Comments on: A Response to Dale Carrico

By: Poor Richard

Poor Richard — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:53:44 +0000

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.

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.

Market anarchists cannot be expected to account for a state capitalist system they denounce all the time.

Marcel, they can be expected to demonstrate that they understand it.

Exactly what role would laws and conventions play in determining what is voluntary?

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.

By: Marcel

Marcel — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:30:39 +0000

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.

Exactly what role would laws and conventions play in determining what is voluntary?

By: Marcel

Marcel — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:23:40 +0000

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.

By: Derek Ryan Strong

Derek Ryan Strong — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:56:30 +0000

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.

By: Dale Carrico

Dale Carrico — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:53:02 +0000

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.