Free-market anarchism, or market anarchism, includes several branches of anarchism that
advocate an economic system based on voluntary market interactions without the involvement
of the state.
A branch of market anarchism is left-wing market anarchism such as mutualists or Gary
Chartier and Kevin Carson, who consider themselves anti-capitalists and self identify as part
of the socialist movement.On the other hand, people who identify as anarcho-capitalists
stress the legitimacy and priority of private property, describing it as an integral component
of individual rights and a free market economy.
There is a strong current within anarchism which does not consider that anarcho-capitalism
can be considered a part of the anarchist movement because anarchism has historically
been an anti-capitalist movement and for definitional reasons which see anarchism incompatible with
capitalist forms.The term may be used to refer to diverse economic and political concepts,
such as those proposed by anarchist libertarian socialists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
Benjamin Tucker or alternatively anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David D. Friedman.
== History ==
=== Mutualism ===
Mutualism began in 18th-century English and French labour movements before taking an anarchist
form associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and others in the United States.
Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby organisation emerges without central authority,
a "positive anarchy" where order arises when everybody does "what he wishes and only what
he wishes" and where "business transactions alone produce the social order."
It is important to recognize that Proudhon distinguished between ideal political possibilities
and practical governance.
For this reason, much in contrast to some of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate
spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was heavily involved in French parliamentary politics
and allied himself not with Anarchist but Socialist factions of workers movements and,
in addition to advocating state-protected charters for worker-owned cooperatives, promoted
certain nationalization schemes during his life of public service.
Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity, free association, voluntary contract, federation,
and credit and currency reform.
According to the American mutualist William Batchelder Greene, each worker in the mutualist
system would receive "just and exact pay for his work; services equivalent in cost being
exchangeable for services equivalent in cost, without profit or discount."
Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist
and collectivist forms of anarchism.
Proudhon first characterised his goal as a "third form of society, the synthesis of communism
and property."
== Internal disputes == Murray Rothbard and other natural rights theorists
cite the non-aggression axiom as the basis for their libertarian systems, while other
free-market anarchists such as David D. Friedman favor free market anarchism based on consequentialist
ethical theories.
Voluntarists, paleolibertarians, and Agorists are propertarian market anarchists who consider
private property rights to be individual natural rights deriving from the primary right of
self-ownership.
Market anarchists state diverse views concerning the path to elimination of the state.
Rothbard endorses the use of any tactic to bring about market anarchy so long as it does
not contradict his libertarian moral principles.
=== Views on property ===
==== Tuckerites ==== Benjamin Tucker originally subscribed to the
idea of land ownership associated with Mutualism, which does not grant that this creates property
in land, but holds that when people customarily use given land (and in some versions goods),
other people should respect that use or possession.
But, when that use stops, ownership is no longer recognized, unlike with property.
The mutualist theory holds that the stopping of use or occupying land reverts it to the
commons or to an unowned condition, and makes it available for anyone that wishes to use
it.
Therefore, there would be no market in land that is not in use.
However, Tucker later abandoned natural rights theory and said that land ownership is legitimately
transferred through force unless specified otherwise by contracts: "Man's only right
to land is his might over it.
If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land from him, then the land is his neighbor's,
until the latter is dispossessed by one mightier still."
He expected, however, that individuals would come to the realization that the "occupancy
and use" was a "generally trustworthy guiding principle of action," and that individuals
would likely contract to an occupancy and use policy.
==== Rothbardians ==== Classical liberal John Locke argues that,
as people apply their labor to unowned resources, they make those resources their property.
For Locke, there are only two legitimate ways people can acquire new property: by mixing
their labor with unowned resources or by voluntary trade for created goods.
In accordance with Locke's philosophy, Rothbardian free-market anarchists believe that property
may only originate by being the product of labor and that its ownership may only legitimately
change as a result of exchange or gift.
They derive this homestead principle from what they call the principle of self-ownership.
However, Locke had a "Proviso" which says that the appropriator of resources must leave
"enough and as good in common...to others."
Rothbard's "market anarchist" followers do not agree with this Proviso, believing instead
that the individual may originally appropriate as much as she wishes through the application
of her labor, and that property thus acquired remains hers until she chooses otherwise.
They term this as "neo-Lockean".
Libertarians see this as consistent with their opposition to initiatory coercion, since only
land which is not already owned can be taken without compensation.
If something is unowned, there is no person against whom the original appropriator is
initiating coercion.
They do not think that a claim of and by itself can create ownership, but rather that the
application of one's labor to the unowned object, as for example beginning to farm unowned
land.
Anarcho-capitalists accept voluntary forms of common ownership, which means property
open to all individuals to access.
Samuel Edward Konkin III, the founder of agorism, was also a Rothbardian.
== Left-wing market anarchism ==
Another contemporary school of left-libertarianism is associated with scholars such as Kevin
Carson, Roderick T. Long, Charles Johnson, Samuel Edward Konkin III, Sheldon Richman,
Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and Gary Chartier, who stress the value of radically free markets,
termed freed markets to distinguish them from the common conception which these libertarians
believe to be riddled with statist and capitalist privileges.
Referred to as left-wing market anarchists or market-oriented left-libertarians, proponents
of this approach strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets,
while maintaining that, taken to their logical conclusions, these ideas support strongly
anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical, pro-labor positions in economics; anti-imperialism in
foreign policy; and thoroughly liberal or radical views regarding such cultural issues
as gender, sexuality, and race.
This strand of left-libertarianism tends to be rooted either in the mutualist economics
conceptualized by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, American individualist anarchism, or in a
left-wing interpretation or extension of the thought of Murray Rothbard.
According to libertarian scholar Sheldon Richman:
Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity vis-à-vis bosses, support poor people's squatting
on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be repealed before
the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges may be exercised.
They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate favoritism—supported by highway subsidies
and eminent domain—view the fictive personhood of the limited-liability corporation with
suspicion, and doubt that Third World sweatshops would be the "best alternative" in the absence
of government manipulation.
Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral politics, having little confidence in strategies
that work through the government.
They prefer to develop alternative institutions and methods of working around the state.
Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and others (echoing the language
of Benjamin Tucker and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that, because of its heritage
and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism should be seen—by
its proponents and by others—as part of the socialist tradition, and that market anarchists
can and should call themselves socialists.
=== Cultural politics === Contemporary free-market left-libertarians
also show markedly more sympathy than mainstream or paleolibertarians towards various cultural
movements which challenge non-governmental relations of power.
For instance, left-libertarians Roderick Long and Charles Johnson have called for a recovery
of the nineteenth-century alliance with radical liberalism and feminism.
Forms of geolibertarianism also fit into this group, but these Georgists are less likely
to accept terms such as "anti-capitalist" or "socialist".
While adopting familiar libertarian views, including opposition to drug prohibition,
gun control, civil liberties violations, and war, left-libertarians are more likely than
most self-identified libertarians to take more distinctively leftist stances on issues
as diverse as feminism, gender and sexuality, class, immigration, and environmentalism.
Especially influential regarding these topics have been scholars including Chris Matthew
Sciabarra, Roderick T. Long, Charles W. Johnson, and Arthur Silber.
=== History === The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented
left-libertarianism—sometimes labeled "left-wing market anarchism"—overlaps to a significant
degree with that of Steiner–Vallentyne left-libertarianism as the roots of that tradition are sketched
in The Origins of Left-Libertarianism.
Carson–Long-style left-libertarianism is rooted in nineteenth-century mutualism and
in the work of figures such as Thomas Hodgskin and the individualist anarchists Benjamin
Tucker and Lysander Spooner.
While, with notable exceptions, market-oriented libertarians after Tucker tended to ally with
the political right, relationships between such libertarians and the New Left thrived
in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for modern left-wing market anarchism.
==== Benjamin Tucker and his contemporaries ====
American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker identified as a socialist, and argued
that the elimination of what he called the "four monopolies"—the land monopoly, the
money and banking monopoly, the monopoly powers conferred by patents, and the quasi-monopolistic
effects of tariffs—would undermine the power of the wealthy and big business, making possible
widespread property ownership and higher incomes for ordinary people, while minimizing the
power of would-be bosses and achieving socialist goals without state action.
Tucker influenced and interacted with anarchist contemporaries—including Lysander Spooner,
Voltairine de Cleyre, Dyer D. Lum, and William B. Greene—who have in various ways influenced
later left-libertarian thinking.
==== Alliance between market-oriented libertarians and the New Left ====
The doyen of modern American market-oriented libertarianism, Austrian School economist
Murray Rothbard, was initially an enthusiastic partisan of the Old Right, particularly because
of its general opposition to war and imperialism.
But Rothbard had long embraced a reading of American history that emphasized the role
of elite privilege in shaping legal and political institutions—one that was thus naturally
agreeable to many on the Left—and he came increasingly in the 1960s to seek alliances
on the Left—especially with members of the "New Left"—in light of the Vietnam War,
the military draft, and the emergence of the black power movement.Working with other radicals
like Ronald Radosh and Karl Hess, Rothbard argued that the consensus view of American
economic history, according to which a beneficent government has used its power to counter corporate
predation, is fundamentally flawed.
Rather, he argued, government intervention in the economy has largely benefited established
players at the expense of marginalized groups, to the detriment of both liberty and equality.
Moreover, the "Robber Baron" period, hailed by the right and despised by the left as a
heyday of laissez-faire, was not characterized by laissez-faire at all, but was in fact a
time of massive state privilege accorded to capital.
In tandem with his emphasis on the intimate connection between state and corporate power,
he defended the seizure of corporations dependent on state largesse by workers and others.Rothbard
himself ultimately broke with the left, allying himself instead with the burgeoning paleoconservative
movement.
However, drawing on the work of Rothbard during his alliance with the left and on the thought
of Karl Hess, some thinkers associated with market-oriented American libertarianism came
increasingly to identify with the Left on a range of issues, including opposition to
war, to corporate oligopolies and state-corporate partnerships, and an affinity for cultural
liberalism.
One variety of this kind of libertarianism has been a resurgent mutualism, incorporating
modern economic ideas such as marginal utility theory into mutualist theory.
Kevin A. Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy helped to stimulate the growth of
new-style mutualism, articulating a version of the labor theory of value incorporating
ideas drawn from Austrian economics.
Other market-oriented left-libertarians have declined to embrace mutualist views of real
property, while sharing the mutualist opposition to corporate hierarchies and wealth concentration.
Left-libertarians have placed particular emphasis on the articulation and defense of a libertarian
theory of class and class conflict, though considerable work in this area has been performed
by libertarians of other persuasions.He has joined Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, and
others (echoing the language of Benjamin Tucker and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining that,
because of its heritage and its emancipatory goals and potential, radical market anarchism
should be seen—by its proponents and by others—as part of the socialist tradition,
and that market anarchists can and should call themselves socialists.
== Criticism == A well-known critique of free-market anarchism
is by Robert Nozick, who argued that a competitive legal system would evolve toward a monopoly
government—even without violating individuals rights in the process.
John Jefferson, a free-market anarchist, advocates Robert Nozick's argument and states that such
events would best operate in laissez-faire.
Many free-market anarchists, including Roy Childs and Murray Rothbard, have rejected
Nozick's arguments.
== See also == Agorism
Anarcho-capitalism Anarcho-syndicalism
Geolibertarianism Individualist anarchism
Issues in anarchism Left-wing market anarchism
Libertarian socialism Mutualism
Propertarianism Voluntaryism
For a New Liberty The Machinery of Freedom
New Libertarian Manifesto Our Enemy, the State
== References ==
== External links == Center for a Stateless Society – anarchist
think-tank and media center focused on market anarchism
lewrockwell.com – A site hosting anarcho-capitalist articles, run by Lew Rockwell with the slogan
"anti-state, anti-war, pro-market," from a culturally conservative perspective
Strike The Root – A voluntaryist website featuring essays, news, and a forum