Left-wing market anarchism

[Bakunin's Apprentice]

What is your take on it?

[Sasha]

What, you mean mutualism?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)

[Comrade Jacob]

More stupid ideologies that cling on to the Anarchist label.

[Sinister Intents]

Mutualism is idealism, and Proudhon was an idealist. It's best to ignore reformist ideologies like that of mutualism. The market is to be abolished, not kept intact.

[Popular Front of Judea]

An honorable anti-capitalist intellectual tradition.

[Bakunin's Apprentice]

No, I do not mean mutualism. Do a simple google search. Mutualism = private property if you use it. Market = exchange of goods.

[Bakunin's Apprentice]

It's sad when even leftists don't know the difference between capitalism and just the market.

[Bakunin's Apprentice]

Market Anarchism, not Mutualism... Memes of production still shared, but people exchange the products of production that, well, they produce.

[Q]

It's sad when even leftists don't know the difference between capitalism and just the market.
As soon as you start to produce for a market, you'll start to produce commodities. That is: products for which you yourself find no particular use outside of selling it. Commodities have outside of a use-value also an exchange-value, which makes them capable for being traded on a market. This in turn implies a universal commodity, that is money, in which these commodities can be traded. Money, as Marx pointed out in Capital, then starts to take on a life on its own as commodity production becomes more important. Commodity A can be exchanged for money, and then you could buy commodity B. Then again, why do the effort of producing a commodity if all you're going to achieve is the same in value?

No, there is a strong tendency that money will buy commodities, which will be sold again for more money. Where does this "more money" come from you ask? Are the traders going to rip each other off all the time? Maybe, but in the end this also results in zero benefit for all the merchants combined, as some have been cheated and others have been the cheaters. No, this "extra" will come from the way the purchased commodity, say iron and coal, have been reworked into something better, say steel. Therefore it is this extra work which will add the extra value in which our merchant can then sell his new commodity at a higher price on the market.

Now, the merchant could make steel on his own. But it would be a far better idea to hire others to make the steel for him. In return our merchant will give the workers enough of the money he'll make on the market so that his hired forces can at least survive the night and work tomorrow. The rest of the money he gets for the steel is then used for buying more coal, more iron, more smelt equipment. He'll need to watch the competition too. Surely others are thinking like him, making cheaper or better steel by having more efficient production methods. If our merchant isn't careful, he might find himself out of business. So he'll need to work harder, give the barest minimum to his hired forces and accumulate more and more money in order to keep ahead of the competition. Money becomes its own goal...

So, markets, where they are dominant, do imply capitalism. It is true that capitalism is itself historically a result of a specific set of political, social and technological developments. But saying we could, now in 2015, simply have markets without capitalism means that you have no idea what you're talking about.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

It's sad when even leftists don't know the difference between capitalism and just the market.

Of course we know the difference between capitalism and the market. The point is that socialism isn't just empty "anti-capitalism" - it means human society operating the means of production according to a scientific plan for the satisfaction of human need. As such, there is no "market socialism" or "market anarchism". I don't understand this fetish people have for markets, but in any case it has nothing to do with socialist politics.