R. A.:
Impersonal free-market institutions cannot be abstracted, or extracted from the legal and
artificial phenomenon of private property. Free-market capitalism cannot be extricated, or
excerpted, from private-property capitalism. Free-market capitalism cannot be separated,
or segregated, from commercial capitalism, from the capitalist process of commodity
production and exchange for private profit, and for pecuniary expansion. I am against free-
market capitalism, with its private property and private profit practice; but, I am not against
free-exchange socialism. There will be mutualist exchange in mature socialism; there will
no longer be market exchange. There will be free-sharing exchange in socialism come of age; there will no longer be free-market exchange. Socialists are not opposed to market-
free exchange; they are opposed to free-market exchange. This is an important matter to
remember, because people who hate socialism will tell you that socialism is against any
freedom of exchange. No! Socialism is not against free exchange; socialism is against
free-market forms of exchange. Socialism is opposed to for-profit exchange, which is what free-market exchange is all about. Socialism is in favor of not-for-profit exchange.
In a market-free, not-for-profit exchange, one does not exchange with one's neighbor, and
thereby beggar one's neighbor. In socialism, there is no competitive war of each against all
others, such that each tries to impoverish the other.
M. P.:
And by "free-exchange" you mean what? My freedom to engage in exchanges you approve
of?
R. A.:
If people have free access to what they need, in a socialist or communist society, then how
would you be able to engage in free-market profiteering exchange? If all are needs are
provided for, if all citizens are employed according to ability and need, then who will want to
purchase what you are selling? In socialism or communism, just as the political state will
atrophy and wither away, so also will markets evaporate away and money decline in utility.
There is a passage in The Book of Isaiah: "Ho. everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and
without price." If no one privately owns the waterholes and wells, then all people have free
and full access to the water supply. Socialism is about people having free and full access
to what they need, without money and without markets.
Whatever exchange is truly free -- without the concrete context of private property, without
the material ensemble of profiteering competition, and without a generalized and formal
commodification, and the extensive commercialization, of everything -- will be an important,
and an imperative aspect of associated and collective life within a truly libertarian and
democratic socialism.
You yourself approve of certain forms of free-market exchange, while you disapprove of
certain other possible forms of free-market exchange. I do have certain evaluative notions
of what would constitute free exchange within a market-free form of mutualistic reciprocity.
For one thing, I do believe that a truly free exchange must be a truly equitable exchange, a
just and fair exchange between equal persons, an honest and honorable exchange
between respectable persons. Free-market exchange does not impose a fair-exchange
stipulation. Competitive exchange is, more often than not, unfair exchange. The market
is a free-for-all struggle, where a fair-and-square morality can get you booted out.
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"We all are born into and build on circumstances, traditions, and situations not of our own
choosing; yet we do make certain choices that constitute who we are and how we live in
light of these fluid circumstances, traditions, and situations."
-- Cornel West, 1991
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