I’m starting to see a lot of mutualists on libertarian and Free STate Project blogs and forums and I know some of them have joined the movement and are in New Hampshire. I don’t understand their philosophy. How can you be for free markets and be anti-capitalist?
They define “capitalism” differently.
Most market anarchists consider capitalism synonymous with the free market, left libertarian market anarchists usually don’t. Though I’m pretty sure most mutualists are socialists, and this is just a new trend.
your sentence doesn’t make any sense, Raptor.
*Fixed. lulz
I don’t understand left-“libertarianism” at all. And I’m reelly not sure do I want to - I have much more important stuff going on.
Haha. A romp around FLL might discourage you from trying to communicate with any left-libs.
What I found (and maybe I this is a straw man) is that they’re simply “anti-hierarchy” of any sort, like to keep the word “hierarchy” as ambiguous as possible, and rail against wage slavery and self-ownership.
what’s FLL?
Mutualists (from what I’ve been able to glean) are not striclty anti-capitalist, they are in favor of smaller firms handling things. As for how one can have free markets without capitalism (I am unaware if this is their argument) what stops a commune the kind of which the anarcho-communists want from competing in a free market?
FLL = forums of the libertarian left.
@Neodoxy: Sure, they could do it. But the idea there is no right to property for anyone. Hence, I should be able to take your banana perfectly legally. This means that you have no power to use force to prevent me. I think these Anarcho-commies argue that property itself is aggression.
False, anarcho-communists (in the Kropotkin and Bakunin styles) do not reject property, they reject private property. You cannot come and take the communes’ bannana. I have also heard it said that they deny property not on goods directly used by the individual but instead goods that they don’t use (hoard) and the means of production, although this last bit I cannot verify. Communes themselves however, are supposed to have property.
With that being said it does not directly relate to the matter at hand.
The term anti-capitalist is basically an acknowledgment that the masses are never going to accept the term capitalism no matter how well it’s explained to them that American Capitalism or basically any capitalism that’s existed in recent memory is a state-interventionist flavor. I like the strategy actually. By ditching the word and using ‘free-market anti-capitalism’ as a label, it serves to prompt curiousity between the two. Something sorely lacking in the leftist sphere imo. Kevin Carson does good work in defending the free-market from state-capitalist conflation.
Mutualists do favor the free market, the biggest difference between them and a misesian is their definition of property rights. To them they are not absolute but based on possession.
Despite its flaws mutualism and kevin carson are allies in the free market debate.
So if we woke up tomorrow and were in a mutualist (no capitalism allowed) system what things would change? Would I still be allowed to keep all of my property? Would I still be able to use gold as currency?
As someone else said, they define “capitalism” differently and usually equate it with statism or government-business collusion.
“Mutualist” these days usually just means a follower of partisan blowhard Kevin Carson (or more minor internet cranks like Proudhon personality cultist Shawn Wilbur). They don’t have a “philosophy” so much as an aesthetic: obsolete industrial socialist class warfare, which they apply in nauseating fashion to an otherwise reasonable foundation of anti-state libertarianism. The vast majority of human beings would consider such “mutualists” to be “capitalists” if the mutualist just described in clear terms what he supports. They call themselves “anti-capitalist” because they don’t understand how language works and cite a handful of dead writers nobody cares about to support their idiosynratic definitions.
I’d find mutualism a lot more palatable if it explicitly repudiated cultural Marxism and PC-ism, like Keith Preston has. That, and I find the whole egalitarian-leftist polemic very quickly wears out my gag reflex. It’s eerily similar to the Calvinist populism from which it descends, and I think mutualists are extremely naive if they think groups like the Venezuelan communists, Allendeists or the OWSers are anything other than aggrieved social democrats who occasionally strike the right time as a broken clock for all the wrong reasons.
The “executive bonuses” hullaballo is a perfect example of this fallacy. Yes, the executives in questions are almost certainly good-ol-boys whose bonuses properly belong to the taxpayers from which it was taken. In practice, however, if you put that forward as a policy proposition, what Joe Bloggs and the media are going to hear is this;
A: Bailouts R’ Us should be nationalized
B: Income taxes should be raised (if you’re lucky, only on the upper tax brackets, even though that in and of itself is a pretty damn broad range of net worths)
C: People should not be “allowed” to earn more or have more personal wealth than the government permits.
D: All of our problems are caused by Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher/that Ayn Randian Alan Greenspan/Milton Friedman/neoliberal (a word which is to economists what fascist is to politics and neoconfederate is to American history) economists, who were avowed anarcho-capitalists who abolished all financial regulations (especially those regarding speculators and derivatives, who are currently up there with “Dominionists” and “Pirates” as villain-of-the-week goes). The only proper solution for this is to reinstitute Glass-Steagall/Sarbanes-Oxley/the Smoot-Hawley tariff/the draft and create a dozen new government departments just to make sure government never becomes corrupt and gets in bed with big business again.
People do not understand, nor do they, I suspect have the time, inclination or desire to, the mechanics of “worker owned privatization” or “mutualized cooperatives”. Perhaps this will change, but I’m not betting on it, at least not as long as the intellectual class is running the academia-media complex.
Furthermore, the people in question show their pure hypocrisy in not condemning the politicians who bailed out the banks in the first place (or as Ron Paul once pointed out, “Congress bought the wine which Wall Street got drunk on”). They aren’t complaining about high bonuses because it goes against the whole principle of risk and reward (i.e. perverse incentives) or they realize that the government has no right to that money in the first place. They are simply social democrats who are using this as a “draw issue” to get people on board their agenda, which is to institute a maximum wage and increase government regulation and taxation of financial transactions (look at the “Robin Hood tax” campaign in Britain if you want to see this agenda in action pre-recession) and the general economy.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the fact they happen to be targeting people who are themselves corrupt is a coincidence, or, at best, an example of the deleterious effects of crony capitalism.
Call me a cynic (capital or lower is fine), call me a psychoanalyst, call me a plain old psycho, but if principled anti-statism lies behind these sentiments more than 10% of the time, then paint me red and call me Ivan.
Do you mean they reject individual property? Because all property is necessarily private - there is some person or group of people that are allowed to possess, use, or otherwise control the item in question. “Private” does not mean the same thing as “individual” - not to me, at least.
On another note, it seems to me that rejecting individual property means rejecting self-ownership.
FLL is indeed very dubious of self-ownership.
Somehow I doubt that those FLL members are dubious of their own self-ownership.
Haha, I like that.