A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of society for granted, never questioning its status as the only feasible way of doing things, given some unstated goals which are taken to be necessary – but seeks to make it operate more smoothly and fairly for everyone. It’s the kind of “reform” that can only be carried out within the existing institutional framework, by the kinds of people currently in power.

For example, in most Western countries the permissible range of “moderate” or “centrist” reforms consists entirely of measures that presuppose a society whose functions are organized around large corporations, government agencies, universities and charitable foundations, and administered from assorted central offices by a large managerial-professional class. Anything that operates outside this acceptable range is, by definition, “extremist” or “radical.”

So a moderate reform – the bad kind – is one that leaves the system intact in all its essentials, but helps it to function “better” in terms of its own starting assumptions.

But there are good reforms. The motive force behind a good reform does not come from people “working within the system,” or “stakeholders” with “seats at the table.” A good reform is one imposed from outside. It’s primary motivation is the fear the people in charge feel in the face of the sheer pressure of public demand.

You can tell a good reform by the fact that all the conventional “stakeholders,” with their “seats at the table,” consider it intolerable. When the managerial elites all howl, “But how could a modern society possibly perform functions x, y or z if we adopted this measure?” there’s a pretty good chance it’s the good kind of reform. A good reform is pronounced “impossible” by the ruling class and the elites serving its interests, because it actively undermines the functions they perform, and calls into question their naturalness and inevitability.

Sometimes good reforms are promoted by those who seem to genuinely view themselves as working within the structural presuppositions of the system, while those at the commanding heights of the system – quite rightly – see the reforms as a threat to the system itself. For example, people like Mike Masnick and Cory Doctorow claim – quite sincerely, I think – to believe in copyright on principle. They just want to reform digital copyright law to make it less onerous on the content consumer and bring it into line with the standards of print era copyright law (incorporating traditional standards like the first sale and fair use doctrines, for instance).

But the folks at the RIAA, MPAA and other representatives of the content industry are entirely correct: Such proposals won’t just “reform” the system – they’ll destroy it. The new digital copyright laws promoted by the content industry are far more draconian than traditional print copyright because they have to be, as a result of the very nature of digital content. Given the costs of setting up a competing print edition of a copyrighted work in the analog era — or owning a printing press at all — detecting violations was fairly easy. And the kinds of cheap reproduction that were within the technical means of an ordinary person — photocopies or bootleg cassettes  — had a pronounced dropoff in quality. That’s not true of digital technology. The average American owns a printing press — the desktop computer, laptop, or Internet-connected mobile devise — capable of making a 100% accurate duplicate of any digital content, instantly, and free of charge.

In the current stage of capitalism, the primary source of profit is enclosing information as a source of rents. And as Johann Soderberg pointed out, in the digital era the enclosure of information requires totalitarian controls on the free flow of information. The current model of corporate capitalism requires DRM, anti-circumvention laws and three-strikes for the same reason the old Soviet nomenklatura had to control access to photocopiers.

The desktop computer, as Cory Doctorow says, is a machine for effortlessly and cheaply reproducing bits. So – and this is me talking, not Doctorow – unless the content industry can impose some artificial obstacle to computers performing this function, like DRM and criminalization of circumvention, the profits of Big Content will simply evaporate. Eliminating DRM and allowing free copying of digital content by users will destroy the basic institutional presuppositions of the system, as surely as tearing down enclosures and abolishing rents would have destroyed those of an earlier system.

The content industries are bound to lose the war anyway – in fact, they’ve already lost it – because even draconian digital copyright laws simply won’t work. They’re unenforceable. Their defeat is inevitable, even if they get every jot and tittle of their desired legal agenda. But the reforms advocated by Doctorow and Masnick would amount to surrender. And that’s a good thing.

The fundamental difference between bad and good reforms is that the former restabilize the system and make it more effective in terms of its own logic, whereas the latter destabilize it and undermine its basic logic. A good reform will knock the system off balance and force it to restabilize at a permanently lower and weaker level of equilibrium.

And that’s what we’re shooting for, folks. The corporate state will not fall all at once, nor will the successor society – horizontal, self-organized, free – supplant it all at once. Our goal is to keep the old system continually on the retreat, continually falling back and regrouping, “rationalizing” its defensive lines further and further back from the old ones. So when the system’s defenders push for what they believe are structural reforms to renovate the master’s house, but they’re actually proposing to knock out a weight-bearing wall, we should grab a crowbar and jump in to help.

Para entender por que, precisamos ver o estado tal como realmente é. Aqueles de nós da Esquerda de livre mercado vemos o estado, em sua essência, como instrumento coercitivo do poder da classe dominante. Os meios econômicos conducentes à riqueza — produção, troca pacífica, cooperação voluntária, compartilhamento e doação — geram saldo positivo. O estado, por outro lado, é o meio político conducente à riqueza por intermédio do qual uma coalizão de classes dominantes usa a força para extrair renda de todo mundo mais.

Os primeiros estados eram instrumentos por meio dos quais reis, nobres e padres extraíam tributo do campesinato. Nos tempos medievais, o estado era uma ferramenta principalmente dos interesses dos latifundiários. Nos primeiros dias da era capitalista, ele serviu aos interesses de grandes proprietários de terras engajados em agricultura capitalista, interesses mercantis e aliança entre mineração, manufatura de armas e monarquia absoluta. À medida que a era capitalista se desenvolvia, os capitalistas industriais juntaram-se à aliança da classe controladora do estado, seguidos mais tarde pelos capitalistas da finança e dos donos de “propriedade intelectual.”

Independentemente dos trajes ideológicos que adotem, as principais beneficiárias das políticas do estado serão as classes econômicas que o controlam. Isso foi verdade na Era Progressista e no Novo Pacto: Embora as políticas daquelas eras fossem apresentadas como populistas e favoráveis ao trabalhador, as principais forças políticas por trás delas eram os grandes interesses corporativos. E é igualmente verdade hoje dos tipos de “reforma de livre mercado” que vemos promovidos pela Heritage Foundation, pelo American Enterprise Institute e pelo American Legislative Exchange Council.

Isso é especialmente verdade da assim chamada “privatização.” Eis aqui como normalmente ela funciona: Você começa com uma infraestrutura construída à custa do contribuinte. O estado a “privatiza” mediante vendê-la para corporação nominalmente privada, em termos basicamente estabelecidos pela corporação nos bastidores. Esses termos usualmente incluem gasto de dinheiro do contribuinte (amiúde acima do valor da venda) para aprimorar a infraestrutura e torná-la vendável; uma espécie de garantia de lucros para, ou restrição à competição contra, a entidade privatizada; e uma evisceração de ativos e esvaziamento em larga escala depois da venda ser concretizada.

Digo “assim chamada” privatização porque uma entidade “privada” que existe numa teia de proteções do estado e cujos lucros são garantidos pelo estado é em realidade uma filial do estado. A única diferença entre um “serviço público” prestado diretamente pelos próprios empregados do estado e um prestado por uma corporação “privada” paga com dinheiro do contribuinte é que o custo desta última inclui uma camada parasitária de acionistas e gerentes corporativos.

Por exemplo, a Corporação de Correções dos Estados Unidos compra prisões públicas — em troca do que apenas pede ao estado para garantir que elas terão índice de ocupação de 90 por cento durante vinte anos. “Privatizar” serviços públicos de água significa que o governo — quando levados em consideração todos os custos — praticamente paga uma corporação para tirar o sistema de água de suas mãos; o novo dono corporativo eviscera e vende tudo o que pode ser removido, e em seguida os consumidores são extorquidos.

Isso é o que os centros direitistas de “livre mercado” querem dizer com “reforma de mercado.” É porém ilusão esperar qualquer coisa diferente, por mais que eles recorram à expressão “livre mercado.” É tão insensato esperar geunína “reforma de livre mercado” de capitalistas da direita quanto esperar políticas genuínas favoráveis ao trabalhador de capitalistas de esquerda. Tentar promover livres mercados ou ajudar as classes exploradas por meio do estado é como fazer origami com martelo.

Na maioria dos casos o único modo legítimo de privatizar propriedade do governo é olhar por trás de toda a insensatez mística acerca do governo, e tratá-lo como propriedade daqueles que em realidade o usam para proporcionar serviços, ou daqueles que consomem esses serviços. Isso significa as fábricas e fazendas de propriedade do governo tornarem-se cooperativas de trabalhadores, e empresas de serviços públicos do governo tornarem-se cooperativas de consumidores de propriedade dos que pagam pelos respectivos serviços.

O último chefe de estado importante a propor privatização segundo esse modelo foi Mikhail Gorbachev, deposto por golpe convenientemente cronogramado que finalmente levou Boris Yeltsin ao poder — seguido pela venda da economia do estado, sob a supervisão de Jeffrey Sachs, à cleptocracia. Em outras palavras, não prenda a respiração à espera de reforma genuína de mercado oriunda do estado.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 5 de agosto de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

To understand why, we need to see the state for what it is. Those of us on the free market Left view the state, in its essence, as a coercive instrument of ruling class power. The economic means to wealth — production, peaceful exchange, voluntary cooperation, sharing and gifting — are positive-sum. Everyone benefits. The state, on the other hand, is the political means to wealth, by which a coalition of ruling classes uses force to extract rents from everyone else.

The earliest states were instruments by which kings, nobles and priests extracted tribute from the peasantry. In medieval times, the state was a tool mainly of the landed interests. In the early days of the capitalist era, it served the interests of  great landlords engaged in capitalist agriculture,  mercantile interests, and the alliance between mining, arms manufacture and the absolute monarchy. As the capitalist era developed, industrial capitalists joined the class alliance in control of the state, followed later by finance capitalists and the owners of “intellectual property.”

Regardless of the ideological trappings it adopts, the primary beneficiaries of the state’s policies will be the economic classes that control it. This was true in the Progressive Era and New Deal: Although the policies of those eras were packaged as populist or pro-worker, the main political forces behind them were large corporate interests. And it’s just as true today of the kinds of “free market reform” we see pushed by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

That’s especially true of so-called “privatization.” Here’s how that typically works: You start with an infrastructure built at taxpayer expense. The state “privatizes” it by selling it off to a nominally private corporation, on terms basically set by the corporation behind the scenes. Those terms usually include an expenditure of taxpayer money (often in excess of proceeds from the sale) to upgrade the infrastructure and make it saleable; some sort of guarantee of profits to, or restriction on competition against, the privatized entity; and a large-scale asset-stripping and hollowing out after the sale takes place.

I say “so-called” privatization because a “private” entity which exists in a web of state protections and whose profits are guaranteed by the state is really just a branch of the state. The only difference between a “public service” performed directly by the state’s own employees, and one performed by a “private” corporation paid with taxpayer money, is that the cost of the latter includes a parasitic layer of shareholders and corporate managers.

For example, the Corrections Corporation of America buys public prisons — in return for which they only ask the state to guarantee they will be kept 90 percent full for twenty years. “Privatizing” water utilities means the government — when all costs are accounted for — practically pays a corporation to take the water system off its hands, the new corporate owner strips and sells off everything that’s not nailed down, and then the customers get gouged.

This is what the right-wing “free market” think tanks mean by “market reform.” But it’s delusional to expect anything else, no matter how much they throw around the term “free market.” It’s just as foolish to expect genuine “free market reform” from right-wing capitalists as it is to expect genuine pro-worker policies from left-wing capitalists. Trying to promote free markets or help the exploited classes through the state is like doing origami with a hammer.

In most cases the only legitimate way to privatize government property is to look behind all the mystical nonsense about government, and treat it as the property of those who are actually using it to provide services or those who consume those services. That means government-owned factories and farms become worker cooperatives, and government-owned utilities become consumer co-ops owned by the rate-payers.

The last major head of state to propose privatization on that model was Mikhail Gorbachev, who was deposed by a conveniently timed coup that eventually brought Boris Yeltsin to power — followed by the selling-off of the state economy, under Jeffrey Sachs’ supervision, to the kleptocracy. In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for genuine market reform from the state.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A Futilidade da “Reforma de Mercado” Dirigida pelo Governo: Privatização.

For those unfamiliar with Xanadu, Wikipedia has a representative picture of its ugly gigantism. The complex rises from the horizon appearing to be the result of a giant child who threw something together using mismatched Lego blocks. The gigantism is reminiscent of Marxist regimes trying to show off their grandeur in ways they don’t realize are ironic. If the project is ever completed, it will be one of the largest malls in the world.

The announcement comes at a time when Christie’s administration is cutting funding for schools and public transit. In the typical manner of conservative reform, they will keep forcing people to pay for bureaucracy, boondoggles, and enforcers, but will give them less in return besides a politician’s promise to lower taxes. Keep the coercive monopoly in place but give the “customers” less.

But apparently the People’s Lego Mishap is too big to fail. The Associated Press reports (“Christie backs NJ oversight of AC casino district,” July 22) that Christie said the project has come too far to abandon. He called it “the ugliest building in New Jersey and perhaps the United States of America,” but said “It is still a $2 billion investment.”

Even a self-styled reformer rules by the logic of government: “We’re digging ourselves into a hole, so let’s get more shovels.” Climbing out of the hole would make you look like a quitter.

It’s easier to dig when you can use taxation to make others pay for the shovels. Government is not funded by individual choice. It is funded through coercion based on the choices of those making the rules.

Government is structured so those who are most able to access the top levels of policy-making wield political power. Because of this, government responds primarily to the most powerful groups in society, who create solutions that everyone will be forced to follow. Government answers to the political demand of power, not to the diverse demands of individual actors.

Starting small and building networks of exchange and consensual aid from the ground up are the immediate steps that should be taken to release the burden of power structures. The sooner people are able to meet their needs outside of government and corporate behemoths, the more smoothly the giants can be slid off the backs of society to fail on their own time.