Counter-Economy

Description

Kevin Carson:

"The late Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), in the New Libertarian Manifesto, coined the term “counter-economics” to describe the building of an economy outside the corporate-state nexus, and operating below its radar. The counter-economy would evade both state regulations and state taxation, starve the state of the revenues it needed to operate, and eventually supplant the corporate-state economy.

Unfortunately, SEK3 took too narrow a view of the counter-economy: rather than viewing illegality as a means to an end, he viewed it as an end in itself, and as the defining characteric of counter-economics. That approach is unsatisfactory, since it means we define our efforts in terms of the state rather than in terms of our own self-derived goals.

Indeed, the state’s own statism is a means to an end, and defined largely in relation to our own self-determined goals: to prevent us from supporting ourselves in comfort, independently of the corporate-state nexus and wage employment, and from receiving the full product of our labor.

If counter-economics is the means, we should also remember that the means is the end in progress. Evading the state is not an end in itself; it is, rather, a means of accomplishing what we would want to accomplish for its own sake, even if the state never existed. Counter-economics is the building of the kind of society and economy we want right now. And if we define it that way, it dovetails nicely with many similar concepts prevalent on the libertarian, decentralist Left: counter-institutions, dual power, and (that wonderful Wobbly slogan) “building the foundation of the new society within the shell of the old.” (http://c4ss.org/content/724)

Source

• Kevin Carson. Barter Networks and the Counter-Economy