market anarchism Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Embracing the Antinomies

July 15, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

[This post originally appeared at the Center for a Stateless Society, as part of the Mutual Exchange on Anarchy and Democracy.] Embracing the Antinomies [including a response to Gabriel Amadej] It should be clear that one of the key conflicts in these debates about anarchy and democracy is a struggle over the nature of anarchism. And it is probably safe to say that nearly all anarchists wrestle with the difficulties of defining that term. Part of the difficulty is that anarchism is simultaneously a kind of system and a matter of tradition. It is at once a political—or anti-political—ideology, […]

Encounters and Transactions

September 9, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur

I expect that for many of the readers of this blog, the most significant of the dangling questions is the one opened in the post on “Anarchy, understood in all its senses.” I’m surprised that there has not been more comment on the main points in that post, which demonstrates that for Proudhon, in one of the works that social anarchists have generally championed, the anarchy of the laissez faire market and the anti-authoritarian anarchy of the anarchists were in some senses so closely connected that Proudhon was indifferent to which meaning was applied to the word “anarchy,” and that […]

Mutualism and “Market Anarchism”

August 3, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s tackle a controversial question: Is mutualism a form of “market anarchism”? It’s a useful sort of question, even though the correct answer is probably “that depends….” Since mutualism has its roots in a world where the distinctions that make a label like “market anarchism” useful simply didn’t exist, distinctions which may themselves run counter to the “classical” mutualist project, it’s tempting to say “no.” But since we’re in the process of rediscovering and reimaging mutualism in a world where the question of “markets” is of real importance, we have to resist the temptation. For those mutualists who have […]