Center for a Stateless Society » elections

It’s election day in the USA. The mass incarceration nation is deciding which political opportunists will rule. On the state and local level, citizens are casting their votes on ballot initiatives that will determine the structure, specifics, or application of state coercion. Some of these ballot initiatives probably deserve support from prison abolitionists, specifically initiatives to reign in the disastrous war on drugs. Other initiatives create new prohibitions and restrictions on human liberty, and ought to be opposed.

But I think it’s worth looking beyond ballot initiatives and the particulars of this election cycle, and instead examining how elections intersect with the prison state. One obvious intersection is felon disenfranchisement. According to the Sentencing Project, “an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions.” There are major racial disparities in this disenfranchisement, “resulting in 1 of every 13 African Americans unable to vote.” These disparities are exacerbated by what the Prison Policy Initiative calls prison-based gerrymandering. In many states, prisoners are counted on the census not for the communities or regions they have been forcibly taken from, but for the community in which the prison is located. This dilutes the voting power of black communities and other communities torn apart by mass incarceration. Moreover, it increases the voting power of communities that receive concentrated economic benefits from prisons, such as communities where prison guards live.

The result is that those most directly harmed by the state have no vote on how it is operated. Those who spend their lives not interacting in the voluntary sphere of communities and markets but under the constant power of the state’s prison guards get no vote regarding the government that controls the prisons. Those who have had their friends, family, and community members taken from them and locked in cages have their voting power diluted through prison based gerrymandering. And when prisoners are released, they typically remain disenfranchised. While the violence of the law has taken years of their life from them, and licensing laws restrict them from entering many professions based on their criminal records, they have no vote on the government that forcefully impacts their life. Clearly, the government does not operate with the consent of those who are most brutally governed by it.

My friend Ørn Hansen points out that this ought to seriously undermine arguments about every American having a duty to vote, writing:

Before you call people out for not voting or you call people stupid or worthless or privileged for not voting, remember that some of us people are legally prohibited from voting because of legal issues. Your system is a sham and cuts out a large portion of people from it because they have been convicted of certain crimes or because they don’t have certain forms of ID. Maybe that’s why we don’t trust your system: because they don’t want to hear from us.

The system excludes people from participating in its elections, and then the system’s sycophantic lapdogs blame and shame them for not participating in the state’s grotesque decision making rituals. Of course, it’s worth noting that even if everyone ruled by the U.S. government were permitted to vote, there would be no duty to vote, as Jason Brennan explains.

Just as mass incarceration impacts how electoral processes work, electoral processes have played a key role in the rise of mass incarceration. As the federal government gained control over sentencing policy and other criminal justice issues, crime became a key election issue. According to the National Research Council, “The two parties embarked on periodic “bidding wars” to ratchet up penalties for drugs and other offenses. Wresting control of the crime issue became a central tenet of up-and-coming leaders of the Democratic Party represented by the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, most notably “New Democrat” Bill Clinton.” These frenzies of punitive power tend to reach a boiling point in the lead up to elections. The National Research Council’s report notes that “the U.S. House and U.S. Senate have been far more likely to enact stiffer mandatory minimum sentence legislation in the weeks prior to an election. Because of the nation’s system of frequent legislative elections, dispersed governmental powers, and election of judges and prosecutors, policy makers tend to be susceptible to public alarms about crime and drugs and vulnerable to pressures from the public and political opponents to quickly enact tough legislation.” Electoral politics likewise tends to make prosecutors and judges behave in more punitive ways. “In the United States, most prosecutors are elected, as are most judges (except those who are nominated through a political process). Therefore, they are typically mindful of the political environment in which they function. Judges in competitive electoral environments in the United States tend to mete out harsher sentences.”

So democratic participation in elections in a sense gave us mass incarceration, a policy that has disenfranchised and excluded many from participating in electoral democracy. Yet this disenfranchisement is one of the least destructive impacts of mass incarceration. Rape, torture, murder, the caging and abuse of children, forcible denial of basic health care, the rich and well-connected stealing from the poor, and countless other atrocities mark the true costs of the carceral state. No election, no public opinion poll, no amount of political participation can make this just or acceptable. Even if all the prisoners and their families were given full voting rights, Lysander Spooner‘s words would ring true: “A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible.”

Elections and the Technocratic Ideology on Feed 44

James Tuttle — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 18:00:18 +0000

C4SS Feed 44 presents Erick Vasconcelos‘ “Elections and the Technocratic Ideology” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford.

It’s not about being governed or not, it’s about who is going to do the governing. Who would we want to sit on the Iron Throne if not a “specialist?” Someone who wouldn’t be driven by politico-ideological passions, but by the “industrial values” Veblen cherished. Someone to oil up the gears of this great machinery that is society.

That is all hogwash, of course, because when we talk about politics, we talk about ideology — about prioritizing, about choosing one collective goal as preferable to another. However, there are no macro social ends, at least not apart from a sum of individual goals or as a mere metaphor. Which is also the reason why it isn’t possible to put public management under the control of experts, because the very definition of what constitutes “public management” is an ideological question subject to political negotiation and resistance.

Feed 44:

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The Slavish Partisanship of Brazil’s Socialists

Valdenor Júnior — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:00:44 +0000

The second campaign round of Brazil’s presidential election between Worker’s Party (PT) candidate and president Dilma Rousseff and Brazilian Social Democratic Party candidate Aecio Neves has started and a large portion of the electorate and the politicians connected to leftist parties have decided to take a stance.

The Liberty and Socialism Party (PSOL), for instance, drafted a note indicating a non-neutral neutrality: They do not support any of the candidates, but recommend that no one vote for Aecio Neves. Politicians from the party, including well-known deputies Marcelo Freixo and Jean Wyllys, have declared their support for Dilma, albeit they state they are taking a “critical” position and do not endorse all of her policies.

The voters are left in a curious position: In social media, it is possible to see PSOL sympathizers and militants saying they are voting for the “lesser evil,” who is supposed to be Dilma, in their opinion. The situation is so ridiculous that they even state that “her defeat would be our defeat, a defeat of the social movements and the left.” It is a cognitive dissonance that supposedly sees Dilma’s victory with disgust, but that effectively works in favor of PT’s project to stay in power.

A bigger defeat for social movements is that Dilma Rousseff will suffer no consequences for her actions and is still seen as a representative of the concerns of the left — in contrast to PSDB’s elitism, which is identical to PT’s. It does not matter that Rousseff and PT are strategic allies of large corporate conglomerates, subsidized by BNDES. It does not matter that PT campaigned for the violent expropriation of hundreds of thousands of families and created monopoly zones for the World Cup that excluded Brazilian workers. It does not matter that indigenous and riverside populations’ rights in the Amazon are continually violated. It does not even matter that PT’s policies contribute to expand Brazil’s housing deficit and push the poor away from urban centers. What matters is that leftists signal their opposition to an elite — to which the PT core leaders actually belong.

During the World Cup, Luciana Genro, the PSOL presidential candidate, stated that it was not a proper moment for protests. Genro’s and the Brazilian college left’s political convenience does not factor into common people’s considerations. That is why we spoke at C4SS in defense of civil disobedience during the World Cup, replacing FIFA’s authorized commerce with free street vendors, bazaars, and non-aligned ventures.

All these factors show the worst trait of the Brazilian left: Its slavish faith in the state. There is, in the left, a very messianic and Leninist notion of what is a political party: The Worker’s Party, despite all the injustice and suffering it promotes in its policies, symbolizes social change and should be kept in power at all costs.

That’s why Brazilian libertarian socialist Mario Ferreira dos Santos used to say that “politics, as a political method of the socialists, is but a means to an end,” but those means “end up becoming more important than the ends and replace them.” Mario noticed that political parties are a “false process of social emancipation” that replaces ends with means and through which we are “never able to reach the desired ends; when we achieve something, it’s always in spite of politics.”

The partisan left pro-Rousseff, nowadays, puts their political means on a pedestal and despises their supposed ends, deifying the role of PT in Brazilian history as a revolutionary vanguard. In doing so, they relativize the absurd injustices committed by their government.

Maybe these militants think they are fulfilling some sort of historical mission and that soothes their conscience, but it certainly does not return the dignity and homes of the evicted and the affected by the World Cup, nor does it give back to the Brazilian people the billions that capitalists pocketed in cooperation with the government.

Government is the enemy of the poor and the minorities. No supposed progressive vanguard can deny this fact.

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Translations for this article:

Spanish, El partidismo servil de los socialistas brasileños.

Sinistra Punitiva e Criminalizzazione dell’Omofobia

Valdenor Júnior — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 11:00:23 +0000

Nell’ormai classico articolo “A esquerda punitiva” (“La Sinistra Punitiva”), Maria Lucia Karam critica la sinistra brasiliana aver abbandonato i propri principi profondi sul cambiamento sociale e per essersi unita a chi vorrebbe un inasprimento della legislazione come strumento per risolvere i conflitti della società e garantire la pace sociale.

Secondo la Karam, la sinistra dimentica che l’apparato repressivo dello stato è rivolto principalmente contro le persone ai margini e fa molto spesso pulizia sociale, e la proposta di ulteriore criminalizzazione e repressione (così come la lotta ai crimini finanziari) avanzata dalla sinistra non risolve le contraddizioni strutturali.

I problemi di sicurezza creati dal traffico di droga ne sono un esempio. Invece di chiedere più repressione per ridurre la sensazione di insicurezza, la sinistra brasiliana dovrebbe riflettere sul fatto che è la stessa criminalizzazione della droga a creare il circuito della violenza. La lotta alla criminalizzazione, dunque, diventa lotta alla violenza.

La Karam conclude notando che il ruolo della sinistra dovrebbe essere di critica al sistema prevalente, non di rafforzamento della sua logica.

Durante il dibattito elettorale del 29 settembre, il candidato cosiddetto minore Levy Fidelix, rispondendo ad una domanda dell’altro candidato Luciana Genro riguardo il matrimonio omosessuale, ha fatto alcune dichiarazioni omofobiche offensive sulla televisione nazionale. Fidelix ha messo in mostra la tipica repulsione eteronormativa verso gli omosessuali mascherata da “difesa dei valori famigliari”. Ed è andato oltre dicendo che il “sistema escretorio” non fa parte dell’apparato riproduttivo e che chi non è eterosessuale dovrebbe, in qualche modo, essere escluso dalla vita sociale. “Lontanissimo” dal resto della società così da poter curare i suoi presunti problemi affettivi e psicologici.

Molti a sinistra, non volendo perdere l’occasione, si sono detti a favore della criminalizzazione dell’omofobia, e hanno usato le parole di Fidelix come esempio di quello che bisognerebbe vietare. Secondo questa parte della sinistra, l’omofobia dovrebbe essere un crimine da trattare come il razzismo. Ma è proprio difendendo questo ragionamento che commettono l’errore della sinistra punitiva.

Criminalizzare un comportamento non può rappresentare il sistema principale per risolvere i conflitti sociali, perché si tratta di costrizione, che dovrebbe essere usata solo in caso di aggressione contro la libertà individuale.

L’idea di ricorrere alla criminalizzazione come soluzione di tutti i problemi è alla base dell’espansione drammatica della regolamentazione della vita da parte dello stato. In questo modo, qualunque comportamento può essere definito criminale.

La criminalizzazione delle opinioni inaccettabili è uno strumento diffuso, comune a tutti i regimi autoritari. Non è neanche uno strumento di cambiamento, ma di reazione. Non esiste una versione purificata perché in fin dei conti stiamo criminalizzando opinioni che davvero meritano disprezzo. È sempre e comunque uno strumento autoritario che serve a soffocare il dissenso.

Come fa notare Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, i grandi cambiamenti storici non sono mai stati il prodotto della “criminalizzazione delle opinioni conservatrici” (cosa che un tempo non era neanche possibile), ma sono passati attraverso un processo storico più complesso che comprendeva la decriminalizzazione delle opinioni e la libertà di espressione. La grande scoperta liberale, se vogliamo garantire la pace sociale, è che non siamo obbligati ad essere d’accordo su tutto, ma solo su chi ha il diritto di decidere chi ha ragione: l’individuo.

Criminalizzare l’omofobia e il razzismo può avere esiti molto spiacevoli. Molti già accusano le femministe di misandria e il movimento Lgbt di “eterofobia”. Accuse assurde, ma non è difficile immaginare che qualcuno potrebbe chiedere la soppressione di queste espressioni, soprattutto se si criminalizza l’opposto, ovvero il machismo e l’omofobia. Nessuno garantisce che questi argomenti non possano in futuro essere criminalizzati come incitamenti all’odio, a tutto svantaggio della libertà di dibattito e dei diritti delle minoranze.

Ecco perché il modo migliore di combattere il razzismo, l’omofobia e le altre culture discriminatorie non passa per la criminalizzazione. Scrive Mano Ferreira in un suo articolo, “Por um principio da nao opressao” (“A Favore del Principio della non-Oppressione”): “Quando edifichiamo il principio libertario della non-oppressione, dobbiamo puntare all’espansione della libertà. Secondo me, è attraverso la cooperazione volontaria e il rafforzamento sociale degli oppressi che, legittimamente e efficacemente, si pongono le basi per la lotta all’oppressione. È necessario analizzare profondamente il meccanismo dell’oppressione e le possibilità di eliminarlo: in questa missione dobbiamo riconoscere l’importanza di autori che aderiscono a correnti epistemologiche diverse, capirli e ridare loro importanza.”

L’azione diretta e il boicottaggio sociale sono strumenti molto utili a questo scopo, come ho fatto notare a quelle femministe che combattono la cultura dello stupro.

Quando si lotta per il progresso della società è bene lasciar fuori la criminalizzazione delle opinioni. L’emancipazione delle minoranze si può ottenere, e si otterrà, attraverso un processo di consolidamento storico e di allargamento e svecchiamento delle reti della cooperazione sociale volontaria, dove la criminalità dello stato e l’oppressione sociale sarà rigettata per essere sostituita dalla libertà.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

The Punitive Left and the Criminalization of Homophobia

Valdenor Júnior — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 18:00:49 +0000

In the now classic article “A esquerda punitiva” (“The Punitive Left”), Maria Lucia Karam criticizes the Brazilian left for forsaking their deeply held beliefs on social change and uniting with those who wish to strengthen criminal law as the principal means of solving society’s conflicts and guarantee social peace.

Karam notes that the left seems to have forgotten that the repressive apparatus of the state turns itself mainly against marginalized groups, serving more often than not as a form of social cleansing, and the very proposal of more criminalization and repression coming from the left (such as the fight against financial crimes) does not solve this structural contradiction.

An example of that is the security problem created by drug trafficking: Instead of supporting even more repression to drug trafficking to reduce the feeling of insecurity, the Brazilian left should reflect on the fact that it is drug criminalization itself that creates the cycle of violence related to drugs in the country. Thus, fighting against criminal law is fighting against violence.

Karam concludes that it is the left’s role to criticize the prevailing system, not to reinforce its logic.

In Brazil’s presidential debate on 09/29, so-called dwarf candidate Levy Fidelix made some vile, homophobic and offensive statements on national TV after being asked by fellow candidate Luciana Genro about his position on gay marriage. Fidelix showed the typical heteronormative revulsion to homosexuality disguised as “defending family values,” but he went even further in declaring that the “excretory system” is not a means of reproduction and that non-heterosexuals should be excluded somehow from social life, “far away” from the rest of society to treat their supposed affection and psychological problems.

Never skipping a beat, many leftists manifested themselves in favor of criminalizing homophobia and used Fidelix’s statements as an instance of what criminal law should ban. Homophobia should be a crime in the same way racism is, according to this sector of the Brazilian left. But in defending that position, they make the punitive left’s mistake.

Criminalizing a conduct cannot be the primary means through which social conflict is solved, because it is the most coercive way of doing so and the one that should be invoked only versus aggression against individual liberties.

The idea of criminalization as a solution for all human problems has dramatically expanded state regulation of life. And according to that point of view, there is no individual behavior that cannot be potentially included in our police records.

Criminalizing unacceptable opinions has been a common tool used by each and every authoritarian regime in human history. It is not ever a tool of social transformation, but of reaction. It will not be purified because we are finally criminalizing opinions that are actually worthy of scorn. It is still an authoritarian means to shut off dissent.

As Steven Pinker shows in The Better Angels of Our Nature, great changes in human history have not come from the “criminalization of conservative opinions” (something that was not even possible at the time), but through a more complex historical process that included the decriminalization of opinions and freedom of expression. To guarantee social peace, the great liberal discovery is that we do not have to agree on everything, but only on who should have the right to decide who is right: the individual.

The process of criminalizing homophobia and racism can turn ugly in the future: Many people accuse feminists of being misandric and the LGBT movement of being “heterophobic.” While these are absurd accusations, it is not difficult to think of a defense of suppression of their discourse on those grounds, since their opposite (machismo and homophobia) can become crimes. There is no guarantee that these discourses will not become criminalized and labeled as hate speech in the future, in detriment of free debate and minorities’s rights.

Therefore, the best way to fight against racism, homophobia, and other discriminatory cultures is not through their criminalization. As Mano Ferreira wrote on his article “Por um principio da nao opressao” (“For a Non-Oppression Principle”): “In putting together a libertarian principle of non-oppression, we should have in mind an expansion of human liberty. Thus, I believe that it is through voluntary cooperation and social empowerment of the oppressed that we build legitimate and efficient bases for fighting oppression. In that process, it is necessary to deeply analyze oppression mechanisms and its possibilities of undoing — a mission in which we should recognize the importance of authors who adhere to other epistemologies, understand them and resignify them.”

Direct action and social boycott might be very useful tools for that, something which I have pointed as a helpful tool for feminists against rape culture.

The paradigm of criminalization of opinions should be abandoned when we are fighting for social progress, since the emancipation of minorities is being obtained and will be achieved through a historical consolidation, amplification and enlightenment of the networks of voluntary social cooperation, where state criminality and social oppression will be fought and rejected in favor of human freedom.

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Translations for this article:

Italian, Sinistra Punitiva e Criminalizzazione dell’Omofobia.

Elezioni e Ideologia Tecnocratica

Erick Vasconcelos — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 11:00:35 +0000

Chi vota per politici come il candidato alla presidenza brasiliana Aecio Neves, così come molti dei simpatizzanti del suo partito (Partito Socialdemocratico Brasiliano, Psdb), spesso va in confusione quando scopre che idee come “efficienza” nel settore pubblico, “cura choc”, e “professionalità” di governo non attirano larghe fette della popolazione. Si tratta di un’idea moderatamente diffusa, appoggiata anche nel governo dello stato di Pernambuco (più come programma elettorale che come azione) da Eduardo Campos, morto il dodici agosto scorso. È l’idea secondo cui c’è, o almeno dovrebbe esserci, una separazione vitale tra la politica e l’amministrazione pubblica; tra l’ideologia e l’efficienza. Ma l’idea della professionalizzazione della politica, che consiste nel mettere i “tecnici” al governo per “gestire” la cosa pubblica come se fosse una normale organizzazione della società civile, è di per sé profondamente ideologica.

È neanche una delle ideologie più recenti: Thorstein Veblen parlava di una tecnocrazia formata da ingegneri già negli anni venti. Veblen, nel suo famoso The Engineers and the Price System parla degli ingegneri (i “tecnici”) come di una classe di persone in grado di promuovere i principi della “gestione scientifica” rivolta alla produzione, opposti ad un sistema di mercato in cui i prezzi fungono da segnale. Veblen non vedeva niente di strano in un’organizzazione corporativa, che lui voleva far assurgere a modello universale e fondamento della società, eliminando le limitazioni tecniche di quelli che lui chiamava “valori industriali”. A loro volta, questi ultimi erano dipendevano dall’efficienza produttiva e non avevano niente a che vedere con gli incentivi del mercato; anzi, vi si opponevano.

Veblen promosse le sue idee riguardo l’industria e la tecnologia come punto di partenza di quella società basata su una produzione di massa da lui immaginata. Questa società, e i suoi valori, avrebbe dovuto far nascere, tramite i lavoratori dell’industria, una nuova forma di democrazia, gestita in maniera innovativa in modo da promuovere l’efficienza, la conoscenza tecnica e l’amministrazione della cosa pubblica. Ovvero una macchina perfettamente calibrata per il dominio e il controllo della società.

Questo ideale distopico riuscì a trovare adepti. Nel corso del ventesimo subì poche modifiche, perlopiù ad opera di progressisti come Joseph Schumpeter e John Kenneth Galbraith. Oggi ne sentiamo parlare soprattutto per bocca dei politici, che pensano di parlare con la voce dell’innovazione quando sostengono la necessità di mettere specialisti in posizioni di governo. È anche una comoda ideologia per un gran numero di burocrati perché non mette in dubbio l’esistenza di un dato incarico di governo, ma semplicemente si chiede chi dovrebbe ricoprirlo. La questione non è se un governo è necessario o meno, ma chi andrà a governare. Chi vorremmo sul Trono di Ferro se non uno “specialista”? Qualcuno che non si lasci trascinare da passioni politico-ideologiche, ma da quei “valori industriali” vagheggiati da Veblen. Qualcuno che olii gli ingranaggi di quel grande macchinario che è la società.

Certo sono tutte sciocchezze, perché quando parliamo di politica parliamo di ideologia, di priorità, della scelta di un obiettivo collettivo piuttosto che di un altro. Ma non ci sono fini sociali, a meno che non si consideri la somma dei singoli obiettivi individuali in senso puramente metaforico. Che poi è la ragione per cui non è possibile affidare la gestione della cosa pubblica al controllo degli esperti, perché la definizione stessa di “gestione della cosa pubblica” è una questione ideologica soggetta a negoziati politici e opposizioni.

Non è possibile rimuovere l’ideologia dal governo perché il governo stesso è un’ideologia: l’ideologia del potere, del controllo e della soppressione della dissidenza. L’ideologia della conformità, della dimensione macro-sociale, della società intesa come astrazione, mai riconducibile alle sue componenti individuali.

Governare, lungi dall’essere un’attività senza ideologie e programmi, consiste nel cucire assieme i programma della maggioranza all’interno di una gerarchia. Non c’è da meravigliarsi se il movimento anarchico tende storicamente verso rapporti orizzontali e la creazione del consenso come strategia che consenta di evitare la nascita di maggioranze e di strutture burocratiche di potere. Questa idea di un rapporto orizzontale ha l’obiettivo di mitigare gli effetti di particolari ideologie quando queste vengono applicate alla collettività. Al contrario una tecnocrazia, con il suo tentativo di razionalizzare i processi, ricorda un dispotismo illuminato. Certo è positivo che un processo socialmente desiderabile debba essere efficiente e consenta un risparmio di risorse, ma prima dobbiamo sapere quali sono i processi socialmente desiderabili. E non lo sappiamo.

È molto ironico il fatto che i politici di lungo corso siano i più grandi (e forse i più cinici) proponenti del credo tecnocratico. Lo stesso Aecio Neves, nonostante i suoi richiami all’amministrazione tecnocratica, è specializzato in una sola cosa: la poltrona. È stato direttore di una grossa banca pubblica, segretario alla presidenza, deputato, governatore e senatore.

Forse Aecio Neves oggi è un fantoccio della retorica che lui stesso ha messo su; un ostaggio. Perché Aecio Neves non è mai stato un tecnico; il tecnico è quello che realizza i suoi programmi politici.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Elections and the Technocratic Ideology

Erick Vasconcelos — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 18:00:19 +0000

People who vote for politicians such as Brazilian presidential candidate Aecio Neves, as well as many of his party’s supporters (the Social Democracy Brazilian Party, PSDB), are often dumbfounded when they find out how unappealing ideas of “efficiency” in the public sector, “management shock,” and “professionalization” in government are to a large sector of the population. It’s a moderately widespread idea, also spearheaded in the Pernambuco state government (more as a campaign bullet point than real actions) by Eduardo Campos, who died on August 12. The belief is that there is — or at least should be — a vital separation between the public administration and politics; between ideology and efficiency. However, the idea of professionalizing politics, putting “technicians” in government positions, and “managing” public affairs like ordinary organizations in society is, in itself, deeply ideological.

And it isn’t one of the youngest ideologies: Thorstein Veblen talked about his technocracy of engineers in the 1920s. Veblen, in his well-known The Engineers and the Price System described engineers (“technicians”) as the class capable of promoting the principles of “scientific management” for production — as opposed to a system of market production with effective price signaling. Veblen didn’t have any problems with the corporate organization and intended to universalize its model as the foundation of society, eliminating technical limitations to what he termed “industrial values,” which were connected to productive efficiency (and had nothing to do with, and indeed were opposed to, market incentives).

Veblen championed his ideas on industry and technique as the starting point of the mass production society he envisioned. That society and its values would give rise, through industrial workers, to a new democracy with a new management style that promoted efficiency, technical knowledge and administration. That is, a machine perfectly adjusted to the control and regulation of society.

This dystopian ideal was able to find adherents and modify itself slightly during the 20th century, especially in the works of managerial progressives such as Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith. Nowadays, we hear it from politicians who may think they speak with the voice of innovation when they say that specialists should fill government positions. It’s also a convenient ideology for a number of bureaucrats because it doesn’t ask whether such government positions should exist at all, but only who should fill them. It’s not about being governed or not, it’s about who is going to do the governing. Who would we want to sit on the Iron Throne if not a “specialist?” Someone who wouldn’t be driven by politico-ideological passions, but by the “industrial values” Veblen cherished. Someone to oil up the gears of this great machinery that is society.

It’s impossible to remove ideology from government because government is an ideology: The ideology of power, control and suppression of dissidence. The ideology of conformity, of the macro-social, of the idea of society as an abstraction, never reducible to its individual components.

Governing, far from an activity without ideology and plans, is the stitching of majority plans within hierarchy. It’s no wonder that anarchist movements have historically tended to horizontalism and consensus-building as strategies to avoid the formation of majorities and bureaucratic power structures. These ideas of horizontalism are intended to mitigate the effects of particular ideologies when applied to the collective. In contrast, technocracy looks like a form of enlightened despotism with its attempt to rationalize processes. Of course, it’s a positive thing that socially desirable processes should be efficient and demand less resources — but we must first know which ones are the socially desirable processes. They’re not a given.

It’s somewhat ironic that lifelong politicians are the biggest (and maybe the most cynical) proponents of the technocratic creed. Aecio Neves himself, despite his claims of technical prowess in administration, is a specialist in one thing only: Getting positions in the government. He’s been the director of a large state bank, secretary of the presidency, deputy, governor, senator.

It may be the case that Aecio Neves nowadays is a puppet of the narrative he’s built for himself, replicating it as a hostage of his own rhetoric. Because Aecio has never been a technician; the technicians are the arms that execute his political plans.

Translations for this article:

Italian, Elezioni e Ideologia Tecnocratica.

Dear Conservative America

Jason Lee Byas — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:00:12 +0000

Conservative? Still disheartened by the election? This column is for you. More specifically, it’s for you if you are the more serious kind, and were already upset about Romney getting the nomination. The kind who still agrees with Barry Goldwater that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

My aim is simple. I wish to convince you that your values are not best advanced by caring about whether or not some establishment Republican presenting himself as a conservative wins an election. In fact, it’s best that you forget both conservatism and elections altogether. Your core values are best advanced by converting to and promoting anarchism, thereby situating yourself as a part of the radical left.

This no doubt sounds absurd. Yet it is exactly the transition many have made. Among them is Karl Hess, the man who wrote that legendary Goldwater speech and whose words still burn in the hearts of many dedicated conservatives. When making the shift from author of the 1960 and 1964 Republican Party platforms to author of anarchist texts with titles like “Neighborhood Power” and “The Death of Politics,” Hess found that the first push came from “the familiar ring of what was being said there. Decentralization. The return to the people of real political power — of all power.”

As a former conservative, I know that your concerns about states’ rights and local governance are genuine, and not thinly-veiled covers for bigotry. You know better than some bureaucrat in Washington what’s best for your community. The problem is not in your zeal on these issues, but in not taking it further.

Why states’ rights instead of no states at all? Bureaucrats in Anchorage, Oklahoma City, Montgomery, or wherever your state government operates might know your community better than ones in Washington, but they don’t know it as well as you do. The need for self-determination goes all the way down.

Whatever good your state and local governments can do, your community can do better all on its own. If you need speed bumps on your street, install them. You shouldn’t have to waste time groveling before city council.

If you’re worried about how that might play out with large-scale problems, I recommend reading about the Common Ground Collective’s efforts after Hurricane Katrina. More recently the same resolve is being shown by Occupy Sandy in New York.

Some of you might think that’s all well and good, but still feel uncomfortable about the “thereby situating yourself as a part of the radical left” part. After all, you believe in free markets. Yet as odd as it may sound, that’s exactly why you ought to find common cause with the radical left.

Someone like you, who might have participated in the original anti-bailout Tea Parties, or at least sympathized with them, probably doesn’t have to be told that big government tends to help big business at the expense of everyone else.

Imagine what a world where we actually had a free market might be like. It seems at least reasonable to consider the idea that corporate power would completely collapse without the active support it gets from government.

Limousine liberals aren’t just talking down to everyone about how much we need more government out of some messiah complex (though there’s also that). They want to stay in a position where they can talk down to people.

If you really want to scare that intersection of the liberal and business elite, by the way, try supporting a local unionizing campaign like those conducted by Industrial Workers of the World. Well-to-do Democratic politicians might have an interest in pandering to rigidly bureaucratic unions that waste their members’ funds on campaign contributions. However, they probably won’t be too excited about a fighting union that sees the government as categorically opposed to its goals and gives out a pamphlet called “How to Fire Your Boss” [PDF].

I don’t expect you to go from Vice Chair of your local GOP committee to hoisting the black flag overnight because of this column. All the same, I do hope it interests you enough to start looking for more information about whatever’s keeping you from making that move.

Translations for this article:

Spanish, Querido Conservador Estadounidense.

The Electoral Suspension of Disbelief

M. George van der Meer — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:00:02 +0000

There exists in the country now — and there has existed for some time — an appreciable readiness to, if you will, suspend disbelief when it comes to the claims of politicians. An eagle-eyed professor of politics describes a detail of this picture in America:

“We carry in our heads this image of economic markets made up of small producers and rational and fully informed consumers, and we tell ourselves that this is perfect competition and an ideal world. But actually it is a fantasy world.”

A fantasy it is, one naturally far more easily comestible than its dark alternative: The truth.

This readiness itself hints at something worrisome, something deeply rooted in the political psychology of the nation. Fundamental things, big questions at the core of what seem to be unsolvable social and political problems, beyond or behind the mania of Donkey versus Elephant — these are not to be hounded. Red herrings are scattered to throw us off the scent, send us on the wrong track. And do we ever suppose that our definitions themselves – of apparently fixed notions like private property, trade, money, and competition — are properly to be subject to strict scrutiny?

In allowing the archists, the emissaries of authority and rulership, to decide what these things mean, we have already lost anything that we might hope to win by, say, voting. But, to be sure, slogans like “free market” mean different things to different people. The capitalists teach us early and often that centralization and expansion are natural and necessary as considered within the logic of economies of scale. Further and further integration of production processes within the firm are, they assure us, obligatory given the demands of efficiency.

But then, of course, the capitalists, these impassioned adulators of freedom and competition, never do introduce the fact that their claims about streamlining and concentration would, if carried out to their apogee, mean the embrace of all production within a single monopoly. I cannot imagine that — at such a point — it would matter whether that monopoly were administered by business suit-clad capitalists or by the mandarins of some “classless” total state.

Professor Coates pleads that the twentieth century American economy was no free market. Indeed, but it probably was and still is capitalism. Notwithstanding the contest that has dominated the past months, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney alike stand for it, and yet as a matter of fact the victor Obama has very little control as an individual over how capitalism will continue to function during the next four or forty years.

To hazard a guess, capitalism will likely appear how it has: Vast stretches of land will be penned in by fictitious claims of right; copyright and patent statutes will prohibit access to ideas, techniques, processes which a free and competitive market makes open to all; licenses, permissions, certifications, and credentials will limit competition to the anguish of the laboring classes and consumers; tax revenues will be withdrawn and then poured gratuitously into the miasmal megafirms of the capitalists.

Really, there will be nothing very competitive about the scene, but surely it will be approved by the political footmen of the men who own the nation. Still, let us at least remember that there have always been in this country free market sorts of a rather different branding. The Anarchists have long been of the mind that a fully liberated competitive system of economics would, simply by its operation, make equal exchange on the basis of cost the expected norm. Such economies could not intelligibly go by the family name of capitalism: They are of a very different pedigree to be sure.

Over the weeks to follow Tuesday’s election, do scrutinize the definitions of these men who pursue office. Test them and see if they fit those suggested by conscience and critical thought. If they do not, consider spending the next election day to come thinking about those core questions that the people listed on the ballot have so ignored.