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seretogis: there is no agreement on this. the "free exchange of goods and services" can take place in any number of contexts, particularly given that "free" is a relational term, not an absolute one. you could say that such "free exchange" took place in context dominated by the guild system and official pricing structures because they functioned as a natural horizon against which economic activity was understood---and the notion of "free" in the end means nothing more than coincendence in the perception of the actors between normative ideas and what happens in 3-d: if these perceptions line up, then the activity is "free" if they dont, then it isnt.
capitalism is predicated on specific structural features. it is not a clause-long characterization of relations. it is particular types of firms owned in particular ways, organized along a particular logic (bureaucratic) characterized primarily by the compartmentalization of tasks...capitalist forms operate with particular structures that underpin market relations, particular types of markets (which are legal creations and so are by their nature always at the curious intersection between the state and what is outside the state)....so no, there's no agreement on this.
aside: rather than go round and round, maybe a step to the side would help (here and elsewhere) me (at least, for what it's worth) to understand where you are coming from better:
it seems to me that the problem here is political--you operate in a space that seems geared around being and not being an anarchist.
i am personally far more sympathetic to anarchism than i am to your style of conservative libertarian politics, if only because the anarchists do not have to go through the gymnastics that you seem to require in order to imagine themselves to be opposing the existing order in the name of a radically socialist alternative. since radical socialism is often understood as direct democracy, i think that you are closer to "les anar" than you like to think. so to differentiate your position from its left correlate, you have to figure out ways to rework the notion of capitalism.
when you do that, you end up repeating all kinds of naive ideological propositions, not least of which is that markets are some kind natural formation (and by extensions are not legal constructs) and so can be opposed somehow to the operations of a modern state.
i dont buy that: i think was markets are varies as the context that enframes them vary.
but if you strip this out of your positions, as you have outlined them here, then it seems to me that you are really quite close of libertarian socialism or council anarchism, except that you dont like the terminology.
is that accurate?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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