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+1 vote
Note: This is in no way an Antagonistic question, I just legitimately lack full understanding in this respect.  
Something that I hear a lot from Anarchists is how wherever you go you cannot escape "Corporate Propaganda" and the sort. I occasionally hear this from Mutualists and free market socialists, but, wouldn't we fall to the same ills with the free market as opposed to a decentralized planned economy (I'm not saying I support either or I am just curious about this aspect of Mutualism) wouldn't there still be advertisements and products to push? How would free market socialism escape the "waiting in line for six hours for a new iPhone" thing that I know so many despise. Sorry if this is an awful question or one that irritates anyone, i'm not trying to, i'm just trying to learn.
by (240 points)
you might consider in any "economy" or "market" how money gets created, who creates it, and whether or not it requires debt and interest.

i don't know of anything other than a gift economy that works fundamentally different from the economies of the world as we know them today. by that i mean, no money creation exists, and the concepts of tabulating debts and accruing interest do not appear. people freely give and receive things, skills, materials, co-ordinate activity, and so on. personally, i have no interest in iphones.
As neither of those things, I'm not gonna answer, but you might want to check out the Libertarian Labrynth/Contr'un. I don't know that Shawn posts here, but he is involved in some Reddit discussions, or was (I don't understand how to find shit in Reddit, or I'd post here, but here is the Libertarian Labrynth: http://contrun.libertarian-labyrinth.org/

1 Answer

+1 vote
No social system is likely to solve all problems of supply and demand, so you might find yourself in a long line once in a while in any sort of anarchist society. But the particular mix of corporate propaganda, sweatshop labor, planned obsolescence, etc. that lines people up for an iphone is probably a hothouse flower only sustainable by capitalism. Without large-scale, systematic exploitation you probably can't sustain the sorts of global production networks that make an iphone possible, and without capitalist property norms, there is unlikely to be much incentive to try. Market anarchism would depend on confronting what is clearly antithetical to anarchism in existing property and exchange norms, so if such a thing were to emerge it would almost certainly have very different incentives built into the economy. It's hard to predict the way those changes would shape things like consumer electronics, but the likelihood of a "decentralization" of demand seems pretty great. And quite a number of mutualists aren't even really "market anarchists" in any strong sense, and are likely to further complicate things by insisting on sustainability and applying ridiculously rigorous notions of mutuality to whatever shared norms exist. Pretty quickly, I think, the iphone scenario would just become impossible, at which point we would need to find other means to waste our days according to our needs and pleasures, and perhaps an anarchist approach that left plenty of room for both cooperation and market exchange might serve us pretty well there.
by (450 points)
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