sc4r
21st October 2003, 12:52
What better informed Anarchists say about the market – see section I.1.3.
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI1.html#seci13
I found this link interesting because it is so obviously less opposed to the idea of a market on a priori grounds and explains the objections it does has in terms which make it clear what the objection actually is. This makes it possible to explain why even those objections don’t apply to every market.
1) The whole article makes it abundantly and explicitly clear that there is a significant difference between the Capitalist Market and the general concept. It makes it explicit that the ‘wage slavery’ objection only applies to the Capitalist market.
2) But the analysis does throughout assume that production agents in any market must be driven by competition for increased profit. This is not so. Not necessarily anyway.
3) The unstated assumption is that a more profitable concern will derive benefit from being more profitable. But this does not have to be the case. In the type of market society I have been describing profit* is not even given (a more accurate word might be credited) to the concern itself. It is societies profit. For society to use as it sees fit.
In fact profit (or loss) within such a society has no tangible form. Its just information.
4) This type of market society uses the knowledge of where profit arises only so that it can modify its production facilities bringing them more in line with true demand (where there is large profit in a market then by definition demand is disproportionate to supply and cost).
5) This resolves the question of externalities the article refers to. As it is not the individual concern, but society, that decides where to invest resources; externalities are recognised in the type of production facilities that are built. An individual concern churning out products with a high net use value only because they failed to incorporate all externalised costs might (left to itself) well choose to invest in doing yet more of the same. But in Market socialism the market is not allowed such unfettered expression through self centred corporate decisions. Such concerns can be forced to internalise costs (in fact no forcing is needed because it is society that does the accounting anyway).
6) All of which seems to leave only two (weak) objections left outstanding, both are connected to the idea that That markets create competition.
More accurately perhaps that they do not discourage it. This is true. Anyone who completely rejects the value of competition in any mode of expression might well utterly reject the market. Personally I’d say such people are living in dreamland. Certainly none ought to respond since in doing so they’d be competing with me J
All that really matters is whether a market creates unhealthy competition. Which in this context I would say means competition which tends to dehumanise labour, or create significant inequality amongst people.
The latter objection can be dismissed out of hand since there is nothing implicit in the mechanism of market that says that differential ability to compete in the market must be granted. You could quite easily set the buying power of every individual at the same fixed level every week or every month or every day.
In fact a market such as I describe actually serves to decrease inequality amongst people in what really matters. Namely their own personal evaluation of how much value they are receiving. All other models I have seen increase, at best, conformity not subjective equality. For me this would be a vastly inferior situation. I do not want to have the same ration of both fags and Marmite as everyone else because I don’t actually like marmite much. I’d happily trade my ration for more fags. And of course there are others who will feel exactly the opposite. A market allows us both to do this and simultaneously equalise and maximise our ration of subjective value.
The former objection is more difficult to dispose of because it is actually very much less clear what it really means or whether there is an acceptable limit. I’d say not many reject the idea that some degree of undesired work would need to be done in any advanced society. By definition there is a degree of dehumanising inherent in such things. And equally it is clear that productivity gain can often be achieved by dehumanising labour in a factory environment (for example). The question is how much is acceptable. And the answer really is that in a non-authoritarian socialist market society (such as I propose) it is the workers themselves that decide. They are not (remember) reliant on productivity for their living; it does not affect it. So they can take a view on whether or not a given degree of ‘dehumanisation’ is acceptable to them as a price for gaining the pride in being part of a concern that churns out great value.
Yes , this is a basically anarchist idea. Don’t bother to tell me that. I know. I have always insisted that many of my views had strong affiliations with anarchy. And I have borrowed from it extensively (something my detractors seem totally unaware of). In fact I could almost call my ideas ‘Market Anarchism’ without any significant loss of appropriateness in the name.
Conclusions :
There is no genuine objection based on ‘wage slavery’ to the idea of a market as opposed to a ‘capitalist market’. The two are not synonymous.
The remaining objections actually only really apply to a market in which concerns compete for profit and can use/trade that profit. A market society does not have to function like that.
That markets do have great informational power is disputed by no-one educated in the subject.
And information is absolutely key to running any large scale society.
Since they confer great benefits with absolutely no significant objections that cannot be managed there is no doubt whatsoever that to create a society that rejected them would be a grave mistake.
[color=red]I would go further and say that it is flat out impossible to create a large scale society capable of sustaining itself, and producing anything approaching the value as we have come to expect, which does not base a good deal of its economic functioning on a market.[color=black]
*Profit here means the surplus of market value paid after deducting full labour value, including an allowance for the labour value required to maintain production tools)
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secI1.html#seci13
I found this link interesting because it is so obviously less opposed to the idea of a market on a priori grounds and explains the objections it does has in terms which make it clear what the objection actually is. This makes it possible to explain why even those objections don’t apply to every market.
1) The whole article makes it abundantly and explicitly clear that there is a significant difference between the Capitalist Market and the general concept. It makes it explicit that the ‘wage slavery’ objection only applies to the Capitalist market.
2) But the analysis does throughout assume that production agents in any market must be driven by competition for increased profit. This is not so. Not necessarily anyway.
3) The unstated assumption is that a more profitable concern will derive benefit from being more profitable. But this does not have to be the case. In the type of market society I have been describing profit* is not even given (a more accurate word might be credited) to the concern itself. It is societies profit. For society to use as it sees fit.
In fact profit (or loss) within such a society has no tangible form. Its just information.
4) This type of market society uses the knowledge of where profit arises only so that it can modify its production facilities bringing them more in line with true demand (where there is large profit in a market then by definition demand is disproportionate to supply and cost).
5) This resolves the question of externalities the article refers to. As it is not the individual concern, but society, that decides where to invest resources; externalities are recognised in the type of production facilities that are built. An individual concern churning out products with a high net use value only because they failed to incorporate all externalised costs might (left to itself) well choose to invest in doing yet more of the same. But in Market socialism the market is not allowed such unfettered expression through self centred corporate decisions. Such concerns can be forced to internalise costs (in fact no forcing is needed because it is society that does the accounting anyway).
6) All of which seems to leave only two (weak) objections left outstanding, both are connected to the idea that That markets create competition.
More accurately perhaps that they do not discourage it. This is true. Anyone who completely rejects the value of competition in any mode of expression might well utterly reject the market. Personally I’d say such people are living in dreamland. Certainly none ought to respond since in doing so they’d be competing with me J
All that really matters is whether a market creates unhealthy competition. Which in this context I would say means competition which tends to dehumanise labour, or create significant inequality amongst people.
The latter objection can be dismissed out of hand since there is nothing implicit in the mechanism of market that says that differential ability to compete in the market must be granted. You could quite easily set the buying power of every individual at the same fixed level every week or every month or every day.
In fact a market such as I describe actually serves to decrease inequality amongst people in what really matters. Namely their own personal evaluation of how much value they are receiving. All other models I have seen increase, at best, conformity not subjective equality. For me this would be a vastly inferior situation. I do not want to have the same ration of both fags and Marmite as everyone else because I don’t actually like marmite much. I’d happily trade my ration for more fags. And of course there are others who will feel exactly the opposite. A market allows us both to do this and simultaneously equalise and maximise our ration of subjective value.
The former objection is more difficult to dispose of because it is actually very much less clear what it really means or whether there is an acceptable limit. I’d say not many reject the idea that some degree of undesired work would need to be done in any advanced society. By definition there is a degree of dehumanising inherent in such things. And equally it is clear that productivity gain can often be achieved by dehumanising labour in a factory environment (for example). The question is how much is acceptable. And the answer really is that in a non-authoritarian socialist market society (such as I propose) it is the workers themselves that decide. They are not (remember) reliant on productivity for their living; it does not affect it. So they can take a view on whether or not a given degree of ‘dehumanisation’ is acceptable to them as a price for gaining the pride in being part of a concern that churns out great value.
Yes , this is a basically anarchist idea. Don’t bother to tell me that. I know. I have always insisted that many of my views had strong affiliations with anarchy. And I have borrowed from it extensively (something my detractors seem totally unaware of). In fact I could almost call my ideas ‘Market Anarchism’ without any significant loss of appropriateness in the name.
Conclusions :
There is no genuine objection based on ‘wage slavery’ to the idea of a market as opposed to a ‘capitalist market’. The two are not synonymous.
The remaining objections actually only really apply to a market in which concerns compete for profit and can use/trade that profit. A market society does not have to function like that.
That markets do have great informational power is disputed by no-one educated in the subject.
And information is absolutely key to running any large scale society.
Since they confer great benefits with absolutely no significant objections that cannot be managed there is no doubt whatsoever that to create a society that rejected them would be a grave mistake.
[color=red]I would go further and say that it is flat out impossible to create a large scale society capable of sustaining itself, and producing anything approaching the value as we have come to expect, which does not base a good deal of its economic functioning on a market.[color=black]
*Profit here means the surplus of market value paid after deducting full labour value, including an allowance for the labour value required to maintain production tools)