An-com Wayne Price critiques Carson’s individualist-anarchism.
By Wayne Price
Anarchist Library
Kevin Carson is attempting to resurrect anarchist economic theory. This is interesting because most current anarchist political economy is speculation about a post-capitalist, post-revolutionary, economy—what it would look like and how it might work. There is little or nothing of an analysis of how present-day capitalism functions. For that, most anarchists either rely on some variety of conventional (pro-capitalist) economics or they look to aspects of Marxism. The latter is the strategy I used in my book (Price 2013)—with the subtitle, “an anarchist introduction to Marx’s critique of political economy.” There have been anarchists using Karl Marx’s economic views—while rejecting his statist politics—beginning with Michael Bakunin. (And there has always been a minority of Marxists who look toward the more libertarian and humanistic side of Marx’s work, whose politics are close to anarchism.)
Carson has seen better days.
Agreed. But his older stuff is still worth checking out.
True, I liked what I (the little, I am forced to say) read of “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy”, but it is hard to care for his opinions in anything that isn’t economics.