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“Property is Theft!” was the battle cry of one prominent French anarchist in the 19th century. “Au contraire, mon frère,” retorted another. “Property is Liberty!” “You’re both wrong,” said a third. “Property is Impossible!” How such people got along with each other is amazing. More so, since it was the same man, Pierre Proudhon, who said all three.

All anarchists support property rights, including those who oppose property rights. And all anarchists oppose property rights, including those who support property rights. Context is everything. So are definitions.

Property is Theft

Proudhon was no fool: He recognized the irony of that statement, for in the process of condemning property, he was confirming it. Without the concept of property there can be no concept of theft. So let’s try to figure out what he might have really meant.

When Proudhon wrote these words, far and away the most important form of property was land, and most ownership of land was the result of arbitrary claims enforced by the ruling government rather than personal homesteading or voluntary transfers traceable to a personal homesteader. In short, most property at the time was stolen.

Thoughtful anarcho-capitalists concede this point, and insist they only support homestead-based claims, thinking they have addressed the entire anarcho-communist objection to private property. They have not. For another fundamental point is that owners of land were considered to have the exclusive right to determine what happens to everything and everyone on their land. And some anarcho-capitalists defend that point of view. Oddly, many of them defend this view of property rights as a logical outgrowth of the principle of self-ownership.

Self-Ownership

As I’ve noted before, my favorite definition of anarchy comes from Roderick Long:

Other People Are Not Your Property

I’ve yet to meet an anarcho-capitalist who objects to this formulation. Nearly all of them also agree with Thomas Jefferson’s formulation of the rights of man in the Declaration of Independence, where he states that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable (which is an acceptable variant of inalienable, regardless of what you’ve heard), meaning that they are “incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.” [No, “uncapable” is not an acceptable variant.]

But if “Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight” is a valid assertion of property rights by the owner, then it is clear that self-ownership isn’t going to get you very far: your unalienable rights only exist as long as you can find a spot nobody else owns, at which point you can be immediately declared an illegal alien. Yes, of course, I might shoot someone because they are a credible threat to my life, but this is true whether they’ve threatened me in the home I own, the apartment I rent, the hotel where I’m staying, or the restaurant where I’m eating: it has nothing to do with my being the owner of the property.

Proprietary communities are another extraordinary application of extreme propertarianism. Defenders of these sometimes assert that any rules can be set and enforced, so long as the property was legitimately homesteaded or transferred. Again, anybody supporting this who claims that self-ownership is unalienable needs to consider how empty they’re making this principle. I can say for certain they’ve never had to deal with the management of a co-op or condo association.

Property is Liberty

However, I come not to bury property rights, but to praise them. Proudhon’s later pronouncement recognized that the claims of private property owners were a bulwark against government violations of life and liberty. I think we need to go further: property rights have proven to be an indispensable way of reducing social violence in general. As James Payne has documented in A History of Force, the world has been getting more and more peaceful over the centuries, and an increasing respect for property rights is probably one of the reasons. John Hasnas has written (PDF) an excellent account of how law developed in pre-Norman England, with property rights arising as an effective alternative to blood feuds. And Bruce Benson, in his many studies in The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, has identified property rights as a characteristic of all the legal systems he has seen develop in societies without central planners. When anarcho-capitalists are asked for historical examples of their societies, they usually pick multi-century examples such as Celtic Ireland and Viking Iceland, while anarcho-communists point to short-term experiments such as the Paris Communes and Spanish Revolution. It does appear that anarchist societies which respected property rights lasted a heck of a lot longer before failing. Alas, like virtually every government in history, virtually every anarchy in history was of finite duration. More on that shortly.

Property is Impossible

The Hasnas piece is especially instructive, because he notes the limits on property that naturally arose. Easements are one obvious example: if you own a piece of land, and I acquire, even by legitimate homesteading, all of the land surrounding yours, I don’t have the right to effectively imprison you by denying you access to my land to get out. It would be useless to own the ground but not any of the space above the ground, yet I can’t own everything above the land up to the end of the universe (I still wonder what exists 1 mile beyond the end of the universe). I can’t exclude air and light going onto my property, and forbid all molecules that I consider to be pollution (especially now that so many think carbon is a pollutant). Absolutism on property quickly becomes absurd. And it is all because we look at property improperly, trying to derive a single set of rules for all situations from first principles, when property is, in fact, a problem solver that self-owners adopt for the purpose of living in peace and harmony with each other.

A Bundle of Rights

Property is not a single right, but a bundle of different rights that can be unbundled when desirable. The 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, who died earlier this year, performed the hard work of determining how real people have solved problems involving common pool resources that resist both government and private property solutions. She discussed at least 5 different categories of property rights: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation, and emphasized that it clearly isn’t “all or nothing.”

One can make even finer distinctions. If I homestead property to build a house, that might include a right not to have loud noise disrupt my sleep, but if I homestead property to build a factory, that right might not exist. We can look at my homesteading property for growing food, another might use the same property for hiking, another as a travel route to the other side, and as long as the later uses don’t interfere with the earlier ones, each has homesteaded a right to the same property. Granted, homesteading a location for a personal residence should provide more of a right to exclude others. Still, reason must prevail.

We homestead property to the extent we are using it and in the manner we are using it, and we abandon our claim when it becomes clear we have stopped using it (as Bill Orton has suggested, much of the difference between ancap and ancom theories of property can be described as how “sticky” property is after homesteading).

Once we stop treating homesteading as granting total and permanent control over property merely through the act of mixing a little labor with it or fencing it off, we expand the number of people who support property rights enormously. Even anarcho-communists support possession, a right not to be violently dispossessed of property so long as a person is using it. And while many ancoms are infuriatingly vague about the length of time a person can stop using property before it is considered abandoned, and why lending property is okay and transferring property is okay, but lending property in exchange for a transfer of property (renting) is not okay, they’re not so insane as to argue that a person who leaves his bed to go to the restroom at night has abandoned his bed and left it open to claimed by another, as some have charged.

Similarly, one of the most well-known common law precepts in the relatively sticky property world we live in is “possession is nine points of the law,” and while it may not have been literally true in statute, it did and to a great extent still does represent the common sense of the average person in the Anglo-Saxon world. The accepted legal principle of adverse possession derives from it, and legal scholars have referred to it over the centuries as a valid idea if not a mathematically literal statement. So let’s not go around claiming the anarcho-communists are spewing pure drivel when they talk of possession rather than property.

Furthermore, even to the extent property rights are legitimate, dispute resolution over property cannot be territorially based, because that means begging the very question. You can’t do that on my property! Who says? The judge says! Which judge? The judge I selected for all disputes involving my property! Who says it is your property? The judge! Which judge? The judge I selected for all disputes involving my property! I want a different judge! You have no choice, since you’re on my property! According to whom? The judge! Which judge? The judge I selected for all disputes involving my property!

Sustainable Anarchy

Anarchists are usually treated to a catch-22 when trying to defend the practicality of our views, by people asking for historical examples. If we point out that there hasn’t yet been a complete anarchist experiment, that is treated as proof of utopianism. If we provide clear examples from the current world, such as in Hasnas’ excellent The Obviousness of Anarchy (PDF), all our examples are dismissed because they are occurring within a society that still has a government (even when its existence has no credible connection to the examples). And if we provide historical examples, of which there are several, of reasonably close approximations to what we propose, we’re asked why they no longer exist.

Based on their great longevity, I think experiments in anarcho-capitalism have proven more successful than those under anarcho-communism. But I think the anarcho-communists have the answer to why the former still eventually failed: concentrations of power are dangerous even when they result from voluntary behavior. In both Iceland and Ireland, voluntary law and private property prevailed for centuries, but the acceptance of Christianity and, more importantly, of the tithing of money to the church, led to increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of those overseeing church operations, and what was voluntary became coercive once that concentrated wealth was used to project violent power.

Thus, it is right to question hierarchy in all of its forms, including landlord-tenant relationships and employer-employee relationships. That doesn’t mean declaring them illegal, but it does mean being uncomfortable with ALL imbalances of power and addressing the reasons for them. At present, enormous amounts of land are closed off to homesteading, even within cities, and both licensing and regulation are used to destroy countless opportunities for self-employment. Intellectual property laws are used to prevent people from using their own tangible property based on their own knowledge, and the only people who can afford to enforce these laws are the wealthiest because of a monopoly legal system that is outrageously costly to use. Get rid of these restrictions and the imbalances of power blamed on capitalism become immensely smaller.

And if you pay attention to the words of the most intelligent anarcho-communists instead of strawmanning their views, you’ll discover that the methods they propose to get rid of the non-violent hierarchies they oppose are non-violent and completely consistent with a free market. As I see it, we are not only allies on the most important issues of our time, such as military intervention, drug prohibition, corporate welfare, and the licenses, regulations, and taxes that destroy the opportunities of the average person, but we are even allies against hierarchy. David Friedman, whose The Machinery of Freedom (PDF) was the book that converted me to anarcho-capitalism (although I now prefer to call myself a market anarchist, common law anarchist, or just plain anarchist), made it clear that he strongly preferred a society of individual business owners rather than large corporations, and saw extending free markets as the best way to achieve that.

In anarchy, networks replace hierarchies as tools for organizing society. Similarly, I see prices replacing bosses, as we coordinate activity through the price system rather than by having people who give orders and people who obey them. But, in addition to that, we need vigilance against imbalances of power when they develop, even when the result of voluntary activity. Boycotting businesses that treat workers poorly or use market power to restrict consumer choice is part of maintaining a free society I switched from an Apple iPhone to a Google Android for that very reason). Ostracizing wealth accumulators who do nothing to help the less fortunate and praising those who use wealth for the benefit of society are also parts of it.

I especially like the idea of goodwill as the ultimate currency, as William Gillis wrote in 2009 on his site, Human Iterations. In an anarchist society, the rich never forget that they cease to be rich if the rest of society chooses not to recognize their property claims: the moment you claim the right to more than what you can personally control, you are relying on other people to honor your claim. So be nice to people.

To Serve Man

Okay, time for the anarchist cookbook. I believe that property is a problem solver, a useful tool for achieving social peace and economic efficiency that benefits society enormously. However, it is a useful social convention, not an absolute right derivable from self-ownership: there is no reason that a person born in the year 2100 should have fewer rights than a person born in the year 2000, but if all the world becomes private property, and property owners can establish all the rules for their property, then every person born after that date will be born a slave, and self-ownership will become a joke. Moreover, the limits on property rights have already been acknowledged in common law, and ancaps need to abandon the cartoon version of contract law, and learn about duress, undue influence, and adhesions: established common law concepts that go beyond the “well, he agreed to it” view of contractual obligations. We’ve modified contract law enough in the US to recognize that employees have the right to quit their job even if they signed a multi-year contract (except for those who join the government military), and debtors can have their obligations cancelled in bankruptcy and never end up in prison if they don’t pay (except for those who owe the government taxes). In short, the sanctity of contract is already recognized as an intolerable concept under law, because it violates self-ownership.

All anarchy requires is that we accept the idea that other people are not our property. With that alone, we’ll create whatever order and organization is needed in an environment of mutual respect. When we have disputes we can’t resolve, we’ll create tools for resolving them. History tells us that private property is one of those tools, but we shouldn’t raise it to the level of a fetish that overrides our common sense and our humanity.

We Can All Live Together

What makes me most optimistic about the future of the anarchist movement is that reality will always win out over theory. Both the ancap who insists that homesteading creates total and permanent domination of a location and the ancom who insists that all private property is evil bow to the reality that, while they may continue to use the tools of persuasion, ostracism, and boycott, they ultimately will have to live in the world as it is. I see no evidence whatsoever that anarchist societies can successfully adopt either of the extremes (and if I’m wrong, I’ll bow to that reality). The Hasnas piece I referenced earlier suggests that people create property rights when they can solve a problem and make exceptions when those exceptions solve a problem. Common law developed from the common sense of people.

Anarchy is not a system. It isn’t even an -ism, although anarchism is a word we sometimes use. It is an attitude of respect for other people, and a rejection of master-slave relationships (with no exception for government officials). What grows from an atmosphere of mutual respect is unpredictable, differs from place to place, and changes over time. I believe that private property has proven its value, but that it isn’t sustainable without a suspicion of all concentrations of wealth and power, even voluntary. As much as I think anarcho-communists are dead wrong about the need to abolish rent and wages, I think they are dead right about the need to be suspicious of all imbalances of authority and to openly condemn those who take advantage of such imbalances.

Up with Property! Down with Hierarchy!

[End Note: I am not claiming that my interpretations of Proudhon’s slogans are identical to his. Proudhon didn’t even say these things, because he spoke French. But I think he and I would have been friends, at least until we got into a discussion of French vs California wines.]

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, ¿Es la Propiedad un Robo?
• Portuguese, Propriedade é roubo?
• Greek, Είναι η Ιδιοκτησία Κλοπή?

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Mercado Liberado.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by David S. D’Amato.

Ontem a Bloomberg informou que Tribunal de Circuito Federal de Apelações manteve a validade de patente protetora de software usado para defesa contra pirataria. A decisão poderá custar a outras   empresas que já usaram a tecnologia biliões em indenizações e “poderá estimular os esforços [do querelante] para coletar royalties de empresas adicionais.”

A mesma notícia continua descrevendo o registro, por dono de restaurante em Baltimore, da palavra “hon” (forma abreviada do tratamento afetuoso “docinho”) como marca registrada, e o questionamento do registro pelo administrador de um website. Tanto a patente quanto a marca registrada detalhadas no artigo oferecem exemplos emblematicamente marcantes de tipos de “propriedade privada” perfeitamente arbitrários que o estado inflige à sociedade.

E do mesmo modo que a cooptação, pelo capitalismo, da expressão “livre mercado” torna mais difícil defender os livres mercados, também as formas espúrias de “propriedade privada” do estado tendem a tornar mais árdua qualquer tentativa de defender a propriedade enquanto tal.

Historicamente o anarquismo foi amiúde definido como implicando em rejeição da ideia de propriedade privada, de direito individual de possuir coisas contra as reivindicações da sociedade em geral. Podemos assumir, no entanto, que os anarquistas “contrários à propriedade” considerariam inadmissível alguém roubar o carro deles, ou ir entrando pela casa deles sem ser convidado. Todos os anarquistas, em algum nível, defendem os direitos de controlarmos nossa pessoa e os produtos de nosso trabalho, concessões que, em meu entender, requerem propriedade, apesar da própria palavra e de sua bagagem.

Não é coincidência Thomas Babington Macaulay, em sua crítica do estado, ter comparado este a “um grande capitalista” — significando em essência um monopolista — tendo como única motivação usar a riqueza da sociedade em favor de uns poucos privilegiados. Muitos dos primeiros anarquistas terão entendido a propriedade dentro desse paradigma, como ferramenta de exploração dentro do sistema econômico capitalista de estado mais amplo.

Não é de admirar, portanto, que tantos deles, em sua hostilidade a todo tipo de autoridade, tenham-se oposto à propriedade, o meio legal pelo qual a riqueza é concentrada. Similarmente, quando Emma Goldman diz que “a propriedade, ou o monopólio das coisas, subjugou e sufocou as necessidades do homem,” estava claramente falando de “propriedade” dentro do contexto do sistema econômico centralizado/monopolizado (ênfase acrescentada).

Dadas as razões apresentadas por esses anarquistas em apoio à sua desaprovação, poder-se-á pensar que também os anarquistas da Esquerda de livre mercado recusem, num sentido particular, a propriedade. Despida de suas exigências morais — aqueles fatores de pré-requisito que justificam a proteção da propriedade da pessoa em relação a algumas coisas — a propriedade torna-se apenas outra maneira de as elites de poder do estado darem-se a si próprias herdeiros. A propriedade intelectual tal como patentes e marcas registradas são elas próprias exemplos disso, permitindo aos monopolistas atuais manter a arma de fogo do estado apontada para nossas cabeças para ou pararmos de competir ou pagar-mos-lhes aluguéis (na forma de “royalties”).

Benjamin Tucker enumerou seus “Quatro Monopólios” precisamente para opor-se ao tipo de propriedade que o estado urde e institui, não para opor-se ao conceito de propriedade pura e simplesmente. “Anarquismo,” ensinava ele, “será palavra sem significado, a menos que inclua a liberdade de o indivíduo controlar seu produto ou qualquer coisa que seu produto lhe tenha trazido por meio de troca em livre mercado — isto é, propriedade privada. Quem negue a propriedade privada será, necessariamente, arquista.”

Repetindo, vemos que anarquistas consistente e corretamente têm feito equivaler a formulação estatista da propriedade a monopolização, precisamente aquilo a que os anarquistas de mercado resistem em todos os aspectos. Se considerarmos o significado de propriedade como definida pelo estado — direitos completamente artificiais concedidos por decreto — então o antagonismo anarquista tradicional começará a ficar claro.

Lembremo-nos bem de que, devido à autoridade repressora das instituições religiosas, muitos anarquistas entenderam o ateísmo como condição indispensável do anarquismo, peça indispensável da atitude contrária à autoridade. (No interesse da clareza: sou ateu.) Significaria isso que nós, anarquistas de hoje, tenhamos de exortar contra a prática da fé, ou melhor faríamos em limitar o anarquismo, como fez Tucker, a oposição a apenas uma coisa muito específica — o estado?

A posição contrária à propriedade poderá ser um artigo de fé dentro do anarquismo, mas apenas na medida em que aceitemos a definição distorcida de propriedade enunciada pelo estado. Nossa tarefa como anarquistas é mostrar às pessoas que, ao discordar da propriedade privada nos termos exarados pelo estado, apoiamo-la em sua forma verdadeira.

Artigo original afixado por David S. D’Amato em 5 de janeiro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Per ABC News:

Authorities are investigating the fatal shooting of a 32-year-old woman in the suburban San Diego area after she allegedly hit a Border Patrol agent with her car.

Naturally the “she should have known better” crowd is out in full force, blaming the victim, Valeria Alvarado. But the video attached to the story clarifies things a little bit.

The agent was “undercover.”

In other words, he was dressed as a mundane gun-waving thug — unaffiliated, or perhaps affiliated with a lesser unit like Otay or Varrio Chula Vista, possibly a carjacker or drug-crazed loon — rather than sporting the full colors of the Brown People Abduction Crew of America’s largest street gang, its “federal government.”

So, Valeria Alvarado defended herself, and Valeria Alvarado died. If the hooligan had bothered to put on a “raid jacket” before running wild in the street, she’d probably have put it in park, prostrated herself, and survived.

Just another gangland murder, but these perps have a better marketing department than MS13 or The Mexican Mafia.

A recurring theme in ruling class circles over the past thirty years has been the “crisis of governability” (e.g. Samuel Huntington, et al., The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, 1975). It increased by at least an order of magnitude with the new possibilities the Internet offered for networked resistance (Netwar) by the late 1990s. David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla (The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico MR-994-A, 1998)  surveyed the global support network for the Zapatista movement as one of the earliest examples of this phenomenon.

One topic that has received far less attention than it deserves, in my opinion, is the application of this networked resistance or asymmetric warfare model in the specific context of labor relations. This is the theme of draft Chapter Nine (PDF – Special Agency Problems of Labor:  Internal Crisis Tendencies of the Large Organization) of my work in progress on anarchist organization theory.

As is the case with the crisis of governability in general, asymmetric warfare in the workplace predates network culture by many decades, if not centuries (it probably started the first time a slave or serf told his master some farming implement “broke itself”).

My concern here is with the specific tactic the Wobblies have called “open mouth sabotage” and the exponential increase in its potential made possible by the rise of network culture.

One of the central themes of the Cluetrain Manifesto was the potential for direct, unmediated “conversations” between workers and customers. The authors believed that by bypassing the company’s official happy talk and engaging in genuine dialogue, workers would create authentic relationships that would actually increase customer loyalty. But that’s only one side of the coin. Businesses that follow the typical MBA model of repeated and relentless downsizings and speedups, and internal authoritarianism to suppress disgruntlement over such policies, have good reason to fear their employees talking directly to the customer. Their worst nightmare scenario is for the workers to realize that the customer (or the general public) is a potential ally against their common worst enemy–management–and to pass along all the dirt to strategically chosen outsiders with the goal of causing maximum damage to the employer.

And given that the majority of corporate employers follow the same “work ‘em to death and replace ‘em” model of workplace relations, and that open-mouth sabotage is impossible to suppress and almost risk-free, it’s safe to assume that the coming decades will see revolutionary changes in management-labor relations as the new potential makes itself fully felt.

One of the first hints of how open-mouth sabotage might be used in the Internet age was the so-called “McLibel” case in Britain, which–although it ended in the early days of the Internet–was a humiliating PR disaster for McDonalds.

It showed itself again in 2004 with the Sinclair Media and Diebold cases (see Yochai Benkler’s account of both). Both of them showed that, in a world of bittorrent and mirror sites, it was literally impossible to suppress information once it had been made public.

Most recently, the phenomenon was demonstrated in the case of Wikileaks, where a judge’s order to disable the site:

didn’t have any real impact on the availability of the Baer documents. Because Wikileaks operates sites like Wikileaks.cx in other countries, the documents remained widely available, both in the United States and abroad, and the effort to suppress access to them caused them to rocket across the Internet, drawing millions of hits on other web sites…

This was yet another demonstration of what has been facetiously labelled the “Streisand effect”: efforts to suppress embarrassing information leading to embarrassment several orders of magnitude worse, from publicity attracted by the suppression attempt itself.

Meanwhile, in late 2004 and 2005, the phenomenon of “Doocing” (the firing of bloggers for negative commentary on their workplace, or for the expression of other non-approved opinions on their blogs) began to attract mainstream media attention. The interesting thing is that employers, who fired disgruntled workers out of fear for the bad publicity their blogs might attract, were blindsided by the far worse publicity – far, far worse – that resulted from news of the firing. Rather than an insular blog audience of a few hundred reading that “it sucks to work at Employer X,” or “Employer X gets away with treating its customers like shit,” it became a case of tens of millions of readers of the major newspapers of record and wire services reading that “Employer X fires blogger for revealing how bad it sucks to work at Employer X.” Again, the bosses are learning that, for the first time since the rise of the giant corporation and the broadcast culture, workers and consumers can talk back – and not only is there absolutely no way to shut us up, but we actually just keep making more and more noise the more they try to do so.

The current potential for open-mouth sabotage, and for networked anti-corporate resistance by consumers and workers, is positively breathtaking. The anonymity of the writeable web, the comparative ease with which disgruntled workers can set up anonymous sites of their own (witness the proliferation of “www.employernamesucks.com” sites), and the possibility of simply emailing large volumes of embarrassing information to everyone you can think of whose knowledge might be embarrassing to an employer.

All a disgruntled worker has to do is keep his eyes and ears open, write things down, and keep a copy of every potentially embarrassing document that comes his way. And just about everything is potential fodder for organizational humiliation, if you compare the official happy talk in memos and newsletters to descriptions of what management is actually doing (often in the same memos and newsletters, as a matter of fact), or if you compare the now-forgotten happy talk of six months ago (“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia”) to what’s actually happening now. It’s pretty easy to put it all together into a single damning textfile. It’s also easy to compile a devastating email distribution list: all your employer’s major customers, contractors and outlets, the community social and charitable organizations management hobnobs with, consumer and labor advocacy groups, mainstream and alternative press at both local and national levels, etc. Just save that draft email with file attachment, pre-addressed to your distribution list, and hit “Send” the day you get fired. Or maybe just set up a dummy email account and send it anonymously right now. Either way, the subsequent barrage of emails and phone calls will hit the executive suite like an atomic blast.

In the comments to the original version of this post, a reader raised the question of whether the media would become so saturated with such attacks against thousands of targets that the individual messages would be buried in white noise. This point would be a valid criticism in regard to the general broadcast media and traditional newspapers. The good thing about network society, though, is that we’re not forced to work through broadcast media. It’s possible to “narrow-cast” open mouth sabotage to the specific audience who will be most interested in it: the major stakeholders doing business with a corporation, the community where it’s a major institution, and all the other recipients that would cause maximum embarrassment to the target.

Let’s take a specific case: Pretend you work at a hospital. You put together a textfile contrasting the deliberate understaffing and other malfeasance where you work to the official happy talk (“extraordinary patient care” “renowned for going above and beyond”) in the mission statement. You send copies to the offices of the most important doctors with admitting privileges, the local United Way/Red Cross leadership the hospital management likes to hobnob with, the Chamber of Commerce and City Council, the local nursing college that sends students to train there, the major charitable donors, the local alternative press, all the reporters whose bylines have appeared under healthcare stories in the mainstream paper, to the CEOs of other local hospitals, and then CC it to the board of directors and C-suite (not to mention major shareholders and creditors!) at corporate headquarters while you’re at it. You can probably apply the same principle pretty easily in any line of wage employment.

We’re living in an era of labor relations characterized by the convergence of two trends: the emergence of unprecedented possibilities for easy, low-cost damage to employers, at a time when workers have less reason for loyalty to their employers than at any time since the Thirteenth Amendment. In other words, the perfect storm. As more and more disgruntled workers figure out the possibilities, it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

The twentieth century was the era of the large organization. By the end of the twenty-first, there probably won’t be enough of them left to bury.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Kevin Carson.

Nicholas Kristoff, num artigo opinativo doNew York Times (“Nossa Instituição Militar Esquerdinha,” 16 de junho), louva o “etos espantosamente liberal” que prevalece internamente à instituição militar — seguro-saúde de caixa único, segurança no emprego, oportunidades educacionais, creche grátis para crianças — em apoio à descrição que dela faz o General Wesley Clark- “a mais pura aplicação de socialismo que existe.”

Para mim — declarado socialista libertário, bem como anarquista de mercado — pelo menos dois erros palmares se distinguem aqui. Primeiro, quando penso em “socialismo” penso em todas as coisas libertadoras originalmente associadas a esse termo desde os dias do começo da classe trabalhadora e do movimento socialista clássico no século dezenove: Fortalecimento do poder da classe trabalhadora, controle da produção pelos trabalhadores e todo o resto. Tanto quanto eu saiba, a instituição militar dos Estados Unidos não está organizada como uma cooperativa de trabalhadores, com soldados rasos elegendo os oficiais, gerindo o próprio trabalho ou votando se ir ou não à guerra. Obedecer a ordens de um chefe “porque eu disse” não é minha ideia de socialismo.

Segundo, a principal missão externa da instituição militar dos Estados Unidos é manter o mundo — ou antes os suínos corporativos que asseveram ser donos dele — a salvo de qualquer coisa que remotamente se assemelhe a fortalecimento do poder dos trabalhadores. Para mim, isso é bastante não-socialista. Nos últimos sessenta e quantos anos desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial (bem mais, em realidade), o foco primário da política de segurança nacional dos Estados Unidos tem sido o de proteger oligarcas latifundiários feudais da reforma agrária, proteger corporações de propriedade ocidental de nacionalização, atuar como coletor de última instância da loja do patrão conhecida como Banco Mundial, e dar poder ao draconiano protecionismo da “propriedade intelectual” que é o baluarte central do poder corporativo mundial nos dias de hoje. A missão primordial da instituição militar “socialista” de Kristoff é manter o mundo firmemente nas mãos de seus soberanos corporativos.

Fora isso, acho que Kristoff entende a coisa exatamente ao contrário: A instituição militar estadunidense é quase uma paródia da cultura corporativa estadunidense. Está eivada de hierarquia, com regras burocráticas de trabalho tayloristas/weberianas e procedimentos operacionais padronizados, e toda a irracionalidade que os acompanha. A única diferença é, os chefes incompetentes usam tipo diferente de uniforme. Se vocês alguma vez assistiram ao filme “Brazil,” ou leem Dilbert regularmente, pegaram a ideia.

Kristoff tem um ponto a seu favor: As diferenças de remuneração entre trabalhadores de produção e gerência superior são muito menores na instituição militar do que nos Estados Unidos Corporativos de hoje em dia. Isso, contudo, apenas significa que a instituição militar está mais estruturada de acordo com as linhas do capitalismo burocrático do velho estilo do “Homem Que Se Identifica Completamente Com a Organização” dos anos sessenta (como descrito por J.K. Galbraith), onde os salários do Chefe Executivo Principal eram normalmente apenas cinquenta vezes o de um trabalhador de produção, em vez do atual modelo patológico do capitalismo desenfreado onde é mais de quinhentas vezes.

A instituição militar, do mesmo modo que a grande corporação, é assolada por altos custos gerais (o custo de treinar um soldado), e dispêndios de capital em haveres de longo prazo sujeitos a depreciação envolvendo enormes desperdícios. A instituição militar, do mesmo modo que uma corporação oligopolista, pode dar-se ao luxo de ser tão desperdiçadora porque não recai sobre ela o custo total de suas próprias atividades.

O sistema de contabilidade gerencial prevalecente nos Estados Unidos Corporativos, inventado há quase um século por Donaldson Brown, da DuPont e da GM, equaliza consumo de insumos com criação de valor. Vocês sabem, como na economia centralizadamente planejada da União Soviética. Custos administrativos tais como salários da gerência, juntamente com desperdiçadores desembolsos de capital em haveres de longo prazo sujeitos a depreciação, são incorporados — por meio da prática conhecida como “absorção de despesas gerais” — ao preço de transferência dos bens “vendidos” ao estoque. E, num mercado oligopolizado, a corporação consegue repassar esses custos — mais uma margem estipulada de lucro — ao consumidor por meio de preços administrados. A instituição compartilha desse sistema de preços, com seus incentivos para maximizar custos (Paul Goodman chamou-o de “o grande reino do custo acrescido de margem”). Vocês já ouviram falar daqueles vasos sanitários de $600 dólares? Só que no caso da instituição militar os preços administrados são chamados de “tributação.”

Em suma, a instituição militar, do mesmo modo que a grande corporação, é uma instituição gigantesca, burocrática, irracional e autoritária que só consegue viver por meio do parasitismo — tornado possível graças ao estado — em relação à classe trabalhadora.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 20 de junho de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Bill Moyers just released a new special report about the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.   You can watch it here.  Because the report is primarily produced by liberals and progressives, it largely accepts the myth that ALEC is primarily promoting policies that decrease the scope of government.  However, it also illustrates the cronyism between corporations and politicians that ALEC facilitates, and left-libertarians should be able to recognize the authoritarianism and statism of many of the ALEC bills discussed.   I have previously written a C4SS op-ed about ALEC, as has Kevin Carson.

When it comes to understanding ALEC, I think Carson said it best:

ALEC’s proposals represent “free enterprise” in much the same way that a chain gang from one of their “private” prisons represents “free assembly.”

Dear C4SS Supporters,

Over the last two weeks, I’ve submitted 13,450 Center op-eds to 2,762 publications worldwide, and have noted five “pickups” of our op-eds:

• My own “Apple: Rotten to the Core?” appeared in Iowa’s River Cities Reader on September 11 and in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on September 23.
• Kevin Carson’s “Ephemeralization: A Weapon Against Capital” was published by Infoshop News on September 21 and in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on September 24.
• Kevin’s “The Joke of Democratic Accountability” appears in this weekend’s edition of Counterpunch.

We’re starting to climb back up out of the hole, with increased content submissions — next week hopefully we’ll have more global material — and on pickups.

Our best analysis is that as the US election season heats up, American newspaper editors are less inclined to publish anarchist material, because it IS anarchist material, because they are focused on the electoral campaigns, and because they have larger piles of op-ed submissions to select from. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop trying!

Have a great weekend.

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

In “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right,” I mentioned Left-Rothbardianism as one possible basis for finding areas of agreement between market libertarians and the Left. I’d like to go into that in more depth now.

In 2004, I was extremely heartened by the “Era of Good Feelings” between the Libertarian Party’s Michael Badnarik and the Green Party’s David Cobb. It gave me some hope for the revival of an even more hopeful project of some 30-odd years before.

During the late 1960s, Murray Rothbard attempted a strategic alliance of the “isolationist” and comparatively anti-statist Old Right with the New Left. That period is the subject of an article by John Payne, “(PDF) Rothbard’s Time on the Left.” Payne writes:

By the early 1960s, Rothbard saw the New Right, exemplified by National Review, as perpetually wedded to the Cold War, which would quickly turn exponentially hotter in Vietnam, and the state interventions that accompanied it, so he set out looking for new allies. In the New Left, Rothbard found a group of scholars who opposed the Cold War and political centralization, and possessed a mass following with high growth potential. For this opportunity, Rothbard was willing to set economics somewhat to the side and settle on common ground, and, while his cooperation with the New Left never altered or caused him to hide any of his foundational beliefs, Rothbard’s rhetoric shifted distinctly leftward during this period.

I would add one qualification, concerning what Payne said about Rothbard setting economics to the side. In fact, as we will see below, Rothbard shared some common economic ground with the New Left. At his leftmost position, Rothbard’s Austrian critique of corporate-state capitalism was quite radical.

In the late ’50s, according to Payne’s account, Rothbard found himself at odds with W.F. Buckley and Frank Meyer at the National Review. His submissions on foreign policy, in a period when he saw the “war-peace question” as key to the libertarian agenda and referred to the “Verdamte cold war,” were rejected. Finally, in 1961, Meyer publicly read him out of the “conservative movement” (or at least out of National Review’s fusionism).

From the early ’60s on, Rothbard found himself increasingly attracted to the left-wing revisionist critique of 20th century state capitalism (or what the New Left called “corporate liberalism“). He was especially struck by the thesis of Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of Conservatism, which came out in 1963.

Rothbard’s Misesian critique of the corporate state, which shared so much common ground with the New Left, was a considerable departure from Mises’ right-wing political affinities. For Mises, state interventionism was motivated almost entirely by anti-capitalist sentiment: what Nixon would have called the “filthy f**king hippies,” or Eric Cartman would dismiss as “a bunch of G*ddamn tree-hugging hippie crap.”

Rothbard, on the other hand, applied Austrian principles largely from the standpoint of Kolko’s critique, which saw state interventionism as motivated mainly by the desire of corporate capitalists themselves to protect their profits from the destructive force of market competition. Kolko directly contradicted the orthodox historical account of the regulatory state, as exemplified by the liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Specificially, he denied that the Progressive Era legislative agenda was formulated primarily as a populist restraint on big business, or that government had intervened in the economy in the 20th century as a “countervailing force” against big business. Rather, the regulatory state was an attempt by big business to achieve, acting directly though the state, what it had been unable to achieve through voluntary combinations and trusts carried out entirely in the private sector: the cartelization of the economy, and the creation of stable oligopoly markets characterized by administered pricing. Payne quotes this summary statement from Kolko’s book:

Despite the large number of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this [the twentieth] century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests. . . . As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could rationalize the economy. Although specific conditions varied from industry to industry, internal problems that could be solved only by political means were the common denominator in those industries whose leaders advocated greater federal regulation. Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.

The purpose of state action was, first of all, to help overbuilt industry simultaneously to operate at full capacity and to dispose of the surplus product it couldn’t sell at cartel prices. Second, as an alternative, it was to enable cartelized industry to operate with high costs and idle capacity and still remain profitable by selling its product at cost-plus markup through monopoly pricing. (This might as well have been the mission statement of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Administration, by the way.)

This initial perception by Rothbard, that New Left revisionist historiography was useful for a free market critique of twentieth century corporate capitalism, led to a considerable amount of cooperation with New Left scholars.

Rothbard participated in Studies on the Left, a project of New Left historians James Weinstein and William Appleman Williams. It was Weinstein, in The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, who coined the term “corporate liberalism.” And Williams devised the thesis of “Open Door Imperialism” to describe American foreign policy. Some of Rothbard’s contributions to Studies on the Left were included in a paperback collection of articles resulting from the group’s efforts through 1967: For a New America.

Rothbard retained friendly ties to the scholarly New Left long after his disillusionment with the radical student movement. His second venture in collaborative scholarship (at the comparatively late date of 1972) was A New History of Leviathan, a collection of critical essays on New Deal corporatism coedited by Rothbard and the libertarian socialist Ronald Radosh.

He contributed one article (“Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal“), in 1968, to Ramparts. (Both David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh, who both later became two of the most odious members of a neoconservative movement characterized by its odiousness, were associated with this leading periodical of the New Left.)

Rothbard founded the journal Left and Right in 1965 as a vehicle for this academically oriented Left-Right alliance. If you’re at all interested in this kind of things, browsing the archives there will well repay your effort.

From his initial scholarly collaboration with New Left academics, Rothbard moved on to attempt a mass movement in alliance with student radicals.

The high point of this alliance occurred in 1969. The radical libertarian/anarchist caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom walked out of the YAF convention in St. Louis (mainly over the Vietnam War and the draft). The roots of the contemporary libertarian movement, and most of its founding personnel, can be traced to this act of secession. Not long afterwards, Rothbard (along with Karl Hess, a former Goldwater speechwriter who coined the phrase “extremism in defense of liberty,” and subsequently moved considerably to the left) organized a mass meeting of the YAF’s libertarian dissidents with similar libertarian socialist secessionists from the SDS. During that event, Hess addressed a combined audience of YAF and SDS insurgents wearing combat fatigues and a Wobbly pin.

Rothbard’s journal The Libertarian Forum was founded in 1969, at a time when Rothbard was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the New Left, and the New Left itself (and specifically the SDS, under onslaught from the Maoist Kool-Aid drinkers in Progressive Labor and the nihilist nutcases in the Weather Underground) was disintegrating. Although Rothbard could get along pretty well with New Left academics, he apparently suffered considerable culture shock in 1969 at finding out just how radical the student radicals really were (their blanket denunciations of academic economists and the wearing of neckties were a particular affront to Rothbard, who was guilty on both counts). Nevertheless the first volume of Libertarian Forum was packed with heady commentary on the New Left alliance.

Take, for example, this quote (PDF) from the May 1, 1969 issue:

[The students] see that, apart from other tie-ins, corporations have been using the government schools and colleges as institutions that train their future workers and executives at the expense of others, i.e. the taxpayers. This is but one way that our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs. Whatever that process may be called, it is not “free enterprise,” except in the most ironic sense.

Consider also this statement (PDF) by Hess:

The truth… is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual…. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and… secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion….

This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super-capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom….

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives…. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.

In another article in the same issue, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” Rothbard proposed a model of privatization far removed from the kind of corporate looting of state assets you commonly find advocated in mainstream libertarian venues these days.

What most people ordinarily identify as the stereotypical “libertarian” privatization proposal, unfortunately, goes something like this: sell it to a giant corporation on terms that are most advantageous to the corporation. Rothbard proposed, instead, was to treat state property as unowned, and allowing it to be homesteaded by those actually occupying it and mixing their labor with it. This would mean transforming government utilities, schools and other services into consumer cooperatives and placing them under the direct control of their present clientele. It would mean handing over state industry to workers’ syndicates and transforming it into worker-owned cooperatives.

But if this was the appropriate way of dealing with state property, Rothbard asked, then what about nominally private industry which is in fact a branch of the state? That is, what about “private” industry that gets the majority of its profits from taxpayer subsidies?

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be “respected.”

Such factories should be taken over by “homesteading workers,” he said. But he went further, and suggested that a libertarian movement, having captured the commanding heights of the state and proceeding to dismantle the apparatus of state capitalism, might actually nationalize such state-subsidized industry as the immediate prelude to handing it over to the workers. He went so far as to say that even if a non-libertarian regime nationalized state capitalist industry with the intention of hanging onto it, it wasn’t anything for libertarians to get particularly bent out of shape about. The subsidized industry was no more the “good guys,” and no less a part of the state, as the formal state apparatus itself. “…[I]t would only mean that one gang of thieves–the government–would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government.”

I’d go Rothbard one further. Why is the criterion for de facto government status the amount of profits directly subsidized from state revenue? What about corporations that function within a web of state regulatory protections, and artificial property rights like Bill Gates’ “intellectual property,” without which they couldn’t operate in black ink for a single day. Anyone who’s read much of my work for any length of time knows that I consider the entire Fortune 500 a pretty good proxy for such de facto branches of the state. As I already argued in an earlier post, the largest corporations are so intertwined with the state that the very distinction between “public” and “private” becomes meaningless.

To reinforce that impression, bear in mind that (as Hess’s remarks above on property suggest) Rothbard considered all land titles not traceable to a legitimate act of appropriation by human labor to be utterly null and void. That meant that titles to vacant and unimproved land were void, and all such land in the United States should be open to immediate homesteading. It meant all the real estate in Southern California currently held as real estate investments by the railroads, pursuant to the land grants of the nineteenth century, should immediately become the absolute freehold of those currently making rent or mortgage payments on it. It meant that all the land in the Third World currently “owned” by quasi-feudal landed oligarchies should immediately become the property of the peasants working it; and land currently being used by corporate agribusiness and other cash crop operations, in collusion with those same landlords, should be returned to the peasants who were evicted from it.

In short, Rothbard didn’t exactly fit the “pot-smoking Republican” stereotype you see the commenters over at Kos regurgitating. This is getting way, way long. I originally intended to fit all the Left-Rothbardian material into one post. But I’ll save the material on Rothbard’s left-libertarian successors (Sam Konkin, Joseph Stromberg, and the rest) for another post.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 9:28 pm

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Os Rothbardianos de Esquerda – Parte 1: Rothbard.

The following article is translated into Russian from the English Original, written by Kevin Carson.

Настоящая историческая эпоха в том числе является эпохой перехода от авторитарных институций, таких как государство и корпорации, к обществу свободных самоорганизующихся сетей и добровольных ассоциаций. И как в любом другом переходном периоде, переменные второго порядка вносят высокий уровень турбулентности в процесс.

Одним из таких источников неопределённости могут оказаться внутренние разногласия в авторитарном лагере. Этого в принципе можно ожидать. Само существование и назначение авторитарных институций является нулевой суммой по характеру. Государство есть инструмент экономической эксплуатации, посредством которой правящие классы паразитов отбирают блага у производителей. Благосостояние же паразитических корпораций составляется из ренты с искусственно созданных прав собственности и искусственно созданных дефицитов от потребителя. И нет ничего удивительного в том, что одна банда воров может подковёрно поцапаться с другой, в попытках установить контроль над противником.

С другой стороны, сетевые сообщества, некапиталистические рынки и прочие добровольные ассоциации свободных личностей не имеют подобных поводов для разногласий, ибо они основаны на положительной сумме, кооперации среди равных.

Также неустойчивость на авторитарной стороне баррикад обеспечивается разногласиями между государствами в глобальной системе. Мы видели это в последние годы, когда государства поощряли (и часто даже пытались встроить в свою систему) диссидентские движения в государствах-соперниках. К примеру, американская политика поощрения использования зашифрованных маршрутизаторов в Иране и Китае, и ограниченная поддержка восстаний Арабской Весны (за исключением Бахрейна и других консервативных монархий Персидского залива, конечно).

По сравнению с Арабской Весной, США удалось куда лучше встроиться в так называемые «цветные революции» в странах бывшего СССР, используя эти революции как одноразовые инструменты для установления в этих странах неолиберальных режимов. Напротив, в сегодняшнем Египте движение Майдана Тахрир отнюдь не горит желанием спокойно принять новый военный режим и обслуживать заказы Всемирного банка и МВФ. И США относятся в целом враждебно к движениям в Испании и Греции из-за их сильной анти-неолиберальной направленности.

Это трюизм геополитики: появление одного сверхгосударства приводит к возникновению коалиции малых держав против него. Одним из ранних признаков таких контр-тенденций является Шанхайская Организация Сотрудничества: свободный союз безопасности между Россией, Китаем и рядом бывших советских республик в Центральной Азии. Можно ожидать стремления её укрепить и увеличить, в случае если США нападут на Иран. Такая атака будет иметь такое же влияние на мировую систему, какое агрессия Гитлера имела на европейских союзников.

Недавно Индия заявила, что будет оплачивать иранскую нефть золотом, а не долларом США. Возможно, Китай в скором времени начнет делать то же самое.

Империя чрезвычайно уязвима к массовому, ненасильственному и скоординированному дезертирству на глобальном Юге: отказ от доллара как резервной валюты, отказ платить внешний долг, непризнание законов об «интеллектуальной собственности» и превращение в свободные гавани информации, и т.д. И я думаю, что мы очень близки к переломному моменту, когда значительное число стран оценит эти идеи как способ сдерживания власти империи. Возможно, нападение на Иран будет тем катализатором, который вызовет цепную реакцию.

Самый важный вопрос в том, как именно империя рухнет. Займётся ли Америка своими собственными делами, не пытаясь тащить за собой весь мир? Наихудшим сценарием будет начало Вашингтоном мировой войны против «несостоявшихся государств» и «государств-террористов» занимающихся тем, что они называют «экономическим терроризмом», с беспилотниками-убийцами в небе Исландии, Испании, Греции, Венесуэлы и других государств, которые будут замечены в попытке сетевого восстания или выхода из глобальной корпоративной системы.

Но даже в последнем случае, однако, мы можем ожидать появления нового свободного мира, чтобы в конце концов победить умирающую сверхдержаву. Сети и другие свободные ассоциации уже сомкнулись вокруг авторитарных иерархий. Они более гибки и способны реагировать на ситуацию быстрее. Потому что они не разделены между собой взаимоисключающими интересами, потому что они могут доверять друг другу, их локальные узлы и отдельные участники могут свободно реагировать на возникающие ситуации по собственной инициативе и подхватывать перспективные инновации других узлов без необходимости соблюдать бесконечные бюрократические правила и стандартные оперативные процедуры для того, чтобы получить разрешение действовать.

Глобальная сверхдержава, основанная на принципах контроля за информацией и вызывающая страх и недоверие в своём собственном народе, долго не продержится. Мы уже видели как одна такая сверхдержава рухнула под тяжестью собственных внутренних противоречий. И я ожидаю, что вторая упадет уже при нашей жизни. Ибо всякое царство, разделившееся само в себе, опустеет, и дом, разделившийся сам в себе, падёт.

Статья впервые опубликована Кевином Карсоном, 25 января 2012.

Перевод с английского Tau Demetrious.

“[A]t what point,” asks Zen Anarchist at Everything Voluntary, “is somebody libertarian enough for your vote?”

I think Zen is asking the wrong question, at least to the extent that he’s addressing most non-voting libertarians.

We aren’t not voting for Gary Johnson because he’s “not libertarian enough.”

Even if he dropped his support for “humanitarian war,” stopped promoting the “Fair” Tax, and retracted/apologized for his call to conscript every business owner in the United States as an unpaid ICE agent, etc., voting for him (or for any other candidate) would not — in the opinion of non-voting libertarians — advance liberty.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and that’s fine — I understand the various arguments in favor of voting, and unlike some non-voting libertarians I don’t consider voting to be a moral failure as such — but my own position is that if we want to get rid of the state, one easy first step to take is to join the non-voting, non-consenting majority and get on with more important things than voting.

When “privatization” just means transferring the state’s coercion and use of taxes to private companies, it’s not a reduction in statism. Instead, it builds up perverse incentives and makes the state less transparent.  This can be seen quite clearly in the case of the for-profit prison industry.   It turns out that while for-profit prisons still receive our tax dollars and still lock peaceful people in cages, they’re not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

And while we’re on the subject, profiting from caging humans isn’t just for the prison operators.   An excellent report released this week documents how Wells Fargo is getting in on the authoritarian action.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US Military has classified WikiLeaks an “enemy of the state”. This is the same legal category reserved for the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. This classification carries some potential penalties for personnel:

Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with “communicating with the enemy”, a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

Just so we’re clear, C4SS supports WikiLeaks and all “WikiLeaks” like projects. We not only host a WikiLeaks mirror site, but are currently raising funds to maintain a Tor relay node. Tor relay nodes help whistleblowers and journalists get their stories regarding corporate and government corruption into the right hands or into the open, safely and anonymously.

The following article was written by Dawie Coetzee and published on the Artisanal Cars, May 6th, 2012.

The main thing is to end dependence on motor vehicles. Anything else is at best inadequate; at worst it exacerbates the problem. All the little incremental efficiencies touted on every street corner will not begin to add up to the proportions of the ecological problem facing us. Most of them would actually reinforce the very mechanisms that have allowed an oligopolizing industry to cultivate so widespread and thoroughgoing a dependence on its products.

Every popular blurb on “What You Can Do for the Environment” contains, after much sound advice about composting and basic generic household chemicals like vinegar, borax, and ammonia, the suggestion to consider buying a new car, as it is more “efficient”. I urge quite the opposite: buy the oldest car that will do the job, regardless of efficiency or emissions. Buy a car that its manufacturer had hoped would have been scrapped long ago, the longer ago the better, and further subvert the industry by doing whatever is necessary to keep it running.

Starve the industry of the sales it needs in order to ensure that its productivity remains above the critical threshold below which it cannot operate viably. This is the nature of the problem: the motor industry does not respond to spontaneous demand, be that practical need or spurious “greed for more stuff”; it responds to the requirements of its technical operating basis, a basis chosen and cultivated precisely because it requires huge production outputs of which only a powerful industrial elite is capable. Once this is established the industry goes about generating a market for its output. It does this primarily by manipulating states, through transport planning and road-building, to create living environments that do not allow for easy living without a car. More recently, as markets have come closer to saturation, the industry has manipulated states into all kinds of supposed safety and environmental regulations, firstly to curtail product life and take second-hand cars out of the market, and secondly to enforce designs that raise critical production-volume thresholds even further, by outlawing any alternative.

That really is what those regulations are about.

Reject the electric car and the hybrid. They exist only in order to entrench the power of the motor industry even further. The extent to which the design of a car depends on the current operating basis is not constant: some designs serve that basis better than others, and indeed all modern cars are designed specifically to be virtually impossible to make in any other way. In this the modern electric and hybrid represent an unprecedented advance. They would simply not work in a context in which vehicle sales, replacement rates, distance travelled, and traffic congestion do not increase significantly. Never before has anything come so close to a single-use, disposable car.

Excessive carbon dioxide production is a pure function of fossil-fuel consumption: but even so, fuel efficiency is moot. This is not only because real alternatives to fossil fuels exist, but because likely incremental improvements wouldn’t be nearly enough, especially if the motor industry engineers more sprawl, longer commutes, quicker scrappage, and more cars to achieve the per-unit numbers. A system can be sustainable at any given level of efficiency, and if anything more easily at lower levels; it all depends on its need structures. End vehicle dependence and total systemic vehicle-fuel consumption falls by well over 90%.

Good work is being done by the open-source movement, but while it labours under the misconception that its agenda is aligned to the purposes of existing safety and environmental regulations, and moreover expends its energies trying to achieve extreme levels of fuel efficiency, it will pose no real threat to the existing motor industry.

Likewise emissions are neither here nor there. None of the “traditional” pollutants, for the control of which, ostensibly, catalytic converters were forcibly introduced, are stable compounds. Both carbon monoxide and unburnt hydrocarbons soon oxidize, leaving only the carbon dioxide and water that the catalyst is supposed to emit; it just takes a bit longer. Likewise, small concentrations of oxides of nitrogen fit easily into the natural nitrogen cycle. As long as concentrations are low and there is enough time, “uncontrolled” vehicle emissions are not problematic. Old cars are not, in themselves, “toxin-spewing jalopies”, even when in questionable tune. Vehicle emissions become problematic only when the intensity of vehicle use reaches the levels required by the motor industry’s technical operating basis. Then one gets photochemical smog and acid rain.

Buy the oldest car that will do the job, to starve the motor industry of custom. Do this not to bully the motor industry into making “cleaner” or “more efficient” products – nor even to change its operating basis, supposing that it could – but to kill it. The motor industry needs us more than we need it, especially as long as automotive technology has a deep vernacular penetration in society. In other words, as long as there are people around who know how to repair, modify, and ultimately to make cars, and as long as there are cars out there that even vaguely conform to their knowledge.

Do not expect the motor industry to die without a fight. Remember that it is really an organ of the State, and has much of the mechanism of government at its disposal. But be clever. Be creative with old parts. Stockpile whatever you can find, regardless of its apparent usefulness or desirability, as long as it is legally “grandfathered”. If they impose annual-mileage limits for “historic” cars, fit a tachometer to judge speed and drive with the speedometer cable disconnected. Or run twelve old cars, if you can afford the licensing, etc. If they impose “events only” use restrictions, form a club and organize your own events. Keep a step ahead of them. If all else fails, get about without a car, and make a huge noise about how difficult it is. None of this legislation is about making it any easier to be without a car. It is about effectively being compelled to buy new cars often. And keep the technical knowledge and the skills alive. Refuse to be a Pure Consumer.

Above all, spread the word.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Kevin Carson.

Durante anos o procedimento padrão depois de espancamento ou disparos pela polícia, quando era a palavra de um cidadão contra a de um policial e o depoimento do policial era apoiado por seus Irmãos de Azul, era “licença administrativa” remunerada para o policial — até que uma junta de revisão não encontrasse “evidência de ilícito oficial” e de “todos os procedimentos e políticas oficiais terem sido observados.” As exceções — tais como o espancamento de Rodney King e o caso Abner Louima — foram raros casos nos quais os carrascos praticantes do ato foram estúpidos ou descuidados o bastante para ser apanhados.

O mesmo é verdade da violência da polícia nas manifestações. Comparem o uso eficaz, pelo movimento Ocupem, de vídeo de violência policial em Oakland, Portland, New York City – NYC e Universidade da Califórnia em Davis – UC Davis com o estado de coisas há uma década, no período entre Seattle e as manifestações contra a Área de Livre Comércio das Américas – FTAA em Miami. O vídeo de telefone celular e a hospedagem de vídeo online estavam, naquele tempo, ainda em estado não desenvolvido. Praticamente o único lugar em que se via informação documentada a respeito de confrontos entre polícia e civis e eventos antiglobalização era a Indymedia. O noticiário da mídia majoritária aderiu quase totalmente à narrativa oficial do Bloco Negro de vândalos mascarados vestidos de preto despedaçando vitrinas do Macy’s.

Nos dias de hoje, quando vídeo amador se torna virótico, não há como a mídia majoritária ignorá-lo.

Independentemente da lei real, a polícia, em praticamente todas as jurisdições nos Estados Unidos, afirmará falsamente que gravá-los é ilegal, e provavelmente em seguida arrebentará seu telefone (e seu rosto).

Ocorre que, com recursos de uplink em tempo real para a Web barateando-se rapidamente, estamos chegando ao ponto no qual a única coisa que um policial conseguirá arrebentando um telefone será um vídeo virótico no YouTube — não apenas do mau comportamento original, mas da interação inteira, desde as ameaças iniciais até o confronto físico para tomar o telefone.

Francamente, nem me importo com a penalidade que a investigação fajuta acabará impondo ao Tenente John Pike da polícia do campus da UC Davis. Acho que na verdade eu preferiria que ele se aposentasse por incapacidade em alguns anos depois de um colapso nervoso, e passasse o resto da vida com medo de sair de casa. Ele dificilmente terá começado a desconfiar do inferno que a vida dele será.

Ele carrega a marca de Caim. O número do telefone dele, endereço de email e endereço residencial já foram amplamente divulgados. Mesmo que não seja exonerado da força, toda vez que ele encontrar um estudante no desempenho de seus deveres perguntar-se-á se aquilo é um olhar de desprezo ou se é só sua imaginação. Toda vez que ele lidar com uma servideira ou uma operadora de caixa, ou encontrar qualquer pessoa nova, verá aquele breve olhar de ter sido reconhecido seguido de uma máscara fria de repulsa educadamente contida. Como diz o dito, “Você pode correr, mas não pode se esconder.”

Isso provavelmente marca a primeira vez em que as novas regras do jogo realmente foram impressas nas mentes dos policiais em toda parte. Podem estar certos de que a lição de Pike não passou despercebida entre os colegas dele, nem nos contatos deles no boca a boca profissional nacional da área de cumprimento da lei. As imagens viróticas da linguagem do rosto e do corpo dele, como ele lança spray em seres humanos como se fossem insetos, são bem conhecidas deles. Mesmo se ele continuar na força, acompanhar a transformação dele, já em andamento, num caco de homem derrotado será a melhor lição tirada da vida real que seus colegas de uniforme jamais poderiam receber. Ser publicamente gravado comportando-se como um porco garantirá, sem sombra de dúvida, alguém passar o resto da vida no mesmo inferno solitário que o Tenente Pike.

Este é apenas outro exemplo de como redes auto-organizadas têm crescente poder de enfrentar instituições poderosas, de maneiras que, no passado, requeriam o contrapeso do poder de outras instituições. O problema, no passado, era que os assim chamados órgãos de “supervisão” mais amiúde do que não aglomeravam-se em complexos de instituições aliadas daqueles a quem supostamente supervisariam. Daí as em grande parte pró-forma “investigações” por comissões de polícia, juntas civis de revisão e coisas da espécie.

Agora porém temos uma comissão de polícia nossa. O nome dela é vídeo amador. E fará com a escória criminosa como o Tenente Pike o que um mundo inteiro de comissões de polícia, fingindo atuar em nosso favor, não conseguia fazer.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 23 de novembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Back in 2008, now-president Barack Obama ran against the Bush administration’s runaway national security state, created partly via legislation like USA PATRIOT and partly via executive practices like warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and the like. One of Obama’s biggest applause lines was “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States; and in the Red States we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries.” Obama strongly suggested — in vague but quite vehement language — his intention of rolling back this national security state. And besides that, he promised “the most transparent administration in history.”

I, cynical anarchist that I am, considered it entirely plausible that we might expect as vigorous a rollback of executive power under Obama as the Church Commission carried out after Watergate.

So much for that theory. Obama may actually be telling the truth about ending torture at Guantanamo. But he still explicitly supports so-called “extraordinary rendition,” by which “terror suspects” are handed over — with a wink and a nudge — to allied regimes that do practice torture. He claims to have shut down so-called “Black Ops” sites where the military and CIA practiced torture under Bush — although there’s no way of verifying this. And Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield (aka Guantanamo East), where we have no idea what still goes on, is still very much in business.

Obama’s attitude toward torture and illegal surveillance by the Bush administration, in every case, has been to use the full power of his office to prevent prosecution of Bush era officials for their crimes against humanity. For this, Obama should personally apologize to the families of the Nazis executed at Nuremberg.

As for Obama’s promises of transparency, in office he has in fact pursued whistleblowers with a level of vindictiveness unprecedented in recent years. He’s actually resurrected Wilson-era legislation like the Espionage Act — originally used against Wobbly and Socialist political prisoners who opposed WWI as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” — to go after those who’ve exposed the sordid workings of his national security apparatus. Nixon would be proud.

On virtually every aspect of his 2008 promises to scale back Bush’s executive power grabs and restore civil liberties, Obama has proven to be an out-and-out liar. Far from undoing Bush’s police statism, in the words of Rehoboam, Obama’s little finger has been thicker than Bush’s loins. Whereas Bush chastised us with whips, Obama has chastises us with scorpions.

The remedy for this sort of thing, as it’s presented in the civics texts, is to punish such betrayal by voting against the betrayer next time. But thanks to the “lesser of evils” dynamic inherent in America’s two-party system, this is impossible.

An entire community of “Pragmatic Progressives” have circled their wagons in defense of Obama (or PBO, as they call him) against left-wing critics who might weaken him against Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Some, like leading PragProg Scott Finley, have actually resorted to baiting left-wing critics of the American security state for their lack of patriotism, making tactical alliances with right-wing troglodytes like Todd Kincannon to harass them. A movement founded on the unum necessarium of defending Obama against the GOP at all costs has gradually slipped down the proverbial slope, now actually allying itself with the GOP to suppress Obama’s left-wing critics.

Mainstream “Progressives,” the most vocal opponents of the Imperial Presidency during Republican administrations, become a captive clientele — no matter how egregious the executive power grab — when a Democrat’s in power. Because, you see, now matter how disappointing they may privately concede Obama’s performance on civil liberties has been, Romney would be even worse! And believe me, his frustrated supporters’ sense of nowhere else to go isn’t lost on hacks like Obama. So in practice, the lesser of evils seems to get a little more evil with each election cycle. And the repressive apparatus of the state ratchets ever upward.

Even when you get an ideal “Progressive” candidate who says all the things that make your heart go pitty-pat, you have absolutely no way of knowing until he gets elected whether he’s a damned liar. And once he’s in there, you’ve got nowhere else to go — because the other guy’s always worse.

All this should be more than sufficient as an object lesson on the futility of political reform in ending economic exploitation and state repression. Any movement that seeks social justice through political involvement and attempting to hold public officials democratically accountable is doomed to failure. The only real way to achieve social justice is by bypassing the state, treating it as irrelevant, and building the kind of society we want without the government’s permission.

We can always use your help.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of Kevin Carson’s “No Matter Who You Vote For, The Winner Is Always The Government“.

The Star Fraction is the first of the “Fall Revolution” books, and my first novel. I started writing it with no idea of where it would end up, let alone of making it the start of a series. It still isn’t: the four books can be read in any order, and the last two of them present alternative possible futures emerging from that mid-21st century world I imagined at the beginning.

In this scenario, a brief Third World War — or War of European Integration, as its instigators call it — in the 2020s is followed by a US/UN hegemony over a balkanized world. The Fall Revolution in the late 2040s is an attempt to throw off this new world order and to re-unify fragmented nations. But, as one of the characters says, “What we thought was the revolution was only a moment in the fall.” His remark has a theory of history behind it.

History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine. One such theory is that society evolves because people’s relationship with nature tends to change more radically and rapidly than their relationships with each other. Technology outpaces law and custom. From this mismatch, upheavals ensue. Society either moves up to a new stage with more scope for the new technology, or the technology is crushed to fit the confines of the old society. As the technology falls back, so does the society, perhaps to an earlier configuration. In the main stream of history, however, it has moved forward through a succession of stages, each of which is a stable configuration between the technology people have to work with, and their characteristic ways of working together. But this stability contains the seeds of new instabilities. Proponents of this theory argue that the succession of booms and slumps, wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, which began in August 1914 and which shows no prospect of an end, indicates that we live in just such an age of upheaval.

This theory is, of course, the Materialist Conception of History, formulated by the pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and (a little earlier) by the German philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx. These men looked with optimism to a future society, and with stern criticism on the present. Property, wrote one of them, “has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property … Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society …”

Beam me up. But before stepping on the transporter to Morgan’s “higher plane”, it might be wise to check the specifications. One constraint on the possible arrangements of a future society was indicated by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He argued that private property was essential to industrial civilization: without property, no exchange; no exchange, no prices; no prices, no way of telling whether any given project is worthwhile or a dead loss. Given that every attempt to abolish the market on a large scale has led to the collapse of industry, his Economic Calculation Argument seems vindicated. Unfortunately, there’s no reason why the Economic Calculation Argument and the Materialist Conception of History couldn’t both be true. What if capitalism is unstable, and socialism is impossible?

The Star Fraction is haunted by this uncomfortable question. For me, it was acutely felt when I was writing the book, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a socialist I had become interested in the libertarian critique of socialism. The fall of the bureaucratic regimes of the East found me neither surprised nor sorry.

No, what was — and remains — dreadful to contemplate was not the collapse of “actually existing socialism” but the catastrophic consequences of the attempt to introduce actually existing capitalism, and the apparent inability of the millions who had brought down the bureaucratic dictatorships to assert and defend their own interests in the aftermath.

In this novel, these issues are seen through the eyes of characters who are flawed and often mistaken, but sometimes heroic. The ideologies through which they try to make sense of it all range from British-style “industrial-grade Trotskyism” to American-style “black helicopter” libertarianism. The big questions about history and economics fuel the adventures of angry white guys (and angry black women) with guns, whose actions tip scales bigger than they know. Their world is one where the New World Order is coming to get you, with black helicopters and Men in Black and orbital gun-control lasers.

And then there’s all the stuff I made up, which begins on the next page.

“The Star Fraction — Introduction to the American Edition” on C4SS Media.

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

A colleague at Center for a Stateless Society recently brought to my attention a story from late last year about unusually high concentrations of severe illness in the area surrounding a Crossett, Ark. paper mill. Members of eleven out of fifteen homes on Penn Road have died of cancer, and respiratory distress is common.

The local cluster of illness is controversial because the mill was owned by Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. As a result of waste dumped in a local channel (near Penn Road) by the Georgia-Pacific mill, Crossett has one of the highest concentrations of carcinogens of any community in the United States. “Crossett crud” is the local name for the black scum on the surface of the channel, and the vapors which rise from it and drift across people’s yards.

Koch Industries’ “Koch Facts” website, in attempting to rebut the claims, repeatedly asserts that the Georgia-Pacific mill’s treatment of effluent “[meet] all limits required by our regulatory permits,” that “our emissions are permitted and monitored based on state and federal regulatory permits.” The plant is “in full compliance with the terms of the permit,” which the website describes as “protective of the river.”

This line of defense should come as no surprise. Richard Telofski, a leading consultant on combating what his corporate clientele calls “cybersmear,” advises corporations to “debunk” accusations of pollution and other malfeasance by stating that they are in full compliance with all federal and state regulatory standards.

Of course anyone familiar with the history of the regulatory state, as recounted by radical historians like the New Leftist Gabriel Kolko, will know that’s exactly what the regulations are there for. First of all, they provide an official seal of approval, much like the quality and safety codes of trade associations. But since, unlike with trade associations, individual firms are not allowed to defect from compliance with the regulatory regime, the regulations do not become an issue of cost competition between firms.  The cost of compliance is borne across the entire industry, and passed on to consumers as a simple cost-plus markup.

Second, compliance with the regulatory standard — which is typically a dumbed-down least common denominator far, far below the standards of common law tort liability — serves as a safe harbor against civil litigation. The regulatory standard — which is, after all, based on (ahem) “sound science” — trumps any more stringent legal standard of liability. So long as a company’s emissions comply with the EPA’s limit on parts per billion of this or that toxic chemical, it doesn’t matter if the entire town has asthma and breaks out in painful lumps.

Finally, compliance with the regulatory standard can sometimes protect a company from even voluntary competition by other firms in an industry that choose to adhere to a more stringent standard of safety or quality. For example, Monsanto has successfully pursued court remedies in some jurisdictions against dairies and other food producers that advertise their products as free from Genetically Modified Organisms or recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. And the big meat packers have won USDA sanctions against smaller packers that advertise their voluntary adherence to a more stringent inspection regime against “mad cow disease” than is required by law.

In all these cases, simply advertising one’s voluntary adherence to a more stringent standard than is required by government regulations is treated as “food libel” or “product disparagement.” That is, it implies that a competitor’s products that just meet the ordinary standard are inferior to one’s own, despite the competitor being in full compliance with legal reguirements (which — again — are based on “sound science”).

Despite the official mythology in the public school American history books — TR the Great Trustbuster, the Muckrakers, Upton Sinclair, and all the rest of it — the main function of the regulatory state is to protect the regulated industries.

More than 281 million views, and recognized by The Guiness Book of World Records as the most liked YouTube video in history.

Top of the iTunes charts in 31 countries, and all over the Billboard Top 100 categories.

Nominated for best video in the upcoming MTV Europe Music Awards.

How could Psy possibly have accomplished all that without a state-enforced intellectual “property” monopoly? The answer, of course, is that there’s just no way he could have.

Oh, wait:

Psy has produced a video that is born to spawn and has further facilitated this by waiving his copyright.

Enjoy: