a free society is formed not only by anonymous economic tendencies and “market forces,” but also by conscious social activism and community organizing. “Market forces” are not superhuman entities that push us around from the outside; they are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from our own economic choices. We are market forces, and in markets broadly understood as spaces of freewheeling social experimentation, it is in our hands, and up to us, to make different choices; or shift the range of choices available, through the creative practice of hard-driving social activism, culture jamming, workplace organizing, strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, divestiture, the development of humane alternatives, counter-institutions, and the practice of grassroots solidarity and mutual aid.

This is, of course, simply to state the normative claim; I’ve only outlined the conclusion, not (yet, here) given an argument in its favor. Left-libertarians’ case for stateless social activism rests on a set of arguments that I can only hint at within the space of this essay, but the normative defense of a broadly leftist programme of social and economic activism
may draw support from (1) independent ethical or social considerations in favor of greater autonomy, less hierarchical, less privileged, less rigid, more participatory and more co-operative social relationships. And it may draw support also from (2) arguments in favor of a “thick” conception of libertarianism, drawing from and mutually reinforcing integrated commitments to a radical anti-authoritarianism, and to concerns about broad social dynamics of deference, privilege, participation and autonomy.

At any rate, the normative and activist element of left-libertarian claims about freed markets may help explain the strength of the bold predictive claim, as follows. Market anarchists’ inquiries under the economic tendency claim give us reasons to suggest, more or less strongly, that getting rid of rigged markets and interlocking radical monopolies would be sufficient to bring about a sort of laissez-faire socialism – the natural tendency of freed markets may well be for ownership to be more widely dispersed and for many forms of concentrated social or economic privilege, stripped of the bail-outs and monopolies that sustained them, to collapse under their own weight. But left-libertarians see freed markets as characterized not only by laissez-faire socialism, but also entrepreneurial anti-capitalism: whatever reasons we may have to predict that some concentrations of economic or social power may not simply collapse on their own, left-libertarians, drawing on the resources of grassroots, nonviolent social activism, intend to knock them over. The strength of the predictive claim, then, comes from its double origins: it is both a prophecy about the likely effects of market freedom; and a radical proposal about what to do with what remains.

Nathan:

I agree that more specifics on Chavez would have been helpful. To be fair, this article is intended as an op-ed for circulation in magazines, and given the constraints of the format it's hard to work in a lot in the way of the background. But, if it helps, here's a (very long) report from a former Bolivarian/Chávez sympathizer. It's somewhat out-of-date, since it was published in July 2006 based on a discussion of the situation in January-March 2006, but it should provide a lot of useful starting points and a great deal of detail about the story up to that point: "Venezuela, Socialism to the Highest Bidder" by Nachie, for the Red and Anarchist Action Network.

If you can read Spanish there are of course Venezuelan radical publications that have repeatedly addressed these issues. El Libertario is one of the longest-running critics; you might check out their election-season editorials in the most recent issue (Sep/Oct 2012), their running commentary on the "Boliburguesïa" (Boli-bourgeoisie or Boli-bosses), etc.
My recent post Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

Fortycal: "Our purpose should be to promote freedom, not engage in endless word-mincing and term-juggling."

No doubt. So why are you here bellyaching about how Kevin Carson uses the word "capitalism" wrong, rather than discussing the argument that he communicates in the article? If the argument is a good argument, it can survive any terminological decision, for good or for ill, about the usage of the term "capitalism" (a usage which Kevin makes absolutely clear at the beginning of the article). If it's a bad argument, then it will be bad whether or not you allow it to be read on its own terms.

It's certainly true that in any discussion of statistics on sexual violence, the details of the definition used can significantly change the results. But neither of the sources under discussion (Mary Koss's 1985 study or the CDCP/NIJ National Violence Against Women Survey in 1995-1996) uses a definition of coercion that depends on active, expressed consent, or that would include various forms of, e.g., economic coercion. (These are of course important things to talk about, and Koss's study in particular did also study many forms of emotional, social or economic coercion in sexual relationships other than sexual assault. But the results she found aren't included in the numbers discussing "rape." Koss counted as rape any unwanted sexual encounter where the victim was either forced into sex by the use or threat of violence, or by disabling her with drugs or drink to the point that she was unconscious or could not consent. The NVAWS actually used a more restrictive definition than that: they only counted nonconsensual sex involving penetration, where the victim was forced into sex by violence or by the threat of violence. (So they did not attempt to gather data on rapes committed by disabling the victim with drugs or alcohol.)

The major, order-of-magnitude difference between the numbers that Joe seems to have found in a quick skim, and the numbers that I cite and discuss in the paper, isn't due to different definitions of rape. If he's drawing from the FBI's UCR numbers (as I take it he is), the major, order-of-magnitude difference is due to two things. First, he is presenting numbers that have to do with incidence of rape within a single year, whereas I am presenting numbers that have to do with the prevalence of rape in any year over the course of a lifetime, which is obviously quite a different thing to measure. And second, he is presenting numbers that are based on the number of reports made to the police, whereas I am presenting numbers based on broad, random-sample surveys that don't require contact with the police. But of course there are many reasons why someone would choose not to report a crime to the police, even if the crime happened, and for a lot of reasons rape happens to be a really dramatically underreported crime.

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"Charles Johnson keeps demonstrating that he is an ultra-egalitarian reality-detached cultural communist."

Well, thanks. But you say that like it's supposed to be a bad thing. Oh well; at least I got a Facebook status out of that one.
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Me:

I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism."

vive la insurrection:

The results of enforcing such a thing would lead to catastrophic conclusions.  I don't see what there is to be happy about, other than leftism for leftism sake.

Autolykos:

Thank you for the kind welcome.

If I may, I'd like to present a hypothetical situation to you. Suppose that there's a factory owned by a single individual. He then offers to pay some people from the surrounding area to use the machines in his factory to make things. Would you call the factory owner a "boss"?

I don't know, from the description you gave me. Probably? But it depends on what you have in mind. I think it matters a lot how the pay and the conditions of labor are determined, and that it matters at least as much, probably more, how much the people being paid to work with the machines in the factory are dependent on keeping up that specific relationship with the owner to make their living, i.e., how much they are able to, and how much they actually do, have viable alternative sources of support.

So for example if people are dropping in to the factory without much of a binding obligation over time, are choosing it as just one among a broad range of options for their day-to-day livelihood, and take home some pay for their time or output while they are there, then sure, that sounds a lot more like some horizontal and really fairly casual trade or contract-labor relationships than like bosses and their employees. If they work mainly or only at the factory, over the long term and in an open-ended arrangement, but their "pay" for working their involves not just cash but for example gaining significant shares of ownership in or residual profits from the factory that they are working in then that is also hard to see as a simple boss-employee relationship, although for different reasons (in this case because the more the "employee" is employed in the factory, the more they become a partner rather than a hireling of the owner). Now if you are imagining that they will have a long-term, open-ended, binding arrangement with the owner, can be summoned to report more or less at the owner's will, are mostly or exclusively dependent on keeping that particular job in order to make a living rather than having significant alternative sources of support, etc., then that is starting to sound more like a boss-employee relationship.

Of course all of this is going to be really highly dependent on a lot of specific details. It's easy for something to be a causal contract labor arrangement in name while really being a pretty narrowly confined boss-employee relationship in fact; and it's possible for things that are formally set out as employer-employee relationships to really functionally work out more like a partnership than like employment. In that kind of case I'm more interested in the way the relationship works out de facto than I am in the name that it is called by.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Bullshit. Employer-employee relationships exist VOLUNTARILY. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist

Well, so now I know that you believe that. But I don't know what your argument for it is.

In any case, I do think that, in the current economic landscape, there are a number of important political privileges granted to large corporate employers, and a number of impoverishing and restricting political burdens inflicted on working-class folks. Do you disagree with that claim? If so, why? If not, then we've got to consider what might change if the privileges and the burdens were removed.

And if I think that workers are often forced into depending on an employment relationship in order to make a living, largely as the downstream social result of that set of subsidizing privileges and impoverishing burdens, then that does imply that, ceteris paribus, were the privileges and the burdens to be abolished, then you'd tend, on the margin, to see fewer workers entering into employer-employee relationships. Maybe you disagree with this. But even if so, that is obviously not exactly the same thing as some kind of utopian belief that everybody is equally smart or equally stupid, or that nobody would ever be poor in a freed market.

The real question here is (1) what survival strategies poor people have available to them and which are foreclosed as a result of political pressure; (2) how much the "rich" would be able to find poor workers willing to work for them on conventional wage-labor terms, when fixed costs of living are much lower and when a much richer set of alternative livelihoods are available outside of the corporate economy; and (3) how often ordinary people's flashes of insight or cleverness is frustrated by state-imposed barriers to entry, or how often rich people's stupidities are protected from market consequences by politically protected markets, bailouts, and the suppression of competition.

b/c of the division of labor

O.K. But I don't reject the division of labor, you know. What I think is that in freer markets labor would be divided along different lines from the way it is currently divided. (A co-op of course is a division of labor; the fact that the workers participate in management decisions hardly means that everybody in the shop is doing the same damned thing.)

Also are u going to take a crack at the questions ive asked?

I was in the midst of typing answers to them at apparently the same time as you were firing off this response. Patience, please.

1. and 2. Yes and yes. See here. I happen to be a natural-rightser, and in fact one of a rather fanatical and absolutist kind. Roderick Long is also, for whatever that is worth. (There are left-libertarians who are not natural-rightsers, but of course there are also right-libertarians -- David Friedman, for example -- who are not. The issue is more or less orthogonal to the left-lib/right-lib divide.)

3. I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term was used e.g. by Wendy McElroy or Carl Watner, and I wouldn't call myself a "voluntaryist" as that term seems mostly to be used today within the movement. Not because I am in favor of involuntary social relationships, but rather because when I've encountered the term it usually seems to come along with a pretty hefty package of additional beliefs about ideal libertarian social and political strategy (for example a fairly "thin," anything-that's-peaceful specification of what social or cultural goals libertarians might care or might not care about advancing through non-coercive means). And while I'm happy to get as fire-breathing and radical as they are about defending the principle of consensuality in all social relationships, there is a lot in the package of additional beliefs that I am not necessarily interested in signing on for.

4. Sure; given that everyone involved consents to the arrangement, in my view you should be "allowed" to do whatever you want without de jure restriction. However, I have some reasons for thinking that you might have more trouble than you expect to finding a market for your wares -- workers may not be interested in buying the kind of arrangement that you are selling.

5. Yes. Again, no de jure restrictions. However, I think that both natural and social factors would tend to produce some quite stringent de facto restrictions on the kinds of scale that you're likely to be able to maintain without aggression, privilege, state subsidy, or insulation from competition.

6. Well, that's not really a question I can pot the answer to in a short forum post or even a long one. I could say that I think it both more efficiently satisfies consumer preferences and also that there are independent ethical reasons to favor it, but my reasons for that have to do with a lot of threads of argument about a number of related, but importantly distinct, topics. Anyway, if you want a broad overview of some of the reasons I have for taking the approach that I do, the Liberty, Equality, Solidarity essay that I linked above may help as a starting point. And so might Bits & Pieces on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism.

7. Not as I understand it. I am an individualist Anarchist.

I do defend (and other left-wing market Anarchists also do defend) some economic or social arrangements that other libertarians have denounced as "collectivist" -- for example, the occupation and reclamation of abandoned faciltiies by squatters and urban homesteaders; voluntary unionism; cooperatively-managed worker-owned shops; and consensual communal ownership of open commons, without the involvement or management of the state. But the reason that I defend these things is because I think the charges of "collectivism" are in fact false, and the way I defend them is generally by trying to show, if I can, how they are really quite compatible with a radical interpretation of individual sovereignty and equal liberty. Maybe I'm wrong about that, of course, but if so, it is in the way that anyone can be wrong about the downstream applications of their fundamental principles.

 

Freedom4Me73986:

Left-libertarians are mostly socialists.

Maybe. Or maybe not. As I've said, I personally am happy enough to sign on for Tucker's (explicitly pro-market, anti-state) understanding of "socialism." Provided that in context it's understood that that's what I mean, or the conversation will easily turn to explaining that that's what I mean. But I know a lot of left-libertarians and, anecdotally speaking, I know a number of left-libertarians (such as Kevin Carson) who agree with me on that; and a number of left-libertarians (such as Roderick Long, Tom Knapp, or I think also Sheldon Richman) who do not agree with me on that, and do not want to use the term -- for reasons that I find understandable, even if I disagree with them. Beyond anecdotes, I really have no idea which group is in the numerical majority; I haven't made any attempt at polling active left-libertarians about this (and I expect you haven't either).

Charles even admitted to being ... anti-capitalist/anti-boss/anti-property rights.

I "admitted," or rather, happily agreed to, two of these things. Not to three of them. You may of course think that being anti-capitalist, anti-boss, and anti-property rights all naturally go along with each other as a matter of course. (That's a common enough belief, both for people who are anti- and for people who are pro-.) But if you're going to take a look at what I've admitted or agreed to, you should keep in mind that I don't agree that they do.

There are kinds of anti-capitalism (take Marx's--please!) which are of course anti-property rights (generally because they believe that if you have property rights you are always therefore naturally going to get bosses and concentrations of ownership in the hands of capitalists). But there have also been kinds of anti-capitalism, older and (I would argue) more radical than Marx's which do not think that (see for example Proudhon, Tucker, Dyer Lum, Voltairine DeCleyre, or many of the other historical writers who appear in Markets Not Capitalism) -- who argue, quite on the contrary, that bosses and corporate ownership persist largely because of systematic governmentalist assaults on free competition and on the property rights of workers. (So that the best way to get an economy without bossing and with diffuse rather than concentrated ownership is to get rid of all government barriers to competition and all government restrictions on poor people's property rights.) You may of course disagree with this approach, but it is mine, and it pretty directly affects the issue of whether the positions on the left side of the forward slashes are really the same as the positions on the right side.