At NBC News’s World Blog, Petra Cahill says that the situation in the Ivory Coast is the “brewing civil war no one is talking about.” Well, we’ve talked about it a good deal over here at the Center for a Stateless Society, with the nuances of political developments in Ivory Coast implicating market anarchism in important ways. And while there is ostensibly a lot on the line for the people of Ivory Coast, market anarchists point out that, so long as elites remain ensconced in positions of power within any government, no election or civil war can possibly usher in peace or justice.

The recent violence in the country, long singled out for praise as a “model of stability in the region,” turns on the results of a contested November election pitting Laurent Gbagbo against Alassane Ouattara. The corporate media has painted Ouattara as a “soft-spoken economist,” Western in education and orientation and “keen on transparency and good governance.”

Ouattara’s apparently the one we’re supposed to root for, the candidate with United Nations support, an effective cheerleader for Africa’s participation in globalization during his career as an International Monetary Fund executive. With France planning to shuffle hundreds of millions toward Ouattara’s government, and President Obama fawning over the former IMF minion, it’s fairly clear that the state capitalists of the West have big plans for Ivory Coast.

There are, however, no good guys here. Last month Human Rights Watch brought to the fore the widespread crimes against civilians — including rape and murder — attributed to Ouattara loyalists. Those atrocities haven’t visibly inhibited the enthusiasm of the United Nations and France for raining helicopter gunfire down on Gbagbo’s “renegade” forces in order to “protect” the Ouattara team.

On the other hand, Gbagbo and Company are culpable for a wide range of atrocities in the civil war of a few years ago. And in spite of the fact that the Ivory Coast Constitutional Commission, the country’s court of last resort, adjudged Gbagbo the winner in November, Ivoirians continue to debate the integrity of the elections themselves.

Regardless of who’s keeping score on either the atrocity count or the ballot count, the math clearly shows that both Gbagbo and Ouattara are criminals, an illation that ought to come as no surprise since the state is a criminal organization. Rather than the interests of the Ivory Coast’s people, the political class is motivated by the prospect of pillaging a region rich in natural resources like cocoa.

The goal is — as it always is for parasites grasping at the levers of political power — to get rich on the backs of working people, extorting them for labor hours and roping off the country’s riches. Call that process what you want, but it’s not a free market of voluntary exchanges among self-ruling people.

Now more than ever, the people of Ivory Coast ought to be able to recognize what their “leaders” are showing them, that the state and the political system are not designed to preserve justice, protect individual rights or provide necessary services. Rather, the state is an agency for the powerful, one conceived out of the desire to loot and enslave.

“The government,” wrote George H. Smith, “is a thug and a thief; be on your guard, watch it with caution, for it is powerful. But do not be awed by it. Do not grant it respect or moral sanction. Treat it as you would any villain.”

A recent letter to the editor of the Boston Globe from an officer at the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group asks, “We’ve already paid to bail out banks and other big corporations — is it fair to ask us to pay their taxes as well?” Her question comes in response to a Globe article from May 1 that reports on a number of big companies that “paid no federal income taxes last year, despite making millions of dollars in profits.”

Since market anarchists regard taxation as no different from any other form of theft, one might assume that we toast Big Business’s tax avoidance. After all, in a free market everyone is entitled to what they make, right? And the answer to that question is yes — again, assuming we were in anything remotely close to a free market.

Unlike a free market, today’s economic system is a product of what Murray Rothbard called “oligarchic rule: rule by a coercive elite which has managed to gain control of the State machinery.” What those elites make is in no way something they’re entitled to, something obtained through simple, mutually satisfactory trade in a market where all are allowed to compete.

In the accepted political lexicon, free market phraseology has long been applied in the service of a state capitalist system defined by constraints and controls on economic activity, poisoning the well against the ideas of genuine freedom. Likewise, the language of egalitarianism and social justice has been dominated by advocates of a statist status quo who are hardly motivated by justice for the productive class.

What we’re left with is a distorted ideological framework wherein economic exploitation is associated with free markets, equitable conditions for the worker with state intervention in the economy. But the American Enterprise Institute doesn’t stand for true free markets, and the Center for American Progress doesn’t stand for true social justice.

The truth, though perhaps most will find it counterintuitive, is that unbridled economic freedom leads to economic justice. The two are not at all in conflict, as we’ve been assured by the fallacies of “both sides,” but are naturally and inseparably bound. It is monopolization, possibly only through the state’s coercive restraints on consensual economic behavior, that allows a few to amass enormous hoards of wealth, that allows them to extract rents from the toils of industrious society.

Although we all implicitly understand the effects of monopoly, we have been instructed to believe that they arise naturally from the uncontrolled bedlam of “cutthroat competition.” Monopoly, though, is a creature of the state, requiring coercion to cordon off resources and limit our options for survival.

Where open competition generates choice for workers and drives prices down for consumers, the state’s obstruction of potential competitors allows a favored few to skim off the top. Without the external pressure that would accompany total economic freedom, elites are allowed to pocket the difference between the price as it would be and the price reflecting a state-created condition of undersupply.

Whatever the amount of that difference, it is owed to the state’s violent intrusion into the economy for the benefit of the ruling elite; it is decidedly not owed to Big Business “giving the consumer what she wants,” or coming out on top in anything like real competition. Next time you’re looking for something to blame for “corporate greed” as it exists within state capitalism, look no further than heap of “consumer protection” and “safety” rules that suppress real free market alternatives.

Regardless of what you need — be it food, a job, anything — if you have to genuflect before the plutocrat’s system to get it, you’re going to be paying more than you would if free people were allowed to use their labor and resources in any peaceful way. Within this nefarious context, corporate tax breaks are repugnant enough, but let’s also spotlight all of those structures of privilege that advantage Big Business every day.

From direct subsidies and intellectual property to government contracts and regulatory cartelization, privilege is literally all around us, forcing us into an arrangement created by the ruling class. Counter to prevailing myth, a free market it is not. As Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice rightly observes in the Globe article, “Our swashbuckling capitalists couldn’t live without the government subsidizing them.”

In a column three months ago (“Egypt: Let the Looting Begin,” Feb. 4),  I suggested that was really going on in Egypt was somewhat different from the official narrative. In quite a few of the “people power” revolutions in recent years — no matter how sincere the people on the streets — it turned out that there were attempts to orchestrate things by people behind the scenes, for whom “people power” was the very last thing on the agenda. In that column I reported that Frank Wisner — a veteran spook, described by Vijay Prashad at Counterpunch as a “bagman of empire,” was Obama’s man on the ground.

Wisner, a former Director at AIG and Enron with longstanding family ties to the OSS and CIA, had previously been involved in drafting the Bush administration’s postwar blueprint for Iraq. That agenda involved so-called “privatizations” of state industry that amounted to insider deals with global corporate interests for pennies on the dollar, “strong intellectual property protections” largely written by Monsanto and the RIAA, and draconian crackdowns on genuine freedom fighters in the labor movement and the Iraqi Freedom Congress. Paul Bremer, with the help of his Heritage Foundation boys in the Green Zone, basically oversaw the looting of everything that wasn’t nailed down.

In that light, some recent news from Libya is especially interesting. First, Alexander Cockburn (“What’s Really Going On in Libya?” Counterpunch, April 15)  reports that a high priority for the NATO operation in Libya was to see to the central banking arrangements of the revolutionary government in Benghazi. On March 19 they authorized the Central Bank of Benghazi to handle monetary policy for the country. Qaddafi, it seems, had announced his intention to repudiate the dollar and the euro and encourage the use of the gold dinar as a common currency by all of Africa. He’d gained tentative buy-in, over the previous year, from a number of Arab and African regimes. The government-owned Libyan national bank in Tripoli, which is independent of the global banking industry, has been a thorn in the flesh of global financial elites for some time.

Things that make you go “Hmmmm …”

Meanwhile, Russ Baker at Alternet announces (“The CIA’s Man in Libya?” April 26)  that the latest head of rebel forces in Libya, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, is a CIA asset. Hifter has lived in the Greater Washington area of Virginia (cough cough Langley cough) for almost twenty years, enjoying an unusually comfortable lifestyle considerably disproportionate to his visible means of support. Hifter has headed the military wing (Libyan National Army) of an opposition movement in exile (NSFL) for most of that time. The CIA sponsored a training operation for the Libyan National Army at a base in Chad during the reign of Bush I, with a view to a possible future overthrow of Qaddafi. In 1996, Hifter headed a failed overthrow attempt, after which he returned to the United States.

So the head of the opposition movement is on the CIA payroll, and the first order of business of the insurgent regime is to create a central bank that takes orders from international finance capital.  Doesn’t look real good for “freedom” in Libya, does it? Looks pretty damn good for the banksters, though.

If the attempt to overthrow of Qaddafi had anything to do with genuine freedom, it’s a safe bet the U.S. government would have had nothing to do with it.  Put not your faith in princes.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

Sorry for the late update this week — I’m running a bit behind.

This week, I submitted 8,454 Center op-eds to 2,819 publications and tracked six “pickups” …

• On April 30, the Portales, New Mexico News Tribune published a lengthy excerpt from my piece, “On the Road to Nowhere with Johnson and Paul,” as “Their view: Government is vehicle that won’t take you anywhere.”
• On May 3, “The crimes of national pride,” by David D’Amato, appeared in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age and the Deming, New Mexico Headlight ran Darian Worden’s “Good riddance Bin Laden: Now get rid of blinders.”
• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation published Kevin Carson’s “Knowing the Real Enemy” on May 4.
• Kevin Carson’s “The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda” appeared in the St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph [PDF] on May 5 and on Antiwar.com on May 7.

Three random acts of link reciprocity for the week: FU Corporate Media, Patrick Henry Press News, and We Never Jump Ship.

Have a great weekend!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

As Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin observes, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [has] said … that Osama bin Laden’s death could advance the effort to reach a political resolution to the war in Afghanistan …” Declaring that the US “message to the Taliban” “has even greater resonance” now that bin Laden is dead, Clinton apparently thinks that the occasion will prompt a readiness to bargain.

But as the leader of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf party said following the death, bin Laden’s martyrdom will be the ultimate inspiration for young Muslims who see themselves as freedom fighters. When Clinton says that the US is “going to look for ways to put this into the context,” she may be disappointed to discover that the Afghan Taliban has done so quite on their own.

Contrary to self-assured guarantees from the State Department, the Taliban will likely be about as willing to negotiate now as they were with Hekmatyar in the mid-90s. Whatever one thinks about them or their own totalitarian inclinations, no amount of death or imperial diplomacy will persuade the Taliban to “come into the political process” imposed by the US.

The decade-long (roughly) “Soviet Afghanistan” period ought to have demonstrated clearly enough that the people of Afghanistan will not acquiesce in the role of any empire’s dusty satellite. But, then, if American foreign policy were about learning the lessons of history and making decisions in the interests of the broad masses of ordinary people (assuming that were possible) — well, you catch my drift.

Among the familiar refrains within the constant cannonade of “War on Terror” news stories is that the US once armed the people who became the Taliban, in an attempt to force the Soviets to decamp to European Russia. Though it’s not clear what we’re supposed to take away from this piece of realpolitik (particularly when it’s delivered by the likes of, for example, Chris Matthews), it is apparently meant to make us think critically — just not too critically.

That US foreign policy is the product of a venal calculus centered on the interests of imperialists is never really the message; no, that would be just too indecorous, too honest, a way to discuss the decision-making of our sage overlords. Instead, the takeaway message is always that complex, strategic alliances, necessary for the preservation of those consecrated “national interests,” sometimes make odd bedfellows, but that we should never question their underlying wisdom.

Now that the Soviet Union has perished, the expediency of a US-Taliban alliance having lapsed with it, all of those canticles about self-determination, democracy and freedom can be discarded. It was, of course, never about hostility to “evil empire” in and of itself, just to one empire in particular, one to be replaced by something only superficially different.

All of Clinton’s talk about maintaining proper levels of funding for the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development are so much Newspeak for, “Endless war is very profitable for the Inner Party.” The notion that the endless war of the US “War on Terror” is really calculated to reduce the level of terrorism is about as coherent as two plus two making five.

As Orwell understood, though, “Orthodoxy means not thinking.” That US imperialism is a prime motivator for terrorist attacks is thus conspicuously outside the Hillary Clinton approach to logic. As a philosophy of individual rights, market anarchism would confine each person to her own realm of discretion, not to isolate us from one another, but prevent subjugation of every kind.

Without the ability of some to subdue others through force — the alpha and omega of the state’s method — society based on voluntary exchange and association would flourish. Empire would not and could not form a part of such a society, whether carried out by the USSR, the US or, as Benjamin Tucker said, any other “band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.”

Since the announced killing of Emanuel Goldstein — er, Osama Bin Laden — I’ve seen much speculation on what kind of big terror attack we can expect in retaliation.  But if Al Qaeda was capable of a large-scale, spectacular reprisal attack, I think they’d already have done it between 9-11 and now. Their actual pattern since then has been one of poorly organized, penny ante attacks, carried out by poorly trained people — suggesting that they picked the low-hanging fruit on 9-11.

It’s quite plausible that, given enough incompetent attempts, somebody will eventually succeed in detonating a bomb and blowing up a plane in the air.  Enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, and all that.  But even if it happens, the damage will be limited to the passengers on one plane out of millions of flights in any one year.  With hardened cockpits and passengers who understand that the goal of hijacking has changed, it will never be possible to fly a plane into a high-value target again.  And it’s unlikely all the TSA security theater in the airports, aimed at preventing the previous attack, is good for anything except satisfying the “Well, we have to do SOMETHING!” idjuts.

The interesting thing, though, is that however poorly planned and executed the attacks have been, they were conducted in accordance with a brilliant strategic vision of maximizing bang for the buck in terms of the U.S. government stupidity they provoke.  An attempt to smuggle explosives on a plane doesn’t have to be anything more than crude and ineffectual, because TSA’s knee-jerk overreaction — not blowing up the plane — is the real goal.  The goal is to make the passenger screening process, the x-raying of all cargo, etc., so onerous, humiliating, expensive and time-consuming that air traffic shrinks radically and the U.S. economy takes a hit.  The goal is for the American people to see their government as intrusive, arbitrary, and callous.

The goal is also for the U.S. government, in response, to stay bogged down in endless wars in the Islamic world, radicalizing people there and causing them to see the U.S. as a crusader army — in the meantime wearying and demoralizing the U.S. population and bankrupting the government.  To paraphrase the late Mr. Bin Laden, it’s only necessary for a couple of brothers with “Al Qaeda” written on a piece of cloth to show themselves in Antarctica, and the President will send Marines to fight the penguins there “so we won’t have to fight them here.”

In that vein, prominent libertarian commentator Radley Balko writes at Reason, “Osama Won” (May 2, 2011).

Wow — deja vu, all over again!  William Graham Sumner, during the Spanish-American War, gave a speech on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”  His argument was that the United States, a nation formed in reaction against European global empires like Spain’s, had — by adopting expansionism and imperialism — been conquered by Spain in the field of ideas and policies despite defeating her on the battlefield.  Despite its ostensible “victory,” the United States experienced a moral defeat by abandoning everything it stood for and becoming what it hated.

Balko, likewise, lists all the changes undergone by America in the past decade. The U.S. has detained people without trial and tortured them at “black sites” overseas, rendered them to other countries to be tortured, claimed a right to detain American citizens without trial, barred those who turned out to be innocent from legal redress in the American courts for their detention and torture, refused compensation to hundreds of innocent people detained at Gitmo, prohibited detainees from talking about their detention and torture, turned the Fourth Amendment’s “search and seizure” provisions into toilet paper with USA PATRIOT and illegal wiretaps, further militarized local police forces, and set up what amounts to a system of internal passport checkpoints in the airports…

Whew.

If, as American presidents have never tired of claiming, Al Qaeda attacked us because “they hate us for our freedoms,” they must like us a whole lot more now.  If Al Qaeda is really fighting us because they hate our freedoms, the war is already over.

However plain it may seem, it’s worth remembering the fact that opposing — every now and then — someone or something that actually is worth opposing is no test for what we ought to support. While it’s clear that the indiscriminate murder advocated by people like Osama bin Laden is an affront to morality, there’s nothing about that fact that contradicts the causal link between United States imperialism and terrorism.

In the old banality, “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and none of this should be taken as an apology for terrorism. But there can be no doubt about the cause-and-effect relationship at issue, about the fact that consistent opposition to terrorism necessarily entails opposition to United States military exploits. The elimination of bin Laden is as good an occasion as any other to draw attention to the worldwide campaign of terrorism being carried out every day by the United States.

If bin Laden was an enemy of humanity and civil society, an agent of senseless death in the world, then the United States government is an enemy many orders of magnitude more dangerous. With its military bases scattered across the globe and its wars victimizing thousands of innocents each day, the attacks of terrorists are retaliations against the United States.

The question of whether such attacks are morally justifiably has nothing at all to do with recognition of the relationship between American Empire and the blowback it provokes. Since we object to the initiation of violence against non-aggressors, market anarchists are of course opposed to terrorism, to the arbitrary disregard of human life. What that means, though, is that we likewise stand against the foremost agency of terrorism in the world, the state — and particularly the hegemonic power of the empire that has spread across the world.

Osama bin Laden was a menacing source of dread in the world, capable of rallying the frustrated and tractable around a terrible cause, but his capacity to deal death was limited as compared to that of the state. The “trustworthy” opinions of the mainstream conversation in politics and international affairs universally recognized bin Laden as an absolute moral evil. As it would be in the case of any serial murderer, voices in support of bin Laden and his inhuman crusade were few and far between, confined to what most consider the fringe, outside “respectable discourse.”

The state, on the other hand, enjoys a sempiternal assumption of legitimacy, one that endures regardless of its crimes or their magnitude, that flies in the face of the moral judgment we apply to “the terrorists.” I have heard it said — and I think it essentially true — that the crucial difference between what is called “war” and what is called “terrorism” is the sophistication of the weapons employed.

The United States murders on a scale that is impossible for an Osama bin Laden, but, because its actions bear the imprimatur of the state, we immunize it from our moral opprobrium. Wrong as it may be, the blowback of retaliatory gestures will continue until the imperialism of the American corporate state comes to an end. Osama bin Laden’s defeat has done nothing to diminish the staggering destructive capabilities of the single greatest enemy of humanity on earth, the United States armed forces; indeed, the propaganda potential of his death may serve to fortify the psychological bedrock on which the Empire is built, but it doesn’t have to.

Market anarchism poses an alternative to the warlike aggression of the state in all areas of life, asking simply that relationships between people be noncompulsory and based on a mutual respect for individual autonomy. Trade where there was misappropriation, and cooperation where there duress — these are the supposedly “radical” modifications that market anarchists would see in society.

The state is still out there, and it is decidedly not hiding. We don’t need to hunt it down; we have merely to reject it and replace it with the superior means of voluntary society.

Osama bin Laden plotted and ordered the killing of innocent people to further his authoritarian political agenda. And finally he was killed. Thus always to tyrants.

But those of us who harbor no sympathy for bin Laden shouldn’t be blinded by patriotic or victory euphoria. The death of bin Laden does not solve the problems that enabled his rise to fame.

The projection of US government power around the world increases hostility toward Americans and the West. The United States has installed, and currently supports, governments that ruthlessly oppress and severely impoverish people — including governments that murder protesters to stay in power. This in turn rouses sympathy or even allegiance to those who fight or murder Americans.

According to many sources, the flexing of US imperial muscle had included support for bin Laden during the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. True or not, it’s believable — and widely considered an example of how political figures change from good guys to bogeymen depending on the uses that US power has for them.

Waving flags and victory signs cannot cover those rotting in Guantanamo without trial, cannot hide the images of torture at military prisons, and cannot refute the fact that the empire punishes an alleged whistleblower while honoring the anonymous “troops” who committed the crimes bravely revealed to the public. Nor can it compensate for the immigrants confined in homeland Guantanamos crafted in the war on terror, or the police state that intrudes ever more into the lives of Americans and the lives of those on the receiving end of American power worldwide.

The national “unity” of September 11 that Obama celebrated in his victory speech was really bellicose nationalism that enabled more war against Muslim countries. While the absence of mob violence was something to be happy about, prejudice towards Muslims — and general regard for anyone who didn’t fall in line as a traitor or other epithet — does not make for a rosy picture.

As an anarchist, I also feel the need to dispel the sense of triumph surrounding the state. A stateless solution to attacks on innocent people is the only real solution. All states project their power for the benefit of politicians and their partners, and all will trample on those in their way and co-opt effort for freedom into energy for serving new masters.

A proponent of state action could point to the fact that the strike force that killed bin Laden came out of occupied Afghanistan or argue that large state armies denied bin Laden space to comfortably operate in, effectively cornering him. However, this does not mean that his apprehension required a massive state invasion. Following the September 11 attacks, the Taliban attempted to negotiate with the United States government to work out how to cooperate against al Qaeda, but their proposals were rejected. If the Taliban had handed over bin Laden and stayed in power, it’s entirely possible that they themselves would have eventually been unseated by a popular uprising of the type now sweeping the Middle East.

The force that killed bin Laden was relatively small, elite, operating on top-quality intelligence — an example of the efficiency that non-state armed forces would likely display. On the battlefield, non-state actors operate with flexibility against rigid hierarchical foes. Al Qaeda itself is likely not a command structure, but a dispersed threat — another reason that bin Laden’s death won’t solve the major problem.

It remains to be seen whether or not Osama bin Laden will be less influential as a martyr than as a living personality. But the position of Public Enemy Number One will be filled again, and the security-state apparatus will keep squeezing American life as the weapons of foreign policy extinguish lives.

History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.

Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.

We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.

Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.

We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.

The interval between the two thresholds has been comparatively brief, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that homo sapiens has existed in something like its present form and the billion years or so that the sun will likely be able to support human life. Seen in that light, this interval is a brief initial adjustment period in the early stages of human productivity. The state was an anomaly in this early stage of the technological explosion, in the childhood of the human race, by whose means the parasitic classes were briefly able to piggyback on the revolution in productivity and harness it as a source of income for themselves.

During this brief interval, parasitic classes — bureaucrats, usurers, landlords, and assorted rentiers — used the state to create scarcity by artificial means, in order to enclose the increased productivity from technologies of abundance as a source of rents for themselves. But after these first few millennia, the productivity curve has shifted so sharply upward that the increases in output will dwarf the rentier classes’ ability to expropriate it. What’s more, new technologies of abundance are rendering artificial scarcities unenforceable.

Around forty years ago, it was fashionable to say that humanity was entering the “Age of Aquarius.” There is a sense in which the 1970s really were the beginning of a new age of human liberation. They saw the birth of the two technologies of abundance — the desktop computer and cheap numerically-controlled machine tools — which will eventually free us from the grip of the corporate state and its artificial scarcities.

The apparent reaction of the decades since — neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, Reaganism and Thatcherism, the jackbooted police state of the Drug War and War on Terror, the neocons’ wet dream of a Thousand Year Reich enforced by the Sole Remaining Superpower, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — can be seen as a desperate rear guard action by the corporate state, the death throes of a dying system, a last-ditch effort by the forces of artificial scarcity to suppress the forces that will destroy them.

This effort will fail. What file-sharing has done to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has done to the national security state, are only the dimmest foreshadowings of what technologies of abundance and freedom will do to the old authoritarian institutions.

Encryption and darknets are destroying the power of the music, publishing, and movie industries to collect rents on their so-called “intellectual property,” and eliminating economic transactions as a tax base to support bureaucrats.

New physical production technologies, by extracting greater outputs from ever smaller inputs, are rendering the privileged classes’ huge supplies of land and capital utterly useless as a source of income.

Ordinary people, with cheap means of informational and physical production, will soon be able to meet our needs through peaceful production and trade in a fraction of the present workweek, and dump the rentiers off our backs.

If this framing of human history is valid, we’re just finishing the dawn of humanity’s brief childhood, and entering the long afternoon of its maturity.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Fin de la Infancia de la Humanidad.

“I place the chances for the birth of a Palestinian state this fall at fifty-fifty,” says Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab for CNN. Citing “favor” toward the idea from the “world community,” Kuttab notes that satisfying the U.S. may require more than just “a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood accompanied by a United Nations birth certificate.”

The assumption seems to be that, while there are marginal differences over which territories are “earmarked for Palestine,” fairly everyone now agrees that the U.N. will soon greet a new member into the world family of states. The Quartet (the U.S., the U.N., the E.U. and Russia) are always on the ready to sing odes to “self-rule” so long as the “self” in that phrase never, ever means real people as against the elite interests of states.

The longstanding consensus among most of the “reasonable” voices on the world stage is that peoples are entitled to political self-determination, that they ought to enjoy the ability to craft their own institutions fit to their unique needs and wants. And while that assumption has informed discussion as to the futures of Israel and Palestine, it has very seldom been suggested that the principle of self-determination could extend even further than a mere “two-state solution.”

Likewise, it has been little inquired as to wherefrom this vague notion of self-determination derives. We seldom call into question the theoretical basis for thinking that a people are a nation, and a nation deserves a state; it is simply regarded as true today that particular cultural, ethnic or language groups merit political arrangements that correspond to the lines that sociologists, linguists and their scholarly ilk have attempted — however roughly — to draw. That those lines are often arbitrary, or intersecting, or impossible to find as a practical matter, is to a great extent ignored.

Even more thoroughly ignored is that, as a historical matter, the nation-state — a unified Germany for Germans and Italy for Italians, etc. — is a relatively novel idea. Perhaps the subjects of history’s many empires, larger and smaller, had a more acute understanding of the artificiality of the state, safe, as they were, from the odd idea that states should square with nations.

Seeing that statism itself was and remains in the nature of conquest and annexation, their ideas about the fundamental characteristics of the state were likely more cynical — and hence more accurate. Today, the state can hide behind democracy, behind the notion of “popular sovereignty” and the perverse Hegelian idea that the state embodies the will of a people. We can guess that it would have been difficult to convince the slaves of Rome that the state was anything other than an agency of the ruling class for plunder and exploitation. It’s possible that we denizens of modernity are more credulous, more unsuspicious of authority than our ancestors.

The mythology of the state as the protector of our liberties, of the weak, and of social justice is so fully fixed in our psychology that we reflexively think, if there’s a problem in the Middle East, just create another state. But if dividing power between two sovereigns — in this case, one old and one newly-created — is thought sensible, thought to serve the principle of self-determination, then what of true self-determination? What of putting an end to the state instead of birthing a new one?

As the only true sovereign body, the individual ought to be made the decision-making entity, replacing the state’s distorted incentive system wherein the many are forced to live with the decisions of a few. A system where each person is left free to act peacefully within his own sphere of autonomy and discretion harmonizes with what Kevin Carson has described as “the need to internalize effort and reward in the same actor.”

Were each Israeli and each Palestinian to conduct his own foreign policy, to allocate his own resources, and to pay his own way, what use would there be for missiles or IEDs? If the problems in the region are, in one way or another, created by the coercion of the state, then the emergence of a new state is hardly to be regarded as a solution.

Market anarchists propose an end to all states, one to come through the expansion and maturation of nonviolent counter-institutions. The state is only a system of force. When it is finally replaced with voluntary dealings and coordination, Isrealis, Palestinians and everyone else will have their solution.