Market Anarchist Blogs

David Tennant (who will be David Ownner after the revolution), Catherine Tate, and other Doctor Who cast and crew members commemorate series 1-4 here:

And this next video reminds us just how Hallowe’eny series 5-6 have been:

(CHT TARDIS Newsroom here, here, and here.)

Here’s a scary story, just in time for Hallowe’en!

Well, okay, it’s not that scary. But hey, I wrote it when I was 12.

Speaking of scary, check out what Brandon’s coolly done to my pic. Or if it’s gone by the time you read this, check it out here.

After initially disagreeing with me (by defending the idea that capitalism is fundamentally about “private ownership of the means of production” or POOTMOP), Stephan Kinsella conceded that for a system with “private ownership of the means of production” to count as capitalism, it must have certain features (emphasis mine):

If society adopted some kind of bizarre model with no firms, no division and specialization of labor, no significant accumulation of capital, I guess I would not call it capitalist.

Kinsella has now elaborated on that idea, fully embracing (along with Marx) the notion of “capitalistic patterns of ownership and control” as distinct from “a free market in land and the means of production,” including  ”employers and employees and employment.” He sees the link as inevitable (as may, arguably, Marx and unlike me*) but at least we seem to agree that POOTMOP, by itself, is too vague to distinguish what capitalists mean by “capitalism” from what they don’t.

Glad that’s cleared up.

* I not only see it as not inevitable but unlibertarian and thus precluded conceptually by the term “free market.”

Filed under: Anti-Capitalism, Left-Libertarianism, Markets, Uncategorized Tagged: Karl Marx, Stephan Kinsella

On the west coast, cops commit war crimes.

On the east coast, cops admit that corruption is a perk of their jobs, and get all indignant about being prosecuted.

Maybe we should start using the slogan “no special rights for cops.” (Of course, applied consistently that would make them not cops anymore. Which is fine with me.)

Mic check.

You know the deal. Join us here. What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

From MondoWeiss

Here. (CHT Theo Nering.)

McCoy was also considered for the role of Older Bilbo in LOTR, but lost out to Ian Holm – a shame, really, as McCoy strikes me as much more Bilboey than Holm (plus, considering that Martin Freeman is now Younger Bilbo, McCoy looks more like an older Freeman than Holm does).

If there's a sure fire way of undermining the trust that, it is said, is needed for democracy to function properly, it has surely got to be making us all pay for it.  If I was ever minded to vote again, the thought of having to pay for the privilege would put me off for good.

Of course, I have an interest: it suits my agenda just fine if, because of big donations from either business or unions, politicians are seen as venal, untrustworthy, policy for sale money grubbers.  They are, for the most part.  And the more people know it the better.

If political parties cannot live within their means, then what does it say about their ability to run an entire economy.  What does it matter if they are bankrolled by the very interests we know they each kow-tow to anyway?  Oh yes, that's right, they don't want us to believe they each have any vestige of ideology left, just that they can each promise us what we want and get their pensions afterwards.

People will always find a way to buy influence, just so long as there are people it is worth their while influencing: people with the power to do favours for rent-seekers.  Reducing the amount individual donors can give hasn't prevented some people I know of finding ways of evading the disclosure limits by getting others to donate on their behalf: every time one door is closed someone will find another one.

The man currently charged with finding a new funding mechanism ought to know, after all: former member of the Midlands Industrial Council (itself a vehicle for hiding donations in the past), now "knight of the realm" and father of a Tory MP.  The noise you hear is the revolving door spinning.

But if you try and make me pay for voting if I choose to do so, I shall do my damnedest to encourage everyone I know not to bother in future as well.  At some point your legitimacy must run out for all to see, surely.

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Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Edited by Iain McKay (AK Press, 2011).

Every time I look through this book, I'm amazed at the sheer amount and quality of material in it, and the scholarly apparatus included with it.

As I keep telling people, the last major Proudhon anthology out there -- if you can call it that -- was Stewart Edwards' Selected Writings of P. J. Proudhon. Calling Selected Writings an anthology is generous. Its format was actually more like that of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, with a long series of short excerpts from assorted works grouped together under topic headings. It totalled 262 pages, which meant that even if someone took the trouble to assemble all the scattered excerpts from any particular book in order in a single place, the result would hardly qualify as an abridgement.

On the other hand, this effort by Iain McKay -- widely familiar as the principal author of An Anarchist FAQ -- is over 800 pages, with almost twice as many words per page. It includes modestly abridged versions of almost all of Proudhon's major works, along with dozens of shorter works in their entirety. The abridgements of longer works include What is Property?, both volumes of System of Economic Contradictions, Solution of the Social Problem, Organisation of Credit and Circulation, Bank of the People, Confessions of a Revolutionary, Interest and Principal, General Idea of the Revolution, The Federative Principle, The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, and The Theory of Property. The excerpted material from General Idea of the Revolution, for example, is over fifty pages, and over forty pages are excerpted from Political Capacity of the Working Classes.

A considerable portion of the material is in English translation for the first time, some of it translated by Proudhon scholar Shawn Wilbur.

Iain McKay's fifty-page Introduction is not only a studied bibliographic essay on Proudhon, but also a closely argued thesis regarding the place of markets in the anarchist movement and anarchism in the socialist movement. As such, it is the latest contribution to the ongoing and often heated "Who is an anarchist?" debates, and will no doubt attract careful attention from my market anarchist comrades at Center for a Stateless Society.

Edwards' venture at a Proudhon anthology, for better or worse, was pretty much it for thirty years or so. I expect this one will stand -- far more deservedly -- as the standard anthology for at least that long.