Capitalism’s relation to spiritual attitudes and ideologies has been historically hostile. The use of magic and the holding of pagan beliefs in peasant communities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was mercilessly crushed, as it was seen as a belief system that removed control from the mercantile elites and prevented the mechanistic control needed to create a class of wage labourers[1]. Along with the enclosure of the commons, and the warping of gender relations to fit new roles created for the purpose of capital accumulation, this is an attempt to engender new relations into the socio-economic sphere.

There seem to be two prevailing views on the particular outcomes of a truly free market mechanism. In the case of right-libertarians, such as Hoppe, we see a belief in a natural tendency toward inequality, where outcomes vary and there will be discrepancies in wealth and capital ownership[1]. With the left-libertarians, such as Carson, we see a belief in much more equal outcomes arising from market exchange, and that the reason this isn’t so is due to massive historical theft by the state and the continued subsidisation of most of the capitalist economy today[2].

Anarcho-capitalism is simply the idea that without the state, capitalist socio-economic organisation will become free of the antecedents of state patronage and regulation, which according to them hamper entrepreneurial activity and put businesses in a quagmire of legislative regulation they can’t possibly navigate. As a market anarchist I have sympathies with many ancap arguments and ideas, including those mentioned. Things like polycentric legal systems and competitive defence companies are both intriguing and a good answer to the statist question of legal order under anarchy. However, precisely because of their credentials as anarchists, and thus their rejection of state interference, they cannot in any way describe themselves as capitalists.

Its generally put to anarchists that without the state, the necessary social investment in health, education and other needs would wither away. Thus we need coercive taxation to maintain the benefits of modern society. Now, the issues of the knowledge problem and inherent state inefficiencies that plague these areas has already been done excellently by many anarchist thinkers. However, the regulations and inefficiencies of these services aren’t going away anytime soon. Political parties and state bureaucracies rely on them to provide funding and justify existence respectively. What does exist instead are elements of a resurgent, libertarian-esque left who have come to see the state for what it truly is, an organisation inherent to and in hoc with capitalism. Socialist parties and groups are recognising that the state is more interested in cutting such services, destroying social investment and eliminating real democracy. In their place, there is an increasing belief in decentralism and the production of deep democracy.

The response to the riots fit into an unfortunate paradigm of ignoring structural and underlying causes. These are easy explanations that characterise the outbreaks as race riots or as pure criminality. Issues such as entrenched poverty, ghettoisation and marginalisation from economic and political spheres are left by the wayside. But to understand the 2011 riots we need to have “more complex and differentiated pictures…if we wish accurately to capture their social predicament and elucidate their collective fate”[1]. So in understanding the outbreaks, we have to initially understand that they weren’t race riots, but rather unrest created by large societal and consumer inequalities. Racialised issues such as stop and search and the killing of Mark Duggan were certainly catalysts, but the multiplicity of reactions and events, such as attacking police stations and large corporate retailers, suggests class-based elements and wider socio-political malaise.

The minimum wage is held up as an example of a social reform that has maintained the legitimacy of wage labour while not allowing the excesses of capitalism to extract all of worker’s surplus value. This is just not the case. By putting an arbitrary price on labour, the state maintains a form of exploitation. Groups of labourers find it more difficult to organise into collectivised worker-owners who can exploit their innate human capital due to unitary employment laws that effectively engender the concept of a wage, and thus the worker-boss paradigm.

Its generally conceived that the entrepreneur is the lone economic wolf in the economy, bringing together the morass of labour, capital and resources and placing it under his/her will. This picture of rugged individualism usually serves little purpose than to justify large expansions of wealth by corporate CEOs and ignores the actual picture of entrepreneurs, that of hard-working, small-scale individuals within networks and communities where wealth and knowledge are shared. To take the entrepreneur outside of the societal context, where they gain their education and skills, is to simply assert the false idea that entrepreneurs are the Ubermensch, the lone individual walking on the tide of the masses. However, the reality is that the ability to be an entrepreneur is limited due to capital constraints and entry barriers, which limit entrepreneurialism to those who have capital[1], which usually means control of the economy by venture capitalists or the established rich, and thus the expropriation of wealth away from both the individual and the community.

Being a major area of Austrian economics, the idea of subjective value is regularly used by libertarians to disprove labour theory of value and subsequently believe they’ve refuted anti-capitalist arguments[1]. Frankly it’s all fanciful word games. Little evidence is really produced out of this, outside a thin justification for modern capitalist economies (which is ironic coming from supposed anarchist capitalists). However, the LTV crowd don’t exactly help their cause, holding to Marxian arguments that provide little evidence themselves. Rather, subjective theory of value is simply a lens to understand multiplicitous decisions in heterogeneous circumstances, thus subsuming different forms of valuation made by autonomous individuals and institutions. Further, empirical evidence shows continued increases in profits and capital gains and the continued stagnation of wages (particularly in the United States). In the end, taking subjective theory of value to its ultimate conclusion, we see the ability for price arrangements to develop in a multitude of different institutional settings, including planned economic relations, moral economies and markets.

It has been the convention of libertarians to disparage Corbyn as a socialist zealot who hasn’t grown out of the debates of the 70s and 80s. Certainly there are areas of economics where he falls flat on his face, particular his love of the state and its capability to redistribute wealth. However, libertarians shouldn’t just dismiss him out of hand. His ideas on People’s QE, nationalised energy and rail markets and foreign policy are both interesting and admirable. At the very least, they provide something of a debate on these issues which have been pushed to the wayside since the days of Thatcher and the beginning of neoliberal capitalism. It creates questions where there was once consensus which can only be a good thing. Continue reading →