We regularly engage in dialogue with Kevin Carson, whose mutualist approach I find very interesting, in particular because it suggest a reconciliation between the market and peer to peer principles.

I found this contribution in a recent email discussion and find that it represents well the specific framework of that tradition, which basically argues that the free market has never existed, and will not until labour is truly free.

Kevin Carson:

“Unequal exchange was built into the labor market from the beginning. That unequal exchange results not from the sale of labor-power as such, but from the fact that privilege (state-enforced scarcity of land and capital) makes land and capital artificially costly and forces labor to sell itself in a buyer’s market, paying a premium for access to the means of production. The natural price of labor in a free market is not, as Ricardo and Marx argued, its reproduction cost (however that argument is qualified by the cultural definition of reproduction cost). The natural price of labor results from its disutility: the fact that only labor, of all the “factors of production,” must be forced to contribute itself to the production process. This is why effort is the source of all exchange value. As Benjamin Tucker argued, in a free market only what has cost contributes to cost; and in the end, what but labor has any real cost?

The prices of all the non-labor factors, over and above amortization costs of embedded past labor, result from monopoly rents attending to artificial property rights. They are examples of Dobb’s privileged tollgate keepers, engaged in what Veblen called “capitalized serviceability.”

Were such forms of artificial scarcity not enforced by the state, and were labor allowed free access to vacant land and allowed to mobilize credit at cost without the state banking system’s entry barriers, then a much larger portion of the labor force would be self-employed, either in individual and family businesses or in worker co-ops. More importantly, where wage employment continued, the rate of profit would be driven down by competition from the possibility of self-employment.

As a wide range of thinkers have pointed out, it is only possible to get labor to work for less than its full product only when it is deprived of independent access to the means of subsistence and production. That’s why it has been such a central focus of the employed classes to close off such access, and to eliminate competition from the possibility of self-employment.

Even so, under the old and conventionally (but wrongly) named “laissez-faire” regime, you are at least right that commodities tended toward their actual value. The main form of exploitation took place within the production process, through the sale of labor-power at less than its natural rate (which was its full product).

But this is not at all true of commodity prices under monopoly capitalism. Economic exploitation in the exchange process has, arguably, superceded exploitation in the employment process in importance. It’s quite likely that the total of super-profits extracted from the consumer through oligopoly markup, embedded rents on artificial property rights like “intellectual property,” etc., exceed the amount of surplus value extracted through the production process. “