-Richard Stallman, Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions. Good scientists are by definition anarchists.

-Theo Wallimann, biologist at ETH Zurich

The individual is the basic functional unit of innovation. Institutions provide resources — capital, human and fixed. But free people can achieve a lot with very little.

Steve Wozniak built Apple from a garage (with the help of frontman Jobs), and now it reigns among the largest companies in the world (not to glorify the crooks at Apple — they are patent trolls and sweatshop labor exploiters).

Do-It-Yourself scientists working in hackerspaces are positioned to make significant contributions with low overhead and little formal training (becoming necessary and valuable apprenticeship sites as the current higher education system deteriorates). The state has yet to heavily clamp down, but, because such freedom threatens the status quo, we can expect intervention to intensify.

Stigmergic Science

The magnitude of creative productivity is most strongly correlated with the number of researchers, and less with the talent of the individuals involved, and fortunately the positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle) of technology continues to lower the cost of instrumentation. That is, happy accident probability is proportional to time invested rather than just skill.

Establishment science institutions are somewhat impeded from developing groundbreaking, disruptive or revolutionary technologies, for three reasons:

First, they need to be able to monopolize them. Anything that lends itself to decentralization (solar power, self-replicating 3D printers) threatens the established order and will be resisted to the end. If a modern-day Nikola Tesla were to invent a disruptive energy technology, s/he would likely be suppressed, just as J.P. Morgan and Edison suppressed [1] Tesla.

“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has, as its ultimate goal, the betterment of humanity.”                            – Nikola Tesla

Second, visible and legally liable institutions must abide the patent monopoly structure. They must pay for the use of ideas. Garage developers fly below the radar. Thus, R&D is cheaper, but patents make marketing a product prohibitively expensive and retard deliverability.

Finally, far-out ideas make established scientists uncomfortable. If your entire career was built around the fax machine, phrenology, the geocentric model or the beeper, you’re not too excited about these crazy kids and their ideas. There is a lot of untapped brainpower out there. The state education mill is a barrier to entry, a great divider — a credential firewall. MOOCs and badges may displace the academic cartel, but not without vested interests fighting to halt creative destruction along the way.

Aided by Randomness

“Academic Libertarian,” statistician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb recognizes that “stochastic tinkering” rather than systematic, institutional agendas yield the greatest discoveries. Taleb is best known for coining the term “Black Swan,” to describe hard-to-predict and disproportionately momentous events.

Stochastic tinkering is a process of trial and error, present in all creative endeavors, where randomness plays a great role. Taleb writes, in his essay The Birth of Stochastic Science (PDF):

The world is giving us more “cheap options”, and options benefit principally from uncertainty. So I am particularly optimistic about medical cures. To the dismay of many planners, there is an acceleration of the random element in medicine putting the impact of discoveries in a class of Mandelbrotian power-law style payoffs.

It is compounded by another effect: exposure to serendipity. People are starting to realize that a considerable component of the gravy in medical discoveries is coming from the “fringes”, people finding what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs lead to Viagra, angiogenesis drugs lead to the treatment of macular degeneration, tuberculosis drugs treat depression and Parkinson’s disease, etc., but that even discoveries that we claim to come from research are themselves highly accidental, the result of tinkering narrated ex post and dressed up as design. The high rate of failure should be sufficiently convincing of the lack of effectiveness of design. […]

All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties; stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system [sic].

I am also optimistic that the academy is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style. But what I am saying is not totally new.

Accepting that technological improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the “empirics”. Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine. Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic, and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.

Radical Biology

As a biologist, I can strongly affirm the accuracy of Taleb’s notion of “accidental” discovery in this field. Biology is extremely complex and experimental outcomes are unpredictable.

Living organisms and cells require time to grow and change. There are too many moving parts and holding them constant is difficult because we don’t even know how many parts there are and how they interact. Metabolic pathways are considered both discrete and continuous, but no one doubts that they are dynamically equilibrating systems that cannot be easily modeled, not as amenable to tinkering like mechanical or chemical engineering — even basic biology is expensive and has historically been the purview of big-budget institutions.

That is changing.

Theory, as usual, has a weak barrier to entry. Projects like TinkerCell allow cellular biologists to design their own metabolic pathways and share them open-source with a community, dramatically boosting stigmergic idea development and cross-pollination. What one wrote on a pad and paper and filed away in a dusty file cabinet for posterity will soon be indexed and searchable.

“Wetlabs,” however, are the big story. These labs are now becoming available to those not associated with universities or corporations. Anyone in the community can pitch in and do biology. Science enthusiasts are organizing IRL to poke and prod at the mystery of life (Making the Modern Do-It-Yourself Biology Laboratory, Singularity Hub).

Molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen established Genspace, a major DIY lab in Brooklyn. Some highlights from her TED talk:

“You might be asking yourself, ‘What would I do in a biolab?’ Well, it wasn’t that long ago we were asking, ‘What would anyone do with a personal computer?’”

“The press had a tendency to consistently overestimate [biohackers’] capabilities and underestimate our ethics.”

“DIY [biotech] people from all over the world … got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. That’s a lot more than conventional science has done.”

“[In a DIY bio lab,] you can work on a project and you don’t have to justify to anyone that it’s going to make a lot of money, that it’s going to save mankind, or even that it’s feasible.”

If you want to get involved, check out this listing of DIY wetlabs, or start your own.

If the success of young scientists like Jack Andraka (who surfed the internet and developed a promising and cheap pancreatic cancer screening test — with the help of professionals) are any indication, it’s better to have a lot of moderately-trained people doing science than just a vanguard of highly trained experimenters.

Regarding experiments, something can be said for quantity over quality, perhaps for two reasons: First, experiments take time. The more the merrier. Second, accidental, wild, speculative results are born from intractable randomness — and positive Black Swans may be more likely to come out of science than, say, finance or statecraft.

In this era of big science, the most important lesson to be learned from […] the achievements of countless amateurs is that scientific observations and discoveries don’t necessarily require giant government grants and huge teams of researchers with specialized degrees. Small science still works, and it often works during off hours, weekends, and holidays when professionals are generally at home or on vacation. -Forrest M. Mims III (1999), writing in Science.

Paternalism Comes Knocking

As is evident from several millennia of prudent governance by states, the right balance between free-form innovation and legal restriction will be struck. Statists are already calling for regulation, but restrictions are quite unenforceable (the tools and knowledge of garage science are becoming ever more accessible).

A number of regulatory approaches have been put forward: requiring biosafety training for all practitioners through programs designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, registering community labs with government agencies, requiring some type of personal liability insurance, excluding felons from DIY activities, and instituting screenings for loyalty and integrity. [2]

The feds have already goofed up an investigation, branding an artist as a bioterrorist.

Casting a long shadow over the DIY bio movement is the case of Steven J. Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The case has been held up as a warning about overly aggressive law enforcement in cases involving home laboratories. While not a scientist—professional or amateur—Kurtz uses DNA and other biological materials in his artwork.

In May 2004, Kurtz and his wife, Hope, had been preparing commissioned works when Hope Kurtz died at their home. Her husband called 911. Her death was later determined to be of natural causes. In attending to Hope Kurtz, emergency personnel observed Petri dishes containing bacteria cultures and food–testing equipment that was considered suspicious. They contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Authorities later told Kurtz he was being investigated for bioterrorism, and, eventually, Kurtz and Robert E. Ferrell, former chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Human Genetics, were indicted on mail and wire fraud for their alleged efforts to obtain biological organisms from a lab that was not allowed to sell to individuals.

In April 2008, a federal judge dismissed the mail and wire fraud charges against Kurtz, noting that there was insufficient proof to go forward. Ferrell was fined $500 after pleading guilty to a count of mailing an injurious article, a misdemeanor.

Scientists had feared the case would be precedent–setting, but instead it has turned out to be a cautionary lesson about the dangers of under–educated law enforcement personnel who cannot tell the difference between a bioterrorist lab and an artist’s studio using common bacteria.

The FBI says it has done much to make sure the Kurtz incident stays as the exception rather than the rule. Many safeguards and precautions have been put into place since the announcement, most important, the education of local law enforcement about DIY scientists and labs.

State enforcement will prove incapable of preventing anyone from, say, dumping noxious chemicals or developing the next superbug (indeed, states are already doing that — they just try to keep them in the lab) — but bio-hackerspace communities might. Everyone else’s experiments tend to be known to others, and getting away with anything sinister is much harder.

The greatest risk in state control of scientific inquiry is this: the government is likely to suppress inventions that threaten profit and mass control. Energy and medicine (PDF) are particularly sensitive areas for the corporation-state. Scientists of the future must be skeptical of idea management by means of centralized systematic violence.

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.”- Carl Sagan, UCLA commencement speech on June 14, 1991

What they call the “social order,” we call predation.

What they call “unregulated” chaos, we recognize as a driver of innovation.

The state cannot be overcome by force, because another state would rise from the ashes of the human mind.

The scarcity and dependence on centralized expertise that appears to justify states can be abolished with the spread of disruptive technology.

Michael Shermer. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

If you can get past the flaws in Shermer’s book (things others might prefer to think of as my fixations, hangups, and dead horses), it’s quite an enjoyable read.

But given my obsession with the ubiquity of vulgar libertarianism, comparable to Captain Ahab’s with Moby Dick, I can’t refrain from pointing out the flaws.

Before I say a lot of nasty things about Shermer’s ideological assumptions, I have to make the disclaimer up front that he comes across as thoroughly decent and likeable on a personal level. That he takes for granted certain ideological assumptions that I have long since declared war on is no reflection on him as a human being. Shermer states, as one of his fundamental guiding principles, a dictum of Spinoza’s: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” I’ll try to keep to that spirit as closely as I can in discussing my caveats about Shermer’s book.

Nevertheless, Shermer displays a considerable vulgar libertarian element in his background assumptions. His writing, over and over, tacitly equates the phenomena of existing corporate capitalism to the “free market.” He constantly uses things like Bill Gates, Wal-Mart, and other transnational corporations to illustrate the principles of the “market,” and treats them as living embodiments of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. He equates “the market” to the existing corporate economy, quoting attacks on the evils of corporate power and then “proving” they can’t be right because “that’s not how the market works.” Implicit in his rejection of The Corporation, of Chomsky and Zinn, is the assumption that the present system, the one they’re attacking, is the market.

A parallel theme is alleged popular hostility or resistance to “free market economics,” which he assumes is motivated by irrationality. A particularly atrocious example (I’m tempted to call it a howler) occurs on page 16:

Folk economics leads us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin, and mistrust the invisible hand of the market. What we do not understand we often fear, and what we fear we often loathe. (As oneNew Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”)

There you have it: invisible hand = excessive wealth = Bill Gates. Anybody who has problems with Bill Gates and excessive wealth must harbor an irrational fear and/or hatred for “the invisible hand of the market.” After all, it’s not like Gates could have gotten so rich by any other means, like the visible hand of the state’s “intellectual property” [sic] monopoly, could he? And we know all those other billionaires got rich through the operation of the “free market.” I mean, we hear it from neoliberal politicians and commentators at MSNBC every friggin’ day, so it must be true. This all reminds me of Dick Cheney in 2000 boasting, of Halliburton’s wealth, that “Government had nothing to do with it.”

The public mindset isn’t really all that irrational, if you keep in mind that their hostility is not so much to free markets, as to what has been called “free markets” by the usual gang of corporate apologists.

I’m about as close to a free market fundamentalist as you can get. But if I thought the “free market” meant what Tom Friedman and other neoliberal politicians and talking heads meant by it, I’d hate it more than anybody.

The average person sees Wal-Mart, Microsoft, downsizings, oil company profits, offshoring, and all the other unsavory phenomena of the corporate global economy defended in “free market” language, and his response is “if that’s the free market, then the free market be damned.” It’s essentially the same reaction as Huckleberry Finn’s. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas’s “property rights” in Jim. He took the slave system’s ideological self-justification at face value–and then said “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the “free market.” And his response is the same: “If this is the free market, I’ll go to hell.”

Shermer asks why people reject Adam Smith’s theory of economics, despite its being so profound and proven. The answer just might be that the rhetoric of free markets, so closely associated with Adam Smith, has been misappropriated to defend a system of corporate power far closer to what Smith condemned than to what he supported. Adam Smith, like the other early classical liberals, was a revolutionary thinker who attacked the entrenched privileges of the landed oligarchy and the mercantile capitalists. It’s almost impossible to go to a mainstream “libertarian” website these days without seeing the thought of Adam Smith misappropriated to defend the modern institution most closely resembling the landed interests and privileged monopolists of the Old Regime: the giant, state-subsidized, state-protected corporation.

As I suggested earlier, most people who display egalitarian reactions against existing inequalities and concentrations of wealth may well believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But that’s only because the rhetoric of “free markets” has been perverted, for the most part, by apologists for those concentrations of wealth which result from privilege and other forms of state intervention. What they hate, they rightly hate. They’re wrong to believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But it’s hard to blame them, when you can’t turn on the TV or read an editorial page without seeing a fundamentally statist economic system of special privilege and protection for big business and the rich described as “our free market system.”

In fairness to Shermer, he sometimes tips his hat to the existence of things like corporate welfare, but for the most part he treats it as a minor deviation from a corporate economy that is, on the whole, a pretty close approximation of the “free market.” If you eliminated the subsidies to military contractors and agribusiness, what you’d wind up with is, in all its essentials, something pretty much like the economy we actually have: a global economy dominated by a few hundred corporations.

For example, he condemns the popular, zero-sum view of foreign trade as an “abandonment of free market principles.” And he cites Nobel laureate Edward Prescott on the foolish popular belief that it’s “government’s economic responsibility to protect U.S. industry….”

But in fact, the overwhelming bulk of the transnational corporate economy is a zero-sum game.

For starters, the main purpose of the World Bank and foreign aid over the past sixty years has been to subsidize the export of capital and offshoring of production from the West, by funding the transportation and utility infrastructure necessary for capital investment overseas to be profitable. The bulk of the U.S. military budget is taken up by the Navy, whose primary purpose is to keep the sea lanes open. No less an authority than Adam Smith argued that such expenses should be borne by those actually engaged in foreign trade. The United States has systematically intervened over the past century to keep landed oligarchies in power, to thwart land reform, and generally–whether by coup or by death squad– to make the world safe for Enclosure. Between this, and the helpfulness of authoritarian regimes in keeping labor docile, supplying sweatshop industry has been supplied with a labor force eager (or rather desperate) to work on whatever terms are offered.

But if that’s for starters, it’s still barely a start. The elephant in the living room is the role of “intellectual property” [sic] in the transnational corporate economy. Despite Prescott’s exasperated lament quoted above, the central function of government in the present system of global trade is to protect transnational capital from competition. One of the most important functions of the GATT Uruguay Round’s industrial property provisions, with their long patent terms, is to lock Western TNCs into control of the current generation of production technology, and thus to prevent the emergence of native-owned competition and lock Third World countries into a permanent position of supplying sweatshop labor and raw materials. It’s also probably not a coincidence that all the profitable sectors in the corporate global economy are those whose business models are dependent either on IP (entertainment and software), direct subsidies (armaments and aviation), or both (agribusiness, biotech, electronics). “Intellectual property” serves exactly the same protectionist function, for transnational corporations in today’s global economy, that tariffs served for the old national industries.

The corporate global economy, in other words, is a statist construct to its very core, and has no more to do with “free markets” than Stalinism had to do with workers’ power. And Shermer explicitly refers to agreements like CAFTA asexamples of “free trade.” The primary practitioners of the “mercantilist zero-sum protectionism” he decries are the transnational corporations themselves. It’s no wonder the public hates “free trade,” if it hears it identified with such practices.

Fortunately, given my background as both a dissident free market libertarian and a dissident libertarian socialist, I’m pretty good at “eating what I want and spitting out the rest,” even when it’s embedded in an ideological framework I disagree with. I’ve had to do this with thinkers ranging from Marx to Mises. And once you get past my hangups, there’s a lot of useful and fascinating material in Shermer’s book, presented in a very engaging manner.

If you enjoy the work of Desmond Morris and similar evolutionary approaches to human social behavior, you should thoroughly enjoy this book. Shermer discusses the apparent irrationalities of human economic behavior, and how the same behavior would make perfect sense from the standpoint of the behaviors selected for in a small primate hunter-gatherer group.

I especially enjoyed his discussions of egalitarianism and reciprocity, and found much of it relevant to the material I posted earlier in draft Chapter Eleven: The Abolition of Privilege.

My main disagreement with Shermer on this subject is with his assumption that such predispositions are contrary to the ideally rational behavior of a utility-maximizing market actor.

He is not entirely wrong on this, of course. There are some ingrained human cognitive biases that do result in irrational behavior.

But for the most part, I believe human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism work entirely with the grain of a genuine market. The real-world phenomena that people condemn, on the basis of values of reciprocity and egalitarianism, in fact result from violations of genuine market principles.

In Chapter Eleven, I discussed why I believe a genuine market, absent the zero-sum effects of privilege, would result in a comparatively egalitarian outcome. The human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism do not operate at cross-purposes to the market, but are the behavioral basis for it. Reciprocity and equal exchange are the normal outcomes of a market operating free from interference. People are most likely to say “That’s not fair” precisely when equal exchange has been thwarted, and a zero-sum situation created in its place, by state intervention on behalf of the privileged.

A good example comes immediately after the Bill Gates howler quoted above.

In most countries, [consternation over income polarization] leads to political policy to raise the poor and lower the rich, because during our evolutionary tenure we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose) world, in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss….

Today, however, we live in a nonzero world….

Um, no. We would live in a nonzero world, if we actually had a free market. What we have, however, is a system of political capitalism in which the state has systematically intervened in the market to raise the rich and lower the poor; to subsidize the operating costs of big business; to enforce artificial property rights like patents and copyright, and absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land that ought to be open to homesteading; and otherwise to protect giant corporations from the competitive dangers of a genuine market. In such an environment, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that fortunes in the billions or hundreds of millions have been acquired at somebody’s expense. It’s entirely reasonable, when you see a turtle on a fencepost, to suspect he didn’t climb up there on his own.

I hope my Van Helsinglike fixation on the vampire of vulgar libertarianism hasn’t obscured the real value of this book. Even if I just can’t let the neoliberal ideology go, it’s really not central to the book. What is central is the evolutionary roots of human economic behavior, a subject on which Shermer provides a wealth of information. The information itself, for the most part, can stand by itself without regard to Shermer’s ideological framework. I found much of it, particularly the parts on reciprocity and egalitarianism, to be quite useful–although perhaps not for the purposes the author intended. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And if I could enjoy it, with my neurotic obsessions, surely any normal person will enjoy it that much more.

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The main thing is to end dependence on motor vehicles. Anything else is at best inadequate; at worst it exacerbates the problem. All the little incremental efficiencies touted on every street corner will not begin to add up to the proportions of the ecological problem facing us. Most of them would actually reinforce the very mechanisms that have allowed an oligopolizing industry to cultivate so widespread and thoroughgoing a dependence on its products.

Every popular blurb on “What You Can Do for the Environment” contains, after much sound advice about composting and basic generic household chemicals like vinegar, borax, and ammonia, the suggestion to consider buying a new car, as it is more “efficient”. I urge quite the opposite: buy the oldest car that will do the job, regardless of efficiency or emissions. Buy a car that its manufacturer had hoped would have been scrapped long ago, the longer ago the better, and further subvert the industry by doing whatever is necessary to keep it running.

Starve the industry of the sales it needs in order to ensure that its productivity remains above the critical threshold below which it cannot operate viably. This is the nature of the problem: the motor industry does not respond to spontaneous demand, be that practical need or spurious “greed for more stuff”; it responds to the requirements of its technical operating basis, a basis chosen and cultivated precisely because it requires huge production outputs of which only a powerful industrial elite is capable. Once this is established the industry goes about generating a market for its output. It does this primarily by manipulating states, through transport planning and road-building, to create living environments that do not allow for easy living without a car. More recently, as markets have come closer to saturation, the industry has manipulated states into all kinds of supposed safety and environmental regulations, firstly to curtail product life and take second-hand cars out of the market, and secondly to enforce designs that raise critical production-volume thresholds even further, by outlawing any alternative.

That really is what those regulations are about.

Reject the electric car and the hybrid. They exist only in order to entrench the power of the motor industry even further. The extent to which the design of a car depends on the current operating basis is not constant: some designs serve that basis better than others, and indeed all modern cars are designed specifically to be virtually impossible to make in any other way. In this the modern electric and hybrid represent an unprecedented advance. They would simply not work in a context in which vehicle sales, replacement rates, distance travelled, and traffic congestion do not increase significantly. Never before has anything come so close to a single-use, disposable car.

Excessive carbon dioxide production is a pure function of fossil-fuel consumption: but even so, fuel efficiency is moot. This is not only because real alternatives to fossil fuels exist, but because likely incremental improvements wouldn’t be nearly enough, especially if the motor industry engineers more sprawl, longer commutes, quicker scrappage, and more cars to achieve the per-unit numbers. A system can be sustainable at any given level of efficiency, and if anything more easily at lower levels; it all depends on its need structures. End vehicle dependence and total systemic vehicle-fuel consumption falls by well over 90%.

Good work is being done by the open-source movement, but while it labours under the misconception that its agenda is aligned to the purposes of existing safety and environmental regulations, and moreover expends its energies trying to achieve extreme levels of fuel efficiency, it will pose no real threat to the existing motor industry.

Likewise emissions are neither here nor there. None of the “traditional” pollutants, for the control of which, ostensibly, catalytic converters were forcibly introduced, are stable compounds. Both carbon monoxide and unburnt hydrocarbons soon oxidize, leaving only the carbon dioxide and water that the catalyst is supposed to emit; it just takes a bit longer. Likewise, small concentrations of oxides of nitrogen fit easily into the natural nitrogen cycle. As long as concentrations are low and there is enough time, “uncontrolled” vehicle emissions are not problematic. Old cars are not, in themselves, “toxin-spewing jalopies”, even when in questionable tune. Vehicle emissions become problematic only when the intensity of vehicle use reaches the levels required by the motor industry’s technical operating basis. Then one gets photochemical smog and acid rain.

Buy the oldest car that will do the job, to starve the motor industry of custom. Do this not to bully the motor industry into making “cleaner” or “more efficient” products – nor even to change its operating basis, supposing that it could – but to kill it. The motor industry needs us more than we need it, especially as long as automotive technology has a deep vernacular penetration in society. In other words, as long as there are people around who know how to repair, modify, and ultimately to make cars, and as long as there are cars out there that even vaguely conform to their knowledge.

Do not expect the motor industry to die without a fight. Remember that it is really an organ of the State, and has much of the mechanism of government at its disposal. But be clever. Be creative with old parts. Stockpile whatever you can find, regardless of its apparent usefulness or desirability, as long as it is legally “grandfathered”. If they impose annual-mileage limits for “historic” cars, fit a tachometer to judge speed and drive with the speedometer cable disconnected. Or run twelve old cars, if you can afford the licensing, etc. If they impose “events only” use restrictions, form a club and organize your own events. Keep a step ahead of them. If all else fails, get about without a car, and make a huge noise about how difficult it is. None of this legislation is about making it any easier to be without a car. It is about effectively being compelled to buy new cars often. And keep the technical knowledge and the skills alive. Refuse to be a Pure Consumer.

Above all, spread the word.

Na declaração da Rio +20 do mês passado (Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Desenvolvimento Sustentável), “A Economia de Que Necessitamos,” a RIPESS (acrônimo em francês para Rede Intercontinental para Promoção da Economia Social e de Solidariedade) desqualifica o modelo da “assim chamada economia verde” promulgado “por governos e corporações,” com o desprezo que ele merece.

Há pelo menos dois problemas com o movimento da economia verde. O primeiro é destacado na declaração da RIPESS: É realmente uma tentativa pintada de verde para criar um novo modelo pintado de verde de acumulação de capital para o capitalismo corporativo global, baseado na “commodificação das comuns.”

O Capitalismo Verde (ou Progressista, ou Cognitivo), como a primeira Revolução Industrial, está baseado em processo de larga escala de acumulação primitiva (expressão técnica que os marxistas usam a qual significa  “assalto maciço”).

A acumulação primitiva que precedeu a ascensão do sistema de fábricas na Grã-Bretanha industrial envolveu o cercado das terras comuns: Primeiro de uma porção majoritária dos Campos Abertos para pastagem de ovelhas durante diversos séculos no final do tempo medieval e início do moderno, depois os Cercados Parlamentares de pastos comuns, áreas cobertas de árvores e para lixo no século 18.

O novo modelo pintado de verde do capitalismo de estado corporativo, como sugere a declaração da RIPESS, consegue a acumulação primitiva por meio do cercado das comuns de informação. O economista Paul Romer chama-o de “teoria do novo crescimento.” Baseia-se no cercado da informação digital e da inovação — coisas que são naturalmente grátis — como fonte de rentismo. Esse modelo “progressista” de capitalismo, promovido por Warren Buffett, Bill Gates e Bono, assenta-se ainda mais em patentes e copyrights do que a versão hoje existente de capitalismo corporativo.

O modelo “capitalista verde” é concebido como reação à principal ameaça com que se defronta o capitalismo corporativo e seu modelo de acumulação de capital: Tecnologias de abundância. Se permitida operar sem tolhimento, a livre adoção de tecnologias de baixo custo e produção efêmera e o efeito deflacionário radical de informações digitais livremente replicáveis não apenas destruiria a maior parte dos lucros corporativos como tornaria a maior parte do capital de investimento supérflua.

É essa ameaça, à parte de toda a retórica “progressista,” que o “capitalismo verde” está concebido para bloquear. É um esforço de última trincheira para resgatar um sistema inteiro de privilégio de classe e de exploração econômica baseado em escassez artificial do impacto revolucionário da abundância.

O modelo de Economia de Solidariedade promovido pela RIPESS — e por meus parceiros anticapitalistas de livre mercado do Centro por uma Sociedade sem Estado — é exatamente o oposto. O que procuramos é uma economia auto-organizada descentralizada, na qual pessoas comuns valem-se das novas tecnologias de abundância (tais como as tecnologias de produção de baixo custo e informação grátis) para construir uma economia pertencente a nós próprios na qual as enormes acumulações de terra e capital das classes rentistas são inúteis.

Isso foi pressagiado pelas cooperativas Owenite dos anos 1830s, nas quais varejistas sem emprego empreenderam produção em lojas cooperativas, comerciando seus artigos com seus parceiros trabalhadores em troca da moeda alternativa denominada Notas de Labor, em trocas de escambo. O problema era que esse modelo só funcionava para comércio artesanal onde as ferramentas de produção ainda fossem acessíveis individualmente. Nâo funcionava em formas de produção industrial dependentes de maquinário de grande porte, especializado, e extremamte caro. Os Cavaleiros do Labor aprenderam isso pelo caminho mais árduo quatro décadas mais tarde, quando seus esforços para criar cooperativas de trabalhadores colidiram de frente com os custos de capitalização do sistema de fábricas.

O lado positivo da época em que vivemos é que nova tecnologia de produção está revertendo esse processo. Crescente fatia do que se fabrica ocorre em fabriquetas que utilizam máquinas operatrizes baratas, de propósito geral, de controle numérico por computador. Uma fabriqueta de garagem equipada com torno mecânico de código aberto, roteador, impressora  3-D etc., custando de $10.00 a 20.000 dólares, pode produzir bens que, no passado, requeriam fábrica de um milhão de dólares. E parcela muito maior é susceptível de tais métodos de produção. Na produção de alimentos, horticultura solo-intensiva de canteiros elevados revelou-se muito mais produtiva do que a agricultura industrial. Novas técnicas, como as de John Jeavons, estão tornando-a ainda mais produtivas.

É tecnologicamente viável trabalhadores e consumidores promoverem e desenvolverem por si próprios uma economia inteira segundo o modelo owenista, com muito pouco em termos de ativos de terra e capital.

Assim, a pergunta é, que modelo desejamos seguir? Cedermos ao modelo Hamiltoniano pintado de verde dos “progressistas” como Gates e Buffett, voltado para proteger os lucros deles dos efeitos radicalmente deflacionários da abundância? A outra opção é defendermos esses efeitos deflacionários em benefício de nós próprios, substituindo a dominação dos chefes, da labuta interminável e das dívidas por uma sociedade de governo autônomo, lazer e cooperação mútua.

Você não deveria demorar muito para chegar a uma conclusão.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 12 de julho de 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

There are at least two problems with the green economy movement. The first is highlighted in the RIPESS declaration: It is really a greenwashed attempt to create a new, greenwashed model of capital accumulation for global corporate capitalism, based on “the commodification of the commons.”

Green (or Progressive, or Cognitive) Capitalism, like the first Industrial Revolution, is based on a large-scale process of primitive accumulation (a technical term Marxists use that means “massive robbery”).

The primitive accumulation preceding the rise of the factory system in industrial Britain involved the enclosure of common lands: First of a major portion of the Open Fields for sheep pasturage over several centuries in late medieval and early modern times, then the Parliamentary Enclosures of common pasture, woodland and waste in the 18th century.

The new greenwashed model of corporate-state capitalism, as the RIPESS declaration suggests, achieves primitive accumulation through the enclosure of the information commons. Economist Paul Romer calls it the “new growth theory.” It’s based on enclosing digital information and innovation — things which are naturally free — as a source of rents. This “progressive” model of capitalism, promoted by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Bono, is even more heavily reliant on patents and copyrights than the existing version of corporate capitalism.

The “green capitalist” model is intended as a response to the primary threat facing corporate capitalism and its model of capital accumulation: Technologies of abundance. If allowed to operate without hindrance, the free adoption of low-cost, ephemeral production technologies and the radical deflationary effect of freely replicable digital information would not only destroy most existing corporate profits but render most investment capital superfluous.

It’s this threat, all the “progressive” rhetoric aside, that “green capitalism” is intended to head off. It’s a last-ditch effort to rescue an entire system of class privilege and economic exploitation based on artificial scarcity from the revolutionary impact of abundance.

The Solidarity Economy model promoted by RIPESS — and by my free market anticapitalist comrades at the Center for a Stateless Society — is just the opposite. What we seek is a self-organized, decentralized economy, in which ordinary people take advantage of new technologies of abundance (like low-cost production technologies and free information) to build an economy of our own in which the rentier classes’ huge accumulations of land and capital are worthless.

This was foreshadowed by the Owenite cooperatives of the 1830s, in which unemployed tradesmen undertook production in cooperative shops, marketing their wares to their fellow workers for Labor Notes in barter exchanges. The problem was that this model only worked for craft trades in which the tools of production were still individually affordable. It didn’t work in forms of industrial production which relied on large, specialized, and extremely expensive machinery. The Knights of Labor learned this the hard way four decades later when their efforts at creating worker cooperatives ran head-on against the capitalization costs of the factory system.

The beauty of the age we live in is that new production technology is reversing this process. A growing share of manufacturing takes place in job shops using cheap, general-purpose CNC machine tools. A garage shop equipped with open-source lathe, router, 3-D printer, etc., costing $10-20,000 can produce goods that once required a million dollar factory. And a much larger share is amenable to such production methods. In food production, soil-intensive raised-bed horticulture was already far more productive than industrial agriculture. New techniques, like those of John Jeavons, are making it more productive still.

It’s technologically feasible for workers and consumers to bootstrap almost an entire economy on the Owenite model, with very little in the way of land and capital assets.

So the question is, which model do we want to follow? Do we knuckle under to the greenwashed Hamiltonian model of “progressives” like Gates and Buffett, aimed at protecting their profits against the radical deflationary effects of abundance? Or do harness these deflationary effects for people like ourselves, replacing the domination of bosses, toil and debt with a society of self-governance, leisure and mutual cooperation.

You shouldn’t have to think about it long.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, “Economia Verde?” Não Somos Verdes o Bastante para Comprá-la.
• Spanish, “‘Economía verde’: demasiado verde para ser buena”.

Well, no.  Technically, it’s just more dirt on top of the grave. Frankly, I’m surprised at the popular reaction to the vote. What did they expect? The state has always been an “executive committee of the ruling class.” Citizens United may have stripped the mask off the system and exposed it in its full vulgarity, but the political system has been rigged in the interests of the big money players since there was a political system. To quote Charles Johnson:

“If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform … then … you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics — with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.”

Trying to change the system by voting for political candidates, or by “getting a seat at the table” to influence legislation, is like trying to beat the house in Vegas playing by house rules. The system can only be “reformed,” if you follow its own prescribed rules, in a manner consistent with the logic of the system. Recently MPAA chief Chris Dodd defended the SOPA digital copyright bill, with a straight face, saying “all the stakeholders had been at the table.” All the stakeholders — Disney, the RIAA and MPAA, Microsoft, Pfizer, Monsanto. You know … everyone except you and me.

We need to fight by our own rules rather than theirs. Asymmetric warfare is called that because it’s war between adversaries who are badly mismatched in resources. Fighting a conventional war against a superpower, or fighting corporate interests for control of their political process, is like a 90 lb. weakling trying to knock out the Hulk by pasting him one on the jaw. Asymmetric warfare is playing by our own rules, attacking the weak point of the enemy in ways forbidden by their preferred set of rules. It’s like the 90 lb. weakling beating the Hulk by moving faster and landing the first blow — and making that first blow a good hard kick in the groin.

The beauty of the age we live in is that the wealth and resources of the ruling class are becoming increasingly worthless. The new decentralized, distributed, and cheap technologies for production and comfortable subsistence nullify the propertied classes’ advantage in resources. Their wealth has historically depended on state enforcement of their control over scarce land and capital, so they could charge us rents in return for access to the means of livelihood and production. Their wealth depends on our need for them. Now that we have the means to produce a decent quality of life with hardly any land or capital, we don’t need them any more.

As they find it harder and harder to compete with progressively cheaper and more efficient technologies in the hands of ordinary people, they lean increasingly on a state that’s bankrupting itself trying to prop them up. So we can beat them simply by withdrawing from their system and building our own.

The plutocracy depends on the state for its wealth. We don’t. All we have to do to destroy them is walk away. So they’d like nothing better than to distract us from building the kind of society and economy we want for ourselves and abandoning theirs to rot, and instead waste our effort and money fighting for control of their system on their terms.

Let them have the Wisconsin state government, and every other government. It’s always been theirs anyway. And now it will die along with them.