If there is one fact our collective history clearly reveals it is that large, centralized nation-states are the worlds most terrifying institutions. The 20th century alone is testament to this. The rise of fascism brought a premature end to nearly 100 million lives. The rise of the Bolsheviks tells a tale of an increasingly oppressive regime addicted to power. State capitalism and the rise of neo-liberal economics in the west are equally disastrous, responsible for a century of perpetual warfare.

Public intellectual Randolph Bourne once wrote, “war is the health of the state.” In the last century the machines of war reached frightening heights of power. The production of nuclear weapons can end all life as we know it. States may cause the greatest extinction in all of Earth’s history. This — the end of our species and countless others — is a real and looming threat.

The state is a system of power and domination. Such a monopoly serves to institutionalize the creeds of racism, sexism, class division, protectionism, biocentrism and more. This is true even in the most “democratic” of nations, including the United States. Such archism deserves abolition. The state is damned.

Yet, here in the fog, there too exists our beautiful struggle.

There is a great tradition in human history: Liberation. We long to be free. Human action continues to prove that with agency we can do great things for one another. We continue to labor, create, preserve and exercise goodwill.

Our inclined labor will produce a world where the children of humanity will live unbound by chains, where no fire or whip will meet their flesh. There will be no need to pledge allegiance to a nation, but all the reason to imagine a world of real and lasting peace. Not a world of dreamers, but a world of contracts, liberated economics and the splendor of the human condition. The peace of common interest, wildness and mutualism.

We must remember this. We must always remember those who risked and sometimes lost their lives and freedom for such an order. We must remember to love those who raised liberty’s hammer. Those who broke down the walls that caged us. We must remember so light will ever conquer darkness — so liberty will no longer be a simple flame, but a piercing, radiant torch.

We will be free. We will face the world without fear. We will stand together and howl into the face of those who wish to reign over us. We will ever challenge their rule. We will continue our embrace of liberty. Global movements have ignited. Join hands, unite the riot — coordinate and cultivate the free society. As we enter the new year, breath deep, let the winter air fill your lungs. Know that you are an animal, that you are alive and demand your freedom. Damn those who wish to deny you. Stare into the dark night and howl. Howl!

To say this is sympathetic territory for me would be an understatement. In my longest essay in Markets Not Capitalism I emphasized the role reputation and goodwill play in relationships as more fundamental and foundational than property titles and critiqued the recurring assumption that property titles are inherent to all societies. Even though my conclusion was a full-throated defense of property titles, albeit repositioned as a looser, less absolute, second order derivation from goodwill and reputation, you might be forgiven for expecting a strictly positive review of Graeber’s breakout book. Certainly many of my colleagues did. And there is a lot to be found of value in Debt for libertarians and anarchists of all stripes. It is a refreshingly audacious work hearkening towards the kind of grand theory building radicals used to do and I’ve found myself handing it out to young activists hungry for something of more audacity and scope than Gelderloos or Bonanno. It’s been far too long since a work of anarchist theory topped bestseller lists. And anything that so flusters and discombobulates liberals, marxists, and vulgar libertarians alike is surely of value.

However Debt is not without its flaws, some of them quite vexing. Perhaps the greatest thing about anthropology is its capacity to demonstrate that often unexamined norms we consider universal are but a tiny sliver in the phase space of cultural and societal configurations that have existed throughout human history. Anthropology helps serve as a reminder of the paucity of our imagination. Yet it is important not to blindly take history as a constraint. Two hundred thousand years of homo sapiens is simply too few iterations, too tightly correlated to truly explore the expanse of what is possible.

Sadly, if there is one underlying failure coursing through Graeber’s bestseller it’s his reactionary instincts in the face of such possibility.

Debt sets out a long and winding exploration of how notions of the interpersonal or economic obligations characterized as “debt” have morphed over the last five thousand years and how these changes correlated to the presence of state violence and the development of currency.

Graeber suggests that the first currencies were direct markers of honor, status, or social goodwill only incidentally exchanged for goods and commodities. Coinage and specie currency were sharp deviations from this norm, invented so religious institutions could keep internal accounts of goods but quickly adopted by states to quantify penal codes, collect taxes, and pay marauding soldiers. Coinage, Graeber argues, was an invention imposed by the state to dissolve the complexity of informal bonds between individuals into relations as universal and interchangeable as its own scope. In this context debt tended towards outright slavery and the specific game theoretic dynamics that characterize statism grew increasingly hegemonic. When your honor or the value you held to others was simplified to the widely interchangeable gold in your pouch, throat-slitting became suddenly quite appealing.

Surrounding this historical transition the wild array of dynamics and social mores at play in various societies became increasingly framed in terms of person-to-person exchanges (theoretically repayable) rather than standing before the community or as matters of hierarchically ritualized benefaction. And in turn, through its persistent creep as a metaphor to frame human relations as exchanges (implicitly between equals or should-be-equals), debt came to signify an unnatural perturbation of baseline equality. While on the one hand the word “freedom” has its roots in Sumerian debt-cancellation, that same moralistic language of obligation to one’s debts was frequently adopted by the oppressed and those with grievances. Amid all of this communities on the periphery played games with notions of perpetual debt to denote and enforce ties of fraternity, but on the whole debt increasingly came to connote a sinful state of inequality and injustice. …Except with things so tangled that exactly who is in the wrong is never entirely clear and consistent rules never really hashed out. Thus, Graeber concludes, we arrived at the ridiculousness of our present situation where for instance plutocratic plunder and the vast subsidy of historical violence are seen as prompt for charity, but the notion of cancelling the supposed debt incurred to one’s explicit oppressors is unthinkable.

Though certain chapters are resplendent with crowing at the repeated close confluence of money, markets and the atrocities of state power, to his credit as an intellectually honest academic Graeber doesn’t flinch away from recognizing situations where state power has withered and markets blossomed.

There have, certainly, been times and places when a kind of free market populism has emerged, where markets began operating independently of governments, at least to some degree – Medieval Islam is one famous example, and later, Ming China—but in such cases, they tended to operate in very different ways than the kind of markets we’re now familiar with, less about competition, much more about creating and maintaining relations of interpersonal trust, or for instance, profit-sharing operations instead of interest, etc etc.

…History shows that you basically need a state to create a situation where people are willing to sign on basically as rent-a-slaves to other people.

That many observers, some with horror, have read these asides as validation of left market anarchist theory is unsurprising. We are of course totally right. About everything. Obviously. But Graeber is less than enthused to see these confessions extend beyond proving the unsustainability of capitalism in the absence of state violence. Free market populism, in his framework, is still an ultimately confused state of affairs, championed by the well-meaning but insufficiently far-seeing. Useful perhaps as a half measure for the US and a few other contexts where anarcho-communist alternatives are beyond culturally alien, but not an ideal goal. For Graeber markets and currency cannot shed the incredibly suspicious stain of their inception through state violence. Currency in particular.

Lest we get too lost in the default rhetorical devices of radicals, let us remind ourselves that if Hitler popularized consensus process or the refrigerator it wouldn’t invalidate either. But in fact history and prehistory are almost certainly more complicated than the selection Graeber presents in his tale. Mass societies have been around for a hell of a long time and so has trade in obsidian, grain, cattle and copper. Things weren’t nearly as simple as one day villages and the next day Mesopotamian scribes keeping accounts in silver; we know there’s a ton of history lost before the proliferation of writing. Gift economies are empirically known to scale poorly, and it’s obvious that when there’s too many people to personally keep track of the approaches that work for villages and tribes start to break down. If cities nine thousand years ago like the famous Çatalhöyük weren’t characterized by intense statism–and there’s less than no reason to suspect they were–folks very likely faced double incidence of wants on a regular basis. In particular the five thousand years of mass society before Graeber starts his account saw many profound social changes, my favorite tale of which is this:

On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself – previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years – was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.

…Not only did the revolutionaries of those remote times succeed in overthrowing a regime thousands of years old, bloody and exploitative – moreover, they also succeeded in developing their own alternative society, devising and realizing it. An egalitarian, classless society arises in which women and men are equal, a society which rapidly spreads over the whole of Anatolia and almost simultaneously over the Balcans and which endures for 3000 years.

When Mesopotamian scribes finally pick up the pen to give us more direct accounts we are not glimpsing the first steps, but a very particular product of a richly storied past we have only fleeting access to.

Sure, when credit is feasible there’s no need for the convoluted dance of boots into obsidian or grain and then back into chickens, but when there’s thousands of teeming people–when people have options outside a tightly controlled tribe, neighborhood, or caste–credit frequently becomes less secure and/or efficient than spot transactions. We know from the North American Great Plains that even when the land won’t support it longer than a few weeks, people will still often struggle to form mass societies when and where they can to take advantage of the benefits such provides in novelty, culture and general opportunity.

Here’s an alternative postulate to Graeber’s: Early mass societies arose and iterated through very different forms and there were many avenues by which they tackled the limits of gift economies. Some mass societies simply preserved the village model internally by subdividing (or remaining divided) into neighborhoods, clans and castes where gift economies could be retained internally while they continued to trade with one another externally, but the danger of losing excommunication as the ultimate sanction required these divisions to still be policed relatively tightly lest individuals start abandoning their ties and debts for greener pastures. Some mass societies with more idealic roots, either as cultural loci or the result of slave uprisings that shrugged off ruling castes leaving behind a single relatively unsubdivided mass of individuals, were obliged to turn more strongly to barter. Lastly still other mass societies, possibly where the maintenance of clans, castes or even polycentric associations had become problematic, resorted to the sort of centralized arbitration and accounting that eventually fueled the fires of empire seen thousands of years later in Mesopotamia where Graeber blithely starts his tale.

But even after his launching point there are systemic biases against anarchistic mass societies in the historical record that he should be damn well aware of. No, in the absence of pharaohs and emperors we don’t tend to erect giant edifices to our glory or stamp millions of coins, but that doesn’t mean freer societies left no trace. By focusing on the classical states of antiquity and then, upon arriving at more recent ages, pointing out that the more free market societies that arose afterward arose afterward, Graeber occludes numerous points any other anarchist historian would place front and center. The gist of which is that freer societies have certainly existed in a great multitude between the gaps in the statist’s saga of war and empire. Some, like the Harappans, major contemporaries of Mesopotamian tyranny, left no signs of priests or leaders, no palaces, temples or monuments. A flourishing trader and artisan society they likely had a spectrum of social respect or at least a diversity of focuses (visible through differences in adornment) while at the same time capital was egalitarianly distributed. They led advancements in the purity of metallurgy, docks, wheeled transport and adopted uniform weights–testaments to how central trade and quantified exchange were to their society. Despite their intense noteworthiness in size, accomplishment and impact, popular history has largely dismissed them for not making reference in any major wars. (And, most deliciously, certain scholars have dismissed them as obviously having a state because they had plumbing.)

I think it’s intuitively obvious that credit and debt preceded currencies focused on coordinating goods. And the introduction of universal metal coinage has both the unmistakable scent of the state’s drive to universalize and the gangster’s need for contextless cash. But the notion that the concerns found in widespread barter only arose as an occasional byproduct of the statist imposition of markets and central currencies as means of accounting is simply unsubstantiatable. Neither Graeber nor I have a time machine and the most relevant particulars to that kind of claim take place before he even begins his story. In the absence of young upstart mass societies just developing in the wilds of Brazil, say, the evidence is scant. Thankfully we can at least get somewhere modeling these kinds of things and that is precisely what economists have done with extensive consideration and mathematical modeling.

Which brings us to a particularly irksome current in Debt. If the book’s systemic failure is not recognizing the breadth of the possible, Graeber’s weakest and at times most embarrassing arguments by far stem from his assertion that a critical distinction between good obligations and bad ones is whether or not anyone’s gotten rigorous or considered about it. In his worst moments he blames mathematics, and indeed elevates it as a comparable evil as you know, loan sharks bludgeoning people to death:

Debt is just a perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.

Of course what’s actually happening is not an issue with mathematics or even arithmetic and quantification, it’s an issue with violently imposed universal simplifications of richly complicated or localized dynamics. The problem is the state and the legalistic impulse that underpins it here, not the innate tendency of human minds to geek out and analyze shit in pursuit of precision and efficiency. Mathematical analysis unto itself in no way implies oversimplification or misrepresentation. And while there are often limits to what we can know and calculate in a given context, especially when dealing with other minds, such limitations are themselves mathematical dynamics. There is just as much to be gained from augmenting our interactions with awareness of these limitations as there is from using mathematical modeling directly when and where it can clarify dynamics and expand our agency.

Distinctions between what can and can’t be quantified substantively in different dynamics and contexts have long been core to modern libertarian analysis, both in the pragmatically mathematical Hayekian sense and the more analytic Praxeological sense. Certainly the legal codification of remuneration for honor violations in units of Irish slave girls, as per one example from Debt, fails virtually every economic and libertarian precept imaginable. That said, there is something quite interesting and fresh in Graeber’s implicit attack on the valuation of gold as a near-universal mediator of social debts. The loss of nuanced social information happening when you can exactly ‘repay’ a friend for their kindness in precious metals is surely stark. Or at least it is when such repayment isn’t a trust-building exercise and a product of their subjective desire via some fresh negotiation that validates both parties as human beings with unknowable subjectivities, but an exchange in which one or both parties can merely default on static universal standards with little to no consideration of the other as a complex individual. The very notion of going back to “square one” strangerhood through repayment, of erasing the accounts containing the context of prior interactions, is only possible when tracking and conveying a particular person’s trustworthiness is impossible, where there are no true currencies available, just dumb commodities like gold that don’t even have a public ledger.

Yet it should be obvious that such situations are not a product of quantification! The impulse seen in the use of coinage to dismiss rich context or make declarations about the objective comparative value of incredibly complex and situational things like favors is clearly sloppy at best and dangerous as hell at worst. But that’s completely different from using a measuring cup when loaning your neighbor rice (or gold) so there’s no lingering misperceptions, disagreements or wasteful default biases. Artificially simplifying universal norms are only sustainable when there’s coercion backing them on some level. The issue is whether debts are enforced through the violent suppression of contextual awareness or the voluntary maximization of it through reputation, trust networks, and risk conveyance. By the time there are kings, chiefs, governments, oligarchs, or central committees remotely capable of revoking debt, things have obviously gone too far and the whole system can be assumed rotten. But the imposition of universal simplifications certainly doesn’t satiate anyone’s drive for precision and informed agency save the rulers, indeed it acts to suppress precision and complex analytic depth at play in our relationships and calculations with regard to one another. The sort of debts Graeber conveys are not, as he puts it, the collaboration of violence and math but rather the suppression of math by violence.

You may ask why I dwell so strongly on this theme within Debt. The misuse of something as richly descriptive and human as mathematics to refer to arithmetic and artificially simple quantification is irritating to be sure, yet I feel this framing belies something deeper than mischosen words. Graeber makes quite a lot to turn on the distinction between quantified and unquantified interactions but in his writing he rarely stays content with such, expanding this theme to decry the “impersonalism” of mathematics and reason. Now one might say math and reason are defined by their search for global symmetries in a world of messy particulars, something that can momentarily disregard those particulars, but in application math and reason have infinitely rich descriptive capacity. I can’t help but smell an anti-intellectual current in Graeber’s language that’s sadly all too common among the left wherein intelligence or analytic rigor is implicitly conceded as inherently sociopathic at high values. Where measuring, modeling or keeping accounts of things inherently implies hostile or untoward intent. In this inversion of any sane or coherent ethics vigilance itself becomes suspect. We cannot afford to examine, measure or analyse our social or interpersonal dynamics too closely because that way lies sociopathy! I’m well aware that through centuries of misappropriation math and reason now strike many as the devil’s sign. But I shudder to think of what it must be like to live in such a world, that openly swallows the premise of our enemies that humane relations are only possible through ignorance and then reacts by embracing ignorance!

Of course I doubt that Graeber is so quite explicit with himself–and we are all sometimes subject to cognitive dissonances–but Debt contains so many arguments or implications from association (even just loose etymology) it risks Glenn Beck territory at points. And, as such, it poses dangers within the wider left and radical discourse. While the scattershot explorations can be enjoyably bracing, it’s embarrassing to see the most powerful and popular anarchist work of this century get mired in weak arguments. Leaping from historical association to causation is the same shit pulled by primitivists to critique refrigerators. Indeed many of Graeber’s fans would be shocked to stop and actually dwell on lines like this:

not only do existing technologies necessarily mean a society based on alienation and oppression, which is hard to deny, since existing technologies have been developed in that context

I mean that is just some pretty extreme faulty reasoning.

For example the more significant dynamic contemporaneous with the advent of large scale states and widely accepted currency is not quantification but writing. Let us remember that bureaucratic account keeping and laws imposing universal prices are direct result of the technology to save memories to papyrus or stone and convey them. We know that the introduction of persistence, of nonnegotiable historical accounts, is always a huge cultural event in any society. Further at the time writing sharply pushed back against prior diseconomies of scale, enabling the growth of cancerous social hierarchies in China, India and the Mediterranean. Until full-fledged alphabets were invented by Semetic slaves in Egypt writing retained a steep learning curve that was critical alongside the sword in preventing the technology’s diffusion to the periphery. The major event contemporaneous to the downfall of Çayönü? The nearby invention of writing in the form of the Vinča signs.

Yet aside from John Zerzan and the occasional wingnut no anarchists reject writing as inherently implying “a society based in alienation and oppression”. We correctly realize that despite its sharp and profound dangers in certain contexts, writing’s even sharper positive potential outweighs them. …Just as the danger from Einstein’s insights making possible nuclear bombs is profound, but the value to better understanding the world around us is even greater still.

In exactly the same sense markets and dastardly evil of measuring cups can be extraordinarily useful.

While priorities vary wildly between each person and over time, human beings have always sought precision in their crafts and interpersonal communications. Even determining what one’s priorities or preferences are in a situation is a calculation, often requiring extensive consideration and measurement. Freed from the oppressive tensions of capitalism we would surely prefer to turn such focus on say crafting baskets or writing poems rather than neurotically calculating and re-calculating the week’s remaining expenses or the quickest trip across town, but even in a world where our everyday stopped being a hustle to merely survive there would still be necessary calculations. The abolition of the artificial scarcities that plague our world does not imply the triumph over scarcity in general. You could no more triumph over entropy. And many of the passions we develop free of survival concerns involve a great deal of complexity and coordination of scarce goods. So long as human beings have dreams and desires in a finite environment there will be coordination and calculation problems to be solved. While the extent of the possible is vast there are limits; you can’t shuffle around loaves and fishes under some cups and magically end up with more loaves and fishes. Sure, much of modern economics is infected with neoliberalism, but there are nevertheless strong mathematical constraints to our interactions with the material universe and each other. Markets provide an array of extraordinarily useful tools for solving these coordination problems; indeed they denote the only phase space where solutions can be found for problems past a certain complexity. Whereas the inherency of subjective knowledge, experience, and desire in our individual brains and the tiny bandwidth of human language place strong limits on communist alternatives, decentralized or not.

While there’s much to critique on many levels to current norms of currency (and the surrounding economic, political, and cultural context), double-incidence of wants is a real phenomenon with important implications. The value of currency of some form in facilitating the cosmopolitan mass society we so desire clearly outweighs the dangers.

Indeed setting our sights slightly further, there’s a very potent point only somewhat obscured by Graeber’s instincts in his own pages, which is that the evidence doesn’t show prohibiting usury makes for positive markets, but rather merely the violent enforcement of usury. “Under genuine free market conditions loans at interest will become effectively impossible to collect,” Graeber writes, but while they would surely be much harder to collect, I highly doubt all instances will disappear because there are occasionally quite valid reasons to ask for and accept it. Instead, defanged of the threat of violence one would expect quantified debts to collapse more directly and organically to the full human relations and contexts that underpin them… including risks and opportunity costs. My British syndicalist friends obsessed with policing the borders of mutualism and individualist anarchism might gasp to hear me suggest it but, in the absence of physical violence or a broadly coercive context like capitalism, voluntary agreements should be free to involve interest in recognition of subjective costs. Because when reputation is the only enforcement mechanism the state’s mercenary coinage is not positioned as the ultimate good, instead goodwill is. To remove violent enforcement from the equation puts an immediate release valve on any potentially metastasizing power relations and grounds people directly in their social context. The main benefit and promise of mass society is having more degrees of freedom with which to respond to cancerous social forms. If usury or wage labor were to completely overrun a society and catalyze a shift from centrifugal tendencies on wealth to accumulative ones we’d surely consider that society a failure. But interest, like credit, often reflects and models important realities of uncertainty and subjectivity that we’d be likewise insane to always ignore.

The problem in all these situations isn’t modeling, but cognitive simplicity and/or the wrong models. Our tools should not simplify or ignore dynamics but give us more awareness of, options in, and leverage over them.

It is precisely through not simplifying our desires into a form parsable by CEOs, politicians, and general assemblies, but instead embracing their infinite diversity and potency that we can begin to make traction against the forces that need visibility and human interchangeability to control us. Yet our desires will always map onto material realities in one way or another–with ordinal preferences–and scarcities of elements, energy, etc. will always exist. Coordinating their allocation with any remote efficiency is not always hyper important, but for desires and considerations of any complexity they will be. I hear tell it’s hard to build a good radio telescope without at least rounding up both string and coconuts. Hayekian calculation problems are no trivial concern and as hardbaked into the universe as entropy or cryptography. Social forms that don’t prioritize individual agency in the allocation of goods that affect them will lose tons of information. Conversely no matter how complex individuals’ subjective desires, autonomous direct action can maximally convey the relevant underlying information through revealed preference. Unless we all retreat to the most tame of land projects and meditation regimes anyone seeking to build a freer society will need to adopt market forms to some degree.

At the same time anarchists should also be the first to point out the dangers in simplifying these motivations. Problems arise when we lose sight of the roots of our reasons for utilizing markets. One of the most fascinating considerations in Debt is the way popular frameworks of ethics have changed over time as religious, ideological or radical movements got knotted up appealing to the dominant language in their society.

When people start fetishizing the act of exchange as a foundation for ethical analysis–internalizing strategic oughts as full blown motivations unto themselves–danger arises.

Graeber has a complicated and tumultuous affair with the notion of reciprocity throughout Debt‘s pages. On the one hand he wants to point to debt as the source of positive currents in societies, lending weight to his abhorrence for quantification by showing how some use a mesh of debts that are never precisely resolved to build ties of community and brotherhood. On the other hand he wants to reject that in favor of the “Everyday Communism” of community members giving to one another (whether salt or accurate directions) without a second thought. Where accounting is never undertaken and human relations are artificially assumed to be permanent:

the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

I sympathize strongly with the impulse here, but not the terms of the solution Graeber presents. In trying to seize the pragmatic high ground by abandoning foundational conceptual considerations and speaking instead in terms of groupable existing cultural practices, Graeber inherently blocks himself from anything more robust or potent than the most mundane casual kindness.

“From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs” is nice as a very abstract guiding light but when applied to any non-trivial particulars it rapidly falls apart. Human needs are simply unfathomably complex. Aside from some base considerations like food, water and shelter that could be easily universally assured by merely toppling the state and capitalism, the vast majority of our needs or desires are in no sense objective or satisfyingly conveyable. Measuring exactly whose desire is greater or more of a “necessity” is not just an impossibility but an impulse that trends totalitarian. The closest we can get in ascertaining this in rough terms is through the decentralized expression of our priorities via one-on-one discussions and negotiations. The market in other words. Communism through praxis rather than the attempted omniscience of committees and general assemblies. But a communism in which individuals must proactively stand up for themselves and give voice to the desires and complexities that only they have access to. A communism in which whenever our knowledge of another person’s needs and preferences grows hazy we solve the calculation through a conversation of comparisons with our own. A communism in which we are constantly looking for opportunities to build trust (through tests like exchange and loans) outside our immediate circles so that our conversations can spread wealth faster and dynamics of distrust can be countered.

(Don’t be distracted by the fact that sociopathic wars of all against all can likewise take place in a decentralized one-on-one fashion of hostile discussions and negotiations. In a different environment with different cultural instincts and different, more advanced social organisms, intentions that slide towards the sociopathic can be recognized and organized against before such contagion gains the strength to seriously self-compound.)

In contrast to the communist potential of the market Graeber’s notion of Everyday Communism in which “no accounts are taken” is capable of sliding by in only a tiny region of possible circumstances. I don’t know about you but a communism that’s only maintainable through our ignorance of details sounds awfully unsatisfying, and certainly unstable. Granted, we all instinctively relax a bit at the prospect of any relief from the constant stressful calculations we’re forced to preform under capitalism, where precarity disrupts our thoughts with a blaring hyper-awareness of every last penny, every last contact, every last risk. But that trauma shouldn’t lead to overreaction in blind pursuit of carthesis. The problem is not that accounts are taken, that relationships are mapped, or trust flows established more rigorously, but that we are forced to pay constant attention to a small and crude subsection of these. That our other desires and preoccupations–some involving extraordinary attention to detail–are suppressed. The problem is not the availability of tools and knowledge, but the infrastructure that denies us a choice in them. Keeping accounts of all the details of our interactions with extraordinary degrees of precision, or merely being able to, do not equate always paying attention to those details. As active minds with desires we will always geek out and stress out about things, and the coordination of goods will always remain one. Similarly Graeber’s exhalation to delude ourselves into assuming infinite persistence (in relationships, in societies, etc) is obviously incredibly dangerous and conducive to oppressive situations. Moralizing in favor of ignorance is a dumb strategy for communism and certainly not pragmatic. The dynamics at play in trivial situations like passing the salt to one another and not giving people false directions, while positive, are not scalable blueprints for a better world.

I want to be absolutely clear here. By rejecting Graeber’s “everyday communism” I am not advocating the secondary moral framework he implicitly sets up as competitor or fallback. There are deep issues with ethics built on notions of exchange. Indeed my greatest critique of “everyday communism” is that it doesn’t go far enough in rejecting the ethic of reciprocity. The internalization of the useful strategy of exchange or tit-for-tat into a core motivating obligation is a cognitive error with nasty consequences. In short reciprocity would be recognized and denounced by millennialist rebels throughout history as a respecter of persons; it differentiates the world according to who has done what for us personally rather than who could best benefit. This is fine for many strategic considerations but awful as a motivational framework. Empathy and compassion are not strategic, they are prior to strategy. They’re what set the goals. The oughts of ethical motivations arise when our identity, our selfhood becomes blurred across time and space. To future versions of one’s “self” who’d be irritated if today one didn’t take out the trash, but also to other fountainheads of creativity and inquiry embedded in different contexts, different bodies. It’s not that we in some sense owe them, it’s that we in some sense are them. Albeit subjectively closed from their full context. Such oughts are not external obstacles or dynamics but direct expressions of our selfhood. Our communist motivations precede the realm of strategies and market exchanges, and will on occasion overwrite the heuristics we adopt in those contexts. As in the case of “intellectual property” where there’s no reason to persist in strategies adopted to deal with actual scarcities.

Graeber is not unaware of the dangers to reciprocity as an idea and he tries to stretch it as far as the concept can go without breaking, but what he conjures as an idealic reciprocity in a broad sense is still not enough:

What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will.

This falls dramatically short of empathy as a foundation for an ethical outlook in two respects, 1) it requires knowledge of the other person’s motivations and 2) it restricts my obligation to merely those who share the same ethos as me. Now I’m not saying that those aren’t strategically important considerations. But most of us would fight to save people from genocide regardless of whether our ethnic or social circles overlapped enough for us to know a damn thing about their motivations. And we’d fight to save them if even we knew they wouldn’t do the same for us.

Indeed, as anarchists putting our lives on the line to fight oppressions that the vast majority of the world silently tolerates or endorses, this is no rarefied academic issue. It’s one that anarchists have grappled with for as long as there have been anarchists. Tensions between egoist theory and altruistic consequentialist practice rivet every single nook and cranny of our movement’s history. Yet as bad as this supposed dissonance has been, many of the grand solutions we’ve flirted with have been even worse. If Kropotkin’s attempt to play realist by embracing mutual aid as “human nature” condemned the anarchist movement to a century of luddism and the natural fallacy run rampant, Graeber is on the verge of canonizing the present generation’s mistakes in which the anarchist decides to play realist by valorizing anti-intellectualism, social capital, and reciprocity.

There are major problems lurking here. We are not “national anarchists” content with a retreat to tribes, with smaller states more attentive in their oppression. Rwanda proved that just as decentralization is always more efficient than centralization, decentralized fascism can be more efficient than centralized fascism. Informal power dynamics matter and must be countered. As do material constraints. A society incapable of complex economic calculation is a society that will leave Einsteins stifling in the fields and the blind without restorative implants.

It’s not enough to merely identify that there are currents of a better world coursing through our veins. We’ve long known this. What should preoccupy us is less what has worked in the past, but what else is possible going forward. Graeber, like all academics, trapped in the land of liberals and sneering marxist dinosaurs, is loathe to commit or substantively consider beyond the most shallow of prescriptions: Abolish the debt. Well of fucking course. Even Chomsky starts to look radical from that position.

Engaging with what is possible–and how to work backward from there to attacks on the existing–requires an analysis deeper than clustered associations from anecdotes. I would love to see left market anarchists and radicals more broadly seriously take up the challenges raised in Debt.

What would currency look like in a freed society? We don’t know, but it’s safe to say it would no more look like the current economy with US treasury notes replaced by silver coins than businesses in the absence of the state would look like Walmart.

There’s been a paucity to our imaginations here too. And mapping out the possibilities, much less learning through praxis which array best meet our situational needs, is sure to be a huge task. I’ve been studying, writing and having conversations about this since 2003 and so too have many mathematicians, economists and computer scientists (“currency” obviously sitting within a much wider phase space of trust and protocol dynamics). There’s interesting work being published on the arXiv, in books and monographs by activist economists like Thomas Greco, and amid the deluge of cryptocurrencies. Indeed the popular explosion of cryocurrencies immediately following the publication of Debt is perhaps one of the most interesting examples of convergent historical pressures, and has seen both truly out there proposals as well as studiously primordial experiments like Ripple and Etherium.

Amusingly a good many libertarians are still kicking themselves today for disregarding Bitcoin thanks to Austrian orthodoxy pretty much rooted in a cobwebbed few paragraph aside by Mises in Human Action. If only they’d paid attention to the man considered by far to be the most likely creator of Bitcoin, Nick Szabo, who wrote extensively on the history and nature of money as a social relation a decade before Debt. Szabo launched off Dawkin’s summary that “money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism” and expanded it into a more rigorous examination, explicitly laying out many of the motivations for Bitcoin:

Collectibles augmented our large brains and language as solutions to the Prisoner’s Dilemma that keeps almost all animals from cooperating via delayed reciprocation with nonkin. Reputational beliefs can suffer from two major kinds of errors — errors of about which person did what, and errors in appraising the value or damages caused by that act. Within clans (the small and immediately local kin group, or extended family, which formed a subset of a tribe), our large brains could minimize these errors, so that public reputation and coercive sanctions superceded the limited motivation provided by the counterparty’s ability to cooperate or defect in the future as the main enforcer of delayed reciprocation. In both homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens sapiens, with the same large brain size, it is quite likely that every local clan member kept track of everybody other local clan member’s favors. The use of collectibles for trade within the small local kin group may have been minimal. Between clans within a tribe both favor tracking and collectibles were used. Between tribes, collectibles entirely replaced reputation as the enforcer of reciprocation, although violence still played a major role in enforcing rights as well as being a high transaction cost that prevented most kinds of trade.

To be useful as a general-purpose store of wealth and means of wealth transfer, a collectible had to be embedded in at least one institution with a closed-loop cycle, so that the cost of discovering and/or manufacturing the object was amortized over multiple transactions. Furthermore, a collectible was not just any kind of beautiful decorative object. It had to have certain functional properties, such as the security of being wearable on the person, compactness for hiding or burial, and unforgeable costliness. That costliness must have been verifiable by the recipient of the transfer — using many of the same skills that collectors use to appraise collectibles today.

Of course as a vision of an ideal world Bitcoin is problematic in many respects. The environmental cost of the energy consumption is nowhere near as high as has been insinuated but is still arguably unnecessary. The trust model has insufficiently examined weaknesses when it comes to the proliferation of future protocol updates–even just the ratio of core developers to users inherently introduces weaknesses the government has been eager to pressure. And the implicit goal of One Big Currency is just as unreasonable as One Big Union. Any flat global currency will radically fail to match the topologies of trust, reputation, and other diverse human realities it floats on top of – lurking instabilities are inherent. Introducing parallel competing currencies all modeled on the dream of a universal standard hardly solves the problem. My own inclination is that exchange facilitating human reputation systems will trend towards a rhizomatic federative model with every community, collective or congealing association floating their own “currency” in a sense, built to be dynamically recognfigured, and with routing protocols fluidly negotiating the network topology on the fly for individual transactions while retaining far more directed information regarding lines of trust and repute. And indeed Bitcoin has already set off a vast cornucopia of such developments from things like color coins, side chains, and meta coins, to communities like the Lakota nation and Catalonia launching their own alt coins (Catalonia even working on a scheme to bake in basic universal income). Of course it’ll be a while before this development process or praxis achieves everything we want.  But in the meantime, in the non-prefigurative actually-existing world of violence distorted markets, we’re having a hard time holding onto even the precondition of a decentralized internet. It’s not just an analogy to note that while the anarchist ideal may be a rich ecology of mesh networks, we’re anemic enough that net neutrality is better than DisneyComcast. And in that context Bitcoin and its variations, must be acknowledged as holding immense practical utility when compared to the current regime. The CNT was a clusterfuck but it did get some good shit done.

And there are a number of things Bitcoin gets right. Whatever sloppily imposed tale of grand historical cycles Graeber cares to conjure, many of the attributes of specie currency are of great utility to resistance movements. If we are to make a serious push back through direct action against global power structures we need the same fungible currencies that gave (and give) lifeblood to pirate utopias and enable millions to hustle out survival under the table. At the same time Bitcoin is caught in a tension with prefiguration by quirk of mathematics which forces every transaction into a public ledger to its satisfy proof of work scheme. This trait was seen as a bug rather than a feature by many Libertarians (and there are a few elaborate schemes in progress to overcome it), but history arguably shows that public ledgers are the more natural framework for currency, from necklaces to clay tablets to marked sticks. The most famous and direct example being the islanders of Yap who carved giant stone coins hundreds of miles away, rafted them home and then simply publicly declared changes of ownership without ever moving them. When a coin was accidentally dropped into the sea on its way to Yap the islanders shrugged and continued to exchange title to it since its physical location was ultimately unimportant. Bitcoin has merely used mathematics to extend the number of parties to such consensuses while freeing our brains to remember and think about other things. (Interestingly this ease has also facilitated an explosion of social gifting which currently constitute the majority of Bitcoin transactions.)

Of course even when it’s possible there can be problems with simply scaling up tools and approaches that work well on the tribal level, just because we can get around Dunbar’s limit on some dynamics doesn’t mean we can for all interrelated dynamics, and to grab onto solutions that have worked before ignoring changes in context is dangerous in the extreme. If a technology–like a currency–can facilitate a liberatory mass society it should be built around enhancing agency and giving folks broader and more fluid choices.

That said, while a great number of problems can be solved by automating the grunt work involved in protocol negotiation, routing, map-learning, stock predictions, etc., even the most furturist general AI will still be starkly limited by Hayekian subjectivity. Unless we buy into the capitalist and state communist vision of limited, controllable desires we will still have to at some point, at some level engage. Even the most advanced tool can’t intuit our needs, or, for example assume a threat or trust model for us. We have to declare our ever changing preferences and contextual considerations, we have to make decisions, we have to actively judge. And it’s here that the issue of what exactly do we want to pay attention to arises. Markets can exist only wherever attention is placed. And some people feel deeply annoyed when huge amounts of attention is placed in areas by others that they don’t want to likewise pay attention to. What should we have markets in? What should we calculate with precision? How can we, in wildly varying situations, mediate between those who for various reasons want to obsess over a dynamic and those who would rather not give a fuck? These are questions often cloaked in combative, reactive rhetoric, but are worth bringing to the fore.

Obviously we shouldn’t just retire human inquiry away at some level of awareness, start some land project and seek no further, but we do occasionally reach plateaus in human computational capacity with diminishing returns. In the absence of a higher-bandwidth language or telepathy, micromanaging our relationships can become counterproductive. When I was a teen I felt horrified and betrayed to overhear a cluster of anarchafeminists bitterly complaining about their sensitive partners checking in about consent on every little action in bed, but the point is actually valid. Over-resolution in a specific realm when it becomes normative can be constraining to those with other priorities in exploration. That said there is of course, ultimately no such thing as over-resolution in our collective striving for understanding in every arena. There’s no area or level to which we all should flinch from examination–regardless of whether we decide we want to live at that granularity in our everyday lives with boring old non-transhuman homo sapiens brains.

We have many problems to solve, from the feedback loops in social capital that drive informal power relations to means for survivors of secret rapists to find one another and coordinate in an untrustworthy environment. A wishful longing for ignorance of historical accounts is not a productive or workable ideal. If there’s one thing I hope readers take away from Debt it’s a calling to geek out on particulars and tackle these dynamics. This isn’t unchartered territory, there’s a lot of really great work going on and tools being forged by heroes. The next chapter on debt, in which many of its forms aren’t abolished from on high but dissolved from below, has still yet to be finished.

So what then to say in conclusion?

I think this summary of Graeber’s is supremely illustrative of the mistakes creeping into his account:

All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are. Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human rela­tions. This is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.

Yet there are no such thing as unseparated human beings! Every human relationship is deeply predicated upon separation. Until brain-to-brain technology matures and radically scales up the bandwidth of our potential communication even the closest of lovers face strong limits from the subjectivity inherent to individual existence. For some relationships and situations Gift of the Magi style catastrophes are a tolerable bullet to bite, but only ever to a certain degree. And as we shake off the shackles of capitalism and let our desires stretch such confusions and logjams will become even less cute.

Further, the notion that “equality is restored” wildly ignores what social currency was about imperfectly declaring: standing and trustworthiness, realities that don’t have to be hierarchical and assessments thereof that don’t have to be collectively managed. When the neighbor returns precisely one cup of rice and maybe a little more as agreed on, that doesn’t have to cancel the relationship, it can enhance it by proving trustworthiness. I am freeing you to have agency in your association with me, so that our friendship might be richer for the knowledge that we are not bound by material considerations. Only with such knowledge can we be capable of developing real affinities. A consensual society should be built off knowing we can reconfigure our social relations at any moment. That their substance lies not in ossified roles or identities but in empathy.

In an understandable but dangerous rush to paint a clean picture David Graeber ignores a host of other possibilities and paints an all-too-cute historical progression and taxonomy in which all human societies mix different degrees of hierarchical, communistic, and market oriented dynamics. But markets, in his tale, are primarily a confused state of affairs in which any permanence or substance to human relations is dissolved and everything is quantified. And the unquantified, unexamined, unmapped ignorance of communism is bliss.

I disagree.

Whatever moralistic language may sometimes cling to them, markets themselves are not rooted in cultural confusion but in inescapable material and game theoretic realities. Currency resolves an important issue in mass societies and while it can have problems they can be solved with more mathematical nuance not less.

We should be incredibly suspicious of valorizing alternatives like Maussian gift economies that embrace interpersonal power dynamics rather than working to negate them. And Graeber’s communism-as-a-deliberate-state-of-ignorance hardly serves any better. If we really care about one another, if we really want to build a freer world from an orientation of empathy and compassion, if we’re really concerned about the crystalization of hierarchies, we owe it to ourselves to be maximally vigilant, to seize every tool at our disposal and remain unpetrified of exploring root dynamics.

It is the interplay of desire and math that ultimately shapes what is possible, not sweeping historical impressions or awkward taxonomies of cultural dynamics. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an exhilarating storm of anecdotes and with many insightful themes, but it flounders in many respects when it seeks to draw lessons from history.

The past is no cage for the future.

The action had been months in the making, orchestrated by an almost endless list of environmental, religious and labor groups. The public protest was expected to be incredibly large, but activists were shocked at such a massive turnout. Hundreds of thousands crafted a party like atmosphere, with tons of energy, in what the Christian Science Monitor describes as a raucous parade. In fact, Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York is quoted as saying:

After over forty years in the trenches of the environmental movement, I’ve never been more inspired and awe-struck… Today proves global support for climate action is undeniable. A swell of humanity has spoken as one: The time to act on climate is now.

This “swell” is particularly speaking to those in attendance at the United Nations Climate Summit. The gathering of roughly 100 heads of state kicked off on September 23. At the summit, officials sought discussion of global carbon emissions and a move towards a consensus for international reduction standards at next years gathering in Paris.

One may argue the environmental movement is stronger now than any other time in human history, with a real chance to force meaningful change. I, with reservation, would agree.

Teacher’s union president Carol Sutton of Connecticut told the New York Times: “I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together. It begins in the streets.” — and I would agree with her. I have attended multiple environmental protests, some as small as 11 people, others as large as 40,000, and they have all been inspirational and exciting. I wish I could have been in the streets of New York, standing shoulder to shoulder, with so many. Social change does begin in the streets, but that is the easy part.

Having such a number of people turn out for the climate march is sure to move the political gathering held at the United Nations. It is good to engage existing institutions and work for change, but this is a short-term solution. The long-term solution will require radicalism. It is here that I have my reservations about the strength of the movement. Engaging institutions will not accomplish what it is we must ultimately seek: Anarchism. Liberty would allow us to explore the idea of mutualism — with each other, and our ecology, by advancing the concept of ecosystem services in the liberated market. It is systems of power and domination, upheld by the state, that have allowed such a divorce of our societies from the natural world.

Most importantly, the burden of proof, the idea that a more sustainable order is worthy of human labor, falls on those of us in the environmental movement — not state institutions. Though engagement of current institutions is needed, we should ultimately seek their destruction and lead by example.

Here in lies the problem with many (certainly not all) movement environmentalists today — we speak in terms of state policy and authoritarian institutions. The same institutions that have failed all species time and time again. The systems of power and domination we so often turn to, from war to development, have long turned their backs on the natural order. They work only to obtain resources, not to preserve. Any state decree exalting the environment should be met with pure skepticism. War alone, the very health of the state, demands enough unsustainable resource extraction and fossil fuel use to propel human civilization into the full effects of anthropogenic climate change. Our plan of action should instead seek to tear down this authority with brute force. Independent scholar Kevin Carson explains:

Our goal is not to assume leadership of existing institutions, but rather to render them irrelevant. We don’t want to take over the state or change its policies. We want to render its laws unenforceable. We don’t want to take over corporations and make them more “socially responsible.” We want to build a counter-economy of open-source information, neighborhood garage manufacturing, Permaculture, encrypted currency and mutual banks, leaving the corporations to die on the vine along with the state.

We do not hope to reform the existing order. We intend to serve as its grave-diggers.

The question then becomes, what will follow? The answer is something both beautiful and complex, while liberating and dynamic. Perhaps it is time to revisit our classical naturalists — of which there are plenty. However, one thing that John Muir (or your favorite historical eco-advocate) and his ilk had was a connection to the natural world and a desire for conservation. They did not much care to talk about what governments ought to do, but rather what they ought not do. Environmental achievement was obtained by pronouncing the splendid beauty of natural ecosystems, the challenges facing nature, and the innate need to protect wild spaces — even for our own well-being. Muir and other environmental advocates also practiced their ideals as they labored for the great outdoors.

In order to meet the demands of a changing Earth we will have to adapt. We will be required to constantly change, just like our mountains and rivers. Anarchist and Deep-Ecologist Gary Snyder, in his essay, The Etiquette of Freedom, describes, in great detail, the need to reclaim the words nature, wilderness and wildness — and it is in wildness that we will discover anarchism.

Nature, of course, is the collective physical world — all landscapes and seascapes, all flora and fauna, free of development. Wilderness is uncultivated land, in a natural state, liberated of human behavior. Wildness, however, is the ultimate practice — a praxis of liberty. Wildness, according to Snyder, is the quality of being wild or untamed. Snyder notes that human beings are indeed wild, but this does not mean disorderly. In fact, he argues that wildness will lead to a highly ordered society where our relationship with nature will be interactive, thus allowing the construction of durable social systems. This is also an idea explored by naturalist anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his book, Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution [PDF]:

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species[…] in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits[…] and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development[…] are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

There is indeed mutualism everywhere in nature, just as in human society, but the concept is absent from systems of power and domination. If we are to take the environment, and the consequences of climate change seriously, it is our duty to abandon such systems as they represent the unsociable species — they restrict human innovation, exacerbate environmental change and are composed of a ruling caste who seek first and foremost their own preservation. Simply, they are doomed to decay — and thus our message along with them.

Environmentalism, in its purest form, seeks the elevation of human society along with the natural world. Conservation and sustainable resource use would re-organize our neighborhoods. We would be free to labor in our own communities, craft our own institutions and own the means of our production. We would have a mutual relationship with our surrounding ecology, where we could receive beneficial ecosystem services such as air and water purification, flood control, carbon sequestration, psychological benefits and much more simply by conserving natural areas.

The natural world would benefit from being liberated of sprawl. Complex ecosystems (even in urban areas) would be left intact. In such an order species decline would be mitigated by the protection and restoration of natural habitat. Furthermore, the more decentralized our societies, the more we are liberated from institutions that seek maximum utility of resources. Then, we could naturally reduce our carbon emissions without coercive force. Our communities will flourish when liberated of state.

This order is possible, it is up to us to obtain it. May our inclined labor craft a beautiful, sustainable existence? If we achieve such a feat, anarchism will be our method and we will know wildness, as it is the process of simply living free – the grandeur of such freedom is only attainable in liberty.

1) Thanks to what is already an incipient recession, the country’s current economic situation is deteriorating rapidly. 75 percent of Argentine workers earn less than 6,500 pesos per month (about US$590), while half of those employed earn less than 4,040 pesos (US$367) per month, i.e., little more than the minimum wage of 3,600 pesos (US$327). The 25 percent that earns the least charges less than 2,500 pesos per month (US$227), the rate of informal employment has already reached 33.5 percent, and 1,200,000 people are unemployed. And these already meager income levels are further eroded by rampant inflation and heavy tax burdens.

Half of the workers who earn the least and consume most of their income, face a 21 percent VAT tax. This is an extremely regressive tax, since a worker with a salary of 3,600 pesos, who consumes most of it, pays taxes that represent more than one-fifth of their salary, while someone with a salary of 10,000 pesos — if we assume their monthly consumption level is equal to the minimum salary as well — pays only 7.5 percent of their income in taxes. In addition to all this, the government’s failure or unwillingness to update income tax brackets in an inflationary environment has swept away the wages of higher paid workers: a construction worker who earns 15,000 pesos (US$1,363) or more, gives up almost 40 percent of their income to the state.

Thus Argentina is emerging as the country where the state has the greatest influence over the economy in the region, and one of the countries in the world where employees pay the most taxes. Due to outdated tax brackets applied to workers earning decent wages, VAT and income tax are the main contributors to the state’s coffers in nominal terms, over and above taxes applied to large soy plantations and fuels [1].

2) But worst of all, the Argentine wage-earner today has less alternatives for emancipation and independence than ever. Even if they could manage to save a bit by somehow avoiding the sting of inflation, they face overwhelming barriers for entering markets, mainly due to national laws and municipal regulations for starting businesses. These restrictions raise startup costs for virtually any modest enterprise to over 100,000 pesos (over US$9,000). But because it is actually extremely hard for workers to avoid the effects of inflation, investment from savings on wages is virtually impossible.

Credit is virtually inaccessible. Banks charge interest rates of around 70 percent, and don’t lend less than 120,000 pesos for small or medium-sized enterprises. Furthermore, banks offer around 18 percent annually on deposits to savers, a trifle when compared with the rates they charge their customers for consumption loans and credit cards. The profits earned by banks for their monopoly on credit are unmatched in other sectors of Argentina’s economy. And with the last devaluation of January this year, profits grew even more. In fact, it could be said that apart from the government, banks were the only beneficiaries of the devaluation. All other sectors suffered a heavy loss in their purchasing power. During the first quarter of 2014, the Argentine economy didn’t grow, yet the banking sector boasted a 300 percent increase in earnings when compared to the same period of 2013 [2].

3) Finding it impossible to gain financial freedom through savings or through credit, all that remains for the average worker is to flee towards assets that enable them to at least protect the value of their scarce capital against inflation. This used to be done mainly through the purchase of US dollars or any other foreign currency, but the state, in an effort to enclose resources to support its client network, imposed a rigid set of foreign-exchange controls in 2011. The system was so rigid during the first stages of its implementation that it fueled a strong black currency market. It was only made somewhat more flexible in January 2014, and for the benefit of a privileged few: only those earning 7,200 pesos per month (US$654) — the equivalent of two minimum wages — or more may acquire foreign currency, and from that point onwards, the allowances for foreign currency purchases grow in tandem with the level of earned income. It is hard to think of a more regressive scheme for rationing a scarce resource.

In other words, more than 75 percent of Argentine workers are left out of the foreign-exchange market, making it extremely difficult to hedge against the inflation of the Peso. The flight towards other assets, such as durable goods like cars — I don’t take real estate into account because it has been inaccessible to the majority of the population for decades — has been massive, and along with Brazilian purchases, is the main factor compensating the reduction of staff and operations by major automakers due to slower economic growth. In short, the Argentine wage-earner has little choice but to work for someone else for a miserable salary that quickly melts away due to inflation — if the incipient recession doesn’t drag them into unemployment altogether.

4) With the crisis of 2001, the popular spirit was such that the slogan on everyone’s mind was “throw them all out,” a clear reflection of the people’s total loss of confidence in the political class. The proliferation of neighborhood assemblies, occupied worker-managed workplaces, and popular organizations without visible political leaders were the norm until Eduardo Duhalde’s police State paved the way, through repression and economic adjustment, for the first government of Néstor Kirchner in 2003. Today, despite poverty figures not being as dramatic as they were back then, the spirit of the Argentine people is similar, but definitely not mature enough.

Still, we are reaching a point at which the legitimacy of representative democracy is reaching a clear historical low: regular people seem to be realizing that the whole political show is all about sustaining the livelihood of the political class, and that once again, the course of events will evolve as it repeatedly has for decades. This perception has been boosted by the fact that the leading candidates for the 2015 presidential elections are all Frankensteins from the Kirchnerist/Duhaldist/Menemist laboratory. Even the “rightist” faction led by Mauricio Macri has greatly warmed up to the current government.

On the other hand, the statist left’s popularity has grown considerably in recent years, especially in some of the country’s major trade associations, and has gained a good chunk of legislative positions. The average worker is no longer convinced by Peronism, which has morphed into what radicalism became during the early twentieth century when it came to power: a purely conservative movement. However, despite the advancement of alternatives to the hegemonic Peronism being a very positive development in itself, it is still the authoritarian left of always. Their proposals are, beyond the “assembly” or “democratic” rhetoric, more centralization, more power to the state, and more taxes on producers.

5) I think Argentina needs a leftist movement that truly advocates for the emancipation of the producer, for the elimination of monopoly privileges in banking, land, and industry, and that doesn’t lean the weight of the state over the shoulders of workers and entrepreneurs — a left that leaves all political and economic decision-making in the hands of citizens. A libertarian movement. A movement that doesn’t spring from the heights of the classical liberal spectrum, who in any case would not approach workers for more than urging them to read Ludwig von Mises and to glorify Juan Bautista Alberdi. There is a huge cultural gap between this alleged rationalism, inherited from the eighteenth century, and the Argentine cultural heritage. The same distance that exists with the rusty figures of Marx and Trotsky that the left pretends to impose.

The Argentine mindset is fundamentally libertarian due to historical, cultural, and idiosyncratic reasons — that’s the key fact we have to work with.

[1] Tax Collection — Annual Series 2014, Federal Administration of Public Revenues (AFIP). A frequent argument against this criticism of statist depredation is that the collected monies “come back” to the people in the form of public or social services, such as the Universal Child Allowance (UCA), or educational services. It is important to note that the UCA is merely a superficial remedy aimed at containing the destructive impulses of the lumpenproletariat (that we all know very well ever since episodes like those of 2001), and that despite the increase in public-education investment from 4 percent to 6.2 percent of GDP, student enrollment in private schools grew seven times more than in public schools due to the continuous decay of the quality of public education, which does not offer any hope for the future for its pupils and keeps teachers in utterly precarious labor conditions. Again, workers suffer a double whammy: they sustain public education with their taxes, and at the same time make an incredible effort to afford paying for the private education of their children.

[2] This is nothing new. It has been pointed out by a great number of thinkers who emphasized the need for the worker to have the capacity to access credit for their emancipation, from Proudhon, William Greene, Benjamin Tucker, and Silvio Gesell, to Kevin Carson in more recent times, among others.

Translated by Alan Furth from the original in Spanish.

Liberty can be described, rather simply, as the state of being free from domination and oppression, imposed by an authority, on one’s way of life, behavior or worldview. This idea means many different things to different people, but the fundamental idea of liberty is individual agency. This libertarian tradition notes that all human beings deserve to be free and equal in dignity and rights. Slavery, on the other hand, can be understood as the absolute domination of the individual — it is the end of agency. Slavery bucks the trend of human progress, it cages liberty. Slavery is unjustifiable and thus illegitimate — it has no place in a democratic society.

To obtain and protect liberty, all illegitimate authority must be abolished. When we tear down systems of domination and oppression, when we liberate humanity from illegitimate power structures, we find the true beauty of human nature. Liberty, then, requires active participation from the populace. Liberty is the product of labor. If a population is passive or apathetic, then systems of power and domination can spread like a cancer throughout society.

Because of this, those dedicated to the principles of liberty and democracy should be very concerned about a recent report, from the United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO), that says forced labor (read slavery) generates a $150 billion annual worldwide profit. Even worse, $99 billion, (two-thirds) of this total profit, is generated through the sexual exploitation of men, women and children. The rest of the revenue comes from forced economic labor in agriculture, construction, mining and domestic work.

This fundamental evil, forced labor, the unwilling utility and exploitation of another must be abolished. To accomplish this abolition, it is necessary to look at the pre-existing conditions that give rise to such authoritarian systems — poverty, violence, poor education, class struggle, racism, sexism, etc – and confront the mechanisms through which these social forces subjugate human beings. This begs the questions: Where does power come from? Who should posses it? Who is responsible for our lives? These questions should lead to inquiry into our social organization and how to better the rights and welfare of all individuals — the common good.

Our collective libertarian tradition can answer these questions and progress the common good by dismantling power structures from above and building, only when needed, from below. When accomplished, labor will be inclined and liberated. In absolute liberty society will change, as America philosopher John Dewey notes, “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order,” respecting all workers as genuine human beings as opposed to resources for economic exploitation.

Luckily, folks continue to labor for liberty so that all may labor in liberty. The emerging open source, networked order, of autonomous individuals and civic sector groups, is advancing Mutualism and working for emancipation in ways traditional command and control governance is incapable of. This new order is stigmergic – decentralized in the freed market. Groups such as Women at Risk International, International Justice Mission and many more are liberating enslaved individuals in both local and global campaigns.

The New Mutualism is coming. May every individual one day live in liberty — until then, and ever after, let’s labor for the common good.

Libertários e anarco-capitalistas, ao defenderem a abolição da propriedade e dos serviços estatais, tipicamente defendem um processo de “privatização” que depende pesadamente do modelo capitalista corporativista de propriedade. A propriedade do estado deveria ser leiloada e seus serviços executados, digamos, pela GiganteGlobalCorp LLC. E a imagem da futura economia de mercado, em relação aos empreendimentos produtivos, é simplesmente a presente economia corporativista menos o estado regulatório e de bem-estar ? Uma versão idealizada do “capitalismo dos barões ladrões” do século XIX. A primeira tendência ignora outras alternativas, igualmente válidas de um ponto de vista anarquista de livre-mercado, tais como colocar os serviços governamentais como escolas e polícia sob o controle cooperativo de sua clientela anterior no nível das cidades ou bairros. E a última tendência ignora a questão do capitalismo de estado, da extensão à qual as gigantescas corporações que receberam uma parte enorme de seus lucros através do estado podem ser consideradas como propriedade privada legítima ou como resultado de roubo.

Ao desafiar essa afinidade estética pela corporação como a forma dominante de organização econômica, Karl Hess denunciou aqueles que simplesmente identificavam o libertarismo “com aqueles que desejam criar uma sociedade na qual os super-capitalistas sejam livres para acumular vastas possessões”. Escrevendo no Libertarian Forum em 1969, Hess argumentou, ao contrário, que

O Libertarismo é um movimento popular e um movimento de liberação. Ele busca o tipo de sociedade aberta, não-coercitiva, na qual pessoas vivas, livres e diferentes podem se associar voluntariamente, se desassociar, e participar, como acharem apropriado, das decisões que afetam suas próprias vidas. Isso significa um mercado verdadeiramente livre em tudo, desde idéias até idiossincrasias. Significa que as pessoas sejam livres para organizar coletivamente os recursos de suas comunidades imediatas ou organizá-los individualisticamente; significa a liberdade de ter um judiciário baseado na comunidade e sustentado por ela quando desejado, nenhum onde não for, ou serviços de arbitragem privados onde isso for visto como mais desejável. O mesmo com a polícia. O mesmo com as escolas, hospitais, fábricas, fazendas, laboratórios, parques e pensões. Liberdade significa o direito de moldar as próprias instituições. Se opõe ao direito dessas instituições te moldarem simplesmente por conta do poder estabelecido ou do status gerontológico.2

Hess desprezava a tendência cultural de muitos libertários de defender os direitos de propriedade privada a despeito de como foram adquiridos, e a assumir que aqueles presentemente no topo da economia capitalista de estado estavam simplesmente coletando a recompensa por um “passado virtuoso”.

Porque muitos de seus componentes [do movimento libertário] (…) vieram da direita permanece pelo menos uma aura ou, talvez, um miasma de defensividade, como se seus interesses centrais fossem, por exemplo, defender a propriedade privada. A verdade, é claro, é que o libertarismo pretende avançar os princípios da propriedade, mas de forma alguma deseja defender, bem ou mal, todas as propriedades que atualmente são chamadas de privadas.Muitas dessas propriedades são roubadas. Muitas têm títulos dúbios. Todas estão profundamente entrelaçadas com um estado imoral e coercitivo que amparou, se desenvolveu e lucrou com a escravidão, explorou e se expandiu por meio de uma política externa agressiva, imperial e colonial, e continua a manter as pessoas basicamente num relacionamento entre servos e senhores através das concentrações de poder político-econômicas.

Dada essa situação, Hess defendeu uma criativa análise libertária, confrontando as questões do “tratamento revolucionário das propriedades ‘privadas’ e ‘públicas’ roubadas em termos libertários, radicais e revolucionários”, incluindo, por exemplo: “A propriedade e/ou uso da terra numa situação de declínio do poder do estado”; “O controle acionário dos trabalhadores das comunidades ou das fábricas produtivas. (…) O que, por exemplo, deveria acontecer com a General Motors numa sociedade liberada?”; e a injustiça de libertar escravos e servos sem estabelecer seus direitos de propriedade das terras de seus prévios donos (i.e., “quarenta acres e uma mula”).

No espírito dos comentários de Hess, eu examinarei modelos libertários alternativos de “privatização” das propriedades e dos serviços do governo, e tentarei aplicar os mesmos princípios por analogia à questão de como lidar com os atuais beneficiários do capitalismo de estado numa sociedade de livre-mercado futura. Ao fazer isso, eu devo antes deixar claro que não sou um anarco-capitalista, como é a maioria dos visitantes regulares do ASC, mas um anarquista individualista influenciado principalmente por Tucker.

Meios Alternativos de “Privatizar” a Propriedade do Estado

A facção anarquista da Young Americans for Freedom [N.T.: Organização estudantil americana fundada nos anos 1960], em seu manifesto de 1969 The “Tranquil” Statement [N.T.: “A ‘Tranqüila’ Declaração”] (um de seus autores era Karl Hess), expressou simpatia pelos estudantes radicais que ocuparam os campi das universidades. Em resposta às denúncias da direita de tais crimes contra a “propriedade privada”, o Statement notou que

a questão da propriedade privada não pertence a uma discussão das universidades americanas. Mesmo aquelas universidades que se passam por instituições privadas são, na verdade, altamente subsidiadas com recursos federais ou, como em muitos casos, sustentadas por fundos de pesquisas federais. A Universidade de Columbia é um excelente exemplo. Quase dois terços da receita de Columbia vem do governo, não de fontes privadas. Como, então, pode alguém razoável ou moralmente considerar a Universidade de Columbia uma instituição privada? (…) E, sendo ela uma propriedade pública (governamental, isto é, propriedade roubada), o libertário radical é justificado em tomá-la e retorná-la ao controle privado ou comunal. Isso, é claro, se aplica a toda instituição de ensino que seja subsidiada pelo governo ou que ajude de qualquer maneira o governo em sua usurpação dos direitos humanos básicos.3

As corporações privadas que recebem “de qualquer maneira” subsídios governamentais, é claro, podem ser escusadas por ver o sinistro potencial desse princípio.

Murray Rothbard, tomando a mesma posição num editorial na The Libertarian, ridicularizou o “grotesco” argumento randiano de que Columbia era uma “propriedade privada” e de que os estudantes portanto estavam violando esses “direitos sagrados”:

Além dos vários laços específicos com o Estado que os rebeldes de Columbia apontaram (…), quase dois terços da receita de Columbia vem de fontes governamentais e não privadas. Como diabos poderíamos continuar a chamá-la de instituição privada?

Defender os direitos de “propriedade privada” de universidades “francamente estatais” era, evidentemente, absurdo. Nesses casos,

A propriedade do governo é sempre e em todo lugar resultado de exploração, para o libertário; o libertário deve regozijar todas as vezes que qualquer parte da propriedade governamental, portanto roubada, for restituída por quaisquer meios necessários ao setor privado. (…)Portanto, o libertário deve aplaudir qualquer tentativa de retornar propriedades roubadas, do governo, ao setor privado, sendo sob o clamor de que “as ruas pertencem ao povo” ou “os parques pertencem ao povo”, ou de que as escolas pertencem àqueles que as usam, i.e., os estudantes e docentes. O libertário acredita que as coisas não corretamente possuídas são revertidas à primeira pessoa que as usa e as possui, e.g., o apropriador [N.T.: “homesteader”] que primeiro limpa e usa uma terra virgem; similarmente, o libertário deve apoiar qualquer tentativa pelos “apropriadores originais” do campus, os estudantes e professores, de tomar o poder nas universidades da burocracia governamental ou quasi-governamental.4

Rothbard argumentou que “o método mais prático de desestatização é simplesmente o de conceder o direito moral de propriedade à pessoa ou ao grupo que toma a propriedade do estado”. Isso implicaria, na maioria dos casos, tratar a propriedade do estado como vaga ou sem dono e reconhecer os direitos de apropriação daqueles que realmente as estão usando. No caso das universidades “públicas”,

os donos adequados dessas universidades são os “apropriadores originais”, aqueles que já a estavam usando e portanto “misturando o próprio trabalho” às instalações. (…) Isso implica a propriedade dos estudantes e/ou dos docentes sobre universidades.5

É possível aplicar esse princípio da apropriação da propriedade estatal por trabalhadores ou clientes de muitas formas. Larry Gambone propôs a “mutualização” dos serviços públicos como uma alternativa à privatização corporativista. Isso significa descentralizar o controle de, digamos, escolas, polícia, hospitais, etc., até menor unidade local viável (bairro ou comunidade) e então colocar esses serviços sob controle democrático de sua clientela. Por exemplo, as pessoas de uma cidade podem abolir o conselho escolar municipal e colocar cada escola sob controle de um conselho selecionado que deveria prestar contas aos pais dos alunos. Em última análise, a taxação compulsória acabaria e as escolas funcionariam com contribuições voluntárias dos usuários. Em termos práticos, a mutualização é mais ou menos equivalente à reorganização de todas as atividades estatais em cooperativas de consumidores.6

Privatização em Sociedades Pós-Comunistas

Murray Rothbard e Hans-Hermann Hoppe tentaram aplicar o mesmo princípio da apropriação original da propriedade estatal em sociedades pós-comunistas.

Embora a abordagem de Rothbard quanto ao potencial libertário da combinação iugoslava do gerenciamento próprio dos trabalhadores e do socialismo de mercado fosse otimista demais e ingênua, sua proposição do princípío para sociedades pós-comunistas foi bastante sólida: “a terra para os camponeses e as fábricas para os trabalhadores, dessa forma tirando a propriedade das mãos do estado e colocando-a em mãos privadas”.7

A queda do império soviético e de seus satélites em 1989-91 transformou essa questão meramente teórica numa questão prática. O curso geralmente seguido no período seguinte envolvia a emissão de ações iguais, vendáveis, das empresas estatais para todos os cidadãos, permitindo então que a propriedade subseqüente se desenvolvesse através da compra e venda das ações. Rothbard propôs, em vez disso, uma solução “sindicalista”:

Seria muito melhor considerar o venerável princípio do homesteading na base do novo sistema de propriedade dessocializado. Ou, para reviver o velho slogan marxista: “todas as terras para os camponeses, todas as fábricas para os trabalhadores!” Isso estabeleceria o princípio básico lockeano de que a posse das propriedades sem donos deve ser adquirida pela “mistura do trabalho com o solo” ou com outros recursos sem dono. A dessocialização é um processo que priva o governo de suas “propriedades” ou controles existentes e que os devolve aos indivíduos privados. Num sentido, abolir a propriedade do governo dos recursos os coloca imediatamente e implicitamente numa condição em que não têm dono na qual uma apropriação anterior pode rapidamente convertê-las em propriedade privada.8

Hoppe fez uma proposta similar em relação à Alemanha Oriental, embora mais hesitante e com mais qualificações.9

É claro, o termo “sindicalista” foi usado principalmente para provocação, já que Rothbard e Hoppe foram ambos claros ao defenderem que essas propriedades “sindicalistas” fossem devolvidas aos trabalhadores e camponeses individuais como ações vendáveis e não aos membros das unidades produtivas coletivamente. O ideal, como Hoppe o expressou, seria o de que a propriedade das ações e o trabalho se separassem o mais rápido possível. Mas não há razão em princípio, como Carlton Hobbs demonstrou em relação aos comuns, por que essas unidades de produção não devessem permanecer propriedade conjunta e indivisível de suas forças de trabalho, com direitos usufrutuários de salários e pensões derivados dela. Esse sistema de forma alguma impediria necessariamente um mercado de fatores de produção. Os coletivos de trabalhadores comprariam novos equipamentos de capital no mercado; mas suas reclamações de propriedade em relação a qualquer unidade industrial de produção seriam coletivas enquanto o empreendimento mantivesse continuidade organizacional e espacial.

Embora Rothbard não tivesse feito tal qualificação em seu texto de 1969 (escrito, afinal, durante sua tentativa de coalizão com a New Left), ele e Hoppe concordaram duas décadas depois que uma tentativa deferia ser feita no sentido de restituir a propriedade estatal aos seus donos legítimos originais antes de um confisco, se registros de propriedade ainda existissem. Hoppe vinculou similares caveats à privatização “sindicalista” das indústrias estatais pós-comunistas em Democracy: The God That Failed.10 Rothbard e Hoppe concordavam que essa restituição seria mais fácil no caso da terra e na Europa Oriental (onde a expropriação da terra ocorreu apenas quarenta anos mais cedo) que na União Soviética. Rothbard enfatizou, contudo, que essa restituição seria virtualmente impossível no caso dos bens de capital e das manufaturas, uma vez que a maior parte da economia industrial foi desenvolvida sob propriedade estatal. Assim, seria melhor colocar a indústria sob controle dos trabalhadores.

Dificuldades Práticas da Privatização Capitalista Corporativista da Propriedade do Estado

A privatização da propriedade do estado, como ela ocorreu é apenas outra forma de subsídio capitalista de estado. Num primeiro momento, o capital transnacional promove projetos de infraestrutura nos países de Terceiro Mundo que são essenciais para retornos sobre o capital ocidental nesses países, como forma de subsidiar o investimento estrangeiro neles às expensas dos pagadores de impostos nativos. Em seguida, o débito resultante é usado para disciplinar o governo do país de forma a fazer com que ele estabeleça políticas favoráveis ao capital ocidental. Finalmente, sob o regime de “ajuste estrutural” imposto pelo FMI e pelo Banco Mundial, o país é forçado a vender seus ativos (anteriormente pagos com o suor das classes produtivas nativas) ao capital ocidental por alguns centavos de dólar. Sean Corrigan perspicazmente descreveu o fenômeno num artigo no LewRockwell.com:

Ele não sabe que toda a estratégia do FMI e do Tesouro dos EUA de dominação total é baseada na promoção de dívidas governamentais improdutivas no exterior, a taxas de juros cada vez mais usurárias, para em seguida ? antes ou, mais freqüentemente hoje em dia, depois do ponto de moratória ? liberar os bancos ocidentais que foram os agentes provocadores dessa Operação Suserano financeira, com novos dólares emitidos, em detrimento dos cidadãos domésticos?Ele não tem consciência de que, subseqüente ao colapso, esses Reconstrucionistas de última hora devem ser deixados arrebatar e comprar o controle proprietário dos recursos e capitais produtivos tornados ridiculamente baratos pela desvalorização ou total colapso financeiro?

Ele não entende que precisa simultaneamente precisa coagir a nação-alvo a explorar seu povo para produzir bens de exportação para pagar a nova dívida refinanciada, em adição à acumulação de um excesso de reservas em dólar como uma suposta garantia contra futuros ataques especulativos (normalmente financiados pelos mesmos bancos ocidentais através de empréstimos a seus colegas das Forças especiais nos fundos de macro-hedge) ? assim assegurando que o mercantilismo reverso da Rubinomics [N.T.: Rubinomics foi o nome dado à política econômica de Bill Clinton por causa de seu Secretário do Tesouro, Robert E. Rubin] seja mantido?11

Privatizações também normalmente envolvem um fenômeno conhecido como “canalização” [N.T.: “tunnelling”], no qual as elites com conexões políticas obtêm vantagens na aquisição de direitos às antigas propriedades estatais. Por exemplo, além do capital ocidental, outro grupo que teve fundos disponíveis para comprar antigas empresas soviéticas foi a nomenklatura do Partido, que acumulou ganhos ilícitos através de décadas de fraudes e corrupção. (Mais ou menos como o bom e velho xerife que usa o trabalho das fazendas do seu condado para colher sua plantação, mas numa escala muito maior.)

Expropriação da Propriedade “Privada” da Classe Dominante Estatista

Mas a linha de argumento até aqui não se aplica somente às propriedades atualmente sob controle formal do estado, mas também a propriedades “privadas” nominais adquiridas através de meios estatistas, ou a empresas construídas com lucros derivados predominantemente da intervenção estatal. Nos comentários acima por Rothbard e Hess sobre as ocupações pelos estudantes, as reclamações de propriedade de universidades privadas financiadas ostensivamente pelo estado foram tratadas como merecedoras de desdém. Elas eram tão suscetíveis quanto as propriedades do estado de serem tratadas como “sem dono” e abertas à “apropriação original” pelos ocupantes, os estudantes e/ou os professores.

Rothbard aplicou o mesmo princípio às corporações privadas que derivavam a maior parte de suas receitas do estado. Universidades nominalmente privadas como Columbia que recebiam a maior parte de seus fundos do pagador de impostos, privadas “somente (…) no sentido mais irônico”, mereciam tanto confisco e apropriação quanto aquelas possuídas pelo estado.

Mas se é assim com a Universidade de Columbia, o que dizer da General Dynamics? O que dizer da miríade de corporações que são partes integrais do complexo militar-industrial, que não apenas conseguem metade ou às vezes virtualmente todas as suas receitas do governo, mas que também participam de assassinatos em massa? Quais são as credenciais delas à propriedade privada? Certamente menos que zero. Como impacientes lobistas por esses contratos e subsídios, como co-fundadores do estado militar, eles merecem confisco e reversão de suas propriedades ao genuíno setor privado o mais rápido possível.12

Tratar a receita bruta como o critério principal, como fez Rothbard, é provavelmente muito simples. A percentagem da margem de lucro de uma firma que adviu do estado nos anos passados é um padrão mais relevante, uma vez que o tamanho presente e a equidade de uma corporação é resultado de sua acumulação passada. No caso dos Estados Unidos, o complexo de rodoviário-automotivo e o sistema de aviação civil foram virtuais criações do estado. Grandes linhas aéreas civis foram viáveis somente por causa do gasto federal em bombardeiros pesados. C. Wright Mills apontou emThe Power Elite que o valor de uma fábrica e dos equipamentos se espandiu em mais ou menos dois terços durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, pela maior parte às custas do pagador de impostos. A maior parte da indústria de eletrônicos foi construída através do dinheiro do Pentágono aplicado em pesquisa e desenvolvimento nos anos 1960; e se os primeiros supercomputadores não tivessem sido comprados pelo governo dos Estados Unidos, é improvável que a indústria fosse capaz de alcançar o ponto de redução de custos para tornar os computadores economicamente viáveis para o setor privado. E não esqueça o papel do Pentágono na criação da infraestrutura da worldwide web…

Mas e quanto aos benefícios não-monetários do estado, como a possibilidade de cobrar preços monopolísticos graças a patentes estatais? Grande parte da cartelização da indústria no fim do século XIX e do começo do século XX ocorreu pela troca de direitos de patente (e.g., entre a GE e a Westinghouse). A indústria química americana alcançou domínio global somente depois que o governo dos Estados Unidos tomou as patentes alemãs durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial e as deu para as firmas químicas de liderança. E o que dizer dos efeitos totais da taxa de acumulação graças à intervenção do estado no mercado de trabalho? (Esta última incluiria as restrições ao direito de organização, como o Railroad Labor Relations Act [N.T.: “Lei de Relações Trabalhistas das Ferrovias”] ou o Taft-Hartley Act [N.T.: Lei americana que restringe o poder dos sindicatos]; restrições à liberdade bancária que mantêm as taxas de juros artificialmente altas, limitam o acesso dos trabalhadores ao crédito e mantêm as dívidas como um instrumento de disciplina.) E também há o benefício coletivo da acumulação primitiva no começo do período moderno (pela qual os camponeses foram destituídos de seus direitos de propriedade tradicionais na terra e se tornaram inquilinos pela vontade do estado), o papel da força mercantilista na criação de um “mercado mundial”, os controles quase totalitários da população durante a Revolução Industrial britânica, os subsídios maciços às melhorias internas, etc.

Juntando todas essas coisas, não é preciso pensar muito para ver que virtualmente todo o grande setor manufatureiro é uma criação do estado corporativista.

A Propriedade das Terras e o Estado

Jerome Tucille certa vez contrastou os legítimos princípios libertários de propriedade da terra com a “anarco-captura de terras” [N.T.: “anarcho-land grabism”]:

Anarquistas de livre-mercado baseiam suas teorias de propriedade privada no princípio da apropriação original: uma pessoa tem o direito a um pedaço privado de terras se misturar seu trabalho a ela e alterá-la de alguma forma. Os anarco-pegadores de terras não reconhecem tais restrições. Simplesmente escale a montanha mais alta e reclame tudo o que você puder ver. Tudo então se torna moral e sagradamente seu e ninguém mais pode colocar os pés nessas terras.13

É claro, esse padrão lockeano de trabalho de apropriação levanta todos os tipos de questões complicadoras. Quanto “trabalho” é necessário para apropriar uma dada porção de terra? Requer direta ocupação e cultivo ou a simples circunscrição (com os pés? num SUV?) e marcação dela é suficiente mistura de trabalho? Se for o último caso, há um tempo limite? Onde paramos antes de reconhecer o direito de um papa de desenhar uma linha através do mapa da América do Sul e dividi-la entre Espanha e Portugal? Por outro lado, se algum ato tangível de trabalho ou alteração da terra é requerido, pareceria que a quantidade de terra que um indivíduo poderia apropriar teria alguma relação definida com a quantidade que ele poderia pessoalmente cultivar. Neste último caso nós nos aproximamos de algo como o padrão de “ocupação e uso” mutualista de apropriação, o qual é meramente um sistema de regras de propriedade privada alternativo, não-lockeano (e o qual este autor defende).

Tibor Machan inadvertidamente apontou ao paralelo próximo entre o roubo do estado pela taxação e o roubo envolvido em muito do que se chama de “aluguel”:

Naqueles dias as classes altas, do rei a sua corte, rotineiramente se envolviam em extorsões. Eles disfarçavam isso com o falso argumento de que tudo pertence ao rei e à sua corte. Sim, monarcas e aqueles que racionalizaram a monarquia propuseram essa fantasia e venderam às pessoas que eles eram os legítimos donos “do reino”, que eles tinham um “direito divino” de nos governar. Dessa forma, quando a maior parte do país ia trabalhar na fazenda ou em qualquer outro lugar, ele tinha que pagar “aluguéis” ao monarca e à sua corte.É claro, se eu vivo em seu apartamento, eu lhe pago aluguel. É seu apartamento, afinal, então você tem direito a isso. Mas e se você conseguiu seu apartamento através da conquista, roubando de um monte de pessoas o que pertencia a elas? Foi na maioria das vezes assim que os monarcas conseguiram governar seus reinos, por conquista. Por direito, eram as pessoas que trabalhavam no reino ? nas terras ou em outros lugares ? que na verdade tinham propriedade sobre o reino, sendo os monarcas os falsos, pretensos donos, nada mais. Mas uma vez que eles conseguiram fazer com que a maioria das pessoas indefesas acreditassem que eles possuíam o reino, o “aluguel” tinha que ser pago.14

Embora haja significativas e fundamentais diferenças entre as teorias mutualistas e lockeanas (e geoístas, por sinal) de propriedade da terra, essa não é a questão aqui. O que é realmente importante notar é o quantoconcordam essas teorias rivais em relação à ilegitimidade de muito do que presentemente é chamado de propriedade “privada”. Vastas áreas de terra reclamadas pelos barões de hoje em dia são ilegítimas por qualquer padrão libertário plausível, inclusive de acordo com a regra lockeana de apropriação. No começo da era moderna na Europa, a classe dos senhores agiu através do estado para transformar sua “propriedade” de mera teoria legal feudal em direito moderno de absoluta propriedade, e no processo roubaram os camponeses, que haviam ocupado e cultivado as terras desde muito tempo, conscientes de seus direitos tradicionais à terra. Esse processo foi seguido por aluguéis extorsivos ou pela remoção em massa e cercamentos. No Novo Mundo, o estado agiu para impedir o acesso às terras vazias ou quase vazias, dizendo que elas eram de domínio “público”. Isso foi seguido por restrições ao acesso de apropriadores individuais juntamente com concessões de vastas terras a especuladores, a ferrovias, a companhias mineiras e serralheiras e a outras classes favorecidas. O resultado foi a limitação do acesso médio independente dos produtores à terra como meio de sobrevivência, para assim restringir sua gama de alternativas independentes na busca de um sustento, assim forçando-o a vender seu trabalho no mercado.

Em virtualmente toda sociedade no mundo onde poucos proprietários gigantes coexistem com um campesinato que paga aluguel pela terra em que trabalha, a situação tem suas raízes em algum ato de roubo passado pelo estado. O fenômeno teve origens na República Romana, como recontado tanto por Lívio quanto por Henry George, no qual os patrícios usavam o acesso que tinham ao estado para se apropriar das terras comuns e reduzir os plebeus ao inquilinato e à escravidão por dívidas. Como escreveu Albert Jay Nock, “a exploração econômica é impraticável até que a exploração pela terra ocorra”.15

Conclusão

Não é preciso que a direita libertária seja se apegue tanto à corporação como forma de organização ideal. Uma economia corporativista como a do padrão atual de forma alguma se segue dos princípios da não-coerção e das trocas de livre mercado. Uma sociedade de livre-mercado que admita a visão de, digamos, Colin Ward e Ivan Illich, em vez de apenas a de Tio Milton e a de John Galt, seria muito mais humanamente tolerável.

Entre não-libertários, o libertarismo é freqüentemente visto somente como uma forma de republicanismo leve em relação às leis de drogas. Em muitos casos, isso é injusto. O movimento libertário possui uma grande facção pequeno burguesa, populista, que tem suas origens em Warren e Tucker e outros individualistas que foi passada adiante pelas mãos de Nock e Mencken. E a maioria dos rothbardianos adere a princípios que significariam a destruição da maioria dos grandes negócios que existem hoje em dia.

Mas em muitos casos, a percepção é infelizmente bastante justa. Um grande segmento do movimento libertário é uma apologia glorificada daqueles presentemente no topo: dos grandes negócios contra os pequenos negócios, consumidores e trabalhadores; do agronegócio corporativista contra os fazendeiros orgânicos; das companhias petroleiras, madeireiras e mineradoras que querem acesso à terra do governo através de concessões politicamente determinadas; e dos colonos nos estados-párias do Terceiro Mundo, ou de estados anteriormente párias como Israel e Zimbábue, às expensas dos nativos miseráveis. Ou, nas palavras de Cool Hand Luke, “É, os pobrezinhos dos chefes precisam de toda ajuda que conseguirem”.

Se o libertarismo continuar a ser percebido dessa forma, como uma elaborada justificação da simpatia pelos ricos contra os pobres, nós não temos chance alguma de vitória. Mas se nós agirmos sobre os princípios da não-agressão e da não-coerção, mesmo quando esses princípios são danosos aos grandes negócios, nós teremos a base de uma coalizão genuinamente libertária de esquerda e direita que seja capaz de destruir a cidadela do estado. Eu espero ter fornecido alguns exemplos concretos de como esses princípios podem ser aplicados em resposta às questões atuais.

Notas

1 ”Common Property in Free Market Anarchism: A Missing Link”http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362

2 ”Letter From Washington: Where Are The Specifics?”, The Libertarian Forum, 15 de junho de 1969, p. 2.

3 In: Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition(Lexington Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co. 1970), p. 268.

4 ”The Student Revolution”, The Libertarian (logo renomeado para The Libertarian Forum), 1 de maio de 1969, p. 2.

5 ”Confiscation and the Homestead Principle”, The Libertarian Forum, 15 de junho de 1969, p. 3.

6 http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/mutualize

7 ”Confiscation”, p. 3.

8 ”How and How Not to Desocialize”, The Review of Austrian Economics 6:1 (1992) 65-77.

9 ”De-Socialization in a United Germany”, The Review of Austrian Economics 5:2 (1991) 77-104.

10 Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002), pp. 124-31.

11 ”You Can’t Say That!”, 6 de agosto de 2002.http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html

12 ”Confiscation”, p. 3.

13 ”Bits and Pieces”, The Libertarian Forum, 1 de novembro de 1970, p. 3.

14 Tibor R. Machan, “What’s Wrong With Taxation?”,http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1103

15 Capítulo 2, Our Enemy, The State.

Tradução de Erick Vasconcelos.

Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, in calling for the abolition of state property and services, typically call for a process of “privatization” that relies heavily on the corporate capitalist model of ownership. The property of the State should be auctioned off and its services performed by, say, GiantGlobalCorp LLC. And the picture of the future market economy, so far as business enterprise is concerned, is simply the present corporate economy minus the regulatory and welfare state–an idealized version of Nineteenth Century “robber baron capitalism.” The former tendency ignores other alternatives, equally valid from a free market anarchist perspective, such as placing government services like schools and police under the cooperative control of their former clientele at the town or neighborhood level. And the latter tendency ignores the issue of state capitalism, of the extent to which the giant corporations that have received the lion’s share of their profits from the State can be regarded either as legitimate private property or the result of theft.

In challenging this aesthetic affinity for the corporation as the dominant form of economic organization, Karl Hess denounced those who simply identified libertarianism “with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings…” Writing in The Libertarian Forum in 1969, Hess argued instead that

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncracies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status. [2]

Hess decried the cultural tendency of too many libertarians to defend existing rights of private property, regardless of how it was acquired, and to assume that those presently on top in the state capitalist economy were simply collecting the rewards of “past virtue.”

Because so many of its [the libertarian movement’s] people… have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

Given this situation, Hess called for creative libertarian analysis, confronting issues of “the revolutionary treatment of stolen “private” and “public” property in libertarian, radical, and revolutionary terms” (including, for example): “Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power”; “Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities…. What, for example, should happen to General Motors in a liberated society?“; and the injustice of freeing slaves and serf without addressing their property rights in the land of their former owners (i.e. “forty acres and a mule”).

In the spirit of Hess’s comments, I will examine alternative libertarian models for “privatizing” government property and services, and attempt to apply the same principles by analogy to the issue of how to deal with current “private” beneficiaries of state capitalism in a future free market society. In so doing, I should first make clear that I am not an anarcho-capitalist, as are most of the regular visitors to ASC, but an individualist anarchist influenced mainly by Tucker.

Alternative Means of “Privatizing” State Property

The anarchist caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom, in their 1969 manifesto The “Tranquil” Statement (its authors included Karl Hess), expressed sympathy with radical students who had occupied their college campuses. In response to right-wing denunciations of such crimes against “private property,” the Statement remarked that

the issue of private property does not belong in a discussion of American universities. Even those universities that pass as private institutions are, in fact, either heavily subsidized by federal grants, or, as in many cases, supported by federal research funds. Columbia University is an excellent example. Nearly two thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How, then, can anyone reasonably or morally consider Columbia University to be private [?]…. And in so far as it is public (government owned) property (that is, stolen property), the radical libertarian is justifiedin seizing that property and returning it to private or communal control. This, of course, applies to every institution of learning that is either subsidized by the government or in any way aiding the government in its usurpation of man’s basic rights.  [3]

Private corporations “in any way” receiving government subsidies, of course, might be excused for seeing ominous potential in this principle.
Murray Rothbard, taking the same position in an editorial in The Libertarian, ridiculed the “grotesque” Randian argument that Columbia was “private property,” and that the students therefore were in violation of these “sacred rights”:

Apart from the various specific tie-ins with the State which the Columbia rebels were pinpointing…, nearly two-thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How in the world can we continue to call it a private institution?…

To defend the “private-property” rights of “frankly state-owned” universities was, self evidently, absurd. In such cases,

government property is always and everywhere fair game for the libertarian; for the libertarian must rejoice every time any piece of governmental, and therefore stolen, property is returned by any means necessary to the private sector…. Therefore, the libertarian must cheer any attempt to return stolen, governmental property to the private sector: whether it be in the cry, “The streets belong to the people”, or “the parks belong to the people”, or the schools belong to those who use them, i.e. the students and faculty. The libertarian believes that things not properly owned revert to the first person who uses and possesses them, e.g. the homesteader who first clears and uses virgin land; similarly, the libertarian must support any attempt by campus “homesteaders” the students and faculty, to seize power in the universities from the governmental or quasi-governmental bureaucracy. [4]

Rothbard argued that “the most practical method de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State.” This would entail, in most cases, treating the State’s property as vacant or unowned, and recognizing the homestead rights of those actually using it. In the case of “public” universities,

the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities…. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities. [5]

This principle of homesteading State property by workers or clients is amenable to wide application. Larry Gambone has proposed “mutualizing” public services as an alternative to corporate privatization. This means decentralizing control of, say, schools, police, hospitals, etc., to the smallest feasible local unit (the neighborhood or community) and then placing them under the democratic control of their clientele. For example, the people of a town might abolish the city-wide school board, and place each school under a board of selectmen responsible to the pupils’ parents. Ultimately, compulsory taxation would be ended and the schools run on user fees. In practical terms, mutualizing is more or less equivalent to reorganizing all the State’s activities as consumer cooperatives. [6]

Privatization in Post-Communist Societies

Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman Hoppe have attempted to apply the same homestead principle to state property in post-communist societies.

Although Rothbard’s assessment of the libertarian potential of Yugoslavia’s combination of worker self-management and market socialism was over-optimistic and naive, his statement of principle for post-Communist societies was quite sound: “land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, thereby getting the property out of the hands of the State and into private, homesteading hands.” [7]

The fall of the Soviet empire and its satrapies in 1989-91 transformed this from a theoretical to a very practical issue. The course generally followed in the ensuing period involved issuing equal, marketable shares in State enterprises to all citizens, and then allowing subsequent ownership to develop through the buying and selling of such shares. Rothbard proposed, instead, a “syndicalist” solution:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the old Marxist slogan: “all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers!” This would establish the basic Lockean principle that ownership of owned property is to be acquired by “mixing one’s labor with the soil” or with other unowned resources. Desocialization is a process of depriving the government of its existing “ownership” or control, and devolving it upon private individuals. In a sense, abolishing government ownership of assets puts them immediately and implicitly into an unowned status, out of which previous homesteading can quickly convert them into private ownership. [8]

Hoppe made a similar proposal specifically regarding East Germany, albeit more hesitantly and with more qualifications. [9]

Of course, the term “syndicalist” was used mainly for color, since Rothbard and Hoppe were both adamant that such “syndicalist” property be devolved to individual workers and peasants as marketable shares, and not to the members of production units collectively. The ideal, as Hoppe expressed it, would be for share-ownership and labor to become separated as quickly as possible. But there is no reason in principle, as Carlton Hobbs showed in regard to the commons, that such production units should not remain the joint and indivisible property of their labor force, with a usufructory right in the wages and pensions derived from it. Such a system would by no means necessarily prevent a market in factors of production. Workers’ collectives would buy new capital equipment on the market; but their property claims to any industrial production unit would be collective so long as the enterprise maintained organizational and spatial continuity.

Although Rothbard made no such qualification in his 1969 statement (written, after all, at the height of his attempt at a coalition with the New Left), he and Hoppe agreed two decades later that an attempt should be made to restore state property to its original legitimate owner before confiscation, if records of ownership still existed. Hoppe attached similar caveats to “syndicalist” privatization of post-communist state industry inDemocracy: The God that Failed. (10) Rothbard and Hoppe agreed that such restoration would be easier in the case of land, and would be easier in the case of Eastern Europe (where the expropriation had taken place only forty years earlier) than in the Soviet Union. Rothbard stressed, however, that such a restoration would be virtually impossible in the case of manufacturing and capital goods, since most of the industrial economy had been developed under state ownership. So industry was best placed under the control of workers.

Practical Difficulties of Corporate Capitalist Privatization of State Property

Privatization of state property, as it is actually carried out is just another form of state capitalist subsidy. In the first state, transnational capital promotes infrastructure projects in Third World countries that are essential to returns on Western capital in those countries, as a way of subsidizing foreign investment there at the expense of native taxpayers. Next, the resulting debt load is used to discipline the country’s government into carrying out policies favorable to Western capital. And finally, under the “structural adjustment” regime imposed by the IMF and World Bank, the country is forced to sell assets (previously paid for in the sweat of the native producing classes) to Western capital at pennies on the dollar. Sean Corrigan ably described the phenomenon in an article for LewRockwell.com:

Does he not know that the whole IMF-US Treasury carpet-bagging strategy of full-spectrum dominance is based on promoting unproductive government-led indebtedness abroad, at increasingly usurious rates of interest, and then – either before or, more often these days, after, the point of default – bailing out the Western banks who have been the agents provocateurs of this financial Operation Overlord, with newly-minted dollars, to the detriment of the citizenry at home?

Is he not aware that, subsequent to the collapse, these latter-day Reconstructionists must be allowed to swoop and to buy controlling ownership stakes in resources and productive capital made ludicrously cheap by devaluation, or outright monetary collapse?

Does he not understand that he must simultaneously coerce the target nation into sweating its people to churn out export goods in order to service the newly refinanced debt, in addition to piling up excess dollar reserves as a supposed bulwark against future speculative attacks (usually financed by the same Western banks lending to their Special Forces colleagues at the macro hedge funds) – thus ensuring the reverse mercantilism of Rubinomics is maintained?  [11]

Privatization also commonly involves a phenomenon known as “tunnelling,” in which politically connected elites have an advantage in acquiring rights to the former state property. For example, besides Western capital, the other group that had funds available for buying up former Soviet enterprises was the Party nomenklatura, which had accumulated ill gotten gains from decades of graft and corruption. (Sort of like the good ol’ boy sheriff who uses labor from the county work farm to staff his plantation, but on a much larger scale.)

Expropriation of “Private” Property of Statist Ruling Class

But the line of argument so far applies not only to property currently under formal state ownership, but to nominally “private” property acquired through statist means, or to enterprises built with profits derived predominantly through state intervention. In the comments above by Rothbard and Hess on occupations by student demonstrators, the property claims of ostensibly “private” universities funded mainly by the state were treated as deserving of contempt. They were as liable as outright state property to being treated as “unowned” and opened to “homesteading” by the occupiers, the students and/or faculty.

Rothbard applied the same principle to private corporations that derived most of their revenues from the State. Nominally private universities like Columbia that got most of their funds from the taxpayer, private “only… in the most ironic sense,” were as deserving of confiscation and homesteading as those owned by the State.

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to private property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible.  [12]

To treat gross revenue as the main criterion, as Rothbard did, is probably too simple. The percentage of a firm’s profit margin that has come from the state in past years is a more relevant standard, since the present size and equity of a corporation is a result of its past accumulation. In the case of the United States, the highway-automobile complex and the civil aviation system were vitual creations of the State. Large civilian jet airliners were possible only because of federal spending on heavy bombers. C. Wright Mills pointed out inThe Power Elite that the value of plant and equipment expanded by roughly two-thirds during WWII, mostly at taxpayer expense. The electronics industry was built largely from Pentagon R&D money through the 1960s; and had not the first supercomputers been bought by the U.S. government, it is unlikely that the industry would have been able to reach the takeoff point for reducing costs to make mainframe computers economical for the private sector. And don’t forget the role of the Pentagon in creating the infrastructure of the worldwide web….

But what of non-monetary benefits from the state, like the ability to charge monopoly prices thanks to State-enforced patents? Much of the cartelization of industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was achieved by exchange of patent rights (e.g. between GE and Westinghouse). The U.S. chemical industry achieved world prominence only after the U.S. government seized German patents during WWI and gave them away to the leading chemical firms. And what of the total effects on the rate of accumulation owing to the State’s intervention in the labor market? (This latter would include restrictions on the right to organize like the Railroad Labor Relations Act or Taft-Hartley; restrictions on free banking that keep interest rates artificially high, limit working class access to credit, and maintain debt as an instrument of discipline.) And then there’s the collective benefit of primitive accumulation in the early modern period (by which peasants were robbed of their traditional property rights in the land and turned into tenants at will by the state), the role of mercantilist force in creating the “world market,” the near-totalitarian controls on the population during the British Industrial Revolution, the massive subsidies to internal improvements, etc.

Taking these things together, it requires no stretch of the imagination to treat virtually the entire large manufacturing sector as a creation of the corporate state.

Landlordism and the State

Jerome Tucille once contrasted legitimate libertarian principles of land ownership with “anarcho-land grabbism”:

Free market anarchists base their theories of private property rights on the homestead principle: a person has the right to a private piece of real estate provided he mixes his labor with it and alters it in some way. Anarcho-land grabbers recognize no such restrictions. Simply climb to the highest mountain peak and claim all you can see. It then becomes morally and sacredly your own and no one else can so much as step on it. [13]

Of course, this Lockean labor standard of appropriation raises all kinds of complicating issues. Just how much “labor” is necessary to appropriate a given piece of land? Does it require direct occupancy and cultivation, or is simply circumscribing it (on foot? in an SUV?) and marking it off sufficient admixture of labor? If the latter, is there a time limit? Where do we stop short of recognizing the right of a pope to draw a line across the map of South America and apportion it between Spain and Portugal? On the other hand, if some tangible act of working or altering the land is required, it would seem that the amount of land an individual could appropriate would bear some definite relation to the amount he could personally cultivate. In this latter case we are approaching something like the mutualist “occupancy and use” standard for appropriation, which is merely an alternative, non-Lockean system of private property rules (and one to which this author holds).

Tibor Machan inadvertently pointed to the close parallel between the State’s robbery by taxation, and the robbery involved in much of what is called “rent”:

In those days the upper classes, from the king to all his cronies, routinely engaged in extortion. They disguised this, however, with the phony claim that everything belongs to the king and his cronies. Yes, monarchs and those who rationalized monarchy spun this fantasy and managed to sell it to the people that they where the rightful owners “of the realm,” that they had a “divine right” to rule us. This way when the bulk of the country went to work on the farm or wherever, they had to pay “rent” to the monarch and his cronies.

Of course, if I live in your apartment, I pay you rent. It is your apartment, after all, so you have it coming to you. But what if you got your apartment by conquest, by robbing a bunch of people of what belongs to them? That is mostly how the monarchs got to rule the realm, by conquest. By all rights it is the folks who were working in the realm — on the land and elsewhere — who actually owned that realm, the monarchs being the phony, pretend owners, nothing better. But since they managed to bamboozle a great many powerless folks into believing that they did own the realm, the “rent” had to be paid.  [14]

Although there are significant and fundamental differences between mutualist and Lockean (and Geoist, for that matter) theories of land ownership, the issue is beyond our scope here. What is really important to note is the extent of agreement between these rival theories as to the illegitimacy of much of present nominally “private” landlord property. The vast tracts of land claimed by present-day land barons are illegitimate by any plausible libertarian standard, including the Lockean rule of appropriation. In early modern Europe, the landlord class acted through the State to turn its “ownership” in mere feudal legal theory into a modern right of absolute ownership, and in the process robbed the peasants who had occupied and tilled the land from time out of mind of their very real traditional rights in the land. This process was followed by rack-rents or by mass eviction and enclosure. In the New World, the state acted to preempt access to empty or nearly empty land, by claiming it for the “public” domain. This was followed by restrictions on access by individual homesteaders, coupled with massive land grants to land speculators, railroads, mining and logging companies, and other favored classes. The result was to limit the average producer’s independent access to the land as a means of livelihood, to thereby restrict his range of independent alternatives in seeking a livelihood, and thus force him to sell his labor in a buyer’s market.

In virtually every society in the world where a few giant landlords coexist with a peasantry that pay rent on the land they work, the situation has its roots in some act of past robbery by the State. The phenomenon goes all the way back to the Roman Republic, as recounted by both Livy and Henry George, in which the patricians used their access to the State to appropriate the common lands and reduce the plebians to tenancy and debt slavery. As Albert Nock wrote, “economic exploitation is impracticable until expropriation from the land has taken place.” (15)

Conclusion

There is no need for the libertarian right to be so closely wedded to the corporation as an ideal organizational form. A corporate economy on anything like the current pattern does not by any means logically follow from the principles of non-coercion and free market exchange. A free market society that makes room for the vision of, say, Colin Ward and Ivan Illich, instead of just Uncle Milty and John Galt, would be a lot more humanly tolerable.

Among non-libertarians, libertarianism is often perceived as just a form of Republicanism that’s soft on drug laws. In many cases, this is unjust. The libertarian movement includes a very large petty bourgeois, populist strand that goes back to Warren and Tucker and the other individualists, and has been passed down through the hands of Nock and Mencken. And most Rothbardians adhere to principles that would mean the destruction of most big business as it exists today.

But in too many cases, the perception is unfortunately quite just. A large segment of the libertarian movement is a glorified apology for those currently on top: for big business against small business, consumers and labor; corporate agribusiness against organic farmers; for oil, timber and mining companies who want access to government land with politically determined leases; and for the settlers in Third World pariah states or former pariah states like Israel and Zimbabwe at the expense of the native dispossessed. Or in the words of Cool Hand Luke, “Yeah, them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.”

If libertarianism continues to be perceived in this way, as an elaborate justification of sympathy for the haves against the have-nots, we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving victory. But if we act on the principles of non-aggression and non-coercion, even when those principles are harmful to big business, we will have the basis for a genuinely libertarian coalition of left and right that can storm the citadel of the State. I hope I have provided some concrete examples of how these principles can be applied in response to current issues.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Propriedade e privatização libertárias: um paradigma alternativo.

Notes:

1. “Common Property in Free Market Anarchism: A Missing Link” http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362

2. “Letter From Washington: Where Are The Specifics?” The Libertarian Forum June 15, 1969 p. 2

3. In Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1970), p. 268.

4. “The Student Revolution,” The Libertarian (soon renamed The Libertarian Forum) May 1, 1969, p. 2.

5. “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” The Libertarian Forum June 15, 1969 p. 3

6. http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/mutualize

7. “Confiscation” p. 3

8. “How and How Not to Desocialize,” The Review of Austrian Economics 6:1 (1992) 65-77

9. “De-Socialization in a United Germany” The Review of Austrian Economics 5:2 (1991) 77-104

10. Democracy, the God that Failed (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002) pp. 124-31

11. “You Can’t Say That!” August 6, 2002. http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html

12. “Confiscation” p.3

13. “Bits and Pieces,” The Libertarian Forum November 1, 1970, p. 3

14. Tibor R. Machan, “What’s Wrong with Taxation?” http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1103

15. Chapter 2, Our Enemy, the State http://www.barefootsworld.net/nockoets2.html

On this episode, The Annoying Peasants discuss mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

On this episode the Annoying Peasants will be discussing mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

$1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

“The Practicability of Mutualism,” a classic statement of Mutualist theory and practice by Clarence Lee Swartz, first appeared as a two-part serialized essay in one of Edward H. Fulton’s many anarchist newspapers, The Mutualist, published from Clinton, Iowa, in December 1926 and January 1927. This is, to our best knowledge, the first time that the entire essay has ever appeared in print since its original publication.

“MUTUALISM IS A SOCIAL SYSTEM BASED ON RECIPROCAL and non-invasive relations among free individuals. The Mutualist standards are:

• INDIVIDUAL: Equal freedom for each — without invasion of others.
• ECONOMIC: Untrammeled reciprocity, implying freedom of exchange and contract — without monopoly or privilege.
• SOCIAL: Complete freedom of voluntary association — without coercive organization. . . .

“THE LIBERTARIAN IDEAL IS THE ONLY CONCEPT THAT PAVES the way for the operation of Mutualism. Perfect Mutualism could not exist under any form of authority. It would be thwarted and emasculated at every turn. Just as today every social and economic evil that serves to enslave humanity is the result of some form of governmental interference with freedom and with natural processes, so would the same or similar forces tend to nullify and counteract, to all extent, the advantages to be derived from the application of the principles of Mutualism. It is a plant that requires the fertile soil of liberty in which to make its unimpeded growth. . . .”

Clarence L. Swartz (1868–1936) was a California mutualist activist, writer and publisher. He was a close friend of the individualist Benjamin Tucker, and contributed frequently Tucker’s paper Liberty, as well as publishing his own anarchist journal, I (1899–1900). After Tucker was forced to retire from publishing by a disastrous fire in his New York book shop, Swartz became a leading figure in preserving, reviving, and carrying forward the tradition of individualist Anarchism and mutualism in America. During the 1920s, he edited an anti-prohibition magazine, The Libertarian, contributed frequently to Edward H. Fulton’s The Mutualist, prepared and published a collection of Tucker’s short articles, entitled Individual Liberty, and published his best-known work, What Is Mutualism? (1927), a new synthesis of individualist and mutualist thought on anarchist economics and strategy.