Charles Johnson on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism
If you’ve ever been to Kevin Carson’s blog, you’ll have noticed its title – Mutualist Blog: Free-Market Anti-Capitalism. This may strike some as puzzling. What is capitalism, after all, if not an embrace of the free market?
Well actually it can be quite a lot of different things, as Charles Johnson explains.
Johnson notes four different concepts of ‘capitalism’: (1) free markets; (2) corporatism; (3) wage-labor economics; and (4) consumerism. These are all different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive (save for the first two), concepts and different people depending on self-interest, politics, and so forth may think of capitalism in one or more of these terms. (Johnson goes into some detail on each, but it’s too much to excerpt here.)
Free markets are how many libertarians and anarcho-capitalist types have come to think of capitalism, but free