This article will be permanently flagged as inappropriate and made unaccessible to everyone. Are you certain this article is inappropriate? Excessive Violence Sexual Content Political / Social
Email Address:
Article Id: WHEBN0039398243 Reproduction Date:
Left-wing market anarchism, a form of left-libertarianism, individualist anarchism[1] and libertarian socialism,[2][3] is associated with contemporary scholars such as Kevin Carson,[4][5] Roderick T. Long,[6][7] Charles Johnson,[8] Brad Spangler,[9] Samuel Edward Konkin III,[10] Sheldon Richman,[11][12][13] Chris Matthew Sciabarra,[14] and Gary Chartier,[15] 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.[16] Referred to as left-wing market anarchists[17] or market-oriented left-libertarians,[13] 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 anti-capitalist,[18][19][20] 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.
The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented left-libertarianism—sometimes labeled "left-wing market anarchism"[21]—overlaps to a significant degree with that of Steiner–Vallentyne left-libertarianism as the roots of that tradition are sketched in the book The Origins of Left-Libertarianism.[22] Carson–Long-style left-libertarianism is rooted in 19th-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.[23] Left-wing market anarchism identifies with Left-libertarianism (or left-wing libertarianism)[24] which names several related but distinct approaches to politics, society, culture, and political and social theory, which stress both individual freedom and social justice. Unlike right-libertarians, they believe that neither claiming nor mixing one's labor with natural resources is enough to generate full private property rights,[25][26] and maintain that natural resources (land, oil, gold, trees) ought to be held in some egalitarian manner, either unowned or owned collectively.[26] Those left-libertarians who support private property do so under the condition that recompense is offered to the local community.
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first American anarchist,[27] and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical published,[28] an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and made his own printing plates.[28] Warren was a follower of Robert Owen and joined Owen's community at New Harmony, Indiana. Josiah Warren termed the phrase "Cost the limit of price", with "cost" here referring not to monetary price paid but the labor one exerted to produce an item.[29] Therefore, "he proposed a system to pay people with certificates indicating how many hours of work they did. They could exchange the notes at local time stores for goods that took the same amount of time to produce.".[27] He put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental "labor for labor store" called the Cincinnati Time Store where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to perform labor. The store proved successful and operated for three years after which it was closed so that Warren could pursue establishing colonies based on mutualism. These included "Utopia" and "Modern Times." Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The Science of Society, published in 1852, was the most lucid and complete exposition of Warren's own theories.[30] Catalan historian Xavier Diez report that the intentional communal experiments pioneered by Warren were influential in European individualist anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries such as Emile Armand and the intentional communities started by them.[31]
[33] and where "business transactions alone produce the social order."[34] 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."[35] Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised as ideologically situated between individualist and collectivist forms of anarchism.[36] Proudhon first characterised his goal as a "third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property."[37]
[43]
Some of the American individualist anarchists later in this era, such as Benjamin Tucker, abandoned natural rights positions and converted to Max Stirner's Egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said that there were only two rights, "the right of might" and "the right of contract." He also said, after converting to Egoist individualism, "In times past ... it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off ... Man's only right to land is his might over it."[52] In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886), Tucker rejected natural rights which had long been considered the foundation of libertarianism. This rejection galvanized the movement into fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism itself. So bitter was the conflict that a number of natural rights proponents withdrew from the pages of Liberty in protest even though they had hitherto been among its frequent contributors. Thereafter, Liberty championed egoism although its general content did not change significantly."[53]
Fred E. Foldvary coined the word geo-libertarianism in an article so titled in Land and Liberty.[55] In the case of geoanarchism, the voluntary form of geolibertarianism as described by Foldvary, rent would be collected by private associations with the opportunity to secede from the rent-sharing community (and not receive the community's services).[56]
Working with other radicals like Ronald Radosh[60] and Karl Hess,[61] 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.[62] 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.[63]
Rothbard himself ultimately broke with the left, allying himself instead with the burgeoning paleoconservative movement.[64] 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.[65] 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.[66] 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.[67]
Arguing that vast disparities in wealth and social influence result from the use of force, and especially state power, to steal and engross land and acquire and maintain special privileges, members of this thought typically urge the abolition of the state. They judge that, in a stateless society, the kinds of privileges secured by the state will be absent, and injustices perpetrated or tolerated by the state can be rectified. Thus, they conclude that, with state interference eliminated, it will be possible to achieve "socialist ends by market means."[68] 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.[13]
[69]
Also there is a tendency to support labour struggles. [70] Long in particular has described the situation where:
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 19th-century alliance with radical liberalism and feminism.[71]
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.
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy are presented as an attempt to integrate marginalist critiques into the labor theory of value.[73] Carson has also been highly critical of intellectual property.[74] The primary focus of his most recent work has been decentralized manufacturing and the informal and household economies.[75] In response to claims that he uses the term "capitalism" incorrectly, Carson says he is deliberately choosing to resurrect what he claims to be an old definition of the term in order to "make a point." He claims that "the term “capitalism,” as it was originally used, did not refer to a free market, but to a type of statist class system in which capitalists controlled the state and the state intervened in the market on their behalf."[76] Carson holds that “Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable.”[77] Carson argues that in a truly laissez-faire system, the ability to extract a profit from labor and capital would be negligible.[78] Carson coined the pejorative term "vulgar libertarianism," a phrase that describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality. According to Carson, the term is derived from the phrase "vulgar political economy," which Karl Marx described as an economic order that "deliberately becomes increasingly apologetic and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of existence the ideas which contain the contradictions [existing in economic life]."[79]
Gary Chartier offers an understanding of property rights as contingent but tightly constrained social strategies—reflective of the importance of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate ownership and of natural law principles of practical reasonableness, defending robust but non-absolute protections for these rights in a manner similar to that employed by David Hume.[80] This account is distinguished both from Lockean and neo-Lockean views which deduce property rights from the idea of self-ownership and from consequentialist accounts that might license widespread ad hoc interference with the possessions of groups and individuals.[81] Chartier uses this account to ground a clear statement of the natural law basis for the view that solidaristic wealth redistribution by individual persons is often morally required, but as a response by individuals and grass-roots networks to particular circumstances rather than as a state-driven attempt to achieve a particular distributive pattern.[82] He advances detailed arguments for workplace democracy rooted in such natural law principles as subsidiarity,[83] defending it as morally desirable and as a likely outcome of the elimination of injustice rather than as something to be mandated by the state.[84] He discusses natural law approaches to land reform and to the occupation of factories by workers.[85] He objects on natural-law grounds to intellectual property protections, drawing on his theory of property rights more generally.[86] And he develops a general natural law account of boycotts.[87] He has argued that proponents of genuinely freed markets should explicitly reject capitalism and identify with the global anti-capitalist movement, while emphasizing that the abuses the anti-capitalist movement highlights result from state-tolerated violence and state-secured privilege rather than from voluntary cooperation and exchange. According to Chartier, “it makes sense for [left-libertarians] to name what they oppose ‘capitalism.’ Doing so . . . ensures that advocates of freedom aren’t confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers—as well as ordinary people around the world who use ‘capitalism’ as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives."[88]
Libertarianism, Emma Goldman, Libertarian socialism, Politics, Socialism
Anarchism, Socialism, Liberalism, Ayn Rand, Property
Libertarianism, Anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Libertarian socialism, Socialism
Socialism, Peter Kropotkin, Politics, An Anarchist FAQ, Emma Goldman
Monarchy, Anarchism, Public administration, Politics, Communism
Anarchism, Libertarianism, Henry David Thoreau, Max Stirner, Anarcho-capitalism
Libertarianism, Anarchism, Liberalism, Ayn Rand, Oscar Wilde
Anarchism, Libertarianism, Politics, Socialism, Free love
Syndicalism, Noam Chomsky, Libertarian socialism, Anarchism, Libertarianism