Writing at Fareed Zakaria’s GPS blog at CNN.com, the Peterson Institute’s Gary Hufbauer and Martin Vieiro undertake to defend big business as “good for America,” contending that the recent backlash against it is “based on three common misconceptions about major U.S. corporations.”

Hufbauer and Vieiro argue that Americans misunderstand the importance of big business in innovation, that Americans’ ideas about “small places with big ideas” are a bit too sentimental.

Their case, a fairly standard and oft-repeated one among apologists for neoliberalism (i.e., neocolonialism) and corporate globalization, maintains that innovation and technological advancement require huge amalgamations of capital and worldwide scale. As the story goes, big business — ostensibly “better placed to capture economies of scale and scope” — are more capable of efficiently integrating all of the moving parts necessary to compete in the global economy.

According to this account, “the Bigs” achieved their size and ascendency through the sacrosanct traditions of free enterprise, serving consumers in ways that the old mom-and-pop simply cannot. But as physicist Brian Greene recently remarked in a radio interview, “Our explanations have to meet our observations.” The narrative related by these champions of big business would be compelling enough but for a fact completely disregarded in their column —  that the “competitiveness” they recount is nowhere to be found among big business.

Though you wouldn’t know it from reading Hufbauer and Vieiro’s ode to the giant multinational, big business benefits from myriad forms of anti-competitive, state-granted privileges that screen it from the “small places” the authors play down. From regulatory barriers to the “informal economy” of the home, to direct and indirect subsidies and suffocating intellectual property laws, big business doesn’t have to compete.

Partly to blame for the authors’ misconception, is historical accident; as various incarnations of state socialism and communism took root around the world in the 20th century, popular discourse took the form of a false dichotomy comprised of capitalism on the one hand and state socialism on the other, with all of those pesky nuances rendered inconvenient to the rhetoric divide.

The apostles of the former half of that dichotomy, capitalism, exalted “American free enterprise” as the apparent concretization of libertarian principles. The latter half, socialism, was reduced to describing complete management of economic affairs by the state, abandoning earlier and subtler notions of the idea that were quite consonant with free market ideas.

One such earlier conception, that of individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, saw socialism as emerging as a matter of course from “the principle laid down by Adam Smith … namely, that labor is the true measure of price.” Neither dictates nor regulations were necessary, Tucker argued, to secure for labor its due, provided, that is, that no dictates or regulations were erected to favor powerful business interests.

In the capitalism of his day, Tucker saw a political economy quite apart from the laissez faire we have been conditioned to attribute to his era. So too is the version of “global free enterprise” we’re looking at today very thoroughly suffused with the weighty intrusions of coercive authority, giving us the overgrown deformities that Hufbauer and Vieiro praise.

Corporations’ lionized “economies of scale” would be hard pressed to remain intact and viable without constant viands provided by the unwitting taxpayer. Instead of “smother[ing] [big business] with honey,” as Hufbauer and Vieiro recommend, we would do well to see what happens if all of that “honey” — special privileges shaped in Washington —  were withdrawn and replaced with a real free market.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

This week, I’ve submitted 6,381 Center op-eds to 2,786 publications on every continent except Antarctica (also excluding, as Center advisor Roderick Long points out, Atlantis; and I must say that my distributions thus far are in fact limited to continents on Earth). That’s fewer than usual — we had less content than usual.

So far, I’ve tracked four pickups this week — and it would only have been two if one of my own older columns hadn’t been picked up and if I hadn’t found a “missed pickup” from more than a year ago. More on that below, too.

This week’s pickups:

• Darian Worden’s “What Counts as Political?” ran in the Kent, Washington Reporter as “Important to recognize, acknowledge religion in politics” on August 31, 2010. Yes, that’s more than a year ago. Why did it only just now pop up in Google search results? Friends, I have no idea.
• “The ‘War on Drugs’ is Really a War on You,” by Kevin Carson, appeared in the Carroll County, Maryland Standard on November 1.
• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age published Kevin’s “To Occupy Wall Street: A ‘General Strike’ Producing for Ourselves” on November 1.
• On November 2, Arizona’s Sonoran News published a column of mine from a couple of months ago: “Barack Obama: Crazy or Con Man?”

So: Reduced submissions, reduced pickups. What’s going on here?

David D’Amato now writes for us when he has time, rather than on a regular basis. Also, one of Kevin Carson’s pieces came out at “feature article” rather than “newspaper op-ed” length. So I only had three articles available to submit to newspapers. Hey, that’s how it goes.

As far as the low number of pickups (saved somewhat by discovering a missed pickup and by having an older piece picked up), reduced content volume explains some of it.

Another factor is that a lot of our content right now is centered around the Occupy movement (which several Center personnel, including but probably not limited to Director Brad Spangler, Associate Director James Tuttle and Research Assistant Ross Kenyon, are actively and enthusiastically involved in) … and our take on that movement doesn’t fit into the emerging mainstream media narrative.

We’re treating Occupy as an imperfect and emergent, but potentially revolutionary, movement. The mainstream media is treating Occupy as a gaggle of discontented reformist Democrats.

We could argue all day about whether the MSM is an active participant in, or just a dupe of, the political establishment’s attempts to co-opt Occupy (positively by the Democrats, as a designated “tool of the enemy” by the Republicans), but either way op-eds that conflict with that portrayal of the movement get a cool reception.

Among C4SS writers, I’m clearly the one with the most pessimistic view of Occupy — but I still think we’re taking the right tack on it. That tack may cost us some pickups right now, but I expect it to gain us credibility as both analysts and activists over time. Just my opinion, but strongly held.

Have a great weekend!

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

In my last column, I argued that the real significance of Occupy Together is not its effectiveness in pressuring the 1%’s state to enact reforms, but rather in showing the 99% our own strength. We’re an entire society in ourselves, the producers, and we don’t need the 1% — it’s they who would starve without us.

Those involved in developing the building blocks of a counter-economy outside the corporate state — the free software movement, the crypto and digital currency movements, the micromanufacturing and permaculture movements — should engage in educational outreach on the possibilities for meeting our own needs without paying tribute to the 1%.

I’d like to expand on that. Dave Pollard of How to Save the World blog has written of “incapacitation — rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive.” (“All About Power and the Three Ways to Topple it,” February 18, 2005). As Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman-Sachs, the corporate system is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Far more important than anything Occupy Wall Street achieves as a pressure movement, is what it will achieve as an educational movement, teaching people ways to sustain themselves through peaceful production, cooperation, sharing and trade with other producers — all outside the corporate system. Far more important than what the demonstrators brought with them to Zuccotti Park will be what they take back home with them — a toolkit for fighting the system from where they live. Or as I put it in my previous column, “a general strike producing for ourselves.”

So the real significance of OWS is not as a political movement to pressure anyone else to do anything, but that it itself is the nucleus of a new society — or as Venessa Miemis recently described it, “the emergence of a living systems organization” (Emergent by Design, October 27).

There are heartening indications that OWS is making just such a transition. It shows signs of turning into a teach-in on a scale that puts the Berkeley effort of 45 years earlier to shame. Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives gave a talk on p2p at Zuccotti Park on November 1, discussing among other things commons-based peer production as “a new way of producing value.” Juliet Schor is scheduled to speak November 4 on the ideas in her book “Plentitude.”

What next? Perhaps a talk by Tom Greco on local currency systems, informing people of the potential of credit-clearing networks to create liquidity for the exchange of services and skills between people who have no conventional money. Perhaps a talk by Marcin Jakubowski of Open Source Ecology on the potential for replacing million-dollar mass-production factories with garage shops with a few thousand dollars in homebrew digital machine tools. Perhaps a permaculturist. The possibilities are endless. Every subsistence need that can be met by self-provisioning in the informal and household economy, or through peaceful sharing and exchange with our peers, deprives the vampire squid of so much blood.

Perhaps almost as important is the effect of the Occupy movement in creating stress fractures within the establishment. There are now national movements — Occupy Police, Occupy Army, etc. — of military veterans and police officers organizing in support of the Occupy movement, vowing to protect it from attack, and refusing to  obey orders to repress it. There have already been sporadic boycotts by NYPD officers staying home from work in support of the 99%, and a mass refusal by Albany police and state troopers to enforce New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s curfew order against the 700 demonstrators in Albany.

Although the evidence is mostly anecdotal and we don’t have much in the way of hard numbers, it’s still heartening. The ruling class is as prone to boiled-frog syndrome as the rest of us. They will always hesitate to resort to full-blown martial law, so long as there remains any room for hope that things aren’t really as bad for them as they seem, because they know it’s the kind of thing there’s no taking back — if it goes badly, it will result in their being dragged in chains before revolutionary courts. Franco’s troops, in the parts of Spain where his coup failed, were burned alive in their barracks by workers’ militia.

And by the time the ruling class finally decides there’s no choice but full-scale repression, it will probably be too late for them. By that time, there will be innumerable defections by police and troops refusing to obey orders, like the Winter Palace Guards in Petrograd. By that time, turncoat elements of the ruling class will be scrambling over each other to cut a separate deal with the winning side.

And this development also falls under the heading of DIY tools for sustainability, since — much like the self-organized efforts on Tahrir Square — it illustrates our ability to maintain the security of our lives and possessions through voluntary cooperation, outside the state’s security apparatus.

Finally, Occupy has indicated its intent to spark a permanent, nationwide squatter movement by the homeless. On the evening on the November 2 General Strike some members of Occupy Oakland moved into a vacant office building bordering Oscar Grant Plaza. They intend to use it as a space for workshops and classes, a library, and a dormitory for those with health conditions.  The larger goal is to set an example for Occupy movements in other cities. Better yet, it will set an example for millions of homeless who sleep in the cold, as bank-owned residential and commercial real estate sits vacant.

This is a winning proposition. The homeless really have nothing to lose. They’ll be sheltered for as long as they’re able to retain occupancy, and if they’re eventually evicted they’re no worse off than before. Meanwhile, the longer they remain in possession the greater the demonstration effect on others to take courage and do likewise; and the more likely other forms of resistance, like defaulting mortgage-payers retaining occupancy and challenging the legality of the bank’s paper, are to emerge.

As a coordinated large-scale swarming movement of millions of people, perhaps in alliance with efforts like Homes Not Jails, it will create positive network effects by raising the political costs to the state of evicting squatters. Every attempted eviction will be streamed online, further hurt the state’s image, and further undermine the morale of its functionaries. In a growing number of localities, local governments will have the sense to realize that, while the homeless and the vacant houses will still be around five years from now, the banks that hold the paper on those houses almost certainly won’t be.

The “authorities” will be forced under pressure of necessity — just as they did in post-collapse Russia as described by Dmitry Orlov — to accommodate themselves to the existence of quasi-legal tent cities, favelas, and squatters in vacant tenements and office buildings.

As Cat Stevens sang:

I’ve been smiling lately, thinking of the good things to come.

And I believe it could be, something good has begun.