"Manorialism,
commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation;
a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the
peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of
exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action
of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive
as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state
intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its
survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital
ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market"
economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to
the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is
nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing
state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and
maintain work discipline.
Most such intervention is tacitly
assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system.
Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were
willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the
Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class
power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system
minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth
century robber baron capitalism.
But genuine markets have a value
for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our
enemies. In fact, capitalism--a system of power in which ownership and
control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a
mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus
value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without state coercion to maintain
the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this
reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker--from whom
right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian
socialist.
It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a
world where a true market system could have developed without such
state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land
and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to
laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely
available in every country without patents, and every people was free to
develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination.
But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production
for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work--as
different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.
