Murray Rothbard once opined that there were only two “just wars” in all of American history. The wars in question were the American Revolutionary War and the secessionist war of the Confederate States during the American Civil War.
Murray’s reasoning for including, at least, the war of the Confederacy is dubious. To quote his take on what constitutes a just war:
My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.
This viewpoint of Rothbard is not the best take on just war. Rothbard uses the collectivist concept of a people rather than the autonomous individual. This can easily lead to a nationalistic defense of state sovereignty as opposed to a radical defense of individual rights. This is not to deny that human beings exist in a social context. It simply acknowledges that consent is ultimately necessary on an individual level.
Even if one agrees with this viewpoint, it doesn’t legitimize the South’s war. The South was trying to preserve coercive domination over black people. And the Confederacy hypocritically denied slaves the same right of secession that the Confederate government was claiming in relation to the Union. The negative libertarian rights and freedoms of the slaves were not acknowledged by the Confederate state.
There is simply no way of reconciling radical libertarian principle with a defense of the so called Southern War of Independence. This doesn’t mean the Union was perfect or perfectly embodied libertarian ideals either. To quote Roderick Long:
When libertarians on one side point out that the Union centralised power, violated civil liberties, committed vicious war crimes, was hypocritical on secession, ignored avenues for peaceful emancipation, and cared more about tariffs and nationalism than about ending slavery, I agree and applaud; but they lose me when they start calling the Civil War the “Second War of American Independence” and portray the Confederates as freedom fighters.
Equivalently, when libertarians on the other side point out that the preservation and extension of slavery was central to the South’s motivations for secession (as seems clear from what secessionists said at the time of secession, as opposed to what they said in their memoirs years later), and that the Confederacy was just as bloated and oppressive a centralized state as the Union, equally hypocritical on secession and equally invasive of civil liberties, once more I agree and applaud. (As I like to say, the Confederacy was just another failed government program.) But they too lose me, when they start calling Lincoln a great libertarian and the consolidation of federal power a victory for liberty.
The proper position to take is one of opposition to both states alike and support for anarchistic abolitionism of the Lysander Spooner variety.
Welcome to 2015! This is Missing Comma, a media criticism and analysis blog project graciously hosted by the Center for a Stateless Society. As with last year, our continuing mission is to understand how various forms of informational media – mainly the news – interact with individuals, and vice versa. Our goal: lay down the framework for an anarchist news organization that not only challenges the existing media landscape, but can ultimately replace it entirely.
To do that, we’ll be looking at the history of journalism, as well as present-day examples of breaches in media ethics and instances where misunderstandings between the public and the media arise. We’ll also be talking with experts in the field of media ethics about various issues from conflicts of interest to press freedom.
We’re expanding our operation this year to include a podcast and DIY educational materials. We’ve got a Patreon page set up here, where you can donate as much or as little as you like to keep us going. We explain where your donations go over there on the Patreon page, but basically, you’ll be helping us to bring on multiple writers to work on the blog and establish a general fund we can tap into for things like printing materials. We’re also expanding our social media presence in 2015 to encompass Twitter and Facebook, and we’ve got a secondary blog over here at Tumblr where we’ll be posting to daily.
This was kind of a short post, but one of our new year resolutions is to adhere to the old adage “quality over quantity” as much as humanly possible. I’m Trevor Hultner, main thing-doer at Missing Comma; you can follow me on Twitter at @missingcomma. We’re also incredibly lucky to have Juliana Perciavalle on the team for a second year as well. She’s about to start her final semester in college, but she’ll be dropping in throughout the year. Thanks for your support, and thanks for reading!
December is almost over and along with it 2014. C4SS had an amazing month and an amazing year and we owe everything to you — our supporters.
This year closes with many people interested in anarchism or, at least, the ground long surveyed and mapped by anarchists. From the stark and gleeful brutality of state sponsored torture to the relentless, metronome regularity of police abuse against peaceful men, women, children and animals, the world is slowly realizing that the state is not only standing on our necks robbing us blind, it is standing in our way holding us back from our future.
This is where, and when, we need more anarchists writing about anarchism — its practicality, its everyday nature and its transformative and uplifting power. Liberty is an acid that dissolves and disintegrates all authority; this is why liberty is blocked at every approach and banned from even basic expression. This is why we need liberty, more then ever, roiling and seething. In 2015 we will do our part in bringing liberty to a boil, but we can’t do it without your support. A stateless society is what we want, more than anything, and C4SS is a concerted way of bringing this goal closer. As Voltairine de Cleyre has said, “We have done this because we love liberty and hate authority.”
If C4SS, as an organization and an idea, is something you like having around or would like to see do more things (like funding more studies, publishing more books, helping with travel expenses for writers to speak at events, updating the youtube graphics, etc), then, please, donate $5 today.
What will $5 a month get you from C4SS? Well let’s see,
C4SS cannot thank Nick Ford enough for his tireless devotion to the Feed 44 project. This is his garden and it is beginning to yield amazing fruit.
The Anarchism of Everyday Life
In December we published Kevin Carson’s 18th Study, The Anarchist Thought of Colin Ward, a survey of the work of Colin Ward. Colin Ward is one of those social theorists, like Pyotr Kropotkin, David Graeber, Elinor Ostrom, James C. Scott or Karl Hess, that grounds their approach in working people working and the flashes of creative problem solving brilliance found in their everyday collaboration and cooperation.
Like Kropotkin’s, Ward’s was a communism expressed in a love for a wide variety of small folk institutions, found throughout the nooks and crannies of history, of a sort most people would not think of when they hear the term “communism.” Kropotkin himself resembled William Morris in his fondness for the small-scale, local, quaint and historically rooted—especially medieval folkmotes, open field villages, free towns, guilds, etc.—as expressions of the natural communism of humanity. But as David Goodway notes, “Ward… goes far beyond him in the types of co-operative groups he identifies in modern societies and the centrality he accords to them in anarchist transformation.”
No More Cheers for Uber
In Uber Delenda Est, Kevin Carson withdraws his initial “One Cheer for Uber…” while doubling down on a radical p2p iteration of the concept, “hack the app, salt the service, fight the competition with better competition.” Even though Carson has withdrawn his cheer, he couldn’t help but point out the ideological blinders that allows both pro- and con-Uber that see it as an expression of a “free market”,
But anyone who either defends or attacks Uber as an example of the “free market” is a damfool. Uber and Lyft are not genuine sharing services. And they’re sure as hell not “free market” or “laissez-faire” operations, Reason‘s and Pando’s agreement to the contrary notwithstanding. The proprietary, walled-garden app they use to enforce the toll-gates between riders and drivers is every bit as much a state-enforced monopoly as the legacy taxicab industry’s medallions.
The Spectacle of Revolution
Ben Reynolds, in his first article with C4SS, The Image of Revolution, takes us through a brief history of 21st century revolutions and attempted revolutions all the while pointing out why they have failed to achieve their desired ends. Reynolds offers us a rapid series of questions that each would-be revolution should be able to enthusiastically answer positively.
If state power is the foundation of oppression, war, and the monopolization of property, then a genuine revolution must dismantle state power. There can be no half-measures or gradual steps in this regard. There are thus only a few simple questions that the observer may ask of any revolution: Does it struggle for the freedom, equality, and dignity of the people? Does it oppose institutionalized hierarchy and authority wherever it may be found? Does it seek to shatter the state? If a movement cannot answer any of these questions positively, then it deserves neither our support nor our sympathy. To the contrary, if it can, it deserves nothing less than the ardent support and aid of all those who struggle together in the name of freedom.
Consent: More Important Then Ever
As the debate concerning issues of sexual assault in our society and in our institutions continue to demand acknowledgement and solutions there is a tendency to turn to the state as the answer. The state doesn’t — it can’t — solve problems. The state can only smash things apart and give priority to elites over the remaining pieces.
But this doesn’t mean that solutions do not exist or, if kept out of the hands of bureaucrats and away from the hammer of the state, do not merit our consideration. Nick Ford in his feature Affirmative Consent: Yes and No takes a moment to delineate the differences between Affirmative Consent “as a law” versus Affirmative Consent “as a cultural norm”:
As a cultural norm it becomes a bigger conversation between equals. It becomes possible to challenge, revise and reorganize our lives in accordance with this norm. When we suggest to our friends that they should aim for affirmative consent, or hold an impromptu protest, invite a public speaker on the matter, hang up signs or integrate this principle into our daily lives, then we are trying to cultivate a norm about consent and how we deal with its absence.
Liberty and Equality
One of the positions that left-wing markets anarchist defend is the difference between the centrifugal forces of freed markets versus the centripetal forces of capitalism. If we were to look into a system and identify great inequalities of wealth and, its corollary, power, then, by our analysis, we have damn good reason to think somewhere in that system a state, in its myriad manifestations, is present and growing. As David S. D’Amato discusses in his The Warning of Animal Farm: Inequality Matters inequalities, vast or developing, are a warning sign, a symptom, that the cancer of the state is beginning to grow or has already metastasized.
Criticizing inequality ought to be important to libertarianism to the extent that we take our own free market ideas seriously and see the political economy of today as far removed from our model. Libertarians should accordingly welcome socialism and class analysis as found in the work of leftists like Hodgskin and Orwell. It’s time we start emphasizing liberty and equality, not liberty or equality.
Another Entrepreneur Lost
As the world watched the police choke the life out of Eric Garner and, then, see the state vindicate the brutality of its agents against peaceful people, C4SS Adviser Cathy Reisenwitz penned, I’m sorry Eric Garner. I don’t know what else to do. Reisenwitz’s touching letter recognizes the fear, sense of hopelessness and heartbreak that comes from living in a society were our friends, family and neighbors can be killed virtually in front of us. I have no doubt in my mind that we will win the day and build a better world, but this will never change the fact that Eric Garner and many many others will not be able to share it with us.
I’m sad. Beyond angry. Brokenhearted. The Staten Island Grand Jury chose not to indict the officer who choked father of six Eric Garner to death on the street while attempting to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes.
The One Soldier that Fought for our Freedom
Chelsea Manning turned 27 in prison on December 17th. Manning has been described by Kevin Carson, back in 2010, as the One Soldier Who Really Did “Defend Our Freedom”. She is yet another example of authority’s self-aware fear of liberty and revulsion to conscience. Nathan Goodman in his letter, Happy Birthday, Chelsea Manning, articulated our feelings for her and our hope for her future,
I hope someday, the sooner the better, Chelsea Manning will be able to celebrate her birthday free from the state’s prisons. Until then, I wish her a happy birthday and as much freedom and happiness as possible.
Fellows on Patreon
Kevin Carson and Thomas Knapp have both popped up on the creator supporting site Patreon. Patreon allows individual to directly support their favorite creators, or in this case, left-libertarian writers. You can pledge any amount that fits your budget or enjoyment of their work, and, for certain pledged amounts, they offer bonuses.
Please Support Today!
All of this work is only sustainable through your support. If you think the various political and economic debates around the world are enhanced by the addition of left libertarian market anarchist, freed market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist solutions, challenges, provocations or participation, please, donate $5 today. Keep C4SS going and growing.
“So let’s look without preconceptions at Scrooge’s allegedly underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit. The fact is, if Cratchit’s skills were worth more to anyone than the fifteen shillings Scrooge pays him weekly, there would be someone glad to offer it to him. Since no one has, and since Cratchit’s profit-maximizing boss is hardly a man to pay for nothing, Cratchit must be worth exactly his present wages.”
“One of my favorite Christmas stories is A Christmas Carol, but my reasons for liking it so much have changed over the years. As I’ve learned more economics, I’ve come to see that Ebenezer Scrooge’s tight-fisted, miserly ways have some admirable qualities.”
“The miser has never recovered from Charles Dickens’s attack on him in A Christmas Carol. Although the miser had been sternly criticized before Dickens, the depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge has become definitive and has passed into the folklore of our time. Indeed, the attitude pervades even in freshman economics textbooks.”
Though it should be duly noted that Mises Daily has been slacking of late. Last year, rather than posting a new Scrooge article, “Ebenezer Scrooge, Humanitarian” merely linked back to Shaffer and Block.
Rand Paul recently suggested that cigarette taxes played a role in the NYPD killing of Eric Garner. This has sparked much ridicule from people supportive of cigarette taxes and taxation in general. Are they right? Is Rand Paul right? This post seeks to offer an opinion on that question.
To begin with, the confrontation might never have happened without Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes. And that would not have been considered a crime without taxation on cigarettes. It’s true that the cops may have still stopped him for another reason or just to harass him, but the likelihood was increased by cigarette taxes.
It’s true that cigarette taxes didn’t literally kill Eric Garner. They did however contribute to the context in which he was killed. When you empower police through compulsory taxation laws; you set up a situation where they may have to forcibly subdue violators. And the act of tax evasion is not a violent one. A person may resist the imposition of a tax with violence, but that doesn’t mean the initial act of refusing to pay a tax is itself violent.
The reason we libertarians oppose compulsory taxation is that we object to the use of force against peaceful people. If the analysis above is correct; tax evaders fall into the category of peaceful persons qua tax evaders. And therefore cannot be justly coerced into paying taxes. Not even taxes with good intent and cause in mind.
The sin kind of taxes leveled on cigarettes are also a particularly loathsome form of taxation. It financially penalizes people who choose to keep buying large quantities of the good being taxed. It’s usually motivated by puritan standards too. The notion that people should meet a state enforced standard of moral or health purity.
Using force to impose such a standard is particularly galling. It would be bad enough for people to receive undue nagging social pressure to enforce purity standards, but the use of physical force to enforce them is even more odious. Such a thing needs to be opposed by liberty lovers everywhere. And we left-libertarians can lead the way.
Some suggestions for working on this issue include peaceful agorist black market activity, educational work, and civil disobedience like occupying congress person’s offices. All of which have been done before with some success. I encourage people to get started on this project today. And to help bring sin taxes to an end. You can trying hooking up with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left or this site, The Center for a Stateless society to assist in the efforts mentioned above.
The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce a new interdisciplinary, open-access libertarian academic journal, the MOLINARI REVIEW, edited by me.
We’re looking for articles, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, broadly understood as including classical liberalism, individualist anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcha-feminism, panarchism, voluntaryism, mutualism, agorism, distributism, Austrianism, Georgism, public choice, and beyond – essentially, everything from Emma Goldman to Ayn Rand, C. L. R. James to F. A. Hayek, Alexis de Tocqueville to Michel Foucault.
(We see exciting affiliations among these strands of the libertarian tradition; but you don’t have to agree with us about that to publish in our pages.)
Disciplines in which we expect to publish include philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, theology, ecology, literature, and law.
We aim to enhance the visibility of libertarian scholarship, to expand the boundaries of traditional libertarian discussion, and to provide a home for cutting-edge research in the theory and practice of human liberty.
All submissions will be peer-reviewed. We also plan to get our content indexed in such standard resources as International Political Science Abstracts and The Philosopher’s Index.
The journal will be published both in print (via print-on-demand) and online (with free access); all content will be made available through a Creative Commons Attribution license. We regard intellectual-property restrictions as a combination of censorship and protectionism, and hope to contribute to a freer culture.
We’re especially proud of the editorial board we’ve assembled, which at present includes over sixty of the most prestigious names in libertarian scholarship.
The journal’s Associate Editor is Grant Mincy (a Fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society), whose pathbreaking work in the field of anarchist environmentalism you should check out here and here.
For more information on the journal, including information on how to submit an article, check out our website. (Information on subscribing, or ordering individual copies, will be available later.)
We’re excited about this new publishing opportunity, and we hope you’ll help us make it a success!
In 1950, the US went to (undeclared, and under pro forma UN auspices) war with North Korea.
In 1953, the parties (the US, the UN, South Korea on one side, North Korea on the other) negotiated a cease-fire, which has now been in effect for 61 years.
Over the years, various incidents have occurred which strained the cease-fire. From the point of view of an American media consumer, most of those incidents (the taking of the USS Pueblo, sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, the artillery duel on and around Yeonpyeong, etc.) have been blamed on the north, but …
Earlier this year, Kim Jong-Un’s regime declared that the impending release of a film, The Interview, constituted an act of war. And we all laughed. Well, most of us laughed. I know I did.
Well, now. This shit is starting to get real all of a sudden, isn’t it?
Could the US go to back to open war with the DPRK over the matter? I’d like to laugh at that notion, too, but then I remember what the Obama regime has done or tried to do to individuals who have initiated embarrassing disclosures about it (the four who come immediately to mind are Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown).
When the US accuses a foreign government of doing things that it has jailed (or tried to jail) and exiled people for, war doesn’t really seem beyond the realm of likelihood. And the US government’s bellicosity abroad seems to run on the same cycle as its descents into banana republicanism and police statism at home. We’re at a pretty high tempo on the latter front right now, for reasons including but not limited to the Ferguson intifada. New attempts at Internet control and censorship here at home, with the Sony hack as an excuse, will almost certainly top the next session of Congress’s to-do list.
Our pale blue dot has circled its star eighteen times since it lost the astronomer who gave us the perspective to see it that way — and that phrase.
Carl Sagan is not usually remembered as a political prophet, aside from pioneering recognition of the dangers of nuclear war and remaining an inspiration to opponents of drug criminalization. But his inquiry probed any political order’s taboo “set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about” (like the USSR’s “capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty” or the USA’s “socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty”). Otherwise, it would wither, as with antiquity’s Alexandrians who never “seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not.”
While not a radical leftist like his feminist wife and coauthor Ann Druyan or his New Leftist friend Saul Landau (who, in a sign of the up-in-the-air alliances of the times, contributed to the Cato Institute’s Inquiry Magazine), his liberalism was influenced by the ferment of SDS’s participatory democracy Whole Earth Catalog-style emancipatory technology. It was thus steadfastly in favor of civil liberties, people power, and sexual liberation, and highly wary of moral panics and calls to trade freedoms for security. Despite being vilified by a right dominated by National Review hawkishness, he sought common ground with pro-lifers. As he said of Albert Einstein, he “was always to detest rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science, and in politics,” and his distrust of politics was evident in proposing “[a] series in which we relive the media and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated government lie.”
He took note that the flowering of inquisitive, tolerant values in ancient Greece and Renaissance Holland grew from their trading economies; as his muse Bertrand Russell put it,
The relation of buyer and seller is one of negotiation between two parties who are both free; it is most profitable when the buyer or seller is able to understand the point of view of the other party. There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength.
His antidote for the existential crises of nuclear war and environmental damage was not consensus reasonable-centrism — he was apprehensive of the triumphalist The End of History prediction “that political life on Earth is about to settle into some rock-stable liberal democratic world government” — but the widest possible experimentation. He recommended two of the great science fiction depictions of functional stateless societies: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with its “useful suggestions… for making a revolution in a computerized technological society,” and Eric Frank Russell’s “conceivable alternative economic systems or the great efficiency of a unified passive resistance to an occupying power.” He hoped the inspiration of such ideas would make a reality “the beginning, much more than the end, of history.”
Chelsea Manning is one of the great heroes of our time. She released secret government documents that described a litany of crimes committed by the American state. In the process, she influenced the Arab Spring and the US withdrawal from Iraq. The state-enabled criminals she exposed have not been held accountable, though their ranks include murderers, torturers, and child rapists. Instead, Chelsea has been punished for exposing these crimes. She was tortured with solitary confinement prior to her trial and then sentenced to decades in prison.
Today marks Chelsea Manning’s 27th birthday, and I’ve been glad to see an outpouring of support for this heroic whistleblower and political prisoner. Gawker posted birthday wishes for her today from journalist Terry Anderson, former Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, and rapper Talib Kweli. Yesterday, The Guardian posted birthday wishes for her from fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden, rapper Lupe Fiasco, and many others.
I hope someday, the sooner the better, Chelsea Manning will be able to celebrate her birthday free from the state’s prisons. Until then, I wish her a happy birthday and as much freedom and happiness as possible.
To learn how to write to Chelsea Manning, check out this guide from the Chelsea Manning Support Network.
Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Akai Gurley. These are just the latest in a line of minorities who have been killed by the police in excessive force cases where no scrutiny was even applied to the cops. While protests arise in the memory of these fallen human beings, I find myself asking a question in their names more abstract at first glance — particularly of the liberal contingent of our alleged “representative” system of government.
There has been from some corners of mainstream liberal opinion justified anger at the disproportionate behavior of the police towards minority populations. However, even this has been couched in terms assuming an overall legitimacy of the system that the victims live within. Consider the view expressed at Salon.com by Elias Isquith, in reaction to Rand Paul pointing out that the excuse used by the NYPD for the harassment and subsequent murder of Eric Garner was enforcement of cigarette taxes: he called this an example of “political narcissism,” unthinking attribution of anything that occurs as vindication of preexisting ideology.
I am not one to deny that such things occur, but to dismiss questions of which laws are enforced in the context of law enforcement — by deadly force, in this case — strikes me as absurd: if indeed the reason that Eric Garner was harassed and subsequently murdered was because of suspicion of circumventing New York City tobacco taxes, then how is that not a valid factor in his death? It is like dismissing the Georgia flashbang grenade maiming of 2 year old “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh — oddly enough, also covered at Salon — in a raid triggered by an alleged petty methamphetamine deal by a relative with “well, The Law is The Law.” Why is the law The Law though? Do outcomes not matter? Is the law a means to its own end of self perpetuation?
An implied reasoning is carried behind the respective mainstream ideologies of US politics, and has been from the beginning. The reasoning has been that there is, within a “representative” government, a range of responsibilities for those granted power of a force monopoly, as well as limits to what indeed can or should be done with such. There is within this an implication: If the responsibilities are unfulfilled, or the limits violated, that legitimacy of the granted force monopoly is void. In other words, the ideologies proposed within the respective wings of defense of “representative” government contain a claimed failsafe that if triggered would see revocation of authority — that is, anarchy — as better than continued recognition. This is to say that eventually everyone is an anarchist, it’s just a matter of when.
Consider the recent circumstances that have led to the administration and justification of deadly force by the State and its officers: Suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, jaywalking, buying pain medication without a prescription (Rumain Brisbon, in Phoenix), even merely existing in the toy section of a Wal-Mart with a toy gun in the case of John Crawford (in an open carry state, nonetheless).
Frankly, any ideology that can dismiss the laws that led to such harsh enforcement has no standing to even bother criticizing the enforcement itself in my opinion — when you state that an act is to be met with force, or allow some to be seen as threats for other than logical reasons, you essentially court violence for your preference — period.
To simultaneously defend taxation as a behavior modifier while decrying the result of its enforcement is hypocrisy. If you claim tobacco taxation as a justified use of force to maintain, the blood of Eric Garner is on your hands, like it or not. You can feel as bad as you wish, it doesn’t bring the Garner family back their father and husband. Government is a hammer, and it landed where it did.
If the anguish and outrage prompted by the murders committed by the enforcers of the State are to mean anything, they suggest something that is today seen as a bridge too far for those anointed as acceptable within the political sphere.
That suggestion is of the bankruptcy of the Government Is Us myth, leaving the reality that we are faced with an Us versus Them scenario, and we are, to the state, The Enemy. If now is not the time for a liberty or death moment, then when?
Como afirmei em setembro, nós passaríamos por um momento de apertar os cintos na embaixada em português do C4SS. É claro que isso não significa que vamos cessar todas as nossas atividades, mas apenas que não estamos trabalhando no ritmo frenético em que vínhamos desde fevereiro.
De 26 de setembro a 25 de outubro, publicamos apenas 6 artigos. Em outubro, nosso blockbuster foi o panfleto de Kevin Carson O punho de ferro por trás da mão invisível, que recebeu até uma introdução especial para o público brasileiro pelo próprio Carson.
Já de 26 de outubro a 25 de novembro, publicamos 9 artigos, três deles originais. Valdenor Júnior falou sobre o separatismo brasileiro e sobre a consciência negra. Já o convidado Eduardo Lopes, por ocasião do Dia da Consciência Negra (20 de outubro) falou sobre como a Lei de Terras, sancionada durante o Império no Brasil, impediu os negros de ascenderem socialmente.
Em outubro, conseguimos 476 curtidas em nossa página no Facebook. Já em novembro, mais 227, ultrapassando a marca de 3000 curtidas. No Twitter, chegamos a 99 seguidores outubro e permanecemos no mesmo patamar em novembro. Não registrei o número de republicações que tivemos neste mês, que ficarão para o mês que vem, quando farei um resumo das atividades de todo o ano.
Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de Mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado
Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: October-November 2014
As I stated in September, we would be tightening our belts in our Portuguese stateless embassy. It obviously does not mean that we will cease our activities, but that we will not keep the rhythm we had since February.
From September 26 to October 25, we published 6 articles. But during that month our blockbuster was Kevin Carson’s The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand in Portuguese, with a special introduction to Brazilian readers, written by Carson himself.
From October 26 to November, we published 9 articles, three of them originals. Valdenor Júnior talked about secessionism in Brazil and about black awareness. Invited writer Eduardo Lopes, for the ocasion of the Black Awareness Day (November 20th) talked about the Law of Lands, that was sanctioned during the Brazilian Empire and prevented black people from reaching economic independence.
In October, we got 476 likes in our Facebook page, while in November we had 227 likes, surpassing the 3,000 likes mark. On Twitter, we reached 99 followers and remained at the same level in November. I did not register the number of pickups we had this month. I will do so this month, when I will do a retrospective for the whole year.
Antiwar.com is having its annual fundraising drive right now. And it’s well worth contributing to. You won’t easily find a better and more comprehensive news source. The site also features great in house editorial writers like Lucy Steigerwald and Justin Raimondo. Not to mention providing links to many op-eds around the web.
The site is something I visit everyday to enjoy the above features. It keeps me abreast of the latest machinations of the warfare state. This has led to a few blog posts on war related current events. If you’d like to see those posts continue; one way to help is to donate to the fundraising drive.
Another reason to contribute is that the financial deck is stacked against the forces of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism. The war party has the whole U.S. treasury at their disposal. Both of the two major party establishments are committed to a policy of statist interventionism. A way of countering this imbalance is to make contributions to sites like Antiwar.com.
In addition to the reason above; Antiwar.com is also worth making a contribution to because of the timely importance of the issues it addresses. In light of further U.S. military intervention in Iraq and continuation of drone strikes; its message is more relevant than ever. We can’t afford to lose a valuable source of information on the warfare state’s policies at a time like this.
As the destructive impact of said policies spreads; we need to keep abreast of developments more than ever. Knowledge is part of challenging oppressive militaristic power structures and the fruits they bear. Antiwar.com does a real service in furthering this aim. An aim that can save countless lives around the globe.
The immense loss of life from U.S. military policy in particular justifies special attention and focus. We can’t afford to lose sight of the importance of battling the evils of U.S. military interventionism. Antiwar.com is an invaluable resource for furthering this agenda. It deserves our support and attention.
The war party responsible for the above doesn’t sleep and neither does Antiwar.com. News is updated daily and new op-eds from around the net appear on a daily basis as well. If you have any extra cash to spare; do consider helping Antiwar.com continue to do this. You will be rewarded many times over by the information and opinion it gives you access to. If you can; please donate today. Don’t put if off. Antiwar.com needs your support today.
“I am that whore. I do confess. I put you on just like a wedding dress and run down the aisle.” I’m listening to Wedding Dress by Derek Webb. I go to this song when I’m sad.
I’m sad. Beyond angry. Brokenhearted. The Staten Island Grand Jury chose not to indict the officer who choked father of six Eric Garner to death on the street while attempting to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes.
They chose not to make the officer even stand trial. Despite video. Despite the fact that chokeholds are illegal. Despite the coroner ruling the death a homicide. Despite everything. They found no evidence to indicate a crime may have been committed. But they did indict the man who filmed the killing. And they tell us cameras on cops will make a difference.
This is a hard day. It’s been a hard week. A hard month. A hard year.
You get to that point when you’re not angry anymore. When you read the NYPD Tweet, “The #NYPD is committed to rebuilding public trust. #Wehearyou,” and just sit there with your mouth agape, thinking, “How could you?”
But, then, how could I? I am complicit. I have not yet burned the fucking system to the ground. The system that allows police to kill young black males twenty-one times more often than their white counterparts. The system wherein people respond to that stat with lies about black criminality. The system where white men Tweet at me, “Why is this about race?” The system which buys cops tanks but never offers consequences for breaking the law, starting with the one that requires them to report on how many people they kill every year. This is the racist, corrupt, lawless, and totally unaccountable system I build and support and allow through my complacency and it is a system for which I must be called to account.
I’m going to the White House tonight. It’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough. It’s so far from enough that, to quote a friend, “A part of me wants to crawl into a hole and never emerge again.” But I’m going. I don’t know what else to do.
A quick update on English language media for December:
I made 33,437 submissions of C4SS op-eds last month, each submission to as many as 2,597 newspapers worldwide (some submissions, if they were only relevant to the US or to some particular locale, to fewer publications than that).
I’ve identified 50 media pickups of our op-eds for November.
Also at four pickups and with some likely December mojo is Grant Mincy’s piece on the coal economy in Appalachia, “Wild, Wonderful and Free.” Two of those pickups were from West Virginia newspapers, meaning the piece is actually hitting home in the locale it addresses.
As of two years ago, my standard for a “successful” month within the Center’s op-ed program was 20 “pickups” — one each weekday in a 30-day month. Lately, that standard has been 50 pickups per month, for several reasons.
One reason is that Before It’s News, a popular aggregation site, picks up most of our material. We had an internal discussion as to whether or not to count those pickups since BIN is an aggregator; we came down on the side of counting them because BIN is an extremely popular site that gets us lots of exposure … exposure worth including in our counts. It regularly ranks in the top 3,000 sites on the Internet per Alexa and its demographics indicate a very broad reader spectrum that qualifies it as “mainstream” in audience. So while there’s a certain “inflationary” effect, it’s not a false effect.
Another reason for raising the bar, of course, is that we expect, want and strive to get better and better at placing our op-eds in newspapers. And in my opinion we are meeting that expectation. Even two years ago, we were lucky to get the occasional pickup in a weekly community newspaper (we loved, and still love, that market, by the way).
These days it’s not at all unusual for our stuff to show up in small town dailies from coast to coast in the US, with occasional penetration into international markets that we had no expectation of getting into back then — Barbados, Jamaica, Fiji and Taiwan are four that come immediately to mind over the last few months.
My new goal, which I have no expectation of making next month but every expectation of making next year, is the 100-pickup month.
I see no reason why we can’t average two pickups per day by “regular daily newspapers” in addition to 40 BIN reprints, left/political media pickups and US/international market/topic-specific “occasionals.”
That’s the next prize. But, and you knew I was going to say this, winning that prize means continuing to ask for, and get, your support. The US Thanksgiving holiday being fresh in memory, let me take this opportunity to thank all of you who have helped make our work effective, and those who will do so in the future.
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
English Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
The talking point popular among right-leaning libertarians that the Plymouth colony is an example of the failure of the commons has been dealt with on C4SS. But it takes a list to make clear just how often the same piece has been rewritten:
It should be noted that some of the pieces, unlike the one analyzed in the linked C4SS piece, do mention that Plymouth’s economics were imposed by it being a corporation, but none draw a parallel to the modern corporation’s not escaping the same problems. (Prentice’s remark that “Each time I produce less, in my work, than enough to earn a profit for my employer, I am stealing from someone else” gets it even more backward.)
Compare with the take on Plymouth of single-taxers like Fred Foldvary. The elision of the otherwise eagerly-cited account by William Bradford’s noting that his assigning colonists private land was “only for present use (but made no devission for inheritance)” has long been one of their points of contention with the mainstream libertarian movement.
