I am not a mutualist. I was first exposed to neo-mutualist ideas via the C4SS blog. I refer to myself as an “anagorist,” a term I coined back in 2010 as my take on agorism; a philosophical designation that, along with mutualism, is popular with the C4SS crowd. My reasons for being anti-market are actually quite visceral. In a market economy one has to market oneself. To say that marketing is my weak suit would be a massive understatement. Virtually every problem I have in life stems either from my tendency to stutter in job interviews or to pay retail because I can’t/won’t haggle over prices. It seems self-evident to me that getting the most out of market exchanges is a skill set, and that skill levels vary between individuals. I see know way around such skill inequalities resulting in social hierarchies.
The C4SS people and other mutualists talk a good game about worker-owned cooperatives, but assume competition between cooperatives. I do understand that competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist, but I don’t see this as a good thing. In capitalism, workers are expected to cooperate with their co-workers while competing with colleagues in competing firms. I don’t believe the latter competition brings out the best in products or people. It leads to inefficiency, such as when workers in one firm re-invent something the other firm has, possibly without even knowing it, thanks to enforcement of knowledge silos. The abolition of intellectual property (something the mutualists, to their credit, favor) would not eliminate that particular inefficiency. That would require the abolition of competition.
The nuclear option in the mutualists’ arsenal of arguments against anagorism (or the equivalent by another name) is the so-called calculation argument of Mises and Hayek. Which reminds me, another pet peeve I have with C4SS that they love quoting right wing philosophers like Mises, Hayek, Nozick, etc., and linking to websites of pro-business think tanks like Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, etc.
My main philosophical project as an anagorist is to develop a strong rebuttal to the calculation argument. I find this quite challenging, as I find the calculation argument quite compelling, even though of course I’m committed to opposition against it. My thoughts on how to build a non-market, non-command economy are summarized in a two-post series using a rubric I call “angel economics.” The basic idea is to build the new allocation mechanism within the shell of the old (the old one being the market) by reverse engineering the market.
While a strong case can be made for price signals in a market being very information-rich, I don’t buy the claim that prices incorporate all information, or even all information that people need in order to make intelligent economic decisions. A price is a scalar quantity, literally a single number. One simply does not reduce dimensionality (such as from vector to scalar quantities) without loss of information. If scary-smart feats of allocation efficiency can be achieved by revealed preference (and I do buy that claim concerning markets) then certainly far more efficiency can be realized with explicit communication of preferences. Parecon (participatory economics) is an attempt to give people an opportunity to express their producer and consumer utility explicitly. Hopefully angel economics can take that farther.
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