Posts tagged reddit

Mutual Markets vs. Corporate Capitalism: A Formulation

So, going through the final rounds of work on Markets Not Capitalism with Gary[1] and the rest of the Collective has really been reminding me that I’ve accumulated a lot of occasional and fragmentary writing — papers, paragraphs, notes, etc. — that I really ought to have been collecting for this blog and sharing more widely. I be trying to work on getting some of that material up over the next several days. For now, here’s a note I was recently reminded of at /r/Anarchism, for the sake of general reference.

cryopyre:

Hardest thing I have explaining to people. Markets =! capitalism. I’m an anarcho-syndicalist/mutualist. I see markets as useful, but private property as a government enforced means of keeping the rich in power.

steveklabnik:

Care to give someone who has mutualism on a reading list a tl;dr? I don’t really understand how markets don’t end up being the same thing. This is due to my lack of reading…

radgeek:

Steve,

Markets are a decentralized means of transferring ownership (individual ownership and quid-pro-quo exchanges of goods and services). Capitalism is a particular pattern of ownership (a class monopoly — where capital and land are concentrated in the hands of employers, landlords and financiers). Some people think that market forms of exchange (individual ownership, contracts, etc.) will naturally lead to capitalist patterns of ownership. Mutualists dissent.

Mutualists think that the concentrations of ownership that exist right now are not the natural tendency of the market form, but the result of government privileges and prohibitions that deform existing markets — including privileges to capitalists (think bail-outs, corporate welfare and government-granted monopolies), and suppression of more grassroots or horizontal forms of economic organization (think of governments mandating people to buy in to the corporate insurance market, shutting down free clinics and mutual aid societies, busting unions through Taft-Hartley and “Right-to-Work,” etc. etc.). So they think that the best way to get rid of capitalist economic privilege is to get rid of the plutocratic political privileges that prop it up, and let it collapse under its own weight. Any social or economic problems that remain would be addressed through social activism and bottom-up, community-based forms of free association — mutual aid societies, neighborhood asembleas, co-ops, unions, etc. Freed markets would be co-ops, worker-owned shops and individuals trying out new experiments and trading with each other for the things they need or want, rather than staging grounds for highly-leveraged corporate capitalist mega-fuckery.

Does that help?

  1. [1] About which, more soon… ↩

Every car set aflame is a refusal to negotiate, a blow against the teleology of anarcho-liberalism, a recognition of the radical temporality inherent in the articulation of communes.

Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our conspiracies of destruction, we offer neither sympathy nor criticism, but only our scorn. We must destroy all impotentiality—for once and for all. The pathetic passivity proposed to us is like a bad joke, and instead of laughter we respond with rupture. Our need to riot is less the setting forth of a concept than the elaboration of an event.

Leaving activism behind: Notes on social war / It is necessary commence absolutely; not to dream of new ways to make demands, but to make manifest the subterranean communes in the heart of each car set aflame. What’s needed is not impotentiality, and even far less *mobilization*, but a putting-into-practice of singular rupture, a rejection in all forms of the being of totality. In the setting forth of multiplicities, we shatter those who would have us give up the radical ecstasy of insurrection for the catastrophe of passivity. This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on fossilization of our desires.

AGAIN

about the authors

(Thanks to skobrin at /r/Anarchism.)

See also:

Dr. Anarchy answers your mail #6: keeping away unwanted attention from statists

… the occasional advice column that’s taking the world by storm, one sovereign individual at a time.

This week’s question comes from a correspondent at the Libertarian subreddit. Our correspondent has been reading some discussion of the increasingly belligerent statism of conservatives within the Tea Party movement and the efforts of conservative politicos like Sarah Palin to harness the movement to their own ends — typically purging libertarians in the process. And he or she agrees, but doesn’t really know what to do about the co-optation and takeover attempts that conservatives always mount when a libertarian organization or a libertarian activist effort starts getting some buzz. What can you do when any time you try to go out in public, you face this kind of unwanted attention?

Dear Dr. Anarchy:

How do we keep neocons or someone else from co-opting a libertarian organization, without some kind of top-down approach? It seems like real libertarians just get drowned out in the din of statists, and the libertarian agenda gets changed in any desirable organization libertarians contribute towards.

Sincerely,
Co-opted in Connecticut

Dear Co-opted,

What you should do is stop wasting your political time on limited-government organizations, and become an Anarchist. instead.

Why is it that neoconservatives and other statist politicos keep trying to co-opt and take over organizations that libertarians started? The answer is the same for any politico — because they see the organization and the people in it as a means to political power. They’re able to treat limited-government reform groups like that because limited-government reform groups, while protesting big government, still want a little bit of government — to hold onto some part of the State and executive power (e.g. government cops, courts, borders, and soldiers). A Sarah Palin sees this as the platform she can stand on: as long as you’re willing to accept a little bit of government, she can ride your movement to victory, or if not victory at least a speaking gig and a comfortable sinecure, with a very selective set of promises about the kinds of government she’ll roll back.

But an Anarchist organization, or an Anarchist direct-action campaign against state power (like CopWatch or No Borders Camp, say), aims to change political conditions by frustrating or bypassing electoral and parliamentary politics, and the goal that you are trying to reach is to abolish the political means itself. When your means and your ends are to destroy the very thing that conservative politicos want to control, you no longer have anything to take that they could want to have.

I know it’s tempting to believe that you can go on doing just what you’ve been doing, and that this time — with the right sort of vigilance, maybe; with the right sort of understanding from the get-go — you’ll be able to do it right, or if things threaten threaten to go wrong, you’ll be able to see the warning signs before it’s too late, and do something about it. But when you keep seeing the same pattern over and over again in your political relationships and your casual interactions, it’s time for you to wake up and start facing facts. Political organizing is always going to attract politicos, and people with more political pull are always going to have the advantage in political organization. It’s not just time to dump this control freak; it’s time to think about whether you should be doing things differently, so that control freaks like this won’t find anything to attract them in the future. Stop putting your hopes into support for limited-government political parties and governmental reform; it’s time to stand up for yourself, without the crutch of legal politics, and put your time, energy and hopes into efforts that bypass governmental politics entirely, and treat the state as an enemy to be smashed, rather than a tool to be seized and wielded.

Sincerely,
Dr. Anarchy.

That’s all for today. Just remember, folks: people are more important than power. And everything is easier when you reject the State as such.

Next week: Dr. Anarchy answers your tax questions!

See also: