Markets Not Anarchism – a panning
I had the opportunity last fall to have a look at Markets Not Capitalism, released by the otherwise-excellent Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia. My comments, however, didn’t make it into the book.
Markets Not Capitalism (or Markets Not Anarchism as I grew to call it in my head) is anything but anti-capitalist and anything but anarchist, despite the explicit claims made by the editors and contributors. Now, to be clear, while I am not a market anarchist, I have no objection to the idea. Enough mutualists and the like have convinced me that an anti-capitalist market economy could be part of an anarchist society. (Basically, such a society would still operate using money but would be setup in such a way that one cannot make money with money but instead only make money by actually doing things.) So I picked up this book feeling hopeful. I thought it would better help me understand my market anarchist comrades.
What I found was disgusting. Here is what I wrote in response:
This book makes the basic assertion that a free market economy will set us free. I consider this to be a remarkably dangerous fallacy.
I do not believe that anarcho-capitalism is a part of anarchism. And despite the protestations one might find within these pages, Kevin Carson’s understanding of capitalism as “government interference with the market” means that much of the “anti-capitalism” involved is simply “capitalism” under some weird up-is-down, war-is-peace, rightwing-is-leftwing double-think.
I do believe that there are a wide range of anarchist ideas, and many of them include market economics, and many of the essays within these pages touch upon them. But anarcho-capitalism is outside of anarchism. An economic system that allows the centralization of power is not an anarchist one, and the ability to make money from your money will do just that.
[This is] a book that makes the claim that black civil rights activists would not have had the right to “resist arrest” when protesting segregation, or claims that libertarian thinkers should defend to the death a bigot’s right to his or her bigotry.
I have no interest in a book would pretend to be anarchist while making such bold claims as that the first enemy of the environmentalist is environmental law. As an environmental activist myself, I know full well that the anarchist position is to use the laws against our enemies when they are useful and to never be constricted by them ourselves. It’s a hopelessly reformist idea to claim that the Clean Water Act should stand between us and the people who are destroying the earth. Anarchists will violate the law and the sanctity of property to destroy what is destroying them.
It was a market anarchist who said it best: property is theft.
Another highlight from the book is the idea, disguised as leftist, that welfare is the anarchist’s first enemy in the fight to destroy economic inequality.
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31 thoughts on “Markets Not Anarchism – a panning”
What Charles Johnson has actually written:
Well, I do have something to say on behalf of extremism. Not on behalf of sacrificing the civil rights movement’s achievements to extreme stands on antistatist principle. Rather, extreme stands on antistatist principle show what the civil rights movement did right, and what it really achieved, without the aid of federal laws.
[I]f libertarianism has anything to teach about politics, it’s that politics goes beyond politicians; social problems demand social solutions. Discriminatory businesses should be free from legal retaliation—not insulated from the social and economic consequences of their bigotry. What consequences? Whatever consequences you want, so long as they’re peaceful—agitation, confrontation, boycotts, strikes, nonviolent protests.
So when Maddow asks, Should Woolworth’s lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? neither she nor Paul seemed to realize that her attempted coup de grace—invoking the sit-in movement’s student martyrs, facing down beatings to desegregate lunch counters—actually offers a perfect libertarian response to her own question.
Because, actually, Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C., nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and dismantled private segregation without legal backing.
Should lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? No—but the question is how to disallow it. Bigoted businesses shouldn’t face threats of legal force for their racism. They should face a force much fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social organization and a culture of equality. What’s to stop resegregation in a libertarian society? We are. Using the same social power that was dismantling Jim Crow years before legal desegregation.
I oppose civil rights acts because I support civil rights movements—because the forms of social protest they pioneered proved far more courageous, positive, and effective than the litigious quagmires and pale bureaucratic substitutes governments offer.
I didn’t bring up Charles Johnson, now did I?
Sheldon Richman (really? His name is “Richman”?) says in his essay “Libertarianism and Anti-racism”:
and that
Telling oppressed peoples that they can’t be violent (or even destructive!) against racist institutions is itself a racist position.
And then he tops it off (and ends the piece) talking about how it would not have been appropriate to even trespass onto segregated property:
Oh, my mistake, I -did- bring up Charles Johnson, because he’s the one who wrote the piece “the clean water act versus clean water” in which he makes the claim that anarchists should be opposed to environmental legislation because liberal environmentalists get caught up in the legalese of it.
> really? His name is “Richman”?
I’ll refrain from the cheap prod of anti-semitism here, but seriously? You think a last name is legit for trolling? God forbid he be called “Goldman”.
I was unaware that Richman was a semitic last name and would not have taken the cheap swipe if I had. My point was not that I think there’s something wrong with his last name, but that it seemed a “stranger than fiction” moment when someone making a capitalist point has the last name Richman.
I made no capitalist point. Have you read the book I contributed to?
Sheldon: from my point of view, arguing as you have for the sanctity of property rights over the right of an oppressed people to destroy racist institutions is a capitalist position.
I think you should re-read the paragraph you just quoted from Sheldon’s article. It’s specifically an endorsement and a defense of the deliberate use of trespass as a tactic for anti-racist social activism. Not a rejection of it.
The claim that Sheldon is “talking about how it would not have been appropriate” when the first sentence in the quoted passage directly and specifically refers to “my inclusion of sit-ins in the list of appropriate nonviolent forms of protest,” seems like a pretty bizarre misreading.
He says that a “sit-in” is appropriate but only because they were totally passive and unresisting.
He says that a sit-in is an appropriate response to segregated businesses, and then in the first sentence of the next paragraph he also categorically states that a sit-in is a deliberate form of trespass. Thus he states that trespass is an appropriate response to segregated businesses. Your interpretation of the conclusion in his article seems to be exactly the opposite of what he actually wrote in that article. Will you admit that this reading of yours was mistaken?
The question of how sit-in protesters should have responded when threatened with arrest for their trespassing is a separate question from the question of whether the trespass and the sit-in itself was justified. Perhaps sometimes the right thing to do is something that will get you arrested; and perhaps sometimes you ought to accept arrest as a consequence of doing the right thing. Now Sheldon says that the students in the sit-in movement were right to sit in, and also that they were right to accept arrest without resisting it by force. That is “nonviolence” without a doubt, and there’s a conversation to be had about that. Maybe Anarchists should reject that position. Maybe that position is wrong. But right or wrong it is a position that is being completely misrepresented if you claim that he is criticizing the use of “trespass” as a tactic. Rather the position being defended is that the sit-in activists were right to trespass, and also to accept arrest, when it came to that, without violent resistance.
Now again, maybe you have a problem with the last half of that position. But we should at least keep in mind that that half of the position that Sheldon is defending was you know, for good or for ill, the considered tactical and ethical position adopted by people in the sit-in movement at the time, who did, after all, think they had some good reasons not to use violence in their resistance. (This is not incidentally the same thing as being “totally passive,” unless you think that the only way not to be passive is to be violent instead. But you can hardly expect advocates of nonviolent resistance to agree with you.) Sheldon is here taking his lead from and defending the chosen tactics of the social movement, not criticizing or policing their behavior. Now there’s an important and perfectly valid discussion to be had about nonviolence in different contexts, but I would like to suggest as gently as possible that your position on this is hardly the only one that might possibly qualify as Anarchistic. And that I have some trouble seeing much coming of any conversation on the topic if it is going to proceed from a presumption that a bunch of white activists and commentators would know better than SNCC how to put on an appropriately anti-racist sit-in.
(this is a reply to Charles, as the comments seem to be nested as far as they are allowed and I can’t “reply” to your comment)
You say:
I don’t believe this is the point that the author was trying to make in his piece. And if it was, it is poorly written. As it is written, it is making the point that their trespass was justified (presumably for economic reasons, as the rest of the article describes) only because of its non-violent and non-resistant character.
I have nothing against civil disobedience and believe nonviolence can be strategically useful. Hell, I’m even fine with people who support it ethically from the point of view of pacifism, despite disagreeing with them. But as written, his point appears to be that the trespass itself would become unethical if they were to resist once on said private property.
Since the idea seems to be that any kind of more active trespass would be ethically immoral for property rights reasons, I still hold to my conclusion that he is not allowing trespass against the property operated by bigots.
But it could just be that, as an anti-capitalist, I have no respect for private property.