Let me preface this by saying I’m the kind of people who are most critical of those they love, and harshly critical only of those they love most.
I love me some C4SS. I miss the days before their blog went no-comment; the current no-comment nature of their blog being the main reason C4SS is a recurring subject in the present blog.
Two recent posts have caught my attention—Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, by William Gillis and Does Anarchism Skirt the Calculation Problem by Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Gillis in particular is the quintessential anti-anagorist and has produced a large body of work explaining why non-market economics is a non-starter. His recent article is a particularly exhaustive drum-down of the catalog of objections to markets, particularly the market aspect of market anarchism. Many of these objections can be found in my own posts in the present blog over the years. These include hope for the possibility of non-centralized economic planning, the idea of explicitly communicating preferences rather than “revealing” them through painful (i.e. costly) economic transactions, reasonably objective classification of luxuries and necessities, rejection of the capitalist doctrine of infinite want, Red Plenty and Cybersyn, Cockshott and Cottrell, and gift economies. In this article he shoots down both of my pet projects, anagorism, and also pubwan (extreme transparency):
I have grown partial to fully public ledger markets, more akin to the informal markets that emerge prior to state “standardization” and forced anonymization. One of the claims against capitalism is that firm competition drives secrecy, impeding accurate clearing. This is certainly true, and we can argue about the degree to which this norm is able to persist only thanks to the various distortions brought on by state violence, but a market once freed will still reflect an aggregate of our desires and thus our values, we must still work to see our most emphatically held values embodied or normalized. Transparency is a hard won and unending struggle in any context. Removing, marginalizing, or severely impairing anonymous transactions would do wonders for firm transparency, but aggressive reporting and broad social expectations will still be needed. If sometimes actors fail to communicate relevant tacit information to create and exploit asymmetries in markets, well they certainly do the same in collective meetings and every other non-market context ever proposed.
What I increasingly suspect, however, is that just as anarcho-communists and anarcho-collectivists will never be able to fully suppress black markets, we will have to live in a world cut with veins of secrecy, deliberately opaque transactions and relations. The real anarchist economic contest, I believe, will eventually be recognized as over how that secrecy is embraced, contained, and navigated.
My reasons for proposing pubwan, a crowdsourced effort to reverse engineer against data asymmetries between business and society, were motivated largely by the desire to create a volunteer-run, nonproprietary, deeply searchable “catalog of the economy.” The Internet contains many websites that purport to facilitate comparison shopping for various products, but these are invariably for-profit businesses in their own right. They dispense 10 or 20 single data points (embedded of course in bloated web pages) in response to queries, not direct access to the database itself. And which firms’ prices are or are not included in results are most likely a matter of behind-the-scenes exclusivity deals.
Hopefully we will see the development of social norms that disparage secrecy in supply chain matters.
William Gillis is perhaps the closest thing I have to a philosophical arch-enemy, although I consider him a political ally. Logan Marie Glitterbomb takes a different, less confrontational (to my interests) approach, arguing that the economic calculation argument is irrelevant and that the point is that people gonna trade no matter what, so get used to it.
My reasons for being anagorist (that is, anti-market) are deeply personal. The realization of a “freed market” won’t trigger in me an unconditional acceptance of the new status quo.
My own struggle has reached a point where my head is capitalist (I don’t distinguish between markets and capitalism) and my heart is (anarcho-)communist. Since I’m (broadly speaking) an INFJ, my heart has more votes than my head when it comes to the tone and implications of what comes out of my mouth, and I’m not in the market (forgive the pun) for a new personality.
I’m not interested in being a citizen of a nation of shopkeepers.
Voluntary economy is an oxymoron. The relevant question is whether you have as efficient a tradeoff between voluntary and economy as is possible. For me, subjectively, this means stateless society, of course, but with eternal vigilance to make sure cooperation holds its own against competition, and the gift economy against the market economy.
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