Kevin A. Carson

The author's economic analysis of the corporate centralization of industries of scale is insightful and well-supported, and his exposition on both the dependence of modern industrial economies of scale on subsidies and other support by government and the implications of the accelerating advancement of distributive, small-scale manufacturing technologies are enlightening. For reasons such as these, this is a very important book. Only the author's preoccupation with mutualist-leaning visions of how a future distributed, localized world market "should" work, and implicit dismissal of alternative economic models for the same ultimate economic empowerment of individuals, detracts from the overall quality of the text. Even this, however, is only a mild scratch in the finish of an otherwise exceedingly well-constructed and well-written perspective on the tensions between forces contending for primacy in the economic markets of our age and years to come in the near future.

If you read this entire book with an open mind and do not find yourself wanting to learn new skills like carpentry, machining, sewing, off-grid energy production, and so on (or put such skills to better use in your community, if you already have them), I might eat my hat.… (mer)

Kevin Carson seems to be single handedly reviving mutualism from its long and dark slumber, and I for one am grateful for it. I've flirted with left-libertarian ideas in the past, but Carson's exposition of mutualist ideology on his blog and in this book are definitely making me seriously revisit this overlooked school of political economy.

Carson does not waste any time at all in getting to the most contentious aspects of mutualist thought as he opens the book immediately with a defense of the (reformulated) labor theory of value. He spends most of his time analyzing and refuting the initial 19th century criticisms of the LTV that sparked the marginal revolution and the abandonment of LTV henceforth. His main dispute with said critics is the repeat offense of evaluating theories of value within the context of state supported imperfect markets (ie capitalism) and not allowing the LTV to hold its own when artificial monopolies are removed from hindering free markets. Along the way he updates Marx's erroneous ideas of subjective value and time-based (and skill-based) differences in labor. He also refutes the austrian school's skeptical attitude towards the use of equilibrium in the argument for LTV merely on the grounds that their praxeological deduction cannot support the inference. I'm not entirely convinced that his resurrection and reformulation of the LTV is valid, but I also don't think it's necessary for the rest of his arguments either! I think marginal utility is a more general and accurate theory of value, but I also think that, once artificial barriers are removed from the free market, labor becomes the predominant factor in cost and, subsequently for most products, value. I also think Einstein's theory of relativity has displaced newtonian mechanics but that doesn't mean I can't use newton's methods when figuring out how fast a ball is going to drop. Similarly, though marginal utility is a better theory than LTV, I still want to use LTV in figuring out how to analyze the structure of an economic system to determine its consequences upon society.

The middle of the book is a historical analysis of capitalism that dispels the myth that there ever was a laissez-faire system and that, on the contrary, capitalism has been a continuation of feudalism and a means to keep imperialist states from losing their power. He uses Benjamin Tucker's 'big four' framework which views the four major impediments to free markets and labor control of production to be state controlled monopolies on land, money, tariff, and patents. Carson adds a fifth monopoly, that of subsidized and centralized transportation/communications infrastructure, which he feels Tucker oddly left out. This last point may be valid with respect to the railroad, highway, broadcast, and telephone systems, but I am sure as hell grateful for the state funded internet (granted the state only funded the initial arpanet/nsfnet and later expansion was, literally, a mutualist endeavor between peering agents). It may be the case that in trying to create a robust internetwork that could withstand nuclear attack, the state inadvertently created the exact type of distributed information infrastructure that set in motion the possibility for its eventual displacement. Carson misses an opportunity to show that the internet has become the most successful example of mutualism in history.

The last part of the book describes the principles behind mutualism and how we should go about achieving them in praxis. Central to mutualism is the cost principle which in more familiar terms is the common-sense idea of there being no free lunch, that all parties need to support themselves by internalizing their costs. States are living off the support of others and so violate this principle. Another theme of mutualism is an evolutionary, not revolutionary. dual power strategy that aims to construct a better system from within and eventually discard the shell of the former system which it has replaced.

All in all, I enjoyed Carson's historically detailed scholarship, and though I may not have been completely convinced by some of his arguments, he has presented mutualism as a compelling and worthy ideology that should be taken seriously.… (mer)