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…↩

• Dedicated to "the mutualists of the world" Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-05-17). Charles T. Sprading’s 1930 Mutual Service and Cooperation is available for download from Google Books. (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Watch Out, Facebook. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-05-26). “The business press may be filled with rhetoric about ‘participatory media’ and ‘user-generated content,’ but the country’s most prominent Web 2.0 company treats its participants like a bunch of CompuServe subscribers circa 1994. …” (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Oh No! Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-05-23). Conservatives won’t want to hear it, but the libertarian alternative to antidiscrimination laws is: COMMUNITY ORGANIZING!Atom (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• The Welfare State. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-05-23). Despite what you may read at other libertarian sites, the welfare state is not the result of efforts by lazy poor people to enslave and live off the productive classes. Rather, it is the result of efforts by the political-social-corporate elite to subordinate and control the poor for a variety… (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• Free George Donnelly Handbill. DarianW, DarianWorden.com (2010-05-24). Thanks to ALLy James Tuttle for creating a solid handout in support of George Donnelly. Download the .pdf at LibertyActivism.info. (Linked Wednesday 2010-05-26.)

• here's a sortof interesting piece of political/cultural. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-05-13). here's a sortof interesting piece of political/cultural commentary by mark lilla. he frames the whole thing in terms of "radical individualism"="the libertarian mob," as against…well, what? obviously the basic contrast of individualism is to collectivism, but it's hard to sit there and squarely endorse that term: there are too many… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

• Arrivals Lounge. Dorothy, Cat and Girl (2010-05-27). (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

• Gimme Your Best Just-World Play. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-05-27). Come on.  I need it after reading this: Jiang Chun Geng is one of 15 elderly Chinese men and women whom Zhu is treating in his simple village clinic for what locals label "rotten leg disease." A definitive diagnosis is no longer possible so many decades after the initial exposure… (Linked Thursday 2010-05-27.)

• Somewhere Near Salinas. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-04-02). The editor of The Commoner, a website devoted to "the commons-based society," travels to South America to study the co-ops that dominate the economy of Salinas, Ecuador. He finds an intricate mix of voluntary cooperation and entrepreneurship — not the sort of combination that should befuddle a libertarian, but one… (Linked Friday 2010-04-02.)

• The Mutualist #1 is now available. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-04-03). The first issue of The Mutualist is now available for download, in pamphlet and non-pamphlet pdfs. (Linked Saturday 2010-04-03.)

• Institutional Silencing. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-04-03). Bear with me as I take you through my thought process today.  I was directed to a blog post reviewing journalist Lori Gottlieb's controversial but mostly sensible new book, "Marry Him!", which claims that today's young women are too picky and may wind up alone, and certainly with a shorter… (Linked Saturday 2010-04-03.)

• The War on Kids, Part...I Lost Count. der Blaustrumpf » Cultural, not Moral, Superiority (2010-04-05). State Government Vs. Entry-Level Employment Opportunities: “Often enough, these individuals were employed at nonprofits which would have promptly gone under had they paid their interns anything resembling a ‘living wage.’ And usually these individuals got ahead at the organization by completing one of these internships. … The book is only being thrown at for-profit companies for now, but it isn't hard to imagine that nonprofits might be next. … Many nonprofits, and small or new for-profits, are only precariously afloat as is, especially with the recession, and even middle-class college kids are feeling pinched. I suppose the usual suspects, the working- and lower-middle-classes, have already been sucked dry and the vampires have to turn to a new class. I doubt many will recognize that this will hurt small businesses and idealistic college kids the most.” (Linked Monday 2010-04-05.)

• Somewhere Near Salinas. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-04-02). The editor of The Commoner, a website devoted to "the commons-based society," travels to South America to study the co-ops that dominate the economy of Salinas, Ecuador. He finds an intricate mix of voluntary cooperation and entrepreneurship — not the sort of combination that should befuddle a libertarian, but one… (Linked Friday 2010-04-02.)

• The Mutualist #1 is now available. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-04-03). The first issue of The Mutualist is now available for download, in pamphlet and non-pamphlet pdfs. (Linked Saturday 2010-04-03.)

• Institutional Silencing. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-04-03). Bear with me as I take you through my thought process today.  I was directed to a blog post reviewing journalist Lori Gottlieb's controversial but mostly sensible new book, "Marry Him!", which claims that today's young women are too picky and may wind up alone, and certainly with a shorter… (Linked Saturday 2010-04-03.)

• The War on Kids, Part...I Lost Count. der Blaustrumpf » Cultural, not Moral, Superiority (2010-04-05). State Government Vs. Entry-Level Employment Opportunities: “Often enough, these individuals were employed at nonprofits which would have promptly gone under had they paid their interns anything resembling a ‘living wage.’ And usually these individuals got ahead at the organization by completing one of these internships. … The book is only being thrown at for-profit companies for now, but it isn't hard to imagine that nonprofits might be next. … Many nonprofits, and small or new for-profits, are only precariously afloat as is, especially with the recession, and even middle-class college kids are feeling pinched. I suppose the usual suspects, the working- and lower-middle-classes, have already been sucked dry and the vampires have to turn to a new class. I doubt many will recognize that this will hurt small businesses and idealistic college kids the most.” (Linked Monday 2010-04-05.)

• Operation Revelation. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-03-05). Here's the intro to a press release from the sheriff of Bossier Parish, Louisiana: Bossier Sheriff Larry Deen has unveiled a new emergency operations plan that will be a continuation of public safety in Bossier Parish should disaster ever strike here at home. The plan, known as Operation Exodus, will… (Linked Friday 2010-03-05.)
• apophenia » Blog Archive » ChatRoulette, from my perspective. www.zephoria.org (2010-03-06). “. . . I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can't tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for. So I actually think that the ChatRoulette version allows you to move on with greater ease, less guilt, and far more comfortably.” (Linked Saturday 2010-03-06.)
• Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule – Part 3. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-03-03). "TWO-GUN" MUTUALISMand theGOLDEN RULE[continued] ARMED AND DANGEROUS Perhaps this has all taken a strangely martial turn, given mutualism's generally peaceful reputation. Isn't the core of mutualism the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" Yes, indeed. But there's nothing simple about fulfilling the Golden Rule. The… (Linked Saturday 2010-03-06.)
• Raspberry Cliché Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-03-07). Last night Hollywood held its most rigidly predictable exercise in conventional wisdom: the Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, established to honor the worst films of the year. Sandra Bullock showed up to collect her Worst Actress and Worst Screen Couple prizes for All About Steve, then razzed the crowd… (Linked Sunday 2010-03-07.)