The Freed Market

It seems to me that one of the most ill-defined, or perhaps ill-understood terms I come across in discussions on mainly Lib Dem blogs and forums is some permutation of "market" (as a noun or an adjective - as in "market forces" or "market mechanisms" say - on its own), "free market" or "free market capitalism".

If I mention that I am a "market anarchist" or similar, some seem to think this means that I must be the natural child of the diabolical union of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.  I even have a troll/stalker on here who pops up in comments every now and again (yes, you know you are not welcome and you know who you are so I don't know why you persist) who seems to think that I am a corporate whore (or rather than anyone who believes that Herbert Spencer had anything good to say at all in his entire life must be such a corporate shill - he doesn't believe in fallacious arguments either I don't think).

No amount of protestation or attempted explanation on my part seems to be able to disabuse some of these people.  The amount of rumpy pumpy that Maggie and Ronnie must have got up to is mind-boggling, since it's not just me who gets it - anyone who dares to consider themselves an "economic liberal" gets it, anyone who can identify or be identified with the "Orange Book" gets it.  It's as if economic liberalism began with and was defined by these two big state deficit raising conservatives in the nineteen-eighties.

So I am always on the look out when I read, hear or see libertarians more erudite and succinct in their explanations than I am for explanations of what I think of as "market" or the "freed market" that might make some better sense for these people than I seem to be able to.

You'll recall that I mentioned briefly in an earlier post that I had signed up for a couple of online courses in "Anarchist Theory and Practice" being offered by the Centre For a Stateless Society.  C4SS can be broadly defined as a "left-libertarian market-anarchist - and Mutualist - think-tank" one of whose leading lights, Kevin Carson, I have often mentioned whose strapline of "free-market anti-capitalism" was what got me interested in anarchism/libertarianism in the first place (having been led probably like many of you to understand by friends and colleagues that all libertarians were right-wing moonbats following a devil-take-the-hindmost ideology that worshipped selfishness and plutocracy).

Anyway, in one of the modules we are using a pilot series of video lectures "An Introduction to Anarchism" by one of the academics who writes for and advices the Centre, Gary Chartier, a California based legal scholar/university professor/occasional blogger.  The series we're using, as well as a few others, are all in playlist form on my YouTube channel.  But I want to direct you to something he says in the Introduction to the course video which I think quite succinctly explains my understanding of the term "market" when I use it in the sense of "I believe in free markets" (rather than state intervention) or "I am a market-anarchist".

From about 7 minutes into the clip, Gary is talking about what we mean by "markets" in this sense.  He says that

To talk of "market anarchism" is really to talk of the freedom of people to craft their own strategies for social interaction, social co-operation, for problem solving, together...Here at the Centre For a Stateless Society we use "market" as an umbrella term for the whole arena of voluntary co-operations, not just about commercial exchange."

...and for me that says it well.  The "market" does not, for me and many libertarians, mean "Tesco versus ASDA" competing to see how much they can fleece from you - that is a feature of "state capitalism" and privilege: exactly, it is true, what liberals should be opposing.  Not Tesco or ASDA per se I should add but the way in which the state interferes in markets - often initially with good intentions, perhaps - and creates or bolsters oligopoly and monopoly and rewards cronyism.  "The market" means the opposite of the state - the way of working that involves voluntary co-operation rather than coerced co-operation which is how the state works - which is the only way, setting aside whether your political ideology believes it can justify this in some "greater good" or similar argument, a state can in fact work.

These opposites echo Franz Oppenheimer's idea of the origin of the state in how humans achieve self survival.  In "The State, Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically":

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others...[for the purposes of his argument] one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.” 

The state, Oppenheimer goes on to explain, is "an organization of the political means", or, in other words, that the state is (and as he explains in fact originated as) the way in which those people organise, create rules and so forth that gets someone else's labour to feed them and sustain them get together and do so.  That may sound an overly harsh definition, but think about it for a moment: can you name any other way of sustaining your life - no, there are only two - you provide for yourself, or you find a way of getting someone else to do so for you.  

A continual theme in libertarian scholarship since, from Albert Jay Nock down to the present, has been that because we are (naturally) inclined to minimise our efforts in sustaining ourselves - not the least because it makes more time for the "higher needs" of recreation and mental and spiritual growth (or that it is more "efficient" in economic language and "maximises utility") - then there is a great temptation to focus on how to get someone else to sustain you if you possibly can.  You could say that humanity has a "more or less intrinsic tendency toward an objective moral evil" if you will.

We may also object that it may have been a good definition for feudal states but that now we are in "liberal democracies" this has changed, that the state is consensual, even sometimes "voluntary" (because we get to choose it and its policies - something else out of the course so far that I will want to return to perhaps in a later post).  But its methods remain the same, even if its beneficiaries are very different, and even feel they can justify it on utilitarian grounds, humanitarian grounds or "social liberal" grounds.  

Just because the beneficiaries of the feudal state were few and its victims many, where it may be said (wrongly I believe) that the opposite is the case under "liberal democracy" does not mean it has found a way miraculously to be non-coercive - for everyone somehow allocated resources by the state there are others who have them taken from them under the threat of legal sanction, because "my gang's more powerful than your gang".  Rightly or wrongly, we can argue, but you cannot actually refute that that is how it works.  Once you legitimise any institution that can create its own "victims" it has the potential to end up in arbitrariness and totalitarianism - and that is what privilege is - law that gives artificial advantage to one interest over another, to create "beneficiaries" and "victims".

The "market" then, is the organisation of Oppenheimer's "economic means" - the voluntary interactions between people by which they freely swap things they have for things they need or want without coercion.  That is all.  Its most important, indeed essential, attribute is that it is voluntary, not coercive.  Not that it is all about money.  Or that we are seeking to "monetise everything".  

I hope that future discussions with people who feel the need to sneer at talk of "markets" may be able to take place with this understanding of what many of us who call ourselves advocates of "free (or freed) markets" actually mean by the term.  If anyone has a "one track mind" about "markets" it is those who recoil from it believing it is al about filthy lucre and the "cash nexus" not those of us who see as, in Gary's words, "an umbrella term for the whole arena of voluntary co-operations, not just about commercial exchange".