File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_2003/anarchy-list.0307, message 79


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.

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