~ Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (BookSurge, 2007) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (BookSurge, 2008) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (BookSurge, 2010) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century (Independently Published, 2021) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ The State: Theory and Praxis (Independently Published, 2022) by Kevin A. Carson.

~ Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2011), edited by Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson.

Kevin Carson’s six books form an unusually coherent intellectual project. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy supplies its economics; Organization Theory examines the corporation; The Homebrew Industrial Revolution turns to technology and productive scale; The Desktop Regulatory State to information and coordination; Exodus to institutional transition; and The State: Theory and Praxis to political strategy. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson’s anthology Markets Not Capitalism provides the wider left-market-anarchist tradition in which Carson belongs.

The proposition connecting them is that markets and capitalism should not be treated as synonyms. Carson favours voluntary exchange, competition and decentralised coordination while regarding historical capitalism as a system profoundly shaped by enclosure, banking privilege, patents, tariffs, subsidies, licensing and regulatory cartelisation. Much of what appears to be the spontaneous outcome of markets may therefore be the accumulated result of political privilege.

In Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Carson attempts to preserve a labour theory of value while incorporating enough Austrian subjectivism to answer its traditional objections. Once scarcity, subjective valuation, time preference, uncertainty and entrepreneurial judgement are admitted into the explanation of prices, labour no longer seems to perform the distinctive explanatory role Carson assigns to it. I would argue that prices do not require an underlying labour value towards which they gravitate; they arise from the competing valuations of consumers and entrepreneurs, while the prices of labour, land and capital are themselves derived from expectations about future demand. Profit and interest therefore cannot simply be treated as deductions from labour’s product, since they also reflect uncertainty, the passage of time and the willingness to commit resources before the final product is sold.

Where Carson does have a point is in his historical account of property and privilege. It goes like this: if private property is justified by legitimate acquisition and voluntary transfer, then present ownership cannot be presumed legitimate merely because current exchanges are voluntary. A wage contract may be consensual, but that does not by itself establish that the distribution of land and capital from which employer and worker bargain arose through equally legitimate means. Carson is therefore right to ask how far enclosure, confiscation, monopoly privilege, subsidy and legal restriction shaped the economic structure inherited by later market actors. I would reply that history is not irrelevant, but that Carson must connect particular injustices to particular titles or continuing privileges. The coercive history of capitalism cannot by itself establish that wage labour, rent, interest or large-scale ownership are inherently illegitimate.

I found Organization Theory more persuasive because Carson applies the Austrian critique of bureaucracy to the private firm as well as the state. Large corporations also have to cope with distorted information, internal hierarchies, principal-agent problems and the tendency of managers to pursue goals that do not always coincide with those of owners or consumers. There is nothing inherently un-Austrian about asking whether firms can become too large to coordinate efficiently. Indeed, economic calculation places limits on the size of the firm because internal divisions ultimately depend upon market prices formed outside the organisation. If one firm absorbed the entire economy, those external prices would disappear and calculation would become impossible.

But Carson sometimes pushes this notion too far for my liking, as a large corporation is not simply a miniature socialist economy. However bureaucratic its internal structure, it still buys inputs on markets, sells outputs to consumers and is subject to profit and loss. Those external prices provide information that a genuinely centralised command economy lacks. Internal inefficiency may therefore be substantial without implying that the firm is incapable of economic calculation. The relevant question is not whether corporations contain planning, but whether the costs of that planning outweigh the efficiencies achieved by operating at scale.

Carson is convincing when showing that subsidies, transport policy, intellectual-property protection and regulation can favour large and centralised firms. What does not follow is that removing those privileges would necessarily produce a predominantly small-scale, cooperative or localised economy, for we cannot know in advance which forms of organisation a genuinely competitive market would select. Some large corporations might disintegrate once their political supports disappeared, while others might remain large because economies of scale, specialisation or network effects genuinely justify their size.

This difficulty becomes particularly visible in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. Carson argues that cheap general-purpose machinery, digital fabrication, small workshops and networked production undermine the economic foundations of the Sloanist mass-production corporation. His discussion of overhead is excellent. A firm burdened with enormous fixed costs must maintain throughput, inventories and distribution networks in ways that smaller, more flexible producers need not.

But technological possibility does not establish economic superiority. Twenty-first-century capitalism has simultaneously produced extraordinarily decentralised software and knowledge production and extraordinarily concentrated semiconductor fabrication, cloud infrastructure, logistics and platform networks. Carson occasionally treats technical decentralisability as though it implied economic decentralisation. I would insist, however, that only entrepreneurial experimentation, market prices and profit and loss can reveal whether distributed production actually economises scarce resources.

The Desktop Regulatory State extends the same optimism to information, with Carson arguing that networked communities, reputation systems, open-source investigation and stigmergic coordination can replace functions previously monopolised by corporate and governmental bureaucracies. Here he makes the deeply Hayekian recognition that useful knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated in official institutions.

But Hayek cuts both ways, and decentralised knowledge is not necessarily accurate knowledge. Networks transmit rumours, fashions and errors alongside valuable local information. Nor does eliminating formal hierarchy necessarily eliminate power. Digital networks can produce their own gatekeepers, reputation monopolies and information asymmetries. Carson demonstrates that decentralised regulation is possible; he sometimes comes too close to assuming that it will therefore be superior.

Exodus is Carson’s most interesting attempt to resolve these tensions. Rather than capturing the state and redesigning society à la Marxism-Leninism, anarchists should construct alternative institutions—cooperatives, commons, mutual-aid networks, community land arrangements and distributed production—which progressively make capitalist and governmental institutions unnecessary. This is far closer to spontaneous-order thinking than conventional revolutionary socialism. There is no central blueprint and no revolutionary authority allocating resources after the seizure of power.

I have a quibble here concerning the fundamental problem of property. Voluntary cooperatives, communes and commons create no difficulty: individuals are free to organise their legitimately owned resources however they choose. The conflict begins when Carson’s mutualist conceptions of possession or occupancy-and-use are employed against absentee ownership acquired without aggression. We should distinguish sharply between genuinely stolen titles—which may be illegitimate and subject to restitution—and property that has passed through legitimate appropriation and voluntary exchange. Carson’s critique regularly blurs historical injustice with a more general hostility towards forms of ownership he considers socially undesirable.

The State: Theory and Praxis finally exposes the unresolved political problem in Carson’s strategy. He rejects both straightforward state capture and an anarchist purism incapable of responding to immediate political circumstances. Existing state mechanisms may sometimes be used defensively while counter-institutions develop outside them.

But once movements accept state intervention because its immediate distributive consequences appear desirable, the distinction between dismantling privilege and creating countervailing privilege becomes unstable. Carson wishes to weaken concentrations of power, but selective political intervention can easily create new constituencies dependent upon the state and new distortions requiring further intervention.

Carson’s books are often more expansive than they need to be. His arguments are frequently buried beneath long quotations, extended literature reviews and repeated restatements of the same point. The range of material is impressive, but tighter editing and more synthesis in his own voice would make the central arguments clearer and more persuasive.

The strength of Markets Not Capitalism lies in separating markets from the institutions that have historically grown up around capitalism and showing that opposition to corporate privilege, monopoly and concentrated economic power does not require opposition to exchange, competition or private initiative. The range of contributors also gives the book considerable breadth, linking nineteenth-century individualist anarchism with more recent arguments about labour, property, intellectual property and corporate power.

As an anthology, however, it is uneven, sometimes repetitive and occasionally too ready to treat decentralisation, cooperation and small-scale ownership as the likely results of freer markets rather than possibilities that would have to be tested through competition. Some contributions also use “capitalism” so broadly that the distinction between opposition to state privilege and opposition to wage labour, rent, interest or large firms becomes blurred. Even so, the collection succeeds in its central purpose. It makes a strong case that markets cannot simply be identified with the existing corporate economy, while leaving open the harder question of what genuinely freed markets would actually produce.

Jo Grimond, leader of the British Liberal Party from 1956 to 1967 and again briefly in 1976, tried to recover a radical liberal tradition that had been squeezed between Conservative defence of established economic power and Labour’s preference for nationalisation and centralised planning. His liberalism was radical in the older sense: suspicious of concentrated power wherever it appeared, whether in Whitehall, large corporations, trade unions, inherited wealth or other entrenched institutions. He favoured decentralisation, stronger local government, wider ownership, competition, cooperatives and forms of industrial democracy while remaining committed to markets and private enterprise. The object was not simply to replace public power with private power, or vice versa, but to create a more plural society in which political and economic authority was dispersed across a much wider range of individuals, firms, associations and communities.

This makes Grimond a useful bridge between the left-market anarchist critique and a more realistic radical liberal programme. There is much to admire in Carson and in the wider Markets Not Capitalism project. Its central insight—that the existing corporate economy should not simply be identified with a free market—is an important one. Subsidies, monopoly privileges, regulatory protections, barriers to entry and other forms of state support can entrench large firms and established owners while making the resulting distribution of economic power appear more natural than it really is. Left-market anarchism is therefore on point when it asks how much of the present economic order is genuinely the result of voluntary competition and how much depends upon political privilege.

As an Orange Book Lib Dem, it is here that I part company with the conclusions drawn from this critique. The existence of state-created privilege does not in itself establish that the state can or should disappear, nor does it prove that a genuinely free economy would necessarily be dominated by small firms, cooperatives or local production. A more convincing response is to retain the radicalism of the critique while adopting a Grimondian method of reform. The state should be smaller, more decentralised and less willing to protect established interests, but it still has a role in maintaining the legal framework of competition, providing public goods, preventing entrenched concentrations of power and preserving the institutional conditions in which individuals and voluntary associations can act freely.

This produces a radical free-market liberalism quite different from either conventional laissez-faire or social democracy. It does not defend the existing corporate economy simply because firms are privately owned, and it does not assume that every economic problem requires further centralised administration. Instead, it seeks to remove privileges, lower barriers to entry, widen access to ownership, strengthen local government and create more room for small businesses, cooperatives, mutuals, self-employment and other forms of voluntary association. Large firms, wage labour, rent or unequal outcomes would not be treated as illegitimate in themselves; their legitimacy would depend upon whether they arose through open competition and voluntary exchange rather than through political protection.

The result is something closer to what I would call a Grimondian “long revolution” than to anarchist rupture. The ambition remains substantial: a society in which economic and political power is much more widely distributed, ownership is broader, markets are more genuinely competitive and central institutions exercise less control over everyday life. But the means are constitutional, gradual and institutional. Reform accumulates through decentralisation, competition, wider ownership and the patient removal of privilege rather than through the expectation that the state can simply be abolished and replaced by voluntary networks.

In that sense, left-market anarchism supplies much of the diagnosis and some of the institutional imagination, while Grimond provides the more plausible political strategy. The attraction of Carson’s project lies in its refusal to accept the existing distribution of power as the natural expression of the market. The Grimondian response is to take that challenge seriously without abandoning liberal political institutions altogether. The long revolution is therefore neither a defence of capitalism as it exists nor an attempt to abolish markets and the state in one stroke, but a sustained effort to disperse power, widen ownership and make both government and the economy more genuinely liberal.