Introduction.
Here you will find three essays, written between 2020-2023, from what can be described as a left-libertarian, individualist anarchist, or market anarchist perspective. As an appendix, I have also added a letter addressed to a friend, defending anarchism from an Eastern Orthodox Christian standpoint.
Not So Spontaneous Order: Historical Capitalism and Classical Liberal Mythology.
The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) has an excellent little book called: Classical Liberalism: A Primer, published in 2015 by Eamonn Butler. It is available on PDF for anyone who desires to read it, and I advocate that you do.
However, I wanted to take issue with their understanding of spontaneous order, so crucial in the operation of a free market society. In an introductory summary, the following statement is made:
· Free speech and mutual toleration are viewed as essential foundations for peaceful cooperation between free people. Classical liberals argue that such cooperation gives rise to spontaneous social orders (such as markets, customs, culture and language) that are infinitely more complex, efficient and adaptive than anything that could be designed centrally.
· In economics, classical liberals believe that wealth is not created by governments, but by the mutual cooperation of free individuals. Prosperity comes through free individuals inventing, creating, saving, investing and, ultimately, exchanging goods and services voluntarily, for mutual gain — the spontaneous order of the free-market economy. (CL:P, pxix)
While there are concise but informative passages on the intellectual evolution of classical liberalism. It is divorced from the historical development of capitalism. Only in a passage on Adam Smith does it mention that he “was suspicious of crony capitalism and of big government” (CL:P, p101). There are no further references to capitalism in the book, which begs the question: what is crony capitalism compared to pure or really existing capitalism? It is quite clear here, that capitalism and free markets are interpreted as synonymous.
This is an example of classical liberal mythologising. That is, the belief that the capitalist economic system is the product of thrift and abstention; of land enclosure and improvement; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange; and the cash nexus as solution to a coincidence of wants. But as history teaches, the Industrial Revolution was not the outcome of peaceful and voluntary cooperation and exchange but violent and coercive state-backed aggression. One need not be a dogmatic Marxist to observe and understand this, it is historical fact.
Classical liberal mythology has as its hero the rugged individualist who appropriates a holding of land, withdrawing it from the overburdened or underutilised commons, and transforming it by his labour into a productive property. This says nothing about the brutal enclosure of the commons, the travesty of clearances, violent suppression of free towns, or outlawing of vagrancy. Far from spontaneous order, it is deliberate social engineering. When classical liberal scholars wax lyrical about the horrors of Soviet forced collectivisation and break-neck industrialisation under Stalin, the utterly disregard the brutality and coercion of the enclosures and clearances that brought about the Industrial revolution.
In effect, capitalism as an economic system is an assemblage of artificial scarcities, dubious property titles, stifling entry barriers, constrictive regulations, socialised costs, and advantageous subsidisation. Put simply, capitalism is the collusion between a privileged propertied minority and the state to expropriate and accumulate natural resources from a dispossessed majority. It is the abrogation of individual property rights for one class of people in favour of another. For capitalism to exist, the rights and access to natural resources for the many has to be restricted so they can sell their labour to the few. Rather than affirming and protecting all property rights and claims, capitalism acknowledges only certain types, preferably those of sprawling and hierarchical corporations. There is a dire truth to the saying that an Englishman’s home is his castle, for this small Barrett box and astronomical mortgage is all the individual has against the incestuous power structure of state, financial sector, and corporatocracy.
When denigrating collectivism, classical liberals forget too, that corporations are not individuals but centrally coordinated assemblages within the spontaneous order of the market. They are legal fictions created to expropriate resources from real living and breathing individuals with wants, needs, and desires. How does the reality of a globalised neo-feudal economy dominated by multinationals fit with the myth of the voluntary association, cooperation, and exchange between free individuals?
In his primer, Butler asserts that classical liberalism is not “an atomistic idea” but instead sees “individuals as members of various overlapping groups, with many family, moral, religious or other allegiances” (p xviii-xix). They can also hold communal and social property titles which complicate the neat distinction between negative and positive rights. Indeed, just as Soviet communism relied upon an authoritarian state to collectivize and nationalise property, so too has historical capitalism depended upon state-sanctioned violence to purposefully abrogate communal patterns of living and development. The creation of welfare systems became necessary because of wealth concentration into too few hands. Having gone too hard in breaking up communal and mutual ways of living, the capitalist state then had reverse track by providing social security before the system consumed itself. The classical liberal fails to recognise its greatest enemy in the form of the welfare state is its own bastard child.
Regarding the place of knowledge in society, in reference to Hayek, Butler states that “most of the knowledge on which social progress depends is dispersed knowledge. It is local, personal, fragmented and partial, and cannot be centralised” (CL:P, 69). Compressing the argument provided in the book, there are four primary reasons by centralisation fails to use and transform knowledge and information efficiently. These are as follows:
- The information extant with society is diffused into the subjectivity of individual agents in their relational activity with the lived environment.
- Such information is predominantly tacit in nature, existing beyond neat conceptualisation and clear articulation.
- The knowledge within society is not stable or given but in the constant flux of becoming.
- Any and all intervention by a central authority in society and the market through regulation and control only helps to disrupt and misdirect the very information it requires to make the appropriate judgements and perform the proper actions.
Given that it is not the market which determines property rights but property rights that determine the market, a particular property regime can create artificial scarcity, distort price signals, and pervert incentives. This applies as much to state socialism as it does to corporate capitalism. The confiscation of land and natural resources creates artificial abundance for the propertied class while impoverishing the dispossessed. Meanwhile, the enclosure of knowledge and information prevents collaboration and innovation. The consequence is inequality and waste.
If classical liberals truly believe in the voluntary and mutual cooperation between free individuals, perhaps they should advocate for a turnover of land to trusts, transfer of natural resources to common governance, conversion of public utilities and services to stakeholder cooperatives, reorganisation of corporations into self-managed and worker-owned mutuals, as well as the abolition of patent and copyright. Liberated from the distortions, privileges, and injustices of capitalism, under this system ownership could be diversified, barriers to entry lowered, access to capital eased, entrepreneurial activity encouraged, wealth redistributed, and power decentralised: fully realising the spontaneous order of the free market.
Sources.
~Classical Liberalism: A Primer (IEA, 2015) by Eamonn Butler (Available here:https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/classical-liberalism-a-primer).
I Don’t Think it Means What You Think it Means: Correcting Some Misconceptions About Left-Libertarianism.
I was so aggrieved after listening to a recent conversation on the IEA Podcast, produced by the classical liberal Institute of Economic Affairs, that I feel compelled to clarify a few misunderstandings.
The topic was libertarian socialism, with the following introduction provided:
Libertarianism, socialism, classical liberalism, Marxism, anarchism. They’re all terms that are thrown around in political discourse but it’s vitally important we understand these concepts and assess their merits and shortcomings.
In this podcast, we uncover what libertarianism is and why people on both the left and the right claim to be libertarian. Is it an oxymoron to be a ‘libertarian socialist’?
Listen to the thoughts of IEA Head of Political Economy Kristian Niemietz and IEA Head of Cultural Affairs Marc Glendening.
Within the discussion, the terms left-libertarian, libertarian socialism, and anarchism are all applied interchangeably. It is also assumed that all left-libertarians are in accordance with Marxism and that they reject outright the concept of private property. Allusions are also made to the irrationalism of such thinking and its repudiation of Enlightenment principles. Names mentioned in the talk include the Russian anarchist-communists, Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin; the French revolutionary syndicalist, Georges Sorel; and the libertarian Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg. The hooligans of Antifa are also briefly discussed. Except for Kropotkin, all these figures have supported political violence to advance their causes.
I would like to highlight several considerations which I feel were missed from the discussion.
It should be remembered that France’s leading libertarian thinkers of the 19th Century, Frederic Bastiat and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, both sat on the left of the general assembly after the 1848 revolution. They both advocated individual ownership and free exchange, as well as being opposed to coercive state intervention in the market. What they disagreed upon was the forms and kinds of ownership and exchange that they regarded as genuinely voluntary.
The type of positive anarchy Proudhon envisioned was a society functioning in the absence of the state where one does “what he wishes and only what he wishes,” according to his Solution to the Social Problem; and where “business transactions alone produce the social order,” as he writes in The Principles of Federation. His version of Mutualist anarchism was concerned with reciprocity, freedom of association, voluntary contract, federalism, and free banking.
This line of thinking found a natural home in the young and energetic United States. Josiah Warren is considered the first American anarchist, founding The Peaceful Revolutionist in 1833. Initially an Owenite, Warren set the tone for an experimental type of lifestyle anarchism at odds with the later violence endorsed the industrial revolutionary anarchists.
Along with Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker is one of the best-known American Individualists. Tucker considered himself a socialist, though this was before Marxists monopolised the term. What he prescribed was a distribution of property in an undistorted and natural free market. In an article for Liberty, entitled A Book That is Not Milk for Babies (1889), Tucker elaborated his visceral hated for government intervention:
First, the government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.
Second. The government has none of the characteristics of a successful business man, being wasteful, careless, clumsy, and short-sighted in the extreme.
Third. The government is thoroughly irresponsible, having in its power to effectively repudiate its obligations at any time.
For Tucker, inequality was the consequence of statutory monopolies enforced by that state which allowed capitalists to dominate the economy. The four principles monopolies he identified were those of money, land, tariffs, and patents.
Without labouring the point further, the thrust of my argument is that left-libertarianism is neither opposed to markets or private property, and neither does it advocate violent action to eliminate the state.
This brings me onto what I call the Princess Bride fallacy, where free markets are conflated with capitalism. This is to say, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Markets in various forms have existed since the dawn of humankind. The capitalist socio-economic system is merely one iteration of market exchange.
In the podcast, much emphasis is made on how oppression has historically been utilised to sustain socialist societies and ensure material equality. But capitalism itself is the product of state sponsored violence. Without the enclosure of the commons and the creation of a landless proletariat, the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been possible. Society may have developed in a more egalitarian and cooperative manner, rather than the unequal and hierarchical society that exists today. Labour organisation has historically been proscribed, regulated, and co-opted to favour the interests of big capital. Even the welfare state, much vaunted by the social democratic left, is an edifice designed to vitiate the natural spontaneity and self-sufficiency of the working-class in providing for itself. Social security is the price capitalism is willing to pay to maintain its hegemony.
It could be argued that capitalism is less an economic system and more a political one, for it requires persistent intervention by the state to sustain itself. This is evidenced in excessive regulation, corporate welfare, expropriation of property, the exercise of eminent domain, restrictions on access to capital, tariffs, patents, copyright, etc. While every effort should be made to dimmish the power and reach of the government, it is still worth questioning how privatisation of state confiscated assets is achieved and what connections are involved.
It can be argued that free-market socialism is the logical conclusion of classical liberalism. Without the state to aid and abet the distortions, privileges, and injustices capitalism requires to reproduce itself, ownership could be diversified, barriers to entry lowered, access to capital eased, entrepreneurial activity encouraged, wealth redistributed, and power decentralised.
The link to the podcast in question can be found here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-g94dy-121283e
A Market for Law: The Case for a Decentralized Legal System.
According to Lawrence M. Friedman in What is a Legal System?, featured in American Law: An Introduction (OSO, 2017), a working definition of the law and legal systems can be clarified as follows:
Law is the set of rules and regulations enforced by the government. The formal law, though, is just part of a broader legal system that includes the structures, substance, and culture that breathe life into the law on the books. (My emphasis)
However, a crucial argument of market anarchist thinking is that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective services within a society should be removed from the coercive and violent purview of the state and given to voluntary and consensual forces of the free and open market.
The objection to government or state monopolization of the law is twofold:
- From a morally egalitarian perspective, it is illegitimate for any single societal force to assert undue control over a particular area of life.
- From an economic slant, monopolies are neither fair nor efficient in providing goods and services due to their lack of incentive and poor use of information.
Resistance to the market anarchist argument for decentralized law is that absent of government enforcement there can be no agreed upon body of law. Therefore, it would seem reasonable that legal provision should fall under the purview of the state. At minimum, there should be single arbiter and provider of justice, complete with the appropriate checks and balances.
But this line of thinking fails to account for the inherent capacity of markets, society, and even nature, to balance diversity with uniformity. Just as the eclectic diversity of wildlife conforms to kindred body plans, so too do different and historical societies evolve similar institutions, customs, and traditions. Commerical success regularly depends upon the ability of a provider to offer the greatest choice and opportunity with the least amount of fuss and complication, playing opportunity off against convenience.
The retort, here, could be that given the natural trend of markets and society towards uniformity in the development of customs, products and services, that monopolization by the state is equally inevitable as it is sensible. Yet, this proposition does not consider that in having established itself as a coercive and monopolizing force, the state then acts as its own arbiter freed the demands and expectations of society, with no recourse to third-party involvement.
Perhaps the most deep and abiding concern levelled against market anarchism is the provision of private protection and defense, with the fear that one competing security service will act aggressively, coopting or eliminating the others, therefore leading to a war of all against all. However, by assuming supreme authority, confiscating the means of forcible action against it, and recruiting or coercively drafting individuals to do its bidding, the state fulfills the very nightmare is it designed to supposedly prevent.
But, unlike a government, a private protection and defense agency cannot externalize its costs through taxation or recruit personnel on mass. Thus, it is restricted in the extent of its resources and the scope of its actions. Furthermore, should a security service act in a belligerent and untoward manner, there is option for its subscribers to voice objection, defer payment, or switch provider, drastically attenuating its capabilities. Thus, unlike elected politicians who rarely face the consequences or pay the cost of their activities, private security firms are beholden to their customers and the system of law. Also, given the plurality of competing protection and security agencies, belligerence by one could provoke preventative action by others. Just as diplomacy and negotiation are the norm in international diplomatic relations between states, so too would it be likely between security services, with an orientation towards peaceful resolution.
The question of neutrality and capture by special interests also arises, positing that the state is free from all economic or class influence, defending the poor and downtrodden against the rich and powerful. By removing the law from government hands is to lay it on the laps of the wealthy and entitled who will manipulate it in their favour. Yet, this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. As a stagnant and lethargic institution, the state is more susceptible to malicious capture and corruption that the democratic forces of the market were providers are rewarded for their honesty and integrity in the provision of service.
In conclusion, it can be said with confidence that rather than an absence of government, the market provision of the law is, in fact, and extension of it: the diffusion of the state into society, as opposed to an assertion of power by a single institution. This also solves the problem of the necessary check and balances required of an authority as they do not have to be designed in advance but emerge organically through the interactivity of individuals in free and voluntary exchanges. Rather than deferring to the judgement of a single arbiter, a free-market legal system can consult a plethora of interacting agencies and suppliers when deciding or providing a ruling, relying upon cooperation and collaboration. To this extent it is pragmatic, accepting that there is no absolute definition of what is good or just, only what works best in each situation and helps to facilitate further action without friction or discord.
Sources.
~ American Law: An Introduction by Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden (Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2017, available online).
Appendix.
Revolt of the Spirit: The Meaning of (Eastern Orthodox) Christian Anarchism – A Reply to a Friend.
At first blush, the political theology of Christian anarchism appears oxymoronic, with the former signifying empathy and obedience, and the latter denoting delinquency and nihilism.
In the classical anarchist tradition of the 19th century, a polarity exists between influential figures such as Bakunin and Kropotkin. The former rejected Christianity not only for its institutionalised role in supporting governing authorities, but also for demeaning the human individual. Yet Bakunin was not beyond recognising the emotive appeal and transformative character of Christianity which challenged existing iniquities. More sober and considerate than his fellow firebrand Russian, Kropotkin recognised the inherent libertarianism and ant-formalism of pre-Nicaean Christianity before it was co-opted and degenerated under state aegis. This interpretation is present in the thinking of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and Ammon Hennacy.
When Christian existentialist Nicholas Berdyaev equated the Kingdom of God with anarchy, he was not simply implying an overturning of the existing worldly order, but its utter inversion: a turning inside out of being and existence. Christ’s message was not delivered to those oppressed by the system but those excluded by it. That is, not merely the subsisting poor, but the diseased, mentally ill, prostitutes, vagabonds, and criminals. This is what in Marxist discourse would be termed the lumpenproletariat, the part of no part, existing below and beyond the structure of class relations and consciousness. Reaching beyond politics and economics, the Christian message demands a confrontation with, and amelioration of, radical otherness. That is, to find goodness and beauty in what is ugly and sinful.
A common trope within Russian Orthodox theology is that of sobornost. Definitions vary, but the religious philosopher and follower of Vladimir Solovyov defined it a mutual or inward presupposition between creatures as subjects, a natural love inherent in all things. Nikolai Lossky even equated it with the operation of the Hegelian dialectic. The notion of spontaneous order associated with the Scottish Enlightenment and Austrian school of economics is also applicable. What is crucial in sobornost is that the individual subject does not loose their character or personality when finding fulfilment within the whole. Opposed to rationalist individualism, it denotes an organic personalism.
In his writings, Berdyaev distinguished between the term bourgeoisie as signifying a social class and as a spiritual disposition. That is, as a way of being or active consciousness. Such a disposition is not the product of capitalist relations but presupposes it. As such, all subsequent movements arising within capitalism and revolting against it are tainted with a materialism devoid of spiritual relationality and futurity. In other words, socialism and communism are merely the pursuit of material satisfaction absent of capitalist volatility. We can see similarities in the thought of Martin Heidegger with his fear that technological thinking will reduce the world to a gasoline station. This notion is also echoed in the work of the English Orthodox convert, Philp Sherrard.
In the (in)famous chapter from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, entitled The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, this conflict between the material and spiritual is perfectly illustrated when Christ is condemned for believing that humans desire spiritual freedom above material happiness. In his trials, Christ could have provided victual sustenance, confirmed the existence of God, and assumed sovereignty over the earth, but he refused on the basis that it would violate human freedom and the spontaneity of the universe He created.
The Orthodox interpret the meaning of the statement that a human being is created in the image and likeness of God to signify static and dynamic aspects of the personality. The image remains undiminished regardless of transgressions and sinfulness, for it is free gift of the Creator. But the likeness is malleable, leading one closer or further from God in the course of one’s life and tribulations. Like a candle flame, it can glow or wither depending on the spiritual oxygen it receives.
Thus, when the Orthodox speak of theosis as the personal transformative process of coming into full communion with God, they do not recognise the despair and irredeemability of creaturely sinfulness present in Western Christianity through the doctrine of Original Sin. And neither do they accept the totalising social and economic prescriptions of radical political movements, such as liberalism, fascism, or communism. Indeed, it was Dostoevsky’s underground man who insisted that even in a crystal palace utopia he would still reserve the right to stick out his tongue, for humanity cannot subsist on bread alone. The contemporary social phenomenon of identity politics is testimony to a world defined by material overabundance but spiritual dearth and want.
While insurrectionary anarchism should rightly be condemned for its nihilistic violence and existential despair, in the American individualist strand, influenced by J.P. Proudhon and advanced by the likes of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and Voltairine deCleyre, among others, we find an optimist movement dedicated to evolutionary experimentation, exploration, and education of individuals and communities. This is complimented by a revulsion and outright rejection of mass revolutionary change and the chaos and destruction it entails.
Returning to The Brothers Karamazov, through the words of Father Zosima, Dostoevsky advocates an ethical vision where divine love is opposed to man-made legalism. Akin to Proudhonian mutualism, it is a way of being that emphasises empathy, forgiveness, and humility. It is an outlook dedicated to building communities and extending relations in spite of the artificial worldly boundaries, restrictions, customs, and taboos imposed upon life. It is a recognition that any desire to ascend up the vertical axis of the cross to Heaven is predicated upon reaching out along the horizontal axis of the cosmos.
When God performed the sacrificial and voluntary act of Creation, did not merely create the world, but also birthed creative subjects to dwell within it. Such creatures are both products and producers of their lived environments through their relational activity. Just as the Holy Trinity is a communion in love, so does humanity as the image and likeness of God seek communion. The basis of such communion, of seeking relationality, is activity. And just as God is eternal but never still, so too are human beings constantly motivated outside, above, and beyond themselves, always orientated towards the future.
When a Christian considers the Law, it should not be held as the font of all ethics, but the unfortunate product of a world fallen into sin. The Law is something to be transcended through creative experimentation which strives transfigure evil rather than eradicating it. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, much of the greatest evil has been committed out of certainty in a solution. What Dostoevsky recognised is that the tragedy of freedom comes not been good and evil, but between competing goods and ethical visions that cannot be reconciled. The desiccated individualism of contemporary humanism exists because it has no forward motion, deprived of the call and response dynamic that God provides.
Perhaps if we are to define the meaning of Christian anarchism, we can characterise it as an ethical venture. What makes us anarchists is a belief in the freedom to explore, experiment, and create, and what makes us Christians is a belief that such creativity can be received, assessed, and valued, stored up in the treasury of Heaven. Creation in this sense was not a singular event in the distant past, but an ongoing process of communion between God and world. Rather than the propaganda by the deed valorised by insurrectionary anarchists, Christian anarchists can be identified for their testimony by the act. That is, small everyday gestures based on voluntary association, cooperation, and mutuality that provide services and hospitality to those in need.
The objective of Christian anarchism is to lay the foundations for new Jerusalem under the nose of Caesar through the development of an alternative social infrastructure that progressively and incrementally undermines Babylon from below. This entails the creation and utilisation of counter-institutions that permit the gradual restructuring of the world in a more peaceful and voluntary direction. Examples could include producer or consumer cooperatives, small enterprises, mutual aid institutions, friendly societies, DIY collectives, community gardens, credit union, etc.
The primordial message of Christianity is one of forgiveness and redemption. It is not a prescriptive religion directed towards forging a new order of values or constructing a utopian society but is a movement seeking to undermine inherited customs and societal structures in favour of concrete interpersonal relations with the intention of liberating arrested potentials for creating value, exercising purpose, and forging community.
The Beginning of Terror 