If you've ever been to Kevin Carson's blog, you'll have noticed its title - Mutualist Blog: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism. This may strike some as puzzling. What is capitalism, after all, if not an embrace of the free market?
Well actually it can be quite a lot of different things, as Charles Johnson explains.
Johnson notes four different concepts of 'capitalism': (1) free markets; (2) corporatism; (3) wage-labor economics; and (4) consumerism. These are all different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive (save for the first two), concepts and different people depending on self-interest, politics, and so forth may think of capitalism in one or more of these terms. (Johnson goes into some detail on each, but it's too much to excerpt here.)
Free markets are how many libertarians and anarcho-capitalist types have come to think of capitalism, but free markets are capitalism in a pure sense, sans state intervention and cronyism. This is what critics of libertarianism call "Utopia" (ignoring the Utopianism of their own preferred systems, naturally). Corporatism is how capitalism works, by and large, in the real world. Pro-business types are in favor of this sort of state-subsidized capitalism. They call it free enterprise, but it's hardly that. This is what earns free markets the bad name. A wage-labor system is the result of resources being in the hands of the very few (capitalists) while the working class is largely subservient to the bosses. This and corporatism forms the central critique of many Marxists and socialists. Free-market advocates often believe that this system would be unsustainable (or less predominant) in a non-corporatist free market system, though it's likely enough that a free market system could still lead to a wage-labor system.
Consumerism and materialism are the perceived sins of a for-profit society. I think this is largely an aesthetic distaste on the part of people who crave more meaning in their lives than any hyper-capitalistic societies can offer - at least, this is the perception. Nostalgia does a lot of the work here.
In any case, Johnson uses these four concepts to illustrate how someone can be at once in favor of a free-market society and against capitalism as its critics largely understand it. Since most critics of capitalism are speaking about the inequities created by the corporatist state (and Johnson brings up Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism argument as an example of one such criticism) then they're not really talking about free markets so much as they're talking about a corporate economy defined by statist intervention:
“Capitalism” has also been used, sometimes by its opponents, and sometimes by beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporatist or pro-business economic policy — that is, to active government support for big businesses through instruments such as government-granted monopolies, subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, “development” grants and loans, Kelo-style for-profit eminent domain, bail-outs, etc. Thus, when a progressive like Naomi Klein describes government-hired mercenaries, paramilitary torture squads or multigovernment financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, as examples of the political economy of “disaster capitalism,” capitalism here must mean something other than markets left free of major government intervention. Rather, this is the state intervening, with a very heavy hand, to promote the interests of a particular class of economic players, or promoting a particular form of economic activity, as a matter of policy. This second meaning of capitalism is, of course, mutually exclusive with the first meaning — state-driven corporatism necessarily consists of projects funded by expropriated tax dollars, or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, and so to be a “capitalist” in the sense of a free marketeer means being an “anti-capitalist” in the sense of opposing the corporate state, and being “pro-capitalist” in the sense of state “growth” policy means coming out against “capitalism” in the sense of genuinely free markets.
Read the whole thing. I've been struggling to articulate a lot of this recently. To be both on the left and in favor of markets, drastically scaling back the state, etc. is a tricky balancing act. Understanding the various ways people think about capitalism, markets, and so forth is crucial in pushing the conversation forward. Too often it founders in the shallow, rocky waters of our preconceived notions.
Jason Kuznicki cautions:
What would a freed market look like? The truth is that probably none of us know. It’s likely to be very weird and to require cultural adjustments that none of us can imagine. There are theoretical reasons to suspect it will be a whole better than what we have, but I’m well aware that not everyone finds these reasons convincing. The strongest arguments that actually do convince are those for incremental movement — this licensing scheme doesn’t do any good;that trade barrier should be abolished; this environmental problem can be solved by defining property rights just a little bit more clearly and strictly. And there is much to be learned along the way, for all of us.
A previous generation of libertarian thinkers seems to have picked up from their socialist counterparts a dangerous longing for utopia. Yet the implications of their own social thought should have made them anti-utopian pragmatists, well aware that none of us know enough to design a perfect society in the here and now. Baby steps. There are knowledge problems everywhere, even in the attempt to let markets solve knowledge problems.
Taking a Burkean approach to social change is probably always a good idea. Move too quickly, make too many radical changes, and you're almost certain to see a backlash. Just as importantly, I'd argue, is the order of operations. We should tackle welfare f0r the rich before we take on welfare for the poor. When you start to remove the state from the equation, this opens the door to many potential opportunists, deregulatory capture, and so forth. Too often market reforms are captured by technocrats and corporatists. And even if we do it all perfectly, there are all sorts of ways a free market could manifest depending on how we get there. We can never start from scratch.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't try.
