“The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We are not afraid of ruins. We who plowed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.”—Buenaventura Durruti

Chopping Off the Invisible Hand: Internal Problems with Markets and Anarchist Theory, Strategy, and Vision[364]

Deric Shannon

With capitalism in crisis (again), people all over the world are looking for alternatives. It makes sense that people are, as it should be all but obvious to anyone by now that capitalism is prone to crises and that if we want a decent world, we need to organize it in some other way. Anarchists typically don’t stop with wanting an end to the existing economy (or in the parlance of some, abolish “economy” altogether), but also argue generally against all forms of domination and various oppressions. The best of us realize that these different forms of domination intersect in complex ways throughout social life, and so our theories and strategies reflect that understanding.

One alternative among anarchists has been a market form of socialism called mutualism. This was both a strategic and visionary economic argument detailed first by Proudhon, which he modeled after what he experienced and observed among sections of workers in Lyon, France in the early nineteenth century.[365] Proudhon argued that worker-owned and managed firms could replace capitalist firms, abolish wage slavery, and create a world where every worker had access to his/her own means of production, either individually or collectively. Since capitalism rests on the ability of capitalists to pay workers a fraction of the value that they produce and keep the rest in profits by virtue of their ownership of the means of production, worker ownership and self-management would rid us of those social relations. Proudhon envisioned a world where these worker-owned and self-managed firms would compete in a stateless market—a socialist market that was regulated by a grand agro-industrial federation.

Proudhon initially made his arguments for mutualist strategy and vision (the two are always intimately tied) well over a century ago. But market forms of socialism have seen a rise in popularity, as we might expect as people begin to question the nature, logic, and “necessity” of capitalism. For example, Schweickart’s work on what he calls “economic democracy” has been translated into multiple languages and enjoys wide support.[366] Mutualists write and agitate with groups like the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Even UK Conservative Party member Francis Maude has suggested that public sector workers might form cooperatives.[367]

In this chapter, I’d like to lay out some broad critiques of market socialism generally, but specifically the anarchist current practiced by the workers of Lyon all those years ago and articulated by Proudhon and his contemporaries (this is, after all, a collection of writings on anarchist economics)—mutualism. I’m a libertarian communist, so many of my criticisms aren’t going to be all that new to others of my anti-political persuasion, but I hope along the way I can at least say some old things in new and useful ways. There’s also been a rise in interest in mutualism in the United States, with this newer form borrowing from some of American anarchism’s tradition of individualists like Benjamin Tucker and Josiah Warren. And with interest in alternatives to capitalism on the rise, this might be a decent place for anarchist communists to intervene. So what follows is a brief critique of what I see as some of the theoretical and strategic shortcomings of mutualism, and particularly—perhaps most importantly—why we might want to reject markets as a part of any post-capitalist vision.

Theory

The state lies at the center of modern mutualist theory and I find myself agreeing with parts of how they analyze the state, but mostly disagreeing with their conclusions. One of the more intelligent and prolific mutualists, Carson, writes that “(a)s a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value—i.e., capitalism—cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist.”[368] So far so good.

Indeed, capitalist social relations require the state to manage the class antagonisms that arise as a result of the private ownership of productive property. Capitalists accrue surplus value from workers by paying them a portion of what they produce (i.e., wages) and stealing the rest in the form of profits. The state protects this arrangement with violence—absent the protection provided by the state, workers could just take the means of production and the full social product of our labors and do with it as we please. But the fiction of private property is reinforced by the fiction of the state—and these mythologies, these fundamentally religious and mystical features embedded in our social organization, allow the expropriation of surplus value. On this, we agree.

The problems arise when modern mutualists suggest that then “(i)t is statism that is at the root of all the exploitative features of capitalism.”[369] Further, “it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist props to capitalism.”[370] This comes rather intuitively from the work of past American individualists who tended to reduce anarchism to anti-statism. Tucker, for example, defined anarchism as “the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.”[371] Thus, abolishing the state was “the fundamental article” of anarchism (here referring to anarchism as articulated by Proudhon and Warren)—“it is the doctrine which Proudhon named An-archism” and anarchists are reduced to “simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.”[372] Mutualists, then, trade the “primary contradiction” of vulgar economism with a new “root” for all social ills—in this case the state. This leads to sloppy and ill-considered theory (which of course leads to sloppy and ill-considered strategy and vision).

After all, the market isn’t isolated from the rest of human experience. And, of course, with the help of the state, capitalism is embedded in our current market practices—but not just capitalism. We are, after all, anarchists—opposed to all relations of domination. Likewise embedded in market practices are patriarchy, assumptions of “normal” and “able” bodies, white supremacy, rigid and heavily policed categories for gender and sexuality—this list could get quite long. And these relations of domination, far from having a “root” that can be attacked to resolve the rest, intersect together in our institutional arrangements as well as our daily lives.

When mutualists propose that the state lies at the heart of our relations of ruling, where do we find these other forms of domination? Their theory treats the state as a root, ignoring the role of patriarchy, for example, in laying the foundations for primitive accumulation and the development of capitalism and the state.[373] Similarly, if we see the state as a first-order hierarchy, structuring the economy and the rest of our social relations that spring from it, it ignores an analysis of the role of white supremacy in the construction of the modern social order. Thus, historical developments from how the slave economy developed modern American capitalism, and by extension the global economy[374] to the role of different eras of white supremacy and their own economic hallmarks, such as Jim Crow in the United States or the strategic use of racial divisions in strike-breaking[375] are all reduced to “statism” in this formulation.

Now all of this isn’t to suggest that the state does not buttress these institutional arrangements—it does. The state was used to codify slavery, implemented Jim Crow, and backed capital in its use of strike-breaking. But, at the same time, these other relations of domination buttress the state itself. That is, there is no root and our relations of ruling are intricately tied together. Further, to assume otherwise is to make all kinds of errors in theory and strategy, springing from those reductionist assumptions. Ackelsberg notes in her excellent book on the Mujeres Libres, a group of anarchist women formed during the Spanish Civil War, how historically many anarchists—and these anarchist women in particular—refused the class reductionism of parts of the syndicalist movement that saw capitalism as the primary contradiction.[376] This led to “many anarchists” treating “the issue of women’s subordination as, at best, secondary to the emancipation of workers, a problem that would be resolved ‘on the morrow of the revolution,’” an idea that the Mujeres Libres struggled against.[377] Unfortunately, mutualist theory makes the same mistake in regards to the state—the supposed “root” of capitalism, leaving the rest to be resolved after we first do away with the state.

Contemporarily, the question of reductionism and primary contradictions is perhaps best answered by black feminists and womanists who put forward the theory of intersectionality.[378] In response to debates in the movements of the ’60s and ’70s in the United States regarding the origin of oppression and exploitation, feminists began having internal discussions about how we might identify and attack this “root” of social oppression.[379] Following the Combahee River Collective statement,[380] many feminists stopped seeing a need for identifying a single source for domination. Rather, they argued that relations of domination intersect in complex ways and aren’t reducible to a single foundation. To fight against any form of subjugation is to recognize the need to fight against them all. This lends itself nicely to anarchist analyzes—particularly where feminists account for anarchist calls to demolish the state and capitalism.[381]

And reducing capitalism to this single origin compromises anarchist theory in some rather head-spinning ways. Some modern mutualists, for example, write and work alongside so-called “anarcho”-capitalists. After all, these capitalists oppose the state too. And if we can just work together with these defenders of wage labor, private property, and hired protection (because someone has to keep the workers’ hands off of those productive assets somehow without the state around to help) we can end the state—and then capitalism falls? It’s a rather interesting case of circular reasoning, even leading Carson at one point to refer to the likes of Murray Rothbard, who once bragged about capturing the word “libertarian” from his “enemies”[382] (i.e. anarchists) as “intellectually honest.”[383]

But anarchism has always been socialist—and since the early twentieth century is typically communist. Anarchists oppose all forms of domination and exploitation and this includes capitalism—we always have. It is an insult to the memory of the thousands of anarchists who have died or been imprisoned fighting against capitalism to suggest otherwise. And it is a compromise beyond all strategic reasoning to suggest that we can unite with capitalists against the state in order to end capitalism. But not so for mutualists, who see the state as capitalism’s root. Indeed, to end capitalism we will also need to bring an end to all relations of domination—as they mutually reinforce one another (this, of course, also means smashing capitalism).

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that we refuse to work in campaigns with supporters of capitalism—including those who oppose the state. Mass organizations and campaigns include folks with all sorts of ideas and we shouldn’t require a litmus test to organize with people (although we might engage in some activities where it makes sense to limit it to people we have some basic agreements with). But we should make a few things clear in our movement activities. First, as mutualists correctly note, capitalism cannot exist without the state. There can be no stateless capitalism, so arguing for it is a dead end in and of itself. Secondly, anarchists are opposed to capitalism, as we are opposed to all relations of domination. We are opposed to wage labor—the ability for people to own productive property and expropriate the surplus value created by others who use it. There are no “anarcho”-capitalists.

A Few Words on Strategy

Theory, strategy, and vision are intimately connected, so I wanted to also say a few words on mutualist strategy. Again, much to the credit of mutualists, they recognize some fundamental necessities in strategy—particularly if we want an end to capitalism and not just buffers to make it kinder to working people:

For labor to wage a successful class war, it must think in terms of war, not “rights” or “the law.” The mainstream unions are psychologically addicted to the legacy of the New Deal “social compact.” Their inability to think outside the limits of the NLRB process is a severe handicap. Labor must think in terms of war, using all the means at their disposal, limited only by srategy [sic] and by their own sense of justice, without regard to “established procedures.”[384]

Indeed, here again we are agreed. But in the same document, Carson doesn’t seem to be advocating for “war” elsewhere. For one, as we might expect from someone who sees the state as capitalism’s “root,” there is nothing there in his “political program for anarchists” on how to deal with patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and so on. Again, anarchists—opposed to all relations of domination—should have something to say about those things. We’ve certainly not come to big agreements on how to deal with those hierarchical divisions, but we shouldn’t ignore them. And putting them into this mutualist framework might be interesting (can the invisible hand strangle patriarchy, for example?). To be fair, I did see an attempt to account for some of these things when I looked over some of the material of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, but capitalism wasn’t roundly condemned in those materials (nor was its role in maintaining these other hierarchical divisions recognized).

Beyond that, much of Carson’s strategy in his political program mirrors Proudhon’s—mutual banking, the creation of cooperatives, the mutualization of public services, and so on. This is a reformist position in the classical sense—we hold off until that last possible moment for confrontation. We might learn here from Martin and Barrot’s communization:

Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighborhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for 15 odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in 3-room family units—in short, it will tend to break all separations.[385]

Here there is no waiting, no markets, no cooperative islands in a sea of capitalism, but the conscious creation of communism in our lives—the expansion of that which exists into other spheres of life, breaking those separations and opening wide those cracks of possibility in the here and now. It is neither an admonition to wait for confrontation or attack, nor is it a suggestion that we wait for a Great Revolutionary Event that ends history, but a suggestion that we intervene in our daily lives now and take what belongs to us—everything. This means we can attack and expropriate this moment and that confrontation isn’t some far-off wish while we create infrastructure—indeed, these confrontations and expropriations are infrastructure.

The creation of alternative institutions figures high in mutualist strategy and has done so since the time of Proudhon. Again, I would agree that we need to create alternatives to replace the existing society (at our best, in the process of destroying the old, we create the new—as Bakunin noted over a century ago). And so Proudhon saw the creation of mutual aid societies, mutual credit and banking associations, worker-owned and operated public services (taken from the purview and direction of the state), and so on as steps out of the existing order. Similarly, and as we might expect from a market socialist, he saw worker cooperatives as central to his strategy for slowly evolving us out of capitalism. But cooperatives, as a demand under capitalism, suffer from what Kay describes as self-exploitation:

Thus the problem is not how capital is managed, but that it is capital, regardless of who manages it or how democratically they do so…the assets of a co-op do not cease being capital when votes are taken on how they are used within a society of generalized commodity production and wage labor. That is to say there remains an imperative to accumulate with all the drive to minimize the labor time taken to do a task this requires, even in a co-op….A firm operating in a competitive market—as would certainly be the case with firms “about to go bust”—must generate enough surplus to re-invest in expanding output and new technology to maintain or improve its market position relative to its rivals. That is to say the firm—as a concentration of capital—has a logic of its own. It needs to be nourished by surplus living labor or it will whither [sic] and perish. As dead labor, it must vampire-like suck life from the living, and lives the more, the more it sucks.[386]

In other words, market pressures come to bear on cooperatives as they do with any other business under capitalism (and would under competitive market socialism). Now, this doesn’t mean that cooperatives are necessarily bad or that self-managed enterprises under capitalism cannot teach us any lessons. Indeed, even minimal decision-making and participation in our work lives under capitalism can point to alternatives to how we’ve organized our social world(s) (nearly completely without our participation, and certainly so in most of our lives at work). But cooperatives as a strategy out of capitalism contain their own internal problems, along with the markets that they assume. And these problems persist into mutualist post-capitalist vision.

Vision

Carson writes that a mutualist world would be “a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work—as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.”[387] I agree. It would differ from our existing society vastly. But two questions arise for me. One, would such a world remain socialist? Secondly, is market socialism—retaining markets, competition among firms, negative externalities, production as a separate sphere of life (i.e., “work” and “jobs”)—really enough?

I said before that I particularly objected to markets in terms of post-capitalist vision. A part of this is because it’s hard for me to see societies that advocate for market socialism, as such, as remaining socialist. I do think that if we recognize a need for a stateless socialism that people will try all sorts of experiments along the way. Communism would be rather meaningless if it were forced onto workers (I’m comfortable forcing it onto our exploiters) and without a state to force a single vision onto people, post-capitalism will take on a lot of different forms in different areas. Workers will likely attempt market forms of socialism. They already are doing so strategically in the cooperative movement, though much of it has lost its socialist character or desire to move beyond capitalism (a reflection of what might come of market socialism without a push to go beyond it?). But arguing for markets as an end goal seems to me to be asking for a return to the same kinds of exploitative relations we have currently. Markets force pressures for profiting in the process of competition. And it’s hard for me to see mutuality within this competitive sphere. When cooperative firms are able to accumulate at greater rates than others, how does this not lead to greater inequalities that form the basis for the kinds of accumulation that precedes capitalism?

This is a bit of a presumption, admittedly—none of us know what a post-capitalist society will look like (though we see glimpses when we live and observe these relations in embryonic form and attempt to embody the values we promote in struggle). Workers, having abolished themselves as a class, (are creating and) will create what that future society looks like. It won’t be dictated by theorists, although I do think it’s incumbent on anti-capitalists to put forward our best guesses (and to do so humbly and as guesses rather than certainties). And in our lives, for libertarian communists, that means creating the content of communism. Thus, rather than seeing the present as a set of what exists at a given moment, we might reorient to seeing it as sets of becoming—of emerging conditions in a historical process in which we, the dispossessed and exploited, are players and not passive spectators.

But, one might ask, why would you criticize market socialism as a post-capitalist vision—as a best guess as to where going beyond capitalism might lead us? Mainly because markets have internal problems that create inequality and because I think they tend to dissolve, rather than create, social solidarity.

First and foremost, markets are not participatory. That is, rather than planning our social lives (or, better yet, living), we leave those things to the proverbial “invisible hand.” We “participate” inasmuch as we guess at what we should produce (actually, typically our bosses calculate what we produce, though presumably we would do so ourselves under market socialism) and we consume what we can create or what is made available to us through the market. We remove our selves from the process and replace them with the motive to profit.

Relatedly, market allocation has negative externalities attached to it. Things like air pollution, to name one (perhaps tired) example, aren’t consented to by third parties outside of the exchange arrangements between a given producer and buyer of a good (say, a particularly gas-guzzling car, to stick with this example). In the process of market competition, these negative externalities are produced without the consent of third parties. So while “free trade” is typically seen as a consensual exchange of goods on a market, it says nothing about the consent of affected third parties. A society where we are free to create our own lives would be a society where we have a part in the decision-making process for those things that affect us to the degree that they do affect us. Markets are anathema to that kind of participation and active creation.

The biggest negative externality of markets, I think, is what they do (and what they would do under market socialism) to social solidarity. If worker-managed firms compete in the market, it means that the income of those workers is tied to how well their firm performs. Some groups of workers will have greater access to the social product as a result of how they manage their workplaces or what they have access to within it. Some will have better equipment, better capacities in the individuals of their workplace collectives, and so on.

This undermines social solidarity in that it pits workers against one another for greater access to the social product. It can generate unemployment, as self-managed firms can lower their expenses by ridding themselves of workers—in much the same way that companies “downsize” under capitalism. With workplaces competing for access to the social product through the market, the greater the firm can maximize its surplus, the greater the income of the workers becomes—thus, this access to added income incentivizes layoffs and unemployment if a firm can maintain output without the need for (perhaps less productive) parts of their workforce.

Similarly, market competition incentivizes negative externalities and can actually de-incentivize positive externalities. With income being tied to the success of a given firm, this provides a motivation for shifting social costs onto others. To return to the example of air pollution, equipment to minimize such pollution can be costly. In a market society, since the income of workers is tied to the success of the firm in market competition, polluting can increase the income of a given set of workers. Relatedly, if a given workplace cannot profit from a social good, it de-incentivizes those positive externalities (in this case, clean air).

And importantly, this kind of competition erodes the kinds of values that motivate most anarchists (even most mutualists). The self-interested profit-seeking of market allocation—even with the kinds of checks in place suggested by mutualists (such as Proudhon’s agro-industrial federation or price fixing)—promotes an ethic of each against the rest. Under capitalism we are taught that ethic as individuals. Were we to compete in a market of self-managed firms, we would learn that ethic as collectivities.

Further, mutualism still assumes the workplace and job as spheres of life separated from the rest of human experience. Rather than ridding ourselves of this fundamental form of human alienation, it retains those separations. This means a couple of important things. One, markets would still serve as a primary source of socialization for children—for people. For example, if a firm can profit from making women feel like shit about their bodies and then produce a product to “fix” that problem, then it incentivizes heavily policed and impossible standards of beauty for women. Markets can create material incentives for the kinds of socialization processes where we are separated from inventing our sense of self outside of those pervasive market relations.

This also means that we’ve retained the workplace—that dreaded place where we waste our time, mostly bored out of our minds and pushed to grind harder and harder, chasing access to commodities (as the workplace is where we are tied to in order to access the social product through compulsory labor). We maintain the kinds of rational and calculable processes that govern capitalist social life. For libertarian communists, it is not enough that we share some measurable and calculable social product. We do not solely want a quantitative shift in how we allocate goods. We want a qualitative shift in how we organize our social world. What might society look like if, rather than being organized around profit, rational exchange, and calculated self-interest, we organized our world around fundamentally different values like pleasure, desire, or even adventure? What might the world look like if we weren’t so concerned with questions like “How much?” but instead asked questions like “How well?” Does alienation and atomization that is self-managed sound like the kind of alternative we should be fighting for? I think we can, and should, ask for (and take) much more. This might also lead us out of a productivist mind-set and into a world where we stop producing so much useless shit.

For the Accumulation of Freedom

I think that mutualists get some very basic things right. The private ownership of the means of production, expropriation of the surplus value produced by workers, the command structures in the workplace—all of these things are part and parcel of capitalism and mutualists rightly reject them. If we see the creation of communism as a process—as an activity of the dispossessed—then we are likely going to see experiments in market socialism along the way, as the idea resonates with many people. I do hope this critique is taken in the spirit in which I intend it—not to denounce mutualist economics or market socialism, but to explain why libertarian communists create different content in that process of making the future and why anarchists might reject a theory, strategy, and vision revolving around markets.

In their theory, I think mutualists are right to suggest that the state protects the social relations of capitalism. But I think they’re wrong to suggest that it is the root of capitalism—as if dismantling the state alone can rid ourselves of the complex and intersecting relations of ruling we live under. Further, it confuses primitive accumulation and the creation of capitalism by ignoring the roles of other relations of domination in creating and supporting both capitalism and the state. This, of course, leads to ill-considered strategy.

Again the mutualist Kevin Carson is right to suggest that working people need to stop thinking in terms of social fictions like “rights” and make war with capital and the state. But in his program, no doubt due to seeing the state as a primary contradiction, he has nothing to say about non-class oppressions. And the mutualist strategy, centered on the market, of creating alternative institutions and reforming our way out of capitalism—particularly through mutual credit and cooperative business enterprises—bleeds into the visionary problems with mutualism.

Mutualists correctly assert that we must move beyond capitalism. But maintaining markets in a post-capitalist society maintains the atomization of any profit and competition-oriented system. Further, it incentivizes negative externalities and de-incentivizes positive externalities. It pits workers against one another in competition over access to the social product. And it maintains the workplace as a separate sphere of life and organizes our social world on the same rational, calculable controls that are part and parcel of capitalist alienation.

Libertarian communism, I would argue, is something we create the content for in our struggles and will often look different than that produced by market socialists, though we do have sentiments that we agree on. While we can’t create a perfect world, I do think we can create a better one. And I believe that we should reach for the most utopian of possibilities while doing so. While guesses about what a future society might look like can provide us with some possibilities for inquisitive folks, ultimately the creation of post-capitalist society is the task of all of the dispossessed—not solely theorists. To me, this movement is communism and its future is yet unwritten, but is becoming.