The capitalist market system is defined by the strictures of wage labour relations and the regulatory mechanisms, which are the used for the valorisation of capital and the commodity production which maintains, expands and homogenises this valorisation. These are the inevitable products of capitalist exchange relations and the creation of a general equivalence in which generic commodities, produced by capital through the wage labour relation, are circulated. For the purpose of these exchanges (some of which maintain the manufacturing and production bases of the classes of capital, and others which engender the final movement of commodities into their form as consumables) markets are used as mechanisms of distribution and sale.

Recently libertarians have been determined to conceive their opinions as comparable to modern neoliberalism. Within neoliberalism they see a generally free market system which is raising living standards in the developing world and progressing all of society forward. As Sam Bowman states in his article on neoliberalism, neoliberals believe in the power of markets to efficiently allocate resources, take a consequentialist view on the appropriateness and applicability of particular political systems and governance structures, and have a positive view of redistribution to correct any market misdistribution. Continue reading →

The Bank of England has recently announced a new round of quantitative easing alongside an interest rates cut, pushing £100 billion into banks, with the prerequisite they use this money “to pass on the low interest rate to households and businesses”. This could, potentially, reinvigorate business lending and lead to new firm creation as well as existing firm expansion. At least, this is the hope. Unfortunately, it seems that this is purely hope over expectation.

The use of intellectual property is the attempt at monopolising the knowledge commons. By having control of ideas and concepts, particular economic agents can control flows of information and direct them under their own economic planning. Intellectual property “is a millstone around the neck of innovation and technological progress, a political mechanism for stifling both in favor of bare monopoly”[1]. From the monopolies that IP creates come proprietary rents, where consumers and small producers have to pay to access particular materials and ideas that have been developed under the auspices of a particular group that arbitrarily holds IP or patent rights. Coming down to it, this is the attempt to introduce a mutated version of private property rights on intangible goods in the form of thoughts or ideas. Continue reading →

The national minimum wage introduced in 1999 by the Blair government was seen as one of the best policies to tackle exploitative work and the conditions of low pay. What better than to create a floor under which no one can fall. Well it seems that floor was not so stable, as young people have borne the brunt of this misguided policy. Effects as serious as rising youth unemployment, significant underemployment and a range of masking effects have led to a situation of under-saturated labour markets and the continual need for young adults to seek other activities such as university education and government-based training schemes, or simply drop out of the labour market altogether. It has also had the effect of deskilling young people and making them reliant on the welfare state and low-skill, low-pay employment through Jobcentres and Jobseekers Allowance schemes.

Michael Gibson tries to demonstrate the infeasibility of a universal basic income by showing that people actually like to work, as evidenced by the increase of hours relative to increased prosperity witnessed during the 20th and 21st centuries. According to him, a UBI would not work as major disincentives are created, which Gibson shows by looking at parallel examples from lottery winners who have not achieved the Marxian dream of free producers but have instead gone down a path of destructiveness and despair. Thus are the effects of “money for nothing”.

This article examines markets as structures independent of capitalist socio-economic organisation. It rethinks markets as economic tools that can be placed in radically different economic systems far removed from the normalities of capitalism. By examining how markets are shaped by five monopolies created by state intervention and artificial economies of scale that rely on massive subsidisation, I see how some of the fundamentals of capitalism, the factor markets and capital-labour relations, are reshaped in a conception of free markets that are not influenced by capitalist agency. I go on to see how the Austrian School’s subject of the individual as an agent of subjective economic desires is changed when placed within structures of free, or freed, markets. The institutions of markets, the surplus value distribution and the multiple social relations that present themselves as possible under a regime of rethought markets shows this subject as instituted in a diverse economy of possibilities and existences. I then examine how, even under capitalism, such a diverse economy already exists on the peripheries and in the interstices of the modern economy. Continue reading →

In invoking the need for stringent economic regulations, their proponents regularly bring up the case that without these regulations the dumb consumer would fall prey to food poisoning, faulty production and all other sorts of calamities and disasters. In effect, they are saying that the consumer is far too stupid to have the capacity to actually choose, and instead needs the guiding hand of the coercive state to do it for him. I call this the dumb consumer fallacy. Continue reading →

Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern world. The fundamental need to push products into the hands of more consumers necessitates the creation of allure, of spectacle. An iPhone would be generic without its characteristic apple. Yet such constructs have a fatalistic quality, that being the genericism inherent that leads to lower quality, higher production and more genericism. Mass production as a system leads to large-scale waste, and a continual reliance on surrounding economic structures. Highly regulated financial markets with fortress-like entry barriers, government creation of massive transport infrastructure (highways and transnational rail networks) and authoritarian regimes in the East and Global South who can eliminate any whisper of trade unionism or worker solidarity. These are all children of the state, built from its core ideology of centralising managerialism. Advertising and big data are the children of the children, nominally independent of direct subsidy, yet all the same creations of it.

The corporation as a concept can easily be summed up by Rothbard, describing it simply as pooled capital among entrepreneurs and other stakeholders. However, the distinction then must be made with this libertarian conception, and the modern reality of corporations as subsidised leviathans that require massive subsidisation through transport subsidies, intellectual property monopolies and limited liability and corporate personhood through state granted charters. All of these limit the market from destroying the modern corporate form, which has huge diseconomies of scale and internal calculational chaos. Continue reading →