As the Australians would say, good on them. Denvir quotes a statement by the Confederation of Ecuadorian Kichwas (ECUARUNARI), part of the country’s indigenous peoples movement: “We have not acquired any debt. The so-called public debt really belongs to the oligarchy. We the peoples have not acquired anything or been benefited, and thus we owe nothing.”

That’s entirely correct. In the specific case of Ecuador, according to John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), the loans were designed to foment conditions that make [Ecuador] subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.” Infratructure loans were granted on the condition that “engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.”

More generally, as described by Bruce Rich in “The Cuckoo in the Nest” (The Ecologist, Jan./Feb. 1994), the World Bank over the past sixty years has nurtured the growth of technocratic complexes within Third World governments, insulated from outside political control, which parrot the assumptions and goals of the World Bank.

From the 1950s onwards, a primary focus of [World] Bank policy was “institution-building”, most often taking the form of promoting the creation of autonomous agencies within governments that would be continual World Bank borrowers. Such agencies were intentionally established to be independent financially from their host governments, as well as minimally accountable politically–except, of course, to the Bank.

The World Bank created the Economic Development Institute in 1956 specifically to enculture Third World elites into the values of the Bretton Woods system. It offered a six-month course in “the theory and practice of development,” whose 1300 alumni by 1971 included prime ministers, ministers of planning, and ministers of finance.

The creation of such patronage networks has been one of the World Bank’s most important strategies for inserting itself in the political economies of Third World countries. Operating according to their own charters and rules (frequently drafted in response to Bank suggestions), and staffed with rising technocrats sympathetic, even beholden, to the Bank, the agencies it has funded have served to create a steady, reliable source of what the Bank needs most–bankable loan proposals. They have also provided the Bank with critical power bases through which it has been able to transform national economies, indeed whole societies, without the bothersome procedures of democratic review and discussion of the alternatives.

These complexes of World Bank and native government technocrats operate this way even when the government is nominally democratic; but for decades the World Bank enthusiastically pursued such policies even (or especially) within military dictatorships (often installed by the U.S., back in the days before the neocons discovered the virtues of “democracy”).

Their main function is to work in collusion with the World Bank to run up debt building the infrastructure foreign capital needs for profitable investment.  A majority of World Bank loans since that agency’s inception have gone to building the roads and utilities necessary to support foreign-owned industry.  The effect is to crowd out decentralized, small-scale, locally-owned industry serving local markets, and to integrate the domestic economy into a neoliberal framework of providing raw materials and labor for foreign industry.

The resulting debt (which the people of the country never approved) can then be used to further cement neoliberal policies, by blackmailing the local government into adopting a structural adjustment program.  And the policies adopted under such programs generally include the “privatization” of the same infrastructure the loans were taken out to build, and selling it to the very people it was built to serve.  Not only that,  but the “privatization” is generally arranged on terms virtually dictated by the purchasers, with native governments sometimes spending more taxpayer money to make the assets salable than the sale actually fetches.  And, naturally, the purchasing companies’ first order of business after such transactions is generally asset-stripping, with revenues from the sale of assets often exceeding the total purchase price.

In other words, Third World countries are borrowing money to buy the rope to hang themselves with.

Here’s hoping that Ecuador’s debt repudiation is the first of many more to come, and that the Third World declares its own jubilee in 2009 without waiting for permission from Bono.

Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 432-0600 Participant Access Code: 525118#

I think all ideologies should be held accountable for the crimes committed in their names….  Now, of course, there are still those on the far left who will insist that all of those crimes were just an aberration–Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot; reality is annoying–and they retreat into their sacred texts….

But lately, particularly just in the past few months, I have noticed something similar happening on the far libertarian right…, and it comes from the fact that the Bush administration… adopted so much of their rhetoric…. But, of course, Bush is the worst thing that has ever happened to believers in this ideology, because while parroting the talking points of Friedmanism, he has overseen an explosion of crony capitalism, that they treat governing as… an ATM machine, where private corporations make withdrawals of the government in the form of no-bid contracts….  The Bush administration is a nightmare for these guys–the explosion of the debt and now, of course, these massive bailouts.

So, what we see from the ideologues of the… far economic right… frantically distancing themselves and retreating to their sacred texts:  The Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose.

Some of us left-wing free market advocates have repeatedly come to Klein’s defense, extolling the value of Disaster Capitalism (despite its theoretical incoherence on the difference between free markets and corporatism) as a concrete account of the Washington Consensus policies adopted around the world.

It’s only fair to give her the benefit of the doubt.  After all, one can’t turn on the television without seeing some neoliberal politician or journalist equating corporate capitalism to the “free market.”   The Internet is full of commentary by mainstream libertarian think tanks, defending everything from Wal-Mart to resource waste and pollution to income inequality to corporate power as a natural outgrowth of “our free enterprise system.”  Under such circumstances, it’s hard to blame a casual observer on the Left from taking the mainstream rhetoric at face value.  After all, if I thought the “free market” meant what Tom Friedman meant by it, I’d hate it too.

On the other hand, Klein is no longer what you’d call a casual observer, after all this time.  She herself has explicitly distinguished the corporatism prevailing in the American (and global) corporate economy from a genuine free market.  So her quoted remarks are asinine.

First of all, it’s an insult to her left-wing free market defenders, who have publicly and vocally expressed our opposition to corporate rule, to hold us morally responsible for the fact that Dick Cheney and his ilk have misappropriated our rhetoric.

Second, does Klein really blame Pyotr Kropotkin and Rosa Luxemburg for Stalin and Pol Pot?  I hope not.   And it is just as foolish to blame libertarians for George Bush.

It’s true that the Bush adminstration adopted free market rhetoric.  And no doubt some libertarians are scurrying about in embarrassment, fearful lest this will be used to “discredit” free market ideas in the same way that the fall of the Soviet Union was broadly used to discredit the Left.  But the people who thought the fall of the Soviet Union discredited all attacks on corporate capitalism were either dishonest or stupid.  And the same is true of those who think AIG and Citigroup discredit the free market.

Every ruling class in history has adopted a legitimizing ideology; and since to stay in power it must justify itself primarily to the ruled, to the people it’s exploiting, its legitimizing ideology generally borrows heavily from the belief systems of–guess who?–the ruled.

The Federalists, for example, managed to squeak their trojan horse through the state ratifying conventions by packaging it in the anglo-republican rhetoric of the Anti-Federalists.

Stalin legitimized his rule in Russia by misappropriating the language and symbolism of the classical socialist and movement and falsely appealing to its values.

And neoliberals, similarly, misappropriate the language and symbolism of “free enterprise,” “free markets,” and “free trade.”

And guess what else? The symbolism and language of Progressivism were appropriated by FDR to sell corporatist policies drafted by GE’s Gerard Swope and the Business Advisory Council.

If anything, it’s fairer to blame Progressives for Swope and the NIRA, because Progressivism (the movement founded at the turn of the 20th century by Herbert Croly, the National Civic League and the editorial circles at The New Republic) really was corporatist.  From its beginning, it was a managerialist ideology, and its class base the new middle class of managers and professionals who ran the new giant organizations that dominated society in the wake of the corporate revolution.  It’s a huge jump from Luxemburg to Stalin, or from Rothbard to Halliburton.  But it’s not much of a jump from Croly to Swope.

So there! There’s nothing clean.  Any belief system with a high level of currency among the ruled populace is likely, in the natural order of things, to be misappropriated by the rulers, in order to secure popular compliance with their rule.

But this is only one side of the picture.  On the other hand, such belief systems–of all kinds–are contested terrain. They are grab-bags of values and symbolism to which rulers can appeal, true enough. But the very same values and symbolism can be reclaimed by the ruled and used to undermine their authority of the ruling class.

For example, working class resistance to the Soviet-imposed regimes in Eastern Europe commonly justified itself in libertarian socialist terms, and relied heavily on socialist symbolism and rhetoric. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1967, the Solidarity movement in Poland–in every case, the aim was workers’ power, workers’ control of industry, etc., and the instrument chosen was self-mangement through workers’ councils in the factories and self-government through direct democracy at the neighborhood level. In other words, the working class of Eastern Europe resisted the Soviet Union with a battle cry of “All power to the soviets!”

This concept–using the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house–should be familiar to most people on the Left. I’d be surprised if Klein wasn’t aware of it.

The parallel to the free market ideology should be obvious, to anyone who isn’t deliberately obtuse.  One of the most powerful weapons against neoliberalism and corporate rule is to demonize the big business interests in terms of their own “free market” rhetoric.  Dean Baker does this regularly.  Baker skewers the “free trade” rhetoric of Tom Friedman by pointing out the real mercantilist nature of phony “free trade agreements,” in which so-called “intellectual property” plays the same protectionist role for transnational corporations as tariffs did for the old national industrial trusts.  RFK Jr. regularly points out that all the “free market” rhetoric conceals a real-world practice of externalizing costs on the taxpayer.  And we on the libertarian left, who really believe in free markets, are doing this kind of thing every day.

There is an enormous potential, among Progressives and the free market left, for entente and common action against the corporate state.  Noam Chomsky frequently refers to “privatizing profit and socializing risk and cost,” and “socialism for the rich and free market discipline for the poor.”  Murray Rothbard, at his best, referred to the ways in which “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.  Whatever that process may be called, it is not ‘free enterprise,’ except in the most ironic sense.”

Is that not the basis for a common agenda?  So why the gratuitous insults?

It’s precisely because we on the free-market left see the value in Klein’s work, that we cringe at the sight of reprehensible remarks like those quoted above.

Celebrated yet controversial left-libertarian author becomes first C4SS paid staff member.

AUBURN, ALABAMA — November 15, 2008 — Center for a Stateless Society — Kevin Carson, author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and a forthcoming major work on anarchist organizational theory has joined the Center for a Stateless Society as the Center’s first paid staff member. In his role as Research Associate beginning January 1st of 2009, Carson will be producing quarterly short research studies for the Center to publish as well as writing news commentary.

C4SS director Brad Spangler said of the move “We’re developing a new fundraising initiative and early on in that process an anonymous donor stepped up to fund the first quarter of Kevin’s research work and the first month of his news analysis for us. We’re very pleased to announce this, as Carson has been a key figure on the radical end of the libertarian movement. Supporting his work means he’ll be able to do more and better of what he already does amazingly well.”

###

ORGANIZATIONAL SUMMARY
The mission of the Molinari Institute is to promote understanding of the philosophy of Market Anarchism as a sane, consensual alternative to the hypertrophic violence of the State. The Institute takes its name from Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), originator of the theory of Market Anarchism. The Center for a Stateless Society is the Molinari Institute’s media center.

CONTACT
Brad Spangler
Center for a Stateless Society
media@c4ss.org
http://www.c4ss.org/

Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 432-0600 Participant Access Code: 525118#

The text of this book is available to read free online.

Are there any regrettable omissions? Well, of course. Any self-respecting anarchist geek could easily cite another thousand pages’ worth of “absolutely essential” additional material, additional authors, additional perspectives. But never mind: this, here and now, is it. Wonder no more what is the market anarchist book to recommend to the anarcho-curious or wave menacingly at the statist heathen; it’s this one.” — Roderick T. Long, President, Molinari Institute