Category: Uncategorized

Agorist Wally Conger informs us that to “make it” in internet marketing (spam?), or marketing in general requires big brass balls.

What are the defining characteristics of a market? The pro-market left libertarians stress the difference between actually existing economics (and the accompanying establishment understanding of what “free market” means) and what they term “freed markets.” I’d like to put some attention on the boundaries between market and non-market, to get an understanding of what the full implications are of being under a market economy, and which of those implications will still apply after the market has been freed. To that end, I seek to find answers to certain questions.

Does an actually free market imply non-entitlement?

And whether it does or not, what are the implications of this? The benefit to workers of freed markets tend to be touted in quantitative terms—getting to keep more of one’s labor product—but doesn’t this assume that one has a labor product to begin with? I can be at peace with the idea that economic niches have to be earned, but I’m not entirely at peace with the idea that they have to be competed over. An economy that doesn’t require labor may be ideal, but for now, labor is needed, but not everyone’s labor is needed. For me, failure of inclusivity is a deal breaker. If that makes me an archist, so be it. There are “normative criteria” that I happen to believe in.

Traditionally, the entitled classes have been understood to be the nobility or landed aristocracy, but of course the right wing messaging machine has re-framed “entitlement” as the new term for safety net programs. Now it seems the entitled classes are those at the very bottom of the food chain; those so marginalized as to be rejected more often than not from even the most menial of employment.

Does successful participation in the freed market imply competition?

If not, how is market equilibrium discovered? If so, how can the losers consider themselves free? Freedom to fail I can get with right libertarianism. Again, is the difference offered by left libertarianism qualitative or quantitative? Does left libertarianism mean the lowest hanging fruit is a little lower, that the cost of living is a lot lower, or some other comparative virtue? Or is the difference between the freed market and the “free market” one of kind rather than degree?

What role does strategy play under the freed market?

What, if anything, is at the intersection of prices, information and strategy? Is there any reason, under the freed market, to play one’s cards close to the vest, so to speak? As the ad copy says, “Expedia can offer prices that airlines and hotels won’t reveal separately.” Left libertarianism, like right libertarianism, is quite adept at explaining why all the complaints people have with market transactions are actually attributable to government policy. Perhaps this includes informational shell games, package dealing and other strategies against real transparency.

I’m assuming that where markets are in play, market share is an issue. Does a worker co-op seek to expand market share? If not, why not? Zero market share implies failure. How big a niche is necessary to achieve solvency? Is solvency even a freed market issue, or just a “free market” issue? It would be helpful if someone would make a list of things truly free markets have in common with “free market” principles as advertised by the big money think tanks, and another list of putative market phenomena that are categorically not features of the truly free market, and perhaps a third list of social ills we should reliably be able to expect to be shrunken to manageable levels by the actual freeing of the markets.

Perhaps the main project of this blog is to put non-market anarchism on a solid theoretical footing. While I’m excited to find that many people envision the supplanting of the exchange paradigm by the gift paradigm, there seems to be no underlying theory that hopelessly left-brained me can latch onto. Also, the implementation doesn’t seem to have gone far beyond the Free Store stage. Oh, and of course software. But you can’t eat software. Three identifiable clusters of interest in the gift paradigm are in feminist anarchism (this link being to what is probably the closest thing to a theoritical understanding of gift economy that I have found), Christian anarchism (where gift economy might be attributed to “agape”) and Venus Project types.

I’m not sure how important gift theory is or should be to anagorist theory. I’ve been thinking mainly in terms of dreaming up alternatives the market as a method of allocation. It seems that in gift-giving, the giver (or in economese, the supplier?) does all the thinking…what to give, when, how much, to whom. Perhaps this authority is some kind of compensation for a “negative” “profit” on the “transaction?” But this “analysis” doesn’t escape conventional economics, does it? Oh well, I continue to brainstorm, as hopefully do others. It’s encouraging that no less than two commenters here have expressed at least some frustration with the agorism expressed by certain left libertarian tendencies.

I find it hard to imagine a situation in which all real needs can be satisfied without any work being performed by people. I find it equally hard to believe that we will ever see full employment; understood to mean enough jobs to go around. Automation is real, and it’s inconceivable to me that the future needs all of us. Thus, as long as we are living under a market economy, some of us will be expendable.

Kurt Vonnegut envisioned this scenario in Player Piano, in which people not in-demand enough to merit a paying gig were relagated to the humiliation and indignity of the “Reeks and Wrecks,” a make-work program created to provide the illusion of being a contributing member of society, but the illusion wore thin rather quickly. In Player Piano, the “engineers and managers” are the last dominos left standing. As the nightmare is materializing right now, it looks more like nursing is the hardest occupation to automate.

It seems apparent that somewhere between the staffed economy and the unstaffed economy is the partially staffed economy. With substantiated complaints of “jobless recovery” for at least three economic cycles, I’d say we’re definitely in that middle zone right now. I think we are managing this transition in the least humane way imaginable. Instead of dividing the reduced workload, some can’t get out of mandatory overtime while others can’t get out of part time employment, and the market denies still others any employment at all.

Spreading out among the working-age population all the work that can’t yet be automated or otherwise obviated may mean training a sizeable fraction of the population in those health care fields that somehow manage to be still in demand. There is an obvious inefficiency involved in investing in the training of millions of people, most of whom will subsequently be working part time, but I never accepted efficiency as the yardstick by which all practices should be measured. We have to evolve from a culture in which unemployment is unacceptable to one in which it is unavoidable, without destroying the self esteem of millions. As Marshall Brain tells us, “‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat’ is a core philosophy of today’s economy, and this rule could make a rapid robotic takeover extremely uncomfortable for our society.”

One benefit of widespread automation and resulting decrease in work requirements/opportunities might be what they call a “universal basic income” or “basic income guarantee.” The downside is that most proposals for such a thing posit the government as the agency which disburses these benefits. For the non-market, non-state sector the trick is to create a non-state method for accomplishing this or the equivalent. It probably falls under the general heading of mutual aid. Click here for a review of some of the literature of mutual aid by one Eric Laursen. It’s mostly about secret societies, which is a little troublesome for someone like me who hungers for inclusivity, but there’s a lot there on the treadmill of economic growth, the isolation of suburban sprawl, and so many other social ills. The concluding remarks (emphasis mine):

But the labor movement never succeeded in creating a health and old-age benefit system that provided for all workers, either. Today, mutual aid still appears to be the only way to create a humane, caring, and fully participatory society. But anarchists have not begun to consider their biggest challenge yet: how to make mutual aid universal. This doesn’t mean the movement needs to renounce the autonomist principle—only that it needs to take confederalism just as seriously.

John J. Alquist informs us that “the Industrial Revolution is dead and the 20th Century is ancient history. These changes spawn a whole new world of nearly universal self-employment, serving global markets.” Alquist is a public speaker who seeks a variety of audiences, including network marketing/MLM groups, among others. Perhaps universal self employment is, among other things, a pyramid scheme.

Bonnie Erbe equates the freelance economy, freewheeling as it is along the highway to universal self employment, to basic economic insecurity, as do I.

David Ellerman defines capitalism as “production organized on the basis of the employer-employee relationship,” with the alternative to this system being “a private property market economy where everyone is self-employed (individually or jointly) in their workplace.” At first glance, it looks to me as though selling oneself to one or more employers as a prerequisite to solvency and independent survival is replaced by selling oneself to one or more customers. The necessity of selling remains a sort of sword of Damocles; the wolf is still at the door. One clear advantage of self employment over employment employment is that the full time employer employer is usually a sort of monopsony, or sole buyer of a person’s labor. With monopsony comes market power, which, like any kind of power, corrupts. One advantage of employment employment over self employment, to me, is that one act of selling oneself gets days, weeks, months, maybe years of employment, whereas self employment may require selling, schmoozing and networking as much as 24/7 for life. Self employment is also monopsony for the entrepreneur with only one customer. This is typically the case when one is “self employed on paper,” basically a de facto employee receiving a 1099 instead of a W-2. Replacing employment employment with self employment seems to me at best an even trade, and perhaps a baptism by fire or worse for shy folk such as myself. Ellerman explains that the type of universal self employment described here entails labor hiring capital. Hopefully this means that labor is less on the defensive; no longer having constantly to prove its worth, compete over every opportunity, no matter how small, and in general, be expendable.

Anagorism, of course, seeks an alternative to property and markets, not just to employers and employees. How to implement an alternative to market employment? One tool I envision is One Big Database for matching people to “jobs.” One science fiction implementation is “Divlab” in Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed. The key element to such a scheme, as I see it, is transparency. The most odious burden the status quo labor market places on me is the necessity of networking, or maintaining the type of social contacts to know where at least some of the “unadvertised” openings are. The statist approach, of course, would be to require public posting of all vacancies. A dual power approach might start with the approach of acknowledging that for now, information about available jobs is insider information, but instead of seeking to become an insider through networking, seek to expose the information through crowdsourcing. If One Big Database can’t be created, at least a sort of distributed database should be possible; hopefully indexing a larger fraction of the labor market than proprietary engines such as monster.com, which makes people jump through countless hoops of saying “no, thank you” to for-profit “universities” in exchange for access to mostly low-value information.

I’m not sure what might be the ultimate goal of anagorism when it comes to matters of employment or alternatives to it. Sufficiently cheap technologies of automated manufacturing might mean total economic self-sufficiency for each individual, without the interdependence which necessitates push-and-shove venues such as trading in the market economy. High-tech modification of the humyn form might result in people getting by with physical inputs small enough to allow being self-supporting even on Mechanical Turk wages. Perhaps we will settle for a soft anagorism in which the market still operates, but more humanely, perhaps through extreme transparency, or better yet, partial satisfaction of needs through non-market activity.

The proprietor of the The Left Libertarian channel at YouTube tells us:

I should also say that I have nothing to do with The Alliance of the Libertarian Left, which is a centrist libertarian platform. My videos promote the 3 schools of Left-Libertarianism: Libcom, Collectivism, and Mutualism.

On the one hand, they distance themselves from left libertarianism on the grounds that it’s a centrist libertarian platform, as do I.  On the other hand, the channel promotes mutualism.  It’s not clear to me one way or the other whether I’ve found a fellow anagorist.  Claimed by the same YouTube user is The Left Libertarian Appendix channel.  Their video Consumer Democracy is a critique of the notion of dollar democracy, i.e. “one dollar one vote:”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK5dFtgvaWE&feature=channel_video_title]

Looks like someone invented picoeconomics. Based on the name alone, it sounds like a very nice idea, sort of like ramen profitability only better. At least one of the complaints I have with Economics As We Know It is lack of scalability. In Earth’s high rent district (a.k.a. the “first world”) there’s a level of income below which survival is not feasible. On a little further reading, it seems the idea behind picoeconomics is not scalability of economic activity, but of economic actors:

Where microeconomics is used to describe the negotiation for resources between individuals, picoeconomics (or micro-micro-economics) describes a similar process but within an individual himself, helping define different aspects of his [sic] behaviour.

This may have implications for thick individualism. According to Robert Vienneau:

If a community cannot have group rights and cannot have an unique ordering of choices², how can an individual have such rights when he may be just as divided in mind as a community?

“Salescritter” is both more gender inclusive and more species inclusive than “salesman.” And no more syllables than “salesperson.”

Some products and services have what I call a high “salescrittership quotient.” These are the ones that naturally adjoin to the word “salesman:” vacuum cleaner, encyclopedia, used car, insurance… Used cars merit particular attention as they are the subject of a famous problem in economics; the “lemon problem” of information asymmetry. Now groceries are something a typical person is buying all the time. A consumer with decent memorization skills who shops multiple supermarkets will instinctively be able to identify which items in a supermarket are above or below the “going rate.” So, there are no salescritters in the supermarket; just people to handle transactions, and fewer and fewer of those. It’s basically a self-serve operation. Persuasion still enters into it in packaging, placement and other psychological games, but commissioned salescritters are not present there, as it is a relatively transparent space. The danger zone is the few-and-far-in-between purchases that are also the big-ticket purchases. Further informational disempowerment ensues if it’s a non-elective purchase. The TV commercials that shout the loudest are furniture stores and replacement windows. These are also very salesy industries, characterized by high pressure commissioned salescritters. One wonders if each industry (or each category of product or service) can be characterized as having a “salescrittership quotient” (SQ) that might be high in the case of home improvement contractors, low in the case of supermarkets, and medium in the case of, say, shoes.

What about the point of intrusion of the necessity of selling into everyone’s life—the job interview? Tim Harford tells us the following:

Then there’s the market for jobs. How many of your colleagues are lemons? If you’re competent but can’t prove it to your boss, you may prefer to be a freelancer. If other competent workers think that way, it may explain why you think your colleagues are idiots and they think the same about you.

I’d like to think that in a post-privacy, radically transparent world, it will be a trivial matter to verify any information on a job application or resume. Hopefully this will mean less need to sell oneself in the interview, but I wouldn’t hold my hopes too high. As Tim Harford says, the outlet seems to be self-employment, or having to sell yourself every single fucking day. We shall see. I don’t expect extreme transparency to solve all the world’s problems, but hopefully it will help level the playing field between the value of BS and the value of other skills.

Joshua T. defines salesiness (in the context of software) as “quantity of suits & money to be dealt with in order to get actual technical detail,” and transparency as “the degree to which the authors interact with the community on defects and releases.” Suits and authors both perform gatekeeper functions. Joshua rates various products high, medium or low on these and four other scales. I suspect they are inversely proportional to each other.

Is it the case that involunary dissociation is the flip side of voluntary association? What if we did it the other way around and practiced involuntary association and voluntary dissociation? Would that be so horrible? It would seem to me about equally horrible. Thick voluntarism without compromise, if it existed, would imply voluntary association and voluntary dissociation. Come and go as you please. Assuming (strictly for the sake of argument) that thick voluntarism is impossible, should we not at the very least strive for voluntarism that is thickerer?

The libertarian left, the folkx who embrace markets while rejecting capitalism, are always quick to point out that “free market” used as a media buzzword refers to something that is anything but free, and the think tanks and lobbyists who advocate what they call free market are in practice proponents and beneficiaries of subsidy and rent. This adequately distances the left libertarian movement from “free market” ideology as bankrolled by big business interests. The thing is, the genuinely principled advocates of laissez-faire capitalism are also critical of “free market” as all-too-commonly understood, and are quite orthodox about advocating an utterly subsidy-free society. How does the left-libertarian view of what does or doesn’t constitute a free market, constrast with that of principled, no-quarter right libertiarianism, of the type that calls itself anarcho-capitalism? Maybe there’s no difference of opinion there about what free market is; with any differences being about what it implies. To quote Hagbard Celine’s tract Never Whistle While You’re Pissing:

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, urury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.

Of course, I’ve always assumed that competition is a defining feature of the Free Market, so it has always seemed natural to me that anyone who prefers cooperation over competition should be anti-market (anagorist). One thing I must find is developments of market theory (if any) that don’t start with the assumption that human nature is competitive.

Could it be that “free market anticapitalism” incorporates a non-hackneyed definition of free market and a hackneyed definition of capitalism? The left libertarians seem at least to be on speaking terms with the people who say capitalism is simply another term for voluntary activity. I have a problem with that definition as, given a choice, I’d rather not practice capitalism, which I understand to mean “running a business.” To me, capitalism is just another word for opportunism. Not something I consider a crime, but not something I consider an admirable personality trait, either. I only resent opportunism when it seems to be a prerequisite for survival, you know, the need to “hustle and grub in the world of commerce.”