Left-wing market anarchism, a form of left-libertarianism,
individualist anarchism and libertarian socialism,
is associated with contemporary scholars such
as Kevin Carson, Roderick T. Long, Charles
Johnson, Brad Spangler, Sheldon Richman, Chris
Matthew Sciabarra and Gary Chartier, who stress
the value of radically free markets, termed
freed markets to distinguish them from the
common conception which these libertarians
believe to be riddled with statist and capitalist
privileges.
Referred to as left-wing market anarchists
or market-oriented left-libertarians, proponents
of this approach strongly affirm the classical
liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets,
while maintaining that taken to their logical
conclusions these ideas support anti-capitalist,
anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical, pro-labor
positions in economics; anti-imperialism in
foreign policy; and thoroughly radical views
regarding such cultural issues as gender,
sexuality and race.
The genealogy of contemporary market-oriented
left-libertarianism – sometimes labeled
"left-wing market anarchism" – overlaps
to a significant degree with that of Steiner–Vallentyne
left-libertarianism as the roots of that tradition
are sketched in the book The Origins of Left-Libertarianism.
Carson–Long-style left-libertarianism is
rooted in 19th-century mutualism and in the
work of figures such as Thomas Hodgskin and
the individualist anarchists Benjamin Tucker
and Lysander Spooner.
While with notable exceptions, market-oriented
libertarians after Tucker tended to ally with
the political right, relationships between
such libertarians and the New Left thrived
in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for modern
left-wing market anarchism.
Left-wing market anarchism identifies with
left-libertarianism (or left-wing libertarianism)
which names several related but distinct approaches
to politics, society, culture and political
and social theory, which stress both individual
freedom and social justice.
Unlike right-libertarians, they believe that
neither claiming nor mixing one's labor with
natural resources is enough to generate full
private property rights and maintain that
natural resources (land, oil, gold, trees)
ought to be held in some egalitarian manner,
either unowned or owned collectively.
Those left-libertarians who support private
property do so under the condition that recompense
is offered to the local community.
== Precedents ==
=== 19th and early 20th century: Mutualism,
individualist anarchism and Georgism ===
Josiah Warren is widely regarded as the first
American anarchist and the four-page weekly
paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful
Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical
published, an enterprise for which he built
his own printing press, cast his own type
and made his own printing plates.
Warren was a follower of Robert Owen and joined
Owen's community at New Harmony, Indiana.
Josiah Warren termed the phrase "Cost the
limit of price", with "cost" here referring
not to monetary price paid but the labor one
exerted to produce an item.
Therefore, "he proposed a system to pay people
with certificates indicating how many hours
of work they did.
They could exchange the notes at local time
stores for goods that took the same amount
of time to produce".
He put his theories to the test by establishing
an experimental "labor for labor store" called
the Cincinnati Time Store where trade was
facilitated by notes backed by a promise to
perform labor.
The store proved successful and operated for
three years after which it was closed so that
Warren could pursue establishing colonies
based on mutualism.
These included "Utopia" and "Modern Times".
Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The
Science of Society, published in 1852, was
the most lucid and complete exposition of
Warren's own theories.
Catalan historian Xavier Diez report that
the intentional communal experiments pioneered
by Warren were influential in European individualist
anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries such as Emile Armand and the intentional
communities started by them.Mutualism began
in 18th-century English and French labour
movements before taking an anarchist form
associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in
France and others in the United States.
Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby
organisation emerges without central authority,
a "positive anarchy" where order arises when
everybody does "what he wishes and only what
he wishes" and where "business transactions
alone produce the social order".
It is important to recognize that Proudhon
distinguished between ideal political possibilities
and practical governance.
For this reason, much in contrast to some
of his theoretical statements concerning ultimate
spontaneous self-governance, Proudhon was
heavily involved in French parliamentary politics
and allied himself not with Anarchist but
Socialist factions of workers movements and
in addition to advocating state-protected
charters for worker-owned cooperatives, promoted
certain nationalization schemes during his
life of public service.
Mutualist anarchism is concerned with reciprocity,
free association, voluntary contract, federation
and credit and currency reform.
According to the American mutualist William
Batchelder Greene, each worker in the mutualist
system would receive "just and exact pay for
his work; services equivalent in cost being
exchangeable for services equivalent in cost,
without profit or discount".
Mutualism has been retrospectively characterised
as ideologically situated between individualist
and collectivist forms of anarchism.
Proudhon first characterised his goal as a
"third form of society, the synthesis of communism
and property".
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French activist
and theorist, the founder of mutualist philosophy,
an economist and a libertarian socialist.
He was the first person to declare himself
an anarchist and is among its most influential
theorists.
He is considered by many to be the "father
of anarchism".
He became a member of the French Parliament
after the revolution of 1848, whereupon and
thereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.
Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a
printer who taught himself Latin in order
to better print books in the language.
His best-known assertion is that Property
is Theft!, contained in his first major work,
What is Property?
Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right
and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété?
Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement),
published in 1840.
The book's publication attracted the attention
of the French authorities.
It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx,
who started a correspondence with its author.
The two influenced each other: they met in
Paris while Marx was exiled there.
Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded
to Proudhon's The System of Economic Contradictions,
or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively
titled The Poverty of Philosophy.
The dispute became one of the sources of the
split between the anarchist and Marxian wings
of the International Working Men's Association.
Some, such as Edmund Wilson, have contended
that Marx's attack on Proudhon had its origin
in the latter's defense of Karl Grün, whom
Marx bitterly disliked but who had been preparing
translations of Proudhon's work.
Proudhon favored workers' associations or
co-operatives as well as individual worker/peasant
possession over private ownership or the nationalization
of land and workplaces.
He considered social revolution to be achievable
in a peaceful manner.
In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon
asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power,
the phrase which much later inspired, in the
view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol,
today "one of the most common graffiti on
the urban landscape".
He unsuccessfully tried to create a national
bank to be funded by what became an abortive
attempt at an income tax on capitalists and
shareholders.
Similar in some respects to a credit union,
it would have given interest-free loans.William
Batchelder Greene (1819–1878) was a 19th-century
mutualist individualist anarchist, Unitarian
minister, soldier and promoter of free banking
in the United States.
Greene is best known for the works Mutual
Banking(1850), which proposed an interest-free
banking system, and Transcendentalism, a critique
of the New England philosophical school.
For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette
Schuster, "It is apparent...that 
Proudhonian Anarchism was to be found in the
United States at least as early as 1848 and
that it was not conscious of its affinity
to the Individualist Anarchism of Josiah Warren
and Stephen Pearl Andrews...William B. Greene
presented this Proudhonian Mutualism in its
purest and most systematic form".
After 1850 he became active in labor reform.
"He was elected vice-president of the New
England Labor Reform League, the majority
of the members holding to Proudhon's scheme
of mutual banking, and in 1869 president of
the Massachusetts Labor Union."
He then publishes Socialistic, Mutualistic,
and Financial Fragments (1875).
He saw mutualism as the synthesis of "liberty
and order".
His 
"associationism...is checked by individualism...'Mind
your own business,' "Judge not that ye be
not judged".
Over matters which are purely personal, as
for example moral conduct, the individual
is sovereign, as well as over that which he
himself produces.
For this reason he demands "mutuality" in
marriage – the equal right of a woman to
her own personal freedom and property".
A form of individualist anarchism was found
in the United States, as advocated by the
"Boston anarchists."
Some "Boston anarchists", including Benjamin
Tucker, identified themselves as socialists,
which in the 19th century was often used in
the sense of a commitment to improving conditions
of the working class (i.e. "the labor problem").
The "Boston Anarchists" such as Tucker and
his followers are also considered socialists
due to their opposition to usury.
By around the start of the 20th century, the
heyday of individualist anarchism had passed,
On the other hand, anarchist historian George
Woodcock describes Lysander Spooner's essays
as an "eloquent elaboration" of Josiah Warren
and the early American development of Proudhon's
ideas, and associates his works with that
of Stephen Pearl Andrews.
Woodcock also reports that both Lysander Spooner
and William B. Greene had been members of
the socialist First International American
individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker identified
as a socialist and argued that the elimination
of what he called the "four monopolies" – the
land monopoly, the money and banking monopoly,
the monopoly powers conferred by patents and
the quasi-monopolistic effects of tariffs
– would undermine the power of the wealthy
and big business, making possible widespread
property ownership and higher incomes for
ordinary people, while minimizing the power
of would-be bosses and achieving socialist
goals without state action.
Tucker influenced and interacted with anarchist
contemporaries – including Spooner, Voltairine
de Cleyre, Dyer D. Lum, and William B. Greene
– who have in various ways influenced later
left-libertarian thinking.
Kevin Carson characterizes American individualist
anarchism by saying: "Unlike the rest of the
socialist movement, the individualist anarchists
believed that the natural wage of labor in
a free market was its product and that economic
exploitation could only take place when capitalists
and landlords harnessed the power of the state
in their interests.
Thus individualist anarchism was an alternative
both to the increasing statism of the mainstream
socialist movement, and to a classical liberal
movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic
for the power of big business".
Two individualist anarchists who wrote in
Benjamin Tucker's Liberty were also important
labor organizers of the time.
Joseph Labadie and Dyer Lum.
Kevin Carson has praised Dyer Lum's fusion
of individualist laissez-faire economics with
radical labor activism as "creative" and described
him as "more significant than any in the Boston
group".Some of the American individualist
anarchists later in this era such as Benjamin
Tucker abandoned natural rights positions
and converted to Max Stirner's egoist anarchism.
Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker
said that there were only two rights, "the
right of might" and "the right of contract".
He also said after converting to egoist individualism:
"In times past ... it was my habit to talk
glibly of the right of man to land.
It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed
it off ... Man's only right to land is his
might over it".
In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886), Tucker
rejected natural rights which had long been
considered the foundation of libertarianism.
This rejection galvanized the movement into
fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents
accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism
itself.
So bitter was the conflict that a number of
natural rights proponents withdrew from the
pages of Liberty in protest even though they
had hitherto been among its frequent contributors.
Thereafter, Liberty championed egoism although
its general content did not change significantly.Geolibertarianism,
an anarchist form of Henry George's philosophy,
is considered left-libertarian because it
assumes land to be initially owned in common,
so that when land is privately appropriated
the proprietor pays rent to the community.
Geolibertarians generally advocate distributing
the land rent to the community via a land
value tax as proposed by Henry George and
others before him.
For this reason, they are often called "single
taxers".
Fred E. Foldvary coined the word geo-libertarianism
in an article so titled in Land and Liberty.
In the case of geoanarchism, the voluntary
form of geolibertarianism as described by
Foldvary, rent would be collected by private
associations with the opportunity to secede
from the rent-sharing community (and not receive
the community's services).Similar economic
positions also existed within european individualist
anarchism.
French individualist anarchist Emile Armand
shows clearly opposition to capitalism and
centralized economies when he said that the
individualist anarchist "inwardly he remains
refractory – fatally refractory – morally,
intellectually, economically (The capitalist
economy and the directed economy, the speculators
and the fabricators of single are equally
repugnant to him.)".
He argued for a pluralistic economic logic
when he said: "Here and there everything happening
– here everyone receiving what they need,
there each one getting whatever is needed
according to their own capacity.
Here, gift and barter – one product for
another; there, exchange – product for representative
value.
Here, the producer is the owner of the product,
there, the product is put to the possession
of the collectivity".
The Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel
Gimenez Igualada thought that ""capitalism
is an effect of government; the disappearance
of government means capitalism falls from
its pedestal vertiginously...That which we
call capitalism is not something else but
a product of the State, within which the only
thing that is being pushed forward is profit,
good or badly acquired.
And so to fight against capitalism is a pointless
task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise
capitalism, as long as Government exists,
exploiting capital will exist.
The fight, but of consciousness, is against
the State".
His view on class division and technocracy
are as follows: "Since when no one works for
another, the profiteer from wealth disappears,
just as government will disappear when no
one pays attention to those who learned four
things at universities and from that fact
they pretend to govern men.
Big industrial enterprises will be transformed
by men in big associations in which everyone
will work and enjoy the product of their work.
And from those easy as well as beautiful problems
anarchism deals with and he who puts them
in practice and lives them are anarchists....
The priority which without rest an anarchist
must make is that in which no one has to exploit
anyone, no man to no man, since that non-exploitation
will lead to the limitation of property to
individual needs".
=== The 1960s: American libertarianism and
the New Left ===
The doyen of modern American market-oriented
libertarianism, Austrian School economist
Murray Rothbard, was initially an enthusiastic
partisan of the Old Right, particularly because
of its general opposition to war and imperialism.
However, Rothbard had long embraced a reading
of American history that emphasized the role
of elite privilege in shaping legal and political
institutions – one that was thus naturally
agreeable to many on the left – and he came
increasingly in the 1960s to seek alliances
on the left – especially with members of
the "New Left" – in light of the Vietnam
War, the military draft and the emergence
of the black power movement.Working with other
radicals like Ronald Radosh and Karl Hess,
Rothbard argued that the consensus view of
American economic history, according to which
a beneficent government has used its power
to counter corporate predation, is fundamentally
flawed.
Rather, he argued, government intervention
in the economy has largely benefited established
players at the expense of marginalized groups
to the detriment of both liberty and equality.
Moreover, the "Robber Baron" period, hailed
by the right and despised by the left as a
heyday of laissez-faire, was not characterized
by laissez-faire at all but was in fact a
time of massive state privilege accorded to
capital.
In tandem with his emphasis on the intimate
connection between state and corporate power,
he defended the seizure of corporations dependent
on state largesse by workers and others.Rothbard
himself ultimately broke with the left, allying
himself instead with the burgeoning paleoconservative
movement.
However, drawing on the work of Rothbard during
his alliance with the left and on the thought
of Karl Hess, some thinkers associated with
market-oriented American libertarianism came
increasingly to identify with the left on
a range of issues, including opposition to
war, corporate oligopolies and state-corporate
partnerships and an affinity for cultural
liberalism.
One variety of this kind of libertarianism
has been a resurgent mutualism, incorporating
modern economic ideas such as marginal utility
theory into mutualist theory.
Kevin A. Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political
Economy helped to stimulate the growth of
new-style mutualism, articulating a version
of the labor theory of value incorporating
ideas drawn from Austrian economics.
Other market-oriented left-libertarians have
declined to embrace mutualist views of real
property, while sharing the mutualist opposition
to corporate hierarchies and wealth concentration.
Left-libertarians have placed particular emphasis
on the articulation and defense of a libertarian
theory of class and class conflict, though
considerable work in this area has been performed
by libertarians of other persuasions.
== Theory ==
Arguing that vast disparities in wealth and
social influence result from the use of force
and especially state power to steal and engross
land and acquire and maintain special privileges,
members of this thought typically urge the
abolition of the state.
They judge that in a stateless society, the
kinds of privileges secured by the state will
be absent and injustices perpetrated or tolerated
by the state can be rectified.
According to libertarian scholar Sheldon Richman:
Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity
vis-à-vis bosses, support poor people's squatting
on government or abandoned property, and prefer
that corporate privileges be repealed before
the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges
may be exercised.
They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate
favoritism – supported by highway subsidies
and eminent domain – view the fictive personhood
of the limited-liability corporation with
suspicion, and doubt that Third World sweatshops
would be the "best alternative" in the absence
of government manipulation.
Left-libertarians tend to eschew electoral
politics, having little confidence in strategies
that work through the government.
They prefer to develop alternative institutions
and methods of working around the state.
Gary Chartier has joined Kevin Carson, Charles
Johnson and others (echoing the language of
Benjamin Tucker and Thomas Hodgskin) in maintaining
that because of its heritage and its emancipatory
goals and potential, radical market anarchism
should be seen – by its proponents and by
others – as part of the socialist tradition
and that market anarchists can and should
call themselves socialists.
=== Labour rights ===
Also there is a tendency to support labour
struggles.
Kevin Carson has praised individualist anarchist
Dyer Lum's fusion of individualist economics
with radical labor activism as "creative"
and described him as "more significant than
any in the Boston group".
Roderick T. Long is an advocate of "build[ing]
worker solidarity.
On the one hand, this means formal organisation,
including unionization – but I'm not talking
about the prevailing model of 'business unions'
... but real unions, the old-fashioned kind,
committed to the working class and not just
union members, and interested in worker autonomy,
not government patronage.".
Long in particular has described the situation:
=== Cultural politics ===
Contemporary free-market left-libertarians
also show markedly more sympathy than mainstream
or paleolibertarians towards various cultural
movements which challenge non-governmental
relations of power.
For instance, left-libertarians Roderick Long
and Charles Johnson have called for a recovery
of the 19th-century alliance with radical
liberalism and feminism.While adopting familiar
libertarian views including opposition to
drug prohibition, gun control, civil liberties
violations and war, left-libertarians are
more likely than most self-identified libertarians
to take more distinctively leftist stances
on issues as diverse as feminism, gender and
sexuality, class, immigration and environmentalism.
Especially influential regarding these topics
have been scholars including Chris Matthew
Sciabarra, Roderick T. Long, Charles W. Johnson
and Arthur Silber.
=== Property rights ===
Left-market anarchism does not have any strict
agreement what constitutes legitimate property
titles.
Arguments have been made for Rothbardian,
Georgist, Mutualist and Utilitarian approaches
to determining legitimate property claims.
Such discrepancies are resolved through deliberation
mechanisms like Polycentric law.
Left-market anarchism also recognizes the
importance of property held and managed in
common as a way of maintaining common goods.
=== Theorists ===
Kevin Carson describes his politics as on
"the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism
and socialism".
He has identified the work of Benjamin Tucker,
Thomas Hodgskin, Ralph Borsodi, Paul Goodman,
Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Peter Kropotkin
and Ivan Illich as sources of inspiration
for his approach to politics and economics.
In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin
Tucker's "big four" monopolies (land, money,
tariffs and patents), Carson argues that the
state has also transferred wealth to the wealthy
by subsidizing organizational centralization
in the form of transportation and communication
subsidies.
He believes that Tucker overlooked this issue
due to Tucker's focus on individual market
transactions, whereas Carson also focuses
on organizational issues.
The theoretical sections of Studies in Mutualist
Political Economy are presented as an attempt
to integrate marginalist critiques into the
labor theory of value.
Carson has also been highly critical of intellectual
property.
The primary focus of his most recent work
has been decentralized manufacturing and the
informal and household economies.
In response to claims that he uses the term
"capitalism" incorrectly, Carson says he is
deliberately choosing to resurrect what he
claims to be an old definition of the term
in order to "make a point".
He claims that "the term 'capitalism,' as
it was originally used, did not refer to a
free market, but to a type of statist class
system in which capitalists controlled the
state and the state intervened in the market
on their behalf".
Carson holds that “capitalism, arising as
a new class society directly from the old
class society of the Middle Ages, was founded
on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier
feudal conquest of the land.
It has been sustained to the present by continual
state intervention to protect its system of
privilege without which its survival is unimaginable”.
Carson argues that in a truly laissez-faire
system, the ability to extract a profit from
labor and capital would be negligible.
Carson coined the pejorative term "vulgar
libertarianism", a phrase that describes the
use of a free market rhetoric in defense of
corporate capitalism and economic inequality.
According to Carson, the term is derived from
the phrase "vulgar political economy", which
Karl Marx described as an economic order that
"deliberately becomes increasingly apologetic
and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of
existence the ideas which contain the contradictions
[existing in economic life]".Gary Chartier
offers an understanding of property rights
as contingent but tightly constrained social
strategies – reflective of the importance
of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate
ownership and of natural law principles of
practical reasonableness, defending robust
but non-absolute protections for these rights
in a manner similar to that employed by David
Hume.
This account is distinguished both from Lockean
and neo-Lockean views which deduce property
rights from the idea of self-ownership and
from consequentialist accounts that might
license widespread ad hoc interference with
the possessions of groups and individuals.
Chartier uses this account to ground a clear
statement of the natural law basis for the
view that solidaristic wealth redistribution
by individual persons is often morally required,
but as a response by individuals and grass-roots
networks to particular circumstances rather
than as a state-driven attempt to achieve
a particular distributive pattern.
He advances detailed arguments for workplace
democracy rooted in such natural law principles
as subsidiarity, defending it as morally desirable
and as a likely outcome of the elimination
of injustice rather than as something to be
mandated by the state.
He discusses natural law approaches to land
reform and to the occupation of factories
by workers.
Chartier objects on natural law grounds to
intellectual property protections, drawing
on his theory of property rights more generally
and develops a general natural law account
of boycotts.
He has argued that proponents of genuinely
freed markets should explicitly reject capitalism
and identify with the global anti-capitalist
movement, while emphasizing that the abuses
the anti-capitalist movement highlights result
from state-tolerated violence and state-secured
privilege rather than from voluntary cooperation
and exchange.
According to Chartier, “it makes sense for
[left-libertarians] to name what they oppose
'capitalism.'
Doing so ... ensures that advocates of freedom
aren't confused with people who use market
rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo,
and expresses solidarity between defenders
of freed markets and workers – as well as
ordinary people around the world who use 'capitalism'
as a short-hand label for the world-system
that constrains their freedom and stunts their
lives".
== See also ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Kevin A. Carson, The Iron Fist behind the
Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism As a
State-Guaranteed System of Privilege (Nanaimo,
BC: Red Lion 2001)
Kevin A. Carson, Austrian and Marxist Theories
of Monopoly-Capital (London: Libertarian Alliance
2004)
Kevin A. Carson, Contract Feudalism: A Critique
of Employer Power Over Employees (London:
Libertarian Alliance 2006)
Kevin A. Carson, The Ethics of Labor Struggle:
A Free Market Perspective (n.p.: Alliance
of the Libertarian Left 2008
Chartier, Gary.
The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011) Apple
Valley, CA: Cobden Press.
ISBN 978-1439266991.
OCLC 760097242
Chartier, Gary.
Economic Justice and Natural Law (2009).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 978-0521767200.
OCLC 318871444
Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011).
Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism
Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power,
and Structural Poverty.
Brooklyn, NY:Minor Compositions/Autonomedia
Chartier, Gary.
Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics
for a Stateless Society.
(2013) New York: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 978-1107032286.
OCLC 795645156
== External links ==
Alliance of the Libertarian Left
Mutualist.org, free market anti-capitalism
Center for a Stateless Society
