Chris Wyatt
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Freedom in the guild system
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The disputes about what counts as interference with freedom have a long and varied history. This chapter adds to this mountainous body of literature by contrasting the guild cooperative with the private enterprise economies, both taken in ideal-typical terms. Expositions on the Hayekian and the radical republican conceptions of coercion are provided. The former regards coercion as both interpersonal and intentional, as the arbitrary instrument of someone else’s will, while the latter has a wider understanding in the sense that coercion exists not only within the workplace but also through systemic forms of domination, where it is experienced in unpremeditated ways. Particular attention is paid to the radical republican claim that the forms through which anonymous interdependency is organised in class-divided societies result in a loss of real freedom. Following suit, the chapter argues that as the terms of transactions and the dissemination of productive assets are greatly significant to the meaningful exercise of agency, an adequate conception of freedom needs to incorporate a more extensive account of coercion. The chapter then explains that in the guild system, as there is an egalitarian access to productive resources, and because there are no plutocracies exerting disproportionate control over the means of investment, there is no structural domination as conceived by the radical republicans. This argument is completed by weaving together the anarchist voluntary and free communal service principles through an associational anarchist reading of freedom to do/become and freedom from. Through these sets of social relations, anonymous interdependence is reorganised felicitously.

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Associational anarchism

Towards a left-libertarian conception of freedom

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