Markets, the left and collectivism

Will Davies makes a very good point here and here:

The notion that the Left stands for cuddly togetherness, while the right stands for nasty selfishness makes no sense.

Spot on. I'd add that, if it's "cuddly togetherness" - community and collectivism - you want, you should favour free markets.
Hayek called the market a "catallaxy", a word meaning not only "exchange" but also "to admit into the community" - thus capturing the fact that markets can build fellow-feeling.
One reason for this is in the very nature of markets. Success in a genuine market (as distinct from rent-seeking exploitatitive hierarchies) requires one to ask: what can I do for others? That builds a regard for others. And markets allow minorities to integrate into society, by showing that they have valuable talents. It's a small step from there to being valued as people.
And as Deirdre McCloskey shows in here and in this book, markets can promote virtues the "left" has traditionally identified with collectivism - trust, faith, even love.
Indeed, even what seem to be the most ruthlessly individual markets of all - Chicago futures pits - can develop norms of reciprocity. In this book, Donald Mackenzie shows how Leo Melamed used these norms to encourage trading in new index futures in the early 80s.
So, markets can build community.
By contrast, the "left's" efforts to do so can easily spill into a nasty narrow-minded nationalist exclusivity: take (please do) Hodge or Byrne. Indeed, the "little platoons" of Womens' Institutes, boy scouts, and churches - self-governing collectivities - are at least as valued by the "right" as left".
So, Will's right. Collectivism (in its best sense) and community are not leftist values, still less anti-market ones.   

Comments

[Phil]

Some speed-skating here, methinks.

Reciprocity? A market without any built-in asymmetry of power - a market where everyone is equally free to trade or not to trade - might foster reciprocity. Such markets are special cases rather than the norm.

As for collectivism, I'll just note that you've done nothing to associate it with the market, so I won't bother challenging what would have been a highly counter-intuitive proposition.

[Matthew]

"Success in a genuine market (as distinct from rent-seeking exploitatitive hierarchies) requires one to ask: what can I do for others?"

Isn't this missing the rather large question of "Who has the most money to spend", and markets will inevitably focus on them?

[Mark Wadsworth]

Seems fair enough.

[ad]

"A market without any built-in asymmetry of power - a market where everyone is equally free to trade or not to trade - might foster reciprocity."

That is not necessary. All that is necessary is that you have a choice of people to do business with, and some means of judging how reliable they are (reputation, past experience, legal guarantees etc).

You will then prefer to deal with the people who are more trustworthy.

It is just another way for people to compete: lower cost, higher quality, greater trustworthiness etc. The same argument applies to any quality you might judge people on.

Power, as such, is not necessary, only options.

[Phil]

"Power, as such, is not necessary, only options."

So all that matters is that the crowd of day labourers have a choice of gates to queue outside?

I needed to eat today, I'll need to eat tomorrow and I'll need to eat the day after that. You need my help in order to go on producing widgets, but not at any price; if you can't sell enough to pay me and make a profit, you'll lay me off and tell the other workers to make more. Labour markets are inherently asymmetrical, which is to say coercive.

[Jack]

There is honour among thieves. I believe that there are even conventions of stolen credit card detail traders.

This is not what people who object to markets are objecting to.

[Kevin Carson]

Phil: Most of those "built-in asymmetries of power" are built in by the state. Let's start with the whole primitive accumulation thing--the Enclosures and other abrogations of the producing classes' customary property rights in the land. Don't you think that without those mass expropriations, the industrial revolution might have gone a bit differently? The working classes would have had a great deal more bargaining power from the ability to support themselves on the land if a job offer wasn't to their liking--not to mention the effects of social controls like the Laws of Settlement on the bargaining power of labor.

And the offers for employment might have come from considerably different parties, if wealth had not been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of capitalist, but had rather been widely distributed among the populace. Same goes for the various forms of legal privilege that enforce artificial scarcity of land and capital.

[Will Davies]

There is much here that I'd agree with. But for the sake of honesty and clarity, I think I need to point out differences between what Chris writes in his post and what I am getting at in the Soundings article.

Soundings' readership/constituency tends to be an intelligent, theoretically literate but failry Old Left bunch. Someone like Zygmunt Bauman is fairly emblematic of this, constantly arguing that market society leads to ever greater fragmentation and postmodern-type experiences of fleeting inner experiences.

I am trying to say two things:
1. Empirically speaking (Here I agree with Chris) it is not the case that the free market in 2007 does not produce collectives. Even David Harvey's new book on neoliberalism accepts that 'neoliberalisation' does not produce the individualism that 'neoliberalism' proclaims.

2. Normatively speaking (and here we disagree), this produces new objects of critique for the Left. I am trying to alert the left to the iniquities of these new collectives, and how they fall short of those that the left might believe in (the problem being that it no longer knows what the latter are). Politics built on ideas of market failure and competitiveness does involve collectivism, but is not social democracy.