A-Infos (en) anarkismo.net: A Response to "In Which the Anarcho-Syndicalists Discover C4SS" by D. Morse and B. Sousa

In this article, we respond to the brief exchange between the Workers' Solidarity Alliance 
(WSA-IWA) and the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). ---- Have you ever noticed that 
when you are in an argument you want to have the last word? It often feels like the last 
word contains its own authority, as if you are the assaulted party and now you have 
defended an honorable view. In debate, this is referred to as the "last word" fallacy; a 
bias towards the most recent argument and likelihood to be swayed by it. Can we combat 
these biases in arguments of value or, more pertinently, ones of fact? The most recent 
political climate is emblematic of effective misinformation and narrative based politics. 
Far Left and far Right political thinkers can believe themselves outside of the influences 
of "centrist" politics, but maybe they too are gripped by the "truths" of bias. The 
inherent vice of a political stance is a loss of objectivity, but a gain of effectiveness. 
Can we actually argue a point legitimately, or will we forever circle mainstream politics 
in a purgatory of "truths?"

R. and Sousa's A Free Market Fantasy, served to respond, in part, to a very brief, 
substance-less, article published by Byas, titled Toward an Anarchy of Production, which 
made an argument for "free markets" in anarchism and the lack of emphasis of "markets" in 
the anarcho-syndicalist community. The anarcho-syndicalist community, as Byas describes, 
is a non-scalable or socio-changeable system if as he says the following:

"Any society worth calling "anarchist" is going to be one that can continually adapt to 
the needs and desires of the individuals within that society. This adaptation must also be 
to the interests of the entire community, not toward the limited aims of a specific class 
of people. There must be ceaseless social experimentation, and there must be incentives 
toward developing institutions that benefit everyone and weeding out those that don't... 
This requires markets, which are uniquely able to account for variation in ways that 
other, more deliberately constructed social arrangements cannot. That 
information-gathering function of the market process is typically just praised for its 
efficiency, but this overlooks its potential as an engine of social change."

This, as R. and Sousa point out, is not consistent with the intellectual framers of 
anarcho-syndicalist constructs (Rocker, Bakunin, Chomsky, Kropotkin and so on) and is 
therefore likely a point of view that presupposes the veracity of the anarcho-capitalist 
perspective and foundationally relies on the thinking of Tucker and others. It is actually 
quite a leap of logic to call "free-markets" efficient in a positive meaning, as many 
philosophers and social thinkers argue that they are efficient at extracting maximal 
profit via minimal investment from "moneyed monopolies," which goes against Tucker's 
position. If we were to analyze markets from a Marxist-environmental perspective, we may 
reach a more disquieting conclusion about their supposed efficiencies.

As the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) article is free of empirically derived 
reasoning (as is almost all literature in the libertarian and/or anarchist communities) we 
must use argumentation based on foundation, structure, and axioms.

Byas defines markets to further the argument of the moral positivism that 
anarcho-capitalism wants to identify with, but constantly fails to do so. Definitions of 
markets and their utility are given by Byas herein:

"By contrast, two of the most important features of markets are radically decentralized 
decision-making based on distributed knowledge, and the availability of alternatives. In 
market transactions, one does not have to convince the community at large of the goodness 
behind one's use of a given resource in order to use it, they just have to provide value 
for value... Within a market, people can act more directly on what they believe is 
genuinely best for them, even when the reasons for that are difficult to communicate to 
those in more privileged positions... By creating new profit opportunities geared toward 
those preferences of the oppressed, the seemingly impersonal market process becomes a 
never-ending social critique, always backed up by immediate direct action A market society 
is a society built on continuous self-creation, whose institutions are always kept in 
check by the looming threat of creative destruction. In so far as anarchism is the 
abolition of hierarchy, the production of anarchy requires the anarchy of production."

This style of thinking is exactly what R. and Sousa describe as "utopian at best" and 
"mightily bold." As is the dictum in the sciences (and should be applied to rigorous 
philosophy and political thought) "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence;" 
which is not seen in the Byas article and from our reading of the C4SS website, not met 
generally by its authors.

Carson starts with a degree of "vituperation" that is rarely seen from a response to a 
publication by the United States based "Friend" of the International Workers' Association 
- the Workers' Solidarity Alliance - and portrays a degree of anxiety over his own ideas, 
which is nice, because it allows us to deconstruct his arguments from a similarly jaded 
and vicious perspective.

The first critique of R. and Sousa's intellectual malfeasance is his appropriation of 
Tucker as synthesizing individualism with Austrian economics, responding to this with an 
obvious shock, as though such thinking is absurd and "inconsistent." Unsurprisingly, the 
C4SS website gives a shiny view of Tucker's economic philosophies:

"Tucker built his theory of individualist anarchism (or what he called "Boston Anarchism" 
to distinguish him from "Chicago Anarchists" who were generally less favorable to markets 
and more favorable to violence as a means for social change) out of the principles of 
individual sovereignty and the labor theory of value (which was commonly accepted by 
mainstream economists dating back to Adam Smith, but was later thrown out by the 
profession after the marginal revolution led by early Austrians, such as Carl Menger and 
Eugene Böhm von Bawerk). For 19th century anarchists, the labor theory of value, or "cost 
limit of price," was the natural extension of the individual's absolute sovereignty over 
themselves. Labor was seen as the source for all wealth, and the laborer naturally owns 
the fruits of their labor as an extension of their self-ownership. Tucker's theory of 
value was intimately related to his ethical views based on each individual having sole 
dominion over their body and their justly acquired property, which required labor mixing."

(We are not entirely sure if this is accurate, and we should not mistake the reality with 
the story. As we don't think that even Adam Smith particularly cared about a man's labor 
being his right, nor did his view of protectionist capitalism conflicted to directly with 
the "Austrian" thinkers Massimino refer to with such distain. How, for instance, would 
Tucker think about large capital investments? How about colonialism? A name is not a 
philosophy and therefore we ought not to get hung up on calls to authority, in general, no?)

Whether or not Tucker's thinking is a synthesis of Individualism with Austrian economics 
is not proved by Tucker's writing on the subject, but on how it is used to further such a 
type of thinking. To quote Bojak, from Bojak Horseman "Hey, I stand by my critique of 
Sartre. His philosophical arguments helped tyrannical regimes justify overt cruelty."

If we want our arguments to exist in the real world then we need to critique them based on 
the influences they dominate, and so free ourselves of intellectual bias in that matter. 
Carson then points to R. and Sousa's inconsistent definitions of markets with quod erat 
demonstrandum authority, which any graduate T.A. would recognize as no certainty of proof.

"R. and Sousa display still more incoherence in their interpretation of Adam Smith. Smith, 
they say, "suggested that that the crafters of legal statutes and political policy in his 
day" guaranteed that the state's policy would promote primarily capitalist interests at 
the expense of everybody else. This, they go on to argue, demonstrates the sheer 
utopianism of believing "that markets could remedy the tendency of those in positions of 
power advance their interests through exploiting the laborers and working class."... But 
if capitalists exploit the working class through statutes and policies enforced by the 
state, then "markets" as we understand them amount to the abolition of such statutes and 
policies. So "markets," by definition, entail the abolition of capitalism in the sense of 
Tucker's monopolies on land, credit and ideas. And the quote from Tucker, above - which 
the authors appear to cite favorably - is an explicit statement that "markets," in the 
sense of abolishing monopolies in land and credit and opening them up to competition, 
would abolish all forms of rent extracted as surplus value from labor."

R. and Sousa are actually arguing the antithesis of Carson's critique, as when they say this:

"Class struggle libertarians know that private property is a major basis for capitalism 
(which historically presupposes colonialism, imperialism, and the use of the state to 
defend said private property)... Therefore, it stands to reason that the ideology evoked 
by Byas and others is by no genuine means anti-capitalist. Ironically, the "free market" 
positions of ALL and C4SS is virtually pro-capitalist, due to the fact that it supports 
the societal roots capitalism depends on, including, most strikingly, private property. It 
is more correct to call this position something like "market liberalism," but it's 
strikingly similar to Anarcho-capitalism, which is an extreme ultra-right view that free 
markets should coordinate the economy without any outside interference."

Or this on Adam Smith:

"More specifically, he suggested that that the crafters of legal statutes and political 
policy in his day ensured that their selfish interests were "most peculiarly attended 
to[no matter how]grievous" the consequence experienced by others... To think that markets 
could remedy the tendency of those in positions of power advance their interests through 
exploiting the laborers and working class is utopian at best."

From these, we are inclined to conclude that R. and Sousa define markets as being a 
purely state-backed capitalist enterprise that is impossible to abstract into its own 
"liberty" centered exchange. Free association cannot exist if single persons have 
unchecked access to the communal resources: the capacity to create monopolies. It is 
ironic that the corporate/state structures that Tucker purports to detest emerge so easily 
from the anarcho-capitalist worldview. Carson's abstraction of the market from the state 
structure is sophomoric and idealistic at best and cannot be used as a refutation to R. 
and Sousa's arguments.

On private property, Carson shows that he can defend his own position without insulting 
the intelligence of another person, but we run into an issue of definitions and of 
purpose. The "use" argument that Carson refers to is the Lockeian argument, and when 
Tucker makes it, he is making the same argument that Locke originally made, which was 
based on a man's right to property of person (which, better stated in modern English as 
Liberty of Person). That means that a man is due his labor, the product of his hands, such 
that he does not exhaust the potential of every other man to use their labor for the same 
purpose. This has striking similarity to the Marxist "each to their own capacity" dictum 
and is a valid point of difference between hardline rightwing anarcho-capitalists who 
don't believe that all persons have a right to life, and the "libertarian left" that 
Carson supports.

It is a common sin in anarchist and socialist circles that capitalism will fail, and that 
what will replace it is morally positive. Carson makes an eloquent argument for the fall 
of capitalism, starting by accepting the colonial roots of resource abundance and creation 
of artificial scarcity by controlled distribution and production. He states that:

"At the same time, artificial abundance is unsustainable because it's a basic economic law 
that corporations will pursue business models that economize on costly inputs and instead 
maximize reliance on extensive addition of inputs that are artificially cheap. Demand for 
subsidized inputs will outstrip the supply. So the economy is driven towards material 
input crises like Peak Oil, and crumbling infrastructure that can't keep up with the needs 
of corporations operating over larger and larger market areas. States must socialize 
larger and larger portions of the total operating costs of capital in order for business 
to be profitable until, as neo-Marxist James O'Connor pointed out, fiscally exhausted 
states can no longer keep up with the demand... On top of all this there's the chronic 
tendency of corporate capitalism towards over-investment, under consumption and excess 
capacity - a tendency that becomes worse over time and is exacerbated by technological 
advances in small-scale, cheap and ephemeral production machinery that requires less and 
less capital expenditure for a given level of output."

Where is the evidence that the socialization of loses will ever be curbed by the failing 
of the corporate empires? (Seriously, where?) The 2009 financial crisis, which has been 
determined to be of criminal negligence by multiple independent reviews, is still billed 
in the form of debt on the American taxpayer. Nestlé corporation has furthered the most 
obvious example of stolen commons by commodifying water, at the expense of both 
governments and peoples. How about risk analyses of oil spill danger? British Petroleum 
longs for artic drilling, even though there exists a 40% failure rate, and is not 
responsible at all for the destruction of that environment? How about climate change? The 
commons of air are completely ignored by business, government, and consumer interests. 
Where is this complete collapse of corporate interests? (Please, send us the data.)

Even if we accept "terminal crisis tendencies" as being accurate, will they lead to the 
outcome that Carson wants? We see these "hollowed out states" as falling prey to even 
further corporate influence. The sort of mechanical society in the cyberpunk futurism of 
Blade Runner, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys where society falls backwards into aristocracy, with 
extreme wealth at the top maintained by private security and technology, and extreme 
poverty plaguing those abandoned by the state and hence destined to live in squalor.

Carson then ends his critique of anarcho-syndicalists by categorizing them as being 
beholden to the "old school" of Marxist socialism that is irrelevant to the modern 
decentralized economy. This argument is a little hypocritical to the earlier assertion, 
which reproached R. and Sousa for using selective quoting to lump all in the C4SS 
community into the anarcho-capitalist position, and then selectively quotes R. and Sousa 
to the same effect. While we cannot and do not want to speak on behalf of R., we think 
that critics need to return to this old Marxist thinking. Carson is right, the working man 
has become totally disenfranchised, where they don't even think of themselves as working 
men - they are entrepreneurs, capitalists, masters of their own destinies, even when they 
live in a one-bedroom apartment with no savings and no real prospect for social mobility...

A note to all authors involved

Obviously by writing this article, as a response to the responders' responses, we are 
utilizing the last word fallacy to our advantage. We hope that what was written came off 
as merely a refutation of inaccuracy and not a direct argument for the anarcho-communist 
perspective, for its validity and viability are worth further debate and reflection. 
Furthermore, we are agnostic to whether or not the "truths" in this article are capital 
‘T' truths or empirical truths, but we try to understand them through a critical attack of 
their consequences/philosophical implications. In turn, the significance of the 
consequences are left to the reader to consider.

Related Link: http://ideasandaction.info/2016/11/free-market-fantasy/

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/30388
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en