Ρу́сский: Рынки, не капитализм — Введение
Türkçe: Kapitalizm Değil, Piyasalar – Bir Giriş
Indonesia: Pasar Bukan Kapitalisme
Español: Mercado, no capitalismo – Introducción
Italiano: Mercato, non Capitalismo
Português: Mercados não capitalismo — Introdução

The individualist anarchist tendency is alive and well. Markets Not Capitalism offers a window onto this tendency’s history and highlights its potential contribution to the global anticapitalist movement. We seek in this book to stimulate a thriving conversation among libertarians of all varieties, as well as those with other political commitments, about the most fruitful path toward human liberation. We are confident that individualist anarchist insights into the liberatory potential of markets without capitalism can enrich that conversation, and we encourage you to join it.

$18.00.

Introduction

Market anarchists believe in market exchange, not in economic privilege. They believe in free markets, not in capitalism. What makes them anarchists is their belief in a fully free and consensual society — a society in which order is achieved not through legal force or political government, but through free agreements and voluntary cooperation on a basis of equality. What makes them market anarchists is their recognition of free market exchange as a vital medium for peacefully anarchic social order. But the markets they envision are not like the privilege-riddled “markets” we see around us today. Markets laboring under government and capitalism are pervaded by persistent poverty, ecological destruction, radical inequalities of wealth, and concentrated power in the hands of corporations, bosses, and landlords. The consensus view is that exploitation — whether of human beings or of nature — is simply the natural result of markets left unleashed. The consensus view holds that private property, competitive pressure, and the profit motive must — whether for good or for ill — inevitably lead to capitalistic wage labor, to the concentration of wealth and social power in the hands of a select class, or to business practices based on growth at all costs and the devil take the hindmost.

Market anarchists dissent. They argue that economic privilege is a real and pervasive social problem, but that the problem is not a problem of private property, competition, or profits per se. It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed — deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist — reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence.

The Market Form

This book is intended as an extended introduction to the economic and social theory of left-wing market anarchism. Market anarchism is a radically individualist and anticapitalist social movement. Like other anarchists, market anarchists are radical advocates of individual liberty and mutual consent in every aspect of social life — thus rejecting all forms of domination and government as invasions against liberty and violations of human dignity. The market anarchists’ distinct contribution to anarchist thought is their analysis of the market form as a core component of a thoroughly free and equal society — their understanding of the revolutionary possibilities inherent in market relationships freed from government and capitalistic privilege, and their insights into the structures of political privilege and control that deform actually-existing markets and uphold exploitation in spite of the naturally equilibrating tendencies of market processes. Since they insist on so sharp a distinction between the market form as such and the economic features of actually-existing capitalism, it is important to carefully distinguish the key features of markets as market anarchists understand them. The social relationships that market anarchists explicitly defend, and hope to free from all forms of government control, are relationships based on:

1. ownership of property, especially decentralized individual ownership, not only of personal possessions but also of land, homes, natural resources, tools, and capital goods;
2. contract and voluntary exchange of goods and services, by individuals or groups, on the expectation of mutual benefit;
3. free competition among all buyers and sellers — in price, quality, and all other aspects of exchange — without ex ante restraints or burdensome barriers to entry;
4. entrepreneurial discovery, undertaken not only to compete in existing markets but also in order to discover and develop new opportunities for economic or social benefit; and
5. spontaneous order, recognized as a significant and positive coordinating force — in which decentralized negotiations, exchanges, and entrepreneurship converge to produce large-scale coordination without, or beyond the capacity of, any deliberate plans or explicit common blueprints for social or economic development.

Market anarchists do not limit ownership to possession, or to common or collective ownership, although they do not exclude these kinds of ownership either; they insist on the importance of contract and market exchange, and on profit-motivated free competition and entrepreneurship; and they not only tolerate but celebrate the unplanned, spontaneous coordination that Marxists deride as the “social anarchy of production.” But left-wing market anarchists are also radically anticapitalist, and they absolutely reject the belief — common to both the anti-market Left and the pro-capitalist Right — that these five features of the market form must entail a social order of bosses, landlords, centralized corporations, class exploitation, cut-throat business dealings, immiserated workers, structural poverty, or large-scale economic inequality. They insist, instead, on five distinctive claims about markets, freedom, and privilege:

• The centrifugal tendency of markets: market anarchists see freed markets, under conditions of free competition, as tending to diffuse wealth and dissolve fortunes — with a centrifugal effect on incomes, property-titles, land, and access to capital — rather than concentrating it in the hands of a socioeconomic elite. Market anarchists recognize no de jure limits on the extent or kind of wealth that any one person might amass; but they believe that market and social realities will impose much more rigorous de facto pressures against massive inequalities of wealth than any de jure constraint could achieve.
• The radical possibilities of market social activism: market anarchists also see freed markets as a space not only for profit-driven commerce, but also as spaces for social experimentation and hard-driving grassroots activism. They envision “market forces” as including not only the pursuit of narrowly financial gain or maximizing returns to investors, but also the appeal of solidarity, mutuality and sustainability. “Market processes” can — and ought to — include conscious, coordinated efforts to raise consciousness, change economic behavior, and address issues of economic equality and social justice through nonviolent direct action.
• The rejection of statist-quo economic relations: market anarchists sharply distinguish between the defense of the market form and apologetics for actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions, since these distributions and divisions hardly emerged as the result of unfettered markets, but rather from the governed, regimented, and privilege-ridden markets that exist today; they see actually-existing distributions of wealth and class divisions as serious and genuine social problems, but not as problems with the market form itself; these are not market problems but ownership problems and coordination problems.
• The regressiveness of regulation: market anarchists see coordination problems — problems with an unnatural, destructive, politically-imposed interruption of the free operation of exchange and competition — as the result of continuous, ongoing legal privilege for incumbent capitalists and other well-entrenched economic interests, imposed at the expense of small-scale competitors and the working class.
• Dispossession and rectification: market anarchists see economic privilege as partly the result of serious ownership problems — problems with an unnatural, destructive, politically-imposed maldistribution of property titles — produced by the history of political dispossession and expropriation inflicted worldwide by means of war, colonialism, segregation, nationalization and kleptocracy. Markets are not viewed as being maximally free so long as they are darkened by the shadow of mass robbery or the denial of ownership; and they emphasize the importance of reasonable rectification of past injustices — including grassroots, anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal approaches to the “privatization” of state-controlled resources; processes for restitution to identifiable victims of injustice; and revolutionary expropriation of property fraudulently claimed by the state and state-entitled monopolists.

The Market Anarchist Tradition

Early anarchist thinkers such as Josiah Warren and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon emphasized the positive, socially harmonizing features of market relationships when they were conducted within a context of equality — with Proudhon, for example, writing that social revolution would abolish the “system of laws” and “principle of authority,” to replace them with the “system of contracts” [1].

Drawing on Warren’s and Proudhon’s use of contract and exchange for models of social mutuality, distinctive strands of market anarchism have emerged repeatedly within the broad anarchist tradition, punctuated by crises, collapses, interregnums and resurgences. The history is complex but it can be roughly divided into three major periods represented in this text — (i) a “first wave,” represented mainly by “individualist anarchists” and “mutualists” such as Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Dyer Lum, and occupying roughly the period from the American Civil War to 1917; [2] (ii) a “second wave,” coinciding with the radicalization of formerly pro-capitalist American libertarians and the resurgence of anarchism as a family of social movements during the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s; and (iii) a “third wave,” developing as a dissident strand within the anarchist milieu of the 1990s and the post-Seattle movement of the new millennium.

In spite of discontinuities and differences, each wave has typically revived the literature of the earlier waves and drawn explicitly on its themes; what has, in general, united them is their defense of market relationships and their particular emphasis on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the market form, when it is — to the extent that it is — liberated from legal and social institutions of privilege.

The anticapitalism of the “first wave” individualists was obvious to them and to many of their contemporaries. Benjamin Tucker famously argued that four monopolies, or clusters of state-guaranteed privileges, were responsible for the power of the corporate elite — the patent monopoly, the effective monopoly created by the state’s distribution of arbitrarily engrossed land to the politically favored and its protection of unjust land titles, the money and credit monopoly, and the monopolistic privileges conferred by tariffs. The economically powerful depended on these monopolies; eliminate them, and the power of the elite would dissolve.

Tucker was committed to the cause of justice for workers in conflict with contemporary capitalists and he clearly identified with the burgeoning socialist movement. But he argued against Marx and other socialists that market relationships could be fruitful and non-exploitative provided that the market-distorting privileges conferred by the four monopolies were eliminated.

The radicalism of Tucker and his compatriots and that of the strand of anarchism they birthed was arguably less apparent after the breaking of the first wave than it was to their contemporaries. Perhaps in part this is because of their disputes with representatives of other anarchist tendencies, whose criticisms of their views have influenced the perceptions of later anarchists. It is also, unavoidably, a consequence of the identification of many of their twentieth-century descendants with the right wing of the libertarian movement and thus as apologists for the corporate elite and its social dominance.

Though there were honorable exceptions, twentieth-century market-oriented libertarians frequently lionized corporate titans, ignored or rationalized the abuse of workers, and trivialized or embraced economic and social hierarchy. While many endorsed the critique of the state and of state-secured privilege offered by Tucker and his fellow individualists, they often overlooked or rejected the radical implications of the earlier individualists’ class-based analysis of structural injustice. There were, in short, few vocal enthusiasts for the individualists’ brand of anticapitalism in the early-to-mid-twentieth century.

The most radical fringe of the market-oriented strand of the libertarian movement — represented by thinkers like Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs — generally embraced, not the anticapitalist economics of individualism and mutualism, but a position its advocates described as “anarcho-capitalism.” The future free society they envisioned was a market society — but one in which market relationships were little changed from business as usual and the end of state control was imagined as freeing business to do much what it had been doing before, rather than unleashing competing forms of economic organization, which might radically transform market forms from the bottom up.

But in the “second wave” of the 1960s, the family of anarchist social movements — revived by antiauthoritarian and countercultural strands of the New Left — and the antiwar radicals among the libertarians began to rediscover and republish the works of the mutualists and the other individualists. “Anarcho-capitalists” such as Rothbard and Childs began to question libertarianism’s historical alliance with the Right, and to abandon defenses of big business and actually-existing capitalism in favor of a more consistent left-wing market anarchism. Perhaps the most visible and dramatic example was Karl Hess’s embrace of the New Left radicalism, and his abandonment of “capitalist” economics in favor of small-scale, community-based, non-capitalist markets. By 1975, the former Goldwater speechwriter declared, “I have lost my faith in capitalism” and “I resist this capitalist nation-state,” observing that he had “turn[ed] from the religion of capitalism.” [3]

The “second wave” was followed by a second trough, for anarchism broadly and market anarchism in particular. By the later 1970s and the 1980s, the anticapitalist tendency among market-oriented libertarians had largely dissipated or been shouted down by the mainstreaming pro-capitalist politics of well-funded “libertarian” institutions like the Cato Institute and the leadership of the Libertarian Party. But with the end of the Cold War, the realignment of longstanding political coalitions, and the public coming-out of a third wave anarchist movement in the 1990s, the intellectual, social stages were set for today’s resurgence of anticapitalist market anarchism.

By the beginning of twenty-first century, anticapitalist descendants of the individualists had grown in number, influence, and visibility. They shared the early individualists’ conviction that markets need not in principle be exploitative. At the same time, they elaborated and defended a distinctively libertarian version of class analysis that extended Tucker’s list of monopolies and highlighted the intersection of state-secured privilege with systematic past and ongoing dispossession and with a range of issues of ecology, culture, and interpersonal power relations. They emphasized the fact that, while genuinely liberated — freed — markets could be empowering, market transactions that occurred in contexts misshapen by past and ongoing injustice were, not surprisingly, debilitating and oppressive. But the problem, the new individualists (like their predecessors) insisted, lay not with markets but rather with capitalism — with social dominance by economic elites secured by the state. The solution, then, was the abolition of capitalism through the elimination of legal privileges, including the privileges required for the protection of title to stolen and engrossed assets.

The new individualists have been equally critical of explicitly statist conservatives and progressives and of market-oriented libertarians on the right who use the rhetoric of freedom to legitimate corporate privilege. Their aggressive criticism of this sort of “vulgar libertarianism” has emphasized that existing economic relationships are shot through with injustice from top to bottom and that calls for freedom can readily be used to mask attempts to preserve the freedom of elites to retain wealth acquired through state-tolerated or state-perpetrated violence and state-guaranteed privilege.

The Natural Habitat of the Market Anarchist

This book would not have been possible without the Internet. The reader of Markets Not Capitalism will quickly notice that many of the articles do not read quite like chapters in an ordinary book. Many of them are short. Many of them begin in the middle of a dialogue — one of the most frequent opening phrases is “In a recent issue of such-and-such, so-and-so said that…” The contemporary articles often originally appeared online, as posts to a weblog; they refer frequently to past posts or pre-existing discussions, and often criticize on or elaborate comments made by other authors in other venues. While the articles have been reformatted for print, many still read very distinctly like the blog posts that they once were.

But this is not merely an artifact of Internet-based social networks. The history of the individualist and mutualist tradition is largely a history of ephemeral publications, short-lived presses, self-published pamphlets, and small radical papers. The most famous is certainly Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (1881-1908), but also includes such publications as Hugh Pentecost’s Twentieth Century (1888-1898), as well as “second wave” market anarchist journals such as Left and Right (1965-1968) and Libertarian Forum (1969-1984). All these publications were short and published frequently; their articles were typically critical rather than comprehensive, idiosyncratic rather than technical in approach and tone. Long-standing, far-reaching debates between papers, correspondents, and the surrounding movement were constant sources of material; where a specific interlocutor was not available for some of these articles, the author might, as in de Cleyre and Slobodinsky’s “The Individualist and the Communist: A Dialogue,” go so far as to invent one. The most famous book-length work from the “first wave” — Tucker’s Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One (1893) — is simply a collection of short articles from Liberty, the majority of which are clearly themselves replies to questions and arguments posed by Liberty’s readers or fellow journal editors. The critical exchanges read very much like those one might encounter today on Blogger or WordPress sites — because, of course, today’s blog is merely a new technological form taken by the small, independent press.

The independent, dialogue-based small press has provided a natural habitat for market anarchist writing to flourish — whereas liberal and Marxist writing found their most distinctive habitats in declarations, manifestos, and intricate, comprehensive treatises. Why this might be the case is a large question, worth exploring far beyond what the limits of this preface might allow. However, it may be worth noting that market anarchism has more or less always emerged as a critical and experimental project — on the radical fringes of social movements (whether the Owenite movement, the freethought movement, the labor movement, the American market-oriented libertarian movement, or the counter-globalization movement and the associated social anarchist milieu).

Market anarchism aims to draw out social truths not by dogmatizing or laying down the law, but rather by allowing as far as possible for the free interplay of ideas and social forces, by looking for the unintended consequences of accepted ideas, by engagement in an open-ended process of experimentation and discovery that permits the constant testing of both ideas and institutions against competitors and bottom-line reality.

The revolutionary anarchist and mutualist Dyer D. Lum (1839-1893) wrote in “The Economics of Anarchy” that a defining feature of market anarchy was the “plasticity” of social and economic arrangements as opposed to the “rigidity” of either statist domination or communist economic schemes. The substance of market anarchist ideas has arguably shaped the form in which market anarchist writers feel most at home expressing them. Or perhaps, conversely, the form of the writing may even be what has often made the substance possible: it may be that market anarchist ideas most naturally take shape in the course of dialogue rather than disquisition, in the act of critical give-and-take rather than one-sided monologue. The value of spontaneity, exploratory engagement, and the rigors of the competitive test may be as essential to the formation of market anarchist ideas in writing as they are to the implementation of those ideas in the world at large.

If so, then these articles must be read with the awareness that they have, to a certain extent, been lifted out of their natural environment. There are longer, sustained treatments of the topics they address, but most articles were originally contributions to longstanding, ongoing projects, and took place in the course of wide-ranging debates. We have collected them in a printed anthology to do a service to the student, the researcher, and anyone else who is curious about alternative approaches in free market economics and anarchist social thought. But they are best understood not as identifying the end of the subject, or even really the beginning, but rather as offering an invitation to dive in in medias res, to see left-wing market anarchist ideas emerging from the dialogical process itself — and to participate in the ongoing conversation. …

Notes:

1. See “Organization of Economic Forces,” General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, ch. 3 (37-58), in this volume.

Ran HaCohen discusses the current conflict in Jerusalem and the intentions of the Israeli government.

Andrew J. Bacevich discusses whether the U.S. can leave Afghanistan or not.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses individualism vs sacrificial collectivism.

George H. Smith discusses John Locke’s justification of private property.

Sarah Lazare discusses a new study showing corporate media refuse to acknowledge civilian victims of US wars.

Vijay Prashad discusses intifada and Palestine.

Jeff Faux discusses collateral damage and Afghanistan.

Matt Peppe discusses the claim that Cuban troops are in Syria.

Noam Sheizaf discusses the ongoing conflict in Jerusalem.

Dan Sanchez discusses hypocrisy and empire.

Ivan Eland discusses foreign policy and the presidential debates.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses Nazi Germany and gun control.

James Bovard discusses mandatory voting.

Sheldon Richman discusses U.S. policy in the Middle East and instability.

Sonali Kolhatkar discusses the need to end the drone wars.

Laurence M. Vance discusses social security.

Stephen P. Halbrook discusses the disarming of Jews in Nazi Germany.

David Paulmbo-Liu discusses what the NYT gets wrong in its Israel-Palestine coverage.

Uri Avnery discusses recent violence in Israel.

Sheldon Richman discusses restrictions on liberty.

Omar Barghouti discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Veronique de Rugy discusses the Ex-Im Bank.

Justin Raimondo discusses lessons of the Cuban missile crisis.

Dave Lindorff discusses the casual use of undercover cops.

Abubakar N. Kasim discusses the humanity of refugees.

Roderick Long discusses juries and race.

Natasha Lennard discusses Bibi’s recent Holocaust claim.

Brian Cloughley discusses the rise of Japanese militarism.

Rob Urie discusses the need to rise up to end police terror.

Thomas Knapp discusses who owns your vote.

“The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny. …

We, the Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.” —Voltairine de Cleyre, Anarchism and American Traditions

Available as an ebook (PDF).

Available as a ready-to-print zine (PDF).

Last night, Chris Matthews reminded Hardball viewers that there “were” “conspiracy theory-types” who believed FDR lied America into WWII. It sounds as if Matthews has only heard about, not actually read, historical accounts which question the high school textbook version of events leading up to America’s entry into WWII.

I quote for him Ronald Radosh from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought [1967]:

Of all the secret measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration in 1941, none was more significant than the conferences with the British staff held between January and March. These led to agreement that the US Navy would convoy all transatlantic shipping, a step that violated the Neutrality Act. What made this agreement particularly reprehensible was that if the populace had known, it would undoubtedly have repudiated the President. Rather than announce and publicly state why he felt such acts were necessary, FDR “publicly took the position that he was against convoys because they meant shooting.” [citing TR Fehrenbach] These commitments could only have the final result of leading the United States into war. When Roosevelt ordered naval forces into the declared Nazi war zone beyond Greenland, it was inevitable that a clash would occur.

Sorry to disappoint, Chris. Presidents lying America into war didn’t start with Dubya.

“Anarchism rejects any form of the domination of the man by man, and no form of the exploitation of man by man, since it tackles all forms of authority:

• Political authority: the State.
• Economic authority: Property.
• Moral authority: Fatherland, Religion, Family.
• Legal authority: Courts, Laws and Police Force.

All the (authoritarian) social forces receive the vigorous and incisive blows that the anarchists attack them with. Anarchism, indeed, is against all oppressions, all constraints, it does not assign any limit to its action… From where do humanity’s sufferings come? … I put side the inherent suffering that arises from nature itself, but all the other sufferings, all the other pain has to due with bad social organization… Here is what the anarchist says to the oppressed, to the suffering ones.” — Sébastien Faure, The Revolutionary Forces

Available as an ebook (PDF).

Available as a ready-to-print zine (PDF).

Gareth Porter discusses how the U.S. could end Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the myth of the antiwar Democrat.

David S. D’Amato discusses private property.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses Hilary’s war in Libya.

Robert Fantina discusses Hilary

Dan Sanchez discusses U.S. intervention in the Arab Spring.

Robert Koehler discusses the Afghan war.

Philip Giraldi discusses war crimes and the U.S.

Uri Avnery discusses Israel.

Andrew J. Bacevich discusses building up armies and watching them fall.

Joseph R. Stromberg discusses the inherent criminality of air power.

David D’Amato discusses the question of who is a capitalist.

Andrew Stewart discusses Israel.

Sheldon Richman discusses the anti-politician politician.

James C. Wilson discusses a book on the underground economy.

Kevin Carson discusses charter schools.

Alex R. Knight the third discusses the natural state of freed markets.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses gun control and Nazi Germany.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses Pinochet’s assassination of a former Chilean official.

Peter Jaworski discusses allowing people to sell their blood.

Lawrence W. Reed discusses Bastiat.

Nicola Nasser discusses smashing the Abbas icon of Palestinian non-violence.

Vijay Prashad discusses what remains in Afghanistan.

Alessandra Bajec discusses justice in Egypt.

Charles Davis discusses anti-imperialism 2.0.

Nick Gillespie discusses Joe Biden.

Nick Gillespie and Amanda Winkler discuss lies about Snowden.

Ronald Bailey discusses crony capitalism.

Anthony L. Fisher and Mike Weiss discuss the Syrian disaster and Obama’s blame for it.

Nick Gillespie discusses the faux withdrawal from Afghanistan.

C4SS fellow William Gillis will be speaking on anarchism at The Future of Politics Conference in Oakland, California this Sunday.

“Anarchism’s lone objective is to reach a point at which the belligerence of some humans against humanity, in whatever form, comes to a halt. And with this end point in mind, people must transcend themselves in the spirit of brother and sisterhood, so that each individual, drawing on natural ability, can develop freely.” — Gustav Landauer, Anarchism in Germany

Available as an ebook (PDF).

Available as a ready-to-print zine (PDF).

Some numbers and interesting notes about C4SS media activities in September:

• 12 op-eds were published and sent to various media outlets;
• There were 34 pickups, totalling almost 3 per op-ed — an excellent average (in August, by comparison, our work was cited and picked up a paltry 10 times);
• Chad Nelson’s “Obama’s Legacy Will Not Be One of Peace” was notably picked up by WesternJournalism.com (and five other outlets);
• Dawie Coetzee’s “Dieselgate: Why VW Will Come Out Smelling Like Roses” was picked up both by The Seoul Times and by The Costa Rica News (aside from other two outlets). We’ve had a good relationship with both outlets for a while now, and it’s good to see that they are still happy to give our content more visibility;
• If we’re talking sheer numbers, Kevin Carson’s “‘Peace Through Strength,’ And Other Lies” seems to have struck a chord: it was picked up 6 times during the month!

Now, we also continue to cultivate a good relationship with outlets such as CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, the Augusta Free Press, and a few others. As I stated last month, our focus is gradually shifting to online media, and I think our numbers from now on will start to reflect that.

One thing I should note: I’m settling on dates around the 10th of each month to publish our Media Coordinator report. That gives me more time to check if our pieces were republished and makes it less likely that we miss a pickup. Our late month reports didn’t work well for pieces published by the end of the month.

If you think we’re doing good work, help us spread the word of anarchy even more! Make a donation!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator

Robert Parry discusses U.S. hypocrisy on bombing.

John Feffer discusses modern day population transfers in the Middle East.

Richard Falk discusses the situation in Yemen.

Uri Avnery discusses Nasser.

Michael Welton discusses Canadian foreign policy.

Dan Sanchez discusses the recent bombing of an Afghan hospital.

Roderick T. Long discusses banking freedom in ancient Athens.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the U.S. bombing of an Afghan hospital.

Dan Sanchez discusses Israeli foreign policy.

Ivan Eland discusses reality and symbolism in public affairs.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. hypocrisy with respect to Cuba.

George H. Smith discusses John Locke on private property.

Dahr Jamail discusses justice for Iraq and one man’s mission.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the U.S. in South Korea.

Sheldon Richman discusses proposals to deal with gun violence.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. tyranny and Bobby Fischer.

Jeffrey A. Tucker discusses the prison state.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the media coverage of the recent attack on an Afghan hospital.

Andrew Levine discusses Obama’s losing game in Syria.

Ryan McMaken discusses gun control.

Robert Koehler discusses the bombing of an Afghan hospital.

Michael Brenner discusses two new books on Henry Kissinger.

Franklin Lamb discusses what should be done about the recent U.S. bombing of an Afghan hospital.

Brian Cloughley discusses the recent bombing of an Afghan hospital and the U.S./NATO propaganda machine.

Uri Avnery discusses Abbas.

Gary Leupp discusses the six most disastrous interventions of the 21st century.

John Feffer discusses the Obama war on whistleblowers.

Robert Fantina discusses Canadian universities and Israel.

David Price and Juan Gonzalez discuss the use and abuse of culture in Afghanistan.

Louis Proyect discusses the end of academic freedom in America.

Though I’m unfamiliar with the work of the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, I was nonetheless pleased to see the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a non-government official. Other (unworthy) candidates this year included Angela Merkel, John Kerry and Javad Zarif.

In “War and Peace as States of Mind” (published in Marc Guttman’s excellent anthology Why Peace), Butler Shaffer hits the nail on the head:

Contrary to our politically directed thinking, peace is not just the absence of war, a condition to be turned on or off as suits the needs of nation-states in manipulating their respective populations. When promoters and conductors of the war system are Nobel Peace Prize recipients, it becomes evident that the popular meaning of the concept has become little more than a confused and contradictory strategy to be employed in fleeting service to the interests of coercive power structures.

…from James Wasserman’s “Pulling Liberty’s Teeth,” published in the third (2008) edition of the anthology Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation:

America’s first state and local gun laws were nearly all designed to keep guns out of the hands of slaves. These included laws passed prior to the American Revolution. After the Civil War, nearly every American gun law sought to keep guns out of the hands of freed former slaves. Thus, gun control has always had a particularly odious racial cast.

Rami G. Khouri discusses the GCC intervention in Yemen.

Robert Parry discusses whether neocons are an existential threat.

Alfred McCoy discusses Obama’s policy towards China.

Nick Turse discusses the meaning of assassination.

Vijay Prashad discusses rogue states and diplomacy with Noam Chomsky.

Yves Engler discusses the Canadian contribution to British colonialism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses a good interview of a British Saudi loyalist.

Aisha Maniar discusses the efforts to hold torturers accountable.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses whether we’re getting somewhere on tech privacy.

Laurence M. Vance discusses the legitimacy of gambling laws.

Bill Buppert discusses American policing and the coming domestic insurgency.

Martha Mundy discusses the war in Yemen.

Ivan Eland discusses why the U.S. shouldn’t go to war with China.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the spread of the War on Terror to Syria.

Adam Dick discusses ending sin taxes on marijuana.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why libertarians don’t compromise.

Leonard Read discusses the penalties of surrender.

James Bovard discusses the Supreme Court’s record on freedom.

Jeffrey A. Tucker discusses Auberon Herbert.

Lawrence W. Reed discusses an antiwar hero.

Sheldon Richman discusses Planned Parenthood, social peace, and the libertarian approach.

Sheldon Richman discusses ending gun violence.

Sheldon Richman discusses why the politicians really need us.

David S. D’Amato discusses the right to rule.

Abigail R. Hall discusses the distrust of Uncle Sam.

Lucy Stegierwald discusses the rotten character of U.S. policy.

Glenn Greenwald discusses how U.S. bombs keep dropping in places where wars have allegedly ended.

Roderick T. Long discusses economic freedom in Athens.

John Pilger discusses Wikileaks.

Joshua Frank discusses the need to oppose all foreign intervention in Syria.

“Dual power” can be nicely summed up by the popular Wobbly phrase of “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” Proponents of a dual power strategy share a belief in developing, at the grassroots level, an “alternative social infrastructure” that piece-by-piece replaces our statist, capitalist, society. Simply put, this revolutionary tactic involves competing with the state by building and utilizing counter-institutions that allow us to live in the type of non-oppressive world we want (as much possible) in the present. Dual power is seen as another form of civil disobedience and/or nonviolent direct action in agorist circles, but with the capability of vastly restructuring our society for ourselves and one another, while the state is left out to dry.

Insofar as how agorism may be used to create a free society, agorists believe that by using markets that operate outside the state’s purview (black and gray markets), a new economy is created alongside the existing “official” economy, slowly eroding the latter. Agorism was developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III, the late radical Rothbardian theorist, as a counter political-economic philosophy.

Examples he and modern day agorists share in vision include communities built around excess networks of producer and consumer cooperatives, small enterprises, mutual aid institutions, do-it-yourself collectives, community gardens, and credit unions that both do and do not directly conflict with capitalist institutions. If a monopoly is in operation with diseconomies of scale, dual-power should involve the act of providing the service at a smaller scale, at a more competitive ideal firm size, properly controlled and “regulated” by unionization of the working members within those firms. This “dual-power economy” would disengage, as far as possible, from the formal capitalist market economy, and increasingly create, over time, its competition within the black and gray market — leaving agorists substantially liberated to organize, produce, labor and exchange however they wish in this untaxed, non-state regulated counter-economy.

We’re pleased to report we’re now on Patreon. Please visit our page and consider chipping in to our vital efforts on a monthly basis. Whatever amount you can give to C4SS is meaningful.

There are already countless ways to give to C4SS. Whether you want to make a one time gift or recurring monthly donations, there are a variety of ways to do so and multiple platforms to pick from. Whichever way you choose to give to C4SS, your contribution will go a long way towards helping us introduce market anarchist ideas into the stale mainstream debate.

Thanks from all of us here at the Center for a Stateless Society.

What’s the difference between “market anarchism” and “anarcho-capitalism”?

The difference between market anarchism and anarcho-capitalism is contentious, and somewhat semantic. Anarcho-capitalists choose to use the word “capitalism” because they believe it denotes a laissez-faire system of economics, free from government control. Market anarchists are far more critical of capitalism, as they believe the term “capitalism” does not denote a truly freed economic system. Market anarchists avoid using the word “capitalism” because it often refers to our current, unfree economic system, dominated by corporations and vast income inequality. Market anarchists say that “capitalism” places too much emphasis on capital, implying rule by the owners of the means of production, a form of oppression which market anarchists oppose. Many market anarchists believe that in a freed society, the world would look very different from how it looks now under state capitalism. They believe that freed markets would not result in corporate domination and hierarchical firm structure. If such firms did exist, they would be few and far between. As Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson write in Markets Not Capitalism, “Market anarchists believe in market exchange, not in economic privilege. They believe in free markets, not in capitalism.”

Adherents of anarcho-capitalism believe a capitalist, laissez-faire economic system is desirable for maximum freedom and human flourishing. Market anarchism does not seek to prescribe a desirable economic system. Instead, market anarchists recognize that not everyone in a free society will desire to engage in a profit-oriented market, and alternative voluntary economic systems, such as cooperatives, gift economies, and communes, may flourish. While market anarchists may often advocate market exchange, pluralism and decentralization are also of great significance. As long as these different voluntary economic systems can peacefully coexist, market anarchists take no issue with such alternatives.

Tom Engelhardt discusses 14 years on from 9-11.

Sheldon Richman discusses the Kim Davis issue.

Nick Turse with additional reporting from Gabriel Karon discusses U.S. military policy in Africa.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses 9-11 and blowback.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses Hilary Clinton’s foreign policy.

Kevin Carson discusses peace through strength and other lies.

Chad Nelson discusses how Obama’s legacy will not be one of peace.

David R. Henderson discusses why the return of conscription won’t substantially reduce the probability of war.

Michael Bassett discusses the weaponization of human rights in the context of the Korean situation.

Patrick Cockburn discusses drone executions as a mark of tyranny.

Stephen Kinzer discusses the war against ISIS and staying out of it.

Todd E. Pierce discusses how U.S. war theories target dissenters.

Jonathan Cook discusses Israel.

Jacob Sullum discusses a call to bring back the War on Drugs.

George H. Smith discusses the traditional Christian take on private property.

Dan Sanchez discusses why peace can’t be achieved through politics.

Michael Swanson discusses a book about militarism.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses bringing Cold War murderers to justice.

David Boaz discusses Rand Paul.

Franklin Lamb discusses the situation in Lebanon.

Ramzy Baroud discusses Palestine and refugee crises.

Ajamu Baraka discusses the Yemen tragedy and the ongoing crisis of the left in the U.S.

David Swanson discusses Bernie Sander’s position on Saudi Arabia.

Thomas Mountain discusses blaming Africans for Western crimes.

Fred Kaplan discusses the GOP debate and foreign policy.

Dan Sanchez discusses Obama’s drone war.

Matt Peppe discusses U.S. relations with Cuba.

Nick Gillespie discusses Rand Paul’s performance in a recent GOP debate.

Cory Massimino discusses the Constitution.

Michael Swanson discusses empire, security, and the war state.

As always, C4SS had an active month covering the world’s major headlines. Dawie Coetzee explained how the Volkswagen scandal will only serve to empower the established auto industry, Volkswagen included. Dylan Delikta looked at the Syrian refugee crisis and the insidious role that nation-states and borders play. And Ryan Calhoun took apart the Kim Davis saga, destroying the phony good vs. evil narrative surrounding Davis and Judge Bunning.

C4SS also published ACLU Sr. Editor Matthew Harwood’s excellent review of David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules. Even Graeber himself stopped to take notice on Twitter.

We also reprinted several left-libertarian luminaries, including material from Karl Hess, Robert Anton Wilson, SEKIII and Voltairine de Cleyre. If you have requests for reprints of other anarchist classics, please reach out to us.

Finally, we’ve ramped up our output on the Stigmergy blog. We aspire to post daily and we encourage you to weigh in via the comments section.

Don’t you think this stellar output deserves a donation? It doesn’t have to be huge — whatever you can contribute will help keep C4SS going and growing.

PLEASE CONSIDER MAKING A ONE TIME DONATION via Paypal:

Many thanks,
Chad

I hope to review Gary Francione‘s Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? here next month. I’ve found much of what I’ve watched and read thus far from Francione compelling. In the meantime, here is a good snippet on the topic of animal rights from Corin Bruce’s essay, Green Anarchism: Towards the Abolition of Heirarchy,

The idea of animal rights proposes that the kind of moral consideration that is often granted to members of our own species should be extended to non-human animals as well. This thinking goes hand in hand with green anarchism, because it can be seen to argue — upon recognising that the hierarchies that pervade our own society should be abolished — that the hierarchies that involve the human subordination of other species of animals should be abolished for much the same reasons.

Central to this approach is the notion of ‘speciesism’, which refers to a prejudice in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species, and against the interests of members of other species. This type of hierarchy is not based upon the recognition of any actual capacities held by members of other species, but instead on the mere fact that they are not members of our own group. Importantly, the logical structure of speciesism is argued to be the same as all other forms of social hierarchy. For example, it is integral to the attempted justification of racism, which locates what someone’s race happens to be as a basis for dominating them, and just as well to sexism, which depends instead on one’s sex. As such, proponents of animal rights argue that speciesist logic is just as irrational as that of any other form of domination: just because someone else is different to me, does not mean that they do not count morally, or that they can be dominated as if they were a resource for my own ends.

If we remove the veil of speciesism, and recognise the capacities that non-human animals often genuinely do possess, then what are we left with? Despite the sometimes vast differences between humans and non-human animals, one property that we seem to hold in common is that which is argued to be crucial for moral consideration: ‘sentience’. Sentience is understood as the capacity to be conscious of the world, or in other words to have experiences from one’s own point of view, which — perhaps most importantly for animal rights — translates into the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. It follows that when a sentient non-human animal such as a pig, donkey, or fish is dominated by a hierarchical structure, that they suffer harm in much the same way that a human being does. As such, it is argued that what species one happens to be a member of is ultimately irrelevant, and that it is whether or not one is sentient — be they human or not —  that is crucial for moral consideration, meaning that anarchist struggles should be broadened to include animal liberation as well.

See also David Graham, Walter Block, and C4SS Senior Fellow Roderick Long on the issue. Chapters 2 and 5 of C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier’s book, Anarchy and Legal Order, briefly touch on the issue as well.

In an email exchange, Gary also shared the following: “By far the most interesting libertarian writing about the issue of animals is Stephen R. L. Clark. (Stephen sometimes calls himself a libertarian, sometimes an “anarcho-conservative.”) I would heartily recommend The Moral Status of Animals and Animals and Their Moral Standing.”

Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, “at ten in the evening.” The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever! –Murray Bookchin

Part of the dissolutionary strategy advocated by C4SS is called Open Source Insurgency or embracing institutional, organizational or technological innovations — low-tech or high-tech — that render centralized or authoritarian governance impossible (or so damn costly as to be regarded impossible). One of these innovations is Tor. And, so, C4SS maintains an always-on Tor Node. But we need your help.

C4SS has maintained a Tor relay node for four years. This is our fourth quarter fundraiser for this project. Every contribution will help us maintain the node until January 2016.

We encourage everyone to consider operating a Tor relay node yourself. If this, for whatever reason, is not an option, you can still support the Tor project and online anonymity with a $5 donation to the C4SS Tor relay node.

C4SS maintains a Tor relay node with a freedom friendly data center in the Netherlands. The relay is part of a global network dedicated to the idea that a free society requires freedom of information. Since June 2011 C4SS has continuously added nearly 10 Mbps of bandwidth to the network (statistics). Although we can’t know, by design, what passes through the relay, it’s entirely likely that it has facilitated communications by revolutionaries, agorists, whistleblowers, journalists working under censorious regimes and many more striving to advance the cause of liberty and the dissolution of authority.

If you believe, as we do, that Tor is one of the technologies that makes both state and corporate oppression not only obsolete, but impossible, please consider operating as a Tor relay or donating to support the C4SS node.

The State is damage, we will find a route around!

• Internet Security Is Our Responsibility
• Tor: The Onion Router
• Tor Is For Everyone: Why You Should Use Tor
• 7 Things You Should Know About Tor
• Using PGP Encryption To Communicate Privately
• Keeping Your Cryptocurrency Safe
• Dark Wallet: New Weapons for Old Wars

If you are interested in learning more about Tor and how to become a relay node yourself, then check out our write up on the project: Stateless Tor.

Please donate today!

Bitcoin is also welcome:

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