Thanks for this post.

I’m certainly inclined to agree that market underdevelopment is the problem here. Provided that we take a sufficiently broad view of what counts as a market mechanism. (The problem with many would-be free marketeers is that they don’t actually pay attention to all the sorts of institutions a free market might feature.)

It used to be, back in the day, that the Left exhorted working folks to form fighting unions, co-ops, and mutual aid societies in order to help counteract both routine exploitation and the dangers of economic downturns. The idea being that when working folks united, they were more powerful than the bosses and more reliable for each other than the functionaries of the welfare state.

This sort of statist nonsense, endlessly celebrated and agitated for by most of the contemporary Left, poses as ameliorating exploitation within the existing market system. All it actually does is transfer control over more workers’ lives to the civil service bureaucracy, and further regiments the economy under the dubious command of the managerial State. All in all it’s pretty weak tea compared to the good old end of the industrial republic of labor and the good old means of building a new society within the shell of the old through the economic means of mutual aid and direct action.