Praxeologically defining market
Market anarchists often run into a lot of grief over usage of the word “market” to mean all voluntary activity rather than simply “the corporate cash nexus”. This is rooted, however, in an important insight from the Austrian School of economics that is pretty central to Rothbardian thought, an insight that itself hasn’t been completely adopted by society at large yet (let alone advocacy of a stateless society). That insight is the praxeological understanding of human action.
Purposeful human action can only take place when it has a purpose — a goal that the person taking an action they have decided upon hopes to achieve.
One can select one’s goals by what one hopes to gain — not just money, but the satisfaction of helping a valued friend, the joy of experiencing a novel work of art or the quiet solitude of a walk in the park. In those cases, value is sought and typically achieved — and value is subjective to the individual.
One’s goals can also be coercively imposed upon one by the threat of force. One seeks to avoid an identifiable and forcibly imposed harm rather than explicitly gain value under this model.
The first method is that of a free market of producers and traders. The second is that of the State and other bandits.
Is the selection of goals voluntary or forcible? There can, of course, be degrees of coercion or extent to which one’s voluntary choices are constrained by coercion one hasn’t directly experienced (e.g. state tainted markets). There is no third way outside of this polar dichotomy of conscious human behavior, though, between the self-selected carrot and the tyrannically other-weilded stick.
In this sense, all genuinely voluntary socialism is a market phenomenon. In a stateless society, “capitalism” and “socialism” would stop being political ideologies and become merely competing business models (cooperatives and mutual aid associations being “socialistic” for example). And, of course, if capitalism (as a business model) is truly parasitic, and hence suffers from unnecessary costs, truly free and open competition will allow “socialism” (as a business model) to out-compete “capitalism” in the marketplace!
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