Kevin Carson, the author of one of my favourite blogs
has also written a book, which is available online .

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, a book I recently read in full and can strongly recommend, represents a small, I think we can say ‘specifically American’, tradition, which calls itself libertarian or ‘individualist anarchism’, which differs both from the better kwown collectivist traditions which were so strong in Europe, but also from the state-oriented traditions of the left.

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Though I’m not an anarchist, see my piece on the state last week, I believe a dialogue with this tradition is fruitful, because it shares the emancipatory vision of autonomy-in-cooperation, which is also key to the P2P ethos. The book is interesting because Kevin is well-read in the various tradition, including the various economic schools of thought.

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Here’s the first excerpt, with some details on the historical origins of the tradition:

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“In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant native American school of
anarchism, known as individualist anarchism, existed alongside the other
varieties.  Like most other contemporary socialist thought,  it was based
on a radical interpretation of Ricardian economics.  The classical
individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander
Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical
liberalism.  It agreed with the rest of the socialist movement that labor
was the source of exchange-value, and that labor was entitled to its full
product.  Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist
anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its
product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when
capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their
interests.  Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the
increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical
liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of
big business.

Shawn Wilbur has argued that the late-nineteenth century split between
individualists and communists in the American anarchist movement (for which
the ill-feeling between Benjamin Tucker and Johann Most is a good proxy)
left the individualists marginalized and weak.  As a result, much of the
movement created by Benjamin Tucker was absorbed or colonized by the right.
Although there are many honorable exceptions who still embrace the
“socialist” label, most people who call themselves “individualist
anarchists” today are followers of Murray Rothbard’s Austrian economics, and
have abandoned the labor theory of value.  Had not the anarchism of Tucker
been marginalized and supplanted by that of Goldman, it might have been the
center of a uniquely American version of populist radicalism. It might have
worked out a more elaborate economic theory that was both free market and
anti-capitalist, instead of abandoning the socialist label and being
co-opted by the Right.

….Unfortunately, individualist anarchist economic thought has for the most
part been frozen in a time warp for over a hundred years.  If the
marginalists and subjectivists have not dealt the labor theory of value the
final death blow they smugly claim for it, they have nevertheless raised
questions that any viable labor theory must answer.

This book is an attempt to revive individualist anarchist political economy,
to incorporate the useful developments of the last hundred years, and to
make it relevant to the problems of the twenty-first century.  We hope this
work will go at least part of the way to providing a new theoretical and
practical foundation for free market socialist economics…..

If there is one valuable practical insight in this entire book, it is the
realization that coercive state policies are not necessary to remedy the
evils of present-day capitalism.  All these evils–exploitation of labor,
monopoly and concentration, the energy crisis, pollution, waste–result from
government intervention in the market on behalf of capitalists.  The
solution is not more government intervention, but to eliminate the existing
government intervention from which the problems derive.  A genuine free
market society, in which all transactions are voluntary and all costs are
internalized in price, would be a decentralized society of human-scale
production, in which all of labor’s product went to labor, instead of to
capitalists, landlords and government bureaucrats”