Fifteen Steps to Corporate Feudalism

posted by Erik

With all my anti-State talk in other posts, this is worth considering, some points I agree with, and I understand what Marker is saying:

but, there is an option missed here: free-market anti-capitalism.

Despite Marker's claim that the goal is less, or no government, the irony is that state-assisted robbery and corporate welfare got us to this supposed goal in the first place. Further, I question Marker's claim that Party libertarians want to eliminate government. They want minarchism, I'll concede, but not anarchism. I find it hard to believe Marker's line of thought, in that I doubt the corporate feudalists really want to stop sucking off the government tit and eliminate the flow of taxpayer subsidies, i.e corporate welfare. They want to roll off regulations, but not assistance, and they intend to get there via a country ran for, by, and of the corporation, not the people.

Back to the option missed by Marker. It comes from the "real" libertarians, on the left, not the faux libertarians in the Party System that co-opted the term/label traditionally held by the left. In Europe, left and libertarian are synonymous. Anyway,  this libertarianism is anti-government, but rather than minarchist, it is anarchist. There are strains that are collectivist/communist and others that are individualist/market-based. The latter is an alternate answer to the Party libs being over-looked by Marker.

The goal of the "free-market anti capitalists" is to abolish the state-driven monopolization of capital. Kevin Carson explains one variant, mutualism, as  "all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid...; and the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product." While both collectivist and individualist strains are far more complex and involved than a blog post can do justice to, Benjamin Tucker explains many differences here: State Socialism and Anarchism: How they agree and differ (1888)

Tucker considers four monopolies enforced by government as central to our enslavement, their abolition being a key to freedom/liberty. Ask yourself if you really think the "Libertarian" Party wants any of these monopolies abolished:

1. the land monopoly... This monopoly consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation...[There are three main rival theories of justice in holdings among free market libertarians--the Lockean, the Georgist, and the mutualist--with Lockeanism predominating. As Bill Orton has characterized their differences, the three schools agree fairly closely on the acquisition of property (i.e, by labor homesteading), but differ considerably on their rules for transfer and abandonment. All three schools agree that the only legitimate way of appropriating unowned land is homesteading by direct, personal occupation and alteration of it: as Locke put it, by admixture of labor. source]
2. the money monopoly, which consists of the privilege given by the government to certain individuals, or to individuals holding certain kinds of property, of issuing the circulating medium, a privilege which is now enforced in this country by a national tax... if the business of banking were made free to all, more and more persons would enter into it until the competition should become sharp enough to reduce the price of lending money to the labor cost, which statistics show to be less than three-fourths of once per cent. In that case the thousands of people who are now deterred from going into business by the ruinously high rates which they must pay for capital with which to start and carry on business will find their difficulties removed. If they have property which they do not desire to convert into money by sale, a bank will take it as collateral for a loan of a certain proportion of its market value at less than one per cent. discount. If they have no property, but are industrious, honest, and capable, they will generally be able to get their individual notes endorsed by a sufficient number of known and solvent parties; and on such business paper they will be able to get a loan at a bank on similarly favorable terms. Thus interest will fall at a blow. The banks will really not be lending capital at all, but will be doing business on the capital of their customers, the business consisting in an exchange of the known and widely available credits of the banks for the unknown and unavailable, but equality good, credits of the customers and a charge therefor of less than one per cent., not as interest for the use of capital, but as pay for the labor of running the banks. This facility of acquiring capital will give an unheard of impetus to business, and consequently create an unprecedented demand for labor, – a demand which will always be in excess of the supply, directly to the contrary of the present condition of the labor market. Then will be seen an exemplification of the words of Richard Cobden that, when two laborers are after one employer, wages fall, but when two employers are after one laborer, wages rise. Labor will then be in a position to dictate its wages, and will thus secure its natural wage, its entire product. Thus the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up. But this is not all. Down will go profits also. For merchants, instead of buying at high prices on credit, will borrow money of the banks at less than one per cent., buy at low prices for cash, and correspondingly reduce the prices of their goods to their customers. And with the rest will go house-rent. For no one who can borrow capital at one per cent. with which to build a house of his own will consent to pay rent to a landlord at a higher rate than that. Such is the vast claim made by Proudhon and Warren as to the results of the simple abolition of the money monopoly.
3. the patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, – in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines.
4. the tariff monopoly, which consists in fostering production at high prices and under unfavorable conditions by visiting with the penalty of taxation those who patronize production at low prices and under favorable conditions. The evil to which this monopoly gives rise might more properly be called misusury than usury, because it compels labor to pay, not exactly for the use of capital, but rather for the misuse of capital. The abolition of this monopoly would result in a great reduction in the prices of all articles taxed, and this saving to the laborers who consume these articles would be another step toward securing to the laborer his natural wage, his entire product. Proudhon admitted, however, that to abolish this monopoly before abolishing the money monopoly would be a cruel and disastrous policy, first, because the evil of scarcity of money, created by the money monopoly, would be intensified by the flow of money out of the country which would be involved in an excess of imports over exports, and, second, because that fraction of the laborers of the country which is now employed in the protected industries would be turned adrift to face starvation without the benefit of the insatiable demand for labor which a competitive money system would create. Free trade in money at home, making money and work abundant, was insisted upon by Proudhon as a prior condition of free trade in goods with foreign countries.
5. not included by Tucker, and not really a monopoly per se, transportation subsidies, without which the face of our world would be vastly different to say the least, and without which giant corporations would not be so giant. Who's to blame for these subsidies, and why do we have them? Which brings the utilities monopoly to mind...

To expand on #1, Proudhon puts it this way: "We do not ask why the earth has been appropriated to a greater extent than the sea and the air; we want to know by what right man has appropriated wealth which he did not create, and which Nature gave to him gratuitously."

While I admire Marker's claims, he's off the mark on several points and has forgotten important viable exceptions outside his box, that still call for the demolition of the State, not to mention any form of privilege. A world where hierarchy, or monopoly of power is removed, and exploitation or domination are gone with it, as they are bedfellows.

Classical liberals (a.k.a. market liberals) advocate a free market economy. Socialism seeks a world where the means of production are owned by workers. Many market anarchists believe that freed markets lead to that world. The state-granted monopoly privileges and rents deigned to the purchasers and wielders of political power removed, the amount of economic opportunity available to working class people would outpace the bureaucratic and artificial economies of the existing corporate-dominated marketplace. source

Vulgar libertarianism refers to those who treat the existing marketplace as one which closely approximates how a freed market would look.  Kevin Carson quotes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy in his essay Contract Feudalism:

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works”— implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”

Libertarians will often condemn the existing aspects of state power and interference in the market but then leap to the defense of those who benefit from the existing order in the same breath.  Conservatives are generally far worse on this front than libertarians but both groups shy from committing anything which smells like class warfare.

Roderick Long has recast this idea of vulgarity into the more descriptive and less polemical right and left conflationisms. A right conflationist is someone who defends existing property relations as being close enough to a free market to be considered legitimate.  A left conflationist is someone who conflates existing holders of wealth as evil or undeserving a la “eat the rich!” The truth lies, as in most things, somewhere in the murky middle ground.

(And, as Jeremy Weiland is fond of saying, “let the free market eat the rich!“) source

Marker needs a second edition, but doubt he would consider the options of left libertarians. Hopefully the smaller government he fears, created by corporations we loathe bite them in their own ass, and people start to see that we have an opportunity here, to make something great from smaller government, to turn to something the "free" marketeers ultimately fear, a "freed" market autonomous from State tinkering. Because a truly free market would mean the demise of the corporate feudalism Marker derides.

Thirty-five years ago, the great libertarian hero Karl Hess wrote: “I have lost my faith in capitalism” and “I resist this capitalist nation-state,” observing that he had “turn[ed] from the religion of capitalism.”[13] Distinguishing three senses of “capitalism” — market order, business-government partnership, and rule by capitalists — helps to make clear why someone, like Hess, might be consistently committed to freedom while voicing passionate opposition to something called “capitalism.” It makes sense for freed-market advocates to oppose both interference with market freedom by politicians and business leaders and the social dominance (aggressive and otherwise) of business leaders. And it makes sense for them to name what they oppose “capitalism.” Doing so calls attention to the freedom movement’s radical roots, emphasizes the value of understanding society as an alternative to the state, [emphasis mine] underscores the fact that proponents of freedom object to non-aggressive as well as aggressive restraints on liberty, ensures that advocates of freedom aren’t confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers — as well as ordinary people around the world who use “capitalism” as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives. Freed-market advocates should embrace “anti-capitalism” in order to encapsulate and highlight their full-blown commitment to freedom and their rejection of phony alternatives that use talk of freedom to conceal acquiescence in exclusion, subordination, and deprivation.  source