I read Petrova’s short piece on Alex’s blog, and it was very lacking. She basically cited Kolko as to why capitalism depends on privilege, but didn’t seem to go much farther than that.

The major criticism both Alex and I make of left-styled libertarians is, while they try to come off as socially aware and concerned with social issues (which, I’m sure, they are), they really have no real means of dealing with the kinds of issues they bring up. That’s primarily because they have no real social theory/practice: they build the entirety of their philosophy on right-libertarian ideas about free markets being the ultimate state of society, and proceed to shoehorn any sort of Critical Theory into that model. For example, according to them, hegemony is solely caused by the State; without the government connecting other societal institutions (schools, media, family, religious institutions, medical apparatus, etc.) all of these institutions would function as islands completely disconnected from social context and would be influenced by nothing more than supply and demand from the free(d) market. “Competing ideologies” would arise due to this, so society would be pluralistic by default. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Markets demand specific cultural norms and ideology (i.e. that property rights are legit, markets are “natural”, alternatives are impossible, money is good, a strong work ethic, and so on). This is a complete misunderstanding of how society actually functions.

I’m actually in the process of writing a very, very long article/blog post dealing with mutual aid in a commodified form vs. mutual aid in a gifting form (going back to the research I did last year for my senior thesis and all that). Using my new-found structural marxism, I’m going to argue that many of these market-based mutual aid institutions 1) do not provide mutual aid in the best way, 2) actually compliment capitalism rather than counter it, and 3) do not provide the space for resistance to the dominant system or ideology in the form of dual-power. I’ll let you know when it’s published.