[p2p-research] What comes next?

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/12/10, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 1. I believe free market capitalism has largely proved the happiest time for
> humans by far.

> 13. State socialism and communism are the past.
> 14. It is possible that debt-based capitalism is becoming the past.

"Free market capitalism" is an oxymoron.  Historic capitalism (not
only debt-based but based on a myriad government interventions,
subsidies, protections, and artificial property rights) is as much a
statist construct as state socialism -- it just hides behind "free
market" rhetoric in the same way that Stalin appropriated the language
and symbolism of the historic socialist movement.

Without peasant land expropriations and quasi-feudal titles to land,
totalitarian restrictions on self-organization by labor, the forcible
conquest of most of the earth and appropriation of land and mineral
wealth, coercion of other countries into trade relations on unequal
terms, massive subsidies to economic centralization and the most
capital-intensive business models, and the cartelizing effects of
"intellectual property" and assorted regulations, capitalism wouldn't
have *been* capitalism.  Capitalism, as a historic system of political
economy, was really just an outgrowth of feudalism with markets
grafted in and allowed to operate in the interstices to a limited
extent.

Capitalism is becoming the past, but free markets may be a big part of
the future.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html