From: "Kevin Carson" <kevin_carson-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: Re: owned vs. free market Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 18:37:33 +0000 >From: Joacim Persson <joacim-AT-ymex.net> > >You are expressing what I recognise as a fundamental marxist idea: >"Capital concentration is a spontaneous process." That is, if goods and >services are traded without any interference, i.e. freely, the spontaneous >result would be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. ...which >then leads to a contradiction: "freedom is slavery". The assumption >doesn't even hold together logically, apart from being rather difficult to >fit with a definition of "an-archy" whithout bending something: logic, >semantics, or view of reality. This is a basic distinction between what anarchists and Marxists believe. Engels pointed it out by saying the anarchists believed: "Abolish the state, and capital will go to the devil." As for the Marxists, however, "We propose the reverse." There was a lot of ambiguity in Marx's and Engels' earlier writing, about how essential the state's intervention had been to the process of primitive accumulation that created capitalism. In Holy Family and Grundrisse, they emphasized the natural outgrowths of the rising trade economy of the late middle ages in concentrating property and creating wage labor. But in the primitive accumulation chapters of Capital, Marx stressed the role of the state in robbing the peasantry of their land and creating a class of wage laborers, and in providing the police state measures that forced workers to sell their labor in a buyer's market. They increasingly came to understand that the latter emphasis made them vulnerable to counterattack by anarchists. Free-market anarchists like the Ricardian socialist Thomas Hodgskin, and the American individualist anarchists, responded "if capitalism is the result of state-imposed unequal exchange, then the way to abolish capitalism is by eliminating privilege and letting the free market give the worker his full product." When the socialist Eugen Duhring later made a similar argument, Engels tore into him with both barrels. He went so far as to argue that no state action whatsoever was necessary to create capitalism. Even assuming that there had been no state expropriation of the peasantry and no enclosures, and assuming that every exchange had been entirely equal, things would have ended up just the same. So Engels was forced to repudiate a major part of his and Marx's intellectual history just to maintain consistency in the face of anarchist critique. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
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