Occupy Wall Street’s resurrection of the old chant — “this is what democracy looks like!” — rings new in the ears of some, but raises old worries in the minds of others: Fear of tyranny of the majority. Fear of the crowd’s imposition of its will on the minority merely because “there are more of us than there are of them.” Fear that “democracy” may come down to two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

Such fears are not unreasonable. “The will of the majority” is a common excuse for forcing things onto others.

But do most people who like the term democracy — and there are quite a few of them — really think of it as voting over who gets eaten? More likely what they mean by democracy is something like Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Chanting in the street and disrupting business as usual are ways for people to genuinely participate in government that don’t necessarily entail accepting — or promulgating — edicts from on high.

But who are “the people?” How is the term defined? The US Constitution apparently defined it as the existing white male power elite. In self-proclaimed “people’s republics” the ruling party defines “the people” as whomever the ruling party’s constituency happens to be, excluding designated class enemies.

In modern democratic societies however, “the people” tends to be used as shorthand for “the general public.” If “the people” actually means “everybody,” then the most democratic society is one in which power is vested in as many people as equally as possible.

So, the most democratic society is the society which anarchists champion: A society in which all individuals are empowered to prevent others from exerting authoritarian power over them, where power relations are flattened and people interact voluntarily as unique individuals with equal liberties.

What would the democracy of an anarchist society actually look like?

A variety of social and economic arrangements would emerge, each basing its legitimacy on voluntary cooperation. In some of these organizations or networks, a consensus approach would reach decisions acceptable to all participants. In others a cooperative model would put decisions in the hands of affected participants.

Any number of options might emerge, but their shared distinguishing characteristic would be the use of social and economic pressure instead of the threat of state force.

Some of these ideas are seen in practice in current anarchist projects including radical bookstores, informal trading networks, and study and activist groups. What holds them together is that they are all ways of challenging the exercise of political authority power. As anarchist arrangements grow and displace authoritarian relationships their participants adapt specific forms to best serve peoples’ needs.

Contrast this to how “democracy” is implemented in the United States.

Together the two “major” parties share a corner on political power, enforced by inertia, debate structuring and law, including restrictions which make it difficult for other parties to even get on the ballot. Gerrymandered districts help keep incumbents in office. Lobbyists have greater access to legislators than constituents do, and a revolving door remains in constant motion between government agencies and the companies they regulate or purchase from. Politicians listen more closely to those who can give them what they want — financial support to stay in office and influence policy-making — than to those who dispose of a mere single vote. Thus are laws and regulations made by the powerful are forced onto people without their consent.

If you only like the term democracy because you want to enforce your will on others fewer in number or just less empowered, you’ll continually find yourself cutting deals with entrenched powers over whose numbers matter. If you want real democracy — power vested in the people — you should be interested in anarchism.

First it was Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police, whose fast draw with the pepper spray relegated him to a lifetime of knowing everyone he interacts with secretly regards him as lower than a tapeworm in Satan’s colon. His nationally viewed thuggery, and subsequent transformation into a national icon of E-vill, was a wakeup call for the entire police culture — probably the first lesson to really sink in deep that things are different now.

Now it’s Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. His little walk of shame began when Emma Sullivan, a Kansas City high school senior, tweeted disparaging remarks about him during his appearance at the Youth in Government program. Brownback’s communications director, Sherienne Jones-Sontag, found the tweet in a vanity search for Brownback’s name, and whined to the folks at Youth in Government. Youth in Government, in turn, whined to the principal of Emma’s high school.

Her principal, like bureaucrats everywhere allergic to controversy — especially when it offends the people who control their funding — went ballistic. After chewing her out, he ordered Emma to write a letter of apology. He even provided talking points.

Even if the story stopped right here, this would be a perfect illustration of the narcissism and sense of entitlement of people in authority. Here’s a guy in a powerful office, surrounded by bootlicking sycophants and yes men who themselves wield enormous power, who makes more money than God. And when a high school girl taunts him, he goes running in tears to sob his little heart out about it — like a little Sunday School girl in Mary Janes who’d just seen some hobo expose his private parts at the park. Oh, you poor, poor man!

In the old days, it would have stopped there. Nobody but Emma and her immediate circle would have known, and she’d probably have wound up writing the letter.

But it didn’t stop there. Her story hit the blogs, wire services and news aggregators like a tsunami, and her Twitter account went from thirty to (as I write) 14,220 followers. A couple of days ago, it was just 5,000. The story broke over the long Thanksgiving weekend before her apology was due. Encouraged by the explosion of public support, and with the proud backing of her mother, Emma refused to apologize. “I would do it again.” That’s the difference between a weasel politician and a brave young woman.

Now Brownback, in the face of all the ridicule, is stumbling all over himself trying to walk it back. As is typical of his ilk, he reacted like a cockroach scuttling under the refrigerator when the kitchen light got turned on. But, weasel to the end, he’s apologizing — not for himself — but for “his staff,” who “overreacted.” Hoo, boy! I wouldn’t eat any food my staff brought me, if I were him. But if this is the way he normally treats people, he’s probably been unknowingly consuming bodily fluids for years.

The Little Eichmanns in the local school district, no doubt resting securely in the belief they’d uneventfully moved l’Affaire Sullivan from in-box to out-box and kept the machinery of state in smooth operation, got a nasty surprise. And like bureaucrats everywhere, they launched into full damage control mode. Here’s their official statement:

“The district has not censored Miss Sullivan nor infringed upon her freedom of speech. She is not required to write a letter of apology to the governor.”

Um, you mean now that you got caught, right?

Jones-Sontag, in subsequent comments to the KC Daily Star, said this was a “teachable moment” for students about use of social media. It was important, she said, for students to learn “the power of social media,” because the stuff stays out there forever.

It was a teachable moment, all right, but not the kind she thinks. For students, it was a teachable moment that conveyed the direct opposite of the lesson Human Resources Processing Factories have been trying to impart all these years: They learned “the power of social media” to expose wickedness in high places. They learned that such exposure is a big freaking club they can pick up and beat powerful institutions over the head with, to even things up a bit.  And the fact that social media “is lasting … on the Internet” was more a lesson for public officials than for students: We’re watching you, and there’s no place to hide.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A Barata Sam Brownback Corre Para Debaixo da Geladeira.

If you haven’t watched Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff,” I suggest you do. These videos include detailed examinations of the waste economy, subsidized inefficiency and planned obsolescence.

A recent installment, “The Story of Broke,” itemizes wasteful government spending on things like the military and enormous subsidies to prop up the well-named “dinosaur economy.” But this is only a preface for Leonard’s argument that the government really isn’t broke: If it stopped wasting money on bad stuff, it would have more than enough for “building a better future.”

Her laundry list of good things the government should spend money on includes energy efficiency projects, retrofitting homes, subsidies to alternative energy and green technology, and millions of college scholarships. But her vision of a “better future” reflects the internal contradictions of progressivism.

On one hand, we have the mid-20th century, conventional liberal vision of government intervention to build giant blockbuster infrastructure projects, spur creation of new industries, and “create jobs.”

On the other, we have the green, “small is beautiful” sensibility which emerged in the hippie era, of eliminating waste and mass consumerism.

The two just don’t go together.

When Rachel Maddow stands in front of a giant hydroelectric dam, or talks about the Interstate Highway System, as examples of doing “great things,” she channels the mid-20th century managerialist liberalism that made Galbraith’s heart go pitty-pat. That vision really isn’t compatible with the “green” and “small is beautiful” stuff that progressives also talk about.

You simply can’t have a capital-intensive economy based on large-scale, centralized infrastructures, unless you can guarantee a revenue stream to service all those overhead costs.  Which brings us to the Galbraith’s dark side: Creating social mechanisms to guarantee the output of industry will be absorbed so that the wheels of industry don’t get clogged up with unsold inventory. It was precisely that imperative that gave us subsidized waste, sprawl, the car culture, and all the rest of it in the first place.

The “progressive” capitalism model of Gates and Warren Buffett is a greenwashed version of Leonard’s dinosaur economy. There’s an inherent contradiction in her dismissal of that archaic economy, while calling for government policies to provide “good jobs.”

Expansionist government activity to utilize industrial capacity and keep everyone working full-time is the old 20th century model. But it requires an ever-diminishing amount of capital and labor to produce a given standard of living. If we eliminate the portion of industrial capacity and labor that goes to waste production, we wind up with lots of abandoned mass-production factories, and lots of people working fifteen hour weeks and buying stuff from relocalized garage factories close to where they live. And that’s not the sort of thing Gates and Buffett like, because they can’t make money off it.

Another problem is Leonard’s prescription: “Who has the real power? We do.”

Really? Barack Obama is the most progressive Democrat in at least two generations. He garnered the largest Democratic majority since LBJ defeated Goldwater, entering office with an apparent mandate from the financial collapse. Congressional Democrats picked up a super-majority. If “we” didn’t have the power to do these things with this once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the political stars, it’s safe to say it will never happen.

A government powerful enough to “build a better future” will almost certainly — on the principle that power is drawn to power — use that power benefit the few, the rich and the powerful. A continent-sized representative government, by its nature, is not amenable to control by a majority of millions of people. That’s why we had all those “dinosaur economy” subsidies in the first place.

If we want to build a better future, contesting the corporate oligarchy’s control of the government is probably not the best way to go about it. Fortunately, there are millions of people out there who really are building a better future, and they’re doing it by treating big business and big government both as obstacles to be routed around.

They’re building a new society within the decaying old society of dinosaur capitalism and its pet government, ready to replace it with something better when it collapses under its own weight.

They include Wikileaks, the file-sharing and free-culture movements, and Occupy Wall Street.

They include Linux developers, micromanufacturers in projects like Open Source Ecology and Hackerspaces, permaculturists, and community-supported agriculture.

They include the builders of encrypted currencies, barter systems, encrypted routers, and darknets.

And they’re not waiting for a government to give them permission.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Dois Vivas para A História das Coisas.
• Spanish, La Historia de las Cosas.

Dear C4SS supporters,

I apologize for the tardiness of this update — it’s a holiday weekend in the US and it just slipped my mind yesterday.

This week I’ve submitted 9.915 Center op-eds to 2,773 publications on six continents, and have logged seven “pickups” of those op-eds:

• This week’s first “pickup” actually happened on August 28, and I somehow missed it at that time: Darian Worden’s “Justice Without the State” in Sagitarius News & Style Magazine (an imprint of the Baltic Review, covering Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Germany).
• David D’Amato’s “Medallions and Monopolies” appeared on November 18, as “News Analyst David D’Amato explains how government-created monopolies distort the economy,” in the Contra Costa, California Times.
• “The ‘War on Drugs’ is Really a War on You,” by Kevin Carson, ran in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on November 21.
• David D’Amato’s “‘Austerity’ in Practice” appeared in the Dhaka New Nation in Bangladesh and in Goa’s O Heraldo in India on November 23.
• Counterpunch published Kevin Carson’s “Amateur Video: The People’s Police Commission” on November 23.
• “Doing the Math on Federal Regs,” by David D’Amato, appeared in the Carroll County, Maryland, Standard on November 25.

Enjoy your weekend!

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

Thousands have taken to Cairo’s streets and about 40 have been killed as government forces use live ammunition and large concentrations of tear gas on demonstrators. Despite the attacks, the people are determined not to allow continued military rule, and are demanding a handover of all government power to civilians.

The Egyptian revolution was not completed in February when Hosni Mubarak stepped down and left power in the hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. A cynic would describe this as a transfer of power from one wing of the armed forces to another. The SCAF is willing to share political power with politicians who are eager to share with them, but they appear unwilling to relinquish that power entirely.

But there is power in the street too. The government is unable to silence the people with deception or violence. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose leadership opposed renewed demonstrations in hopes of succeeding in upcoming parliamentary elections, has suffered from defections and internal opposition as some members have put the people before party loyalty and rejoined the revolution. It will be a hard struggle to take power from the hands of the military, and the people should not easily give up what they win.

The best result would be to keep power dispersed among the people: To develop the neighborhood and civil associations that people use to cooperatively fill each others’ needs, to topple the military leadership and put their arms under control of the people, to assemble revolutionary courts recognized by popular consensus and put those who have struck violently at revolutionaries on trial. While pursuing the necessary tearing down of the old regime, the crowd should not neglect building alternatives from the bottom up, or another authority will fill the gap left by their absence.

Fortunately, the process of organizing popular revolution provides foundations for institutions that can displace state control with consensual relations. Individual liberty can be best safeguarded, and material and social needs best realized, by voluntary organizations that operate for the benefit of participants and do not impose their will on peaceful people. Egypt does not have to be a centralized state, but can be a coalition of diverse popular networks peacefully cooperating on the basis of affinity.

Egyptians face the difficult decisions of how to proceed with a revolution that the current rulers and those who intend to share power with the current rulers are trying to hold back. This is a problem that might become more common globally as established powers continually fail to meet the expectations of people and make it clear that their power is based on acceptance of force. Whatever course is taken, liberty and the other needs of the people are best secured by building networks outside of the establishment power structures.

For years, the standard drill after a police beating or shooting, when it was a citizen’s word against a cop’s and the cop’s testimony was backed up by his Brothers in Blue, was “administrative leave” with pay for the cop — until a review board found “no evidence of official wrongdoing” and that “all official procedures and policies were followed.” The exceptions — such as the Rodney King beating and the Abner Louima case — were rare cases in which the offending thugs were stupid or careless enough to get caught.

The same is true of police violence at demonstrations. Compare the Occupy movement’s effective use of police violence video in Oakland, Portland, NYC and UC Davis with the state of affairs a decade ago in the period between Seattle and the anti-FTAA demos in Miami. Cell phone video and online video hosting back then were still in an undeveloped state. About the only place you saw documented info about police riots at anti-globalization events was Indymedia. Mainstream news almost totally adhered to the official narrative of masked Black Bloc vandals smashing windows at Macy’s.

These days, when amateur video goes viral, there’s no way the mainstream media can ignore it.

Regardless of the actual law, police in just about any jurisdiction in the U.S. will falsely claim that recording them is illegal, and probably smash your phone (and your face) in the bargain.

But with rapidly cheapening real-time Web uplink capabilities, we’re approaching the point where the only thing smashing a phone will get the cop is a viral YouTube video — not only of the original misbehavior, but of the entire interaction, from the initial threats to the scuffle to take the phone away.

Frankly, I don’t even care what penalty the sham investigation winds up imposing on Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis campus police. I think I’d actually prefer he retire on disability in a few more years after a nervous breakdown, and spend the rest of his life afraid to leave his house. He’s hardly yet begun to grasp just what hell the rest of his life is going to be.

He wears the mark of Cain. His phone number, email address and street address are already widely publicized. Even if he isn’t discharged from the force, every time he encounters a student in the course of his duties he’ll wonder if that’s a sneer of contempt or just his imagination. Every time he deals with a server or cashier, or meets anyone new, he’ll see that brief look of recognition followed by a frozen mask of politely suppressed revulsion. As the saying goes, “You can run but you can’t hide.”

This probably marks the first time the new rules of the game have been really impressed on the minds of cops everywhere. You can rest assured the lesson isn’t lost on Pike’s colleagues, or on their contacts in the national law enforcement professional grapevine. The viral images of his face and body language, as he sprays human beings like insects, are well known to them.  Even if he stays on the force, watching his ongoing transformation into a defeated wreck of a man will be the best object lesson his buddies in uniform could ever receive. Being publicly recorded behaving like a pig will guarantee, beyond the shadow of a doubt, spending the rest of one’s life in the same solitary hell as Lt. Pike.

This is just another example of how self-organized networks are increasingly empowered to take on powerful institutions, in ways that once required the countervailing power of other institutions. The problem, back then, was that so-called “oversight” bodies more often than not clustered in complexes of allied institutions with those they were supposed to oversee.  Hence the largely pro forma “investigations” by police commissions, civilian review boards, and the like.

But now we have a people’s police commission of our own. It’s called amateur video. And it will do to criminal scum like Lt. Pike what a whole world of police commissions, pretending to act on our behalf, couldn’t.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Vídeo Amador: A Comissão da Polícia do Povo.

Rex Nutting, MarketWatch’s Washington Bureau Chief, offers a misguided, if sincere, take on federal rulemaking. Presented with the possibility of a new regulation, Nutting contends, “[t]he businessman does what businessmen do: He fights the regulation tooth and nail.”

Discussing the costs and benefits of environmental regulations, Nutting rightly notes the costs of widespread corporate ruination of the natural world. And in the present, state-distorted economic system, where genuine individual rights are subordinated to big business impunity, Nutting’s on the right track.

His thesis embraces an important mistake, however, in claiming that government amounts to “the people,” setting big government in opposition to big business. Contrary to Nutting’s earnest assertions, capital and the state are, as a practical matter, virtually indistinguishable. The federal agencies that regulate a given industry are no friends of the proverbial “little guy.” They do the bidding of the plutocrats, even if inadvertently.

The argument underlying many treatments of regulatory capture, even if only implied, is that it’s an irregularity, a glitch in an otherwise pragmatic, working balance between “public” and “private” interests. It too often doesn’t occur to the student of regulatory phenomena that institutional pressures and incentives drive the strictly technical conversations she imagines.

A certain coziness, however “professional” or “objective” its appearance, is a matter of course when companies and government agencies work so closely together. The groups needn’t consciously collude or engage in the kinds of corruption — outright bribes to influence specific decisions — that catch the attention of mainstream news.

Due to no more than the natural and ineluctable tendencies of the groups involved, regulations tend to concentrate power in big business rather than reining it in. Analyzing the state of the American economy at the turn of the last century, historian Gabriel Kolko wrote that the large trusts were increasingly “unable to compete successfully or hold on to their share of the market.”

The regulations that ensued from “national progressivism,” Kolko argued, were in effect a “defense of business against … democratic ferment.” Regulations made doing business far more costly and complicated, and while the reigning business powerhouses could absorb the new costs, the local country store usually couldn’t.

The result has been an economy constituted of corporate cartels protected from genuine competition and able to pass their enormous costs onto consumers and taxpayers. The state is in its very nature a “captured organization,” a vulturine institution that functions to manipulate economic relationships for a small elite.

Without any conspiratorial motive on the part of any one person or group, the state and organized interests impose a version of “competition” that’s tolerable to the rich and powerful — one in which, for instance, self-sufficiency and -employment are anomalies.

Unless you can afford a phalanx of compliance lawyers to parse the regulatory terrain, unless you have an army of lobbyists to swarm the seat of government, your chances of finding a niche between state-privileged corporate behemoths is slim.

The way to protect the environment, undermining corporate excess and freedom from responsibility, is to withdraw special privileges and dispensations. As the source of those, the state is the single greatest impediment to accountability and anything like environmental sustainability. The state is not “the people,” unless by “people” you mean agency czars and corporate CEOs.

Current accounts of the Occupy Movement depict it as drawing derision from those who are “just trying to get to work.” Exhorting Occupiers to “get a job,” conservatives frame their opposition in standard, obsequious corporatese. Apparently assuming that people are unemployed because they want to be, the reflex response of self-abasing, “respectable” people has been to throw their resumes at the movement.

That we debase ourselves by reducing individual identity so narrowly to, for instance, job title is symptomatic of the hierarchies that trap us. In 1984, George Orwell described a society in the shape of a “pyramidal structure,” defined by its tiers of Low, Middle and High, and (perhaps more importantly) by their roles relative to one another.

The distinctive, defining feature of such a class society, Orwell argued, was not so much that the High necessarily live a life of opulence and abundance, but simply that they live better than the class below. Accordingly, it was not just the spoils of an all-embracing exploitation that drove and distinguished Orwell’s authoritarian class society, but also the psychological benefits an oppressor derives from oppression.

Today, the qualities of what are commonly referred to as the “public” and “private” sectors are, contrary to conventional wisdom, quite indistinguishable, with sterile, monolithic bureaucracies epitomizing both. The efficient, innovative, giant corporation is no less an invention of elite propaganda than is the notion of the state as munificent protector against capitalist greed.

In reality, the state has always confined economic relationships within an autoclave, prohibiting certain kinds of competition while subsidizing others. The ultimate result of the state’s violent interventions is an unvaried, lifeless economy where a small group of corporate aristocrats — corresponding to Orwell’s “Inner Party” — enjoy positions of social and economic superiority.

From their dress and their titles, what Robert Paul Wolff called “the visible signs of officiality,” we are able to recognize and distinguish members of the ruling class just as we recognize the lower classes that hold them up.

Now, as class awareness has become a perceptible, indeed palpable, ingredient in a popular movement, it is more important than ever to differentiate the pyramidal corporate capitalist system from a true free market.

A true free market would pull the rug out from under social structures that depend for their existence on systematic force in opposition to individual rights, cooperation and trade. As 1984 so arrestingly taught, the psychology of brutal hierarchies is intimately yoked to a particular, unjust distribution of wealth.

Were genuine free markets permitted to circulate the benefits of resources and technologies, the world’s hierarchies would be unable to corner and capture us or our productive power. The “vicious circle” is immediately apparent: Extreme economic inequalities rely on extreme inequalities in individuals’ rights within society, and the reverse is just as true.

The wealth that big business boasts is therefore directly tied to the fact that they have prerogatives that we do not. Subsidies, regulatory and cost barriers, government contracts and arbitrary mandates all blend together in a paradigm that disempowers the worker. Some “free market.”

Occupy’s servile critics — all of the statist economy’s good worker bees — might do well to consider how much their hard-work mantras mean to the Bosses. Perhaps then those job titles would reveal themselves as embarrassments, not laurels.

After the police state and national security cult of the Bush years, it’s nice to have our national security statism dished out by such a bunch of sensitive souls for a change. The Reaganites and neocons sent out goons in uniform to bash people’s heads in, both domestically and abroad because, you know, they were all mean and stuff. The Democrats do it because they care.

Just look at the Obama administration’s decision to name a Navy cargo ship after slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Can you imagine the Bush administration doing something like that? They’d probably have named it after some warlike figure from naval history. Not Obama.  If our progressive Commander-in-Chief rains death from the skies on Iran (only because he had to do it to “stop their aggression,” dontcha know), those below can take comfort in knowing not only that they’re being burned alive on orders from a progressive rather than from a nasty old right-winger — but that the ammo comes courtesy of Medgar Evars!

Now that’s change I can believe in! I can’t wait for the Martin Luther King, Jr. daisy cutter. Or maybe they can name every HK drone that kills an American citizen without trial after Thoreau, Howard Zinn, Gandhi, or Utah Phillips.

And the folks who were gassed, pepper-sprayed and clubbed out of their Occupy camps all over the country in the last few days should feel better that not only were at least two of the attacks (in Oakland and Portland) ordered by mayors of impeccable progressive credentials — they even received helpful advice from progressive little piggies at the Homeland Security Department and FBI of Mr. “¡Sí Se Puede!” himself.

That’s right!  Mayor Quan said that, just before she sent in her enlightened and caring stormtroopers to clear out Occupy Oakland, she was in on a conference call of eighteen cities discussing how to handle the Occupy situation. Better yet, according to Rick Ellis of Minneapolis Examiner, based on a “background conversation” with an anonymous official from Obama’s Justice Department:

“… local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.”

Afterward, Mayor Quan denied that the cities “coordinated” their raids; she merely “talked with other mayors to share experiences.” See, that’s the kind of thing you can only get from a Democrat. She didn’t talk with them about how to bust people’s heads in, like a grouchy old Republican mayor. She “shared experiences,” like a New Agey Californian!

Of course, those of us in the South are quite familiar with informal meetings of government officials to “share experiences.”  Like when several county commissioners get together for a barbecue at the county executive’s house, for instance. And while they’re sitting around sharing experiences and all, the subject just happens to come up of — say — what a great industrial park Uncle Billy Bob’s pasture would make. Perfectly legit — isn’t that what Oprah calls the Law of Attraction?

So folks all over the world, from Oakland demonstrators to wedding parties in Afghanistan, are finding out what Hope and Change are all about.  Those progressive bullets hurt so much less, don’t they?

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Matar-nos com Gentileza.

Dear C4SS supporters,

This week, I’ve submitted 8,129 Center op-eds to 2,772 publications on six continents, and have detected four pickups/citations:

• “‘Austerity’ in Practice,” by David D’Amato, ran in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on November 13.
• The Deming, New Mexico Headlight published my piece, “Herman Cain: If He Did It …” on November 14.
• On November 15, Monga Bay (a popular conservation/environmental web site) cited/quoted Kevin Carson’s C4SS research study, “The Decline and Fall of Sloanism.”
• Finally, on November 17, the Carroll County, Maryland Standard made David D’Amato’s “Addicted to Incarceration” the Center’s 400th media pickup since we began tracking in June of 2010!

That’s a little better than one pickup per weekday on average. Throw in weekends, it comes to one pickup about every 1 1/3 days. We’ve had pickups in (by my possibly imperfect count) 28 countries on six continents, and in 26 US states and territories.

As far as my goal of reaching 500 pickups by the end of 2011, that’s not looking so good … but we’ll keep trying, and I won’t pretend I’m not proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.

Please — help us keep it up! We don’t ask for a lot of financial support, and we do a lot with what we get. The Center’s 4th Quarter 2011 Fundraiser “chip in” widget is visible in the sidebar of every page at C4SS.org. Pick a number — perhaps one of those from the statistics I throw around above — and send us that much. If you value having the market anarchist message broadcast worldwide, I think we’re giving you your money’s worth.

Have a great weekend!

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

Recently, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered offered an important if unusual lesson in microeconomics.

Noting the economy’s “bumpy ride” over the past few years, the segment spotlights one “sure thing” in these tough times: Taxi medallions. Due to the high price, most drivers must take out loans to own them, giving the lender a security interest — or “mortgage” — in the glorified pieces of tin. “A taxi medallion,” the story explains, “is a physical object that gives the bearer the right to pick up rides for hire; it turns out, it’s also a good investment vehicle.”

That’s because the price of medallions has skyrocketed in recent years, with at least a couple fetching more than $1 million each. The medallion owner featured in the story, a New York cabbie who bought his for about $215,000, watched it more than triple in value in eight years.

The high price of medallions is, of course, a corollary of their scarcity, of the fact that they have the practical function as the only inroads into owning a legally operating cab. Once barriers to market entry are erected around cab driving, or any other worthwhile economic activity, those who control access to that activity can collect tolls at the entryways.

This is the way artificial — as against naturally-occurring — scarcity works, coercively precluding competition in order to allow rent-seekers and established market actors an unfair, unearned windfall. The mortgages attached to worthless pieces of metal are directly analogous to the economic rents presently embedded in virtually all other areas of economic life.

The only way that big business can extort wealth from the productive is to forcibly rule out natural opportunities to create value. The state, through a profusion of permits, licenses and regulations, creates the legal framework without which monopoly could not exist and thus serves the interests of big business.

Discussing medallions on All Things Considered, Baruch College business professor Edward Rogoff said, “There’s nothing like having a monopoly to keep you profitable.” He goes on, “When you limit competition, you get strong profits, and those profits get reflected in the value of the enterprise.”

Rogoff’s example of Econ 101 is simple and obvious enough, but it has far-reaching implications for contemporary economic reality, a reality made up of state-fortified cartels in a very unfree market.

Market anarchists submit that people should be left free to use their resources in any peaceful way they see fit. Arbitrary restrictions and spurious, state-created “rights” that benefit the “Top Companies” must be slowly, nonviolently abraded, replaced with genuine, labor-based individual rights and a bona fide free market.

The state’s costly permission slips don’t “protect consumers,” but instead subject working people to the centuries-old leeching of a ruling class. We could and would do just fine without that idle class and without their mechanism of authority, the state.

One of the corporate establishment’s favorite tricks for countering dissent is fake populism — dismissing as “class warfare” any critique of genuine privilege while misdirecting the working class’s resentment toward the underclass.

It’s sometimes called “producerism”: An attempt to manufacture a sense of class solidarity between wage workers and their alleged fellow “producers” in the plutocracy, against the parasitic lower orders. See, the banksters, billionaires and cowboy CEOs aren’t to blame for the average person’s economic pain. They’re “producers,” just like us! The culprits are the 47% who “don’t pay any taxes,” an unholy alliance of ACORN, SEIU and single moms on food stamps.

The latest example of this astroturf right-wing populism is the so-called “53%” movement, created by RedState.org founder Erick Erickson, with the help of Josh Trevino of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Their website, the53.tumblr.com, features photos of contributors holding up handwritten statements on the general pattern of Mr. Erickson’s own inaugural post: “I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up, you whiners.”

One contributor, a Marine veteran, writes: “I don’t blame Wall Street because it doesn’t matter what Wall Street or anyone else does. I am responsible for my own destiny. I will succeed or fail because of me and me ALONE.”

This sort of sycophancy is just painful to read. Here are people with multiple jobs and underwater mortgages, struggling to survive while falling all over themselves trying to outdo each other in absolving the Mr. Moneypennys and Daddy Warbuckses of any responsibility for their plight. It’s like watching a dog that keeps crawling back on its belly to lick the boot of the man who’s kicking it.

The worst part of this pathetic movement is that, intellectually speaking, it’s completely incoherent. It’s not derived from any consistent principle that bears looking into. Its participants can’t claim, as a matter of principle, that it’s wrong to resent other people or to blame them for their problems. After all, their very name suggests it’s entirely appropriate to condemn parasitism — namely, that of which the 47% is allegedly guilty.  And most of its contributors are the same people who’ve been loudly cheering on the likes of Joe the Plumber who complained the country was going to hell in a handbasket. So it’s OK to blame your problems on THEM — just so long as THEM is the Kenyan Marxist and not the billionaires.

“Know when to bark and when to lick,” as the saying goes. Resentment and moral outrage are entirely righteous when directed downward, but shameful and impious when directed upward against one’s betters. It’s perfectly OK to express resentment against economic injustice — just so long as you blame the poor instead of the rich. It’s like a slave blaming his troubles, not on the master, but on another slave picking cotton too slowly. Utterly contemptible.

You folks in the 53% movement are being played.

You don’t like parasitism? The billionaire banksters and corporate welfare queens who fund your astroturf movement are the biggest parasites in human history. They loot wealth from the genuine producers with a front end loader, while you worry about people scraping up welfare with a teaspoon.

You say you don’t like big government? The corporations are the government. Count the number of people from Goldman-Sachs in the Treasury, from Cargill in the USDA, and from Pfizer in the FDA. Now count the number of welfare moms. Yeah, that’s some “Marxist” in the White House, all right. Schmuck.

The statism involved in food stamps and TANF is barely a rounding error on the statism involved in the privilege of the super-rich. The central function of the state is to enforce the artificial property rights, artificial scarcities, entry barriers, regulatory cartels, and other monopolies from which the privileged rich extract rents. Welfare is just a way of giving back a miniscule fraction of this stolen loot to the poorest of the poor, to prevent politically destabilizing levels of starvation and homelessness. Ever hear the phrase “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel?”

So here’s a message for those of you out there who pride yourselves on licking the spittle of the rich and powerful while you kick those who are down. You think you’ll get a gold star or a pat on the head if you suck up to them enough? If you work hard enough building their pyramids, maybe they’ll make you Pharaoh someday? You really think the folks on Wall Street whose apples you’re polishing admire you as fellow “producers?”

They’re laughing at you.

A new American Civil Liberties Union report documents an area of public policy you’ll never hear much debate about within the political class: “How private prison companies have capitalized on the nation’s addiction to incarceration.” The report sheds light on a societal cancer that generates billions for plutocrats.

The Drug War is among the ruling class’s expedient multitools, used to justify every totalitarian extension of the state from domestic repression to global meddling. As it does with everything else, the use of authority to constrain the drug trade creates in illegal drugs a new and artificial importance, a pot of gold materializing from “restrictionist price.”

Since drug prices are determined not by free exchange between consenting adults, but by arbitrary legal controls, drugs become far more profitable than they would otherwise be. The result is a state-created point of intersection with society that not coincidentally serves the ruling class’s interests.

Whatever its outward objectives, the War on Drugs is in fact primarily an economic distortion, formulated — deliberately or not — to accomplish specific goals. Among these goals is to provide life support for an unparalleled and well-documented mass incarceration society.

Per Damon Barrett’s exhaustive study of drug policy Children of the Drug War, America’s War on Drugs “giv[es] ‘the land of the free’ the contradictory distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet,” by no insignificant margin. US political administrations from Reagan’s through George W. Bush’s, Barrett points out, increased imprisonment of drug offenders by more than 1,000 percent.

This has naturally redounded to the benefit of America’s overgrown, welfare-hounding prison companies, firms like Corrections Corporation of America, which consume hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Even as states throughout the country go functionally bankrupt, prison companies are doing better than ever, cashing in on their relationships with policymakers and regulators.

Given that the Drug War hasn’t corresponded with anything like a reduction in drug use or drug-related crime (indeed, most data indicate that drugs are more readily available than ever), we can only conclude that monopoly capitalism is the true engine behind that war.

But we should take care to note that using the coercive mechanisms of the state to profit by caging human beings is not characteristic of a free market. Genuine free markets stand in stark contrast to the dishonest system of profiteering that binds the state and capital together today, colluding to produce prisoners faster than the prisons can swallow them up.

Market anarchists believe, in the words of Benjamin Tucker, that “attempts to arbitrarily suppress vice [are] in themselves crimes.” However one regards participation in drug use, alcohol consumption, or any other popular vice, a free society treats only invasion against others as a criminal act.

And it is invasion against peaceful society that the Drug War prescribes, allowing elites to capitalize on a market that would not exist but for that invasion. Like alcohol prohibition before it, drug prohibition has been a blessing only for organized crime — the “legitimate” sort sitting in Washington, and the gangs that wish to protect the high prices rendered by illegality.

Genuine free markets would vastly decrease the destructive power of drugs within society, a power that is today guarded greedily by powerful interests.

“The Italian senate,” reports BBC News, “has adopted a package of austerity measures designed to avoid a bailout of the eurozone’s third largest economy.” The story observes that a “technocrat government,” now the subject of debate, may be necessary to “bring the country’s finances under control,” implying that all any economy needs to function properly is a few twists and tweaks from powerful experts.

Just as the institutional frameworks of the state demand that the laboring classes subsidize the corporate economy, so do the sacrifices of “austerity” fall unevenly on the poor. Rather than representing prudent and forbearing policies of real frugality, Europe’s austerity measures merely mean that those who benefited from the excesses of the state-distorted economy can now make us pay for their crises.

It’s important to bear in mind, though, that none of the economic situation enfolding Europe today has anything at all to do with the free market that left-libertarians advocate. Though they have been conflated by the beneficiaries of privilege, true free markets and actually existing capitalism are not at all based upon the same operating principles.

In a free society, one without a state to coercively offload the power elite’s costs onto workers, each individual would be charged with internalizing her own costs. American individualist Josiah Warren called this kind of a system (that is, a genuine free market) “Equitable Commerce,” adding that “[i]t leaves every one in undisturbed possession of his or her natural and proper sovereignty over its own person, time, property and responsibilities.”

Pervasive, systematic bargaining power inequalities can, in the long run, only be maintained through force, confining exchange relationships to the advantage of a tiny minority. When individuals have few or no options outside of those officially approved and authorized by the reigning economic power blocs — when competition is made illegal — corporate and government elites are able to charge fees on all productive activity.

In due course, the debarment of real, substantive economic freedom corresponds with a disproportionate accrual of resources in wasteful, inefficient processes. And why wouldn’t it? With neither the calibration imparted by the free shifting of resources, nor the discipline of a theft- and subsidy-free economy, the powerful players can swell to “Too Big to Fail.”

Its nerve endings dulled by the distorting final results of state intervention, the corporate capitalist model is constantly carrying itself over a cliff. Such a mode can never “work,” can never function in anything like a logical, cost-effective way, because it necessarily disconnects reward from labor.

Rather than drawing still more out of those who were forced to underwrite the wastes of the status quo economy, Italy — and the world — ought to, in Kevin Carson’s phrasing, pull away “the statist props of capitalist privilege.”

Doing so would mean a true free market, simply economies made up of consensual relationships instead of sustained invasions against the individual. Free from the exploitation of institutions beyond their control, society and community would at last become sources of vitality and creativity in the world.

“Austerity” is a lie: There will be none of it for the ruling classes of Europe. Rejecting caricatures of increasingly vital ideas, Italians and Europeans generally should consider market anarchism as a comprehensive manifestation of fundamental ideas about fairness and economic justice.

It was long believed that the queen played a central role in the complex social order of an ant colony, through the exercise of direct command and control over her subjects. Not so.  Biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse coined the term “stigmergy” for the anthill’s social organization  There is no central coordination, no hierarchy, no administrative mechanism.  Each ant’s behavior is entirely spontaneous and self-directed, as it responds independently to the chemical trail markers left by other ants.

Mark Elliot, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the best study on the subject to date, applied the term “stigmergy” to any form of human socialization in which coordination is achieved not by social negotiation or administration or consensus, but entirely by independent individual action against the background of a common social medium.

That’s essentially the organizational form used by the Linux developer community, by networked resistance movements like the Zapatista global support network of the 1990s, and by the post-Seattle anti-globalization movement. It’s the way Wikipedia and al Qaeda are organized.

Eric Raymond, writing on the open source software community, called it the “Bazaar” model.  Under the Bazaar model, every individual contribution is modular. Every participant is self-selected, and her action is based entirely on her independent judgment of what needs to be done. So all actions are not the result of consensus or majority consent, but of the unanimous consent of everyone participating. Those with the highest level of interest in a particular aspect of a problem and the highest affinity for finding a workable solution contribute to that part of the project.

In networked movements, any such contribution or innovation in a single cell will only be adopted by those who find it valuable. Those that are considered valuable instantly become the property of the entire network, free for adoption by all. So the self-selected individuals most interested in solving problems are spontaneously developing innovative solutions all over the network, and those solutions that work immediately become available for adoption by each cell deciding only for itself.

As Cory Doctorow points out, the record companies developed their DRM in the mistaken belief that it only had to be strong enough to deter the average user, and that the small number of geeks capable of cracking it would be economically insignificant. But in fact it takes only one geek to crack the DRM and post an MP3 on a torrent download site, and it becomes freely available to average users. In a stigmergic organization, the intelligence of each becomes the property of all with virtually no transaction costs.

In contrast to a hierarchically administered organization, in which proposed innovations must be evaluated and deliberated upon — gestated — by a central authority over a period of many months, a stigmergic network goes through generational changes in praxis with the speed of replicating yeast.

That’s exactly what’s happened with the social movements of the past year and a half — the arc from Wikileaks’ cable release in Summer 2010 to the latest developments in Occupy Oakland. Bradley Manning, a heroic soldier morally appalled at the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Iraq, allegedly took it upon himself to release hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Wikileaks chose to post them online.

In the face of attempts to shut down Wikileaks by seizing their domain name or cutting off funding vectors like PayPal, the stigmergic innovation mechanism kicked into high gear.  Thousands of mirror sites sprang up all over the world. Thousands more websites and blogs posted the numeric IP addresses for Wikileaks’ sites. And hackers like The Pirate Bay’s Rick Falkvinge immediately started thinking about an open domain name service and open digital payment systems.

The Wikileaks cables included private diplomatic assessments of the level of corruption in the Tunisian government, which were quickly circulated by Facebook among the dissident community.  Mohamed Bouazizi, a poor vegetable vendor in Tunisia, set himself on fire in protest after being slapped in the face by a government official, sparking a revolution that has toppled several Arab governments and since spread from London and Amsterdam to Spain to Greece and Israel, to Madison and Wall Street — and outward again from Wall Street to hundreds of cities around the world.

Egypt’s attempt to destroy the revolution by shutting down the Internet spurred projects like ContactCon to a new sense of urgency in developing a “NextNet,” a global open meshwork that can’t be shut down because the only routing nodes are the users’ own hardware at the endpoints.

The Occupy movement itself operates stigmergically, with innovations developed by one node becoming part of the total movement’s common toolkit. Some Oakland demonstrators made the first experiment in occupying a vacant office building and encouraging the homeless to squat vacant and condemned buildings all around the city. They did this in a clumsy and imprudent way, unfortunately, provoking vicious police repression.

But the basic idea remains, and someone will soon do it better — because that’s the way stigmergy works. All across America, there are vacant office buildings and homes owned by banks, and millions of homeless people who need a place to sleep. There aren’t enough police and sheriffs’ deputies in the world to stop them from moving in, if they get it into their heads to start moving in on their own initiative.

What’s more, the homeless have nothing to lose — if they get kicked out, they were housed for the period of time while it lasted. And every single eviction becomes another point of failure for the system, to be publicized with cell phone videos and streaming Internet coverage.  Every single house becomes the site of another defensive stand, another PR nightmare for the local “authorities” hauling families out of their homes before the eyes of the world. Already, the Minneapolis movement has interposed itself in defense of foreclosed homeowner Monique White.

It’s only a matter of time until local Occupy movements become centers of innovation, not only in protest tactics, but in new forms of social organization in the communities where they live. In communities all across the country, people will realize that they’re neighbors who live in the same town or city — there’s no reason their cooperation has to be limited to the park or town square.

Occupy will become not just a protest movement, but a school for living: Local currency and barter systems for the exchange of skills by the unemployed, small-scale informal and household production techniques for unemployed workers who need to provide for as many of their own needs as possible through self-provisioning, intensive horticultural techniques like permaculture — the possibilities are endless.

Occupy Wall Street recently became a teach-in, with Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives speaking in Zuccotti Park on peer-production as a mechanism for creating value, and Juliet Schor discussing the decentralist and DIY economic ideas in her book Plenitude. A character in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time said that the new world, the revolution, wasn’t built by slogans and big meetings. It was built by people who found new ways of feeding themselves, new ways of teaching their kids, new ways of relating to each other.

So all over the world, we’re figuring out ways to live without the land and capital of the classes who think they own the planet, ways to make their land and capital useless to them with no one to work it for them. And they can’t stop us because we have no leaders.

In the words of Neo, in “The Matrix”:

“I know that you’re afraid … you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. … I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. …  I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

Or more succinctly, as Anonymous puts it:  Expect us.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of this article, Converge and Overtake!: The Stigmergic Revolution and The General Idea of the Revolution in the 21st Century.

Translations for this article:

• Russian, Стигмергическая революция.
• Swedish, Den Stigmergiska Revolutionen.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

This week, I’ve submitted 7.161 Center op-eds to 1,791 US publications.

As is usual when we only submit in one country, pickups are down — in this case to two. David D’Amato’s “The Science of Anarchism” ran in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on November 7, and my own “Cain: If He Did it …” appeared in the Juneau, Alaska Empire on November 9.

I was hoping for at least six pickups this week. Didn’t happen.

Silver linings: We will probably pass the 400 mark for MSM-published or -cited op-eds next week. Also, it looks like that Empire pickup was our first in Alaska. So, we are still moving forward, and still extending our reach into new places.

This week’s pseudo-random reciprocal blogospheric link love goes to The Moral Liberal, Infoshop News (they reprint our stuff regularly and I don’t thank them often enough!), and Aretae.

Now, it’s back to work looking for some internationally submittable content, or perhaps writing said content myself. Have a great weekend!

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

Italy and Greece prepare to welcome new prime ministers, with the latter already sustained by the EU’s bailout fund. This state of global political and economic reality gives resounding testimony to the failure of statism as a way of organizing human affairs — in terms not only of justice, but also efficiency.

Among the few largest economies in Europe, Italy’s makes up almost a fifth of the EU’s, but the country’s debt stands at more than twice its GDP (over $2.5 trillion). If ever the interdependence of the political and the economic were clear, it is so in Italy, the picture of a political schema marked by bribery and moral turpitude.

Greece, too, has for decades been singled out as a center of political misconduct and abuse of power. But are these Mediterranean nations so different from other governments around the world?

If we believe the burnished slogans advanced by its public relations masters in both academia and the media, the state is necessary to the creation and conservation of order in society. Its hierarchies and strictures, its layers of social and legal orthodoxy indurated over the centuries, stand between us and the arbitrariness of chaos.

The state, the argument goes, is the vehicle for expertise, managing society under the guidelines provided by shared ethical sensibilities and goals. But in our keenness to highlight how the state’s concentrated strength alienates and abuses the individual, we anarchists have perhaps failed to effectively articulate another point: That the state is a pestilence eating away at every one among the professed rationales in its favor — that every aim from fairness to economic stability is sabotaged by authority.

On its face, it may seem counterintuitive that the halls of government are the source of the great part of society’s disorder, poverty and violence. We are taught that the state, representing the interests of the people and the general welfare, is a great parapet against which indigence and crime crash and dissolve.

Never is it considered — even while only a small few actually control the mechanisms of power at any given time — that elites might have an interest in perpetuating widespread want and destitution. Though most people don’t hesitate to acknowledge that business corporations and other organizations act in the interests of those who make them up, that fundamental assumption is pitchpoled with regard to the state.

In governments the world over, in parliaments, ministries and courts, we witness the powerful, rich and connected enshrined strategically in positions of import and influence. And for all of the plain indications of corruption and profiteering, we nonetheless largely believe that there is nothing inherently contradictory about the theory and practice of the state.

We still cling to the myth that the state virtuously declines to exert its monopoly on coercion in order to respond to its own institutional incentives. Whether we recognize it or not, however, the state does — consciously or otherwise — serve the oligarchs orbiting around its center of gravity, around the headspring of privilege created by authority.

In doing so, allotting favors to the ruling class, the state produces imbalances that represent the difference between labor-saving, streamlined economies of free decisions, and the rigid, inflexible economies of today. In short, widespread corruption and widespread insolvency are natural companions.

The fundamental, structural problem with the state, the thing that makes it unworkable in principle, is that it is simply coercive exaction, blackmail and nepotism — i.e., corruption — on a large, organized and legitimized scale. Italy and Greece are mere illustrations of the same general problems that characterize all politicized, hierarchical societies.

How indeed could a nation rationally allocate resources in the forms of time, labor and things of value if individuals and communities are forcibly restricted from doing so themselves? Genuine free markets have no relation whatever to the political capitalism of the global, state-dependent economy.

When dignity and autonomy return to the life of the individual, allowing her to trade with her fellow equals on a mutually-respectful basis, the crises that Europe now hosts with wane and pass away. The state, of course, will have passed away with them, leaving real order and peace behind.

Domenico Letizia of biblioteca dell’egoista had some nice things about Larry Gambone, market anarchism and me in an article entitled “le Cooperative e la cultura americana.”  He earlier mentioned Roderick long, free market anticapitalism, and me in an article at Anarchismo Liberale.

When I contacted him by email, Domenico had further positive comments about C4SS. He mentioned the persistence of a cooperative tradition in his country (most C4SS readers, I assume, are somewhat familiar with the Emilia-Romagna economic model by now), and suggested I post links to the Italian articles, in hopes that it would “spark a discussion of the spread of anti-statism in Italy.”  May it be so!

Greetings to our newfound comrades in Italy

So, the circus is in town again. Yet another politician, facing yet another set of sexual misbehavior allegations. Whodathunkit?

In America, this kind of spectacle traces its roots to at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Whether it’s titillating (two of the Kennedy brothers and Marilyn Monroe), scandalous (the other Kennedy brother and Mary Jo Kopechne, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky) or creepy from all sides (Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Jack and Jeri Ryan, John Edwards and Rielle Hunter), we can’t seem to get enough of politicians and the illicit, semi-licit or just plain salacious.

This week’s peep show feature flick: The panoply of sexual harassment allegations leveled against Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain. The (potentially) 270-Electoral-Vote-Question is whether or not Cain’s an abusive lecher who parlayed his position as CEO of the National Restaurant Association into opportunities for sexual gratification by conditioning women’s employment, promotion, etc. on whether or not he got that gratification.

Do I know the answer to that question? No, I don’t. But in the spirit of OJ Simpson’s “tell all, without admitting guilt” book, If I Did It, I’d like to take a swing at the implications of the answer being “yes, he did.”

Folks, if he did it, why should any of us feign surprise?

Abuse of personal power and pursuit of political power are just slightly different expressions of the same pathology. In both cases, the intent is to achieve one’s goals through the exercise of authority and the threat of punishment.

Furthermore, it’s not just that power corrupts, it’s that corruption demands feeding. Once corrupted by power, it’s only natural for the powerful to seek ever more power, the better to give wider and more satisfying play to the corruption.

That a sexual harasser (or any other corrupt or rapacious person) might seek public office is something we should find no more surprising than that someone who likes to run long distances might enter a marathon, or that someone who likes food might visit a restaurant. As Willie Sutton is (apocryphally) said to have answered when asked why he robbed banks, “because that’s where the money is.”

In the ongoing debate between anarchists and advocates of political government, the latter side loves to play the trump card: People are corruptible and rapacious and must be reined in. The argument goes back most famously to Thomas Hobbes and his “war of all against all,” against which he posits the restraining power of the “sovereign.”

The anarchist rejoinder to this argument is that the worst possible answer to corruptibility and rapacity is centralization of power in one institution, an institution inherently attractive to — and vulnerable to — hijacking by the corrupt and rapacious.

Within the context of modern American politics, the measure of Herman Cain’s sin — and of the system’s inherent unworthiness of our loyalty — lies not in whether or not he did it, but in the fact that whether or not he did it, he let himself get caught up in the question of whether or not he did it. And the measure of our gullibility is that we continue to tolerate systems of governance which reward the behavior and only penalize its public disclosure.

The New Republic‘s Michael Kazin detects the influence of a “throwback” ideology — anarchism — on the Occupy movement. He’s right, of course: We’re there. And refreshingly, Kazin doesn’t just arrogantly write our influence off as a bad thing.

“[T]here is something both bracing and even rational about the anarchist revival. …” Kazin writes. “Anti-authoritarianism can be a useful corrective to authorities who have lost the confidence of the citizenry, if not their legitimacy to rule.”

It’s nice to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, Kazin misses the point. He’s not alone.

Love it or hate it, virtually every observer of the Occupy movement puts a “throwback” spin on things, usually referring to America’s social and political convulsions of the late 1960s (the latest conservative mantras invariably reference “those smelly hippies”) or to the 2009-2010 “Tea Party” movement. Those comparisons aren’t wholly without merit, but they fail to capture the essentials.

As a mostly unknown ideal, anarchism doesn’t fit into the old boxes. As it always has, anarchism represents the way forward to a society unencumbered by political government and the class warfare which inevitably accompanies it. If the Occupiers hope to accomplish anything worthwhile, they must likewise reject conformity to past patterns. Even if the movement fails, let it “fail forward,” revealing worthwhile lessons and creating the template for a mass movement come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

If we seek “throwback ideologies,” we need look no further than Occupy’s opponents — the Westphalian nation-states and their symbiotic corporate partners, responsible for the enslavement of billions and the murder of hundreds of millions in the last century alone.

“The confidence of the citizenry” be damned — their claim of “legitimacy to rule” is balderdash. They’ve had their day in the sun and then some, and at its best the Occupiers represent a force which loosens their grip on power. Which, of course, explains why the statist right is so eager to dismiss them and the statist left so intent on co-opting them.

I count myself among the movement’s most pessimistic supporters. The odds were long to begin with. They grow longer as the days get shorter and colder (autumn is a bad time to launch an “American Spring”), as the establishment and the political class marshal their astroturf and co-option efforts, as ideological fault-lines and just plain human nature (e.g. the Occupy Wall Street “women’s tents” to protect female occupiers from the preying element) begin to emerge, and as the media just plain gets bored with the whole thing and decides to move on to the next sensation.

If, as I expect, the Occupy movement drifts gently away into the good night of “old news,” dispersing dandelion-like on multiple winds, its most valuable and enduring legacy will be those who go into it believing that the existing system can and should be “reformed” and saved, but come out holding aloft the black flag on which nothing is written^*.

—–
* I grabbed that phrase from Ken MacLeod‘s wonderful novel, The Sky Road, then forgot to attribute it to him, for which I sincerely apologize. Just noticed, and now fixed!