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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Sinistra Punitiva e Criminalizzazione dell’Omofobia.

One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”:

It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and in North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied — usually through the state — in every field of human activity. If, as we have seen, the simplified, utilitarian descriptions of state officials had a tendency, through the exercise of state power, to bring the facts into line with their representations, then one might say that the high-modern state began with extensive prescriptions for a new society, and it intended to impose them.

Scott’s high-modernist Hall of Fame would include “Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.” It is inexplicable that he left out Abraham Lincoln.

As described by National Review editor Rich Lowry,

From his first stirrings as a politician, Lincoln committed himself to policies to enhance opportunity. He wanted to build canals and railroads to knit together the nation’s markets. He wanted to encourage industry. He wanted to modernize banking. He hated isolation, backwardness, and any obstacles to the development of a cash economy of maximal openness and change. He thrilled to steam power and iron, to invention and technology, to the beneficent upward spiral of a commercial economy. With Emerson, he celebrated “men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey.”

As with other authoritarian high modernizers, Lincoln’s vision of the society he wanted to build implied an aversion to the society it would replace. In many ways his father, Thomas Lincoln, symbolized everything he wanted to eradicate from American society. William Herndon’s bookHerndon’s Lincoln includes descriptions of Thomas such as the following:

[Thomas] was happy — lived Easy — & contented. Had but few wants and Supplied these.

He was a man who took the world Easy — did not possess much Envy. He never thought that gold was God.

Well, you see, he was like the other people in this country. None of them worked to get ahead…. The people raised just what they needed.

Bourgeois Virtues

Everything Lincoln hated about his family and those like them — their lack of ambition, working only when they felt like it and then stopping when they had just enough to get by, et cetera — echoes how the industrious gentleman farmers of 18th-century Britain felt about cottagers who lived off their common pasturage rights and access to the common fens and woods. And it foreshadowed Lenin’s contempt for the shiftlessness and backwardness of the Russian peasantry.

The “bourgeois virtues” Lowry finds so admirable in Lincoln’s agenda were also the heart of the rationalist westernizing ethos Len-in sought to inculcate in Russians:

From his youth, he exemplified a middle-class morality at the core of the Whig and the Republican ethic. Self-control and self-improvement, rationality and abstemiousness were the necessary personal ingredients to economic advancement. Lincoln hewed to these qualities and evangelized for them.

Lincoln was a direct descendant of the modernizing Puritans of the 17th century, who  banned the large number of saints’ days on which peasants previously rested and celebrated, and imposed the Calvinist Sabbath on what had been a day of games and enjoyment.

So naturally there is no small element of cognitive dissonance entailed in Lowry’s professed fondness for markets and his dislike of “dependence on government.” He sees the corporate economy of our day, at least in its broad outlines, as a logical outgrowth of Lincoln’s vision, and one Lincoln would very likely embrace if he saw it today.

It is the dense, creative commercial network that he imagined, but on steroids — a heavily urbanized population of more than 300 million, robustly democratic yet highly educated and technologically proficient, featuring some of the most innovative companies in the world.

Lowry, like Lincoln, may be fond of business — but he is no friend of the market as such. The market — like all of human society — is for him mere raw material, to be forced, by the transformative will of progressive-minded people like himself running the state, into the cash nexus to whatever extent he finds aesthetically pleasing. That means today, as it meant in Lincoln’s — as it meant in Britain during the Enclosures, and in Russia under Pyotr Stolypin and Lenin — the use of raw political power to override individual preferences.

The Sledgehammer

Whether he admits it or not, what Lowry favors is not freedom or markets as such, but the promotion of his vision of “progress”: the expansion of the cash nexus, firm size, market areas, and division of labor far beyond the natural levels that would be set by market forces alone. And with Lincoln, he detests — as such — the homemade, the nonmonetized, the informal, and all forms of production for direct consumption. (Lowry explicitly equates the ratio of subsistence production to production for the market and reliance on homemade goods with the level of backwardness.) Like Lincoln, Lowry celebrates the use of the modernizing state to force people out of such activity — much as the English capitalist farmers and mill owners of 200 years ago celebrated the use of state power to drive the rural population from independent subsistence into the wage market like wild beasts.

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider this quotation from Lowry himself: “The extension of modern transportation networks would take a sledgehammer to the subsistence economy of Lincoln’s youth. It would make it obsolete, impossible even.”

The American — like the global — corporate economy lives, moves, and has its being in dependence on government. It is a creature of the state and is sustained in its existence every instant by the ongoing support of the state. Lowry surely knows that.

It is Lincoln’s legacy economy itself which has rendered Americans “dependent” — dependent not just on government, but just plain dependent. Dependent on big government, big business, wage employment, and the cash nexus.

And despite what Lowry believes, none of that was ever necessary from a standpoint of objective, immaculate, ideologically neutral “efficiency.” Rather, the economy that Lincoln built compelled the average person to work harder than necessary to achieve a given level of consumption. The forms of centralized, capital- and management-intensive, high-overhead production he fostered suppressed or crowded out more-efficient forms of production that would have otherwise very likely evolved naturally — the integration of electrically powered machinery into decentralized, local craft production, in which workers would have far more control over the conditions under which they produced, and economic progress strengthened community rather than destroying it.

The Serpent

The economy that emerged from the railroad land grants and bond issues, high industrial tariffs and patents of the Gilded Age, far from being tantamount to “technological progress,” was not even the best way to integrate new technology such as electrical-power generation and electrically powered machinery into production. Writers such as Pyotr Kropotkin celebrated the possibilities of electrical power for destroying the primary ration-ale for the large factory: the need to economize on power from prime movers by running as many machines as possible off belts from the drive shaft on a single steam engine. The electric motor meant that a prime mover could be built into each machine; hence the machines could be sited as close as possible to the point of consumption, the machines scaled to the flow of production, and the flow of production itself scaled to demand on a lean, just-in-time basis. Lincoln’s “internal improvements” and other subsidies to centralization instead tipped the balance toward the kind of economy described by Alfred Chandler in The Visible Hand: an economy of extremely expensive, product-specific machinery that had to be run full-speed 24/7 to minimize unit costs from idle capacity. That in turn required a coercive social mechanism of high-pressure marketing, mass advertising, and planned obsolescence to guarantee the consumption of waste production.

And despite Lincoln’s quite genuine belief in the fundamental right to eat the bread one has produced by his own hand, the corporate economy his Whig agenda gave rise to is more a transgression than a fulfillment of the sentiments he expressed here:

[It] has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.

He denounced “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I shall enjoy the fruits of it.”

But that describes the corporate economy of our day to its very core: monopolies, entry barriers, regulatory cartels, artificial scarcities, artificial property rights — a thousand and one ways in which the landlord eats the fruit of the tenant’s toil, the employer that of the laborer, the usurer that of the borrower, the incumbent business owner that of the would-be competitor, and the bureaucrat that of the taxpayer.

Lowry rightly laments the restoration of segregation and debt-peonage in the South after the end of Reconstruction. He neglects to mention, however, that that retrogression and the Gilded Age model of corporate capitalism were both part of the same grand bargain in 1877. The corporate capitalists secured their uncontested control of the national polity in return for giving Southern Redeemers a free hand in setting up an apartheid system in the South. Having thus secured their southern flank, the northern corporatists directed their attention to a full-scale civil war against farmers and laborers: the post-Haymarket liquidation of the labor movement, the use of the railroads’ state-backed power to break cooperatives, the use of federal troops to break the Pullman Strike, and pitched battles against workers in the Copper and Coal Wars.

All of that had nothing at all to do with genuine free markets and everything to do with using the coercive state to impose a social engineering agenda from the top down.

Good neocon that he is, Lowry also celebrates the meritocratic vision of universalized higher education as the path to success, and decries the tendency of those without high-school degrees to work fewer hours and have more leisure (while the college-educated — the Gallants in this Goofus-Gallant scenario — work increasingly long hours). He ignores — of course! — the whole issue of who decides the relative balance of effort and leisure required for comfortable subsistence, and the level of education required to “get ahead.”

I suspect the idea of a decentralized economy of self-managed neighborhood workshops with people living comfortably on the output of a 20-hour work week, and of an educational system driven by the autonomous needs of self-employed artisans, open-source coders, and permaculturists, rather than by the imperative to process human raw material to the specifications of corporate HR departments, would be anathema to Lowry. So much the worse for him.

Lowry also sees America’s “more assertive” foreign policy from the turn of the 20th century on, and America’s subsequent “influence on the international order,” as a realization of Lincoln’s grandiose dreams of “the spread of liberty to all men.” Anyone familiar with the work of William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky, or William Blum will take a slightly different view of America’s role in the world in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In short, both Lowry and Lowry’s idealized Lincoln are entirely in favor of activist government, so long as it’s “pro-business.” Lowry’s rhetoric of “our free institutions and free economy” is pure buncombe.

This article was originally published in the March 2014 edition of Future of Freedom.

About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all the time.” He starts out with the best one of all:

“Unlike the many presidents who preceded him, he cares about what is best for the greater good. He truly does represent The People. His actions have always been motivated by a sincere desire to do what is best for the majority, even if it meant losing ground with the wealthy, influential or powerful minority.”

Um, yeah. That’s why he adopted a Republican “universal healthcare” proposal to require everybody to buy private health insurance — and give taxpayer money to the ones who can’t afford it. That should be popular with “The People,” all right — at least those who own stock in insurance companies. That’s why he quietly promised the drug companies he wouldn’t use Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s why Joe Biden conducts copyright enforcement policy out of Disney’s corporate headquarters and the administration backs draconian copyright legislation dictated in secret by proprietary content industries.

Among my favorite other howlers:

“2. He is for civil rights. He has consistently spoken on behalf of the disenfranchised, the underdog and the most controversial members of society …”

Yeah, I know he said a lot of stuff about gay marriage and ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. But he refused to actually stop prosecuting gays in the military before the law was repealed, or to put enforcement on the back burner, even when he was fully capable of using his executive authority to do so.

And notice Lynch doesn’t say “civil liberties.” Obama said a lot of stuff about them, too — back in 2008. Since then he’s expanded unconstitutional wiretapping, run interference for the telecoms that help out with it and given amnesty to people who systematically ordered and engaged in torture. Holding war criminals accountable would be “divisive,” you see. He owes the late Nuremberg defendants an apology — they were only following orders, too.

4. Healthcare. I think we already covered that.

“5. He is for the middle class. Here are just a few of the comments made by President Barack Obama in recent months …”

A lot of presidents were for a lot of stuff, if you stick to reading their collected speeches. In practice, Obama’s farm policies are written by ADM and Monsanto, and the office of Secretary of the Treasury is permanently reserved for Goldman-Sachs alumni, just as under his predecessors.

Obama’s actual economic policy is classic Hamiltonianism: Responding to technologies of abundance that reduce the need for capital and labor by using Rube Goldberg mechanisms to artificially prop up the demand for those inputs — even if it means giving people tax breaks for throwing stuff away and replacing it. The stomach-churning irony is that most of the same greenwashed Whole Foods liberals who applaud this also condemn planned obsolescence and the Military-Industrial Complex, which were designed to accomplish exactly the same result. The proper approach to technologies of abundance is to make sure their benefits are fully internalized by workers and consumers, by ceasing to enforce monopolies, artificial scarcities and rents of all kind. If it takes only fifteen hours of labor a week to produce our standard of living, it should only take fifteen hours of labor to enjoy that standard of living. But that would annoy Obama’s Big Business friends.

My favorite, though, is this:

“10. He is for peace. Let us never forget that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 …”

Yeah, he uses that Peace Prize as a paperweight to hold down his drone kill list. Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan — he  transformed it into a remote-control video game war in which wedding parties can be massacred at the push of a button. And of course, Lynch can’t resist throwing in a mention of the Zero Dark Thirty crap about killing Bin Laden.

I can’t help picturing someone fifty years ago breathlessly gushing “I love JFK because he’s the Peace President” — while ignoring the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination and Green Berets in Vietnam.

Lynch’s points, edited for substance, are basically on the same level as a guy in a bar decked out in Full Cleveland thirty years ago saying “I feel comfortable with Reagan.”  Obama’s the Reagan of moderate center-left NPR liberals who shop at Whole Foods. If you’re satisfied with the image of peace and social justice, while government in substance continues to serve the same powerful interests, keep right on voting — that’s what it’ll get you.

The state is that entity which claims a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence in a given territory, according to Max Weber. The Hobbesian, Rousseauvian, Lockean perspectives are that the state arose from a world of chaos via a social contract that happens to empower a ruling class (for the good of the people, of course).

The funny thing is, nobody can point to the precise moment when the state arose. Perhaps it was a place like Çatalhöyük (ca. 7500 BC) or Sumer (ca. 2900 BC)—where a stratified society was structured on the basis of might and religious doctrine. The earliest monarchies, empires, and republics—they derive power from violence and the legitimacy of the erroneous inevitable.  Inalienable rights were unheard of – if you blasphemed God (or one of his temporal bureaucrats in the Vatican) within the Holy Roman Empire, you could be excommunicated and any schmuck could kill you without reprisal. Government is rule by some men [sic] over others, nothing more. So is ours—which, let the record show, was built out of slave labor justified by a profound sense of faith in the arbiters of White moral supremacy. In some sense, it still is.

One feature unique to states is taxation, or the forcible extraction of property to be used in a way that the victim would not use themselves. When other groups take your property (or money, which equals time plus energy), it is called theft. Social goods like roads, schools and medical care can be and are best provided by the market. The state has little incentive to provide a quality product because it has no competitors. Capital intensive projects are not better handled by the state due to diffusion of responsibility and bureaucratic opacity. Taxation is extortion at gunpoint, a vestige of tribute paid by a subservient group to conquering armies, according to David Graeber, in his 2011 treatise Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

The only way we justify taxation is to claw back the monopoly profits “earned” (stolen) by the class that has taken control of the machinery of the state (capitalists). But redistribution does not address the root of the problem: state-secured privilege conferred to the politically connected capital class. Capitalism is not to be conflated with free markets, which have existed in various forms (including really free exhange, like Marcel Mauss’ gift economies) throughout human history.

Although controversial, the present scheme, state-capitalism, has only been around since the Early Modern Period. To paraphrase Gary Chartier in Markets Not Capitalism, this system is a symbiosis between big business and government, where the workplace is ruled by an individual called a boss. It is not inevitable that we should live in a system where there are more empty houses than homeless people, or that there can be such a thing as a permanently impoverished working class.

Voters place their hope in God-Kings called Presidents, expecting them to lift them out of servitude. The funny thing is, the rulers are drawn from the same elite class that holds essentially the same ideology as the prior masters. There are exceptions – Presidents who grew up poor, but they became wealthy prior to their inauguration and executed policies that favor the elite. One cannot become president without selling out to corporate interests because of campaign financing. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

What about the poor?

Saying nothing of colonialism and imperialism—strictly the purview of states, policies that originated much of the world’s destitution—capitalism requires poverty to function. Someone must do the dirty work, staff the military, and subjugate themselves to others in exchange for depressed wages.

The welfare / social safety net cash doled out to the poor covers only bare necessities; the Marxian opium das volkes, a mere placation of radical revolution that would threaten state-conferred capitalist privilege (Marx was an astute critic but a dreadful problem solver – state violence can’t be remedied by augmenting state power). Supporting the welfare state is rational on realpolitik grounds, but not as an endgame.  However, the deeper question is this: why are there so many working poor, when an entire class of people need not work at all yet find themselves stubbornly wealthy?

Jesus did not originate the welfare state in an act of benevolence. Rulers employed payouts to bribe the population under a structural-functionalist logic: to keep the system alive and buy their allegiance. In the 1870s, Otto von Bismarck crippled the German Socialist movement by offering a palliative concession, saying  ”my idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.” To this day, oppressed people believe the state is looking out for them. The reality is that the state breaks the legs of the poor and hands out taxpayer-funded crutches.

The state is that entity which claims a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence in a given territory. (Philippe Leroyer/Flickr)

State Violence

State violence is proffered as a solution to the consequences of past state intervention, like these:

1. Creation of a legal entity called the limited-liability corporation, which absolves capitalists of crimes and protects their personal wealth from judicial penalty. The state recently decided to give these legal “persons” speech rights. Corporations are immortal, and enjoy considerable tax advantages. The wealthy pay a pittance in capital gains tax, the commoners pay the heftier income tax. Corporations were originally chartered to build bridges and public works and then disband; modern corporations live on – insatiably seeking greater profits regardless of social consequence – the “fiduciary responsibility.” This un-empathetic behavior characterizes psychopathy.

2. States subsidize politically connected businesses like Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Goldman Sachs and Exxon. These companies externalize their diseconomies of scale onto the taxpayers, including disproportionate use of roadways, government research, and monopolistic patents (which deprive people of access to vital generic forms of drugs, for example).

3. Weakening and co-opting labor unions, actively suppressing worker-owned modes of production (workers’ cooperatives). In the previous elections both Romney and Obama favored corporate plunder despite extensive evidence that worker-owned enterprises are far more efficient (no policing costs and workers have an incentive to increase revenue when they share in the profits).

4. Fake regulatory agencies like the FDA, EPA, USDA and SEC which protect corruption under the guise of consumer / taxpayer protection. They are foxes guarding the henhouse, made up of the same individuals that worked in the supposedly regulated industry just prior.  Phenomena known as “regulatory capture” and the “revolving door.”

5. And lets not forget: imperialism, conscription and mass murder. The CIA, the military-industrial complex, the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, TSA, and the DEA. In sum, the modern welfare-warfare state that knows best for you.

6. Enforcing a monopoly on the issuance of a fiat currency, the value of which derives from government’s future ability to tax. This money is devalued by printing more, which transfers purchasing power from those who get the new money last to those that receive it before circulating (The Cantillon Effect). In this case, Federal Reserve member banks are the beneficiaries. This is an invisible tax.

Illusion of Choice and the Presidential Elections

The epic electoral battle staged every four years is meant to juxtapose two presidential candidates as polar opposites, like Zeus and Hades. But lest we forget, they were brothers. As rhetorical wars are fought and bought with corporate money, the truly substantive issues are never brought up because both teams have a vested interest in the statist quo.

Neither candidate exhibited reservations about a century of ongoing American imperialism, with 700 military bases spanning the globe, or that this country spends more than the next 19 largest spenders combined on the military-industrial-congressional complex. Instead, they bickered over social issues like an individual’s right to marry whomever they want. In an anarchist system, marriage exists outside of the state; couples don’t need state approval to declare their union legitimate.

The corporation-state is the dominant institution of modernity. The logic of state necessity and inevitability rests upon many uninvestigated premises. These assumptions must be interrogated; otherwise court-intellectuals and demagogue-pundits distract us by dramatically rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

The media always drum up the race as the most important election in history. Those that actually study the history of politics realize that platforms have been blending and triangulating—moving unceasingly in the direction of statism. Left and right may polarize, but they share essential authoritarian characteristics. For example, both candidates favored the National Defense Authorization Act – which strips Americans of their right to a trial before jury and allows for indefinite detainment. Furthermore, both parties are beholden to the dictates of the financial sector, empowered and cartelized by the Federal Reserve.

During the election, both Romney and Obama differed on a slim few substantive issues, and one candidate may be marginally better than the other. However, being forced to choose between these two candidates is like deciding to poison the well with either cyanide or arsenic; innocent people die either way.

Obama is a militaristic president. For example, Obama authorized the drone killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi (a United States citizen living in Yemen) in September 2011. The CIA killed his 16 year old son two weeks later. There was no due process – the President unilaterally assassinated a US citizen on foreign soil.

If any individual killed another person, it would be a heinous crime. When a state kills someone, it’s for the greater good and often remains secret for supposed “reasons of national security.”

Any military age male (18-35) is considered a militant by the U.S. army unless proven otherwise. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, from 2004 to 2012, between 2,562 and 3,325 people were killed in drone strikes in Pakistan alone. The U.S. also operates drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.  Some 474 to 881 of those killed in Pakistan were civilians, including 176 children. Another 1,300 were wounded. These numbers are likely to be low, because the U.S. and Pakistani governments seek to obfuscate the severity of the carnage.

Why should we give more power to the guys with the guns and expect that to solve our problems? We need human-scale solutions. We must dig to the root of the issue, which is state-capitalism itself; or the economic system where state power protects illegitimate ownership claims and creates artificial scarcity to protect profits. The state is what makes capitalism (but not markets) possible.

The state and the capitalist class are not antagonistic forces, and America is nowhere near a “free market.” Big business hates authentically free markets – capitalists prefer mercantilism. Unless you are member of the ruling class, you should do everything you can to bring about a less violent, non-statist paradigm—because states have a nasty tendency to start putting certain people in camps and you never know who will be next.

Manning is the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking (to Wikileaks) classified information: Evidence of corruption and underhanded tactics in promoting US global dominance, as well as video footage of a US helicopter crew murdering two Reuters journalists and shooting up a van with kids in it after its driver attempted to evacuate wounded victims of that attack.

Manning spent eleven months — before his trial even began — in punitive solitary confinement, typically confined to his cell for 23 hours a day and forced to strip naked at night. The Guardian reports that Mendez “could not reach a definitive conclusion on whether Manning had been tortured” because the US military has consistently denied him permission to meet with Manning privately.

US President Barack Obama, who campaigned on change and offered transparency, bears direct responsibility for the abuse, and possibly the torture, of Manning.

Not surprising: This is the same president who signed indefinite detention without trial officially into US law, and who claims the authority to order the murder of anyone anywhere on his personal assertion that they are “enemy combatants.”

This is the President Obama who, as commander in chief of the US military and chief executive of the US government bears direct responsibility for murderous drone attacks, in which powerful missiles mutilate bystanders, then return to rain death on people who come to the scene of previous attacks.

This is the same President Obama who has shown almost complete indifference to voices from the massive populist Occupy movement, or to the violence used against them.

Obama is doing his thing as top politician. In order to make the impact he wants to make he needs to be in power, bending toward whichever interests prop him up. That means picking up where George W. Bush left off, and making deals with other arms of power: The warlords of the American military-industrial complex, the financial executives, the bureaucracy, and so on.

The Republican Party is falling all over itself to show that it can find candidates who would be worse than Obama. They talk about “getting tough,” appealing to people who think doing bad things to people the government says to hate makes them tough.

Anyone else? Ron Paul might at least scale back some of the government’s worst excesses or encourage other politicians to become temporarily less evil to undercut his support. However, it’s doubtful he’ll win because the Republican establishment would rather lose the top post for four years than risk permanent reductions in their power and privilege. In the end Paul is a politician with a shady past; putting a lot of hope in him would be silly anyway. Third Parties have the deck stacked against them on everything from ballot access to exclusion from public debate.

The power structure tends to reward people who are best at climbing over others to reach its top. What they are willing to do for those already on top keeps them in good standing with the ruling club.

Sure, politicians can be more or less evil, but we don’t have to invest our political efforts in helping a lesser evil come to power. We can work independently of politicians, in the short term pressuring them from outside and in the long term dispensing with them altogether.

Abolishing power structures and dispersing power as widely as possible is the ultimate democratic project of bringing power to the people. It is a project of fostering community based in respect for individual liberty and autonomy.

If it sounds like anarchy, that means you are on the right track. Ask what makes the word anarchy scarier than politicians who claim the right to kill anyone anywhere, put those who challenge them in solitary confinement for months, and instruct police to attack people occupying public space instead of upsetting the bankers and bosses that are so important to keeping them in power.