Some will say that such rights are needed in order to give artists and inventors the financial incentive to create. But most of the great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright laws. Indeed, sufficiently stringent copyright laws would have made their achievements impossible: Great playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare never wrote an original plot in their lives; their masterpieces are all adaptations and improvements of stories written by others. Many of our greatest composers, like Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Ives, incorporated into their work the compositions of others. Such appropriation has long been an integral part of legitimate artistic freedom.

Is it credible that authors will not be motivated to write unless they are given copyright protection? Not very. Consider the hundreds of thousands of articles uploaded onto the Internet by their authors everyday, available to anyone in the world for free.

Is it credible that publishers will not bother to publish uncopyrighted works, for fear that a rival publisher will break in and ruin their monopoly? Not very. Nearly all works written before 1900 are in the public domain, yet pre-1900 works are still published, and still sell.

Is it credible that authors, in a world without copyrights, will be deprived of remuneration for their work? Again, not likely. In the 19th century, British authors had no copyright protection under American law, yet they received royalties from American publishers nonetheless.

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In polemics, framing is everything. If you’re engaged in apologetics for an existing system of power, the best thing you can do is portray it as normal, natural and inevitable, and imply that things are the way they are because that’s just pretty much how everybody likes it. It’s critics of the system who want to impose their will on everybody else and force radical changes on the regular, ordinary way everybody prefers to do things. The irony is, it’s usually those on the mainstream Center-Left and Center-Right who present themselves as the defenders of normality and consensus, and accuse radical critics of the system like libertarians or socialists as the authoritarian social engineers. But this time it’s Gillespie.

Specifically, he recommends Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance as a humorous indictment of anyone (like “progressives”) engaged in systematic critique of the form of actually existing capitalism we live under, comparing them to utopian communities like Brook Farm (which is satirized in Hawthorne’s novel).

And if you’re a progressive or neo-con reformer, put down down your slide rule or whatever instrument you’re using to create the parameters of your nouveau Great Society and pick this up immediately….

It reminds us that even the best intentions are rarely strong enough to overrule either the longings of the human heart or the basic laws of economics.

As the quote suggests, Gillespie tries to position himself in the “just right” happy medium between left-wing critics of corporate capitalism and “neo-con reformers,” but in fact the system we live under is completely a product of neoliberal intervention, just as much as the earlier New Deal model of Consensus Capitalism was a result of “progressive” intervention. The neocon “reform” of Iraq under Bremer and the CPA, far from an outlier or a dramatic departure from some preexisting model of “regular” capitalism, was a direct continuation of long-term neoliberal trends that are defended at Reason every single day. Going further back, the American model of corporate capitalism that has prevailed since the late 19th century required an even more massive state intervention to establish, and capitalism itself as it emerged from late medieval times more massive still.

In every case, the capitalist system as we know it was imposed on societies from the top down by some party in control of the state. In industrial Britain it was the outcome of late medieval enclosure of open fields and the nullification of peasants’ traditional rights in the land, social controls like the Poor Laws, the Parliamentary Enclosure of common pasture and waste in the 18th century, and police state controls in the early 18th century like the Combination Laws, laws against working class friendly societies and the internal passport system created by the Laws of Settlement.

In the United States it required two civil wars. Not only the first Civil War in which the industrialists and financiers of the north decisively defeated the slave-based agricultural capitalism of the south and secured a monopoly on the national polity, but a second civil war in which they defeated all challenges to their agenda from the Left. In his history of the American cooperative movement, For All the People, John Curl refers to the political triumph of industrial capital in the Gilded Age as the Great Betrayal. This seizure of power relied first on the use of military Reconstruction to politically neutralize the slave-power and its regional economic model as a rival to northern-style industrialism, and second on the electoral bargain of 1877 (for which the Betrayal was named) in which Hayes and the plutocratic interests he represented were given a deadlock on the national government despite having an electoral minority, in return for giving the Redeemer class a free hand in imposing regional Apartheid in the former slave states). The industrial capitalists took advantage of their uncontested political power to impose corporate capitalism by a revolution from above. The statist means they used included the railroad land grants,  a high industrial tariff, a national banking system and the pooling and exchange of patents.

This statist transformation provoked a response from the Left–what Curl calls the Great Uprising–by the labor, cooperative and farm populist movements. In the end, the leaders of the new nationwide monopoly corporations used state power to defeat the Great Uprising. Between the state-created railroads’ ability to impose rates at will, and the financial power of the state-enabled banking system, monopoly capital declared war on consumer cooperatives and drove millions of farmers into debt and bankruptcy. The labor movement was broken on the front lines by Cleveland’s use of federal troops in the Pullman Strike and by governors’ use of martial law and state militia in the copper and coal wars. In addition the labor and socialist movements were politically liquidated by the police state uprising after Haymarket, and by the ideological offensive of “loyalty” and “100% Americanism” culminating in the mass arrests and vigilante violence of Wilson’s War Hysteria and Red Scare.

The neoliberal revolutions around the world over the past three decades have all followed Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.” In every case–Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia, Iraq under Paul Bremer, the European periphery in today’s Euro crisis–either a coup, military invasion or large-scale financial crisis has been seized upon to “break” a system in order that transnational financial elites might reconstruct a country in their own image. In every case, this has resulted in the large-scale enclosure and looting–aka “privatization”–of taxpayer-funded services and assets, the diversion of state revenues to repaying odious debt at face value as the priority for spending, and rubber-stamping “free trade” accords whose main real function is to enforce the new, draconian levels of “intellectual property” protectionism that corporate control of outsourced production depends on.

The neoliberal transformation of the past three decades has been possible only through a series of interventions starting with Volcker’s use of the central banking system to destroy the bargaining power of labor through the biggest recession since WWII. Clinton set up a legal framework in the ’90s–the “intellectual property” components of the Uruguay Round of GATT, the WIPO copyright treaty and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–without which corporate globalization would have been impossible.

Taken all together, then, the system of power we live under is the result of a series of revolutions from above imposed by the state with a level of coercion comparable to Stalin’s first Five-Year Plans.

And far from being a movement to unilaterally impose ideologically-driven controls on a spontaneously-arising system that reflects ordinary people’s desires, the twenty-year cycle of uprisings that began with the EZLN insurrection in Chiapas has been (as Immanuel Wallerstein describes it) a long-overdue counter-offensive by the global Left against a previous twenty-year statist offensive by the forces of corporate neoliberalism.

Far from requiring the seizure of state power or authoritarian social engineering to stop it, the only thing required for global corporate power to go down in flames is for states to stop what they’re doing now. Stop enforcing patent and trademark protectionism that enables corporations to outsource actually making anything for someone else, yet still be able to charge a 10,000% markup from retaining a legal monopoly on disposal of the product. Stop the looting of taxpayer-funded public services by politically connected insiders. Stop enabling neo-feudal landlords to evict peasants from land that is rightfully theirs so it can be used for cash-crop export production in contract to global agribusiness companies. Stop enforcing the music and movie industries’ copyrights.

Everything that’s being done in the way of creating a genuine successor society to corporate capitalism is being done horizontally and cooperatively, in open-source software development groups, neighborhood gardens and Permaculture operations, hackerspaces and open-source hardware development groups, community currencies, open-source sharing software, vernacular self-built housing. The most promising models for a post-capitalist society are all based on autonomism, on self-organized peer production based on the commons, on exodus and secession by the producing classes, and on prefigurative politics and the creation of counter-institutions. Compared to the waves of corporate capitalist and neoliberal revolution from above, the waves of resistance starting with the Zapatistas and running through Seattle, the Arab Spring, M15 and Occupy are incomparably more spontaneous and libertarian than the system we’re fighting.

So to sum up, Mr. Gillespie. I know one thing about the “basic laws of economics” — the global corporate economy we live under now couldn’t survive for a day without massive and ongoing intervention by the state. The corporate capitalism you defend was put into place by an all-out war on the longings of the human heart every bit as much as the Iron Curtain, as evidenced by our slogans of “Ya Basta!” and “Another world is possible”–and every bit as doomed to fall. And we’ll put down the slide-rule just as soon as we take it from the cold, dead hands of the people who created the system you defend.

It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.

Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.

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We would be much better off if we weren’t tormented by scarcity. There would be no conflict or potential for conflict over physical goods. This hypothetical world — one of superabundance or post-scarcity or infinite supply or infinite reproducibility or whatever you want to call it — is preferable to both options presented in the libertarian dichotomy. Superabundance would also obviate and overcome other undesirable corollaries of scarcity, including opportunity cost, supply and demand, and ultimately economy itself. Unfortunately, this world doesn’t exist.

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We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty.

Newell is obviously right. The digital rights management (DRM) scheme in games have failed miserably, not only because they are ineffective (all antipiracy systems have been circumvented), but because they have also lowered sales and made worse the gamer’s experience.

Newell’s story, while true, is convenient, because Valve itself manages a DRM system. Steam, besides being a store, is an antipiracy mechanism as well, but at least it tries to offset the rights the players lose by giving them some nice perks: online matchmaking, mod tools and low prices.

Steam tries to reach a middle ground between gamer culture, which reacts against any attempt to encroach on their rights, and the large corporations’ sensibilities, that are so keen on defending their so-called “intellectual property”. The big game publishers have noticed they are losing the battle. Recently, popular gaming website, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, published an editorial that condemned the fact that video games never go into the public domain. In arguing his point, John Walker did not flinch from the logical consequences of his reasoning and radically denounced “intellectual property”:

[W]hy shouldn’t someone be allowed to continue profiting from their idea for as long as they’re alive? . . .

[M]y response to this question is: why should they? . . .

Why should someone get to profit from something they did fifty years ago? In what other walk of life would we willingly accept this as just a given? If a policeman demanded that he continue to be paid for having arrested a particular criminal thirty-five years ago, he’d be told to leave the room and stop being so silly. “But the prisoner is still in prison!” he’d cry, as he left the police station, his pockets out-turned, not having done any other work in the thirty-five years since and bemused as to why he wasn’t living in a castle.

What about the electrician who fitted the lighting in your house. He requires a fee every time you switch the lights on. It’s just the way things are. You have to pay it, because it’s always been that way, since you can remember. How can he be expected to live off just fitting new lights to other houses? And the surgeon’s royalties on that heart operation he did – that’s the system. Why shouldn’t he get paid every time you use it?

Reactions like this, to intellectual monopoly, paved the way for projects like the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB), in which consumers pay whatever amount they want for several excellent games, no DRM, compatible with both Windows and Linux. HIB, too, served as an example for the Story Bundle, that gathers books from independent authors – and there are many other examples.

Clearly, they are initiatives that try to steer consumers into supporting creators of cultural goods, and they have been fairly successful. However, the very fact that people are able to pay what they want seems to be a weakness of the model. After all, it seems that creators are perpetually dangling their tip jar, hoping that people will toss them enough quarters to get by, not being able to depend entirely on their work. And it would be inconceivable that large companies would surrender to such a model, since they are still erecting their pointless pay walls.

What is the alternative? The Brazilian Northeast might have one of the answers.

For years, not only record companies, but also musicians and bands from the Southeast have tried to suppress CD and DVD piracy. They do campaigns repeatedly, they remind us about the illegality of copying “their” discs, and they pretend that we do not have the right to play “their” songs and videos that we have bought “in public”. Nevertheless, Brazil remains one of the leaders in piracy in the world. Street vendors still sell pirated CDs and DVDs, and the police keeps making huge apprehensions of merchandise — to steamroll shortly afterwards in big public displays (the junk is to be “ecologically discarded” then).

The service offered, by them, is still terrible. It is hard to get a hold of music and movies conveniently at competitive prices. And street peddlers are still chased after.

In the Northeast, though, things changed. And the change was brought about by local bands, extremely popular in their regions, but who play little known or unpopular styles in South and Southeast Brazil. Street vendors are not seen as enemies anymore, but as allies. Calypso (a band that is technically from the North) started off the trend of giving their CDs and DVDs directly to street vendors. Other bands soon followed suit and saw that it made no sense to close off a channel of communication with their audience. Those vendors, then, became one of the principal means of dissemination of music in the North and the Northeast, and chasing them off started being an economic nuisance, instead of an imperative (which explains why there are many more street peddlers in the Northeast than in the rest of the country).

The Northeast took it a step further yet. Bands that play a style of forró known as “brega” (literally “kitsch”) abandoned the pretense of making strictly authorial songs. Now, several bands play the same song, each one their way. Every season, we have several (sometimes dozens) of the same songs played differently by many distinct bands. Musicians are not distinguished by what they play, but rather by how they play, and all of them are a step ahead of the authorial bands because they play exactly what the public demands at that season, at that moment.

The face of this new style is Wesley Safadão and his band Garota Safada. In their concerts, Garota Safada give away, free, their CDs and DVDs, and put all the songs up for free download on their website. Wesley Safadão is not very worried about piracy, because it promotes his real product: concerts (taken to every small city in the Northeast, attracting tens of thousands of people every time), TV appearances, commercials, and, of course, his own brand and style of playing – which define him much more than authorship.

Safadão is not losing sleep over the fact that Banda Grafith or Forró da Pegação play the same songs as him. In fact, all of them are all too happy to promote the same songs.

Songs that may be considered kitsch by the Southeast, but are verifiably much more profitable and do not depend on dying models such as IP.

As Gabe Newell said, the problem was service all along. The poor Northeast has it figured out, the rich Southeast is busy steamrolling CDs.

It would be odd, indeed, to declare, following some rigorous ethical constructivism, that property in anything is legitimate. I fear that is what I did in my first response because I never included a key part of libertarian property theory. That is, external property is only legitimate, only an extension of self-ownership, in the case of scarce goods.

You can’t homestead or acquire a good that is superabundant, such as air. To have a fully fleshed out theory of property, you need to account for the difference between scarce and non-scarce goods. I couldn’t claim a certain “area” of air as being rightfully mine since it is, for all intents and purposes, not scarce. As Rothbard puts it in “Man, Economy, and State,” air is “In most situations in unlimited abundance. It is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfillment of ends….Air, then, though indispensable, is not a means, but a general condition of human action and welfare.”

Air, and other things of super abundance, are not goods in the economic sense. They are simply there. Therefore, they aren’t proper subjects of homesteading. That is, they can’t be owned. Suppose that we lived on the Enterprise and had access to the replicator: a machine which creates whatever we want out of thin air, at no cost (besides the few seconds it takes to work). In the world of Star Trek, everything is in super abundance (well, technically not everything since the replicator can’t create living organisms or dark matter, but it can create any economic good we know of).

Now, once I used the replicator to create a delicious pizza for me for lunch, and I am sitting down to eat it, I think it is rightfully mine. If Worf tried to come over and take it, I believe that would be, in effect, stealing. So, in a sense that pizza is rightfully mine since I made it part of my ongoing projects. However, Worf is able to use the replicator and make his own pizza, or whatever Klingons eat. There is no conflict since the resources are not scarce (ignore for the purposes of this discussion the scarcity and/or availability of the replicator itself).

This is exactly Joseph’s point. Without scarcity in goods, conflict over resources is impossible and the notion of external property becomes meaningless. He succinctly uses this point to argue against intellectual property. Let’s go back to the original quote, “At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.” The theory of property is this: People have claim rights to external, scarce goods by mixing their labor with them and making them part of their ongoing uses. This is the part concerned with normative ethics.

We must delve deeper into each specific situation to apply this theory, to do applied ethics. We must first determine what is or isn’t scarce in the real world before we can see what property applies to. Pizzas and comics are scarce goods that can be legitimate property. Air and ideas are superabundant “goods” that can’t be legitimate property. The world of Star Trek, because of the “natural (the replicator isn’t really natural) conditions,” external property doesn’t really make sense. In our world, external property is a valid concept since there are scarce goods, but there are also things it doesn’t apply to.

Ultimately I believe Joseph and I are in full agreement on this issue. It only took some clarification to realize it. The issue is not consequential vs deontological reasons for external property. The issue is looking at the real world and seeing where valid property exists. It is conceivable that a world exists where they don’t. A world of superabundance. A world where I live on the Enterprise. However, I can only dream of that world. Scarcity, so far, is a fact of our world. Joseph and I agree that property only applies to those scarce objects.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange began as a feature by Joseph S. Diedrich, Private Property, the Least Bad Option. Cory Massimino and Diedrich have prepared a series of articles challenging and exploring the themes presented in Driedrich original article. Over the next week, every other day, C4SS will publish one of their responses. The final series can be followed under the title: Private Property: How, When and Why. 

In response to my recent article, “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” Cory Massimino has penned a well-articulated rebuttal. I find myself in agreement (more or less) with everything he says, yet I don’t believe my article is in any way contradicted or undermined. In my opinion, Cory asserts that my article claims more than it actually does, and for that, I am at least partially responsible. Allow me to clarify my positions.

My central argument is as follows. Many libertarians operate under the assumption that private property alone fosters peaceful interaction. From there, many conclude that its structure and function — viz., exclusive control of resources — make private property inherently good. They assign to it the status of a universally applicable ethic (valid in all cases, regardless of given conditions).

There are two problems with that: First, private property is not sufficient to promote peaceful interaction; however, under certain circumstances, it is necessary. I say “certain circumstances” because another factor must be considered. There are two classes of resources: scarce and non-scarce. Scarce resources are excludable, and absent a system of exclusive control, conflict over their use is unavoidable. Non-scarce resources are not excludable, and therefore no conflict over their use naturally occurs. Only if we attempt to apply private property norms to them does conflict over their use become a reality.

Second, as a corollary, private property cannot be assigned the status of a universally applicable ethic. Rather, its status is contingent upon the uncontrollable dictates of nature. Its structure and function (exclusive control) dissuades conflict over scarce resources, but actually promotes conflict over non-scarce resources.

Moreover, in the realm of scarcity, private property is not only necessary for peaceful interaction. It is also logically unavoidable. There are various theories that demonstrate the logical necessity of private property, including “rights-skepticism,” Stephan Kinsella’s “estoppel” theory, and Hans-Herman Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics,” to name a few.

Hoppe begins by proposing that rational discourse (argumentation) proves self-ownership, “Justification — proof, conjecture, refutation — is argumentative justification. Anyone who denied this proposition would become involved in a performative contradiction because his denial would itself constitute an argument.” To engage in rational argumentation presupposes exclusive control over one’s own physical body:

No one could propose anything and expect the other party to convince himself of the validity of this proposition or deny it and propose something else unless his and his opponent’s right to exclusive control over their respective bodies and standing rooms were presupposed.

From there, Hoppe proceeds to deduce the logical validity of private property rights in “other scarce means.”

There are other ways to arrive at the same general conclusions; argumentation ethics is but one example. Yet all valid arguments and theories of this sort have at least one fundamental commonality—a consideration of scarcity. Hoppe mentions it explicitly. Self-ownership is a priori justified only because our bodies and standing room are scarce. In other words, private property attains validity and becomes just only because the possibility of conflict exists.

Private property in scarce resources, then, is a universally applicable human ethic. It allows each individual to assess his or her actions prior to acting. We can determine ex ante whether or not the actions we intend to take will be just or unjust.

Consider the other class of resources—those that are non-scarce. In this case, private property (exclusive control) has the opposite effect. It promotes conflict where none would otherwise arise. In addition, from an abstract theoretical viewpoint, private property is ultimately logically impossible in non-scarce resources. I argue this in an article at the MacIver Institute:

[I]f indeed property, [non-scarce] resources can be sold, rented (licensed), given away, or stolen…

To be sold, rented, given away, or stolen, however, property must obviously be owned, a requisite that makes necessary the consideration of unowned proprietary resources…

If the prognostication of universal appropriation is fulfilled, eventually a world will exist in which all [non-scarce] resources are appropriated. Every idea will be owned—every concept, every design, every plan, every thought. Indeed, even the abstract idea of an “idea” will be owned. In other words, the concept of action will be under exclusive control.

As a corollary, anyone who uses the concept of action—i.e., acts—without prior permission from its owner would be engaging in an illegitimate form of property acquisition, viz., theft. In order to seek said permission to use (or rent or buy) the concept of action, one must talk or write using words and concepts—in other words, one must act…

Via reduction ad absurdum, we expose an undeniable contradiction. Nevertheless, even though theoretically impossible in the long-run, we still have the ability to impose private property onto non-scarce resources. And we do it all the time, most notably with intellectual “property.”

My intention with “Private Property, the Least Bad Option,” was to be both descriptive and prescriptive. Hence, when I wrote, “Scarcity doesn’t govern the non-physical world, and thus it is unnecessary, imprudent, and patently foolish to impose coercive private property strictures onto it,” I was making not a theoretical observation but a precise recommendation. We should never impose artificial scarcity upon the non-scarce world of ideal resources and digital “space.”

Furthermore, when I said, “private property isn’t morally meritorious or great in itself,” I meant that in a very specific sense. Merit can only be interpersonally determined based on the ability of a means to lead to an end. Private property (which, even when it is our only logically coherent possibility, is still only a means) can be morally meritorious and great, but only insofar as it aligns with our ultimate ends.

If our ultimate end is increased social welfare and a higher standard of living (a desire predicated on peaceful interaction), then private property in scarce resources must be upheld. On the other hand, private property (or the attempt thereat) in non-scarce resources must be rejected. At best, private property is a neutral concept in itself; based on given natural conditions, it can be either good or bad.

This theory is called left-wing market anarchism or laissez faire socialism. Its basic contention is that a truly freed market has never existed, and that capitalism is a statist system. There is also the conviction that genuinely freed markets would result in greater relative equality and more worker friendly conditions. The first thing to cover are the four big monopolies identified by the late individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker. They are described in his famous essay, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, And Wherein They Differ. They are the money monopoly, land monopoly, tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly or intellectual property monopolies. Let us consider each in turn.

1) The money monopoly pertains to a government or state grant of privilege to select individuals or people possessing certain types of property. This privilege is the exclusive right to issue money. The effect of this is to keep interest rates artificially high or maintain them period. In a left-libertarian market anarchist society, anyone would be free to issue a currency. There would be a competitive whittling down of lending money to the labor cost of conducting banking business. Another positive effect identified by Tucker would be the absence of control mentioned below:

It is claimed that the holders of this privilege control the rate of interest, the rate of rent of houses and buildings, and the prices of goods,—the first directly, and the second and third indirectly.

Kevin Carson has quoted Alexander Cairncross to the effect that:

the American worker has at his disposal a larger stock of capital at home than in the factory where he is employed….

Said capital or property would serve as collateral or backing. This would increase the bargaining power of labor in relation to capital, because the laborers would be able to organize their own credit systems for conducting independent business apart from the capitalists. As Gary Elkin notes:

It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers’ control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.

2) The land monopoly consists of governments or states granting or protecting land titles not based on occupation and use. This is a critique of absentee landlordism and the rent following therefrom. This has the effect of shutting out land based work as a competitive factor with industry. It also destroyed the independence to be derived from occupying land or making use of a stateless commons.

3) The tariff monopoly pertains to the protection of the profits of domestic capitalist industry from foreign competition. This increases the price of goods and thus extracts more of the product of laborers from them. It also helps create oligopolies or monopolies, because there is no competitive whittling down of profit or size. It’s worth noting that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thought the money monopoly had to be abolished before the tariff monopoly, because the people put out of work by foreign competition would need a market with a vast demand for labor to find different work.

4) The patent or intellectual property monopoly allows people to extract monopoly prices from things that could conceivably be competed over. A person is also denied the ability to use their property in a way they see fit through aggressive force. Two people can write the same book without stealing from each other. Patents are also pooled by corporations to prevent any competition and to control economic resources. This allows them to lock the third world into a dependence on them for technology. In addition to the above, Kevin Carson has noted:

A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.

In my next post, I will continue this introduction.

Stay tuned!

For the forces of information freedom, and other movements associated with the successor economy, to attempt to fight the established interests of the existing system for control of the state, is like an army trying to capture control of an entire infrastructure mile-by-mile – and to do so when, far from possessing material superiority, it is outnumbered ten – or a hundred-to-one by the defending enemy. It’s utterly stupid.

Lawrence & Wishart’s views of revolutionary praxis, as evidenced in the website’s official statement and in public remarks by managing editor Sally Davison, are a virtual parody of the most authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects of Old Left culture. As far as their worldview is concerned, the most innovative and interesting theoretical currents in Marxism, and the Left in general, the past few decades might never have happened.

The Old Left of the mid-20th century conceptualized revolution within a mass-production age framework, as the political seizure of all the commanding heights of the political and economic system, like the state and large corporations.

The best strands of recent Marxist thought, on the other hand — like for example autonomism — all involve the idea of prefigurative politics and “exodus.” That is, they see the transition to a post-capitalist society not as some sudden and large-scale event in which all the powerful institutions are captured and put under new management. They see it as a prolonged transition from one historical epoch to another like that from feudalism to capitalism, in which the successor society grows out of a whole host of seeds within the old system. Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or the German Oekonux group, see network forms of organization like commons-oriented peer production as the seeds of the future society within the present one. The latter group sees free and open-source software, and the p2p groups that develop it, as prefiguring a future post-scarcity society of abundance.

This is an approach that coincides in many ways with that of the free market Left. Like libertarian communists, we envision a society in which new technologies of abundance and liberation render state’s artificial property rights and artificial scarcities — and the capitalist rents on them — unenforceable. And we envision a society in which the radical downscaling, distribution and cheapening of the means of production (cheap, open-source micro-manufacturing hardware, permaculture, desktop information production, etc.) bring production outside the control of large bureaucratic institutions like corporations, and integrate it instead into the economies of households, neighborhoods and local communities. This means a large and increasing share of our production to meet our daily needs will be shifted outside the wage system, and even outside the cash nexus altogether and into the sharing economy. Like libertarian communists, we of the free market left see many areas of life as ideally managed as social commons rather than by states or corporations. In virtually every area of life, horizontal networks of equals replace the old bureaucratic hierarchies.

At the same time, the interesting and truly progressive forms of Marxism are centered on the idea of exodus. Exodus was at the center of Hardt and Negri’s analysis in Commonwealth. Rather than storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, the working classes treat the existing system of power, as much as possible, as irrelevant. We evade it. We bypass it. We secede from the state-corporate economy and build our own counter-economy within it. We shift as much of our production and consumption into the social realm as possible, cooperatively producing and sharing or exchanging with each other, taking advantage of new communication and production technologies that render the old institutions irrelevant and free us from dependency on them. This, too, is an idea that the free market left shares with libertarian communists.

Put the two principles together, and you get a model of “revolution” based on starting from the myriad seeds of the future society within the present system, growing and nourishing them, and building the new system within the shell of the old. Meanwhile, we starve the old system by shifting increasing amounts of our labor, money and resources out of it and into the new one of our own making. Eventually the growing seeds will coalesce into a full-blown system that supplants the old one, and the old system will survive only as shrinking islands of authority and exploitation within a fundamentally different society based on freedom and abundance.

The combination of prefigurative politics and exodus is in many ways similar to Gramsci’s “war of position,” in which the workers’ movement achieves victory not by storming the ramparts of the old system (a “war of maneuver” in his terminology), but within the larger culture and economy itself. Only after we have shifted the overall correlation of forces in society at large can we launch the final assault on the institutional commanding heights of the old system. But our approach differs from Gramsci’s in one important respect: we don’t ever need to launch that final assault.

The conventional Marxists of the mid-20th century saw large-scale, capital-intensive production as inherently more efficient. Indeed, progress itself was practically defined by the accumulation of capital. So it followed that the most efficient and productive society would continue to be one in which functions were carried out by large, hierarchical institutions. They would just be placed under working class management.

We, on the other hand, see small-scale, distributed, low-overhead production technology as the wave of the future. We believe horizontal networks and small cooperative shops can do everything that the old bureaucratic dinosaurs used to do, only better. So we don’t want to storm those old institutions. They have nothing we need.

So for us, the revolution is in the here and now, starting with the many ways that people are already creating the kind of society, work, lives and institutions we want to live in. The ends we are struggling for are embodied in the very means we use.

Lawrence and Wishart has no use for this model of revolutionary transition. In their official statement (“Lawrence & Wishart statement on the Collected Works of Marx and Engels,” April 25), they dismiss the whole free and open-source movement, and the idea of information freedom, as

a consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid, while the large publishing and other media conglomerates and aggregators continue to enrich themselves through advertising and data-mining revenues and through their far greater institutional weight compared to small independent publishers.

The open-source and free culture movements are at war with the single monopoly — “intellectual property” — which is structurally most central to corporate capitalism as we know it. And yet Lawrence and Wishart equate it — in language that might have come from managerialist liberals like Andrew Keen or Thomas Frank — to the dotcom capitalism of the nineties.

Their managing editor, Sally Davison, dismissed the very idea of prefigurative politics (Noam Cohen, “Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely,” New York Times, April 30), coming just short of quoting Lenin’s dismissal of left-wing communism as an “infantile disorder”:

We don’t live in a world of everybody sharing everything. As Marx said, and I may be paraphrasing, “We make our own history, but not in the conditions of our own choosing.”

In other words, never mind all that stuff about building the kind of stuff we want here and now. That’s something we can worry about after the revolution is over. Post-capitalist society as something that will be officially put together by competent authorities after the revolution has been safely fought and won (under the leadership of those same competent authorities, of course).

Far from building a post-capitalist society within the interstices of the old, dying system, Davison and her comrades favor accepting the domination of our lives by the exploitative nature of the present system until it officially comes to an end. Far from building alternatives to the institutional monopolies and rents of capitalism, Davison wants to accept them as inevitable — to embrace them — so long as the present system survives.

Lawrence & Wishart, in pursuing a business model based on the most central monopoly of capitalism, and treating it as just and right, remind me of Hardt and Negri’s statement in Commonwealth that the Social Democratic agenda is basically “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”

It would mean, on the one hand, re-creating the mechanisms by which capital can engage, manage, and organize productive forces and, on the other, resurrecting the welfare structures and social mechanisms necessary for capital to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class.

Lawrence & Wishart, despite their proclaimed stance of revolutionary socialism and enmity toward capitalism, find themselves perversely not only rejecting the seeds of post-capitalist society within the present system, but actively embracing and trying to strengthen the monopolies the present system depends on.