Kevin Amos Carson - The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...11

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand

Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege

by
Kevin Amos Carson

2001

All Your Books Are Belong To Us !
http://c3jemx2ube5v5zpg.onion

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand
Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege
Copyright 2001 Kevin Amos Carson

Published in 2001 by Red Lion Press
Revised in 2002
Purchase a printed copy from Distro of the Libertarian Left here: http://distro.libertarianleft.org/for/contemporary-radicalism/the-iron-fist-behind-the-invisible-hand/?referredby=c4ss.org
***With each purchase, The Center for a Stateless Society will receive a fraction of the money in donation.***
http://c4ss.org/content/19702

Purchase a printed copy of this essay here: http://distro.libertarianleft.org/for/contemporary-radicalism/the-iron-fist-behind-the-invisible-hand/?referredby=c4ss.org
The economist Adam Smith famously used the idea of an "invisible hand" to describe the self-regulating nature of a free market.
In this essay, Kevin Carson, a Mutualist (market anarchist), elegantly explains capitalism's feudal origin, its intimate relationship with the state, and why free markets are impossible under capitalist systems. Specifically, he explains how state intervention is and has always been necessary in order to keep the capitalist upper class in power, and he discusses the various forms this has taken throughout history.
An audio reading by Mike Gogulski is available here: http://www.nostate.com/2228/the-iron-fist-beind-the-invisible-hand-audio-mp3-podcast/

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.

The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called market economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called laissez-faire was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.

Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a market system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randoids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal free market is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare statei.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.

But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalisma system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from laborcould not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus valuei.e., capitalismcannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market mutualist Benjamin Tuckerfrom whom right-libertarians selectively borrowregarded himself as a libertarian socialist.

It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the workas different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.

THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY

Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.

For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as primitive accumulation. What the capitalist system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital. That meant expropriating the land, to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself. [Marx, Chapter 27: The Expropriation, Capital vol. 1]

To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.

J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government. [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36].

When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one. [Marx, The Expropriation]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.

Another major theft of peasant land was the reform of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then only a feudal title, into rights of modern private property. In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the reform, tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, The Expropriation...].

Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commonsin which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's property rights advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields.... [Captain Swing 27].

Next page

1234567...11

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege»

Look at similar books to The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Bryan Perrett

Iron Fist: Classic Armoured Warfare

Kevin Alberto Sabio

Raise Your Brown Black Fist 2: MORE Political Shouts of an Angry Afro Latino

Kevin Carson

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy

Kevin Carson

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution

Kevin A. Carson

The Desktop Regulatory State

Douw Steyn

Iron Fist From The Sea: South Africa’s Seaborne Raiders 1978-1988

Smith

The Invisible Hand

Blendi Fevziu

Enver Hoxha. The Iron Fist of Albania

Michael Perelman

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers

Kevin Hearne

Hexed: The Iron Druid Chronicles

Kevin A. Carson

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto

Kevin A. Carson

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy

Discussion, reviews of the book The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guarenteed System of Privilege and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.