[p2p-research] what to think of the market

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/29/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> A friend of mine just returned from a tour of Iceland.  She found it
> extremely commons-oriented--shared grazing rights...lots of community assets
> (heated geo-thermal pools for instance which even small towns have)...lots
> of fish in the diet from the sea, etc.

Some conventional liberals like to  point to Somalia as an example of
the ultimate free market society, without a state framework.  The
market anarchists and anarcho-capitalists have stood the example on
its head, arguing that Somalia--for all its problems--probably has a
better quality of life than it did under any of the stable centralized
regimes propped up by the USSR and U.S.  The proper comparison, they
say, is not between Somalia and stable Western countries with
governments, but between Somalia now and Somalia before.

Socialist anarchists like Iain McKay of the Anarchist FAQ stand the
example back on its feet and argue that, far from being an
anarcho-capitalist utopia, Somalia has other social anarchist
stabilizing factors like a large element of common land (with ultimate
property and reversionary rights to the clan), extended families and
villages as income pooling units, etc.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html