Kevin Carson

Kevin Amos Carson (United States, 1963) is an American political economy writer who self-identifies as an anarchist without adjectives. He is known in the left-libertarian sphere for theorizing since 2006 a renewal of an ancient economic theory associated with historical anarchism known as mutualism and for self-identifying with the tradition of free-market individualist anarchism, however in 2015 he decided to abandon all of these. labels because they consider them self-restrictive of their thinking.

Thought

Carson began by being close to paleoconservative thought and then moved towards the levellers, the commonwealthmen, the Anglo-republicans of the century XVIII, distributism and similar movements. Carson says that his first major influence was probably Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, which made him "read about corporate welfare, economies of scale, and economic decentralization" while also beginning to see himself as a "leftist" and joined the Wobblies (IWW). At that stage he also approached anarchist thought, among which were Boston anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker as well as anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess. He was also interested in Carl Oglesby and other figures of the North American New Left.

Carson became known in 2006 for creating a "neomutualist" theory — a left-libertarian (pro-market) revisionism of the older mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his 19th-century followers XIX, which was not necessarily pro-market — which according to its author exists on "the outer edges of free-market liberalism and socialism." Carson incorporated into this new mutualism a synthesis of the criticisms that both the Austrian school and Marxism have already made of monopoly capitalism. In his book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy Kevin A. Carson tried to rescue the old mutualism of the 19th century, integrating marginalist critiques into the labor theory of value—a theory that most economists abandoned to end of the XIX century. Carson finally announced the abandonment of his mutualistic economic theory project in 2015.

Carson's neomutualist theory—currently abandoned by its author—is favorable to market economics and destatization through mutual societies, and predicts that under the operation of markets freed from statist regulations and privileges, private land ownership It would be based exclusively on productive use and occupation, abolishing private ownership of absentee land, and that competitive pressure would lower the prices of reproducible goods and services, tending to make them equal to production costs. He also believes that cooperativism would be a predominant form of social organization in a free market society as understood by this theory. Carson's theory maintains that "state intervention is what differentiates capitalism from the free market" and that capitalism was created on "an act of expropriation as massive as feudalism," and asserts that capitalism could not exist with the absence of the State. Carson's theory states that if a true laissez faire system were put into practice—assuming the assumptions that labor has an objective value from the labor theory of value—it would result in to a system where the ability to extract a profit from labor and capital would be insignificant. The benefits would be so insignificant that the separation of labor from property and the subordination of labor to capital would be impossible, achieving an egalitarian society where there would be no difference in income between working as a self-employed entrepreneur, for a salary, or being part of a cooperative..

Reviews

Criticism from libertarians has been present against Carson's neomutualist theory. Laissez faire capitalist George Reisman accuses mutualism, and Carson, of supporting exploitation when it does not recognize the right of the individual to protect the land he has mixed with his labor if he happens not to be using it. Reisman considers the confiscation of these lands to be the theft of the product of labor and has said that "mutualism claims to oppose the exploitation of labor, that is, the theft of any part of its product. But when it comes to labor that has been mixed with the land, it turns a blind eye out and turns to the side of the exploiter." Economist and anarcho-capitalist Walter Block says of holding the mutualist labor theory of value in the Today, as Carson does, "For anyone in this day and age to even take this doctrine seriously, much less try to actually defend it, is equivalent to doing the same with respect to widely and appropriately rejected positions like flat earth.", or the phlogiston theory. It is, in a word, medieval.” Carson countered by saying that Block misrepresented some of his postulates and probably did not read his book.

Roderick T. Long criticizes the argument of Kevin A. Carson, who maintains that full private property rights do not follow from the concept of self-ownership, Long presents the argument that if one accepts self-ownership, as Carson does, then appropriation rights without Lockean condition must be accepted. However, Long accepts the concept of public ownership as valid and writes that communities can acquire land "by collective appropriation" which could "[offer] a basis for non-conditional Lockeans to recognize the property regime of communities as legitimate." mutualist, Georgist, and Lockean-conditionist communities.

Kevin Carson is also characterized by using his own definitions of "socialism" and "capitalism", where the first is closer and the second is far from the free market, definitions that according to Carson are inspired by the ancient Ricardian socialists or in remote authors of the socialist tradition such as Thomas Hodgskin who contrast with the terminology commonly used in contemporary political philosophy, for which he has received criticism from George Reisman for obscuring the theory with ambiguous terminology. Carson gives as an answer that he has chosen using this terminology to continue what he says is a historical tradition, while arguing that the structure of capitalism as it has actually existed would be very different from that of an authentic free market, which is why, as he defends, capitalism and free market are not synonyms.

Books

He has three published books:

• Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (translated to Spanish by Innisfree in 2020 as 'Studies on Mutualist Political Economy')
• Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
• Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto