Market anarchism

Market anarchism is the branch of anarchism that advocates a free-market economic system based on voluntary interactions without state involvement; a form of individualist anarchism.Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. The basic doctrine of market anarchism is that the legislative, adjudicative, and protective functions are unjustly and inefficiently monopolized by the coercive state, and they should be entirely turned over to the voluntary, consensual market forces. Market anarchism opposes the state and considers it inherently coercive. Gustave de Molinari is considered to be the originator of the theory.

Variations

Anarcho-capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism is the most prominent view in market anarchism; it was developed primarily by Murray Rothbard, who combined the Austrian School economics of Ludwig von Mises with a natural-rights framework of self-ownership, drawing from 19th-century individualist anarchists. Rothbard considers the state, an institution funded by compulsory taxation and claiming a coercive monopoly on law and defense, inherently illegitimate, stating; "The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects… a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens."

Mutualism and left-wing market anarchism

Mutualism is associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; it retains a modified version of the labor theory of value, claiming that prices tend toward the cost of labor under genuine free competition. However, the subjective value and time preference following the Austrian tradition are not outrightly rejected.

This had a significant influence on the formation of Individualist anarchism in the United States, such as that of Benjamin Tucker, and after that, left-wing market anarchism also emerged in related to Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, Roderick Long, etc.

Agorism Agorism, proposed by Canadian-American anarchist Samuel Edward Konkin III, is associated with left-libertarianism; it draws heavily from Austrian economics and rejects anarcho-capitalism's association with big business. Instead, it advocates counter-economics—building black- and grey-market voluntary exchanges outside the state control as a strategy for peacefully dissolving the state.

Terminology issues Due to contending definitions of the terms 'markets' and 'capitalism' which are not used by free-market anti-capitalists,Chartier, Gary. Johnson, Charles H. Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp. 60–61. "In order to get clear on the topic in a conversation about 'Free Market Anticapitalism,' the obvious points where clarification may be needed are going to be the meaning of capitalism, the meaning of markets, and the meaning of freedom in the market context... market anarchists have spent a lot of time...the possibility of disentangling multiple senses of 'capitalism'...The meaning of the term is obviously central to any free market economics...Pro-capitalist economists have often suggested such a broad understanding of 'markets' even if they have not fully understood...its implications. For example Murray Rothbard...." anarcho-capitalism has been referred to synonymously as "free-market anarchism," but the ideologies differ significantly.Miller, G. Tyler; Paul, Ellen Frankel; Miller Jr., Fred D., eds. (1993). Liberalism and the Economic Order, Part 2. p. 115.Long, Roderick T.; Machan, Tibor R. (2016) . Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?. Ashgate.Hoffman, John; Graham, Paul (2006). Introduction to Political Theory. p. 243. The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), which Kevin Carson is associated with, is one such group of free-market anti-capitalists; as is Samuel Edward Konkin III's agorism, a tendency associated with left-libertarianism."Anarchism". In Gaus, Gerald F.; D'Agostino, Fred, eds. (2012). The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. p. 227. "Later [left-libertarianism] became a term for the left or Konkinite wing of the free-market libertarian movement, and has since come to cover a range of pro-market but anti-capitalist positions, mostly individualist anarchist, including agorism and mutualism, often with an implication of sympathies (such as for radical feminism or the labor movement) not usually shared by anarcho-capitalists."

Some writers, such as Iain McKay, have been skeptical of this conceptual nomenclature on the grounds that it still leads to misunderstandings about its similarity to anarcho-capitalists. The dispute is not merely semantic; Carson and McKay argue that using "market anarchism" as a synonym of anarcho-capitalism overshadows a distinct, left-wing, anti-capitalist tradition of free market thought stretching back to Proudhon.

Market anarchism

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