Language and theory in market advocacy
William Gillis recently made some damned good points about language and the struggle to be understood in anarchist economic theory discussions:
Instead of referring to the behavior and dynamics of the free market, I refer instead to “a freed market.”
You’d be surprised how much of a difference a change of tense can make. “Free market” makes it sound like such a thing already exists and thus passively perpetuates the Red myth that Corporatism and wanton accumulation of Kapital are the natural consequences of free association and competition between individuals. (It is not.)
Read the whole thing.
Ultimately, it’s all a simple point, really, even in Marxian terms… Oppressive kapitalism is ALL ongoing “primitive accumulation” (i.e. statist theft). Reciprocal exchange, per se, is blameless.
Pity that such points get harder and harder to make when the likes of Jeffrey Tucker insist on combining all of the right theory with all of the wrong values (and no sense of context). Tucker has a piece on LewRockwell.com entitled “How To Handle Getting Fired“, which isn’t perhaps as knuckle-headed of a title as the headline used to promote it on home page of the site — “Getting Fired Is Good for You“. This is the sort of misapplication of theory that makes freed market advocacy sound not intensely liberating, but more like a deranged, brainwashed S&M cult. “Hurt me! Hurt me, please!”
Tucker is correct that a change of employment can be a career growth opportunity. Tucker is also correct that it is best for relationships, including employment relationships, to end when they stop being mutually beneficial. Tucker works so hard to make these points, though, that he loses sight of how devastating such a financial upheaval can be for the ordinary person.
There is a sort of unreal, “through the looking glass” feeling that comes with reading the work of someone who seems to exist in some sort of Disneyland where the biggest potential problem with getting fired is merely a bruised ego. In the case of most people, getting fired results in a palpable sense of fear — and I don’t mean some vague, existential threat of the unknown and moving into uncharted territory that merely needs to be bravely confronted by our intrepid individualist hero. I refer to the immediate and nigh primal human fear of not being able to pay your rent or not being able to feed your kids. Nowhere in the piece does Tucker even acknowledge any problem with that set of common circumstances accompanying job loss, and more’s the pity from a libertarian perspective, due to the role of the State in creating those circumstances.
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Thanks, Brad. This is great!
The problem with people like Jeffrey Tucker is, as I think was best described by Kevin Carson, that they are more “Yay Team!” type people and tend to be promoting Libertarian doctrines on the basis of emotive principles and not on logical assessments of problems.
In the article you are referring to, Brad. It is obvious that there is a clear cut motive behind the article being written and it detracts from all objectivity that might be made in such an analysis. You are correct in your assessment that being fired will cause a great deal of stress, but the article writer - I think Tucker himself - is also correct that disengaging from cooperation when all benefit is lost is beneficial to both parties. The two are not mutually contradictive, because they do not describe the same instance. Usually when someone is fired it is for a more aggregate gain to a firm, not for one or the other’s direct benefit, something along the lines that Tucker is describing would be on the basis between mutual cooperation, not voluntary employment. There is a difference between the two.
Brad, this the most useful, down to earth piece of advice a market anarchist could ask for. Tips on getting our points across without sounding like pro-corporate apologists are sorely needed. Thanks a lot, man!!
SO, definitely true, but at the same time I think the point needs to be hammered home to the mutualist/geoist camps as well, only for them it should be something along the lines of not sounding like pro-marxian apologists.