Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

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The Left… is convinced of the fundamental equality of man, that all men are “created equal.” It does not deny the patently obvious, of course: that there are environmental and physiological differences, i.e., that some people live in the mountains and others on the seaside, or that some men are tall and others short, some white and others black, some male and others female, etc.. But the Left does deny the existence of mental differences or, insofar as these are too apparent to be entirely denied, it tries to explain them away as “accidental.”…

In fact the Left (or at least most members of it) does not deny that there are differences in individual ability and intellect. But never mind that. Hoppe isn’t satisfied to stop there:

…[The right libertarian] realistically notices that libertarianism, as an intellectual system, was first developed and furthest elaborated in the Western world, by white males, in white male dominated societies. That it is in white, heterosexual male dominated societies, where adherence to libertarian principles is the greatest and the deviations from them the least severe (as indicated by comparatively less evil and extortionist State policies). That it is white heterosexual men, who have demonstrated the greatest ingenuity, industry, and economic prowess. And that it is societies dominated by white heterosexual males, and in particular by the most successful among them, which have produced and accumulated the greatest amount of capital goods and achieved the highest average living standards.

Some people might see an internal contradiction between Hoppe’s repeated use of the term “dominated” to describe the role of certain privileged segments of society, and the idea that “libertarian” ideas were formulated by societies based on domination.

But obviously Hoppe does not, since he makes little effort to hide his salivation at the prospect that his avowedly principled belief in self-ownership, non-aggression and rules of initial acquisition will have the effect — just coincidentally, of course — of perpetuating the domination of these same white heterosexual males. So the primary beneficiaries of the ideas of liberty that straight white men invented will be those same straight white men.

Hoppe is fond of arguing that every single bit of naturally scarce property should be assigned to “some specified individual.” From there, in a typical restatement of his stock argument, he goes on to assume the universal appropriation of all land within a country. And with all land in the entire country, including roads, under individual ownership, it follows that nobody can enter the country or travel along any stretch of road without the permission of some private landowner or landowners. This, at one stroke, solves the “problem” of immigration, since — although national borders as such do not exist — no one but an invited employee or bracero can enter a universally appropriated America without trespassing on somebody’s land. It also solves the gay rights “problem” since, the country being composed overwhelmingly of God-fearing Christian folk like Hoppe himself, nobody will want “those people” on their property. If you find the libertarianism of Thomas Paine and William Godwin hard to stomach, through the miracle of universal appropriation you (assuming you’re a straight white propertied male) can make your own “free” neo-feudal society in the image of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Maybe everybody else who’s not straight, white or male will benefit from having those smart straight white men managing them for their own good.

Hoppe’s ideas of universal appropriation don’t seem to hold up so well, though, at least from the perspective of someone without Herr Doktor Professor Hoppe’s Mount Rushmore-sized brain. Even among right-libertarians, the usual standard of legitimacy in private appropriation of land is that of John Locke and Murray Rothbard: actual occupancy and use. A piece of land that is undeveloped and unaltered is, by definition, unowned. And the vast majority of land in the United States, as no less a libertarian than Albert Jay Nock noted, is vacant and unimproved. The only way — now and in the foreseeable future — that land could ever be universally appropriated is through what Franz Oppenheimer called “political appropriation” and Nock called “law-made property.” This is the same thing that Rothbard — a name you’d think would carry some weight with Hoppe — called engrossment: the enclosure of land not yet occupied or developed, in order to collect tribute from its rightful owners, the first people to occupy it and put it to use.

Leaving aside Hoppe’s views on the universal appropriation of land and exclusion therefrom of “undesirables,” he also neglects the fact that the benevolent, naturally libertarian white men in the “civilized” West spent a few centuries robbing, pillaging and enslaving the non-European parts of the world that it colonized, before they decided to share the blessings of liberty with them. In the process of doing so, they also destroyed an awful lot of preexisting civilization and gutted a lot of civil society — and wealth — there.

Jawaharlal Nehru argued with some plausibility that Bengal was the poorest part of India because that was its first site of infection by the disease of British colonialism, via Warren Hastings. The British systematically stamped out the Indian textile industry as a competitor with Manchester, and also (starting with Hastings’ Permanent Settlement) robbed most of the population of their property in land and turned local elites into wealth extraction conduits for Empire.

And when these good-hearted white Western males they finally did get around to sharing these nifty new ideas of liberty with the people of color they ruled, they kept all the stuff they’d looted in the meantime — as a reward, I suppose, for their selflessness in inventing liberty for the good of all those brown and black people who would otherwise never have heard of it.

It almost makes you wonder, though, if there wasn’t some other, less costly way those unfortunate people of color might have acquired ideas of liberty.

Speaking of which, I almost forgot David Graeber’s account of consensus-based decision-making as an almost universal phenomenon throughout history, as opposed to Hoppe’s idea of “human rights” and “democracy” being some unique creation of the White Male Canon that required a Manhattan Project-level of effort and genius to come up with. Western conservatives (of whom Hoppe is one) typically see human liberty and self-government as the kind of advance ideas that only white males in places like Periclean Athens or Philadelphia ca. 1787 could come up with. On this assumption, Graeber comments:

Of course it’s the peculiar bias of Western historiography that this is the only sort of democracy that is seen to count as “democracy” at all. We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens — like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history — many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE — and obviously, they must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.”

* * *

The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic” — well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles — is that they do not vote. Now, admittedly, this is an interesting fact. Why not? If we accept the idea that a show of hands, or having everyone who supports a proposition stand on one side of the plaza and everyone against stand on the other, are not really such incredibly sophisticated ideas that they never would have occurred to anyone until some ancient genius “invented” them, then why are they so rarely employed? Again, we seem to have an example of explicit rejection. Over and over, across the world, from Australia to Siberia, egalitarian communities have preferred some variation on consensus process. Why?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision—either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has nothing to do with local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.

* * *

“We” — whether as “the West” (whatever that means), as the “modern world,” or anything else — are not really as special as we like to think we are; …we’re not the only people ever to have practiced democracy; …in fact, rather than disseminating democracy around the world, “Western” governments have been spending at least as much time inserting themselves into the lives of people who have been practicing democracy for thousands of years, and in one way or another, telling them to cut it out.

Those poor brown folks also arguably had more respect for the idea of “property” than their white instructors, when you consider that the white men selflessly extending the benefits of Western civilization to the rest of the world had already robbed the great majority of their own domestic population of their property (e.g. the Enclosures in England) before they decided that property rights were sacred. And that they went on to loot most of the property of the people in the Third World before they finally adjudged the locals as capable of enjoying the blessings of liberty without white supervision. But by that point, again, the commandment “Thou shalt respect property rights — starting NOW!” wasn’t retroactive — it didn’t apply to the enormous mass of wealth those white men and their ancestors had already looted, and continued to sit on. So the primary effect of those Western ideas about “property rights” was to protect the property rights of landed elites and transnational corporations who retained possession of all the land and mineral resources that previous generations of libertarian Western white men had looted for them under colonialism.

So as it turns out, ordinary people throughout the world had already somehow managed to find ways of dealing with each other as equals and settling their differences peacefully without white Western males thinking up libertarianism for them, and when white Western males finally came around with their new and improved idea of Capital-L Liberty they killed, enslaved or robbed most of the human race as compensation for their benevolence.

There’s a great line in Cool Hand Luke that applies here. One of the guards at the prison farm tells Luke that the clanking of the irons he’s wearing will “remind you of what I’ve been telling you — for your own good.” And Luke responds: “Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, Cap’n.”

In polemics, framing is everything. If you’re engaged in apologetics for an existing system of power, the best thing you can do is portray it as normal, natural and inevitable, and imply that things are the way they are because that’s just pretty much how everybody likes it. It’s critics of the system who want to impose their will on everybody else and force radical changes on the regular, ordinary way everybody prefers to do things. The irony is, it’s usually those on the mainstream Center-Left and Center-Right who present themselves as the defenders of normality and consensus, and accuse radical critics of the system like libertarians or socialists as the authoritarian social engineers. But this time it’s Gillespie.

Specifically, he recommends Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance as a humorous indictment of anyone (like “progressives”) engaged in systematic critique of the form of actually existing capitalism we live under, comparing them to utopian communities like Brook Farm (which is satirized in Hawthorne’s novel).

And if you’re a progressive or neo-con reformer, put down down your slide rule or whatever instrument you’re using to create the parameters of your nouveau Great Society and pick this up immediately….

It reminds us that even the best intentions are rarely strong enough to overrule either the longings of the human heart or the basic laws of economics.

As the quote suggests, Gillespie tries to position himself in the “just right” happy medium between left-wing critics of corporate capitalism and “neo-con reformers,” but in fact the system we live under is completely a product of neoliberal intervention, just as much as the earlier New Deal model of Consensus Capitalism was a result of “progressive” intervention. The neocon “reform” of Iraq under Bremer and the CPA, far from an outlier or a dramatic departure from some preexisting model of “regular” capitalism, was a direct continuation of long-term neoliberal trends that are defended at Reason every single day. Going further back, the American model of corporate capitalism that has prevailed since the late 19th century required an even more massive state intervention to establish, and capitalism itself as it emerged from late medieval times more massive still.

In every case, the capitalist system as we know it was imposed on societies from the top down by some party in control of the state. In industrial Britain it was the outcome of late medieval enclosure of open fields and the nullification of peasants’ traditional rights in the land, social controls like the Poor Laws, the Parliamentary Enclosure of common pasture and waste in the 18th century, and police state controls in the early 18th century like the Combination Laws, laws against working class friendly societies and the internal passport system created by the Laws of Settlement.

In the United States it required two civil wars. Not only the first Civil War in which the industrialists and financiers of the north decisively defeated the slave-based agricultural capitalism of the south and secured a monopoly on the national polity, but a second civil war in which they defeated all challenges to their agenda from the Left. In his history of the American cooperative movement, For All the People, John Curl refers to the political triumph of industrial capital in the Gilded Age as the Great Betrayal. This seizure of power relied first on the use of military Reconstruction to politically neutralize the slave-power and its regional economic model as a rival to northern-style industrialism, and second on the electoral bargain of 1877 (for which the Betrayal was named) in which Hayes and the plutocratic interests he represented were given a deadlock on the national government despite having an electoral minority, in return for giving the Redeemer class a free hand in imposing regional Apartheid in the former slave states). The industrial capitalists took advantage of their uncontested political power to impose corporate capitalism by a revolution from above. The statist means they used included the railroad land grants,  a high industrial tariff, a national banking system and the pooling and exchange of patents.

This statist transformation provoked a response from the Left–what Curl calls the Great Uprising–by the labor, cooperative and farm populist movements. In the end, the leaders of the new nationwide monopoly corporations used state power to defeat the Great Uprising. Between the state-created railroads’ ability to impose rates at will, and the financial power of the state-enabled banking system, monopoly capital declared war on consumer cooperatives and drove millions of farmers into debt and bankruptcy. The labor movement was broken on the front lines by Cleveland’s use of federal troops in the Pullman Strike and by governors’ use of martial law and state militia in the copper and coal wars. In addition the labor and socialist movements were politically liquidated by the police state uprising after Haymarket, and by the ideological offensive of “loyalty” and “100% Americanism” culminating in the mass arrests and vigilante violence of Wilson’s War Hysteria and Red Scare.

The neoliberal revolutions around the world over the past three decades have all followed Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.” In every case–Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia, Iraq under Paul Bremer, the European periphery in today’s Euro crisis–either a coup, military invasion or large-scale financial crisis has been seized upon to “break” a system in order that transnational financial elites might reconstruct a country in their own image. In every case, this has resulted in the large-scale enclosure and looting–aka “privatization”–of taxpayer-funded services and assets, the diversion of state revenues to repaying odious debt at face value as the priority for spending, and rubber-stamping “free trade” accords whose main real function is to enforce the new, draconian levels of “intellectual property” protectionism that corporate control of outsourced production depends on.

The neoliberal transformation of the past three decades has been possible only through a series of interventions starting with Volcker’s use of the central banking system to destroy the bargaining power of labor through the biggest recession since WWII. Clinton set up a legal framework in the ’90s–the “intellectual property” components of the Uruguay Round of GATT, the WIPO copyright treaty and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–without which corporate globalization would have been impossible.

Taken all together, then, the system of power we live under is the result of a series of revolutions from above imposed by the state with a level of coercion comparable to Stalin’s first Five-Year Plans.

And far from being a movement to unilaterally impose ideologically-driven controls on a spontaneously-arising system that reflects ordinary people’s desires, the twenty-year cycle of uprisings that began with the EZLN insurrection in Chiapas has been (as Immanuel Wallerstein describes it) a long-overdue counter-offensive by the global Left against a previous twenty-year statist offensive by the forces of corporate neoliberalism.

Far from requiring the seizure of state power or authoritarian social engineering to stop it, the only thing required for global corporate power to go down in flames is for states to stop what they’re doing now. Stop enforcing patent and trademark protectionism that enables corporations to outsource actually making anything for someone else, yet still be able to charge a 10,000% markup from retaining a legal monopoly on disposal of the product. Stop the looting of taxpayer-funded public services by politically connected insiders. Stop enabling neo-feudal landlords to evict peasants from land that is rightfully theirs so it can be used for cash-crop export production in contract to global agribusiness companies. Stop enforcing the music and movie industries’ copyrights.

Everything that’s being done in the way of creating a genuine successor society to corporate capitalism is being done horizontally and cooperatively, in open-source software development groups, neighborhood gardens and Permaculture operations, hackerspaces and open-source hardware development groups, community currencies, open-source sharing software, vernacular self-built housing. The most promising models for a post-capitalist society are all based on autonomism, on self-organized peer production based on the commons, on exodus and secession by the producing classes, and on prefigurative politics and the creation of counter-institutions. Compared to the waves of corporate capitalist and neoliberal revolution from above, the waves of resistance starting with the Zapatistas and running through Seattle, the Arab Spring, M15 and Occupy are incomparably more spontaneous and libertarian than the system we’re fighting.

So to sum up, Mr. Gillespie. I know one thing about the “basic laws of economics” — the global corporate economy we live under now couldn’t survive for a day without massive and ongoing intervention by the state. The corporate capitalism you defend was put into place by an all-out war on the longings of the human heart every bit as much as the Iron Curtain, as evidenced by our slogans of “Ya Basta!” and “Another world is possible”–and every bit as doomed to fall. And we’ll put down the slide-rule just as soon as we take it from the cold, dead hands of the people who created the system you defend.

An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he?

Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York University in Toronto, where he remains Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus. In Wealth and Power in America (1962) he reflected on persistent poverty in the United States. Other works in American economic history followed. Thereafter, events moved Kolko increasingly into issues of war and peace. Gifted with a definite independence of thought, he was generally seen as part of the New Left.

Kolko’s vision of American economic history overlapped with, but differed from, that of other New Left historians. William Appleman Williams, for example, divided American history into three ages: Mercantilism (1740-1828), Laissez Nous Faire (1819-1896), and Corporation Capitalism (1882 to present). By the early 20th century a “class-conscious industrial gentry” sought to guarantee the dominance of large corporations by using government (1) to engross foreign markets for goods and capital; (2) to provide market stability and predictability, partly through formal or informal cartelization; and (3) to reduce discontent by recognizing union rights (within limits) and instituting a very minimal welfare state. The New Deal rounded out this system of “corporate syndicalism” (Williams’s term). Other New Left historians, including James Weinstein, David W. Eakins, Martin J. Sklar, and R. Jeffrey Lustig, tended to speak of “liberal corporatism” or “corporate liberalism.” Pursuing this system’s origins, historians ventured back into the 19th century, and Kolko’s early work reflected that journey, so let us begin with his second, more focused study, Railroads and Regulation (1965).

The locomotive of history

In Kolko’s view, all historically existing capitalist systems have relied on the state. Once state-promoted railroads had become the biggest 19th-century investment sector, their subsequent difficulties necessarily called forth further aid from a political system eager to help. Given their origins, American railroads essentially rested on gross over- or malinvestment, a situation made worse by the land speculation they encouraged, as well as watered stock and endless promotional scams. Alas, just enough sharp fellows had scrambled into railroading to create a degree of competition that might ruin or certainly inconvenience the owners once they actually had to transport something and make money on their massive fixed capital. Following regulatory proposals through Congress (and elsewhere) between 1877 and 1916, Kolko concluded that railroads dominated overall and got most of what they wanted. This was the birth of self-conscious political capitalism. (Meanwhile, one could add, the railroad industry had done much harm, economically and socially, by fostering “economies” on a new and artificial scale [“national markets”]; and, as economist Michael Perelman writes, the railroad industry’s seeming immunity to market forces confused economists, who developed new — and not necessarily better — economic theories.)

Political capitalism: Free market and strong state

Railroads had spurred the rise of corporations in other key industries, and the new political capitalism necessarily spread to other sectors. Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism (1963) takes a grand tour of the late-19th- and early-20th-century American economy, its general trends and exceptions to them, covering steel, oil, automobiles, agricultural machinery, telephone services, copper, insurance, meatpacking, and banking. Broadly speaking, America’s rapidly industrializing economy still displayed much decentralization and considerable (and unwelcome) competition. Now, key businessmen consciously sought political solutions to preserve or improve their positions. (This mattered far more than their subjective or theoretical views, including arbitrarily deployed free-market verbiage.) Above all, they wanted the stability and rationalization that only law and the state could give them.

For Kolko, a conservative consensus shaped the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Politicians generally put business first. Industry wanted (and got) a veto over regulatory agencies. The outcome, Kolko wrote, was political capitalism: “the functional unity of major political and business leaders,” doing business (as of 1963) as the Establishment, an “interlocking social, economic, and political elite.” This was not entirely new. American economic organization during World War I fulfilled the Progressive program of the eastern elites, and later Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt worked within the war model.

In Kolko’s view the best European social theorists shed little light on the specifically American experience. Marx’s “purely economic” categories proved unsuited for dealing with American developments. For Kolko, from 1887 on, new U.S. political bureaucracies aimed at shielding the profits of established businesses from both unwanted competition and unpredictable political developments.

Wealth and power further pursued

In his Main Currents in Modern American History (1976), Kolko presented an overall vision of American history and pursued political capitalism well into the 20th century. Here he stated his disagreements with Williams and the Wisconsin school on the relative importance of the Open Door for American exports. Kolko stressed instead American capital’s need (all through the 20th century) for imported raw materials for their industrial processes, a connection that sheds needed light on persistent American interest (and intervention) in rather secondary overseas markets such as Southeast Asia. (Oil of course speaks for itself.) Kolko thus brought subsidized exports together with American control of overseas resources (raw materials) in a more powerful notion of what the Open Door entailed for American planners from at least 1941 onward.

I would add that since 1789 American federal courts and bureaucracies have tended to see the promotion of private business and economic growth as their main job. (See the critiques of this policy that John Taylor of Caroline wrote between 1814 and 1822.) By the late 19th century, key economic and political actors began to see themselves as a central planning board for the American capitalist system as a whole, a project that the New Deal raised to a new level. Broadly speaking, business was happy enough with these new services, and most Americans complied with the ever-changing new order, perhaps because the federal apparatus had already shown its power to crush whole sections of the American people from 1861 forward — whether separatists, labor unions, or dissenters from World War I. (See below.)

Interestingly, Kolko laments the defeat of the southern and western populism of the 1880s and ’90s, which he calls “the most truly libertarian social force” of its time. The movement’s eclipse was assured when close to a million American populists departed for the farming provinces of Canada (an emigration that American historians mostly ignore). Where labor history is concerned, Kolko sketched the history of an ethnically divided working class, immigrant and native, sold out (as it were) by business-oriented union leaders. He comments,

Violence was used in America more than in any other country that bothered preserving the façade of democracy, but what was clear from this, apart from the fact that the threat to constituted order evoked a response all out of proportion to the real danger, was the readiness to employ yet far more if it were required.

Unlike populism, eastern progressivism was all about sustaining the going order through political capitalism. Referring to World War I, Kolko writes, “The national government had built a vast administrative structure which businesses had defined and guided from its inception, and they might yet do so once again.” Later, New Deal banking legislation reflected the same purpose: “Using political means, big banking could now impose its norms in a national banking structure….”

In chapters 7 (“The Accumulation of Power”) and 8 (“Politics and the Foundations of Power”) ofMain Currents, Kolko zeroes in on the workings of the American political and economic structure. Given the selection of key state officials (especially for foreign policy) from the ranks of big business, big banks, and top law firms, policy is inevitably subservient to the interests of commerce broadly conceived. Even those recruited from other strata receive training in this received outlook. The resulting leadership class exhibits a collective myopia, only made worse by the serial crises that this class manages to produce. Given the higher policymakers’ shared (and fixed) worldview and class ties, conformity, promotion, and fear of losing influence are all that counts. In recent times almost no one has resigned from office over a matter of principle.

The elite proceeds with complete contempt for the wishes of the governed: “‘Freedom’ thereby becomes a posture the powerful tolerate among the powerless, and those in power make certain they will remain ineffectual.” At the same time, consensus “becomes an ideological phrase which wholly obscures the real basis of authority in United States society since the Civil War — law and the threat of repression.”

Kolko paints a gloomy picture of a banal, empty culture with no real community at any level. The early, unconditional, and violent victory of the American elite, along with its inability ever to feel really secure, has led to unhappy results: “Having fulfilled their desire to break the possibility of opposition, they also destroyed, as well, social cohesion and community.” Further, in American political life, “charlatanism, infantilism, cynicism, apathy, and gangsterism have all merged in ever-changing ways with the regulatory functions of the political mechanism and its responsibility to perform essential and predictable tasks.” Deliberate exclusion of the people from any effective participation in political life — or even their own lives — caps the whole edifice.

Inside the American whale

Two recent critics, Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, fault Kolko for not approving of any phase of American capitalism, laissez-faire or corporatist. This is a fair point: He does not approve. But if Kolko stands convicted of not being a libertarian, it is not clear how this invalidates his historical work. History is not theory, and back-and-forth leaps between facts and theory (ideology) may not avail. And the little matter of “laissez-faire” needs another look: A fairly minimal state was quite strong enough in England to clear peasants off the land and (later) to remove sundry traditional rights that blocked rapid industrialization. In the United States, governments undertook similar projects of bourgeois social engineering chiefly in aid of already wealthy or (sometimes) rising interests.

As Kolko knows, big business is not ideologically naïve; its embrace of the state is rational and interest-driven. Like Hobbes and Locke, big business knows that the kind of market society it desires absolutely requires a strong state. The trick is to have such a state while publicly demanding the opposite. Accordingly, big business subsidizes free-market ideas (which retain some mass appeal) and enrolls petty-bourgeois (small-business) elements as defenders of the corporate sector. The authoritarian populist style of Thatcher and Reagan, combining a strengthened state with much free-market rhetoric, showed that this formula sometimes works. It is surely an exercise in futility for anti-imperialists, decentralist conservatives, agrarians, libertarians, etc., to serve such causes.

But to return directly to Kolko, it seems fair to say that his accounts of progressive reform down into the early Cold War have held up rather well. Perhaps Elizabeth Sanders is right to say that big business, while dominant, did not completely control the progressive reform process. Yet Nancy Cohen’s work on the remoter origins of the new federal bureaucratic state allied with corporations reinforces Kolko’s main conclusions.

Running all through Kolko’s important and informative historical work is a consistent critique of (and contempt for) the activities and claims of America’s ruling elite. (They have earned it.) His turn toward the history of wars, American or otherwise, led him to focus on the autonomous power of states, and therewith to an even higher level of criticism.

Part 2: Kolko Abroad

Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate as to be historically negligible. The result has been a more realistic, but no less radical, critique.

In The Roots of American Foreign Policy (1969, especially chapters 7 and 8), Kolko connected the domestic and foreign aspects of American political capitalism in terms of class, state and private institutions, economic goals, and supporting ideology. We find here very useful reflections on the forces and ideas underlying “vaunting and fear” and “perpetual war for perpetual peace” (timeworn Old Right phrases) as inevitable companions of American foreign activities. (We can only sample some key points here.)

Class. With similar class origins and the same education, the “very top foreign policy decision-makers were … intimately connected with dominant business circles in their law firms.” The result has been a “dual relationship — one which uses the political structure to advance the domestic and global economic interests of American [political] capitalists,” one that “has characterized Washington leaders for the better part of this century.”

Ends and means. U.S. policymakers use the dependence of raw-material-producing nations as leverage for gaining access to their markets and resources. Strangely enough, for all the American rhetoric about free enterprise, America “is the world’s leading state trader, even though it has consistently attacked this principle when other industrial nations used it to advance their own neocolonial export positions.”

Ideology. Having described the U.S. political economy elsewhere (see part 1 in last month’s issue), Kolko notes that “neo-Hamiltonian” ideas serve as “a justification for the political capitalism that was the most critical outcome of American liberal reform” in its domestic and overseas dimensions. Interestingly, the relatively nonideological American military had failed (as of 1969) to rally around this Hamiltonian ideology of “the positive and predatory state.” The career of Robert McNamara as a corporate-liberal, technocratic secretary of defense “showed how fully the Military Establishment was merely the instrument of warfare liberalism in the Fair Deal-Great Society period.”

World War II

American Non-Diplomacy, 1943– 1945. Kolko’s Politics of War (1968) set out many broad themes that would dominate his later work. U.S. policymakers in 1943–45 found themselves faced with three overriding issues: (1) the global, revolutionary Left; (2) the Soviet Union as a great power and suspected source of all revolutions; and (3) Britain as enemy and rival, mainly because of its sterling bloc and imperial trade preference.

In important respects the real drama began in Italy, where Anglo-American occupation policies set precedents for later occupations: precedents the Soviet Union might exploit as its headlong pursuit of retreating German armies left Soviet forces in possession of Eastern Europe. To keep Italy away from the sterling bloc, Americans elbowed Britain aside, but U.S. and British forces jointly suppressed Italian political activity, disarmed the Resistance, and kept fascist administrators in place, as needed. Britain was promoting France — soon to be liberated — as a phony Great Power subordinate to a projected, British-dominated Western European economic bloc.

Ironically, the French Communist Party, feared by all, had become a patriotic, nationalist bulwark of order. Kolko reasons that if the Soviets (as reputed) controlled the French CP, then Soviet intentions were quite moderate. In Belgium the British repressed the Left. Here was another precedent for the rule cujus regio, ejus economia — whose region, his economy (my phrase). Anglo-American rivalry and their shared suspicion of Soviet intentions affected policies toward every nation about to be occupied by any of the three powers.

Despite Western expectations, the Soviets followed a pragmatic, country-by-country strategy as their armies came westward. In contrast, Kolko writes, “By the end of 1944 both the United States and Great Britain had intervened in the internal affairs of every major Western European nation in order to contain the Left and proscribe each other’s influence, systematically restricting Soviet influence as much as possible while Russia fought the European land war in the theater of central importance.” Underneath mounds of verbiage, then, a de facto division of Europe was in the cards from mid-1943, well before anyone ever yelled “Cold War!” The Soviets, willing enough “to leave the Greeks and Yugoslavs to their own fate,” could not afford such luxuries in Poland or Romania.

As of 1944, American strategic planning was shifting from the German to the Soviet menace, but policymakers postponed almost all diplomatic issues, biding their time until U.S. predominance could settle them in America’s favor. American peace plans, from 1941 forward, consisted of: (1) economic goals “inherited almost completely from the world view of Woodrow Wilson”; and (2) improvisation to meet crises and enforce those goals. Goals were “highly explicit in the economic field,” and American reconstruction of the world economy was “by far the most extensively discussed peace aim.”

Open doors and raw materials. Throughout Politics of War Kolko stresses the centrality of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s conception of free trade as American officials’ chief war aim, aside from bare victory. This “free trade” was of course the famous Open Door policy, which was considered to be a global panacea, and which entailed a very large role for American state power as its motor of progress. As Kolko puts it,

For an international free trade doctrine, the Hullian program, which in principle received the approbation of most business organizations and firms interested in the subject, seemed to rely much more strongly on the Federal government’s active and continuous intervention than Adam Smith’s invisible hand, but nearly a century of pragmatic business-government relations had determined the precedent.

As I noted in part 1, Kolko adds American planners’ felt need for access to overseas resources and key raw materials to the William Appleman Williams school’s emphasis on the Open Door policy for American exports of goods and capital. This broadening of the applied Open Door reflected American policymakers’ own internal expansion of their operational ideology. A “right” to raw-materials access is a perfect counterpart to a “right” to overseas markets, and from at least May 1944, U.S. policymakers treated American access to raw materials as a self-evident implication “of the Open Door, which originally only meant equality with the most-favored foreign nation rather than [with a target country’s] domestic interests.”

The Open Door (or equal opportunity everywhere) for American corporate business was the key to U.S. world policy and something to which the United States would readily sacrifice its professed interest in overseas democracy. If American economic goals had been met, Kolko speculates, the United States could easily have tolerated total Soviet control of Eastern Europe, with that region back in its old, semicolonial economic role and the Russians as middlemen. “Rhetoric aside, expedient references to the Open Door … functionally meant American economic predominance, often monopoly control, over many of the critical raw materials on which modern industrial power is based.” There was little that was truly new in the full use of state power to shape this “free market.” With intermediaries like the Saudi oligarchs and the Iranian state on the payroll, America “saw underdeveloped areas primarily as a problem of raw-materials supplies, and that misery and stagnation would be the basis of such an American-led world was of no consequence in American planning for peace.”

Conduct of the war. Britain and the United States had long planned what became the terror bombing of World War II. In the Far East the Americans hoped to use both Russia and the atom bomb against Japan. In Kolko’s view (Politics of War), “The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945.” In the end, a “mechanistic attitude” prevailed. For U.S. leaders there was never any moral dilemma about using the new gadget. Elsewhere Kolko writes that, whatever the other side’s systematic inhumanity, “the Allies consistently transgressed traditional legal and ethical standards concerning civilians and war crimes,” and in Korea (1950–1952) the United States departed even farther from those rules.

Global planning and open doors. The United Nations grew up in the shadow of “the reality that America’s brand of internationalism was truly a plan for its own hegemony in the postwar world” (Main Currents of American History). U.S. plans for world monetary reform entailed accelerated trade and turnover, and massive overseas (private and state) lending as a floor under U.S. exports. American policymakers fielded their choicest “anticolonial” rhetoric as leverage in the quest for raw materials. Expected American control over the UN would make colonial economic resources available to all mankind, but mostly to American corporations. More practically, Washington used the leverage supplied by Lend-Lease and other means to open up the British trade bloc and to deprive Britain of its export markets in Latin America and, in time, its Middle Eastern and Iranian oil fields.

Anatomy of a War

The outcome of all this American effort was the classic Cold War system that “contained” defeated enemies (Germany and Japan) and certain victors (Russia and Britain) under the guise of containing communism. This broad story continues in Kolko’s Limits of Power, coauthored with his wife, Joyce Kolko (1972), but here we shall rush ahead into Vietnam, as treated in Kolko’s Anatomy of a War (1994 [1985]). In great detail Kolko sketches out the “vast orgy of violence [that] was the product … of the capital intensive premises of U.S. reliance on firepower. Officers fought the only war possible and the Vietnamese people paid a monumental price not because of individual caprices but because the United State’s entire military system performed exactly as it was intended to” (emphasis added).

Kolko thoroughly discusses the ideology and practice of “the Revolution” (the party in Hanoi and allied forces in South Vietnam) and tensions between them. In North and South alike, those resisting the Saigon government and American forces showed remarkable adaptability in military and economic affairs that belied the top-down Leninist party model.

War, economy, and state

Kolko’s Century of War (1994) is a broad study of the impact of modern wars on society and politics. One important conclusion Kolko draws is that “it was not the wisdom of Leninist revolutionaries, much less the glacially paced manifestation of Marxist axioms regarding the economy, but rather the folly of old orders that was the origin of the Left’s greatest political and ideological successes in the twentieth century.” Twentieth-century wars were the clearest expression of this universal ruling-class folly. (As for the war-bred Left, Soviet pragmatic conservatism and the power lust of left-wing leaders in various countries aborted its radical social and nationalist goals.)

World War I was a technology-driven train wreck that irreparably scarred European civilization and marginalized officer classes everywhere, sidelining their feudal-heroic values and replacing them with technocrats allied with heavy industry. If “stupidity in high places has been the bane of modern history,” Americans leaders — ever surprised, idiotically optimistic — earn special mention.

War, capital, and the state

Kolko’s tour of mankind’s bellicose folly leads him to conclude that conservative, Weberian, and Marxist theories of bureaucracy “gravely distort much of mankind’s past experiences” and leave researchers unable “to fathom the consummately self-destructive irresponsibility of leaders playing with the lives of their subjects and gambling on the very future of their social and political orders.” He sees some kind of radical, humanist exit as needed, but gives only hints in the works surveyed here. Kolko’s historical thought might seem to rest on methodological cynicism and justified anger. It is perhaps better to see it as the product of stark realism and considerable intellectual courage.

La Nottoway Plantation and Resort non descrive la storia della schiavitù: le dà una mano di tinta e la glorifica. Dice il suo sito che “Randolph [Nottoway] sapeva che per mantenere i lavoratori ben disposti era necessario provvedere non solo alle necessità di base dei suoi schiavi, come l’alloggio, il cibo e le medicine, ma occorreva anche dare loro una ricompensa e un premio per la produttività.” Invece di mettere in evidenza la violazione dei diritti insita nella schiavitù, il sito definisce gli schiavi “lavoratori ben disposti” e propaganda i presunti benefici ricevuti dagli schiavi.

Il sito vanta anche il fatto che “Una ristrutturazione profonda costata milioni di dollari ha riportato questa piantagione storica ai suoi giorni di gloria”. Io non definirei i giorni della schiavitù, dell’abuso, e dello sfruttamento, “giorni di gloria”.

Il problema qui va oltre una semplice ripulitura della storia della schiavitù. Dovremmo chiederci per quale ragione questa piantagione esiste ancora. Dovremmo chiederci perché è ancora proprietà di persone ricche. Gli schiavi mischiarono il loro lavoro con la terra, facendola fruttare. Furono loro, non gli schiavisti criminali che ritennero il titolo dopo la guerra civile, a lavorare e sudare su quella terra. Come scrive l’economista libertario Murray Rothbard,

“un elementare principio di giustizia libertaria avrebbe richiesto non solo la liberazione immediata degli schiavi, ma anche l’attribuzione a loro, senza compenso alcuno per i padroni, della proprietà della piantagione in cui avevano lavorato e sudato.”

Ma questa giustizia fu negata. I negri liberati non possedevano le loro terre. Al contrario, erano costretti a lavorare per quelli che avevano monopolizzato ingiustamente il territorio. Alla schiavitù seguì la mezzadria, il lavoro a stipendio da sfruttamento, la disoccupazione e altre forme di sfruttamento della povertà strutturale. Le origini dell’attuale povertà strutturale che piaga le comunità di colore possono farsi risalire in gran parte alla schiavitù e al relativo problema del monopolio delle risorse. Questo è un buon esempio di quello che Kevin Carson chiama “il sussidio della storia”, in cui una storia fatta di violenza e razzia gioca un ruolo critico nell’ordine economico moderno.

Le terre delle piantagioni restarono nelle mani dei proprietari di schiavi, per poi passare in quelle dei ricchi capitalisti. Oggi la Nottoway Plantation appartiene alla società di investimenti Paul Ramsay Group. Il suo proprietario, Paul Ramsay, è tra i maggiori contribuenti dei partiti politici australiani. Distribuisce grosse somme ai politici dell’Australia’s Liberal Party, un partito di destra, omofobico e misogino.

L’eredità della schiavitù è evidente non solo nel monopolio delle risorse e nei profitti che la classe dirigente trae dai “centri vacanze” ricavati da queste piantagioni. Il tredicesimo emendamento proibisce la schiavitù “eccetto come punizione conseguente ad un crimine”. Così dopo l’abolizione formale della schiavitù gli stati del sud approvarono una serie di Leggi sui Neri, che in sostanza li criminalizzavano. Questo permise alle popolazioni del sud di continuare a tenere i negri in schiavitù servendosi di un sistema che permetteva di affittare i detenuti. Alcune piantagioni furono convertite in prigioni. Il penitenziario di stato della Luisiana, conosciuto come Angola, è un’ex piantagione di schiavi modificata dove i negri vengono ancora oggi sfruttati come manovalanza agricola. Il razzismo della schiavitù esiste ancora: il 60% dei carcerati è di colore.

Dalla punizione del crimine all’ordine economico, la nostra società è profondamente influenzata dalla schiavitù. Questa è tenuta in piedi dall’ideologia e dalla struttura del razzismo. Kilie Brooks, un’attivista che ha protestato contro il ritrovo dei cantautori nella piantagione, ha espresso chiaramente il concetto:

La debacle di Ani DiFranco fa parte di una serie composta da molti, molti esempi quotidiani di odio per i neri, un fenomeno globale che questi ultimi devono combattere ogni giorno. L’odio per i neri è rappresentato sia dall’esperienza ancestrale della schiavitù che da quella attuale del sistema carcerario: entrambi sono esempi di genocidio.

Opporsi al razzismo contro i neri significa opporsi al monopolio delle risorse, il sistema carcerario e altri metodi di oppressione.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

The Industrial Revolution is typically regarded as a story of capitalism, free enterprise, and progress in technology and living standards. This paper attempts to disentangle the threads of capitalism, free enterprise, and progress, in the context of the Industrial Revolution, with a focus on Britain and the United States. It aims to bring some historical perspectives into the current discourse.

The paper will explore the nature of progress, the controversy of living standards, the coercion that existed at the birth of the industrial revolution, and potential alternative points of departure for historical progress. What is the relation between capitalism, free enterprise, and progress? Who benefited from them? Was the specific form that industrialism took the most beneficial of plausible alternatives?

Capitalism, free enterprise, and technological and social progress need to be unbundled from the package idea of the Industrial Revolution. A rough definition of capitalism for this purpose would be:

a social system typified by 1) the control of workplaces by owners who are not laborers in the firm, 2) the direction of work to profit these owners, and 3) social hierarchies produced by these economic relations. Free enterprise could be defined as: a state of affairs in which goods and services are produced and exchanged according to consensual agreements between producers and traders. Technological and social progress means: The improvement of general living conditions and the advance of technology.

Of course all of these definitions are themselves at least somewhat contentious. Capitalism has a number of definitions, and some would contend that the mere accumulation of capital implies or even necessitates a certain social relationship. Free enterprise is also problematic. It suggests either “relatively free enterprise,” some kind of gradation, or an abstraction that is useful as a model but not fully achievable. And determining whether specific examples of activity do or do not constitute free enterprise can also be tricky. The relationship between technological progress and social progress is not always so clear, as will be shown below. But the concepts are sufficiently clear for a useful study.

Progress

The Enlightenment was a historical movement well suited to foster a culture of innovation. Enlightenment principles can be characterized by a belief in reason, and an emphasis on human capability and earthly dignity. These principles combined with the printing press and the fracturing of religious and political authority accelerated the progress of science and ethics in Western Europe.

Coercion

It is of prime importance to examine the political context in which a socio-economic system operates. If the market functions on “higgling and bargaining” and coercion exerts significant pressure on the “higgiling and bargaining,” then is the term “free market” really appropriate? And how free is enterprise in such a market?

British industrialization took place at a time in which the rulers of Europe were terrified of the French Revolution, an event whose proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity resonated widely among individuals who labored under the old order. Because access to land and resources was distributed according to political privilege and not occupancy and use, the masters of the productive process were able to prevent industrial and agricultural labor from living autonomous and prosperous lives.

E.P. Thompson, in his classic text The Making of the English Working Class, characterizes the years 1760 to 1820 as “years of wholesale enclosure, in which, in village after village, common rights are lost, and the landless and – in the south – pauperized labourer is left to support the tenant-farmer, the landowner, and the tithes of the Church.” Enclosure of the commons severely restricted opportunities for personal autonomy, creating a more controllable workforce. This phenomenon was not unrecognized at the time. An article in Commercial and Agrictultural Magazine in the year 1800 cautioned against distributing too much land to the laborer because,

When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings… the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work…

Possessing the means of subsistence could “transform the labourer into a petty farmer; from the most beneficial to the most useless of all the applications of industry.” Though this primarily concerns agricultural, not industrial workers, the principle remains that potential employees who are well off will likely demand more compensation for their labor than those who have few other options.

The worker’s options were further restricted by legal inequities. At a time when combination acts targeted trade unions and reform organizations, large manufactures colluded with each other to cut off the power of exit from the workers‟ bargaining chips.

Such a state of affairs did not pass without resistance. Reform societies sprung up to agitate for more liberty for commoners. Jacobins and other radicals circulated subversive literature, including the works of Thomas Paine. An influential book was Volney’s Ruins of Empire, excerpts of which were circulated as a Jacobin tract during the 1790s. Ruins contains a segment dividing society among two classes of people. The majority of people “by useful labours contribute to the support and maintenance of society.”

They were “labourers, artisans, tradesmen, and every profession useful to society,” and they were exploited by “a petty group, a valueless fraction,” who were “none but priests, courtiers, public accountants, commanders of troops, in short, the civil, military, or religious agents of government.”

The state resorted to all sorts of measures to suppress radical threats to the established order. E.P. Thompson describes legal decrees breaking up reform societies, police spies, executions, and paying of mobs to terrorize reformers. Despite the repression, they continued to hold widespread public support and were admired at their trials.

Industrialization emerged from a context of coercion and social conflict.

The Standard of Living Controversy

Although industrialization resulted in a tremendous increase in aggregate wealth, the benefits did not immediately reach those on the bottom of the social hierarchy. Technological improvement should lead to widespread improvements in the quality of life. However, the social structure of capitalism impeded the general improvement in living conditions.

Evidence of unequal benefits is seen in Robert Fogel‟s study, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. In his examination of statistics of height, mortality, and nutrition, he concludes that the great advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “brought only modest and uneven improvements in the health, nutritional status, and longevity of the lower classes before 1890.” An example of his findings is that:

Data on life expectancy in Great Britain reveal that although the life expectancy of the lower classes remained constant or declined in some localities during much of the nineteenth century, the life expectancy of the upper classes rose quite sharply. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, the gap in life expectancy between the upper and lower classes increased by about 10 years.

Clearly the benefits of industrialization did not reach all the English people equally. As shown by examining the extensive political conflict and regime of coercion, such inequality was not a given, but a consequence of choice.

The influence of increased population density and migration on disease could be noted to explain the lack of longevity increase. But this is just another way of saying that the living conditions of the poor tended to be dangerous and unsanitary. The elimination of laboring in rural commons as a viable option meant that more people would be exposed to these conditions with less ability to improve them.

By the start of the twentieth century, longevity began to increase. By this time labor movements, increased social consciousness and valuation of production over command, a gradual accumulation of capital in lower classes, returns on previous investments in health and medicine, mutual aid organizations (including friendly societies), and accessible technological improvements allowed the benefits of industrialization to reach the lower classes to a greater extent.

It is also necessary to consider the subjective nature of living standards. Even if the factory worker could afford to consume more calories and work fewer hours than his ancestors who were agricultural workers, he might prefer working in the fresh air without foremen and stopwatches. However, the onslaught of the land monopoly and the brutal suppression of working class combination made this a less viable option.

While industrialization eventually raised living standards, it took many years for the benefits to reach those who were forced to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Capitalism Versus Free Exchange

Capitalism as a social relation can be characterized as a parasite on free exchange and scientific progress as they emerged from under the domination of state and church, a cause of distorting technological change to serve the ends of economic and political domination, and an obstacle that prevented the benefits of production from reaching everyone as evenly as they would in a comparatively undistorted free market.

John Thelwall, a prominent English Jacobin, denounced laws against the association of workers, as well as the “land monopoly,” enclosures, and “accumulation of capital,” declaring that “a small quantity of labour would be sufficient to supply necessaries and comforts, if property was well distributed.” He envisioned a society based on independent manufacturers, smallholders, and small traders, in which there existed protections for laborers.7 (It would be interesting to examine the extent to which combination acts prevented the rise of co-operative business organization as an egalitarian method of scaling up independent artisan enterprises to better compete with capitalist industry.)

Because coercion left workers with few means of subsistence besides hiring out their labor for long hours, they were unable to compete against the privileged. The closing of opportunities to labor worked to the advantage of the capitalist. In order to reclaim the ability to engage in some measure of free enterprise themselves, workers had to limit the control of capitalists; in other words they had to stifle the advance of capitalism. Because investments in new technology were made by the wealthy, research and implementation of new technology largely responded to the demands of the wealthy and prioritized profitability for owners over improved labor conditions.

Alternative Points of Departure for the Course of History

While it is difficult to make convincing counterfactual arguments, it is useful to discuss other possible courses of history in order to undermine arguments of historical necessity and demonstrate the relevance of the historical experience to current critiques of capitalist society.

The suppression of anti-scientific superstition and the enhancement of individual sovereignty could have provided incentives to labor freely for a better world. The technology and production methods produced by a free society would have been produced in a cultural atmosphere of comparative solidarity and an economic atmosphere of comparative egalitarianism. Instead of serfdom, starvation, and dark satanic mills, the worker could have produced in a freer workplace and lived in a freer society. A more equal rise in living standards combined with the more widespread investment in resources could have brought environmental concerns to prominence earlier.

Commercial customs involving pre-industrial craftsmen reveal a preference for fairness and quality. E.P. Thompson describes how wages were regulated by local custom. The social prestige of the worker or notions of fair prices, just wages, or standards of craftsmanship influenced prices. Profit and value was not measured only in monetary units. However, this state of affairs should not be idealized: Custom and guild associations created social hierarchies and cartelization by artisans, entrenching the privilege of some workers and limiting the mobility of others.

But customs in pre-industrial society are valuable as alternative points of departure, as the basis for a direction of improvement, instead of an inconvenience to be replaced with more brutal hierarchy. The rise of capitalism didn‟t destroy a free market, but it prevented one from emerging.

Political revolutions suppressed or recuperated by authoritarian elements in Europe and the United States during the period of industrialization failed to firmly establish the liberty that could have resulted in a more egalitarian technological flourishing. While libertarian and egalitarian ideas were developing during the period of industrialization, various elites managed to keep control of society and continue its operation along hierarchical and authoritarian lines.

An emphasis on liberty, equality, and fraternity, which was popular in radicalism of the period, would have been beneficial to the commons had they been allowed to take root. In her article “Reformulating the Commons,” Elinor Ostrom lists a series of factors that increase the likelihood of successful self-governing of commons by their users. Among these are trust and reciprocity among appropriators, and autonomy from external authorities. The prevalence of radical ideology could have increased trust and decreased enforcement costs, thus increasing the feasibility of self-governing commons with a minimal amount of hierarchy. Agriculture could then have been under stable control by laborers, benefitting food production, increasing the options for laborers, and enhancing the ability of workers to accumulate capital. But as it happened, the commons were stolen, laborers were left with little land, and the authoritarian political structure of the day would have regarded cooperative associations with suspicion at the very least.

Applicability to Modern Times

A disentangling of the threads of capitalism, free enterprise, and technological and social progress enables one to better separate good and ill in history. A lot of the evil that people endured for the goods delivered by technology was not necessary to suffer. This opens questions about industrialization in the abstract, as well as the direction of technology. Another area that could be examined is the improvement of agricultural techniques in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the extent to which monopoly prevented its gains from reaching most people.

Finding alternative points of departure in the voluntary associations and common customs of history can lead to an improved ability to find alternative points of departure in today’s associations and customs that can lead to a future of greater freedom.

Prosperity and progress did not require privilege. A sacrifice in living standards accompanied a sacrifice in freedom, and standards and freedom rose as the power of the master classes was upset and the benefits of technological progress were made more accessible.

Sources:

1. Carson, Kevin. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge Publishing, 2007)
2. Fogel, Robert. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
3. Long, Roderick. “Medical Insurance That Worked – Until Government ‘Fixed’ It.” Formulations, Winter 1993.
4. Ostrom, Elinor. “Reformulating the Commons.”
5. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

The Nottoway Plantation and Resort doesn’t illuminate the brutal history of slavery; it whitewashes and glorifies slavery. The resort’s website claims that “Randolph [Nottoway] knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce, it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive.”  Rather than highlighting the rights violations inherent in enslaving human beings, the resort euphemistically calls slaves a “willing workforce” and advertises the supposed benefits slaves received.

The site also brags that “A dramatic, multi-million-dollar renovation has restored this historic plantation to her days of glory.” I wouldn’t call days of slavery, abuse, and exploitation “days of glory.”

The problem here goes beyond sanitizing the history of slavery. We should ask ourselves why this plantation still exists at all. We should ask why wealthy white people still own it. The slaves mixed their labor with the soil, developing it. They, not the slave-owning criminals who retained title after the Civil War, worked and toiled on the land. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote,

“elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated.”

But this justice was denied. Black freedmen did not own their own land, and were instead forced to work for those who had unjustly monopolized the land. Slavery gave way to sharecropping, exploitative wage labor, unemployment, and other forms of exploitation of structural poverty. The ongoing structural poverty that plagues communities of color can largely be traced to slavery and the related land monopoly. This is a good example of what Kevin Carson calls “the subsidy of history,” in which historical violence and plunder plays a critical role in the modern economic order.

The plantation lands remained in the hands of slave owners, eventually passing into the hands of wealthy capitalists. Currently, the Nottoway Plantation is owned by the Paul Ramsay Group investment firm. The firm’s owner, Paul Ramsay, is one of the largest political donors in Australia, donating handsome sums to the right-wing, homophobic, misogynistic politicians of Australia’s Liberal Party.

This ongoing legacy of slavery isn’t just apparent in land monopolization and the ruling class’s profit from “plantation resorts.” The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” So after slavery’s formal abolition, Southern states passed Black Codes, effectively criminalizing black people. This enabled Southerners to continue enslaving blacks, using the so-called the “convict lease system.” Some plantations were converted to prisons. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is a converted slave plantation where blacks are still exploited for their agricultural labor. The racism of slavery persists; 60% of prisoners are people of color.

From criminal punishment to economic order, our society is pervasively shaped by slavery. This is upheld through an ideology and structure of racism. Kylie Brooks, an activist who organized against holding the retreat at the plantation, put it well:

The Ani DiFranco debacle is one in a pattern of many, many daily experiences of anti-blackness — a global phenomenon — that Black folks have to struggle through daily. Anti-blackness in particular refers back to the ancestral experiences of enslavement and ongoing current experiences of the prison system, both as genocidal phenomenons.

Resisting anti-black racism means standing against the land monopoly, the prison system and all other systems of oppression.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Ani DiFranco, la Schiavitù e il Sussidio della Storia.

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]”

“Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to expand and at other times destroys its mainspring. Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state.

In the first great phase, that of the Italian city-states of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, power lay in the hands of the moneyed elite. In seventeenth century Holland the aristocracy of the Regents governed for the benefit and even according to the directives of the businessmen, merchants, and moneylenders […].”

- Fernand Braudel, (1977) Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, (pp. 92-3).

The job of the capitalist is to allocate capital for the generation of profit. However, this motivation does not always result in an optimal outcome for the majority of people, and, for some, its consequences are so egregious that the utility of state-backed capitalist profit-seeking should be reconsidered and replaced with another, voluntary model.

One reason people are willing to accept opulence in the face of destitution, the destruction of the environment, a manufactured consumerist culture, and the existence of a permanently impoverished, hard-working class that labors for a permanently wealthy, capital monopolizing leisure and power-wielding class is this: They think these are the prices we must pay for market relations and the wonders of modernity and efficiency – that is, they conflate the market, or agora, with the system of corporation-state capitalism.

They believe that from markets and trade follows Exxon, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, McDonalds, Monsanto and Goldman Sachs. But, on the contrary, these multinational corporations would be unlikely to thrive without the protection and privileges granted by the monopoly on violence known as the state.

Before we can critique capitalism, we should solidify our definition of the functional unit of capitalism, the capitalist. The liberal economic theory of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Joseph Schumpeter holds that capitalists are entrepreneurs, who take the risk of starting a business and are appropriately compensated with profit (though certainly these thinkers were not as sanguine about capitalism as depicted by the Right of today, particularly regarding rents and monopoly). The risk-reward definition of the capitalist is specious, because capitalists are much more than mere entrepreneurs.

Capitalists, often using the state, mould the economy to their will. They, unlike our notion of the small-time or innovative entrepreneur, are not subject to the whims of shifting economic forces. Compare the large capitalist merchant or financier’s power over the market to the humble shopkeeper, craftsman or inventor. All participate in the market as risk-takers, but there is something unique about the capitalist. In order to interrogate the legitimacy of capitalism, we need a historically informed definition of the capitalist.

I will draw upon the work of the Annales School historian Fernand Braudel, considered by many to be the greatest historian of the twentieth century, founder of cliometrics, and author of the foundational three volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th-18^th Century. A student of Lucien Febvre, Braudel held no illusions about the inequality inherent in capitalism and the extra-entrepreneurial role of the capitalist in the early modern period.

Braudel distinguishes between capitalism and the market, and if anyone is qualified to do so, it is the historian who actually established the empirical study of the emergence of capitalism. Braudel asserted three defining features of the capitalist versus the entrepreneur:

1. The refusal to specialize
2. Avaricious speculation in financial markets, and
3. Monopoly control of the market rather than simply filling in a niche demanded by consumers.

Tripartite model

In Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800, Braudel defined three levels of oikonomia: material life, economic life, and capitalism.

Material life consists of “very old routines, inheritances and successes, and is there at the root of everything.” [1] Agriculture and tool use, animal domestication and basic cookery are all part of this basic material life. The term denotes “repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial, like money or the separation of town from country.” [2]

Economic life is,

“A higher and more privileged level of daily life, with a wider radius involving constant care and calculation. It is born of trade, transport, differentiated market structures, and of contract between already industrialized countries and those still primitive or underdeveloped, between rich and poor, creditors and borrowers, monetary and pre-monetary economies. It is, in fact, almost a system in itself.” [3]

Capitalism is a more “sophisticated” mechanism, “with its rules, attitudes, advantages and risks, [and] has betokened modernity, flexibility and rationality from its earliest beginnings.” Capitalism “encroaches on all forms of life whether economic or material, however little they lend themselves to its maneuvers,” [4] and, “once achieved, was only to the advantage of a privileged few.” [5] Using the modern, controversial term “capitalism,” a historian ventures dangerously close to anachronism, Braudel says, but,

“Certain mechanisms occurring between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries are crying out for a name of their own. When we look at them closely, we see that fitting them into a slot in the ordinary market economy would be almost absurd. One word does come spontaneously to mind: capitalism. Irritated, one shoos it out the door, and almost immediately it climbs in through the window.” [6]

Braudel provides two useful, early definitions of capital and capitalist. “Capital is a tangible realty, a congeries of easily identifiable financial resources, constantly at work; a capitalist is a man who presides or attempts to preside over the insertion of capital into the ceaseless process of production into which every society is destined.” Capitalism is a process carried on “generally for not very altruistic reasons.” [7]

“Capitalism is still based upon exploiting international resources and opportunities […] Capitalism still obstinately relies upon legal or de facto monopolies, despite the anathemas heaped upon it on this score. […] Capitalism is the perfect term for designating economic activities carried on at the summit, or that are striving for the summit.” [8]

Lenin wrote, “Old capitalism, where free competition reigned, was characterized by the exportation of merchandise. Present-day capitalism, in which monopolies reign supreme, is characterized by the exportation of capital.” [9] Braudel questions this assertion, stating that:

“Capitalism has always been monopolistic, and merchandise and capital have always circulated simultaneously, for capital and credit have always been the surest way of capturing and controlling a foreign market. Long before the twentieth century the exportation of capital was a fact of daily life, for Florence as early as the thirteenth century, and for Augsburg, Antwerp, and Genoa during the sixteenth century.” [10]

Modern fanfare conflates capitalism with innovation, which granted humanity its material comforts. It appears that capitalism was a mere tag-along, capitalizing on pre-existent hierarchy.

“Capitalism needs a hierarchy. […] Capitalism does not invent hierarchies, any more than it invented the market, or production, or consumption; it merely uses them. In the long procession of history, capitalism is the latecomer. It arrives when everything is ready. In other words, the specific problem of the hierarchy goes beyond capitalism, transcends it, controls it a priori. […] For this is indubitably the key problem, the problem of problems. Must the hierarchy, the dependence of one man upon another, be destroyed? ‘Yes,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre in 1968. But is such a thing really possible?” [11]

Short of ascending into sheer anarchy, perhaps not. Nonetheless, legislatures attempt to dull the blade of exploitation, whether they are sixteenth century German communes [12] or the modern political parties of the Left. The left-right, labor vs. capital battle is used to excuse failings of both perspectives. The underlying flaw in both systems is coercion—by state or capitalist alike.

Market Versus Capitalism 

“What I personally regret, not so much as a historian but as a man of my time, is the refusal in both the capitalist world and socialist world to draw a distinction between capitalism and the market economy. To those in the West who attack the misdeeds of capitalism, politicians and economists reply that these wrongdoings are a lesser evil, the indispensible reverse side of the free-enterprise-and-market economy coin. I do not believe that.

To those who, as part of a movement of ideas that is noticeable even in the U.S.S.R., worry about the ponderousness of the socialist economy and would like it to be more ‘spontaneous’ (I construe that word to mean ‘more free’), the reply is that this lack of spontaneity is a lesser evil, the indispensible reverse side of the destruction-of-the-capitalist-scourge coin. I do not believe that either.

But is my concept of the ideal society realizable? In any event, I don’t think it has many partisans around the globe.”  [13]

The market economy and capitalism are not the same. The market economy is composed of daily, local exchanges such as “wheat and wood being sent to a nearby city.” Braudel would “even include trade on a broader scale, as long as it is regular, predictable, routine, and open to both small and large merchants; for example, the shipping of Baltic grain from Danzig to Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, or the oil and wine trade between southern and northern Europe.” [14]

The market is defined by “transparent exchanges, which involve no surprises, in which each party knows in advance the rules and the outcome, and for which the always moderate profits can be roughly calculated beforehand.” Trades only involve two or three people: Self-employed producers, clients, and perhaps an intermediary. The transactions are said to have been “eye to eye and hand to hand.”

“John Kenneth Galbraith talks about ‘the two parts of the economy’ the world of the ‘thousands of small and traditional proprietors,’ (the market system) and that of the ‘few hundred highly organized corporations’ (the industrial system).

Lenin wrote in very similar terms about the coexistence of what he called ‘imperialism’ (or the new monopoly capitalism of the early twentieth century) and ordinary capitalism, based on competition, which had, he thought, its uses. […] Then alongside, or rather above this layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.”[15]

Speculation

The capitalist appeared wherever exorbitant profits were to be made.

“The capitalist’s proper sphere is the international world of long-distance trade and banking, the sphere of historical grandeur and of grand profits where kingdoms and fortunes are made and unmade by virtue of the ability of the capitalist to cross frontiers and to profit from regional and national differentials in supply and demand.”[16]

Opportunistic profit seeking could benefit those in need. “Let a famine break out in the Mediterranean—a famine such as that in the 1590s—and international merchants representing major clients would divert entire ships from their usual routes […].” [17]

“This type of exchange replaced the normal collective market and substituted for it individual transactions based on arbitrary financial arrangements that varied according to the respective situation of the individuals involved. This fact is clearly established by the frequent lawsuits in England over the interpretation of notes signed by sellers.

It is obvious that here we are dealing with unequal exchanges in which competition—the basic law of the so-called market economy—had little place and in which the dealer had two trump cards: he had broken off relations between the producer and the person who eventually received the merchandise (only the dealer knew the market conditions at both ends of the chain and hence the profit to be expected); and he had ready cash, which serves as his chief ally.” [18]

This process was elaborated in the Fernhandel, a zone of free operation that traversed great distances (from Amsterdam to retailers in Persia, China or Japan). The Fernhandel necessitated and “resulted in sizable accumulations of capital, especially since long-distance trade was carried on by a mere handful of individuals. Not just anyone could join the group.” [19]

Capitalists were engaged in speculative ventures, with high risk (unless guaranteed by the state) and high reward (unless done for glory, like the Medici acting as Papal creditors despite knowingly enduring losses for the honor, i.e., a bailout). This was quite unlike small-time producers who had modest profits and little opportunity to make lucrative investments, or to allocate funds for prestige rather than maximizing return on capital to society. 

Refusal to Specialize

Unlike the shopkeeper, scholar, or craftsman, the capitalist refused to specialize. This refusal was not to avoid putting all his eggs in one basket, rather it was because one sector was not economically developed or deep enough yet to absorb the capitalist’s energies. Furthermore, Braudel viewed the capitalist as having an unfair advantage, enjoyed at the expense of the majority.

“Specialization and division of labour usually operated from the bottom up. If modernization or rationalization consists of the process whereby different tasks are distinguished and functions subdivided, such modernization began in the bottom layer of the economy. Every boom in trade led to increased specialization of shops and the appearance of new professions among the many hangers-on of trade.

Curiously enough, the wholesaler did not in fact observe this rule, and only specialized very occasionally. Even a shopkeeper who made his fortune, and became a merchant, immediately moved out of specialization into non-specialization.”  [20]

“The characteristic advantage of standing at the commanding heights of the economy, today just as much as in the days of Jacques Coeur (the fourteenth-century tycoon) consisted precisely of not having to confine oneself to a single choice, of being eminently adaptable, hence non-specialized.” [21]

The defining characteristic of capitalism is its chameleon-esque adaptability:

“Faced with inflexible structures, [capitalism] is able to choose the areas where it wants and is able to meddle, and the areas it will leave to their fate, incessantly reconstructing its own structures from those components, and thereby little by little transforming those of others.

This is why all the economic creativeness of the world stems from pre-capitalism, and why it is the source or characteristic of all great material progress and of all the most burdensome exploitation of man by man. Not only because of the appropriation of the surplus value of man’s labor. But also because of that disproportion in strength and position, on a nation-wide as well as a world-wise scale, which means that at the whim of circumstance there will always be one position more advantageous to adopt than the rest, one sector more profitable to exploit. The choice may be limited, but what an immense privilege to be able to choose!” [22]

Monopoly

Braudel argued that capitalists are often monopolists, working closely with the state, their guarantor. They do not operate in competitive “free markets,” but rather in the antimarket, where exclusivity and privileged access to information are key.

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]”

“Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to expand and at other times destroys its mainspring. Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state.

In the first great phase, that of the Italian city-states of Venice, Genoa, and Florence, power lay in the hands of the moneyed elite. In seventeenth century Holland the aristocracy of the Regents governed for the benefit and even according to the directives of the businessmen, merchants, and moneylenders […].” [23]

As then, so today; the business of government is business. However, according to Braudel, the elite didn’t need the state in order to come out on top, because their trade is opaque (zones d’opacité) and exclusionary.

“[Capitalists] possessed superior knowledge, intelligence, and culture. And they grabbed up everything worth taking–land, real estate, and land rents. Who would doubt that these capitalists had monopolies at their disposal or that they simply had the power needed to eliminate competition nine times out of ten?

When writing to one of his confederates at Bordeaux, a Dutch merchant advised that their planned be kept secret; otherwise, he added, ‘this affair will turn out like so many others in which, once competition comes into play, there is no chance to make a profit.’ Finally, the sheer size of their capital enabled capitalists to preserve their privileged position and to reserve for themselves the big international transactions of the day.” [24]

Secrecy and monopoly are the enemies of fair exchange and the price mechanism. This strategy appears endemic to the capitalist mode of exchange. Therefore, capitalism can not be relied upon to establish or move toward an authentic equilibrium of prices.

“So in the end, people believed, rightly or wrongly, that exchanges play a decisive role as a balancing force, that through competition they smooth our uneven spots and adjust supply and demand, and that the market is a hidden and benevolent god, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand,’ the self-regulating market of the nineteenth century and the keystone of the economy, as long as one sticks to laissez faire, laissez passer.

In this there is an element of truth, an element of bad faith, and also some self-deception. Can we forget how many times the market was diverted or distorted and prices were arbitrarily fixed by a de facto or legal monopolies? [25]

 […] But such manipulations were as foreign to ordinary mortals as the super-secret deliberations of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel are to the man on the street today.”  [26]

Nascent Capitalism in the Middle Kingdom

Successful capitalists were aligned with the state, but the state could not be so powerful as to overpower the capitalist class.

“The growth and success of capitalism required certain social conditions. They require a certain tranquility in the social order and a certain neutrality, or weakness, or permissiveness by the state.” The Chinese state tolerated capitalist trade, but the system was slow to take hold because local trade networks were sufficient at the time.

In China, villages were organized roughly equidistant around small trade centers, not more than a day’s walk away. This allowed peddlers to travel the countryside and prevented the establishment of major trade centers.

“The most astonishing organization of the elementary-market was surely that of China, where it was strictly, almost mathematically, based on geography. […] A few fairs did exist, but they were of secondary importance and were held on the borders of Mongolia or at Canton for the benefit of foreign traders, who were in this way kept under surveillance.

Thus one of two factors must have been involved: either the Chinese government was hostile to these higher forms of exchange, or else the capillary system of the elementary market was adequate, and the Chinese economy did not need veins or arteries. For either of these two reasons, or for both of them, the exchange in China was virtually decapitated, sawed off, and I shall indicate in a subsequent chatter that this was an extremely important factor in the non-development of Chinese capitalism.” [27]

European state leniency regarding wealthy, powerful dynasties and individuals was the seed from which capitalist hierarchy bloomed.

“The basic inequality of partners that underlies the capitalistic process is visible on every level of social life. But in the end, it was at the very summit of society that capitalism unfolded first, asserted its strength, and revealed itself. It is on the level of the Bardis, the Jacques Coeurs, the Jakob Fuggers, the John Laws, or the Neckers that we must conduct our search, that we have a chance of discovering capitalism.

There are two types of exchanges. One is down-to-earth, is based on competition, and is almost transparent the other, a higher form, is sophisticated and domineering. […] I am not denying the possible existence of a clever and ruthless village capitalist in wooden shoes. […] Lenin stated that even within the socialist world, the village market, having once regained its freedom, might well reconstitute the whole tree of capitalism. […]” [28]

European capitalism thrived during the Columbian Exchange, which was predicated upon labor exploitation and influx of commodities. Bruadel outlines Dependency Theory to describe this process:

“After all, Western Europe transferred—virtually reinvented—the ancient practice of slavery to the New World and ‘induced’ the new serfdom in Eastern Europe as a result of economic imperatives. This lends weight to Wallerstein’s assertion that capitalism is a creation of world inequality; in order to develop, it needed the connivance of the international economy. It was born of the authoritarian organization of a region that was simply too vast. It would not have grown to be as sturdy in a restricted economic area, and it might not have grown at all if cheap labor had not been available.” [29]

Wallerstein on Braudel 

World-Systems Theory historian Immanuel Wallerstein summarizes Braudel’s perspective:

‘Here, then, is our picture. Economic life is regular, capitalism unusual. Economic life is a sphere where one knows in advance; capitalism is speculative. Economic life is transparent, capitalism shadowy or opaque. Economic life involves small profits, capitalism exceptional profits.

Economic life is liberation, capitalism the jungle. Economic life is the automatic pricing of true supply and demand, capitalism the prices imposed by power and cunning. Economic life involves controlled competition, capitalism involves eliminating both control and competition. Economic life is the domain of ordinary people; capitalism is guaranteed by, incarnated in, the hegemonic power.

Finally, the policy implications for the contemporary world are massive. If real capitalism is monopoly and not the market, then what is to be done is a question that may be answered very differently from the ways in which anti-systemic movements have been answering it for the past one hundred years. In this effort at “liberation,” [workers] have sought the support of the state as regulator, as protector of “competition,” but they have repeatedly encountered the role of the state as “guarantor” of the very monopolies against which they are struggling.’ [30]

Braudel critiqued the modern notion of the capitalist benefactor on three fronts: Refusal to specialize, avaricious speculation, and monopoly control. He also questioned the supposed antagonism between the “public” state and private market—they actually work in concert to privilege the elite. Capitalism itself is not good or evil, rather a system with costs and benefits; enabling immense value to be squeezed out of people and resources while distorting prices, creating scarcity, and entrenching an exploitative, domineering state-capitalist class.

Free-market anti-capitalists assert that the good associated with exchange within the agora can be preserved in spite of the abolishment of the slave-master relationship between the MBA-wielding executive and the third world sweatshop worker, the poisoned consumer and those millions killed in resource wars, sacrificed upon the altar of Mammon.

The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for the team. “… [I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.”

Besides, she says, even if your local public school is pretty crappy, your kids probably won’t suffer too badly. After all, if you’re the kind of parent who’s selective and involved enough to send your kid to a private school in the first place, you’re probably providing the kind of support system your kid needs to do OK despite going to a crappy school.

Benedikt brings in her own bad self to clinch the deal. She went to a mediocre school, never learned a lot of that fancy college-prep stuff, and consequently didn’t learn much in college, either. But still, she turned out “perfectly fine.” And even if she never read Walt Whitman in high school, she got the benefit of socializing with all sorts of kids — e.g., “getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park.”

Here’s the thing: The very fact Benedikt could write something so utterly devoid of critical thought is proof that she did not turn out “perfectly fine.” If she takes such a conventional, uncritical view of the functional role of social institutions, then she’s exactly the kind of product the schools are designed to churn out. If “one of our nation’s most essential institutions” means “essential for the interests of the people running the nation,” she’s exactly right.

The public schools are, as they were originally set up to be in the 19th century, human resource processing factories. Their purpose is to supply the state with compliant subjects and employers with compliant workers. The ideal products are functionaries smart enough to perform their assigned tasks, but not smart enough to critically analyze the system or their roles in it.

The purpose of modern public education is fundamentally evil: To inculcate a view of a society organized around giant corporations, centralized government agencies and other authoritarian hierarchies as natural and inevitable — “just the way things are” — and an acceptance of one’s own role in that society as a reflection of merit.

Think I’m exaggerating? The first statewide public school systems were organized in New England around the time textile mills needed people conditioned to line up on command, eat or urinate at the sound of a bell, and cheerfully comply with orders from someone behind a desk. Take a look at the public educationist literature from the turn of the 20th century, quoted at great length in the work of critics like John Taylor Gatto and Joel Spring, on the purpose of the system. The public educationist literature of that period is explicit on the role of the schools in shaping a human product perfectly socialized to be satisfied with its role as cog in a machine managed by other people.

And those kids from the trailer park she talks about being socialized with? The system is set up to process kids like that (in the terminology of Huxley’s Brave New World) into obedient Gammas, managed by uncritical, cheerleading Betas like her.

What’s more, the idea that everyone should voluntarily herd themselves into the same crappy authoritarian institution, so that all will have some incentive to make that institution somewhat better, is utterly perverse. The beauty of networked communications technology and the free replication of digital information is that it’s no longer necessary to get everybody on the same page, and coordinate their efforts through some common institution, in order for anyone to do anything.  The public schools are built on a mass-production industrial model of moving humans to a central location to be processed with a limited, uniform menu of information. But a near-infinite amount of education can now be moved around instantly at almost zero cost.

It’s like saying “if everybody gave up the Internet and forced themselves to rely on CBS, NBC and ABC News, they’d work harder to see the Fairness Doctrine enforced.” If we all just force ourselves to rely on an archaic industrial-age dinosaur and it’s one-size-fits-all product, we’ll have an incentive to make sure the homogenized product isn’t too crappy.

If we were just means to the end of the public schools’ flourishing, it would be a good argument. But we’re not.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Cómo Argumentar Involuntariamente Contra el Sistema de Educación Pública.

En un artículo de opinión para C4SS acerca de la “crisis” coreana, Tom Knapp escribió, respecto a sus impresiones negativas de Corea del Norte:

“Casi todo lo que sé de ella es en realidad lo que otros gobiernos optan por decirme. Y esos otros gobiernos mienten rutinariamente – a todos, sobre todo, día tras día, como política básica…”

El actual tamborileo guerrista del gobierno de los EE.UU. (y por las noticias de cable – si hay alguna diferencia) confirma plenamente el escepticismo de Knapp. Echemos un vistazo más de cerca a la versión oficial de los acontecimientos en Corea durante las últimas décadas:

La versión estándar de la Guerra de Corea es una agresión no provocado y sin ambigüedades por parte de Corea del Norte, comenzando con una invasión repentina y masiva a través de la Línea de Demarcación. Pero en realidad, durante los años previos a la guerra, ambos lados realizaron constantemente incursiones transfronterizas, a menudo con miles de soldados.

La versión norcoreana de los hechos es que el régimen de Seúl había llevado a cabo un bombardeo de artillería de gran escala a través de la frontera el 23 y el 24, seguido por un ataque sorpresa de Corea del Sur en la ciudad de Haeju. El informe de estado militar estadounidense al caer la noche del 25 de junio dijo que los norcoreanos habían capturado todo el territorio tres millas al sur del río Imjin – excepto el área del “contraataque de Haeju”. John Gunther, en su biografía de MacArthur, relata haber sido informado por un miembro de alto rango de la ocupación estadounidense el día 25: “Tenemos una gran noticia. ¡Los surcoreanos han atacado a Corea del Norte!”.

Cuando la guerra estalló, el dictador de Corea del Sur Syngman Rhee ordenó la masacre de por lo menos 100.000 disidentes de izquierda con la aquiescencia del comando militar de EE.UU. Las víctimas incluyen a decenas de miles de presos políticos encarcelados por Rhee en años anteriores. El régimen vació sus cárceles, alineó a los prisioneros y les dispararon, tirando sus cuerpos en fosas cavadas a toda prisa. Durante algunos de estos asesinatos en masa estuvieron presentes oficiales militares de Estados Unidos; de hecho, el ejército americano fotografió a algunos de ellos.

A modo de antecedente, el sistema coreano de gobierno que había surgido en el vacío dejado por la retirada de Japón en 1945 era una federación de comunas autónomas, en las que el cuantioso e influyente movimiento anarquista coreano desempeñó un papel importante. Autoridades militares soviéticas y estadounidenses, en sus respectivos ámbitos, rápidamente le pusieron fin a la situación. Los estadounidenses, obviamente sospechosos de anarquistas o izquierdistas de todo tipo, alentó a aristócratas desposeídos para formar un régimen militar que encarceló a decenas de miles de los anarquistas que había desposeído, y en unos pocos años, aprovechó la guerra para acabar con ellos de una vez por todas.

Avancemos rápidamente hasta la actualidad: la amenaza de represalia nuclear a objetivos norteamericanos de Kim Jong Un tienen lugar en el contexto de grandes maniobras navales conjuntas de EEUU y Corea del Sur dentro de aguas territoriales de Corea del Norte. Los EE.UU. las reclama como aguas de Corea del Sur basándose exclusivamente en una línea de demarcación establecida unilateralmente por los Estados Unidos al final de la Guerra de Corea. La línea dibujada por Estados Unidos no está confirmada por ningún tratado o reconocida por ningún organismo internacional. Y por las normas habituales del derecho internacional para el cálculo de las aguas territoriales, las demandas que Corea del Norte hace de las aguas en las que tuvieron lugar los ejercicios son totalmente legítimas.

Por lo tanto, viendo los eventos por fuera del prisma ideológico deformador de las declaraciones oficiales de EE.UU. y sus loros en los medios de comunicación, lo que realmente sucedió es que Corea del Norte respondió a una provocación enorme y a una amenaza creíble con una advertencia de represalias en caso de ataque.

Puede que llegados a este punto, me digas “de acuerdo”. “Pero incluso si todo eso es verdad, responder a una provocación en alta mar en aguas de Corea del Norte con bravuconearías sobre objetivos nucleares en los EE.UU. es una locura, ¿no?”

Bueno, ciertamente es inmoral. El que un estado a responda a la agresión militar de otro estado matando o amenazando con matar a su población civil es monstruoso. Y si es monstruoso, es monstruoso cuando cualquiera hace. También sería monstruoso si algún país puramente hipotético, el único país del mundo con armas atómicas, los usara para matar a cientos de miles de civiles en dos ciudades japonesas. Sería monstruoso si algún país puramente hipotético con cientos de bombarderos de largo alcance hubiese tenido, como política militar oficial, ser el primero en usar armas nucleares y golpear cada centro de población importante en la URSS en represalia por una incursión convencional en Europa occidental.

El gobierno de EE.UU. es un estado. Y mentir deliberada y desvergonzadamente cuando sirve a sus intereses es lo que los hacen los estados. No permitas que mueran millones de personas por una mentira.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 5 de abril de 2013.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.