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Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
This book is an attempt to revive individualist anarchist political economy, to incorporate the useful developments of the last hundred years, and to make it relevant to the problems of the twenty-first century. We hope this work will go at least part of the way to providing a new theoretical and practical foundation for free market socialist economics.
409 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2004
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October 3, 2020
I'd never heard of Carson or the Center for a Stateless Society until a few of my twitter friends mentioned them recently as a non-Marxist approach to anti-capitalism. And while I was a bit skeptical of that, I have to admit they're basically right. After reading so much Marx and Marx-related material, and constantly going back to my Marxist friends and being accused of un-Left sympathies for pointing out simple logical issues, or for failing to object to uncontroversial statements made by un-Left libertarians like Hayek, it's a huge relief to get to a book that starts out by attacking those same logical faults and citing those same libertarians (and some even worse!) from a dogmatically moralizing Leftist perspective.
I don't know if this is intentional or not, but there's a very strong echo of Capital Vol 1 in this book's structure. It opens with 100 pages of meditation on value theory, which, like Marx, gives no indication at all of why this question is interesting or important, and presumes a fairly substantial familiarity with existing positions on the question. Fortunately, having just read a bunch of Marx, I was in a better position to follow that than I've ever been. His position is . . . strange to me. He spends the first section attempting to tear down the marginal theory of value in favor of the labor theory. But he does this by acknowledging that the marginal theory was always implicit in Marx's formulation of the LTV, that Marx's theory of surplus value as a special kind exploitation occurring even in the absence of coercion was nonsense, and that labor is the sole source of value because it is the only source of *marginal disutility* in the economy. His objections feel utterly semantic. Bohm-Bawerk was right in his critique of Marx but failed to justify why these criticisms should be taken as marks against the LTV paradigm instead of being corrected by better formulations. It's true that economic value is determined by marginal utility and disutility, but from the right angle, under certain conditions, the only kind of utility or disutility that matters is labor. Why do this?
Well, as far as I can tell, he thinks it's a better way to frame the ethical foundation of his political stance. He assumes throughout that the reader knows what mutualism is (at least, the definition) and already believes it's correct, and is simply reading the book in order to learn their beliefs in more detail (It's not unlike the Capital reader companions I tried out in that respect). His politics come down to one simple principle: if every individual pays the full cost of their choices, everything will turn out as well as possible. "The most important thing is to avoid . . . externalities." As long as this principle applies, market dynamics will be approach ideal social distributions of resources and production. There are some details to work out--he acknowledges that there is no way to use this principle to decide between the three libertarian-consistent property rights rules he mentions--but otherwise it's just the one thing. "Every single evil of capitalism can be traced to a violation of [this] principle."
The meat of the book, paralleling Marx again, is a historical discussion of primitive accumulation. His goal here is not simply to reprise the general Leftist focus on historical violence as a root of contemporary inequality (though it is that) but to distinguish his Left-Libertarianism from the more well-known right-wing kind, showing that the application of their shared principles is not just plausibly but definitively consistent with a Leftist political stance. The libertarian slant you hear even on relatively neutral platforms like EconTalk would have you believe that the violations of libertarian principles most important to guard against and most in need of redress are well-meaning state economic policies and regulations. Carson agrees those issues are bad (they violate the cost principle!) but frames the issue from the other side. He emphasizes that while the government may not have like, forced railroads to install seatbelts or banned the use of certain pollutants in the 19th century, their openly imperialist and classist violence both within and without their borders was a far greater violation of the cost principle, one that should make any libertarian recognize that this early capitalism was by no means a golden era of freedom.
This is more or less exactly where I'm at on this question these days, so I found all of this, again, fairly welcome and refreshing. The problem is that while Carson might be ecumenical and critical in his combination of Rothbard, Marx, and a dozen other thinkers, he is still an extremely ideological thinker. He is entirely satisfied to compare the world to his little principle and the priorities and proclivities he uses it to validate, and expresses no real curiosity outside that. He wants to reconcile his libertarianism and his Marxism, and once he's satisfied that he's done so, he moves on to the steps between here and utopia. This plays out more or less how it always does: everything that violates the cost principle is bad, the state needs to be destroyed, but until then we should live according to our values and try not to do anything evil. He notes, eg, that we should focus on getting rid of corporate welfare before welfare for the poor.
This last bit of course is the interesting part. In his primitive accumulation bit, he extends the violence of the state into the 20th century, focusing on American imperialism abroad, again all the standard Leftist stuff. But he also talks about Progressive reforms. His position, based entirely on his Rothbardian Marxism, is that the capitalist class maintains its position by using the state to enforce a monopoly on the means of production. Whatever the state does, and whatever it does not do, regardless of which party supports any given policy or its opposite, is in service of perpetuating this situation. Food safety regulations displace the cost of monitoring to the taxpayer and discourage competition. Welfare payments and state health insurance lower the wages companies have to pay workers. The nature of the state as this class cabal mechanism, with the coercive enforcement of unjust property rights (extended from PA), its currency monopoly, patent rights, tariffs, and subsidies to things like transportation and research universities, make exploitation inherent in everything it does. It's like. . . well, a weird fusion of Austrian libertarianism and Marxism. Carson doesn't believe, as Marxists do, that free market exchange is somehow inherently exploitative. But he does believe that in actually existing markets, there might as well be no ethical transactions.
This is, I think, the big issue I have with him and that I wish he was a bit more interested in elaborating. I find it more frustrating than Marxism because there's no obvious way to unknot the premise. It's like consent in sex. As long as consent is absent--and it is with every state existing today--nothing can be ethical. And yet, like the Leftist "no ethical consumption under capitalism", this seems to leave us in a position where the very ethical judgments that underpinned our analysis in the first place no longer apply.
My perspective on this situation is that the evolutionary context is crucial to making any sense of it. Predation (or parasitism, as Carson prefers to term it) is a perfectly valid strategy in an evolutionary context. It's just bad in a society of mixed, cooperating predators and prey. So while there's a sense that primitive accumulation is a kind of moral aberration, this is really not such a weird thing, right. The weird thing would be the society Carson wants us to build, where such violence is entirely suppressed. Carson is better about this than some writers on the Left, but he still gives very little thought to the nature of this suppression, both the death of living states and the prevention of future ones. It seems kind of crucial to me, not just in a trite "but how will you pay for it?" kind of pragmatist v idealist rebuttal, but in the distinction he's drawing between societies. He seems, once again echoing Marx, to imply that there will be a temporal disjunction between current statist reality and his libertarian ideal. We will, one day, end the state, just as Marx thought we'd end capitalism. But, again as in Marx, he never really demonstrates why it makes sense to require this to be complete to count. Why, in other words, pockets of liberty, marginal gains in liberty, relative distributions of the use of force, etc, don't count? Why should we embrace this all-or-nothing sentiment, where the degree the state distorts markets from their free equilibrium doesn't matter because the state was involved so it's bad?
The most challenging expression of this for the Progressive or socialist worldview is that Carson takes as hard a line on positive externalities as he does on negative ones. He frames any funding of public goods at all--roads, broadband, postal service, ports, education, etc--as subsidies to the ruling class. The "good" things the government does are just as bad for him as the "bad" ones. If subsidies get roads or electricity or parcel delivery to ppl in distant rural areas that wouldn't otherwise be worth delivering to, this is a distortion of market equilibrium. If subsidies allow companies to build factories that drop the price of goods and allow more people around the world to afford them, this is a distortion of market equilibrium. There is a way the world "should" be in the absence of state intervention, and any deviation from that in any direction is bad. The cost principle goes both ways: polluters should pay, taxpayers shouldn't. This is another place where evolutionary thinking seems relevant to me. Network size and innovation produce changes (positive and negative) that aren't easily captured by the market equilibrium framework. It's not especially hard to imagine a scenario in which a government does something unjust like collecting taxes in order to overcome a barrier that market actors on their own never would have bothered to but which pays off in the long term. But maybe that's just my liberal brainwashing speaking and a "truly" free market really would be able to overcome all such problems to the extent it was worth solving them.
It just seems to me (and here I'm just echoing Brink Lindsay on libertarianism) like there is no way to enforce the cost principle without some kind of mechanism to do so. And those mechanisms have to make decisions that, like his property rights case, have no obvious default interpretation relative to the cost principle. More importantly, many of those mechanisms seem likely to look a lot like many of the things states already do. The framework Carson supports, which he occasionally mentions as having come into existence before being stamped out by primitive accumulation or speculates about coming about after it, is a "free federation" where people voluntarily come together to manage problems like externalities. He even goes so far, in his last chapter, as to suggest that can and should build these federations in the body of the state, so that they seem more viable and the total abolition of the state becomes less of a drastic change. And yet the idea that like, the state as it exists now is in fact an expression of this same process (as, one might suggest, many post-revolutionary states were in at least some meaningful part), is completely off limits to him. He wants us to know in no uncertain terms that present states are NOT a battleground of competing interest groups. They are just the tool of the same ruling class that came to dominance from feudalism.
So overall, I both do and don't vibe with what Carson's doing here. I think he presents a best-case version of dogmatic, radical, tear-it-all-down Leftism. (The fact that he insists his radical pro-market anti-state libertarianism should still be called anti-capitalism is IMO the best illustration I've seen of the utter confusion that term brings but he has his little definition and within that context, fine, etc). But he's still not selling exactly what I'm thinking these days, either. His disinterest in the tougher philosophical and theoretical questions of left liberal/libertarianism, particularly in the analysis of class as an economic phenomenon, is utterly unsatisfying relative to where I'm at. He just takes it totally for granted that such things can and do exist and treats right-libertarians with scorn for denying it without offering much of a defense. So I'm still out here looking for that.
Incidentally, speaking of class, it's conspicuous to me that while Carson is otherwise a fairly standard Leftist in his moral commitments and historical grievances, I don't think he ever once mentions race or gender, even when they seem plausibly relevant. His discussion of primitive accumulation is more America-focused than Marx's but doesn't iirc feature Native Americans at all, and his other main examples are just from Britain again.
I don't know if this is intentional or not, but there's a very strong echo of Capital Vol 1 in this book's structure. It opens with 100 pages of meditation on value theory, which, like Marx, gives no indication at all of why this question is interesting or important, and presumes a fairly substantial familiarity with existing positions on the question. Fortunately, having just read a bunch of Marx, I was in a better position to follow that than I've ever been. His position is . . . strange to me. He spends the first section attempting to tear down the marginal theory of value in favor of the labor theory. But he does this by acknowledging that the marginal theory was always implicit in Marx's formulation of the LTV, that Marx's theory of surplus value as a special kind exploitation occurring even in the absence of coercion was nonsense, and that labor is the sole source of value because it is the only source of *marginal disutility* in the economy. His objections feel utterly semantic. Bohm-Bawerk was right in his critique of Marx but failed to justify why these criticisms should be taken as marks against the LTV paradigm instead of being corrected by better formulations. It's true that economic value is determined by marginal utility and disutility, but from the right angle, under certain conditions, the only kind of utility or disutility that matters is labor. Why do this?
Well, as far as I can tell, he thinks it's a better way to frame the ethical foundation of his political stance. He assumes throughout that the reader knows what mutualism is (at least, the definition) and already believes it's correct, and is simply reading the book in order to learn their beliefs in more detail (It's not unlike the Capital reader companions I tried out in that respect). His politics come down to one simple principle: if every individual pays the full cost of their choices, everything will turn out as well as possible. "The most important thing is to avoid . . . externalities." As long as this principle applies, market dynamics will be approach ideal social distributions of resources and production. There are some details to work out--he acknowledges that there is no way to use this principle to decide between the three libertarian-consistent property rights rules he mentions--but otherwise it's just the one thing. "Every single evil of capitalism can be traced to a violation of [this] principle."
The meat of the book, paralleling Marx again, is a historical discussion of primitive accumulation. His goal here is not simply to reprise the general Leftist focus on historical violence as a root of contemporary inequality (though it is that) but to distinguish his Left-Libertarianism from the more well-known right-wing kind, showing that the application of their shared principles is not just plausibly but definitively consistent with a Leftist political stance. The libertarian slant you hear even on relatively neutral platforms like EconTalk would have you believe that the violations of libertarian principles most important to guard against and most in need of redress are well-meaning state economic policies and regulations. Carson agrees those issues are bad (they violate the cost principle!) but frames the issue from the other side. He emphasizes that while the government may not have like, forced railroads to install seatbelts or banned the use of certain pollutants in the 19th century, their openly imperialist and classist violence both within and without their borders was a far greater violation of the cost principle, one that should make any libertarian recognize that this early capitalism was by no means a golden era of freedom.
This is more or less exactly where I'm at on this question these days, so I found all of this, again, fairly welcome and refreshing. The problem is that while Carson might be ecumenical and critical in his combination of Rothbard, Marx, and a dozen other thinkers, he is still an extremely ideological thinker. He is entirely satisfied to compare the world to his little principle and the priorities and proclivities he uses it to validate, and expresses no real curiosity outside that. He wants to reconcile his libertarianism and his Marxism, and once he's satisfied that he's done so, he moves on to the steps between here and utopia. This plays out more or less how it always does: everything that violates the cost principle is bad, the state needs to be destroyed, but until then we should live according to our values and try not to do anything evil. He notes, eg, that we should focus on getting rid of corporate welfare before welfare for the poor.
This last bit of course is the interesting part. In his primitive accumulation bit, he extends the violence of the state into the 20th century, focusing on American imperialism abroad, again all the standard Leftist stuff. But he also talks about Progressive reforms. His position, based entirely on his Rothbardian Marxism, is that the capitalist class maintains its position by using the state to enforce a monopoly on the means of production. Whatever the state does, and whatever it does not do, regardless of which party supports any given policy or its opposite, is in service of perpetuating this situation. Food safety regulations displace the cost of monitoring to the taxpayer and discourage competition. Welfare payments and state health insurance lower the wages companies have to pay workers. The nature of the state as this class cabal mechanism, with the coercive enforcement of unjust property rights (extended from PA), its currency monopoly, patent rights, tariffs, and subsidies to things like transportation and research universities, make exploitation inherent in everything it does. It's like. . . well, a weird fusion of Austrian libertarianism and Marxism. Carson doesn't believe, as Marxists do, that free market exchange is somehow inherently exploitative. But he does believe that in actually existing markets, there might as well be no ethical transactions.
This is, I think, the big issue I have with him and that I wish he was a bit more interested in elaborating. I find it more frustrating than Marxism because there's no obvious way to unknot the premise. It's like consent in sex. As long as consent is absent--and it is with every state existing today--nothing can be ethical. And yet, like the Leftist "no ethical consumption under capitalism", this seems to leave us in a position where the very ethical judgments that underpinned our analysis in the first place no longer apply.
My perspective on this situation is that the evolutionary context is crucial to making any sense of it. Predation (or parasitism, as Carson prefers to term it) is a perfectly valid strategy in an evolutionary context. It's just bad in a society of mixed, cooperating predators and prey. So while there's a sense that primitive accumulation is a kind of moral aberration, this is really not such a weird thing, right. The weird thing would be the society Carson wants us to build, where such violence is entirely suppressed. Carson is better about this than some writers on the Left, but he still gives very little thought to the nature of this suppression, both the death of living states and the prevention of future ones. It seems kind of crucial to me, not just in a trite "but how will you pay for it?" kind of pragmatist v idealist rebuttal, but in the distinction he's drawing between societies. He seems, once again echoing Marx, to imply that there will be a temporal disjunction between current statist reality and his libertarian ideal. We will, one day, end the state, just as Marx thought we'd end capitalism. But, again as in Marx, he never really demonstrates why it makes sense to require this to be complete to count. Why, in other words, pockets of liberty, marginal gains in liberty, relative distributions of the use of force, etc, don't count? Why should we embrace this all-or-nothing sentiment, where the degree the state distorts markets from their free equilibrium doesn't matter because the state was involved so it's bad?
The most challenging expression of this for the Progressive or socialist worldview is that Carson takes as hard a line on positive externalities as he does on negative ones. He frames any funding of public goods at all--roads, broadband, postal service, ports, education, etc--as subsidies to the ruling class. The "good" things the government does are just as bad for him as the "bad" ones. If subsidies get roads or electricity or parcel delivery to ppl in distant rural areas that wouldn't otherwise be worth delivering to, this is a distortion of market equilibrium. If subsidies allow companies to build factories that drop the price of goods and allow more people around the world to afford them, this is a distortion of market equilibrium. There is a way the world "should" be in the absence of state intervention, and any deviation from that in any direction is bad. The cost principle goes both ways: polluters should pay, taxpayers shouldn't. This is another place where evolutionary thinking seems relevant to me. Network size and innovation produce changes (positive and negative) that aren't easily captured by the market equilibrium framework. It's not especially hard to imagine a scenario in which a government does something unjust like collecting taxes in order to overcome a barrier that market actors on their own never would have bothered to but which pays off in the long term. But maybe that's just my liberal brainwashing speaking and a "truly" free market really would be able to overcome all such problems to the extent it was worth solving them.
It just seems to me (and here I'm just echoing Brink Lindsay on libertarianism) like there is no way to enforce the cost principle without some kind of mechanism to do so. And those mechanisms have to make decisions that, like his property rights case, have no obvious default interpretation relative to the cost principle. More importantly, many of those mechanisms seem likely to look a lot like many of the things states already do. The framework Carson supports, which he occasionally mentions as having come into existence before being stamped out by primitive accumulation or speculates about coming about after it, is a "free federation" where people voluntarily come together to manage problems like externalities. He even goes so far, in his last chapter, as to suggest that can and should build these federations in the body of the state, so that they seem more viable and the total abolition of the state becomes less of a drastic change. And yet the idea that like, the state as it exists now is in fact an expression of this same process (as, one might suggest, many post-revolutionary states were in at least some meaningful part), is completely off limits to him. He wants us to know in no uncertain terms that present states are NOT a battleground of competing interest groups. They are just the tool of the same ruling class that came to dominance from feudalism.
So overall, I both do and don't vibe with what Carson's doing here. I think he presents a best-case version of dogmatic, radical, tear-it-all-down Leftism. (The fact that he insists his radical pro-market anti-state libertarianism should still be called anti-capitalism is IMO the best illustration I've seen of the utter confusion that term brings but he has his little definition and within that context, fine, etc). But he's still not selling exactly what I'm thinking these days, either. His disinterest in the tougher philosophical and theoretical questions of left liberal/libertarianism, particularly in the analysis of class as an economic phenomenon, is utterly unsatisfying relative to where I'm at. He just takes it totally for granted that such things can and do exist and treats right-libertarians with scorn for denying it without offering much of a defense. So I'm still out here looking for that.
Incidentally, speaking of class, it's conspicuous to me that while Carson is otherwise a fairly standard Leftist in his moral commitments and historical grievances, I don't think he ever once mentions race or gender, even when they seem plausibly relevant. His discussion of primitive accumulation is more America-focused than Marx's but doesn't iirc feature Native Americans at all, and his other main examples are just from Britain again.
May 20, 2024
Mutualism, the political and economic theory that Carson champions, is a sort of free-market anarchism or left-libertarianism. It has American ancestors among the 19th Century anarchist bloom, such as Josiah Warren and Benjamin R. Tucker, and in the brief libertarian/new-left reconciliation of the 1960s promoted by Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, and others.
Mutualism is universally misunderstood these days. Left-wing activists tend to suspect that mutualism’s advocacy of a free market must mean that it’s really advocating entrenched big business exploitation, while the mainstream “free market capitalist” libertarians suspect that mutualism’s criticism of entrenched big business exploitation must mean that it’s really advocating big-government socialism. Much of mutualist activity today involves patiently explaining itself to its critics and potential allies.
Carson is a tireless scholar and promoter of mutualism, and this book pulls together much of the patient explaining he’s been doing. It puts mutualism in its historical context, comparing and contrasting its economic theory with those of other schools of thought, particularly the Marxian and Austrian schools. It examines the nature of government and of the ruling class and why this makes government an inherently poor tool for correcting injustice. It contrasts capitalism as it actually developed and as it actually exists with a free market, and demonstrates why defenders of the latter ought to strongly oppose the former. And finally it sketches a realistic plan for how we can get from the mess we’re in now to a freer world whose abundance is more justly shared.
The first segment of the book is dedicated to explaining and defending the labor-theory of value: how the prices of goods in a free market will tend to gravitate to express the value of the labor embodied in them, how deviations from this general rule can be explained, and how this value should belong to the laborer as the natural wage of the labor. Carson asserts:
The various ways in which the state steps in to ameliorate the very same exploitation of capitalism that it caused in the first place are, Carson demonstrates, further methods of entrenching an exploitative elite. The social safety net, public infrastructure, consumer- and worker-protection legislation, and the whole lot actually function to the advantage of capitalist elites — allowing them to extract more profit from labor via the exploitation of a non-free market by externalizing costs, eliminating competition, and cartelizing.
The book is available to read on-line, and you may also be interested in an interesting back-and-forth between Carson and some of his right-libertarian critics in an issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies devoted to Studies in Mutualist Political Economy a few years ago.
Mutualism is universally misunderstood these days. Left-wing activists tend to suspect that mutualism’s advocacy of a free market must mean that it’s really advocating entrenched big business exploitation, while the mainstream “free market capitalist” libertarians suspect that mutualism’s criticism of entrenched big business exploitation must mean that it’s really advocating big-government socialism. Much of mutualist activity today involves patiently explaining itself to its critics and potential allies.
Carson is a tireless scholar and promoter of mutualism, and this book pulls together much of the patient explaining he’s been doing. It puts mutualism in its historical context, comparing and contrasting its economic theory with those of other schools of thought, particularly the Marxian and Austrian schools. It examines the nature of government and of the ruling class and why this makes government an inherently poor tool for correcting injustice. It contrasts capitalism as it actually developed and as it actually exists with a free market, and demonstrates why defenders of the latter ought to strongly oppose the former. And finally it sketches a realistic plan for how we can get from the mess we’re in now to a freer world whose abundance is more justly shared.
The first segment of the book is dedicated to explaining and defending the labor-theory of value: how the prices of goods in a free market will tend to gravitate to express the value of the labor embodied in them, how deviations from this general rule can be explained, and how this value should belong to the laborer as the natural wage of the labor. Carson asserts:
Throughout history, the state has been a means by which the producing classes were robbed of their produce in order to support an idle ruling class. Without state intervention in the marketplace, the natural wage of labor would be its product. It is statism that is at the root of all the exploitative features of capitalism. Capitalism, indeed, only exists to the extent that the principles of free exchange are violated. “Free market capitalism” is an oxymoron.
The various ways in which the state steps in to ameliorate the very same exploitation of capitalism that it caused in the first place are, Carson demonstrates, further methods of entrenching an exploitative elite. The social safety net, public infrastructure, consumer- and worker-protection legislation, and the whole lot actually function to the advantage of capitalist elites — allowing them to extract more profit from labor via the exploitation of a non-free market by externalizing costs, eliminating competition, and cartelizing.
The book is available to read on-line, and you may also be interested in an interesting back-and-forth between Carson and some of his right-libertarian critics in an issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies devoted to Studies in Mutualist Political Economy a few years ago.
April 10, 2020
A compelling argument for an updated labor theory of value, a detailed history of state capitalism, and an inspiring description of anarchist results and strategies. Carson has crafted a truly impressive work of political theory.
July 4, 2025
Some predictions are outdated, but overall it's a nuanced discussion of political economy in my opinion
June 1, 2011
Excellent run-through of the history of political economy. Brings to light a lot of surprising quotes from Engles, Marx, Schumpeter, Ricardo, Smith, Mises, Rothbard, etc. Thats another thing. This book is largely composed of quotations. The consequence was that when Carson quoted people I already knew, it gave me a reference point from which to understand Mutualism, and when he quotes people I was unfamiliar with I wanted to go read their books to get the full story. The number of quotes can be overwhelming, but it does serve Carson's "See guys, what I'm saying really isn't far from what you probably already believe" strategy very well.
As for his LTV theory, I've got to mull it over a bit, but it seems to be at least mainly correct. First off, its not really an LTV in the way I was familiar with. Carson acknowledges off the bat that what is "socially necessary labor" is determined through subjective(!) means. He also immediately acknowledges that his LTV will say nothing about the price or value of rare goods and/or non-reproducible goods, land, and a few others. He also acknowledges that not all labor hours have the same value. These are huge concessions, and the fact that they are roundly ignored by Walter Block in his criticism of MPE is saddening (did Block even read the thing?). He also gives some pertinent quotes which seem to indicate that the versions of the LTV which Ricardo, and Smith believed also gave similar concessions. Which would seem to indicate that many of the classic refutations of the LTV like the "mud pie" argument are basically strawmen. Anyway he gives a good case for the position that on a free market price generally trends towards cost. If price dips below cost, production will cease. If price jumps far above cost, it incentives other firms to enter that industry and compete away the profits. True, no?
After the first couple chapters it gets a lot less technical. Thats when he starts trying to explain the entire state-capitalist structure of production. I'm not really content with this explanation. It makes superficial sense, but he provides insufficient evidence for some specific claims. For example: WalMart and transportation subsidies. He claims that WalMart benefits disproportionately from a state funded transportation infrastructure and that without the state WalMart would collapse in competition against Mom and Pop for this reason alone. But doesn't Mom and Pop benefit from the transportation infrastructure as well? Couldn't a large firm like WalMart get bulk-priced transportation rates on a free market? Where does the data supporting this claim come from, and how can such lofty extrapolations be made from it? He also missed out on incorporating the Austrian business cycle into his explanation. That said, in general the system he describes meshes very closely with my understanding. Additionally, he incorporates a lot of "Leftist" analysis of how the statist economic system works into his analysis in a much more comprehensible manner than I've heard from prior leftists. But some of the specific definitive claims he makes about how things are compared to how they would be under free market conditions seem rather shaky.
His strategy section was pretty good, but not a subject I'm very interested in. The old idea of building a new society in the shell of the old one. He was a bit too comfortable with the idea of nationalization for my tastes though. However, he was very tolerant of the idea of "panarchy" even if some of the decentralized governance areas which it produced were theocratic, racialist, or otherwise non-state authoritarian. I found this very realistic especially coming from someone I assumed was a "thick" libertarian.
Theres a lot more I could say, but I've already said too much and I don't care if anyone enjoys this but me =)
Overall, a very fun read. Insightful, lucid, and generally accurate as far as I can tell. If you do read it, make note of the caveats. The claims which Carson makes are a lot less "radical" (compared to reglar anarchic libertarianism) than many people seem to think they are.
As for his LTV theory, I've got to mull it over a bit, but it seems to be at least mainly correct. First off, its not really an LTV in the way I was familiar with. Carson acknowledges off the bat that what is "socially necessary labor" is determined through subjective(!) means. He also immediately acknowledges that his LTV will say nothing about the price or value of rare goods and/or non-reproducible goods, land, and a few others. He also acknowledges that not all labor hours have the same value. These are huge concessions, and the fact that they are roundly ignored by Walter Block in his criticism of MPE is saddening (did Block even read the thing?). He also gives some pertinent quotes which seem to indicate that the versions of the LTV which Ricardo, and Smith believed also gave similar concessions. Which would seem to indicate that many of the classic refutations of the LTV like the "mud pie" argument are basically strawmen. Anyway he gives a good case for the position that on a free market price generally trends towards cost. If price dips below cost, production will cease. If price jumps far above cost, it incentives other firms to enter that industry and compete away the profits. True, no?
After the first couple chapters it gets a lot less technical. Thats when he starts trying to explain the entire state-capitalist structure of production. I'm not really content with this explanation. It makes superficial sense, but he provides insufficient evidence for some specific claims. For example: WalMart and transportation subsidies. He claims that WalMart benefits disproportionately from a state funded transportation infrastructure and that without the state WalMart would collapse in competition against Mom and Pop for this reason alone. But doesn't Mom and Pop benefit from the transportation infrastructure as well? Couldn't a large firm like WalMart get bulk-priced transportation rates on a free market? Where does the data supporting this claim come from, and how can such lofty extrapolations be made from it? He also missed out on incorporating the Austrian business cycle into his explanation. That said, in general the system he describes meshes very closely with my understanding. Additionally, he incorporates a lot of "Leftist" analysis of how the statist economic system works into his analysis in a much more comprehensible manner than I've heard from prior leftists. But some of the specific definitive claims he makes about how things are compared to how they would be under free market conditions seem rather shaky.
His strategy section was pretty good, but not a subject I'm very interested in. The old idea of building a new society in the shell of the old one. He was a bit too comfortable with the idea of nationalization for my tastes though. However, he was very tolerant of the idea of "panarchy" even if some of the decentralized governance areas which it produced were theocratic, racialist, or otherwise non-state authoritarian. I found this very realistic especially coming from someone I assumed was a "thick" libertarian.
Theres a lot more I could say, but I've already said too much and I don't care if anyone enjoys this but me =)
Overall, a very fun read. Insightful, lucid, and generally accurate as far as I can tell. If you do read it, make note of the caveats. The claims which Carson makes are a lot less "radical" (compared to reglar anarchic libertarianism) than many people seem to think they are.
May 11, 2012
Strange as it sounds, there truly is nothing in this book that provides a defense of Carson's proposed system of mutualism. Carson almost entirely rejects Proudhon and focuses more on the contributions made by Tucker.
It would not be until 2008 in 'Organization Theory' that Carson would actually give a blueprint of what mutualism would look like.
The first third of the book focusing on his subjective recast of the LTV would have been much better with a conclusion at the end, rather than the reader being left to memorize all of the endless quotes from various economists throughout history and trying to remember all of Carson's responses to them.
If you read the historical section of the book, you are free to steer clear of his "The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand" pamphlet which is also popular, as it pretty much provides a more detailed version of that.
Carson gives an account of what he refers to as the subsidy of history using academic and unorthodox sources, thereby laying waste to the self defeating vulgar libertarian myths about the "free market" and its place in history.
I would recommend this book to the intellectually curious, but if you were expecting him to actually talk about mutualism and how it would work then look somewhere else, preferably to Clarence Lee Schwarz or to Carsons 2008 work "Organization Theory".
It would not be until 2008 in 'Organization Theory' that Carson would actually give a blueprint of what mutualism would look like.
The first third of the book focusing on his subjective recast of the LTV would have been much better with a conclusion at the end, rather than the reader being left to memorize all of the endless quotes from various economists throughout history and trying to remember all of Carson's responses to them.
If you read the historical section of the book, you are free to steer clear of his "The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand" pamphlet which is also popular, as it pretty much provides a more detailed version of that.
Carson gives an account of what he refers to as the subsidy of history using academic and unorthodox sources, thereby laying waste to the self defeating vulgar libertarian myths about the "free market" and its place in history.
I would recommend this book to the intellectually curious, but if you were expecting him to actually talk about mutualism and how it would work then look somewhere else, preferably to Clarence Lee Schwarz or to Carsons 2008 work "Organization Theory".
April 23, 2020
Dry, dense, informative. But also opinionated. Carson is a strong writer with a keen eye. Recommended to anyone curious about value theory or markets.
The book is in three parts.
For the first, the book is a tour through the value theory zoo. Carson reads hundreds of years of literature spanning the whole "political spectrum" into a single-threaded tapestry. Where it fails is that it's not exactly a value theory tutorial, which I would have liked! I'd like to see Carson attempt to write in the style of a user's manual for a cognitive toolbox, after all what good is a zoo if you don't grok how the different flavors of value theory lead to different predictions or norms? He really assumed that I already knew basic marxian, hayekian, etc. thought as the reader, and this assumption really degraded the quality of the book's strongest section.
The next part is polemical history of capitalism, focusing on all the times markets were undermined in favor of protecting/expanding privilege. Frankly, I tuned out much of this because of its polemical style, and cherry picking to make a point that I wasn't particularly resistant to agree with in the first place.
The last part is strictly norms and recommendations for where we go from here as a society.
The highlight is the first part, I'd recommend that stronger than I'd recommend the rest of the book. A value theory, in short, is some account of what occurs in a trade. Sometimes it provides an answer to the question "why do we observe people trading?", but usually is more along the lines of "what are the preconditions for trade?" or something which is more directly posed as "where does value come from?". Like I said-- the book is not a tutorial, and I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you how a marginalist labor theory of value differs from some other labor theory of value and what the significance of that difference might be, but you might glean more than I did if you read the book.
Here's a Robert Anton Wilson quote that he brought up in a discussion of diseconomies of scale, which are the informational problems faced by large organizations:
"...a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger... communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs".
You can sort of sum up the whole mutualist project as a matter-of-fact statement about compression-- political organizations proposed by mutualists are simply the most effective means of dealing with the physical limits of information! If you have this in mind, the goal is very simple (to have a more effectively organized society), the rest is just parsing history and literature.
3/5. It's written for someone smarter and more experienced in its subject matter than me, but,paradoxically, anyone smarter or more seasoned than me would probably have little patience for its polemical tone. Which is a tragic place for a book to be in!
The book is in three parts.
For the first, the book is a tour through the value theory zoo. Carson reads hundreds of years of literature spanning the whole "political spectrum" into a single-threaded tapestry. Where it fails is that it's not exactly a value theory tutorial, which I would have liked! I'd like to see Carson attempt to write in the style of a user's manual for a cognitive toolbox, after all what good is a zoo if you don't grok how the different flavors of value theory lead to different predictions or norms? He really assumed that I already knew basic marxian, hayekian, etc. thought as the reader, and this assumption really degraded the quality of the book's strongest section.
The next part is polemical history of capitalism, focusing on all the times markets were undermined in favor of protecting/expanding privilege. Frankly, I tuned out much of this because of its polemical style, and cherry picking to make a point that I wasn't particularly resistant to agree with in the first place.
The last part is strictly norms and recommendations for where we go from here as a society.
The highlight is the first part, I'd recommend that stronger than I'd recommend the rest of the book. A value theory, in short, is some account of what occurs in a trade. Sometimes it provides an answer to the question "why do we observe people trading?", but usually is more along the lines of "what are the preconditions for trade?" or something which is more directly posed as "where does value come from?". Like I said-- the book is not a tutorial, and I'm not an expert, so I can't tell you how a marginalist labor theory of value differs from some other labor theory of value and what the significance of that difference might be, but you might glean more than I did if you read the book.
Here's a Robert Anton Wilson quote that he brought up in a discussion of diseconomies of scale, which are the informational problems faced by large organizations:
"...a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger... communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs".
You can sort of sum up the whole mutualist project as a matter-of-fact statement about compression-- political organizations proposed by mutualists are simply the most effective means of dealing with the physical limits of information! If you have this in mind, the goal is very simple (to have a more effectively organized society), the rest is just parsing history and literature.
3/5. It's written for someone smarter and more experienced in its subject matter than me, but,paradoxically, anyone smarter or more seasoned than me would probably have little patience for its polemical tone. Which is a tragic place for a book to be in!
July 27, 2013
Gives one a good handle on contemporary mutualist political thought and allows the reader to come up with a unique grasp of how the mechanics of free market anarchism would work. This book also brings the philosophy of free market anarchism to the working classes with its emphasis on worker control and self-determination.
March 20, 2021
A very good read, and a good insight into thoughts around the 2010s. I'm aware that Mr. Carson has moved on since this book was written, but I wanted to start at the beginning, as such.
The opening chapters - a reconceptualising of the Labour Theory of Value, synthesising the Austrian insights, are frankly. hard work, for a layman, or a newcomer. They seem obvious, but rely on an immense amount of prior knowledge, especially in the citations, unless you're prepared to follow all of the citations (of which there are many).
However, they are important, as they lay the groundwork for later chapters, which are that there is no reason (absent statist intervention) why labour does not receive the full product of it's input - and later chapters do great work to explain why this is the case. I would recommend taking the first few chapters slowly, even if it seems like hard work, and attempting to internalise the concepts presented. They will help massively in later chapters.
Carson makes a convincing - and well-researched - case for why inequality exists, couple with a fierce-throated advocacy for truly "freed" markets. I'm somewhat biased, because I have at this point read some of his later works whereupon he expounds upon genuine praxis and solutions (touched upon here, but not quite as fully developed as in later works), but I think this is a great starting point for market libertarians to really understand why we don't live under a market system right now.
The opening chapters - a reconceptualising of the Labour Theory of Value, synthesising the Austrian insights, are frankly. hard work, for a layman, or a newcomer. They seem obvious, but rely on an immense amount of prior knowledge, especially in the citations, unless you're prepared to follow all of the citations (of which there are many).
However, they are important, as they lay the groundwork for later chapters, which are that there is no reason (absent statist intervention) why labour does not receive the full product of it's input - and later chapters do great work to explain why this is the case. I would recommend taking the first few chapters slowly, even if it seems like hard work, and attempting to internalise the concepts presented. They will help massively in later chapters.
Carson makes a convincing - and well-researched - case for why inequality exists, couple with a fierce-throated advocacy for truly "freed" markets. I'm somewhat biased, because I have at this point read some of his later works whereupon he expounds upon genuine praxis and solutions (touched upon here, but not quite as fully developed as in later works), but I think this is a great starting point for market libertarians to really understand why we don't live under a market system right now.
November 19, 2018
On the one hand it's got a niche title and requires some knowledge of economics, political philosophy and the libertarian milieu to understand it. On the other it's a hugely important book about the world we all live in that can really help make sense of the pickle we are in. It's a must-read. In fact, to engage in political work without having understood some of the ideas and history presented here as so many people do can lead to bad consequences despite good intentions.
February 20, 2020
Carson is an eloquent advocate for mutualism and is highly skilled at making an argument for this ideology that can appeal to more right-libertarians. I docked a star due to the over reliance on quotes and lack of explanation of how a mutualist society would work. Overall, though, it led me to a serious reconsideration of my political views.
July 30, 2022
Fantastic read
Carson is quite clearly a very well-read man. His use of history and theory really highlights and proved his point: Capitalism, at its core, is state interference in the market. "Free Market Capitalism" doesn't exist.
Everyone should read this.
Carson is quite clearly a very well-read man. His use of history and theory really highlights and proved his point: Capitalism, at its core, is state interference in the market. "Free Market Capitalism" doesn't exist.
Everyone should read this.
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April 1, 2023Some good stuff in here
January 3, 2018
A great consolidation of radical thinking
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