Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is Keith Farrell, a Students For Liberty campus coordinator at the University of Connecticut (“Why the Pope is Wrong on Inequality,” City A.M., Aug. 21). He accuses the Pope of “scapegoating world poverty on the wealthy” and credits Marx with first coming up with the idea “that the success of some hurts others economically and that the rich have only gotten rich at the expense of the poor.” Farrell quotes a South Korean: “If someone has made a fortune for himself, fair and square, and has a lot of money, I don’t think that’s something to be condemned.”

An interesting hypothetical, but just how much of the economic elite’s growing concentration of wealth actually was made “fair and square?” Throughout his op-ed, Farrell implicitly equates the system we live under now with “economic freedom” and “free enterprise.” But that’s an example of what I call “vulgar libertarianism,” defending actually existing corporate capitalism as though it were a free market, and using “free enterprise” rhetoric to defend wealth and economic power which corporate capitalists have actually amassed through an overwhelmingly statist system of power.

Marx was hardly the first to figure out that in a class society, ruled by a class state, the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. It probably dawned on some Sumerian or Chinese peasant busting his hump with a hoe trying to produce enough to live on after paying rent to a temple priesthood. And plenty of radical free market thinkers — Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Franz Oppenheimer — have drawn the same conclusion more recently. The capitalist system we live under today is the lineal heir to the state-enforced class systems of thousands of years ago.

“Free markets,” far from structurally defining capitalism, are permitted to operate on its margins only to the extent that they’re compatible with the propertied interests controlling the state. Even in the supposedly “laissez-faire” nineteenth century, “free enterprise” was a superstructure erected on a foundation of centuries of massive robbery — the enclosure of land and dispossession of the peasantry, first in the industrializing West and then the colonial world, massive restrictions on the free movement and association of working people in industrial Britain, slave labor and the seizure of global mineral wealth. Today many of the fruits of that robbery, like absentee titles to vacant land and corporate ownership of Third World natural resources, and a monopoly on the supply of credit and the medium of exchange by the owners of stolen wealth, are still legally enforced.

Corporate capitalism today depends on even more statism — “intellectual property,” regulatory cartels and other entry barriers, and massive direct subsidies in such forms as the Military-Industrial Complex and the civil aviation and Interstate Highway systems.

It’s true, as Farrell says, that standards of living have increased in absolute terms despite the rise in inequality — true as far as it goes. But the advantages of technological progress are governed by the same targeted pricing that governs all monopolies: Giant corporations use patent monopolies to enclose technological progress and let just enough of the benefits of increased productivity trickle down to the working classes to make it worthwhile for them to keep buying, while appropriating the rest as monopoly rents for themselves.

Farrell’s statement that “capitalism has brought freedom and abundance” to South Korea bears similar looking into. South Korean capitalism was built on the foundation of US military occupation and a military regime installed by the occupation authority, which subsequently liquidated the quasi-anarchist society of self-governing village communes and self-managed factories that had emerged after the Japanese pullout in 1945. This regime put anarchists and leftists of all kinds in mass graves, and during its decades in power wasn’t exactly friendly to the “economic freedom” of — say — Korean workers who wanted to unionize.

Interestingly, Farrell shares one erroneous assumption with Pope Francis: That reducing inequality requires government “redistribution of wealth.” They’re both wrong. What we have now amounts to an upward redistribution of wealth, with “taxes” on the producing classes in the form of the state-enforced monopoly rents we pay to landlords and capitalists. We don’t need state intervention to redistribute wealth downward. We need revolution to stop the state from redistributing wealth upward.

It’s time for free marketers to stop acting as hired prize-fighters for the present system of power, and start using free market ideas to defend actual economic justice.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, Por qué el Papa está menos equivocado que Keith Farrell.

I’ve waited my whole life to come to realize, through some dawning revelation, why precisely I’m supposed to like the Symphonie Fantastique. Today, right now where I sit, I’m fully prepared to say what I’ve put off saying for as long as I can remember: the Symphonie Fantastique is wrongly named.

For numerous reasons, I vehemently disagreed with his assessment. But there’s one reason I want to focus on in particular. The individual who posted this also happens to be a libertarian like me and like Hector Berlioz, the composer of Symphonie Fantastique.

My response:

I’m going to have to disagree with you here…Symphonie Fantastique is a grand example of a composer breaking conventional molds of form and orchestration. Five movements. Strange instruments. An implied program. Intentionally irreverent use of religious cantus. One of my personal favorites. Hector Berlioz don’t care!

Hector Berlioz embraced an attitude of intentional, intelligent irreverence toward all things customary and conventional. Throughout his life, he challenged the status quo, musically and otherwise. He wasn’t a rebel just for the sake of being a rebel; he understood exactly what the state of the world was and how he could change it. He held individual expression up as a pinnacle virtue, harnessing his own to influence others peacefully and thoughtfully.

Like many libertarians, Berlioz was a voracious autodidact. Unlike many other composers of the era, he received no formal musical training early in his life. Nor was he precocious like Mozart. Rather, he diligently studied harmony textbooks, teaching himself how to write music.

When he turned eighteen, Berlioz left home to study medicine in Paris. After a short stint at the university (and a reviling experience of viewing a human corpse being dissected), he abandoned medicine and attended the Paris Conservatoire. There, under the tutelage of Jean-François Le Sueur and Anton Reicha, Berlioz refined his composition skills.

This was a time not unlike today: A “new economy” was emerging. “The decay of absolutism on the European continent spelled the end of artistic patronage on the part of the aristocracy and the church,” writes musicologist Richard Taruskin. “The broad middle-class public now replaced the traditional elite.”

According to historian Giorgio Pestelli, these economic allowed for the emergence of the modern freelance musician. “Free from immediate detailed instructions from his master or protector,” composers and musicians “could be subject in a similar way to the kind of demand imposed by the musical market.” The “new course” appealed “above all to the competitive spirit” and, in so doing, rewarded entrepreneurial insight.

Like many young entrepreneurs today, Berlioz needed to supplement his income. In addition to composing, young Hector also worked as chorus singer and vaudeville performer. Over time, his hard work paid off as he became famous as a composer and conductor across France and western Europe.

Berlioz’s most famous and most remembered work is Symphonie Fantastique—by far. Since its first public performance in 1830, critics and audiences alike have proffered their strong opinions on the 50-minute-long behemoth. Some love it. Some hate it. Some are downright flummoxed by it.

Symphonie Fantastique called for ninety instrumentalists at a time when the standard orchestra employed half that. Compared to contemporaneous scores, Berlioz’s presents dynamics, articulations, and other expressive markings with revolutionary explicitness and meticulous detail. Brass players need mutes and the timpanist needs “sponge-headed sticks.” The range of wind instruments extends from the piccolo to the tuba. While all of these things are commonplace now, they were utterly radical at the time.

To add to the uproar, Berlioz tied the music to a program in a particular way. Purely instrumental music was elevated, becoming sacrilegiously tantamount to opera. “Berlioz wished to have [the program] distributed to audiences to prepare them to understand the work,” says Taruskin. “[M]any in the Victorian era understandably found shocking.”

The program describes each of five (five!—as opposed to the standard four) movements in scenic detail. “Funeral knell, ludicrous parody of the Dies irae,” part of the fifth movement program, alludes to Berlioz’s satirical use of a Catholic funeral hymn in a movement entitled “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath.”

Libertarianism has an ideological component. Economic freedom, civil rights, free speech, private property—they’re all part of the package. But libertarianism also has an attitudinal component. Liberty lovers aren’t afraid to brazenly resist established norms and expectations. Like Hector Berlioz, we don’t fit nicely into the mold society prescribes. We question what others accept and rebuke anyone who stands in our way.

“The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.”

The busted tank is owned by Freedom Industries, which uses the chemical for coal processing. Some 300,000 people have been directly impacted by the disaster, forced to wait in long lines at fire stations to receive potable water. There’s been a constant run on stores for the precious resource as well.

This is a story to often told in Appalachia. The Massey Energy coal slurry spill in Martin County, Kentucky (where 306,000,000 gallons of toxic slurry hit the town) and the TVA coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee, are also part of the history of industrial disaster in the region. This history is wrought with class struggle, environmental degradation and corporatism. From the expulsion of Native Americans to the rise of King Coal, the Hawks Nest incident, the labor struggle, the Battle of Blair Mountain and the wholesale destruction of mountain ecosystems via Mountaintop Removal, Appalachia is on the front lines of the war with the politically connected.

The coalfields of Appalachia have long been home to impoverished people, overlooked by the affluent in the United States. Still, the “War on Poverty” has made its way into the Appalachian hills several times. Most famously, US president Lyndon Johnson singled out the region for his “Great Society” programs, and presidents 42, 43 and 44 have all tried to help the region as well. Instead of offering a new way forward, their programs further damage the area.

Much of the “War On Poverty” has been fought via economic engineering, centralizing the economies of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky (along with parts of Tennessee and Virginia) into the hands of extractive fossil resource industries — notably coal and natural gas. The mechanization of these industries, however, has reduced the labor force. Specialized labor moving to the region has caused short-term booms and long-term busts. Once an extractive resource is exploited and gone,  communities are left to deal with mono economies and irreversible ecological destruction.

The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.

Over the years numerous citizen coalitions have formed. These groups are networking together to ban the exploitation of Appalachia. Groups such as Appalachian Voices, Mountain Justice, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy  (see: ilovemountains.org), Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and many others, have developed true grassroots movements across the region.  The Appalachian movement is building a sense of urgency around the plight of the weeping mountains, and the people who call them home. Movements work, the line has been drawn: The corporate state or its end — it really is that simple.

Which side are you on?

Then it struck me that there’s another problem with that dichotomy that left-libertarians in particular are in a good place to point out, and it has to do with popular ideological assumptions about whose “economic freedoms” are most often violated.

For most people, the archetypal examples of something that violates “economic freedoms” typically involve repressing a wealthier or otherwise more generally privileged person, and their archetypal examples of something that violates “social freedoms” typically involve repressing a poorer or otherwise more generally oppressed person. When you control for that, it becomes a lot harder to distinguish between what’s a restriction on “economic freedom” and what’s a restriction on “social freedom.”

For example, consider labor laws that harm serious, wildcat unionizing. Are those restrictions on “economic freedom” or “social freedom?” What about holding vast amounts of completely untouched land? Vagrancy laws? Zoning (especially regulations regarding non-related people sharing a house)? Eminent domain? Occupational licensing? Drug laws? Prohibitions on sex work? Immigration laws? The general regulatory web that prevents a resurgence of mutual aid societies?

It’s definitely not clear to me, and I think that shows the purpose this distinction really serves.

But to see the true vulgar libertarianism in the Mercatus report, one should look at how they evaluate economic freedom. One significant portion of their evaluation of states was based on their “lawsuit climate.”  But litigation is an important way to hold companies accountable for damage in a free society, and has in fact been unjustly limited by the rise of the regulatory state. They also treat “right to work laws” as a boon to freedom, even though the laws are a violation of free contract.

This ranking system is an embarrassment to libertarians. As an anarchist, I am skeptical about whether we can even rank governments on how compatible they are with freedom. However, if I were to develop rankings, I would not use the criteria employed by Mercatus. Their attitude seems to be that the rights  of marginalized individuals are trivial and that “them pore ol’ bosses need all the help they can get.”

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.

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.

Throughout his life and work, Ingalls always contended that genuine laissez-faire could cure most of the ills associated with the labor question. The problem was that many economists and mainstream commentators had mistaken a system of state privilege for a condition of economic freedom. We’ve never gotten away from that, of course, with outlets like Fox News keen to brandish the guidon of a most unfree capitalist domination of the earth under the pretense of “Freedom of the World” reports. Coercive state protection of capital’s prerogative of demanding tribute, it must be said, has nothing to do with free markets or laissez-faire. But those are used equivalently by the great and seemingly growing list of these reports–themselves fairly interchangeable. We might do well to remember that, just as Ingalls and Lazarus had a conception of freedom quite different from those of many laissez-faire advocates of their day, so do many contemporary libertarians recognize the distinct difference between the now strictly potential freedom of the world and the “Freedom of the World” we apparently have.

This workshop [presented at the Mobilizing and Organizing From Below Conference] will be a short talk and then a discussion on how anarchist analyses of capitalism and visions of different futures can guide our practices of organizing and living for a different kind of society. Focused around the work in The Accumulation of Freedom, this conversation will center on three main questions as themes:

1. What kind of world do you want to live in?

2. What limits must we accept when constructing a positive, creative vision? and

3. What must we do to get to that world?