Clearly, the conflicting economic tendencies within anarchist thought are sorely in need of some sort of reconciliation. Fortunately, the work of Kevin Carson in the field of economics provides a means of doing so. Drawing upon both the Marxist and Austrian traditions within economics, Carson demonstrates that those who criticize the socialists for their carte blanche rejection of markets are correct in doing so.[85] After all, there is nothing inherently wrong, certainly not from an anarchist perspective, with the voluntary exchange of goods, services, and labor in the marketplace. Indeed, voluntary exchange is the cornerstone of anarchist social relations. Anti-market socialists have thrown out the baby with the bath water. However, pro-market, anti-state thinkers have quite frequently erred in failing to comprehend the degree to which market distortions resulting from state intervention are the source of genuine class exploitation. A principal problem is that many pro-market and anti-market observers alike consider the present system of international state capitalism to be an authentic product of the free market. The “left” tendency among anti-statists abhors this set of arrangements while the “right” tendency applauds it. Yet an authentic free market economy would produce institutional arrangements of a vastly different nature from those currently in existence.
The end of liberal democracy as a dominant political paradigm, and its replacement with philosophical anarchism, would naturally generate a brand new economic paradigm in the place of the current paradigm of state capitalism. Liberal democracy and state capitalism are considered by virtually all “mainstream” political theorists to be the natural corollaries of one another. Indeed, one often hears talk of “capitalist democracy” or “democratic capitalism” as some sort of ideal among establishment ideologists, particularly among (who else!) neoconservatives. On one hand, it is not exactly true that state capitalism and liberal democracy are natural complements to one another, as state capitalism preceded liberal democracy, and the mass democracy of the present era.
Carson, following the lead of both Marx and Rothbard, explains how the declining feudal aristocracy of the latter Middle Ages sought to reverse its own fleeting fortunes by reinventing itself as a class of bourgeois capitalists by means of state interventionist tools of the mercantilist variety in order to preserve the centralization of wealth.[86] Hence, the birth of the paradigm of state capitalism that has come to dominate all of the industrialized nations. However, it is true that liberal democracy came to power largely through the efforts of a mercantile class, a middle class in the traditional European sense, who resented having to share power with the monarchy, the church, the landed nobility, and other relics of the feudal era. Subsequently, liberal democracy took the shape of mass democracy in order to justify the expansion of the state needed to effectively buy off and pacify newly emergent power groups (intellectuals, professionals, union bosses, political interest groups) who went on to comprise the “new class” of managerial elites of whom George Orwell and James Burnham provided penetrating critiques.[87] At the present time, the corporate elites of state capitalism and the bureaucratic elites of the welfare-warfare state (i.e., liberal democracy) have largely become intertwined with one another in the form of a state-corporate ruling class. This ruling class has become dominant in all of the advanced nations and is currently reconstituting itself on an international level in the form of the New World Order.
Conventional theories of political economy typically portray “Big Business” and “Big Government” as natural antagonists of one another. The “left” champions the state as the protector of the little guy from the predatory corporation while the “right” champions the corporation as the hapless victim of predatory government bureaucrats.[88] However, the present corporate system could not exist without the favors granted to corporations by the state in the form of subsidies, infrastructure, central banking, the state monopoly over the production of currency, tariffs, monopoly privilege, contracts, bailouts, guarantees, military intervention, patents, the suppression of labor, regulatory favors, protectionist trade legislation, limited liability and corporate personhood laws, and much else. Similarly, the state’s legislative process and executive hierarchy is beholden to the corporate interests who fund the electoral system and provide the bureaucratic elite among the military, foreign policy, and “international trade” establishments. Condoleeza Rice’s migration from Chevron to the National Security Council is no mere coincidence. The amalgam of Big Business and Big Government, consolidated on an international scale, represents a centralization of wealth and power of so great a degree as to jeopardize the future of humanity.
What sort of economic order would accompany the political victory of anarchism? Economic decentralization would naturally follow political decentralization. As the massive, bureaucratic nation-states currently being incorporated into the New World Order collapsed and disappeared, the corporate entities propped up and protected by these states would also vanish. Just as the dissolution of centralized political power would result in the sovereignty and self-determination of communities and associations, so would these entities be able to develop their own unique economic identities. Economic resources of all types, from land to industrial facilities to infrastructure to high technology, would fall into the hands of particular communities and popular organizations. Such entities would likely organize themselves into a myriad of economic institutions. It can be expected that workers would play a much greater leadership role in the formation of future economies as workers access to resources and bargaining power, both individually and collectively, would likely be greatly enhanced. The result would likely be an economic order where the worker-oriented enterprise replaces the capitalist corporation as the dominant mode of economic organization.[89]
The disappearance of massive, bureaucratic states would also result in the greater fluidity and dynamism of the marketplace, ushering in greater efficiency, more rapid innovation and, in the long term, rising living standards within the context of a more equitable overall distribution of wealth. Economic arrangements might include worker owned and operated enterprises, a proliferation of cooperatives and family businesses, mutual banks of the type envisioned by Greene, Proudhon, and Tucker, communal arrangements of the type envisioned by Kropotkin (and practiced, to some degree, by the kibbutzim of Israel), co-determined enterprises operating as a partnership between labor and management and industries operated by unions or workers councils in the manner envisioned by traditional anarcho-syndicalists, guild socialists, distributists, or council communists. The Mondragon workers’ cooperatives of Spain have achieved some degree of success in this area.[90] Of course, if some groups of workers or entrepreneurs wished to organize themselves into giant, hierarchical formations similar to the traditional corporate model, that would be their prerogative. In addition, there would likely be an increase in the number of small to medium sized businesses of an individual or private nature, farmers, craftsmen, artisans, and the self-employed. The culture of particular regions or communities would shape the emerging economic arrangements. Land would be worked communally in those locations, such as central Africa, where traditions of communal ownership are strong. Open marketplaces would abound in regions where cultural precedent existed. There might also be municipalized industries or enterprises in some quarters, as well as such endeavors being owned by political parties of a particular stripe and operated by party members. There may be communities run by the Revolutionary Communist Party or the National Socialist Workers Revolutionary Party, each with their own factories or farms, with adherents of party ideology providing the workforce. Still other communities might maintain economic arrangements modeled on the teachings of those figures their members find most inspirational, whether Gandhi or Qaddafi.[91] Kevin Carson provides a description of what a post-state capitalist economic order might look like:
1. an economy of self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers cooperatives, and worker-controlled large enterprises, all dealing with each other through the free
market;
2. a money system based on labor exchanges or mutual banks, in which the producers associate to transform their own products into money and credit without relying on usurious banking monopolies;
3. a system of land ownership based on occupancy and use, with no enforcement of rights of absentee ownership;
4. a government based only on free association without initiating coercion against non-aggressors. This means all expenses are met by user fees and membership dues charged to willing participants. My own picture is . . . local government, minus compulsory payment for or consumption of its services.[92]
This vision is idealistic yet realistic, and Carson’s overall economic analysis and objectives effectively reconcile the anti-statist traditions of classical liberalism and classical socialism. Of course, much variation on this broader theme is likely, as previously noted. For example, different sorts of communities might define “just” ownership or use of property in different ways, and the structure of local political institutions might be highly varied. The collapse of the New World Order and the corporate-social democratic bureaucracies that govern its core provinces would inevitably lead to the coming to local power of a good many political or cultural elements disagreeable to the liberal elites who dominate the current world order and those who ape their values. For example, the disappearance of the nation-states across Europe would likely lead to the proliferation of a wide assortment of self-assertive communities and enclaves led by Communists, nationalists, monarchists, racialists, Catholic or Orthodox traditionalists, Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, warlords, or ordinary criminal gangs. Similarly, an end to Anglo-Zionist imperialism in the Middle East would inevitably lead to the removal of the region’s current regimes and national borders alike, as these are nothing more than a legacy of previous imperial eras. However, it is quite doubtful that the sociopolitical institutions that would evolve in the Middle East following the dissolution of the present order there would be of a particularly “progressive” nature, as far as Western definitions of “progressive” are concerned. Already, the embarrassment of the neoconservatives, who have discovered unexpectedly that the people of Iraq prefer an ayatollah to a Tony Blair, has been witnessed.
Just as political decentralization would naturally result in the greater influence of those sociocultural and ideological elements most disagreeable to the values of modern liberalism, so would economic decentralization inspire a regeneration of those communitarian values that have been suppressed by the forces of global corporatism and its materialist/consumerist ethos. Although an end to the gargantuan bureaucracies of the current nation-state system and the overarching system of international state capitalism would on one hand result in a greater economic dynamism of the type sought by many “free market” libertarians, the absence of powerful corporate entities would allow the emergence of economic institutions that would be much more rooted in organic local and regional cultures and therefore much more beholden to the values and norms of those cultures. Further, the wider dispersion of economic resources involved in economic decentralization would allow greater opportunities for self-determination and self-sufficiency among the neo-proletariat and provide the traditionally beleaguered classes with the means for self-emancipation.
The Death of the Nation-State System
The aforementioned predictions concerning what sort of politico-economic arrangements would follow the demise of the New World Order naturally assume an end to the five hundred year pre-eminence of the nation-state system. Simply put, the system of nation-states is one whose historical relevance has already expired. Traditional nations have largely devolved into provincial regions of the global order. Contrary to the sentiments of old-fashioned nationalists, this is not necessarily an unwelcome development. The principal function of the nation-state has been the greater concentration of political and economic power and the increased destructiveness of war and imperialism. Of course, the liberal “solution” to the horrors of international warfare has been even greater wars, imperialism, and centralization culminating in a Wilsonian global state that makes the world safe for corporate-mercantilist totalitarian-progressive “democracy.” Against this liberal perversion, an authentic anarchism offers the radical dispersion of power as an antidote to the total wars generated by the modern state. As Joseph Sobran explains:
. . . in the year 1500 there were about 500 distinct political entities in Europe; by 1800 the number had been reduced to a few dozen, and was soon further reduced by the unification of Italy and of Germany . . . Certain words, “secession” being one, are used in tones of horror that imply there is no point in discussing their possible merits. But, if secession is always bad, history can move in only one direction: toward a single global state, from which nobody must be allowed to withdraw, no matter how tyrannical it may become . . . In the twentieth century the great nation-states (which were also empires) collided in the two most terrible wars of all time.
The explosion began with the assassination of a single man in Sarajevo in 1914. The alliances among the European states drew everyone into war, including, within three years, Midwestern farm boys who had never heard of the Archduke Ferdinand.
This would have been impossible if Europe had still consisted of those 500 independent political entities of the year 1500. Europe had seen many wars, but they had mostly been local. The “Great War” was something totally new, dwarfing even the Napoleonic Wars.
We have far more to fear from the consolidation of states than from secession and dispersion. With small states, there are sure to be local conflicts at almost all times, but it would be relatively easy to flee them. With only a few huge states, the danger of a general holocaust is constant.
Secession, small states, limited government, dispersion of power—these are the real paths to peace. The more political entities there are, the more rulers are forced to compete with each other for subjects, who can migrate to less oppressive domains. But when only huge states exist, with monopolies of power extending for thousands of miles, escape is difficult.[93]
One of the few positive features of the New World Order is that the enemy is now much more clearly identified.[94] It is pointless for contending political, economic, and cultural tendencies to continue to bicker among themselves when all are rapidly being subjugated by the forces of globalism. As there is now really only one government, the system of international state capitalism, the task of anarchists has become much more simplified. Globalism may well be the final stage in the historical evolution of the state. The global superstate represents the consolidation of conventional nation-states into an ever-more powerful entity. The annihilation of the global superstate may well be the catalyst that ultimately leads to the realization of the reign of anarchism, just as the execution of the French monarch became the cornerstone of the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy and the supremacy of the bourgeoisie.
Separation of Law and State
No discussion of what the end product of a particular political or economic order might be can ever be complete without substantial reflection on what sort of laws and legal systems such arrangements might produce.[95] Thus far, it has been argued that the practical effect of the full implementation of the anarchist program would be the proliferation of countless voluntary communities and associations whose primary function would be the provision of the means to sovereignty for many different types of ideological or cultural tendencies. The internal structures of such associations would likely span the entire spectrum of political preferences. There might well be communities of monarchists, fascists, communists, liberal capitalists, liberal multiculturalists, theocrats, black nationalists, white nationalists, anarchists (of every possible stripe), neo-Aztecs, UFO enthusiasts, or whatever. Obviously, all of these elements would have very different views on the meaning of life, the role of the human species in the universe, the nature of human beings, the proper relationship between the individual and external institutions or collective entities, the proper
means of reproduction and child-rearing, the methods of handling deviants from community norms, and much else. Consequently, the laws and legal institutions would differ greatly from community to community.
Many anarchists claim to categorically reject of the concept of “law,” but this is simply a matter of semantics. Most anarchists believe that acts such as murder or robbery should be socially disallowed, although there may be considerable disagreement on what causes such antisocial behavior, and how offenders ought to be handled. Unless one prefers a hermitic existence in the Arctic or Andes (a reality that would be much more possible in an anarchist world), it is impossible for an individual to exist in the same manner as an asteroid floating about in the vacuum of space. As soon as a particular community is established, norms begin to develop concerning what is and what is not acceptable behavior. It is to be expected that the legal culture of a broader society organized along anarchistic lines would place a high emphasis on individual autonomy, or what the libertarians sometimes call the “non-aggression axiom.” Such an emphasis would partly result from the prevalence of anarchistic thought in the broader society. However, it is to be expected, for reasons that will be explained below, that a radically decentralized politico-economic order would naturally evolve along such lines, regardless of the ideological inclinations of its inhabitants.
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