The problem with left- “anarchists” is that they seem to like to make broad statements of “fact” that are not true at all. Such as “a free market has never existed”. Any coments?
Well, I’m not a left anarchist but the Free market really has never existed in the U.S, although I’d say it was somewhat close to a free market after Jackson got rid of the 2nd Central Bank and before Buchanan signed the Morrill Tariff into law.
In some sectors it didn’t and some it did and at different times and places.
“A free market has never existed” in the sense that it has always been a slave to the state, to one degree or another, and therefore not entirely free. Of course commerce existed, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here today, but it wasn’t free. At least not absolutely - you can show that sometimes it is relatively more or less free than others. e.g People in the USA were probably somewhat less oppressed than those in the USSR in a given year.
Don’t read too much into these labels, but if you substitute “free market” for “good” and “the state” with “evil”, the situation becomes subjectively easier to understand, imo… If someone were to say, “there has never been good”, you’d think they were utterly mad, but on the other hand it’s not difficult to appreciate that good has always coexisted with evil - that there has never been absolute good, and that the good things there have been are almost always tainted with shades of grey. It’s also true that the ‘bad’ forces are materially dependant on the existence of the good - there’s no ecosystem where everything is a parasite - and that ‘good’ is understood and defined in terms of a comparison with that which is evil. Otherwise it would simply be called ‘the way’ to do things, and not ‘a good way’ to do things.
If we abolished “evil”, what would stop “good” from becoming “evil”?
Haha. In truth, there is no such thing as abolishing evil by proclamation. What’s really happening is that while there is a government around, there is the belief that it can abolish evil by proclamation. By abolishing this belief, manifestly evil things are far more likely to be identified as such, and will not be able to benefit from the illusion that they are not, in fact, evil, which is really what underlies the problem with the state, and with corporations.
What prevented British people from identifying the British East India Company as an evil force? Well, the fact that it had a magic charter from the sovereign, and was seen as sharing a “British” identity with them. That’s what separated it from the Dutch East India Company or the French East India Company, wasn’t it? If it it hadn’t had this charter, how would it have been perceived by the British, at least? I’m going to assume that the people who resisted the Company in India didn’t really care that it wasn’t technically, on paper, the official state military of Britain.
There’s this faulty assumption that with a government - a magic wand that gets pointed at things to declare them “good” or “evil” by decree, and then supposedly works to minimise the latter - the “ordinary person” (the consumer of society) would have more control over the way society is shaped than if there wasn’t such a thing. In reality, it’s a scam. The purpose of government is to guide the consumer of society to think in terms of the morality the ruling elites want them to have - normally they want the plebs to think that the patricians aren’t doing anything wrong, but that it would be wrong for a pleb to try to replicate their “success”. The purpose of government is to instill slave morality. Without a government, the consumer of society has to come up with his own justifications for right and wrong, and suddenly they no longer decide whether a “corporation” is good or evil based on how well they are accepted by the government.
There’s also a strangely naive assumption that a government won’t always be controlled by ruling elites with their own selfish interests, probably the very same same ruling elites who control “the corporations”, if this is how they have structured society to benefit them…