ANARCHIST THEORY:

INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN CARSON:

The following interview with American left libertarian theorist Kevin Carson of the Mutualist Blog first saw the light of day at the Isocracy website. Molly reprints it here from the Mutualist Blog. One of the "privileges" of sitting in the hospital recovering from surgery was that I was able to begin reading Carson's first book, 'Studies in Mutualist Political Economy', and I hope to review it here at Molly's Blog when I am finished. Aside from the people gathered around Z Communications Carson is the only anarchist in North America doing what I would consider serious theorizing in economics. Not that I agree with everything he says, but he definitely says it very well, and makes a far more scholarly case for his views than the half-hearted borrowings from Marxism so common amongst anarchists or, worse, total ignorance of economics.

In any case it is refreshing for a more or less traditionalist anarchist socialist like myself to read about the case for "free market socialism/anarchism". Once again, I have my differences, particularly around the concept of "externalities" and the ability of a market to accommodate them in cost. I still think, however, that those of us who have more traditional (outside the USA) views have a lot to learn from people like Carson. Personally I am a "pluralist" when it comes to economic forms of some future libertarian society, and I have a hard time accepting any of either the traditional or newer anarchist economic theories as being sufficient in themselves. But more of that in the planned review. For now check out Carson's blog and purchase his books there. Here's a taste of what he thinks.

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Mutualism: An interview with Kevin Carson:
Kevin Carson Interview
Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism (Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand). Describing his politics as being "the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism", he certainly will find a welcoming audience among our group - which is why he's been asked several difficult questions.
The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand is available in html format and Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective are both available as PDF files.
Q.Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The Isocracy Network.
A.Thanks for inviting me.

Q.Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial definition offered by the anarchist Proudhon to contemporary examples and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?
A.Well, first of all, it's important to distinguish between mutualism as a general form of praxis, and mutualism as a theory. Mutualist practices (friendly societies and lodges, guilds, arrangements for mutual aid, etc.) are probably old as the human race. Proudhon, Owen, Warren, et al simply created a theoretical framework that emphasized such forms of organization as a building block of society. It's a bit like the centipede trying to figure out how it's been walking all this time, or the man who was astonished to learn he'd been speaking in prose all along and didn't even know it.

For that matter, there have been important anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin who emphasized mutual aid and other mutual organizations, without in any strict sense being mutualists. Cooperatives and mutuals have been central to the counterinstitution-building of much of the decentralist Left in the U.S. since the 1960s, but their thought is not explicitly mutualist either.

I n fact, I'd go so far as to say that most of the important examples of mutualist practice (the cooperative movement, the local currency and alternative credit movements, etc.) are not explicitly or self-consciously mutualist in ideology.

Having read Proudhon for some years, his thought is so complex and at times even seemingly self-contradictory, that I still hesitate to summarize it. But I'd venture to say, as an approximation, that his programme centered on 1) abolishing artificial property rights in land and artificial scarcity of credit, so that the working class could secure cheap access to the prerequisites of production; and 2) organizing the economy around associations of producers. Of course Proudhon was an important founding thinker for anarchism as a whole as well as for mutualism; so these ideas, in modified form, have heavily influenced later collectivist, communist and syndicalist variants of anarchism.

Mutualist praxis was central to the Owenite movement in the UK (e.g. Owenite craft unions organized cooperative production and distribution by strikers in their own shops), as well as such things as the Rochedale cooperatives, the Chartists, and land colonization movements. Owenism, by way of Christian socialism and guild socialism, probably had a significant (if indirect) influence on distributism.

In the U.S. mutualism's primary founder was the Owenite Josiah Warren. Warrenism, cross-pollinated with J.K. Ingalls' occupancy-and-use view of land ownership and William Greene's mutual banking theories, together led to the plumbline individualism of Benjamin Tucker. Tucker focused almost entirely on the abolition of artificial property rights and privilege in land and credit, assuming that when the legal props to rent and interest were removed and cheap land and credit were universally available, the forms of organization would take care of themselves. He displayed almost no interest whatever in cooperatives, associations for mutual aid, etc., as such.

Dyer Lum, John Beverley Robinson, and Clarence Swartz, all heavily influenced by Tucker, supplemented his focus on eliminating monopolies with some positive speculation on cooperative forms of organization; in so doing, they represented a partial fusion of Tucker's version of individualism with the older cooperativist tradition of Proudhon and Owen. Lum, in particular, was also friendly to the radical labor movement and had fairly close ties to the I.W.W.

Q.Would a highly successful large worker's cooperatives, like the John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain [centered in Basque Country] serve as evidence that mutualist economics can and does work in the large scale? Are credit unions evidence that mutualist economics can replace capitalist banking?
A.Although I'm quite friendly to both Mondragon and credit unions, and consider their influence to be decidedly positive, I believe their form is still distorted considerably by the capitalist milieu within which they exist. I like Mondragon's federated system of cooperative producers, distributors and banks within a single umbrella organization. But it's much too centralized a system in my opinion, with worker representation only effected at the level of the board of directors for the system as a whole; below the level of the Mondragon system as a whole, it's a fairly top-down system of conventional management, with no significant self-management at the level of individual departments or factories.

I would greatly prefer local markets with lots of stand-alone cooperative manufacturing shops on the Emilia-Romagna model, integrated with cooperative banks in some sort of barter or local currency network of the sort promoted by Tom Greco.

Most credit unions, unfortunately, have adopted the culture of the conventional banking industry, and have almost no ideological affinity for the larger cooperative or counter-economy movement. Of course they are still greatly preferable to capitalist banks; being controlled by many small, local depositors, they are far less prone to the excesses of the capitalist banking system that we've seen in recent years.
Q.Proudhon, although arguing that he opposed the idea of individuals deriving an income through rent and investments, said that he never wished "to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree" such activities. A contemporary mainstream economist may argue that Proudhon's position here would be particularly utopian in those markets that have high barriers to entry or other monopolistic features, that a worker's cooperative versus an entrenched capitalist enterprise in such a market would require a miracle on the scale of David vs Goliath for success.
A.That sounds a bit like Tucker's pessimistic view of things in his later years, when he seemed resigned to the idea that the large industrial trusts had grown to the point that their market power would persist even after the Four Monopolies were removed.

I think such a view neglects the extent to which capital-intensiveness is a source of high overhead cost and inefficiency, and is only made artificially profitable by the state's subsidies and protections. In fact production as such has become far less capital-intensive over the past three decades, with the old mass-production core outsourcing increasing shares of total production to flexible manufacturing networks and job-shops, and some of them retaining little more than control over marketing and "intellectual property." The development of cheap, small-scale CNC tools in the 1970s meant that the capital outlays required for manufacturing imploded by one or two orders of magnitude. That was the beginning of a long shift from older mass-production industry to Emilia-Romagna, the Toyota supplier network, the job-shops of Shenzhen and Shanghai, etc.

The process continues even further in the same direction with the desktop manufacturing revolution of recent years: cheap, homebrew CNC machines scalable to the small shop and garage.

When physical capital costs are so low, most of the financial role of the old industrial core is becoming redundant. And with small-scale production driven by local orders on a lean, demand-pull, JIT basis, marketing is similarly redundant.

"Intellectual property" is the main surviving buttress to the old corporate walls, and it's becoming increasingly unenforceable.
Q.A follower of Henry George would argue in the realm of natural resources it would be impossible for success and that land-rents should be socialised. How would you respond to these claims?
A.I'm quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed. But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalties created by taxpayers--not to mention by removing state enforcement of title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own miniature "downtown" cores, differential rent would be far less significant. I think a majority of George's aims could be achieved by Tucker's means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard's means.

Q.With examples of worker's self-management in the former Yugoslavia, and modelling by economists such as Jaroslav Vanek and Benjamin Ward, it has been shown in some cases (especially in critical infrastructure) it is advantageous for labor-managed firms, in their objective of increasing income per worker, to either lay-off workers or - like a monopolistic capitalist firm - to reduce productivity and thus derive monopoly profits. How would a contemporary version of mutualism prevent these problems?
A.It's been a long time since I read Vanek's work on worker-managed economies, but my immediate reaction is that there's probably no fool-proof set of governance rules. When the firm is controlled by capital-owners, they'll behave in such a way as to maximize returns on capital; when it's controlled by managers, as in most large Western corporations, they'll maximize benefits to management at the expense of both labor and capital. At least in a worker-managed firm, the decisions will reflect the interests of a bare majority, which can't be said of the other two mechanisms. Beyond that, I think the answer to the kind of behavior you describe lies in exit as much as in voice: the lower the capitalization requirements and the lower the barrier to entry for most forms of production, and the lower the cost threshold for comfortable subsistence, the less catastrophic changes in employment will be. I'd like to see an economy where a much larger share of total consumption needs are met through production for subsistence or barter in the household/informal sector, and the average time spent in wage employment is much less than at present.

That would mean a significantly larger share of the population would be self-employed than at present, a very large share would work hours that we would regard as "part-time," household arrangements for pooling wages and hoarding labor-time would be much more resilient, and even wage-earners would tend to accept as normal prolonged periods of unemployment during which they lived off subsistence resources while waiting for a job to their liking.
Q.Pro-capitalist neoliberals, such as George Reismann, Roderick T. Long have criticised your advocacy of mutualism. Reisman and Long both argue that you do not support John Locke's ownership of landed property that has been mixed with labour or, to use the peculiarly U.S. vernacular, "homesteading". It seems that both this critics have fundamentally misunderstood Locke's concept of land ownership, which recognises a public cost for exclusion and use in addition to the right of added value. How do you respond to these criticisms?
A.To be frank, I can't say with any degree of confidence what Reisman understands about anything. But I think Long acknowledged Locke's Proviso and explicitly characterized his own position as "non-Proviso Lockeanism." I'm not a Georgist myself, although I'd be well-disposed to a local property rules system based on some form of common ownership and community collection of rent. In any case, justifiably or not, when answering Lockean critics I tend to tacitly work from the premise that "Lockean" means "non-Proviso Lockean." And for the most part, I think a radical and consistent application of non-Proviso Lockean rules would go most of the way toward achieving the aims of the Tucker-Ingalls land theory.

... all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous band of nature: ... Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property... For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.John Locke: Of Civil Government - Second Treatise

For that matter, over time I've come to see the bounderies between the Tucker-Ingalls and non-Proviso Lockean systems as less distinct, and to perceive some practical problems with the Tucker system (at least the more radical variant--he seems to promote different versions of the system at different times). At times Tucker himself seemed to concede the existence of house-rent, but to argue that the nullification of titles to vacant land would (through market competition) cause the land-rent component of rent to disappear and overall rent to fall to the value of rent on buildings. Now, to me, that seems to imply that Tucker wasn't necessarily (at least at times) dead-set against absentee ownership in principle. That variant of his land theory, at least, seems to imply that the important thing was to eliminate large-scale absentee title to vacant and unimproved land.

In any case, I tend to think that doing so would go a long way to eliminating landlord rent through market competition.
Q.Another critic, Walter Block argues that you are actually some sort of Marxist because you use the labour theory of value for deriving a theory of exploitation. It would seem that (a) Block is unaware that Adam Smith and David Ricardo also used the labour theory of value and (b) using it to calculate a rate of exploitation is hardly the same as using it as an anchor to exchange values.
A.I think the Austrians also, for the most part, exaggerate the extent to which marginalism/subjectivism is a radical departure from classical labor and cost theories. It's closer to the truth to say that marginalism provides a mechanism for explaining the tendency that Ricardo et al described. The marginalist/subjectivist claim that "utility determines value" is true in a technical sense, if you add the qualification "at any point in time given the snapshot of supply and demand in the spot market." But it's not true in the ordinary way we use those words. If you allow changes in supply over time to enter the picture, then supply alters until the utility of the marginal unit reflects the cost of producing it--i.e., exactly what Ricardo said.

It makes far more sense to treat marginalism as a complement or fulfillment to classical political economy, rather than as supplanting it.
Q.Politically, where do you think mutualists should align themselves. Should they spend their efforts in building cooperative organisations, like Proudhon's advocacy of dual power? Or is there some mileage to be made in being involved in existing political organisations, such as the Labour Party - Cooperative Party groups in the U.K.? What about in the United States; is the Libertarian Party salvageable?
A.I think by far the most important, and the most interest, of our tasks is actually building the kind of society we want, and doing so so far as possible without regard to the state. But there's something to be said for putting external pressure on the state, and participating in political coalitions to remove as much state interference with our activities as possible. Of course the primary emphasis of such coalition-building should be forming pressure groups, rather than attempting to become part of a governing coalition.

A lot of this parallels Daniel DeLeon's disputes with the anarchists in the I.W.W. DeLeon argued that "building the structure of the new society in the shell of the old" (i.e. building industrial unions to serve as organs of self-management) would not be enough by itself. So long as the capitalists controlled the state and its armed force, and the significant minority of people whose class interest was tied up with it, there was the danger of the "Iron Heel" being brought to bear against counter-organizations. On the other hand, political victory alone wasn't sufficient; he gave the example of threats by Jay Gould to organize a national capital strike and lockout if the socialists ever captured the national government. Workers, DeLeon argued, should be focused on building counter-institutions, but also be prepared to seize the commanding heights of the state long enough to dismantle them and prevent them from being used against themselves.

What we need is a primary focus on institution building, without entirely neglecting the need for a political movement to run interference for the counter-institutions.

What's more, there's the very real danger an authoritarian state might make a concerted effort to stamp out the counter-economy through (for example) the kinds of totalitarian surveillance Richard Stallman described in "The Right to Read," intensified licensing and zoning to suppress low-capital producers, etc. It's a waste of effort and probably corrupting to seriously run our people for Congress or the White House. But it's perfectly sensible to carry out propaganda against legislation like the DMCA, to support lobbying campaigns organized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NORML, etc.
Q.Proudhon argued that through a society of contracts between individuals, a federal structure could arise. This of course must presume that individuals have the capacity to engage in uncoerced contractual arrangements. What other political requirements do you think have a particular priority in breaking down authoritarian elements in statist rule?
A.Well, it could be that the authoritarian elements of statist rule will persist on paper right up to the point at which they become irrelevant. But in my opinion it's at least worth a shot to pressure the state from outside, and form ad hoc alliances to pressure the state, in order to minimize its interference and fend off attempts at intensified interference. That includes local efforts against licensing and zoning that impede household microenterprise and micromanufacturing, local pressure to defend peaceful squatters and vagrants, pressure against the regulatory suppression of self-organized mutual-aid efforts, pressure at the national level against further expanding "intellectual property" law, and so forth.
Q.Kevin, thank you for your time and views.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS:

MUTUALIZE THE BANKS ?-YES!:

A tip of the Molly hat to Larry Gambone of the Porkupine Blog for bring this to my attention. It seems that in Britain there is a move afoot to "remutualize" at least two of the failed banks. To say the least this is a positive development. Mutuals, known in this country as credit unions, are naturally more cautious than the free wheeling banks that led the world into the present economic crisis. They provide a natural barrier against the sort of speculation whose results we are seeing today. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, they provide a non-governmental source of credit that would be available to the many (and probably many more in the future) enterprises that are presently in dispute, often with workers' occupations of the facilities. Mutuals/credit unions could be a source of credit for such enterprises if their workers wish to turn them into producers' cooperatives. They would provide a third alternative different from either waiting for a private "white knight" or calling for nationalization of the workplace in question. The agreements taken up with such mutuals leave the actual workplace free to develop true workers' self-management, something that neither private buyouts nor nationalization does.

Yes, the British initiative is small, but I hope it comes about and that it is imitated on a larger scale worldwide. Here's the news from the pages of the British newspaper The Guardian.

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Turn failed banks back into mutuals, Labour told:
Rock and B&B should be restored to savers
Pressure is mounting for the government to explore ways to remutualise Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, nationalised after the shares crashed amid fears that they could collapse amid the world financial crisis. Both companies were mutuals before becoming stockmarket-listed banks in the 1990s.

Labour MPs are pushing for the government to expand the role of mutuals, which are owned by depositors and borrowers. They do not have shareholders who may be more interested in diverting profit to bolster dividends than getting customers a better deal.

Mutually owned building societies are widely viewed as more cautious than banks, which have been accused of irresponsible lending during the boom. Societies are barred from funding more than half their mortgages from the wholesale money markets, which have frozen up in the wake of the credit crunch.

One option would be to remutualise Northern Rock and B&B, both of which have been rescued by the taxpayer at a huge cost, although part of B&B was acquired by Spanish bank Santander. The principle of remutualisation is supported by the Co-operative party which sponsors 29 Labour MPs, including schools secretary Ed Balls.

The Co-op's general secretary Michael Stephenson said: "The government could consolidate Northern Rock and its holding into one institution; when all debts are paid back, the institution could be converted into a building society. Alternatively, government could give existing financial mutuals (such as Nationwide) the right of first refusal when it decides to put the institutions it nationalised up for sale."

John McFall, Labour chairman of the Treasury select committee and a Co-op sponsored MP, says: "If ever there was a time for an expanded mutual sector, it's now. We desperately need to restore faith in financial services in this country." Although he stopped short of calling for a firm commitment to remutualise the Rock and B&B, he told the Observer that the idea was "a fertile area for debate".

He was backed by Mark Lazarowicz, Labour MP for Edinburgh North and Leith, who says: "This is an issue that is worth airing at a time when confidence in the banks is at an all-time low."
Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Social and Economic Research, said remutualising Northern Rock and B&B could be a relatively simple, albeit lengthy, process with money owed to the taxpayer repaid by borrowers who redeem their debts over time. New "membership" shares could be issued to depositor/members, he said.

It emerged this weekend that the Building Societies Association is to commission academic research into how the mutual sector could be expanded in Britain, after banks that ditched mutuality in favour of plc status have either been nationalised or taken over in "mercy killings" by rival institutions. They include HBOS, which has been merged with Lloyds TSB, and Alliance & Leicester, which was bought by Santander.

Stephenson said: "When the last Conservative government encouraged building societies to demutualise, it plundered generations of assets from mutual societies, replacing prudent mortgage providers with some of the worst culprits of casino capitalism."

AMERICAN POLITICS/ANARCHIST THEORY:

TRANSITION TO AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY:

Molly has long been a fan of Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog. While not "going all the way" with his 'free market anarchism', Molly still fells that he is one of the best of that American breed. He always has something interesting to say. Thus, a little notice on his blog led Molly down the path to Barack Obama's Citizen's Briefing Book. This is a creation of the Obama machine which acts as a continued polling site, taking the pulse of what Americans think is important. This is obviously not some sort of participatory democracy, though the new American Administration would not be displeased if this illusion became common.

Carson has presented his own set of proposals at that site, a proposal for less government protection of the corporation and for decentralized, small scale, industry to replace the failing corporate models. Here's his brief. You can vote proposals on the Obama site either up or down. Consider going over and making your voice heard, at least in terms of supporting a truly alternative idea.

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Easing the Transition to an Alternative Economy:
If we want to replace the present centralized economy of waste production and planned obsolescence, it's an inescapable fact that a great deal of excess manufacturing capacity cannot be saved. In my opinion it's a mistake to try to prop it up through expedients like the Detroit bailout.

Corporate capitalism has been plagued from its late-19th century beginnings with chronic crises of overaccumulation and overproduction, which would probably have destroyed it in the Great Depression (despite the New Deal) had WWII not postponed the crisis for a generation by helpfully blowing up most of the plant and equipment in the world outside the U.S. and creating a permanent war economy for absorbing surplus output. But Europe and Japan rebuilt their industrial capital by 1970, and since then the chronic crises have been back with a vengeance. Before the current downturn, America's overbuilt industry couldn't dispose of its full output running at capacity, even with everybody tapping into home equity and maxing out their credit cards to replace everything they owned every five years. And we'll never see those levels again. So there's no escaping the fact that much of our plant and equipment, in a few years, will be rust.

The goal should be a shift from the present system of overaccumulated, centralized, oligopoly industry, and its business model of planned obsolescence and "push" distribution, to a decentralized economy of small-scale manufacturing for local markets. This means, among other things, a switch from capital-intensive production methods based on product-specific machinery, to production with small-scale, general purpose machinery. It means, in place of the old Sloanist production model, something like the present-day economy of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region: networked small manufacturers producing for the local market, with a high degree of cooperative ownership. Such an economy, based on a "pull" distribution model with production geared to demand on a just-in-time basis, will be insulated from the boom-bust cycles of the old national "push" economies. And we need a new model of user-friendly, modular product design aimed at cheap and easy repairability and recycling.

Your main focus, in my opinion, should be to ease the transition by eliminating present policies (market-distorting subsidies, privileges, and cartelizing regulations) that impede it and protect the old economy from the new one.

This means, for one thing, eliminating differential tax exemptions that favor firms engaged in centralized, large-scale, capital-intensive production: e.g., the depreciation allowance, the R&D credit, the deductability of interest on corporate debt, and the exemption of stock transactions involved in mergers and acquisitions from capital gains tax). Then lower the corporate income tax enough to be revenue-neutral.

It means, especially, eliminating the biggest subsidy to economic centralization, and to artificially large market area and firm size: i.e., subsidies to long-distance transportation. The Interstate should be funded entirely by weight-based user fees on trucking, which causes virtually all of the roadbed damage. All subsidies to new airports or to expanding old ones should be eliminated, including all federal guarantees of local bond issues.

Perhaps most important of all, it requires radically scaling back the present strong "intellectual property" regime. IP (through patent pooling and exchange, monopolies on current production technologies, etc.) is probably the single most powerful cartelizing force, which enables each industry to be concentrated in the hands of a few players. It impedes the transfer of skills and new technology from the old manufacturing dinosaurs to the kinds of small, local producers we need. It also serves as a powerful bulwark to planned obsolescence, imposing legal restrictions on the manufacture of cheap generic replacement parts.

Scaling back IP law (a good start would be repealing the DMCA, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the Uruguay Round's TRIPS accord) would eliminate the barriers to the diffusion of skill and technology that currently prop up the old corporate dinosaurs of the software and entertainment industries, and facilitate their replacement by networked production on an open source model. Please cut loose the MPAA, RIAA, and Bill Gates, and do so yesterday!

Finally, we need to eliminate all subsidies to large-scale agribusiness. The result will be a flourishing sector of community-supported agriculture, replacing the old agribusiness dinosaurs as fast as new ground can be cultivated.

INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:

ANARCHIST COMMUNISTS ON THE ECONOMIC CRISIS:

Here from the Anarkismo site is a statement from several of the international anarchist communist organizations. Molly has to point out that she doesn't agree with the "cause" of the present crisis as it is presented here. That may be understandable. Most academic economists not only failed to predict the crisis; they are also only now scrambling to explain it. the cause is one thing. the response is another. The following is valuable in terms of response.

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Anarchist Communist Statement On The Global Economic Crisis And G20 Meeting:
Sunday November 16, 2008 21:36 by Anarkismo Editorial Group

International anarchist communist statement on the global economic crisis and G20 meeting, endorsed by Alternative Libertaire (France), Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Italy), Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (Australia) and Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa).

Anarchist Communist Statement On The Global Economic Crisis And G20 Meeting

1.The current crisis is typical of the crises that regularly appear in the capitalist economy. "Overproduction", speculation and subsequent collapse are inherent to the system. (As Alexander Berkman and others have pointed out, what capitalist economists call overproduction is actually underconsumption: capitalism prevents large numbers of people from fulfilling their needs, and so undermines its own markets.)
2.Any solution to the crisis prepared by capitalists and governments will remain a solution within capitalism. It will not be a solution for the popular classes. Indeed, as in every crisis, the workers and the poor are paying – while financial capital is being bailed out with huge sums. This is likely to continue. No change within capitalism can resolve the problems of the popular classes; still less can such a solution be expected from individual politicians, such as Barack Obama. The most such politicians can do is play a part in offering the capitalists a way out, and perhaps in throwing the working class some crumbs.
3.The bank bailouts show not only whose interests the state serves, but the hollowness of capitalist commitment to free markets. Throughout history, capitalists have stood for markets when it suits them, and state regulation and subsidies when they need it. Capitalism could never have existed without state support.
4.In the US, the UK and elsewhere, the bailouts have taken the form of nationalisation of troubled financial institutions – with the full support of capital. This shows that capitalists have no fundamental problem with state ownership, and that nationalisation has nothing to do with socialism. It can also be a method of screwing the working class. We ourselves, not the state, need to take control of the economy.
5.Owing to the globalisation of capital under neo-liberalism, the ruling class recognises that the solution must be global. The G20 is meeting from 15 November to discuss the crisis. This is significant. The rulers of the US, Europe and Japan are coming to realise that they cannot handle the crisis on their own; that they need, not only one another, but other powers, notably China (which is emerging as a top industrial producer, and is on its way to becoming the world's third-biggest economy). India, Brazil and other "emerging" economies will have seats at the table. This may mark a recognition – under discussion for some years – that the G8 alone are no longer the world's economic decision makers. It is likely to signal a shift in the running of the global economic system.
6.We place no hopes in the inclusion of new capitalist powers. China's rulers may claim to be socialist; others, such as Lula of Brazil and Motlanthe of South Africa, may present themselves at times as champions of the poor. But in fact, all are defenders of capitalism, exploiters and oppressors of the people of their own countries, and, increasingly, imperialist or sub-imperialist exploiters of the people of other countries.
7.If the crisis is to lead to anything other than complete defeat for the global popular classes, poverty, exploitation and war, the popular classes must mobilise. We must demand bailouts, not for the capitalists, but for us. We anarchist communists will fight for those who got homes on subprime mortgages to be bailed out and keep their homes. We will continue to engage in and support struggles for jobs with better wages and shorter hours, housing, services, health services, welfare and education, protection of the environment. We fight for an end to imperialist wars and to repression of our class and its struggles.
8.We present these demands in response to the G20 meeting, and will continue to present them in the future. Through such demands, and through direct action to bring them about, we will work towards building a global movement of the popular classes that can put an end to capitalism, the state and the crises they create.
Signed:
Alternative Libertaire (France)

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Italy)

Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (Australia)

Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa)

ANARCHIST THEORY:

THE CAT'S MEOW- DISCUSSION ON ECONOMICS:

Over at the Anarchist Black Cat discussion board (dedicated to improving the state of anarchist discussion) there are a couple of new and interesting threads on economics. Both are under the 'Map-Making' section of the board. The first goes under the heading of 'My Forthcoming Exchange With Michael Albert' and has already drawn a lot of intelligent comment on the relation of Parecon to anarchism. The second is 'Private Property', and it begins a discussion on mutualism. Go on over. Read the best.