Thursday, January 25, 2007

A couple of things

Blogging's been ultrasluggish lately, but I'm somewhat swamped with exams. Since nobody is reading this blog at this time anyway (I've been too patient with the BLL methinks), I owe nobody an apology, but in case somebody actually reads this stuff - hey, I'm still alive! :)
But my mind hasn't been as dormant as my keyboard, so let's go over the few things that I remember right now of what I wanted to post about.

1. First of all, the new Pain of Salvation album is out! The Gods of progressive metal have descended upon us yet again and what a descent it is! They could have settled for something old and tried but ooooh no, this is PoS we're talking about. Scarsick seems almost the opposite of their previous effort, the ambitious, broadwayish and orchestral Be. SS is gritty, down-to-earth, sarcastic. And full of surprises, too, such as the second Disco Metal song I've heard in my life (next to Edge of Sanity's Sacrificed).

But more to the topic of my blog, the album is dedicated to bashing capitalism in general, which provides some food for thought.Even though I've been a supporter of free-market capitalism nearly all my life and have never strayed therefrom (even as I'm ever more convinced that the term is self-contradictory), I can't fail be touched by the band's portrayal of indifference, greed and promiscuity - owing to their enormous ability of conveying emotion in music. Of course, it is not my place to assume that my taste for particular cultural values trumps morality, but it makes me wonder just how much of this culture is spawned by modern neoliberal capitalism, and how much is a genuine outgrowth of free markets and free expression.

One aspect that I think needs to be explored is how inflation influences behaviour. As inflation lowers real interest rates, what it does is pushing people to spend more (hence the consumerism Daniel Gildenlow portrays in 'Kingdom of Loss') and to work more (hence greed, prozac and a lot of other things). 'Kingdom of Loss' mentions how 'time' is the root of the problem - the constant pursuit thereof. Doesn't inflation push people to consume and work more and kick back and relax less than they really want to?
Maybe some think-tanks need to stop gloating over how glorious the spirit of consumerism is in neo-Randian litanies and dig deeper into the root of the problem.


2. Which cuts into another point, a peeve of mine, namely the cult of efficiency, or cult of numbers. An outgrowth of current neoliberal thought and yet another reason why libertarians have to distance themselves from corporate capitalists. The Warsaw School of Economics, where I'm studying is a merry collection of individuals, most of whom are infected by this dreadful disease. I swear, if I hear 'nakręcić koniunkturę' ('boost the economy', more or less) again, I'm gone shove... uuugh. Well, the thing is, though the lecturers are bearably pro-free market in the Milton Friedman sense of the word, to them everything is justified as long as it 'boosts the economy.' What's even more irritating, even though 70 years have passed since Keynes' blunder, everybody still buys into the "more inflation=boost to economy" mantra. Of course, inflation pushes people to produce more, which does a great job at cranking up those numbers but does it really serve The People? Nobody knows and nobody cares.



3. On a more-or-less unrelated note, I'm warming up to calling myself a socialist. It was probably Brad Spangler who first suggested that market anarchism of the 'capitalist' brand is, in fact, socialist in its nature. The points raised most often by those denying the title of anarchist (and, subsequently, socialist) to us are the issue of land and wage labour. Now land is a completely separate issue, which I will address some other time (suffice to say, I'm growing dissatisfied with Locke, while remaining none too comfy with usufruct mutualism and Georgism), but the latter I'll take issue with here.

To most socialists, wage labour is exploitative and therefore immoral, because the worker is not paid the entirety of their labours's value. This normative casting of the Labour Theory of Value claims that one is entitled to the full worth of one's work. Since 1871 (and even before), however, an economist is inclined to asked 'value to whom' and this is a question that the classical economist is unable to answer. If by 'value' we mean value to the employer, then no trade is moral, as no trade involves indifference. If no trade is moral, than no socialist or anarchist can support markets, which would put, for instance P. J. Proudhon out of the anarchist and socialst traditions - a pretty absurd conclusion if there is one. If we mean value to the employee then all trade (including wage labour) is moral.

I haven't read Mr Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy in its entirety yet, but I've been led to believe that Mr Carson's support for a revised Labour Theory of Value stems from the Ricardian view that in the long term, wages tend towards an equilibrium between the utility of the produced goods and the disutility of labour. This does not occlude in any way the reasoning above. It is the disutility of labour that would form the basis of such a theory of value and the disutility of labour is, in other words, the value one places on their labour.

One could make the claim that wage labour is immoral in a capitalist environment because capitalists, using State coercion, prevent the market from reaching that equilibrium. And if that is the problem with capitalism then we market anarchists are sure as hell anti-capitalist.
So to oppose what Rothbard dubbed 'capitalism' in the realm of labour makes little sense from whichever standpoint, as it entails no exploitation, even in the Marxist sense of the word.
Unless socialism means having to accept long disproven economic fallacies, market anarchists, like Rothbard, Konkin, et. al. are sure as hell socialists and sure as hell anarchists. Benjamin Tucker, though deprived of the insights of marginalism, understood this, which is why he went so far as to call Gustave de Molinari and Auberon Herbert anarchists, both of whom were somewhat less radical than many representing the non-mutualist side of market anarchism.


More to come!

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