C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The State as Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Sometimes the capitalist state’s internal rules and procedures, created to serve an economic ruling class, in specific cases wind up sabotaging the very interests they were created to serve. Much like the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence (the “war within my members” St. Paul wrote about), the legal framework and administrative machinery created to maintain capitalism takes on a life and internal logic of their own. Or if you’re more familiar with Ghostbusters, when the destructor assumes a form it’s limited by all the weaknesses the laws of its own nature impose on that form.

Authoritarian hierarchies will die because they’re built on conflict of interest. They can’t trust their subordinates with discretion to use their own judgment or situational knowledge, so they create standard operating procedures, “best practices” and Weberian work rules that degrade everybody’s effectiveness. In order to limit the discretion of subordinates to harm the system, they must limit their discretion to use their own knowledge most effectively. The system doesn’t know what the system knows; the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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