Kevin Carson discusses the role of the commons in market anarchism.

Kevin Carson discusses how Obama doesn’t want to defeat ISIS too badly.

Cory Massimino discusses individualist anarchism and hierarchy.

Kevin Carson discusses a book on new forms of worker organization.

Mel Gurtov discusses America’s return to Iraq.

Corey Robin discusses Labor Day readings.

Rizwan Zulfiqar Bhutta discusses lessons in counter-terrorism.

Ron Jacobs discusses the rational unreason of imperial war.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses what going to war with Syria would really mean for the U.S.

Robert Murphy discusses why we need to scrap the empire to have a free society at home.

Ezra Klein discusses the DNC’s braindead attack on Rand Paul.

Lew Rockwell discusses why libertarians are winning.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses why we don’t need a police czar.

Anthony Gregory discusses class theory in the first part of a series.

Tariq Ali discusses current Pakistani politics.

Benjamin W. Powell discusses market regulation of secondhand smoke.

Nathan Goodman discusses the labor politics of prisons.

Rick Sterling discusses myths about the conflict in Syria.

Dave Lindorff discusses the re-invasion of Iraq.

Belen Fernandez discusses Patrick Cockburn’s new book on ISIS.

Thom Holterman discusses Gary Chartier’s book on anarchy and legal order.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses why reassessing WW2 is a good idea.

Justin Raimondo discusses anti-interventionism and its discontents.

Rachel Burger discusses incest and the state.

Sheldon Richman discusses whether freedom requires empire.

Sheldon Richman discusses the crisis in Ukraine.

Jeff Sparrow discusses wars conducted in the name of humanitarianism.

Vassily Ivanchuk beats Alexey  Shirov

Vassily Ivanchuk beats Gary Kasparov.

Right-libertarians or non-left libertarians aren’t known for an overwhelmingly positive view of labor unionism. Walter Block was the target of a past blog post by me that illustrates this. This post challenged the simplistic notion that labor unions are just creatures of government. This notion tends to be at the core of anti-unionism amongst some libertarians.

Anti-unionism amongst libertarians serves no good purpose. Libertarian individualism is certainly compatible with a form of unionism that involves self-interested workers forming a voluntary association to deal with the power of the boss. People are not only oppressed by government. The power of the boss can be immensely repressive too.

Liberty is a multi-faceted thing. It certainly doesn’t exclude freedom in the workplace. Libertarians who wish to provide a comprehensive attack on authority and oppression should take notice of this truth. A boss can serve the role of a mini-state with all the attendant consequences for human freedom.

Libertarians who desire to reach the majority of people dependent upon employers for a livelihood need to offer an analysis like the above that will connect to their experiences as subordinate employees. Not only is it politically prudent, it’s the approach most compatible with human liberty.

Human liberty is preferably defended in this more totalistic fashion. It’s far better to advocate liberty in all areas of life rather than settle for a limited amount. The workplace is a key battleground for liberty. One that requires libertarians to step up to the plate and provide answers.

Nobody who loves liberty wants to be told when they can and can’t go to the bathroom. Something that an employer has the power to control. And a power worth contesting in the name of freedom. Not to mention all the other attendant petty tyrannies listed in Corey Robin’s linked piece above.

Some libertarians worry that unionism or labor struggle generally is collectivist and must depend on government coercion to succeed. This confuses collectivism with collective action. The second issue of government coercion being necessary is addressed in my post on Walter Block linked to above. Please consider commenting on that post and this one!

On this occasion, I’d like to discuss the relationship between prisons and labor. There are many facets to this relationship, from the use of prisons to enforce work discipline, to prisons as sites of slave labor, to the role of police and corrections officers unions in pushing for increasingly coercive criminal justice policies.

Prisons and Work Discipline

Prisons have been used to enforce work discipline for centuries. In his book The Enterprise of Law, Bruce Benson explains how England transitioned from customary law to authoritarian law controlled by the state. He notes that prisons were first used in England primarily in order to control the poor and force them to work:

“Houses of correction” were first established under Elizabeth to punish and reform able-bodied poor who refused to work. A “widespread concern for the habits and behavior of the poor” is often cited as the reason for the poor laws regarding vagrancy and the establishment of facilities to “reform” the idle poor by confining them and forcing them to work at hard labor. But Chambliss reported that “there is little question but that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers (whether personally free or unfree) to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay.” Such laws clearly reflected the transfer function of government.

In this case, prisons were used as institutions of violent coercion meant to establish work discipline, enforce the work ethic, drive down wages, and thus transfer wealth from poor and working people to landowners.

The Slavery Connection

Slavery did not experience a clean and straightforward end in the United States. Rather than prohibiting slavery universally, the 13^th Amendment prohibited slavery “except as punishment for a crime.” In the South, this was followed by the passage of the Black Codes, which criminalized a litany of innocuous actions specifically for blacks.  So rather than abolishing slavery, the 13th Amendment simply changed its form.  This created forced labor that was arguably worse than chattel slavery. As Angela Davis explains in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?:

Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.

This convict lease system was truly appalling, and allowed for the enslavement of former slaves under similarly brutal and racialized conditions to the ones they had supposedly been emancipated from. While prison labor is no longer as brutal as it was under the convict lease system, it still persists.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is literally a converted slave plantation where inmates are forced to toil in the fields. Companies like Walmart, AT&T, and Starbucks all profit from prison labor. So do war profiteers like BAE, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The racism of slavery persists; according to the Sentencing Project, 60% of prisoners are people of color, with 1 in 3 black men experiencing imprisonment in their lifetime. America incarcerates on a mass scale, with more than 2.4 million people imprisoned. The abolitionist movement has some unfinished business here.

Prisoners have their rights violated repeatedly, and that’s true with respect to their labor as much as anything else. While most labor unions either ignore this or simply focus on how competition from prison labor drives down wages outside prisons, the Industrial Workers of the World seeks to organize in solidarity with striking prisoners.

Marginalization from the Labor Market

James Kilgore argues that the main labor problem entailed in imprisonment today is not slavery inside, but marginalization outside the prison. Kilgore points to a litany of ways marginalization from the labor market intersects with incarceration. First, he notes how it fuels incarceration, writing “The chief labor concerns about mass incarceration are linked to broader inequalities in the economy as a whole, particularly the lack of employment for poor youth of color and the proliferation of low wage jobs with no benefits.”

Kilgore then notes the numerous ways that those who have been incarcerated are marginalized from the labor market. He explains:

People with a felony conviction carry a stigma, a brand often accompanied by exclusion from the labor market. Michelle Alexander calls “felon” the new “N” word. Indeed in the job world, those of us with felony convictions face a number of unique barriers. The most well-known is “the box”-that question on employment applications which asks about criminal background. Eleven states and more than 40 cities and counties have outlawed the box on employment applications. Supporters of “ban the box” argue that questions about previous convictions amount to a form of racial discrimination since such a disproportionate number of those with felony convictions are African-American and Latino. Advancing these Ban the Box campaigns will have a far more important impact on incarcerated people as workers than pressing for higher wages for those under contract to big companies inside.

However, even without the box, the rights of the formerly incarcerated in the labor market remain heavily restricted. Many professions, trades and service occupations which require certification, bar or limit the accreditation of people with felony convictions. For example, a study by the Mayor of Chicago’s office found that of 98 Illinois state statutes regarding professional licensing, 57 contained restrictions for applicants with a criminal history, impacting over 65 professions and occupations. In some instances, even people applying for licenses to become barbers or cosmetologists face legal impediments.

So here we see criminalization producing a stigma that excludes people from employment in many careers, both due to the judgement of employers and the exclusionary nature of occupational licensing laws. The IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee has condemned these forms of exclusion.

Furthermore, Kilgore notes that “the very conditions of parole often create obstacles to employment. Many states require that an employer of a person on parole agree that the workplace premises can be searched at any time without prior warning-hardly an attractive proposition for any business.  In addition, tens of thousands of people on parole are subject to house arrest with electronic monitors.  All movement outside the house must be pre-approved by their parole agent. This makes changes in work schedule or jobs that involve travel an enormous challenge.” In It’s About Time: America’s Imprisonment Binge, criminologists James Austin and John Irwin note that these parole policies lock ex-convicts out of legitimate employment and thus make them more likely to reoffend, not less. 

Immigration Detention and Exploiting Migrant Workers

One of the largest segments of imprisonment in the United States today is immigration detention. Immigrants are locked up in detention centers without charges, trials, or often even access to counsel.

Undocumented immigrants outside of detention centers live in constant fear of being caught, imprisoned, and deported. This fear can easily be used by employers in order to intimidate, abuse, and exploit migrant workers.

A recent documentary from Frontline, Rape in the Fields, exposes how immigrant women are vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse on the job, largely because fear of deportation deters them from reporting such abuse.

In addition to making migrant workers vulnerable to violence, abuse, and exploitation, immigration restrictions trap third world workers in poverty. As Bryan Caplan puts it, “Most would-be immigrants are desperately poor, but could easily work their way out of poverty if they were here.” 

The effect of immigration restrictions is bad for immigrant workers and bad for consumers. Not only are workers trapped in poor countries where they can’t earn much, but their production is also restricted accordingly. As Caplan explains, “Immigration laws trap people in countries where workers produce far below their potential.”

So total production decreases dramatically because of these coercive laws that trap people in poverty and leave violators vulnerable to exploitation and violence.

Unions for the Prison State

While most of this post emphasizes how workers are harmed by incarceration, it’s noteworthy that particular workers benefit from and actively lobby for mass incarceration. Corrections guard unions and police unions are concentrated interest groups that benefit directly from criminalizing the public, expanding prison populations, and expanding the state’s violent powers. These groups engage in persistent rent seeking, lobbying for authoritarian policies. In a sense, imprisonment is a mechanism of plunder, by which these concentrated groups of workers benefit at the expense of most other workers. The prison state means enslavement, exploitation, marginalization, and structural poverty for workers around the globe, but for guards and police it means being given extraordinary power and extracting rents through the state.

Libertarians often spend a lot of time defending the rich who have supposedly earned their wealth in the marketplace purely through productivity, and then they denounce the crooked labor unions and “socialists”who seek to steal the justly acquired property of the rich. This is a dangerous oversimplification of how the economy is structured, and it unfortunately pushes libertarians away from their true allies on the progressive left.

Working class activism is generally perceived in libertarian circles as collectivist, riddled with economic fallacies, and as yet another coercive state intrusion into the voluntary and peaceful exchange of goods. This very well might be true, but mainstream labor activism is in reality a well-justified but misled reaction to the horrors of state power and capitalism. After all, the elite have been using the state to rig the scales in their favor for virtually all of history. It should come as no surprise when people fight fire with fire by trying to steer the state into advancing their interests instead of that of their oppressors. Unfortunately, libertarians leave out the first part of this cycle and focus exclusively on the statism of the unionizers, ignoring the original anti-market behavior committed by the capitalists.

These positions are chosen as a result of the system of false choices which confront us politically.

We are currently born into a cruel dialectic where one can only reasonably support “markets” or support state power, and virtually all American politickin’ falls within this analytical framework. However, both options further entrench our corporate rulers.

Free market rhetoric in the United States is almost universally a euphemism for fascism. Being for “free markets” in cable news-speak means one wishes to keep the loot corporations have acquired through lobbying, removing none of their numerous subsidies, helpful regulations, competing good prohibitions, tariffs, land use policies, favorable tax codes, inflationary central banking practices & legal tender laws, licensing requirements, zoning mandates, intellectual property restrictions, etc. which bolster the position of the rich at the expense of the working poor, while at the same time removing all protection for the impoverished in the way of welfare programs and labor laws.

This is clearly an insane and disastrous course of action, and definitely an anti-libertarian one. Progressives are correct to oppose “free markets” if this is what they mean.

Consistent libertarians also reject virtually all of the policies I listed, but fail to recognize and frame what this position means for the impoverished of America. The liberty movement is absolutely a fight which can include those who traditionally agitate with labor movements. Libertarian aversion to sounding like a leftist is, in this author’s humble opinion, primarily a result of their long-standing alliance with the right. It is time to end this pattern permanently, but we must also confront the established progressive strategy.

The alternative culturally-approved political avenue of supporting state power to oppose the criminal manipulation of the economy perpetuated by capitalists is well-intentioned, but should be opposed for practical considerations. As it currently stands, very few progressives or libertarians would deny that the state works for the benefit of corporations and not for the average person. As public choice economics sadly elucidates, average people are not incentivized to pay close attention to politics because their vote is statistically unlikely to make a difference, and the costs which they accrue from the political machinations of corporations are spread thinly amongst themselves and all citizens, whereas the benefits are horrifically concentrated for special interests groups like Monsanto who lobby for unjust economic advantages in the marketplace.

Politicians and bureaucrats are primarily motivated by self interest, like everyone else, and thus have far more to gain from supporting those who receive concentrated benefits rather than the rationally oblivious (and often poor) John Q. Public. Mr. Public is being slyly stolen from and subverted but simply does not have the time or resources to become educated about the countless threats to his social and economic well-being. The threats are too numerous, costly, and diverse, and thus political action to combat special interests is extremely difficult. Contrasted with those who have massive opportunities for extreme profit as a result of state power, the amount of regulatory capture and special interest rulership which dominates the American state is no real surprise .

As long as those justly seeking to limit the power of corporations follow the regulatory route, they will face an incredibly well-financed group with money to burn in order to keep their unjust anti-market privileges.

There is, however, a way out of this incredibly destructive and marginalizing false dichotomy now while reflecting upon Jimmy Johns and the IWW.

Eliminating the state’s power to grant special favors to in-groups would genuinely please both libertarians and progressives. We need to acknowledge this immediately and work together to end corporate tyranny.

The state’s intrusion into the economy has purposefully limited competition to the corporations and has dramatically narrowed the range of opportunities for working people to become entrepreneurs through self-employment or collectives/co-ops. Thus they are forced to accept less benefits, worse working conditions, and “wages so low they freaked” as a result of the deck being stacked against freedom of competition in conscious favor of the corporations, the highest bidders for state power.

If Americans removed the state’s ability to play favoritism to the economic elite, which forces labor to be the pawns of the holders of capital, rather than workers jockeying for an artificially low number of jobs, businesses would be forced to compete in order to attract and keep laborers. Why would anyone work for a capitalist when one could reasonably be one’s own boss in a syndicalist or otherwise horizontally-organized workplace? The Jimmy Johns’ workers might very well have been able to start their own sandwichery! And if they ever did choose to work for a capitalist, it’d be because they were getting one heck of a deal.

This freed market approach wouldn’t face the huge public choice problems of avoiding regulatory capture, nor would it unnecessarily limit human creativity and productivity, and it would lead to the progressive end of a more egalitarian society. Libertarians and progressives would be able to make incredible progress by breaking through the false dichotomy and by creating our envisioned world through this strategy.

So next time you see a libertarian being a sourpuss about workers unionizing at Jimmy Johns or celebrating Labor Day, remind them gently that all of us are reacting against corporatism in our own way. For whilst libertarians oppose the use of the state to artificially raise the status of one group at the expense of other peaceful individuals, they have little to fear from laborers rightfully seeking whatever solace they can glean from the corporatist state. They are merely victims of the current system of false choices. The enemies of libertarianism are absolutely not laborers who desperately need economic freedom, nor progressives, but the corporate overlords who criminally wield state power and “free markets” against the impoverished.

Transportation subsidies are pro-corporate, and not just for the contracts to create and maintain the infrastructure. They effectively hide the true cost of transporting distant goods by socializing the costs amongst all citizens.

I personally don’t drive on roads in South Dakota, nor do I even use most of the roads in Arizona, but myself and all of my neighbors are forced to support them financially. In fact, I hardly ever use the interstate highway system except for sporadic road trips. Truckers, who are seemingly always changing lanes in front of me, deliver freight for an overwhelming majority of the year, but are responsible for the same $161 out of the $50 billion that every individual American taxpayer is.

Now surely it is clear that the consumer is going to pay for the transportation of goods eventually, as every market actor seeks to minimize their own expenses by passing the buck. However, with financial assistance to distant firms, the American state is making it ever more difficult for local and regional businesses to compete with large well-established corporations. This government behavior also tragically removes the ability for consumers to choose for themselves who to support in a fair marketplace.

Without subsidies, prices for products would reflect the true costs of transportation and thus a new spirit of localism might be inspired purely by normal market processes. That inspiration would no longer depend exclusively upon the willpower and conscious consumerism of localists.

As a libertarian, I absolutely respect every individual’s right to peacefully trade his or her produce with any other person. However, I do not think the American state should take money from all taxpayers and then give it to businesses as a subsidy. Taking money from innocent people, even when the government does it through taxes, and then coercing them into paying for something which they don’t want, never asked for, or don’t agree with morally, is incredibly unjust. Any system of societal organization built upon this principle should be decisively rejected.

Eliminating this policy of indirect subsidies to big business would do much to economically incentivize community members to spend their dollars locally, and would challenge those businesses which are successful due to artificial advantages given to them through government power rather than by serving their customers well. Contrary to popular belief, the end of this anti-freedom policy is a basic way in which freeing the market would disempower America’s dominant corporate interests. Will this policy be eliminated? That seems doubtful. The things reasonable people see as its harms are basically the purpose of government in the eyes of the ruling class.