On June 12, the northwestern Syrian city of Jisr al-Shugur, CNN reports, “was under heavy shelling as hundreds of military vehicles entered the city and helicopters hovered in the sky.” The vicious onslaught, which Syrian state television blames on “armed gangs,” has escalated what human rights activists are calling a “humanitarian crisis” in the country, with some estimates placing the death toll at more than 1,200.

Since March, protests have raged in the Arab country, where authoritarian military rule has long been the norm. Recently though, the Syrian government’s crackdown on protesters has intensified to a level of violence exceptional even in one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

The official narrative claims that the tanks and helicopter gunships are necessary to “restore security and tranquility,” that Syria is “terrorized” by groups opposed to President Bashar Assad’s rule. According to observers, however, Syrians were fleeing the ravaged city to escape the state’s unprovoked blitz against overwhelmingly peaceful protests.

For 40 years, Syria has caricatured the worst kind of dictatorship. The autocratic Assad family, imposing martial law and ossifying widespread poverty, long ago banned political parties, handing control of the economy to political favorites. The government’s recent spree of murders and arbitrary arrests has put on display for the world the kinds of policies Syrians have long endured.

And although Syria would seem to represent the utmost extreme of Orwellian, antihuman public policy, its actions are only an instance of what the state is, by definition, geared to do: Transgress individual liberty. “Liberty,” writes economist George Reisman, “should be understood as freedom from the government, specifically, freedom from the initiation of physical force by the government.”

Aggression against peaceful individuals is the feature of the state that sets it apart from other human institutions. Market anarchists see the systematic coercion of the state as an instrument of a small power elite, empowering and enriching it at the expense of the productive majority.

The state, then, is and always has been a tool of class warfare, dividing those who live and trade nonviolently from those who profit from the obstruction of and theft from voluntary society. Because the state’s system of hierarchy and authority is inherently unstable and offensive, its maintenance requires sustained militarism and the use of fear to suppress awareness.

In contrast, market anarchists advocate simply for an undeviating application of a principle that almost everyone, at least implicitly, subscribes to — that people should be free from violent interference within their own sphere of autonomy. Consistent respect for the dignity of each human being would mean an end to the state’s ill-founded ability to use crime against the rest of society.

Lamenting that the very “personality of man” had been rendered an “unpaid prostitute” of the ruling class, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called for “free contract” to replace “arbitrary law.” “To be governed,” he said, “is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded … .”

The people of Syria, petrified under the shelling of their government, understand acutely and intimately the gravity of Proudhon’s words. The Syrian state, like all states, is nothing more than a criminal gang that has deluded the population into a belief in its legitimacy.

The brazen savagery of the Assad government against its own people mocks all decency, revealing the true nature of the state. The silver lining, if indeed one can be discerned, is the opportunity for all of us to renounce the naive belief that the state is at all necessary or ethical.

Massachusetts State Representative Ryan Fattman drew criticism for remarks he made regarding the state’s participation in the federal “Secure Communities” program. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Fattman was asked if he was concerned that the program might make a woman without legal immigration status hesitant to report to the police that she was raped and beaten as she walked down the street. His response? “My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward.” (“Immigrant checks urged,” June 8, 2011)

Note how Fattman reveals his priorities. He doesn’tt attempt to argue that his policy will not result in crimes going unreported. His attitude could be characterized as “who cares if someone’s body and dignity are violated in the most offensive way? She didn’t have the proper paperwork to exist here.” A cynical person might describe Fattman’s statement as tacit approval of brutality against those who violate immigration restrictions. They’ve been designated outlaws, and are thereby outside of the law’s protection.

Whatever the malice of his intent, it is clear that Fattman wants the undesirables out. What happens to them as a result is not his concern. They simply “should be afraid” to report any crimes to the agencies that are supposed to deal with crimes.

Fattman’s remarks exemplify the attitude of putting “the nation” before human life. The immigrant without papers has violated the sanctity of the nation, crossing borders without obtaining permission from the byzantine bureaucracies that answer to the politics of prejudice. The woman’s actual safety is not as important as the hypothetical safety of the “good citizens” who are supposed to be secure under the surveillance state. In this way rape becomes a less serious crime than paperwork violations.

Paperwork violators — including those who haven’t committed any actual crime — continue to be deported in massive numbers. Those passing through the process find themselves transported among a bewildering array of local prisons and unidentified detention centers that have been aptly named “homeland Guantanamos” by immigrant rights activists. There’s a profitable industry in making people disappear.

The state primarily serves people with political power and those who can deliver more — like prison industry lobbyists, for example. Those without political power can develop counter-power by creating networks of informed individuals that make it easier to live apart from, and eventually in opposition to, state power.

If these networks seek to neutralize all impositions of authority of one person over another — to disperse political power — then they are working toward anarchism. Anarchy empowers peaceable individuals. Incentives toward actual crimes would be reduced by a dynamic economy and social norms that discourage coercion, while victimization could be reduced by systems that don’t instead focus on victimless activity. This puts the whole idea of borders into question, which is a good thing. Borders are boundaries between gang territory, typically drawn by conquest and upheld by oppression.

In early June, as a prelude to an expansive study of the Fortune 500 due later this summer, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) published an analysis of “the current corporate tax debate.” Anarchists oppose taxes on principle as an exalted form of theft, but the fact that the most profitable firms in the country aren’t paying up raises other important questions.

Arguing that the “tax code has … become overburdened with loopholes, shelters and special tax breaks,” CTJ’s study demonstrates that twelve of America’s largest companies currently pay, in effect, a tax rate of negative 1.5 percent. That means that some corporations — among them, Boeing — are in fact making money through the tax system as it is currently operating.

Even apart from its tax bill sleights of hand, corporate America is the beneficiary of federal spending that amounts to a gratuitous handout. While none of us working folk pay negative tax rates, the state has, for decades, channeled our greenbacks to favored Big Business players.

It’s no exaggeration at all to single out corporate welfare as the defining feature of the American political system, to see the federal government itself as just a slimy culvert for giveaways to the rich. In the United States, though, champions of our system of “free enterprise” keep themselves perpetually up in arms only at “illegals” and the inner city poor “getting something for nothing.”

The American Right is quick to denounce cradle-to-grave welfare statism, carping that people on public assistance ought to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But if we really, sincerely oppose people living off of the hard work of others, then perhaps it is time we undertook an honest inquiry into who benefits most from the welfare state.

As Stephen Slivinski observes, companies like “Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits through programs like the Advanced Technology Program and the Export-Import Bank.”

Through policies ranging from direct subsidies and grants for research and development to the Foreign Military Financing Program, the federal government is a goose laying golden eggs for the rich. Although none of these policies are properly part of a free market, it’s understandable that conscientious, left-leaning Americans look understand “free market” to mean “field day for moneyed bigwigs.” Since all we ever hear from the corporate establishment are claims that we presently enjoy a free market system, such confusion is a matter of course.

Contrary to the scores of corporate press releases dominating the media, however, freedom and competition don’t translate to funneling billions of dollars from struggling taxpayers to suits at the largest companies in the world. Whatever anyone thinks of the free market in theory, the statist “public/private partnerships” we have today just aren’t it.

Market anarchists — who regard free markets as a means of liberating working people from corporate mastery — have no interest in identifying with today’s collusive economic framework. As philosopher Roderick Long explains, market anarchists regard the present economy as one in which “corporatism [is] systematic and all-pervasive” rather than “mere friction in an essentially free-market mechanism.”

The state provides an exceedingly valuable service to the rich. Unlike ordinary working people, however, who have to pay for the “services” that the state ostensibly provides us, Big Business just has to kick back and guzzle down our dollars. Comparing public assistance for the poor with corporate welfare, do we really have to wonder whom the state intends to serve?

A market anarchist society, free of the state’s upward redistribution, would break the elite’s coercive monopolization of societal wealth. Absent the state, there are plenty of seats at the table of economic plenitude. Today, on the other hand, those seats are stolen as footrests for the idle rich.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

I feel like I’ve jinxed us. Ever since I mentioned that averaging nine “mainstream media pickups” per week would put us past 500 for the year, we’ve regularly stayed below that figure.

This week, we managed eight actual “pickups,” but we rounded that out with two solid references/citations, which are also counted in our “press room” statistics.

First, the pickups … like I said, eight of them, in five countries on three continents:

• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age published Darian Worden’s “Exporting Thuggery” on June 3; David D’Amato’s “Libya and G8 hypocrisy” on June 5; and D’Amato’s “Scots splitting from the state?” on June 10.
• France’s Contrepoints published David D’Amato’s “La vitre cassee japonaise” (Japan’s Broken Windows”) on June 5, and Kevin Carson’s “La fin de l’enfance pour l’homme?” (“Childhood’s End for Humanity?”) on June 10.
• The Canadian ran David D’Amato’s “Libya and G8 Hypocrisy: The State Must Go,” as “G8 pursues ‘War is Peace’ policy in Libya,” on June 6.
• On June 7, Kevin Carson’s “If This is the Free Market, Why do I Feel so Unfree?” appeared in the Carroll County, Maryland Standard.
• And on June 10, the Seoul, Republic of Korea JoongAng Ilbo published David D’Amato’s “The crimes of national pride.”

Not a bad week right there (as I never tire of mentioning, JoongAng Ilbo alone has more readers than the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times combined), but the “mentions/citations” really top it off.

First, the Center’s director, Brad Spangler, was interviewed for and quoted in a Leavenworth Times story on last weekend’s rally in support of Bradley Manning.

Then we got a dispositive answer to the burning question “so, they printed it, but did anyone read it?” from the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, which ran a letter to the editor in response to one of David D’Amato’s op-eds.

I’m running behind — it will barely still be the 10th when I pull the trigger on this update — so I’m going to take a week off from the random blogosphere reciprocal link love routine. Sorry about that. I couldn’t help but notice while Googling for “MSM pickups,” though, that the Bitcoin blogosphere continues to find our material interesting and arguable, and that dL over at Liberale et Libertaire has several thoughts on the whole thing. Check it out, and have a great weekend!

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

In 1996, US President Bill Clinton grudgingly, famously and dishonestly announced that “the era of big government is over.” Fifteen years later, a hypothetically (very hypothetically) honest President Barack Obama would be doing the world a favor by announcing that the era of political government — or at least of the Westphalian nation-state — is over.

That announcement will never come, of course. A head of state admitting that the entity over which he presides has finally devolved from merely dysfunctional and scary to entirely non-functional and irrelevant? Ain’t gonna happen. But it’s increasingly apparent that we now live in a world with very different rules from those prevailing in 1648 … or, for that matter, 1948. Borders are passe, and vestiture of “sovereign” authority in political government is on its way out.

Two recent incidents illustrate the new paradigm well: US Senator Chuck Schumer’s public meltdown over the existence of unregulated currencies and markets, and Citigroup’s disclosure of the latest compromise of customer information in a cyber attack.

What do these two incidents tell us about the efficacy and role of the state? The first tells us that it can’t work any more. The second tells us that its sole remaining function is to damage society.

Schumer’s conniption occurred after he learned about Silk Road and Bitcoin. The former is an online market which gets around the US government’s insane drug laws by effectively anonymizing transactions while still providing for the production of market information like “reputation.” The latter is a digital currency used for, among other things, transactions on the Silk Road.

The government, thundered Schumer, must investigate Bitcoin! It must shut down Silk Road, andseize their domain name!

What he’s missing — or perhaps simply can’t get his authoritarian brain around — is that both services are at least potentially, and numerous other similar services will soon be actually, beyond his gang’s powers of supervision and control (and, I should mention, taxation). The market is slipping its leash. The Schumers of the world are going to have to find another dog to walk.

But what of enterprises which remain, by choice or through lack of adroitness, under the state’s thumb? Citigroup is a prime example. In May, hackers managed to tap into their database and extract personal information on 210,000 customers. Why were they able to do so? Because even though the technology now exists (Silk Road! Bitcoin!) for secure, anonymous financial transactions to take place entirely without that information, the US government’s “Know Your Customer” laws and other regulations which benefit neither bank nor customer, but only government regulator and tax collector, require that it be gathered, stored, and made accessible to Uncle Sugar’s minions on demand.

It’s often said that people “vote their pocketbooks” in political elections. That’s true. They do so elsewhere, too. And in a competitive market, new entrants are even now exposing the cost of political government as far too high.

Government takes half your money. As for the rest of it, government manipulates it through fiat currency schemes, erects costly barriers — the “borders” of Westphalia-style states being a prime example — to its movement, and continually noses around in what you’re doing with it, using tools that put it at even further risk.

Now that alternatives which can’t be co-opted or crushed are available, is it any wonder people are beginning to move their wealth and their economic activity elsewhere, evading those regulations, ignoring those borders, and leaving the Chuck Schumers to stew in their own broth? If you haven’t started doing so yet (and you probably have, for years, if only by dealing in cash or barter when you can), you will soon. And so will everyone else.

The state’s revenue base is shrinking, and its ability to do anything about that shrinkage is disappearing. That’s not to say the state doesn’t remain dangerous. Like a 500-ton chicken with its head cut off, it can certainly do a lot of damage in its death throes. So watch out! … but find yourself a bib, because dinner is coming soon and it’s going to be extra crispy.

Since her appointment to run the President’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — assembled in response to the Panic of ’08 — Elizabeth Warren’s name has been all over the news. And as The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki notes, Warren may “be the most hated person in Washington” — as well as, he says, “the most popular.”

The duality of opinions about Warren that Surowiecki points out registers the great American myth that he buys into: That corporate powerhouses and Washington are engaged in some kind of contest for power, both with the desire to be the dominant feature in the country’s social life.

According to the New Yorker piece, “[t]he banking lobby sees her as its nemesis,” as an “anti-capitalist radical” and an enemy of business. Ironically, even while he misunderstands the underlying feature of the business/government interconnection, Surowiecki says that “an empowered CFPB could actually be a boon to business.”

It shouldn’t surprise us that further regulation would represent a “boon to business,” though that causal link probably seems counterintuitive to most Americans. The truth is that, despite its constant alleluias to “American free enterprise,” Big Business has no use for anything like a real free market. Indeed, it typically does everything it can to avoid being forced to compete.

When the state seems to “tighten the screws” on commercial power, limiting its range of motion on (supposed) behalf of the consumer, the outcome is to reduce the field of competitors. Only the savviest, richest and most well-connected business players can afford compliance with the state’s largely arbitrary rules, so only small businesses — those without K Street suits hovering about Congress — end up losing.

It’s true that regulations cost Big Business money, but all of those added costs are more than recouped through the monopoly prices huge corporations are able to charge as a result of state intervention. At bottom, the state has never been anything but a money machine for economic elites, erecting barriers and tolls throughout our commercial interactions to make sure that the “free” part of “free enterprise” never actually reaches the people it would help most.

If resources, from labor hours to capital goods, were truly allowed to flow freely without state interference, it would flatten the corporate cartels and their ability to pen in industry. Apostles of genuine free markets from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to William Godwin and Benjamin Tucker harbored none of today’s delusions about the relationship between Big Business and Big Government, and never saw that relationship as antagonistic.

While the details of that relationship — its marginal contours — have changed with the times, never has its fundamental character. As historian Gabriel Kolko once observed of the flood of regulations during the Progressive Era, “Business reliance on the federal government may have been variable in its emphasis, but it was consistent in its use.”

It is that use that market anarchists assail when we oppose the state altogether, that contamination and destruction of free markets for the ruling class. The incentive that Surowiecki discusses — “to make sure that potential customers were able to distinguish between ripoffs and good deals” — is, as we have seen, ill-served by constraining competition, but it’s built into a real free market.

Free and voluntary exchange in a commercial environment liberated from the grasp of Big Business elites is the way to true consumer protection. To achieve that kind of market, however, we have to terminate its chief obstacle — the state itself.

In standard “small government conservative” discourse, one of the more popular talking points concerns the alleged mechanism behind the rise of big government: The poor and working class majority vote themselves largess out of the public treasury, taxing all the thrifty and productive “John Galts” out there, until government spends and borrows itself into bankruptcy.

There’s only one problem with this little scenario: The actual hogs at the trough mostly look like Mr. Moneypenny on the Monopoly gameboard.

Take a look at the biggest causes, on the spending side, of the deficit increase since 2001:

Two unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an increase in the so-called “Defense” budget (when’s the last time America actually fought a war to defend her own territory, as opposed to attacking some little country on the other side of the world?).

The unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit, which amounts to a transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars a year to Big Pharma for drugs at a patent markup of up to 2000%.

The vast expansion of the security-industrial complex since 9-11 — Homeland Security, the TSA, and tens of billions a year in increased intelligence spending — with Uncle Sam throwing out untold thousands of contracts to security and surveillance technology firms, all the while calling “Soooie!  Here, piggy!”

And of course there’s the ongoing growth of the prison-industrial complex under the War on Drugs, with prison guard unions and private prison corporation lobbyists agitating for ever more draconian drug laws.

And if you think about it, it’s minorities, the poor, and the less educated who are least likely to vote. Who do you really think is more likely the primary actor behind the food stamp program — the agribusiness interests in Bob Dole’s old constituency, or that powerful voting bloc of single mothers on welfare?

Take a look at the map of net taxpaying states and net revenue consuming states: The overwhelming flow of money is from taxpayers in Blue States to recipients in Red States. 27 of 32 states that get more than they give vote Republican, and 14 of 18 that give more than they get vote Democratic.

This really shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The overwhelming majority of net tax recipients are in the South, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and Alaska (you know, those ruggedly independent areas that want government to get off their back).

Military bases are disproportionately located in the South. At one time the tech industry in Newt Gingrich’s old district was the top recipient of DoD R&D money. And the economies of states in the Plains and Rockies (not to mention Sarah “Thanks, But No Thanks” Palin’s Alaska) are heavily skewed toward agriculture and extractive industries.

The primary recipients of farm subsidies are large-scale cereal grain operations in Red States of the Midwest and Upper Plains. And the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion” (you may have heard of it) is mainly a movement of the oil, mining, ranching and logging industries to get preferential access to government land, along with taxpayer subsidies of much of their operating expenses.

Even the welfare state, on which the working poor and underclass of the Red States are disproportionately dependent, is a subsidy to the low-wage employers in all those “right to work” banana republics of the South.

So when the Norquists, Armeys and DeLays say they’re against “big government,” know them for the liars they are.  They’re not against big government as such. Big government that helps poor people, of course, is socialism — flaming red ruin on wheels. But big government that helps the Good ol’ Boys in the country club isn’t big government at all. It’s just “free enterprise.”

Where is John Galt?  That’s him over there with his face in the trough.

The Arab Spring, the succession of popular uprisings still underway in places like Libya and Syria, has changed the way people around the world think about relationships of power. Where political authority had, to many, appeared to be a monolithic, immovable pillar at the foundation of society, it now seems somewhat more impermanent.

That street protests spurred on Facebook could lead to demands, and demands could lead to the ouster of rulers, has come as a surprise to many — including the rulers and the ruled. Though the Arab Spring has something important to teach us about the nature of power itself, it is far from clear what the takeaway lesson is. Freedom-loving people were inspired and filled with hope when, for example, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak vacated his post, but apprehensive at the thought of a new Mubarak emerging from the field of generals governing the country in the wake of the revolution.

For participants in the revolts of the Arab Spring, the conundrum is abstract but glaring in front of them, how to lop off the head of the Leviathan without another growing up in its place. It has too often seemed to be the case that the impetuous societal change or revolution is the one most unable to penetrate deeply into the core premises on which a given society is built.

Events in Libya, where a bloody civil war rages under the paternalistic watch of NATO and the U.N., leave us still more reasons to be skeptical about the aggregate result of the Arab Spring. While the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt stood opposed to dictators aligned with the West, the imperialists (headed by the U.S.) are nonetheless seizing on the opportunity to fashion Libya in their own image.

Between the creeping opportunism of both the state capitalist Empire and would-be replacement dictators, events in the Arab world look, at best, like a mixed bag. Regardless of what transpires from here forward, though, these events have demonstrated with abundant clarity just how fragile power is, and just who controls the destiny of society at large.

Martin Buber’s thesis, that “[p]ower abdicates only under the stress of counter-power,” is central to the questions raised by the Arab Spring. There can be no doubt now that counter-power has the ability to supplant despots and transform governments, but it need not stop there.

As Buber also observed, Marx and Engels were right that, assuming the state actually represented the whole of society, it would be rendered superfluous and therefore unnecessary; their mistake, however, was to maintain the necessity of a total state helmed by the working class itself — to maintain that such a state was even possible, let alone a necessary step toward a stateless society.

Rather than seeking to capture the machinery of the state from the hands of the elite few for the productive majority in society, market anarchists argue that we should begin to make it obsolete right now. Our means of accomplishing that end need not and should not incorporate violence, instead peacefully protesting and competing with the state.

The challenge for anarchists lies in the fact that, although the power elite will not willingly cede its arbitrary dominion over us, adopting its method of violence in an attempt to eradicate it will prove futile. To truly and lastingly eliminate tyranny and empire, we must change the way we look at the state itself.

For market anarchists, the true revolution, which is itself already in progress, is inherent in the demonstrations the world has witnessed in the first half of this year; their potential — the potential of nonviolent protest and disobedience toward the state — is limitless and can, if we want it, create a world defined by voluntary exchange and cooperation.

But we have to want it. We have to continue to put stress on the state at its most brittle points, and to refuse to let up at signs of what seems like progress. No new government is good enough, and the true culmination of the ideas underlying the Arab Spring will not be reached until the state at last wilts and dies.

According to MSNBC, “an astonishing victory for nationalists in the Scottish parliamentary elections” presages a referendum on whether the country should secede from the United Kingdom.

For more than three centuries, the Treaty of Union between England (subsuming Wales) and Scotland has yoked together the two British countries, with political power residing predominantly in London.

Needless to say, even if most Scots found the union politically expedient in its day, the civic considerations of the present are far removed from those of the dawn of the eighteenth century. While there’s no perfect analogy to this political interconnection, it slightly resembles the relationship between the federal government of the United States and the governments of the states.

The Scottish legislature has competence to attend to many areas of public policy, but under the Scotland Act of 1998 the United Kingdom “retains ultimate power to legislate for Scotland on all matters.” Though Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom’s political edifice has endured for generations, it has never completely ossified for many Scots, who see full political autonomy as impossible so long as the link survives.

Since market anarchism is a social philosophy based on self-ownership — insisting on independence and self-rule for every human being — peaceful secession is an idea at its very heart. The Scottish nationalists’ arguments for independence are based on the claim that weighty ideological differences make rule from the outside unacceptable.

The people of Scotland, they argue, part ways with those of England on enough important issues that there cannot be complete justice for the former under the political domination of the latter. The two groups have different preferences, so — it is argued — they ought to have separate and distinct governing bodies.

For market anarchists, the nationalists’ invocations of sovereignty and independence are somewhat spurious insofar as they would not carry these principles to their logical ends and extinguish the state altogether. Nevertheless, their rationale for proposing a divide from the United Kingdom is compelling, highlighting the fundamental moral and economic problems with statism.

Consider the problems that would undoubtedly arise if you were charged with making decisions about your neighbor’s life, from the sort of car she ought to drive to the kinds of groceries she ought to buy. Beyond just the ethical unconscionability of taking these decisions away from her, you would soon realize that, lacking her particularized understanding of her own living situation, you were unable to manage efficiently her daily life.

This is the intrinsic problem in all foreign domination and therefore all of statism; it delegates to a small, ruling class responsibility for governing our lives and livelihoods, foolishly assuming not only that the elite can govern us, but that they will do so without rigging the game to exploit us.

If London, for example, is allowed to make significant policy judgments for Scotland, every incentive pulls in the direction of London robbing Scotland of its resources and taking advantage of its people. The relationship between any state and its subjects is no different, breeding all of the same incentive problems and exploitative relationships.

Market anarchists do not claim that individuals should be able to do whatever they please, just that they should be able to do, in the words of Leonard E. Read, “anything that’s peaceful.”

Unqualified political independence, if taken seriously, would not stop at an independent Scotland or even an independent Edinburgh. It would mean no less than independence and self-determination for each individual, a society without the state where true community could develop freely to solve the problems of human life.

A controversial and “polarizing” election in Peru that, according to CNN, “pit[ted] the county’s left and right against each other,” has apparently ended in a victory for “leftist military man Ollanta Humala.” When Humala ran for president unsuccessfully in 2006, his campaign identified closely with the policy approach of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

This time around, though, Humala has distanced himself from Chavez in favor of what onlookers are calling a turn away from “radical rhetoric.” Taking the characterizations of the mainstream media at face value, the Chavez brand of politics represents a vision of “social revolution” that stands in sharp contrast to the “free-market economic policies” supposedly championed by Humala’s opponent, Keiko Fujimori.

That Chavez’s apparently “radical” socialist prescriptions are, in themselves, not so very radical, and that Fujimori’s “free market” is nothing of the sort are details curiously left out of the media’s tale of a “triumph of extremes.” Far more remarkable than their overhyped dissimilarities is the fact that neither candidate stands for any real departure from statist orthodoxy.

Ironically, for all the media’s accentuation of the divide between Fujimori’s ostensible wish to privatize everything and “fears [that] Humala will nationalize industries and expropriate private property,” the two look more alike than not. Within the coercive strictures of statism, handovers to corporate favorites (dubbed “privatization”) and full-blown government ownership are both forms of violent monopolization against the free market. As the elections in Peru show, the mainstream political spectrum’s gulf between “left” and “right” is all too often a distinction without a difference.

Contrary to the tepid, empty rhetoric of politicians, market anarchism represents a truly radical alternative to politics itself. Although Fujimori and Humala may have real disagreements regarding how best the state’s power elite ought to “take care” of the populace, neither challenges the assumption that it ought to do so.

Market anarchists propose that individuals are fully competent to take care of themselves — that the law ought to be composed of accepted customs and centered on consent and nonaggression. Politicians are incapable of creating any positive change for society because, even if they wanted to, the state’s very definition prevents it. If human beings really do have fundamental rights that precede social systems, then force and control can never be justified by any set of goals.

Moreover, even if those goals are worthy, the nature of economic reality is such that planning is not practically desirable or possible. As the work of Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek taught, economic information is in “the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all separate individuals possess.”

Attempts to capture or collect that knowledge in a single mind or even a number of them in a government bureaucracy are foredoomed from the start. As a practical matter, casting unqualified individual rights aside in favor of the state’s coercion and hierarchy will mean simply that only those in charge have any rights at all.

The argument that market anarchists are “too absolutist” with regard to individual rights is thus shown to be absurd: No conception of rights could be more extreme than one that gives a small group the right to control — that is, to own — others, that entitles that group to direct the property of all.

Upon consideration, statists are very extreme indeed where individual rights are concerned. They just insist that only the ruling class ought to enjoy those rights and define them far more expansively than any libertarian would. Compare that framework for rights — exemplified by the kinds of “privatization” someone like Fujimori might authorize — with that of conscientious market anarchists, and all of the sudden a genuine free market doesn’t look as scary as the “moderate” media suggests.

Peruvians should not wait for the “social revolution” or believe the lie that it could come from an election (or one hundred of them). The revolution is already underway, already immanent in every form of voluntary interaction between free, autonomous individuals. Recognizing that fact is a first step in the right direction — the direction away from parasites like Fujimori and Humala.

Charles Schumer, a charter member (along with Lieberman, Hatch and Feinstein) of the US Senate’s authoritarian moral scold caucus, is at it again. Schumer, for those who don’t recall, exemplifies the managerialist heart of darkness of 20th century liberalism. That ideology might be personified, in the colorful phrase of libertarian commentator Joe Stromberg, as “the body of Leviathan and the head of a social worker.” Schumer’s ideal government is a giant nanny that stomps around, like Godzilla in a gas mask and kevlar vest, saying “Momma don’t allow. Momma don’t allow.”

This time, his primary vendetta is against the  online black market site Silk Road — but he has plenty of ire to spare for the encrypted e-currency Bitcoin as well, for facilitating such anonymous transactions. Silk Road — whose URL (http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php) is accessible only through the Tor anonymizer — became a center of media attention after a story at Gawker.com on June 1 revealed that the anonymous marketplace hosts such goods for sale as hashish, weed, ecstasy, heroin and LSD.

Silk Road is a classic example of the kinds of rating and reputational mechanisms that emerge in a free market, absent the regulatory state. Although sellers’ real identities are unknown, their history of quality and reliability is tracked on the same user feedback model as Amazon and Ebay.

Schumer, naturally, is outraged. Besides suggesting legislation to prohibit unauthorized encrypted currencies, he’s called on the Justice Department to shut down Silk Road and seize the website. This last is a favorite strategy of his. In the past he’s co-sponsored legislation authorizing the AG to take the same action against sites engaged in “intellectual property piracy” [sic], and has been foremost among those cheering on the government’s seizure of the Wikileaks domain name.

But his experience with Wikileaks should have taught him this strategy has outlived its usefulness. Wikileaks has a number of domain names, including country-level domains, and is hosted by servers in countries all around the world — many of them beyond the reach of American law. And it continues to be accessible at its numeric IP addresses, which thousands of supporters around the world have defiantly posted and linked to online. Wikileaks is, as Schumer found out — or would have found out if he had more intelligence than an artichoke — simply impossible to shut down without shutting down the Internet.

As for Silk Road, its domain name can’t be seized — there is no domain name. It’s got a .onion URL, for which there is no registry. And what’s the point of outlawing encrypted e-currencies when you don’t know who’s using them and you can’t catch them doing it?

Actually, Schumer’s Barney Fife act could be the  best thing that ever happened to Bitcoin. Back in March, an earlier target of Schumer’s grandstanding was Fuzz Alert, a smartphone application that alerts drivers to speed traps, speeding and red light cameras, and sobriety checkpoints. After Schumer drew attention to the app, its sales doubled.

Maybe he can do a similar favor for the darknet economy. The more he vents his impotent rage, the more public attention he draws to the fact that government attempts to suppress Silk Road and Bitcoin are, well, impotent.

A lot of people out there would like to engage in peaceful trade — even in violation of government commands to “touch not, taste not, handle not” — without the state’s permission, surveillance or taxation, who may not yet be aware things like Bitcoin and Silk Road exist. The more and more loudly you protest, Senator Schumer, the more economic activity will move beyond the reach of the corporate state. So by all means, bluster on! Command the waves to advance no further. Show people everywhere, beyond the shadow of a doubt, just how contemptible your so-called laws really are.

We don’t care what Momma don’t allow.

Last week (Thursday, June 2), reports CNN, “Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan survived a no-confidence vote in parliament.” The no-confidence motion was lodged by the opposition party in response to the Prime Minister’s “handling of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear crisis.”

If the political process has seemed to the Japanese to be incapable of solving the country’s many problems, then they have begun to see through the state’s veneer of sensibility and order. Anarchists, contrary to our reputation as agents of chaos, urge only that we extend the no-confidence vote to the state itself.

Whereas we are quite comfortable subjecting particular administrations and policy decisions to scrutiny, the political paradigm itself is conspicuously exempt from probes regarding its efficacy. Given the state’s miserable record concerning the social issues it is supposedly designed to address, we might wonder why it continues to enjoy the public confidence.

On the whole — across geographic boundaries and time — has the state’s record of murder, theft and exploitation really shown it more worthy of our confidence than that of Prime Minister Kan’s government? As a specific example of the state, is present day Japan really unique in its failures, or is there something fundamentally wrong with politics itself?

Market anarchists recognize that the fundamental nature of the state makes it impossible for it to serve society in any positive way. Although, as Frank Chodorov observed, scholars have “turned tribute into ‘fiscal policy’ and clothed it with social good,” this merely reflects our “adjustment to conquest.” The state, with violence as its foundational tool, has always been an origin of social problems — at least for the laboring masses. For the ruling class, on the other hand, these problems have proved very profitable.

To abrade the foundations of authority and hierarchy, we too must file a no-confidence motion, one entered simply by our abstention from the political process. Once we withdraw in large enough numbers, implementing our vision of change through peaceful counter-institutions, the state will be forced to compete with the versatility of true free market society.

The state depends for its existence, and that of its economic system, on tractable, “civic-minded” subjects, pietistic sheep who will accept without thought “the way things are.” That the state has dominated society so completely and for so long leads most to believe that it ought to exist, that it has won out on the practicality and strength of what it does for us.

Nothing, however, can be accomplished through arbitrary force and compulsion that cannot be achieved through voluntary agreement, trade and cooperation. The important difference between a market anarchist society set free from the state and society as it is today is in the initiation of aggression against the peaceful person.

In the latter social system, every facet of an individual’s life is defined by the use of coercion against non-aggressors, forcing them into an economic and social (or rather anti-social) arrangement that they did not choose. It would be a mistake to conceive of a hypothetical, genuine free market economy in the narrow terms of the formal economy as it exists today, denominated in dollars and excluding black and grey markets.

The free market is rather a construction used to represent all of those voluntary and consensual happenings in economic life, not only quid pro quo exchanges, but also, for example, charity and gift. The free market, then, is not merely a strictly economic imperative demanded by efficiency and cost-effectiveness, but an ethical one too.

It is distinguished by the cost principle, whereby each individual internalizes her own costs, but it is also defined by the noncompulsory nature of the relationships that comprise it. The economic crises inherent in statism are thus tied inextricably to the broader, moral wrong that it rests on: Confidence in the state is confidence in crime, the belief that forceful engineering for the few can have benefits for the many.

Like Japan’s government, all governments everywhere are crying out for a popular vote of no-confidence. To cast that vote, you have merely to withdraw your consent from the state and invest in the kinds of harmonious social organization that actually do help real people.

The problem with any sort of “political” ideology is that they are largely made up of a “laundry list” of specific issue proposals. This is true whether there is an underlying consistent idea behind them or not.

Let’s first examine the favorite whipping boy of many people, “libertarianism”. The problem, as some of the more clever leftoids have argued, is that the ruling class will look through this laundry list and throw their weight behind the parts of it that strengthen their position, and discard the rest, thus making libertarianism into a less aggressively socially conservative form of conservatism.

“Lower taxes?”
Sure, let’s lower taxes for the rich.

“Less regulation?”
Well, let’s remove the regulations that counteract corporate power, but not the other ones (see: Enron).

“Legalize drugs?”
No friggin’ way, chief.

But what’s not clearly understood is that this is also true for “liberalism” and so-called “social democracy” or “democratic socialism” or what have you. Modern American “liberalism” is simply Mass Corporatism on steroids. It’s pure bureaucratism. You play nice and obey the rules and if you’re a very excellent drone you get to make money, but not too much, unless you become an insider. In some ways, it’s a bit less harsh than the conservative version of Corporatism but it’s also much harder to evade or escape. The conservatives give you more of a chance to do your own thing, but they also leave you utterly fucked if you fail.

There is no political ideology that can escape this co-optive process carried out by the ruling class. This has led to a principle called the Iron Law of Oligarchy which states that every form of political organization ends up becoming an oligarchy. I think this is true of any political structure, but not necessarily every social structure.

Being a renegade, an anarchist, an agorist or a syndicalist is a zebra of a different stripe. These are what I’d call “anti-political” or “apolitical” ideologies. In these schemes, the non-ruling class takes it upon themselves to create their own sub-society that functions outside the political-economic superstructure, rather than trying to influence that superstructure. This of course leads to conflict at the margins, which, until a certain critical mass is reached, requires stealth and evasion from the authoritarian structure.

As the superstructure grows more advanced and integrated, direct conflict becomes less and less effective as a strategy over time. So in a sense, all of the “political” ideologies are the bulwark, the front line forces, of the ruling class oligarchy. The age of the mass strike came to an end after WWI, for the most part, in the US, and in the 60s in Europe. But there are forms of direct action that have subtly replaced this, in which workers and freelancers take back their surplus value from the oligarchy.

The response has been the warfare-outsourcing project, in which the ruling class devastates the peripheral states and then ruthlessly exploits the surviving working class there. This is what the “cold war” and now, the “war on terror”, were designed to accomplish. Orwell predicted this aspect of things in his book 1984 pretty well. Then for the core states, bread and circuses or soma, keep the population from drifting into the grey zones and keep them supporting the oligarchy. Huxley predicted this aspect of things in his book Brave New World pretty well.

The problem for the ruling class is that they can’t really keep it up forever. We’re bleeding them, and they’re eating their own raw materials trying to maintain an inefficient oligarchic economy. This is the reason why “green” ideology has become popular lately. The ruling class hopes to use fear of environmental destruction in order to suppress consumption by the working class, allowing them to “sustain” corporate hegemony. The fear of environmental destruction is a real fear, but it is the state-corporate oligarchy itself which is causing the destruction. They use the conservatives as a red herring to provide a comical, irresponsible “anti-environmentalist” position that will help drive the more reasonable portion of the population into the “pro-environmentalist” camp.

The mask of political liberty and/or justice is beginning to show too many cracks. The ruling class is forced to act more and more openly and directly to keep the game of spinning plates going, as the inefficiencies and crises inherent in large hierarchic systems start to occur more frequently. This drives more people into the grey zone, into various renegade ideologies (including simple “I don’t give a fuck”ism). This creates more crises for the ruling class — lather, rinse and repeat. The question that lies before us is whether they will be able to re-establish themselves after the collapse.

Whether they can pull a Russia and liquidate, and let the collapse act as a “blow off valve” for their structural inefficiency and come back in a slightly less totalitarian, but no less authoritarian form… or perhaps a China, where they gradually balance economic freedom for some with cultural hegemony over all. These two nations are, perhaps, experiments for the ruling class.

We renegades must find each other and strengthen our own non-political societies, despite our differences in opinion, if we hope to provide a better alternative than these experiments.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Contraste entre Estratégias Políticas e Apolíticas.

C4SS Director Brad Spangler is addressing the Free Bradley Manning Rally in Leavenworth, KS today. In tandem with that event, we’re releasing Spangler’s special report, “Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, and the Case for Anarchism” [PDF].

Dear C4SS Supporters,

Every time we have a long holiday weekend in America, I anticipate a drop in media “pickups.” Usually that turns out to be correct. Local papers like to run local reminiscences and “human interest” stories, not “over the transom” op-eds, at holiday times. For some reason, global “pickups” seem to also drop off, even when the holiday in question is US-only. This week was no exception — but we did get four “pickups” that I’ve found so far this week:

• The Deming, New Mexico Headlight ran my piece, “The Self-Service State,” on May 31, and David D’Amato’s “Government is Civil War” on June 1.
• Kevin Carson’s “Iceland: A Thaw in the DRM Curtain” appeared in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on June 1.
• The Portland, Oregon Skanner ran Darian Worden’s “Exporting Thuggery” on June 2.

Every few weeks I also like to reduce my submissions velocity a little, on the theory that “familiarity breeds invisibility.” Papers which ignore our stuff when they’re seeing it every day or every other day for a long time may take more notice of it if it shows up a little less frequently.

As it happens, this was a perfect week for that, being a business day shorter than usual in the US, and based on when C4SS content actually became available for me to submit. I made a total of 7,456 submissions to 2,819 publications this week.

We’re making our presence felt in other media too, of course:

This week C4SS Advisory Panel member Gary Chartier turned up as the topic of the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s podcast series, “The Libertarian Tradition,” narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Cataloging ultra-prolific Advisory Panel member Sheldon Richman’s published writings would probably be a full-time job in itself, but I’ll mention one that seems particularly pertinent to the Center’s approach: “Slave Labor and Intellectual Property” in the Foundation for Economic Education’s The Freeman.

As media coordinator at the Center, I try to keep my eye on the “mainstream” ball, but the news in “movement media” is just too encouraging not to mention. In particular, discussions at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the United Kingdom’s Libertarian Alliance have recently seriously addressed “left-libertarian” ideas of the sort which are increasingly identified with the Center’s writers. By “addressed” I do not mean to imply “endorsed,” of course, but the fact of the discussions themselves is quite encouraging.

Some random blogospheric sightings of the Center: Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Golden State Liberty, and The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe.

Have a great weekend!

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

A prominent libertarian author recently issued a challenge — in rather emotional terms — to a prominent libertarian opponent of “intellectual property.”  Never mind who — actually there’s been more than one such recent exchange between prominent libertarian figures, with almost identical arguments.

The author asked whether it should be considered theft to reprint their book — with their name on it — without permission.  Doing so, this author argued, would deprive them of a certain amount of potential profit on the sale of their own book.  And in the process, it would turn that portion of their labor in writing the book into slave labor.

First of all, I’m skeptical of just how negative an impact the abolition of copyright would actually have on authors’ income.   In most cases, where the author serves a smaller niche market and charges only a modest markup over printing costs, it’s doubtful whether it would be worth it to undercut them.

Actually setting up a book for print involves considerable inconvenience.   If you take a facsimile PDF document of someone else’s book and set it up as an on-demand print job, you’ve not only got to charge a price that covers the basic cost of the on-demand publisher’s services plus the value of your time and trouble, but also overcome the visibility of a preexisting distribution outlet already associated with the author’s name — one that probably comes up on the first page of Google or Amazon results.  So why would most people go to the trouble of searching a POD equivalent of The Pirate Bay for your book, and trying to figure out from the listings whether it was complete, whether it had the same pagination as the standard edition (important if you want to quote it in scholarly work), and so forth — all just to save a buck or two?

There are considerable rents attaching to the time and trouble of setting up a book for publication, as well as for authentication and convenience.  So long as the author doesn’t get greedy and charge a premium significantly over the amount of this rent, they should be relatively safe.

The main effect of abolishing copyright in music and written work, I think, would be to wash out the excessive name-value premiums added to the work of the big blockbuster creators, and the middleman profits of the publishing and record industry.

Second, the idea that someone has a right to a certain rate of profit — and that market competition which deprives them of this rate of return is “theft” — is ludicrous.  It’s as idiotic as the claim by Property Values Nazis that their alleged right not to have the value of their house lowered trumps my right to have a clothesline or compost pile on my own property, or to park my car on the grass.

Nina Paley caricatured this kind of argument beautifully in one of her “Eunice and Mimi” cartoons.  EUNICE:  “Copying a song instead of buying a copy is stealing!”  MIMI: “Doing  for yourself what you could pay someone else to do is stealing!”  BOTH:  “Competition is theft!”

If anything, the “slave labor” accusation should be on the other side.

“Intellectual property,” like tariffs and all other monopolies, is a barrier to the free movement of labor and capital into certain legally defined areas of production, which has the effect of maintaining artificially high prices that would not exist under free market competition.  “Intellectual property,” in our corporate global economy, performs exactly the same function the tariff did in the old national industrial economies:  It regulates the conditions under which one is allowed to produce a particular good for a particular market, so that the beneficiaries are able to charge a monopoly premium.  Rather than erecting territorial barriers around particular nations like the tariff, “intellectual property” builds walls around global corporations.

What’s more, erecting barriers to the conditions under which labor can produce a certain good gives the licensed producers of that good an artificial degree of control over the terms on which labor is employed in that particular form of production — thus shifting the balance of bargaining power away from labor and toward the employer.

So it would be far more plausible to argue that the extra hours we work to pay the copyright or patent premium on a good, or the extra hours we must work for the same income in producing that good because one producer has a state-conferred monopoly on hiring labor to produce it, are slavery.

BBC News recently reported that “Brazil has launched a welfare scheme to lift millions out of extreme poverty by 2014.” The South American country’s plan will direct resources into already-established programs and toward those regions with the highest rates of poverty.

In an interview about the program, Social Development Minister Tereza Campello said, “[W]e need to change the mindset that it is up to a poor person to come to the state, and ensure that the state reaches out to the poor person.” What may have escaped the attention of the Minister, however, is the fact that the state, in Brazil and around the world, has always been quite successful in reaching out to the poor person.

The problem is that, when it reaches out, it is to steal and exploit rather than to lend a hand. Founded on principles of self-ownership and nonviolence, market anarchism regards the state as an instrument of the powerful. Genuine free markets, on the other hand, are an adaptable current that undercuts the ability of any group of elites to ascend to a position of dominance.

By choking off or ruling out opportunities for independent subsistence or employment outside of state-corporate economic system, the state forces working people into that system. And upon its arrival, the laboring class discovers that, with its bargaining power neutered by the state’s reins on its methods of survival, mammoth, hierarchical institutions set the terms almost unilaterally.

Since regulatory cartelization for the corporate elite reduces the number of employers (and accordingly job opportunities) in the marketplace, hordes of workers have no choice but to sell their labor hours at an extreme discount. Rules that are supposedly in place to protect the consumer function to keep viable alternatives — from products to services — from ever reaching the people who would benefit most from them and from lower prices.

Virtually everything is rendered more expensive for the indigent (for the benefit of powerful cartels) under the pretext of public health and safety. Costly licenses that require even more costly education prevent the poor from entering professions or starting home businesses to serve their communities.

What’s more, by damming off the economic outlets for small enterprise, the state’s regulations concentrate and accumulate capital in the hands of a few powerful monopolists. Without genuine competition from below, state-protected corporations need not design and deliver products based on consumer demand, but may palm off on us whatever junk they please.

Collusion between the state and the gigantic, major non-profits precludes even new charities by using everything from the tax code to minimum capital requirements and accreditation to outlaw “smallness.” Similarly, mutual aid societies for health and unemployment insurance are interdicted by laws that engross these industries for Big Business and its army of well-compensated Beltway lobbyists.

Any real chance for “affordable housing,” always at the center of new state poverty programs, is extinguished by eminent domain land grabs for huge corporations, zoning lands that decide where you can make your home, and building codes written by developers. Instead of a cozy zone for corporate dominance and exploitation, the free market would mean the ultimate coup for the common man against commercial power.

The problem is not a lack of state intervention into the economy on behalf of the least fortunate, but too much intervention into the economy on behalf of the rich, and the preemption of a true free market for their benefit. Measures like those undertaken by Brazil are necessary only because the state capitalist economic framework systematically directs wealth away from those who create it and toward the idle rich — the greatest recipients of government welfare.

Of the French free market radicals of the nineteenth century, Murray Rothbard wrote that they saw the free market as the means to “dissolving the ruling classes.” Only a distorted, inaccurate reading of “free markets” could blame them for the wealth disparities that many poor and very few very rich.

Real free markets are the ultimate anti-poverty program, but as Brazil demonstrates they are not to be considered by experts in capital cities. Strip the economy of the coercion and hierarchy of the state and the poorest will stand to benefit the most, to avail themselves of all the possibilities foreclosed by the ruling class’s monopoly system.

MSNBC reports that Syrian government troops have killed at least 15 people in an attack on a central town today (June 2), “bringing the total killed there to 72 since the onslaught began.” Earlier this year, revolutions around the Arab world prompted calls for reform in Syria that in turn led to widespread opposition to the rule of President Bashar Assad.

Assad is the successor to his father, Hafez Assad, who ruled the country for nearly 30 years, imposing a draconian military rule characterized by frequent human rights violations. The MSNBC story goes on to note that, “according to activists and human rights groups,” “[t]he regime has killed more than 1,100 people and detained 10,000 since the uprising began in mid-March.”

The Syrian state’s indiscriminate murders have recently included almost 30 children, and the government has gone so far as to jail a teenager for blogging. As awareness of the Assad family’s illegitimacy has grown, the illegitimate acts themselves have escalated with it.

Violence is, by definition, at the heart of everything the state does. The very existence of the institution depends on precluding, through the use of coercive force, competition in the sphere of defending the rights of individuals. It is important to make known of market anarchists that we do not advocate or wish for a society in which chaos, lawlessness or mob rule would prevail, that statelessness means only the lack of arbitrary aggression, hierarchy and monopoly.

Rather than the thuggish state of things obtaining under the state, market anarchism proposes a return to the natural order of cooperation and trade. Although they are often confused or conflated, the state and society are not of the same kind, and are not even reconcilable. Market anarchists conceive of “society” as the sum total of all of the organization, association and exchange that unimpeded people voluntarily undertake to improve their own lives and those of the members of their communities.

Market anarchists would not tear asunder the fabric of this kind of society, but would allow it to flourish free from the exploitative constraints of a small power elite. Syria is an apposite example of the kind of corruption, venality and barbarism that defines all states, institutions that were never intended to do anything but enslave.

Unapologetically authoritarian and nepotistic, the Syrian state allows a handful of government courtiers to dominate the economy while martial law keeps average, working people in line. Now that Syrians have awakened to the abuses of their government in large enough numbers to threaten its power, it has resorted to the basest, most ruthless manifestations of political violence. Whether or not Syria’s current ruling class survives, no longer will they enjoy even the thinnest assumption that their rule is anything but completely illegitimate.

It is our willingness to give credence to the odd, ahistorical notion of the state as caretaker and guardian of the weak that sustains and protects its debauched and unnatural systems. Anarchists are often asked how and why — if indeed the state is so contrary to the natural order — it manages to prevail as the dominant form of social arrangement.

Few of us, though, would deny that rape and murder are unnatural and inhuman, even though these crimes continue in existence; that some, small group of people does commit them doesn’t, to the vast majority of us, seem to suggest that they are somehow to be recognized as perfectly consonant with the natural, humane interactions of ordinary people.

And the same principle is true of the state, which has for millennia allowed a ruling class to benefit from economic limitations superimposed on real free markets — which has stamped out resistance and protest at every turn. Events in Syria are a microcosm of events that go on unabated, at varying orders of magnitude, in every corner of the world.

While states continue to suppress the functioning of peaceful, consensual society, we all remain as Syrians are today — subjects of oppression and arbitrary brutality. “Every state organization … ,” wrote Rudolph Rocker, “is an artificial mechanism imposed on men from above by some ruler.” These, Rocker explained, stand in contrast to the “natural formations” that society creates spontaneously out of “common needs and mutual agreement.”

Market anarchism represents the liberation of society, and its method of genuine free markets, from the state. Syria embodies that struggle. The Assads are fundamentally no different from the ruling class at large, and the sooner all rulers are gone, the sooner society can thrive.

Jeff Riggenbach, in his weekly Ludwig von Mises Institute podcast on “The Libertarian Tradition,” discusses the life and work of C4SS Advisory Panel member Gary Chartier, author of The Conscience of an Anarchist.

A few days ago, the G8 — that cabal of states with the world’s most powerful economies — issued an appropriately preachy statement saying, among other things, “[Gaddafi] has no future in a free, democratic Libya. He must go.” That statement follows after another odious international group, the U.N. Security Council, released a resolution that uses the language “excluding a foreign occupation force” to green light a foreign occupation force. This is Orwellian political euphemism at its most unabashed.

For the G8 and the U.N., “War is Peace,” and self-determination always allows plenty of room for bellicose interventionism. When a country no longer fits comfortably into the openly dissolute web of compromises and pacts used to enslave the world to state capitalism, the kingpins make a change. This time, the bosses felt that Libya was ripe for the West’s creeping paternalism.

Bare hypocrisy characterizes the G8’s — particularly the United States’ — admonitions toward Gaddafi, their rebukes incorporating all the usual denunciations of “rogue nations.” But like the state’s uses of the words “terrorist” and “criminal,” the meaning of “rogue nation” is conspicuously inapplicable, at least in the popular parlance, to the hegemonic empire responsible for the world’s worst malfeasance.

Broadsides against Gaddafi’s Libya are, whatever their merits, difficult to take seriously when they emanate from the United States, with its multiple wars raging on without end. It seems that the categorical exceptions to appellations like “rogue nation” are defined not by any identifiable moral principle, but by the magnitude of the crimes at hand. The more extensive the global enterprise of murder and exploitation, the more likely it will be held conveniently exempt from media scrutiny and unpalatable labels.

Not only do the United States and its co-conspirators enjoy immunity when they butcher innocents, they’re actually applauded for their “humanitarian interventions” to the point that the President of the United States receives the Nobel Peace Prize. A quick look at regimes that the United States has both propped up and toppled reveals no trend with respect to “legitimacy.”

Indeed, US foreign policy decisions would appear nearly random absent the panoply of interests underlying its strategic conquests. Vague notions of “legitimacy,” arbitrarily defined by the dominant cultural force of a given age, have always lent the requisite rationales to aggression and conquest. From the Eternal City’s outward march against barbarians, to the maritime powers of the Age of Exploration capturing the Occident with the permission of the Church, empire has forever been built under moral pretexts.

For the United States and the rest of the West, “democracy” — as a practical matter, long a hollow invocation — has been the rallying cry for expansion. As international law expert Anne Orford observed, “a ‘largely economic’ enterprise of imperialism continues” today, even after the “era of decolonisation.”

This new colonialism, defined by the exportation of Western, corporate capitalism versus old-fashioned claims of territorial sovereignty, lies at the heart of every supposedly “humanitarian” war. Anarchists understand that the G8 is right about one thing: Gaddafi must go. So too, though, must every apparent “leader” of every state the world over.

Consortiums of criminal bands like the United Nations and the G8 sanctify a corporate imperial order foisted on the globe by its most powerful states. Just as empires impose foreign systems on their outposts, the state itself forces every individual into an existence defined by servitude to a ruling class.

The path away from statism, market anarchism teaches, is also the ideal end result, a society where voluntary exchange and cooperation on a genuinely free market define the social fabric. If the G8 has the moral authority to declare that Gaddafi must go, then every free, sovereign individual certainly has the same authority to announce to the state that it is no longer welcome in society.