My response to Dale Carrico’s comment on the free market movement here.
My main objections are two, Dale.
First, your overbroad assertions about “market libertarians,” which are belied by the fact that there’s a sizable community of left-wing market libertarians who see the large corporation as a creature of the state, and who see the state’s primary functions as protecting and subsidizing big business.
Second, your implication that the existence of powerful large corporations in actually-existing capitalism is some sort of indictment of market libertarianism as an ideology, and specifically of its focus on the coercive state as the primary evil.
Behind this is still another implication, that market libertarianism is primarily a defense of actually existing capitalism using “free market” language. While there are certainly many right-wing libertarians who do follow this pattern — and they may well even constitute a majority of mainstream libertarians — their position is far from uncontested within the market libertarian movement.
I would contend that the large corporation the currently predominates wouldn’t exist at all without the state to externalize its operating costs and suppress competition.
I could raise a third point about the role of pre-commercial social mores, conventional rules of the game, etc., as background conditions within which any market operates. But in fact I don’t dispute the existence of such factors — I’d just quibble, on a semantic basis, by saying that I don’t see their existence as at odds with a free market. Generally speaking, I use the term “market” in a broad sense to include all consensual, voluntary arrangements — including voluntary communism, common property, gift economies, and also primary social units governed by non-monetized gift relations (e.g. cohousing projects, extended families, intentional communities, etc.).
I thank Kevin Carson for his response. His second objection, that I contend “market libertarianism is primarily a defense of actually existing capitalism using ‘free market’ language” is exactly right. Market discourse has as its primary life in my view the provision of rationalizations for selective deregulations, selective privatizations, selective subsidizations of military-police functions that amount to stealth centralized economic-planning in the service of corporate-militarist elite-incumbent interests. Just as academic communists properly are expected at any rate to account in some form for the tyrannies that have claimed to govern in their image, market libertarians should take seriously into account the real-world work their rhetoric serves, even if they find these applications compromised or hypocritical. Contrary to Carson’s first claim, I do not disregard the pure market theorists — I offered criticisms of their ideal formulations in the piece to which he was responding as well as the unquestionably sweeping (and I would add, incomparably devastating) practical applications of market rhetoric over the last half century. Still, for those of us interested in speculating here about the democratizing and consensualizing possibilities opening up or newly threatened by p2p expressive, educational, agitational, organizational, critical, surveillance formations it seems to me that exposing the problems and confusions in ideal market formulations — setting aside for the moment the wreckage from “vulgar” rhetorical appropriations — is often the most fruitful line of inquiry. Throughout this set of exchanges, the point that matters to me the most by far is my insistence that the legitimacy that properly attaches to governance defined by the democratic ideal of equity-in-diversity is different in kind from the efficiency/optimality mechanisms and justifications for non-governmental organizations that often provide the focus of p2p accounts and then — disastrously in my view — get misapplied to the normative-institutional state sphere. Often, I believe prior commitments to anarcho-spontaneist or elite-design ideologies among techno-centric intellectual-workers trained in neoliberal university settings in the promotional-financial epoch of corporate-militarist capitalism provide the basis for this misapplication. But all that is a discussion for another time (in my view an enormously important one for folks who would be drawn to this site), or I hope so, at least. In conclusion, let me add that I think it is important to complicate some of the interesting assumptions of your final paragraph: I am not sure that it ever makes sense to speak of “the market” at all — rather than of historically and socioculturally specific market-places. This is a point Karl Polanyi, for example, already masterfully explored at the exact historical moment when Hayekian/Misean formulations of neoliberal market fundamentalist ideology arrived on the scene. I also think it is makes less sense still to speak of “natural” markets given the role of laws, norms, conventions, geographical/architectural constraints in articulating what passes for “market transactions,” “innovations,” “voluntary contracts,” and so on from moment to moment and place to place. Given all this I don’t think one can coherently assume the analytic vantage from which your final points are imagined to be offered, among the crucial consequences of which is that it is actually a question and not a given just what passes for “consensual, voluntary arrangements” in the first place, and that only in recognizing this do we grasp the stakes of conversations like the one we are having here.
I would echo Dale’s sentiment concerning historically and socio-culturally specific markets. This is one problem I have with market anarchists using the term market very loosely.
Academic state-communists are properly expected to account for the consequences of their theories when they are/were put to practice.
Market anarchists cannot be expected to account for a state capitalist system they denounce all the time.
Exactly what role would laws and conventions play in determining what is voluntary?
Kevin, there is unquestionably a synergy between the state and the mega corporation but I doubt that one would cease to exist without the other. To make such a contention without a shred of support is poor argument.
Marcel, they can be expected to demonstrate that they understand it.
Laws and conventions (especially case law/history/precedent) define the actually-existing parameters of voluntary, free, market, etc. Lawyers and other adults understand that dictionary definitions are seldom sufficient for the complexity and ambiguity of human commerce.