labor is done individually. While there may be groups, all the work is still done individually. Remuneration is decided between the employer and the employee."
No work is done individually. Take my last workplace, a petrol station. Often I was on the site alone (so the bosses could increase their rate of exploitation by paying one person minimum wage, preventing them from taking proper breaks at the same time), and yet I was working on a site distributing petrol which had been tankered in by other workers, refined by others, drilled and shipped by yet more. I was selling processed food which was delivered by more workers, produced and packeged by others, from milk and beans and sugar produced by more. There was nothing individual about it, and my renumeration was certainly not a negotiation with my boss - he payed the minimum feasible rate. If I had objected, I would have been replaced by someone more desperate. Simple enough stuff, this is the fundamental dynamic by which profit is turned and capital expropriated.
Think of market prices as the traffic lights of the economy - they send the signals to producers about what to produce. Without them, you get chaos.
As opposed to the chaos of food speculation and inflation which is putting the price of food beyond the reach of the class who produce it throughout much of the world, bringing about misery and starvation? Why can't they afford it? Its certainly not because of poor negotiation with the employing class, as any serious collective attempts to "negotiate", through strikes for instance, are met with the repressive power of the bourgeois legal apparatus, courts, riot police, troops and tanks.
rights of the minority trampled on
Which minority is this? The employing class? Preventing minority decision making is a fundamental democratic principle, but capitalists are rarely interested in democracy in any meaningful sense.
We propose not the chaos of the market, nor aurtarky, but a communism of sovereign democratic workers and consumers councils, to bring about production for need, rather than for the necessities of capital accumulation.
The anarchist faq has plenty of information to counter the arguments you have put forward, I recommend looking at it properly. For instance:
I.1.3 What is wrong with markets anyway?A lot. Markets soon result in what are termed "market forces," "impersonal" forces which ensure that the people in the economy do what is required of them in order for the economy to function. The market system, in capitalist apologetics, is presented to appear as a regime of freedom where no one forces anyone to do anything, where we "freely" exchange with others as we see fit. However, the facts of the matter are somewhat different, since the market often ensures that people act in ways opposite to what they desire or forces them to accept "free agreements" which they may not actually desire. Wage labour is the most obvious example of this, for, as we indicated in section B.4, most people have little option but to agree to work for others.
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So, even if we assume a mutualist or market-socialist system of competing self-managed workplaces, it's clear that market forces would soon result in many irrationalities occurring. Most obviously, operating in a market means submitting to the profit criterion. This means that however much workers might want to employ social criteria, they cannot. To ignore profitability would cause their firm to go bankrupt. Markets therefore create conditions that compel workers and consumers to decide things which are not be in their interest, for example introducing deskilling or polluting technology, longer hours, and so on. We could also point to the numerous industrial deaths and accidents which are due to market forces making it unprofitable to introduce adequate safety equipment or working conditions, (conservative estimates for industrial deaths in the USA are between 14 000 and 25 000 per year plus over 2 million disabled), or to increased pollution and stress levels which shorten life spans.
In addition, a market-based system can result in what we have termed "the ethics of mathematics," where things (particularly money) become more important than people. This can have a de-humanising effect, with people becoming cold-hearted calculators who put profits before people. This can be seen in capitalism, where economic decisions are far more important than ethical ones. And such an inhuman mentality can be rewarded on the market. Merit does not "necessarily" breed success, and the successful do not "necessarily" have merit. The truth is that, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on. . . Such qualities might be just the valuable ones for a war of all against all." [For Reasons of State, pp. 139-140] Thorstein Veblen elaborated at length on this theme in The Leisure Class, a classic analysis of capitalist psychology. Needless to be said, if the market does reward such people with success it can hardly be considered as a good thing. A system which elevates making money to the position of the most important individual activity will obviously result in the degrading of human values and an increase in neurotic and psychotic behaviour.
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Any market system is also marked by a continuing need to expand production and consumption. This means that market forces ensure that work continually has to expand, causing potentially destructive results for both people and the planet. Competition ensures that we can never take it easy, for as Max Stirner argued, "[r]estless acquisition does not let us take breath, take a calm enjoyment. We do not get the comfort of our possessions. . . Hence it is at any rate helpful that we come to an agreement about human labours that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil." [The Ego and Its Own, p. 268]
Value needs to be created, and that can only be done by labour. It is ironic that supporters of capitalism, while usually saying that "work" is and always will be hell, support an economic system which must continually expand that "work" (i.e. labour) while deskilling and automating it and those who do it. Anarchists, in contrast, argue that work need not be hell, and indeed, that when enriched by skills and self-management, can be enjoyable. We go further and argue that work need not take all our time and that labour (i.e. unwanted and boring work) can and must be minimised. Hence, while the "anti-work" capitalist submits humanity to more and more labour, the anarchist desires the liberation of "work" and the end of "labour" as a way of life.
In addition, market decisions are crucially conditioned by the purchasing power of those income groups that can back their demands with money. The market is a continuous bidding for goods, resources, and services, with those who have the most purchasing power the winners. This means that the market system is the worst one for allocating resources when purchasing power is unequally distributed. This is why orthodox economists make the convenient assumption of a "given distribution of income" when they try to show that a market-based allocation of resources is the best one (for example, "Pareto optimality"). While a mutualist system should reduce inequality drastically, it cannot be assumed that inequalities will not increase over time. This is because inequalities in resources leads to inequalities of power on the market. Any trade or contract will benefit the powerful more than the powerless, so re-enforcing and potentially increasing the inequalities and power between the parties. This could, over time, lead to a return to capitalism (as Proudhon himself noted, the "original equality [between contractor and workmen] was bound to disappear through the advantageous position of the master and the dependence of the wage-workers." [System of Economical Contradictions, p. 201]).
With the means of life monopolised by one class, the effects of market forces and unequal purchasing power can be terrible. As Allan Engler points out, "[w]hen people are denied access to the means of livelihood, the invisible hand of market forces does not intervene on their behalf. Equilibrium between supply and demand has no necessary connection with human need. For example, assume a country of one million people in which 900,000 are without means of livelihood. One million bushels of wheat are produced. The entire crop is sold to 100,000 people at $10 a bushel. Supply and demand are in equilibrium, yet 900 000 people will face starvation." [Apostles of Greed, pp. 50-51] In case anyone thinks that this just happens in theory, the example of African countries hit by famine gives a classic example of this occurring in practice. There, rich landowners grow cash crops and export food to the developed nations while millions starve in their own.
Lastly, there are the distributional consequences of the market system. As markets inform by 'exit' only -- some products find a market, others do not -- 'voice' is absent. The operation of 'exit' rather than 'voice' leaves behind those without power in the marketplace. For example, the wealthy do not buy food poisoned with additives, the poor consume it. This means a division grows between two environments: one inhabited by those with wealth and one inhabited by those without it. As can be seen from the current capitalist practice of "exporting pollution" to developing countries, this problem can have serious ecological and social effects. So, far from the market being a "democracy" based on "one dollar, one vote," it is an oligarchy in which, for example, the "79 000 Americans who earned the minimum wage in 1987 have the same influence [or "vote"] as Michael Milken, who 'earned' as much as all of them combined." [Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, p. 21]
In other words, markets are always biased in favour of effective demand, i.e. in favour of the demands of people with money. A market may be Pareto-optimal, but it can never (except in the imaginary abstractions of mathematical welfare economics) allocate the necessities of life to those who need them the most.
In addition, markets never internalise external costs. Two people (or companies) who strike a market-rational bargain between themselves need not consider the consequences of their bargain for other people outside their bargain, nor the consequences for the earth. Thus market exchanges are never bilateral agreements as their effects impact on the wider society (in terms of, say, pollution, inequality and so on). The market also ignores the needs of future generations as they always discount the value of the long term future. A payment to be made 1 000 years from now (a mere speck in geological time) has a market value of virtually zero according to any commonly used discount rate. Even 50 years in the future cannot be adequately considered as competitive pressures force a short term perspective on people harmful to present and future generations, plus the ecology of the planet.
This are largely straightforward logical arguments, which even a cursory look at the world would confirm.
For economic proposals, see
these are excerpts from a debate I had with some "libertarians" a while ago, I'm afraid I did rather badly, I was hoping to hear what you guys thought.
"rights of the minority trampled on
no ability to efficiently allocate resources, based on lack of market pricing
no ability to deal with resource or good shortage
Without a market to allow for price-fluctuation, you'll have huge shortages in some areas and large surplusses in others.
Shortages when there is a "price" plan happen because the price is too low. This is what will happen.
without a capital market, there is no way of allocating resources in the ways consumers want. Consider the example of a collective farm that can grow corn or soybeans. If there is only one good being produced, this isn't a problem, as more is always preferable to less. However, since the farm is producing two products, there are hundreds of thousands of different production possibilities: 800 bushels of corn, 200 of soybeans; 650 corn, 350 soybeans; etc, etc. How do we know what to produce? How do we know how much of these commodities should be immediately consumed, and how do we know how much should be used as capital in the production of derivative products? Well, in a free market, consumers will bid up prices of the commodities (or their derivatives) that they want and refrain from buying those they don't; thus, competitive forces will bring the market into equilibrium. Yet how does a central planner know what to produce without these market signals? Answer: they can't. There is no possible way to determine the subjective wants of consumers (that can't be cardinally measured in the first place) without a market. Any decision will be purely arbitrary, thus the huge shortages, surpluses, and waste Knight mentioned. And the example I mentioned only has two products. In a modern, complex economy, production possibilities are virtually infinite.
Think of market prices as the traffic lights of the economy - they send the signals to producers about what to produce. Without them, you get chaos. The only reason centrally planned economies have hung on (with a standard of living a tiny fraction of freer-market economies) is that they have been able to rely on external markets to get pricing information.
this causes even more problems, as the person/firm that gets to the producer first gets the goods, which is not necessarily the most efficient use of scarce resources.
Shortages occur whenever the market price is below the equilibrium price. This may - in the extreme short run - be due to the factors you mentioned, but unless government sets a price ceiling (all in the name of "protecting the consumer" from "price gouging," of course), prices will quickly rise so that the quantity of goods sold will equal the quantity consumers demand. When price ceilings are set below equilibrium, you will create shortages.
Because of scarcity and the need to choose between alternatives, and due to the fact that wants can't be cardinally measured, there is no way to determine what the population desires without a free market .
And how is "their portion" determined in a way that isn't completely and totally arbitrary? How are resources allocated to the most efficient producers, and away from the least efficient producers?
Most often, shortages happen when demand exceeds supply because the cost is simply too low. Allow the price to rise and the shortage won't happen. The market process will work and clear.
However, when there's no rational way to set a price (such as in pareconosocialism), shortages happen because 1. there's no rational means of understanding how much to produce. 2. there's no rational way to set a price that will clear the market without causing a huge leftover demand
Why would I set price ceilings? Why is it necessary to have monetary exchanges at all?
To eliminate the need for double-coincidence of wants that a strictly-barter economy has. And if you don't even have barter, you are way back in the mandatory autarky section.
labor is done individually. While there may be groups, all the work is still done individually. Remuneration is decided between the employer and the employee."