The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract.

A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until the point of “agreement,” have been absent of coercion and duress. But what if they haven’t? What if history has been a series of tragic and violent misadventures, a long list of appropriations, injustices, and other villainies carried out by the state to enrich a small ruling class?

Would we still want to defend sweatshops, or would we start to attack them on free market grounds?

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Una tipica difesa dello sfruttamento da parte dei sostenitori del libero mercato punta il dito sul fatto che “lo sfruttamento è meglio delle alternative disponibili”. Questa difesa tende anche ad enfatizzare il ruolo dello sfruttamento in un “processo di sviluppo che, alla lunga, migliora lo stile di vita”.

Quando le autorità per decenni non fanno che sbarrare la strada alle altre possibilità servendosi della violenza sistematica di stato, così da privare la popolazione di diritti e risorse, per forza lo sfruttamento comincia ad apparire come una buona opportunità. Anche la migliore.

Ma è con questa revisione selettiva della storia, ovvero chiudendo un occhio davanti alle ingiustizie economiche, che molti presunti sostenitori del libero mercato si guadagnano una reputazione. Un anarchico di mercato non capisce le ragioni di chi per difendere la libertà, il sistema concorrenziale e i diritti individuali spreca il fiato giustificando la schiavitù salariale offerta da chi sfrutta il lavoro.

L’espressione “schiavitù salariale” dà fastidio a molti difensori del libero mercato, che spesso obiettano dicendo che la relazione tra datore di lavoro e dipendente si basa su un accordo e un contratto volontario.

Ma perché un contratto sia lecito occorre che le relazioni, nel momento in cui si raggiunge questo “accordo”, siano libere da costrizioni e minacce. Ma, e se non fosse così? E se la storia non fosse altro che una serie di disavventure tragiche e violente, un lungo elenco di appropriazioni indebite, ingiustizie e abusi perpetrati dallo stato per arricchire una piccola classe di potere?

Vogliamo continuare a difendere lo sfruttamento, o vogliamo attaccarlo sulla base dei principi del libero mercato? Come scrive William Bailie, “La schiavitù salariale è semplicemente un modo moderno di dire schiavitù tout court.” Così come gli anarchici di oggi, anche Bailie non vedeva il capitalismo come un processo di avanzamento e sviluppo, ma come un “arretramento economico” che ostacola il procedere della libertà personale.

Noi anarchici di mercato crediamo nella libertà, nelle qualità imprenditoriali, e nell’individuo sovrano più di quanto non ci credano molti sedicenti sostenitori della libera impresa. Non crediamo che le persone nei paesi in via di sviluppo sceglierebbero di lavorare lunghe ore in condizioni disumane e per una paga miserevole se non ci fossero restrizioni arbitrarie come la proprietà intellettuale e l’accesso limitato a risorse comuni come la terra.

Chi giustifica lo sfruttamento tende ad ignorare il problema del monopolio terriero. Come dice Murray Rothbard, il problema è che “la proprietà terriera viene continuamente espropriata con la forza”. Per Rothbard, il legittimo proprietario di una terra è “chi veramente la possiede”, non chi “vanta il diritto di proprietà e di sfruttamento di qualcosa che è stato acquisito con la violenza”.

La storia di quelli che oggi sono considerati paesi in via di sviluppo, dove si concentra la maggior parte dello sfruttamento del lavoro, è macchiata dal furto e dal monopolio politico della terra che ha tenuto bassi i salari e innalzato le rendite. Queste violente imposizioni politiche non hanno niente a che vedere con i veri principi del libero mercato.

Viene da chiedersi se chi difende lo sfruttamento dal punto di vista del “libero mercato” creda davvero che questo sia il risultato della libertà d’impresa, cosa che renderebbe le attuali condizioni economiche completamente difendibili.

Forse chi difende questo sistema, pur ammettendo i predicati storici dello sfruttamento, pensa che sia importante riconoscere che nei paesi in via di sviluppo un salario basso e lunghe ore di lavoro rappresentano la scelta migliore per i poveri. Ma nessuno nega questo fatto di per sé. È che per un anarchico di mercato il fenomeno è semplicemente ingiusto e indifendibile nella sua forma attuale.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Typical free market defenses of sweatshops focus on the fact that “sweatshops are better than the available alternatives.” These defenses also tend to emphasize sweatshops’ role in a “process of development that ultimately raises living standards.”

When authority precludes other options, using systematic state violence over a course of decades to divest people of their rights and resources, of course sweatshop employment begins to look like a good option, even the best one.

But this selective redaction of history is just how so many supposed champions of free markets earn their reputation for turning a blind eye to economic injustice. Market anarchists find no coherent or principled reason why defenders of freedom, competition, and individual rights ought to waste our words making apologies for the kind of wage slavery offered by sweatshops.

The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract.

A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until the point of “agreement,” have been absent of coercion and duress. But what if they haven’t? What if history has been a series of tragic and violent misadventures, a long list of appropriations, injustices, and other villainies carried out by the state to enrich a small ruling class?

Would we still want to defend sweatshops, or would we start to attack them on free market grounds? As William Bailie wrote, “Wage-slavery is merely the modern phase of chattel slavery.” Like the market anarchists of today, Bailie saw capitalism not as a process of advancement and development, but as an “economic retrogression” under which personal freedom had been retarded.

Market anarchists have more faith in freedom, entrepreneurship, and the sovereign individual than most self-described advocates of free enterprise. We don’t believe that, uninhibited by arbitrary restrictions like intellectual property law and given free access to common resources like the land, the people of developing countries would freely choose to work long hours for low pay under the most inhumane conditions.

Apologists for sweatshops tend to ignore the problem of land monopoly, as Murray Rothbard put it, the problem of “continuing seizure of landed property by aggressors.” Rothbard argued that the legitimate owners of land are “the true possessors,” rather than those “whose original and continuing claim to the land and its fruits has come from coercion and violence.”

The history of what is today regarded as the developing world, the site of most sweatshops, is marred by political land monopolization and theft that has driven wages down and rents up. Such deep political coercion has nothing to do with real free market principles.

One wonders whether “free market” defenders of sweatshops really do believe that we got to the current status quo using the free enterprise road, which would arguably make the economic conditions of today entirely defensible.

It may be that sweatshop defenders acknowledge the historical predicates of sweatshops while nevertheless seeing it as important to recognize sweatshops as the best alternative for the poor in the developing world. But no one really denies that fact on its own — on the contrary, market anarchists simply contend that these phenomena are unjust and untenable as they exist in the world today.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Schiavitù Salariale e Sfruttamento Sono Libera Impresa?
• Spanish, La esclavitud salarial y las maquiladoras no son fenómenos de libre mercado

This study calls for pause and careful reflection. Rising sea level is a particularly dangerous aspect of global change which may eventually produce millions of climate refugees. Eustatic change could displace entire island nations, swallow coastal cities, increase flood damage and reduce the availability of important ecosystem services offered to our societies from coastal wetlands. Following such reflection, the natural question to ask is what exactly is human civilization to do about climate change?

Most discourse over climate change from the body politic simply asks after the role of the nation, or state, in addressing the problem.  There are many problems with this type of debate, not least of which is that actually existing capitalism is incredibly reluctant to change its ideology and abandon practices which perpetuate environmental degradation and social injustice. Take for instance the Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment, which warns that the effects of climate change are “immediate and widespread.” Obama himself touts the new assessment (in a solar paneled Wal-Mart surrounded by socks, gaudy flip-flops and other items produced for mass consumption) by announcing a series of corporate pledges to increase renewable energy use and boost solar generation. In his speech Obama declares: “Together, the commitments we are announcing today prove that there are cost-effective ways to tackle climate change and create jobs at the same time.”

There you have it: “Growth at any cost” economics and the corporate state championed as an answer to the anthropogenic influence on climate change. Obama’s speech was nothing but an endorsement of the status quo. Of course the administration also advocates cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and other regulations to slow anthropogenic change, but this rhetoric serves the sole purpose of green-washing the inherit reluctance of the current political economy to embrace real change.

As seas change there is an emerging necessity for a corresponding sea change in politics — enter the market left.

The market, or libertarian, left, largely endorses the idea that human-kind strives for the free, unhindered unfolding of the individual and social forces of life (to borrow from Rudolf Rocker) — and institutions that contain such development are illegitimate unless democratically (small d) justified. If any authority is illegitimate, which is usually the case, it is to be dismantled and only reestablished, if need be, from the grassroots. Under such a socio-economic order society would be freed from political guardianship, liberating individual labor from concentrated private capital.

The market left simply seeks the true market form — an alliance of liberated individuals based on co-operative, inclined labor and community interests. Such an order can only exist in a massively decentralized society. The market left envisions a society where political boundaries are dissolved thus leaving only natural boundaries — watersheds, landscapes and ecosystems. Here, the individuals relationship to community and the environment will be much more understood. Only in liberty will the body politic be empowered enough to manage a changing global climate.

The answer to the aforementioned climate question is the stateless society.

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!

The American Federation of Teachers blacklists asset managers who manage public sector employees’ defined benefit pension funds, but have contributed to organizations that advocate moving government employees into defined contribution plans (like 401ks). Reason‘s Scott Shackford (“Support the Free Market? The American Federation of Teachers Wants You to Bugger Off,” April 9) characterizes the blacklist as a war on those who “support the free market” and describes organizations that advocate defined contribution pensions as “free market think tanks.”

We hear a lot of this kind of “free market” advocacy from beltway libertarian organizations these days. “Free market reform” means, not moving social functions from the state sector to voluntary associations, but simply funneling taxpayer money through for-profit corporate intermediaries or remodeling government agencies themselves to resemble neoliberal corporate culture. So vouchers and phony “privatization” that give taxpayer funds to politically connected corporations are “free market” policies. So are public sector “reforms” that ape the recent corporate culture of union-busting, downsizing, speedups and pension looting. In short, “free market” just means it looks corporate and somebody’s making a profit — even if that profit is just the fruit of being jacked into the state.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing from Reason. Two years ago Ron Bailey ascribed Democratic criticism of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to hatred for its agenda of “free markets and limited government” — a phrase he used repeatedly (“Leftwing Pitchforkers: Kill the Limited Government Monster,s” April 26, 2012). He approvingly quoted the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Fred Smith to the effect that the attack on ALEC was “part of a broader attack by those seeking to drive all market voices from the marketplace of ideas.” Bailey also denounced, in high dudgeon, the instinct of the “morally stunted Left” to “follow the money” when in fact “[v]alues matter more than money.” And he echoed Fred Smith’s praise for CEOs “willing to stand up for free enterprise” (presumably by donating to ALEC).

Presumably by “values” and “free enterprise,” Bailey and Smith refer to the way private prison corporations use ALEC to promote harsher drug and immigration laws that — purely by coincidence — are extremely lucrative (it’s about values, not money, see?) for private prison corporations. Or the way Koch Industries uses ALEC to promote corporatist pipeline projects that never be built without wholesale state land theft via eminent domain. Or Pfizer, which uses “intellectual property” law to extort 2000% price markups from consumers for drugs under patent monopolies. Or the oil companies that use local authoritarian governments or hire death squads around the world to terrorize native populations who object to their land and resource grabs. What a big-hearted bunch these “free enterprise” CEOs are!

A real friend of free enterprise and limited government, Adam Smith, suffered from no such faux naivete about the purported “idealism” of businesspeople involved in lobbying the government. He observed, quite pointedly, that when businesspeople get together to influence the government it almost always involves some scheme by which business robs or swindles the public with help from the government. And the so-called “free market think tanks” that big business supports, and which writers like Shackford and Bailey are so fond of, are prime examples of the phenomenon.

The topic of Moisés Naím’s book is the decay of power — the shift of power “from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace.”

But he might just as easily call it a book on the transition from hierarchies to networks. Power, Naím says, isn’t just shifting in the directions described in the quotation above. Power itself is evaporating — “slipping away” — even in the hands of its new recipients. And what’s emerging in its place is a society based not on power but voluntary association: horizontal networks and self-managed groups.

The main reason for the declining power of legacy institutions is falling barriers to entry. Individuals, small groups, and self-organized networks are increasingly able to take on powerful institutions on an equal — or more than equal — basis. That results, in Naím’s terminology, from the “More Revolution” (quantitative increases in population, income, literacy, et cetera), the “Mobility Revolution” (self-explanatory), and the “Mentality Revolution” (more education, rising expectations, and decreased deference to authority).

But the decisive revolution, in my opinion, is the “Less Revolution”: the ephemeralization, or the decline in material requirements (overhead and capital outlays) required to undertake any given function. The 20th century was the era of large, centralized, hierarchical institutions, mainly because of the large capital outlays required to enter the field. The precipitous fall in capital costs required to undertake the same functions means that by the end of the 21st century there probably won’t be enough of such institutions left to bury.

Declining advantages

The rest of the book is a survey of Naím’s thesis — the declining power advantages of size — as it applies to specific facets of society.

In politics, majority parties in control of national governments are finding their political power less and less meaningful. The proliferation of groups with veto power — organized interest groups such as the Pirate Party in Europe and Tea Party in the United States, the Arab Spring, hacktivist movements, and NGOs et cetera — has led to a paralysis in national politics. The application of asymmetric warfare techniques to other areas of life — political, economic, social — means that the deliberate application of power finds itself increasingly thwarted by “vetoes, foot-dragging, diversions, and interference.” The network-communications revolution and the removal of transaction costs for coordination have increased what Samuel Huntington called the “crisis of governability” back in the 1970s by several orders of magnitude.

In the international arena, despite the apparent concentration of power in the hands of the United States (the “sole remaining superpower”), the actual power advantage of the United States and second-tier Great Powers is steadily diminishing. As asymmetric warfare techniques proliferate, the advantages of superior military force are in rapid decline. The weaker military side prevailed 55 percent of the time between 1950 and 1998, compared to only 12 percent between 1800 and 1849. And the change has accelerated in the last decade or so, with the rapid technological advances and cheapening of area-denial weapons that make American power-projection capabilities less and less usable.

In economics the falling capital outlays for production are undermining the whole material basis for the power of large institutions. The revolution in cheap manufacturing technology makes the large mass-production factory irrelevant from a purely material and technical standpoint. The revolution in desktop information processing, network communications, and P2P (peer-to-peer) organization is having a similar effect on the big media corporations.

The network-information revolution is also rendering large government and corporate institutions vulnerable to networked public information and pressure campaigns. Until the 1990s, the Mexican government’s attempted suppression of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas or Shell Oil’s use of mercenary death squads to suppress local resistance in Nigeria would hardly have merited an inside paragraph in the major newspapers of record. But thanks to global information campaigns on the Internet, such state and corporate malefactors have found themselves blindsided by negative publicity and scurrying under the refrigerator like cockroaches when the kitchen light is turned on.

For most prestigious corporate brands, the five-year risk of a catastrophic collapse of value from attacks on their public reputation has grown from 20 percent to 82 percent over the past 20 years. Negative publicity by means of networked communications media is a venerable David-vs.-Goliath strategy that has been practiced by the Wobblies as “open-mouth sabotage” for decades. More recently, in the Internet Age, it’s been the primary weapon of public-pressure campaigns such as Charles Kernaghan’s fight against Kathie Lee Gifford, and the Coalition of Immolakee Workers against Taco Bell and KFC. Corporations are starting to learn they no longer live in the broadcast era of one-way communications that they control. And their attempts to shut up critics with SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) or DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down notices are running up against what Mike Masnick calls the Streisand Effect: attempts to suppress embarrassing speech have the tendency to draw orders of magnitude more attention to the embarrassing speech.

The shared paradigm

The main problem with Naím’s analysis is that, for all his celebration of the network revolution and the decline in institutional power, he wants to stop the rolling rock halfway down the hill. Throughout the book, he warns of the dangers attendant to a loss of authority, like “anarchy” or a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” At the same time he idealizes the role of authority — e.g., the “Pax Americana” — in imposing order.

In the end he seems unable to conceive of the possibility that rather than being something “imposed” by authority, order may instead result from horizontal, voluntary cooperation.

It is a fundamental deficiency of vision. He repeatedly points to all the complex problems facing the world — climate change, terrorism, resource depletion, et cetera — that, in his view, require some sort of usable power to solve. He ignores the extent to which such problems actually result from the past exercise of that power.

In so doing, he perpetuates a paradigm common to both mainstream Left and Right that should be quite familiar to us in American politics: the portrayal of the world’s present ills (poverty, corporate power, the concentration of wealth, et cetera) as natural and inevitable absent state intervention to prevent them. The statist Left justifies state intervention on the grounds that it’s necessary to prevent the otherwise inevitable emergence of wealth disparities and concentrations of economic power caused by an unregulated market. The statist Right (which misappropriates to itself the label “free-market” or “libertarian”) shares the view of those outcomes as inevitable, but argues either that the outcomes really aren’t all that bad or that they’re the reward for superior productivity and performance in a “free market.” This shared paradigm of statist Left and Right serves as a legitimizing ideology for both big government and big business by portraying them as competitors or enemies rather than, as they are in reality, parts of a single interlocking system of power.

That is demonstrated by Naím’s view of the importance of some hegemonic power in guaranteeing global political stability. He idealizes the “peace” and “stability” imposed by hegemonic powers such as the bipolar superpower condominium of the Cold War, as well as the United States’s unilateral attempt to impose a world order since the end of the Cold War. He totally ignores the fact that many of the instabilities that supposedly require a hegemon to suppress them were themselves the direct result of past exercises of hegemonic power.

How much terrorism was directly generated by Britain’s promotion of the Zionist project in Palestine, or the American decisions to overthrow Mosadeq and to destabilize the Soviet client regime in Afghanistan? How many global hot spots are aftereffects of the World War I victors’ hubris in drawing imaginary lines through the territories of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires?

How much bloodshed was foisted on the world by the U.S. government itself, when it supported Central American death squads, instigated bloody coups in places such as Indonesia, and promoted the universal triumph of military dictatorship in the Southern Cone of South America through Operation Condor?

The superpower dual hegemony during the Cold War may have “left little room for local conflicts to spread,” but superpower involvement in local proxy wars also made them extremely bloody. The deforested toxic-waste dump that persists in what was formerly South Vietnam should be enough to convince us of that. Instead of asking who will prevent aggression after Pax Americana, it would make more sense to ask who will deter America.

Misunderstanding free trade

Naím also idealizes — unjustifiably — the world order enforced by superpower military hegemony and the “soft power” of the IMF and World Bank. The claim that the Washington Consensus promotes “lowered trade barriers” is ludicrous. It has lowered tariffs — but only because tariffs have ceased to serve corporate power and instead have become a hindrance to it. Meanwhile, it greatly strengthened a new form of protectionism: so-called intellectual property, which serves the same protectionist function for transnational corporations that tariffs did for industrial corporations a century ago. The global system of information lockdown enforced in behalf of transnational corporations — I call it the DRM (digital rights management) Curtain — is more protectionist than anything Smoot and Hawley could have imagined.

The “peace” enforced under the UN Security Council since World War II has been a regime of extraction by the industrial powers of the global north against the global south.

What Washington calls a global regime of “free trade” in fact ratifies a status quo resulting from centuries of imperial land expropriation, enclosure, and slavery. It protects state-subsidized and state-protected global corporations in mining and agribusiness, as well as sweatshop employers, against victims’ attempts to obtain justice. It has absolutely nothing to do with free trade or free markets.

The problem with Naím’s framing is that he fails to understand the true nature of the state. The state, as Franz Oppenheimer pointed out, is the political means to wealth — i.e., rent extraction — by the coalition of privileged classes that control it. This is as true of the global neoliberal regime enforced by the United States as it is of domestic policy. The American state does not promote “free markets” or “lower trade barriers,” but instead a mixture of markets and state intervention best calculated to guarantee the maximum sustainable rate of rent extraction for the classes that control the state.

Despite his enthusiasm for the network revolution, Naím constantly finds himself looking back to the fleshpots of Egypt. His most thoroughgoing rhetoric about the revolutionary effects of decentralization notwithstanding, he seems most comfortable with a hybridized vision in which the network revolution is domesticated, co-opted, and incorporated into existing institutional power structures.

The history of the last few decades is a history of attempts by existing power structures to put new wine in old bottles — to domesticate new decentralized production technologies by decentralizing operations while retaining centralized disposal of their product. Transnational corporations outsource actual production to small job shops in China but use “intellectual property” law to integrate them into a corporate framework. They attempt to copy the advantages of P2P organization within their institutional framework by means of management fads such as the Wikified firm and Enterprise 2.0, despite the fact that genuine P2P organizations are inevitably more agile and efficient than corporate imitations.

Naím shows no little sympathy with this state of affairs. In language reminiscent of Tom Peters’s gushing back in the 1990s about the portion of his new Minolta’s price that reflected “human imagination” rather than labor and materials, Naím celebrates the growing share of firm market value that results from patents and copyrights, human capital, and goodwill rather than the book value of tangible assets: in other words, “value” created by embedded rents on artificial scarcities enforced by the state, rather than by natural scarcities or necessary costs of production. To put it in Biblical language, the Children of Israel have invented a way to make bricks without straw — but Pharaoh has forbidden it in order to keep the straw suppliers in business.

Naím imagines that new small-scale production technologies such as job shops full of cheap CNC (computer numerical control) machinery will be integrated into the existing global economy — “small-batch production of mass-market goods.” But that is only a temporary hybrid form resulting from the effort — ultimately doomed — to integrate garage-production technology into a corporate institutional framework. It will eventually give way to small-batch local production of goods for local consumption, by small neighborhood shops in both American and Chinese communities. Garage factories in American communities will soon be producing knockoffs of patented industrial goods, or illegally producing generic replacement parts and accessories from CAD/CAM files on the Pirate Bay. Chinese and Vietnamese shops will ignore Nike’s trademark and sell identical sneakers — without the enormous brand-name markup — locally.

In every case, genuine network organizations run circles around the corporate imitations. And (as the record companies can tell you in regard to file-sharing technologies) the artificial property rights on which such attempts at co-optation depend are becoming unenforceable.

Despite Naím’s attempt to maintain a position with one foot in the old world and one in the new, there’s no halfway stopping point. He needs to stop worrying and learn to love complete freedom.

This article was originally published in the November 2013 edition of Future of Freedom.

Since then, I have given some thought to the plausible origin of the trend and was surprised to find myself in agreement with what William Neuman’s recent piece for the New York Times has to say about it.

The reason I was surprised is that unlike most analyses of this sort, which tend to assume a false dichotomy between social and economic problems, Neuman’s piece addresses the structure of Venezuela’s economy as a key causal factor:

“… the same resource that the government relies on — the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.”

Still, what the piece doesn’t do is apply Occam’s Razor thoroughly enough to clarify the role of oil as the fundamental cause of Venezuelan women’s particularly aggressive fixation with plastic surgery.

For instance, Neuman quotes Lauren Gulbas, a feminist scholar and anthropologist at Dartmouth College, who has studied attitudes toward plastic surgery in Venezuela, saying that,

“There’s this notion in Venezuela of ‘buena presencia,’ ‘good presence’… that communicates that you have certain aspects that say you are a hard worker, a good worker, an honest person …. there’s a virtue associated with looking a certain way.”

But while Neuman points out oil as as the plausible main cause of the phenomenon, the culture of easy money, consumerism and instant gratification that he claims it creates is not sufficient to explain the fixation of women with cosmetic surgery rather than with any other status good. And I frankly don’t understand how Gulbas concludes that the reason women choose to enlarge their breasts, inflate their buttocks and thicken their lips is to signal they are honest, hard workers — clearly, the main reason they want to perform this sort of changes to their bodies is to enhance their sexual attractiveness.

The clearest consequence of the enormous power that the state has historically accumulated through the oil monopoly in Venezuela is, unsurprisingly, a particularly strong capacity to control and distort every aspect of the economy and, increasingly, foreclose avenues for people to pursue genuinely economic means to wealth.

Now, the foremost non-economic means to wealth in such conditions are political. But because these are necessarily few in comparison to the economic opportunities that would prevail in a free market, people will also increasingly seek to affiliate as close as possible with those who have a more direct access to political power. One effective way to create such affiliations is through marriage.

Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that people engage in all-out, zero-sum, arms-race style competition to increase a perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex. In the case that they don’t succeed in the high-stakes, risky game of the political means to a comfortable standard of living, the second-best alternative is to marry one who does.

(As a side note, that such highly stereotyped standard of physical attractiveness prevails in Venezuela starkly contradicts the mainstream progressive notion that such stereotypes are created by free markets.)

And there would be no reason to expect women to be more prone than men to fall into this social dynamic if it weren’t for the inescapable grip of patriarchy, which slants economic opportunities in favor of men to the detriment of women even in the absence of the rocambolesque obstacles created by economic policies like those currently in place in Venezuela.

There’s a prejudiced notion both in and out of academic circles that might lead some to argue that the whole thing boils down to machismo, a term frequently used to denote the supposedly stronger patriarchal nature of Latin American cultures when compared to other Western societies.

But patriarchy is as pervasive as it is a perverse, universal social legacy. And while many other social factors might strengthen its pathological consequences, statist economies put them on steroids. In Venezuela, or elsewhere.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Patrarquía con Esteroides: La Fiebre de la Cirugía Plástica en Venezuela.

Market anarchists have long understood such mechanisms for limiting competition and thus systematically cheating consumers and workers/job-seekers. Discussing the issue over one hundred years ago, Benjamin Tucker asked, “Why are the capitalists so afraid of the logical extension of their own doctrines?” Championing the “free play for the economists’ boasted law of supply and demand,” Tucker applied Watson and James’ logic to the relationship between established firms and their domestic competitors. His argument is no less relevant today than it was in his time.

We ought to be just as mindful of regulatory protectionism as it exists within the United States’ own borders as we are of its manifestation on the global stage. Influential companies are unceasingly engaged in a competition for the control of and access to legal instruments that can hinder competition in their favor. But this is not the competition that market anarchists past or present have prescribed, instead insisting on less of this sort and more of the kind implicated by the law of equal freedom.