Legal scholars at NYU and Stanford have just released a new study titled Living Under Drones.   The study contains a wealth of useful information.  It debunks pro-war myths that the strikes only have minimal civilian casualties.  It illustrates how the strikes are illegal and potentially destructive to US security interests.  But most importantly, the study interviewed over a hundred Pakistanis directly impacted by the strikes, and detailed the horrible cost the bombings exact on individuals and communities.

I would urge you to read some personal stories  from victims of the drone war.

The Industrial Radical, the long-awaited periodical from the Molinari Institute (C4SS’s parent organization), is finally available! Details on the first issue here.

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

Em semanas recentes Barack Obama foi atacado por alguns plutocratas de renome por suas atitudes pretensamente “de oposição às empresas”.

Então Charles Koch, o bilionário safado de direita de diversos institutos de estudos interdisciplinares e fundações libertários disse, na edição de 4 de abril de O Estandarte Semanal, que Obama era um “igualitário” que havia “internalizado alguns modelos marxistas,” acreditando, em particular, que “a empresa tende a alcançar sucesso à custa de exploração de seus clientes e funcionários.” O irmão dele, David, palpitou ser Obama produto de “influências contrárias à empresa e ao livre empreendimento.”

Francamente, não me causa grande surpresa uma Autoridade Executiva Principal com evidente sabor de baunilha das 500 da Fortune como Buckley fazer tal acusação. Afinal, a falsa inimizade entre o governo hipertrofiado e as grandes empresas é essencial para o teatrinho de cunho moralista que governa a política estadunidense(*). (* morality play – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_play)

Digo “falsa” por ser ela tão genuína quanto o conflito entre o “bom policial” e o “mau policial” numa sala de interrogatório. Na verdade as grandes empresas têm sido o principal vilão por trás do aumento do estado ativista; como Roy Childs escreveu em “As Grandes Empresas e a Ascensão do Estatismo Estadunidense,” os intelectuais têm sido, historicamente, lacaios das grandes empresas. Chefões corporativos que reclamam do governo montar no cangote deles fazem-me lembrar do Irmão Coelho(*) berrando “Por favor não me joguem nessa moita de espinhos!” [de onde ele pode facilmente escapar, N.do T.] (* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit)

Estou, porém, um tanto surpreso por os irmãos Koch — peças de centro da política e da finança libertária no mundo político e social de Washington — identificarem “livre empreendimento” com “empresas.” É uma distinção tão básica que praticamente todo mundo que usa o rótulo de “libertário de livre mercado” a estabelece, pelo menos de boca. Os libertários professos, em sua maioria, pelo menos reconhecem em princípio que os interesses das empresas podem ser os maiores inimigos do mercado, mesmo quando muitos deles não observem esse princípio na hora da ação.

Charles Koch negligencia a possibilidade de as empresas dominantes em nossa economia em realidade lucrarem a expensa de trabalhadores e consumidores. Este não é, afinal de contas, um livre mercado. Está pleno dos modos políticos para se chegar à riqueza. Plausivelmente a maioria dos lucros das 500 empresas da Fortune resulta de subsídios proporcionados pelo contribuinte, de monopólios concedidos pelo governo tais como “propriedade intelectual,” de formas especiais de proteção, e de barreiras a entrada, em vez de da troca tranquila no livre mercado.

Assim sendo, por que seria tão inconcebível que muitas das empresas, na economia na qual realmente vivemos, pudessem receber seus lucros por meio de exploração? A menos, por outro lado, que os irmãos Koch tenham algum interesse velado em fingir que a atual economia corporatista seja em realidade livre mercado.

Depois de acompanhar o desempenho de Obama nos últimos dois anos, fico pensando no universo do Spock Dissimulado(*) quando ouço reclamações acerca do viés “antiempresas” dele. (* quanto à inautenticidade de Spock, ou seu conflito entre duas naturezas internas, ver http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock)

Sem dúvida, Obama usa alguma retórica igualitária e de oposição às empresas. É ótima forma de tirar a atenção das pessoas do movimento de suas mãos enquanto ele enche os bolsos das grandes empresas com subsídios e as cobre de toda sorte de regulamentação anticompetitiva. E vejam as pessoas das quais se resolveu cercar: Emanuel, Geithner, Summers, Rubin, Immelt. É, realmente um senhor círculo de estudos maoístas esse que ele arranjou.

Queria que Obama fosse “contrário às empresas” o bastante para fazer essa retórica ser acompanhada de simplesmente rumar para o ideal de livre mercado mediante cortar o vasto séquito de subsídios governamentais às Grandes Empresas — mas, infelizmente, não é para isso que ele está lá.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 8 de abril de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

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

Reporting on demonstrations and outbreaks of violence in Libya this week, CBS News observes the “collision between Libyans’ aspirations for change and the capability of the country’s fragile, post-Muammar Qaddafi leadership to bring it.” Since the 40-plus year rule of Qaddafi ended last year, a miscellany of would-be tyrants have vied for position, with the militias that helped oust Qaddafi remaining something of a wild card.

While the number of definite factions is open to question, the widespread trepidation in Libya is palpable. There is a sense among the people that any moment, a shot fired, the rise of a charismatic leader, etc., a new despotism could come forth.

Conventional wisdom teaches that, in the absence of the state, violent conflict is inevitable, political, religious and class groups destined to clash until a single, central source of law and order is instituted in society. To avoid such endless and untold chaos, people inaugurate the “artificial man” of the state, its objectivity, fairness and justness proceeding from the fact that it is something separate and apart from the people who create it. By agreement, the theory instructs, people relinquish a portion of their natural sovereignty so that they might have peace.

But libertarians and radicals of all stripes suggest another backstory for the state, one that replaces the deified state of fairy tale political science with the actual, historical state. Endorsing this second narrative, market anarchists argue that, in the words of American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, “the State had its origin in aggression, and has continued as an aggressive institution from its birth.” American historian Charles A. Beard wrote similarly, “War thus begets the king.”

The aggression of the state, its attack on peaceful, productive society, is not random or without purpose, but fundamentally economic in nature; it has enabled a parasitic class of marauders to live at the expense of others throughout history. Naturally, then, the state’s presence in society has yielded results — like those in Libya — decidedly opposite those of the fairy tale chronicle that has been inculcated in us.

What is transpiring in Libyan towns today, what materialized last year during the Arab Spring, these are reactions to innate, shared awareness that society is subject to the rule of a conquering group. In its establishment, and then protection and patronage, of monopoly, the state is the principal source of poverty. In its furtherance of poverty, the state catalyzes the preconditions of crime and violence — the chaos is it thought to thwart.

The principle of equal liberty allows people with different beliefs and worldviews to live and work alongside one another, indeed, to cooperate and collaborate. It is only the inception of political authority, the power of some group to rule everyone, that creates the kind of bloodshed we witness today.

A fractionated society, divided along cultural, ethnic and other lines, its people estranged from one another, is not necessary or ineludible. We can mitigate or escape entirely most of the attributes of the splintered, political society by embracing a philosophy mutual respect and non-coercion. Market anarchists are upholders of this philosophy.

People who would leave their neighbors in peace, who would trade on a voluntary basis, who would refrain from forcing their views on others through politics, are all already anarchists. Libyans ought to oppose not any particular political ideology or regime, but the state itself; only in its final abolition can legitimate law and order come to fruition.

Bill, over at Reasons to be Impossible, has an interesting response to my Contract Feudalism post.

The gist of it is that the forces of market competition under mutualism would lead to worker-owned firms engaging in behavior much like that of present-day capitalist firms: a drive to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate! In other words,

you can have a capitalism without capitalists. You can have all the profit seeking behaviours, without the personal gains for any real sensuous human being.

One thing Bill mentions is economic rents from superior location, access to superior services, etc. Regarding the latter, it’s important to remember that a great deal of existing economic rent is an externality resulting from the state’s subsidies to the operating costs of business. In a society where all public services were operated on the mutualist cost principle, and the cost of providing services was reflected in price, there would be no such externalities.

As for the former, it’s obvious that some economic rents would still accrue from superior production sites or innate skills, even without the artificial scarcities created by the state’s enforcement of privileges like absentee landlordism and the money monopoly. But in my opinion, permanent producer surpluses resulting from superior location, fertility, skill, etc., are considerably smaller in scale than the monopoly returns from artificial, state-enforced scarcity.

Another problem, he suggests, would be that higher than average profits from the introduction of new production methods, superior skill and productivity, etc., would be reinvested, and that production would become concentrated in the hands of such firms. And generally more efficient firms, likewise, would expand and take business from the less efficient, and market power would be concentrated in the hands of the winners. Firms would be driven to cut costs and increase the productivity of labor, with the work forces of even producers’ co-ops sweating themselves to accumulate and compete.

I think Bill underestimates the amount of such pathological behavior that results, not from the market as such, but from the distorted markets that exist under state capitalism.

According to neo-Marxist analyses of late capitalism, like those of Paul Mattick and James O’Connor (as I understand them at any rate), one of the major motive forces for continuing accumulation is the need for new investment to counteract the falling direct rate of profit–itself a result of previous over-accumulation. But since there would be no equilibrium rate of profit on capital under mutualism in the first place, there would be no falling rate of profit to worry about. And there would likewise be no rates of profit to be equalized between industries, as described by Marx in volume 3 of Capital. “Capital” would simply be a cost to be amortized, with workers paying themselves back for their investment of their own past labor. On the other hand, the problem of over-accumulation is primarily a result of the state’s subsidies to accumulation and its cartelization of the economy. The state encourages the over-building of industry to the point that it cannot dispose of its full product at market prices, let alone the cartel price established by oligopoly firms. So that’s another imperative that wouldn’t exist in a mutualist free market.

Bill also underestimates the different competitive dynamic that would result from a radically decentralized market. We are currently at one extreme of the pole: a centralized economy with production for large, anonymous commodity markets; and with it a boom-bust cycle that results from the informational problem of targeting production to demand. A mutualist free market would be much closer to the other pole: a decentralized market of production for local use, in which consumers and producers likely know each other, and firms have ongoing business relationships over time.

Specialists in economy of scale like Walter Adams and Barry Stein have demonstrated that maximum efficiency for most consumer goods is reached at a relatively low level of output: without government subsidies to the ineffiiciency costs of large-scale production, most of what we consume could be produced most efficiently by a factory of at most a few dozen workers producing for a local market area of a few thousands or tens of thousands.

In such a local market, demand and supply are likely to be more stable and predictable over time, and market relations between competing producers are likely to exist within an organic social context, regulated by customary norms: much closer, in social spirit, to the artisan production of past ages than to the anonymous production for large-scale wholesale markets we have today. I expect that competitive pressure in such an environment would be much less dog-eat-dog, and the pace of innovation would be much more relaxed.

Finally, I think Bill neglects several important limiting factors on the ability of “winner” firms to translate their gains into continued growth. First: the initial profits from introducing a new production method will quickly dwindle to zero, if there is no barrier to market entry and free competition. In the case of introducing new production technology, or superior products, firms operating within the margin will certainly derive temporary producer surpluses from it–until the innovations are adopted industry-wide. Under mutualism, though, there will be no patents with which to cartelize ownership of new forms of technology, and derive ongoing monopoly returns from them. The equilibrium rate of profit will still be zero.

Second: as we already mentioned, advantages in economy of scale from increasing firm size reach a saturation point at relatively low levels–so there’s only so much a “winning” firm can expand before it becomes counterproductive.

Third: the inability to draw monopoly returns on land and capital, and to compound them annually, likewise puts a severe limit on the potential of firms to expand. If holdings of land and capital cannot “grow,” accumulating a great deal of capital in any one place becomes much more difficult.

Without the ability to draw monopoly returns on capital, that’s one less incentive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. A workers’ co-op may make capital investments to be competitive with other firms, or to shorten their work hours. True, the initial gains to the individual firm, in cheaper product or shorter work hours, will disappear under competition. But if there’s no class of capitalists that can draw absentee returns from the ownership of capital, then all productivity gains from capital accumulation will go either to the worker or to the consumer.

If there are productivity gains from accumulation, somebody must benefit, because either total output will increase or total work hours will decline. If there are no capitalists pocketing the productivity gains for themselves, then the gains must go somewhere else. Either the average income for labor as a whole will increase over time, or the average work-week will decrease, or both, as the gains from productivity are distributed throughout society. The evils of the present system result from the absentee ownership of capital and land, so that labor does not fully internalize all the rewards of increased productivity.

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

Era uma vez, uma porção importante da economia estadunidense tinha sua base numa instituição peculiar, dependente de certo bizarro “direito de propriedade.” Tal instituição peculiar era defendida por pregadores e políticos, por lobistas e por um exército de editorialistas, os quais argumentavam que aquela forma peculiar de propriedade era propriedade no mesmo sentido que qualquer forma ordinária de propriedade. Qualquer violação dessa forma de propriedade, proclamavam eles, era “furto”, exatamente no mesmo sentido de alguém subtrair das pessoas suas posses ordinárias.

O governo federal recorreu à censura para proteger essa forma de propriedade, e foi desenvolvido um estado policial intrometido para levar a efeito a obrigação legal do governo federal de fazer cumprir o direito peculiar de propriedade da qual dependia a tal instituição peculiar. O governo foi forçado a tornar-se mais e mais autoritário em defesa dessa instituição peculiar, porque ela feria frontalmente qualquer instinto humano de liberdade.

Por outro lado, houve proliferação de grupos de defesa e figuras públicas que condenavam a instituição peculiar, e preconizavam a extinção da forma peculiar de propriedade da qual ela dependia. Argumentavam que aquela assim dita “propriedade” era completamente ilegítima e odiosa e não era, na verdade, propriedade genuína no mesmo sentido das posses ordinárias. Ademais, houve esforços organizados para ignorar ou desafiar aquelas reivindicações ilegítimas de propriedade, e para driblar as tentativas do governo de fazê-las cumprir.

Os tempos do era uma vez são hoje.

Joe Biden, anteriormente Senador, a partir da holding bancária – MBNA, e agora Vice-Presidente, a partir da Associação Cinematográfica dos Estados Unidos – MPAA, acaba de anunciar:  “Vejam, pirataria é puro furto. Há gente por aí furtando flagrantemente dos estadunidenses — furtando as ideias deles e roubando as energias criativas dos Estados Unidos. Não há motivo de tratarmos propriedade intelectual de maneira diferente daquela pela qual tratamos propriedade tangível.”

Bem, “propriedade intelectual” é tratada diferentemente de propriedade tangível, sim senhor. Isso, porém, deveria fazer Biden feliz, porque aquela primeira, em verdade, é feita ser respeitada mais estritamente do que propriedade tangível. A propriedade intelectual tem de ser protegida de maneiras tais que a propriedade tangível — propriedade legítima — nunca foi, porque a primeira não é natural. Por exemplo, o copyright digital depende de legislação que criminaliza tecnologia que drible a Gestão de Direitos Digitais, mesmo no caso de um comprador de CD que deseje apenas copiá-lo para finalidade de “uso honesto”, tal como tocá-lo em mais de uma plataforma. O copyright digital depende de criminalização da palavra, tal como afixar uma sequência de números num blog ou usar essa sequência numa camiseta. Eis porque Eric Corley foi processado: por publicar um código que conseguia craquear a Gestão de Direitos Digitais da indústria do cinema.

Tais formas de proteção não têm precedentes no caso de propriedade tangível. Bem, na verdade há um precedente. O governo dos Estados Unidos proibiu, nos anos 1850, a distribuição, pelo Correio dos Estados Unidos, de qualquer literatura que pusesse em dúvida a legitimidade de outra instituição peculiar(*), e o Senado dos Estados Unidos proibiu qualquer discussão de sua legitimidade por membros no plenário. (* Essa outra instituição peculiar é, entendo eu, a escravatura, também baseada no conceito de ‘propriedade’. Ver por exemplo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850 e também http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2951.html)

“Propriedade intelectual” é feita cumprir por forças-tarefas especiais do FBI, uma delas administrada a partir da sede da Disney(*), com suas ações estreitamente coordenadas com as da MPAA. Provedores de serviços de Internet são arrolados como agentes auxiliares do FBI, espionando seus clientes em favor dos “proprietários” de conteúdo digital. Vejam se vocês conseguem encontrar esse tipo de zelo e diligência nos policiais se mera propriedade tangível, como o carro de vocês, for furtada. (* Segundo o New York Times, Walt Disney foi informante do FBI de 1940 até sua morte em 1966. Ver http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/06/movies/disney-link-to-the-fbi-and-hoover-is-disclosed.html)

Bem, na verdade há um precedente: o aparato policial autoritário que cresceu em torno da tarefa de reclamar “propriedade” fugida(*), sob as regras daquela outra instituição peculiar dos anos 1850. (* A lei exigia que todo cidadão prestasse auxílio para captura de escravos fugidos. O escravo fugido capturado, outrossim, não tinha direito a julgamento por júri. Ver http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2951.html)

Ambas as instituições peculiares, ontem e hoje, estavam do lado errado da história. Os seres humanos querem ser livres. A informação quer ser livre. Todas as leis em contrário no final fracassarão.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 15 de abril de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Apple turns down an app to track u.s. drone strikes in Afghanistan.

If only the drones were slim and rectangular with rounded corners! Then Apple would move heaven and earth to shut them down.

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

Depois do culto do estado policial e de segurança nacional dos anos Bush é agradável ter nosso estatismo de segurança nacional criticado por tantas almas sensíveis favoráveis a mudança. Os Reaganitas e neoconservadores mandavam capangas de uniforme para dar pauladas nas cabeças das pessoas, tanto domesticamente quanto no exterior porque, vocês sabem, eles eram todos malvados e coisas da espécie. Já os Democratas fazem isso porque se preocupam.

Vejam só a decisão da administração Obama de dar a um navio de carga da Marinha o nome do ativista de direitos civis assassinado Medgar Evers. Seria possível imaginar a administração Bush fazendo algo assim? Ela provavelmente teria dado ao navio o nome de alguma figura belicosa da história naval. Obama não. Se nosso progressista Comandante-em-Chefe fizer chover morte vinda dos céus sobre o Irã (só porque terá sido obrigado a fazê-lo, para “deter a agressão deles,” sabem como é), aqueles lá em baixo poderão consolar-se com saber que não apenas estarão sendo queimados vivos por ordem de um progressista e não de algum sórdido velho direitista — como com saber que a munição vem como cortesia de Medgar Evers!

Isso sim é que é mudança na qual dá para acreditar! Mal posso esperar pela bomba batizada de Martin Luther King, Jr. Ou talvez possam dar a todos os aviões não tripulados que matam cidadão estadunidense sem julgamento os nomes de Thoreau, Howard Zinn, Gandhi, ou Utah Phillips.

E os sujeitos tirados de seus acampamentos do Ocupem em todo o país nos últimos dias com gás, spray de pimenta e cassetetes deveriam sentir-se melhor não apenas por pelo menos dois dos ataques (em Oakland e Portland) terem sido ordenados por prefeitos de impecáveis credenciais progressistas — mas também por estes até terem recebido útil aconselhamento de bacorinhos progressistas do Departamento de Segurança da Pátria e do FBI do Sr. “¡Sí Se Puede!”(*). (* Sim, podemos (mudar), em espanhol – Palavras do slogan de campanha do hoje Presidente Barack Obama.)

Isso mesmo! A Prefeita Quan disse que, logo antes de mandar suas esclarecidas e atenciosas tropas de choque para limpar o Ocupem Oakland, estava numa audioconferência de dezoito cidades discutindo como administrar a situação Ocupem. Melhor ainda, de acordo com Rick Ellis do Minneapolis Examiner, com base numa “conversa de bastidores” com uma autoridade anônima do Departamento de Justiça:

“… órgãos locais da polícia receberam recomendação de encontrarem algum motivo legal de expulsar residentes de cidades de tendas, recorrendo a leis de zoneamento e regras já existentes de toque de recolher. Foi também recomendado aos órgãos que fizessem maciça demonstração de força da polícia, incluindo grande quantidade de equipamento de controle de distúrbios. Em particular, o FBI teria recomendado relações com a imprensa, com uma apresentação sugerindo que quaisquer manobras para despejar manifestantes fossem coordenadas para ocorrer em horário quando a imprensa pelo menos provavelmente estivesse presente.”

Posteriormente, a Prefeita Quan negou que as cidades tivessem “coordenado” suas incursões; ela apenas “falara com outros prefeitos para compartilhar experiências.” Vejam, é o tipo de coisa que você só pode obter de um Democrata. Ela não falou com eles acerca de como descer o pau na cabeça das pessoas, ao contrário do que faria um velho Republicano mal-humorado. Ela “compartilhou experiências,” como uma californiana da Nova Era!

Obviamente, aqueles de nós do Sul estamos bem familiarizados com reuniões informais de autoridades do governo para “compartilhar experiências.” Como quando diversos delegados de condado se reúnem para um churrasco na casa do executivo do condado, por exemplo. E enquanto eles se sentam por ali compartilhando experiências e tal, por acaso surge o assunto — digamos — que ótimo parque industrial poderia ser construído nas pastagens do Tio Billy Bob. Perfeitamente legítimo — não é o que Oprah chama de Lei da Atração?

Assim gente do mundo todo, desde manifestantes de Oakland a festas de casamento no Afeganistão, está descobrindo o que significa a tal Esperança e Mudança(*). Essas balas progressistas ferem tão menos, não ferem? (* Ver o Esperança e Mudança de Obama por exemplo em http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/how-are-you-liking-that-hope-change/)

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 19 de novembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

It occurs to me that Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and I do, in fact, have one extremely significant thing in common: All three of us want to run my life.

Last week, BBC News’s Mark Mardell reacted to Mitt Romney’s revealing contention that, because they’re dependent on government, forty-seven percent of Americans will vote for Barack Obama no matter what. The argument is that these lazy spongers on the system are dependent on government handouts for all of their necessities, and so shudder at the “personal responsibility” candidate, Romney.

Brooding on Romney’s words, Mardell wonders whether redistribution truly is an idea foreign to the United States. In so doing, Mardell draws especial attention to the difference in American and British attitudes about redistribution and the role of the welfare state.

Market anarchists hold what is perhaps a unique perspective on “redistribution,” as it were, one that leans less on easy rhetorical distinctions and rather more on the substantive facts of the relationship between the state and powerful corporate actors. Attacks on individual liberty and free competition actually do translate into an enormous overall redistribution of wealth — yet the redistribution is “upward,” that is, from the vast majority of people, who incidentally produce the vast majority of wealth, to the small few who benefit from American capitalism.

The great strength and underpinning of that system, at least from an ideological standpoint, is the deftness with which its beneficiaries, people like Mitt Romney, are able to pass it off as “competitive free enterprise.” Market anarchists contend that American capitalism, centered on monopolies of land and finance, bears no relation to genuine free markets, where “free” is employed in the legitimate sense of voluntary exchange without arbitrary privilege.

Redistribution is thus quite native to the American Way, only with its true character bedimmed by the careful disinformation of the United States’ political and economic elite. Mardell does well to note that “hundreds of years ago [redistribution meant] distributing the wealth of the masses upwards to the kings and lords.” He would do better still to recognize the similarity, indeed the perfect continuity, between the economic programs of yore and the finance capitalism that makes people like the GOP’s presidential candidate rich.

Appraising the whole catalog of coercive legal privileges built into and forming the structural basis of the American economy (and that of the world at large), the notion that we have every-man-for-himself, cutthroat competition is risible at best. To be sure, we of course do see that kind of fully-developed, aggressive competition among laborers, wage-earners of all kinds who live paycheck to paycheck.

They jockey for employment opportunities within an environment constrained by the many limits on competition that benefit politically entrenched Big Business. Corporate welfare is, in the United States, the only kind that adds up to anything at all significant, and the only kind that matters at all to the political class.

Beyond just the billions upon billions of dollars that are poured into favored companies each year in the form of direct subsidies and bailouts, the richest corporations benefit mightily from the various regulatory barriers, licenses, patents, and permits that forcibly prevent ordinarily people from capitalizing on the property and skills they have.

The deficiency or complete lack of competition in so many areas of economic life means that working people are met with a “take it or leave it” proffer from Big Business. When you haven’t anywhere else to go, you’ll accept pennies on the dollar for pay and you’ll pay twice as much as a product is worth.

And in both cases, there is upward redistribution just as certainly and concretely as there is when the state gives taxpayer dollars to corporations outright (see, for instance, TARP, which handed hundreds of billions to Wall Street).

It’s time to abandon the myth of the American system peddled by plutocrats like Mitt Romney. A huge piece of that myth is the puzzling, ahistorical notion that the state is the great protector of the poor and powerless. At every point and juncture, the state has been the preserver of the rich, of coercive privilege at the expense of competition. To end the continuous theft from productive people, it is necessary to end the state.

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés]

Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition.

Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions:

• Agent: who effects the redistribution?
• Rationale: what justifies the redistribution?
• Means: how is the redistribution accomplished?

Statist Redistribution

For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist — it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state — though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of property via eminent domain, or the transfer of resources acquired via taxation.

Thus, both kinds of statists shift wealth from those who produce it to politically favored elites. They may also, of course, shift resources to the economically vulnerable, but the prime beneficiaries of these programs are various groups of politically influential people.

Statist redistribution is unjust because it employs aggressive means and because it is undertaken by the state — an aggressive monopolist. It is indefensible to the extent that its viability depends on the coherence of consequentialism. And it is undesirable because it serves the interests of the power elite at the expense of the well being of ordinary people.

Solidaristic Redistribution

Many libertarians acknowledge the importance of voluntary, solidaristic redistribution, undertaken by people using their own resources for the purpose of aiding victims of accident or disaster or those experiencing economic insecurity and not coercively mandated by the state. It is, indeed, perfectly consistent with libertarian principles to maintain that, while it is not just to use force to effect solidaristic redistribution, engaging in it may nonetheless be an “imperfect” duty: something one has a responsibility to do, but which one doesn’t owe to any specific person, and which can reasonably be fulfilled in multiple ways — and which cannot therefore be claimed by anyone in particular as a right. The agent of such redistribution is the individual, using her own resources and operating independently or through a voluntary association. The rationale is the importance (however understood) of helping those who need assistance. The means — all voluntary — might include contributions to worthwhile projects, providing unemployment for those unable to secure work, various kinds of investments, and direct gifts to economically vulnerable people.

Transactional and Rectificational Redistribution

But this is hardly the only kind of redistribution libertarians can and should favor. Libertarians also have good reason to recognize the importance of two other kinds of redistribution: redistribution understood as the predictable and desirable outcome of the maintenance of a freed market, and redistribution as a matter of corrective justice.. We can call these kinds of redistribution transactional and rectificational.

Transactional Redistribution

Transactional redistribution is just a description of what happens in a genuinely freed market. Markets undermine privilege. Without the protection afforded by monopoly privileges (including patents and copyrights), subsidies, tariffs, restrictions on union organizing, protections for long-term ownership of uncultivated property, and so forth, members of the power elite, forced to participate along with everyone else in the process of voluntary cooperation that is the freed market, will tend to lose ill-gotten gains. They will retain wealth only if they actually serve the needs of other market participants. And they will be unable to use the legal system to protect their wealth from squatters (by enabling them to maintain uncultivated land indefinitely) or to limit vigorous bargaining by workers (both because workers will be freer to organize without statist restrictions and because the absence of such restrictions will give workers options other than paid employment that will improve their negotiating positions).

While unfettered competition obviously will not create mathematical equality, it will make it much harder for vast disparities of wealth to persist than at present. The state props up the power elite, using the threat of aggression to shift wealth to the politically favored. Removing the privileges of the power elite will lead, through the operation of the market, to the widespread dispersion of wealth members of the power elite are able to retain at present in virtue of the protection they receive from the political order.

The means of transactional redistribution is the market. The direct agents are ordinary market actors, while those responsible for the elimination of statist privileges that distort the market and prop up the wealth of the power elite are the indirect agents. The rationales for transactional redistribution include thevalue of freedom and the injustice of the privileges transactional redistribution corrects.

Rectificational Redistribution

Eliminating privilege and creating a freed market will tend to foster the widespread sharing of wealth. But it will not on its own be sufficient to make up for the effects of systematic aggression by the members of the power elite and their allies. That’s why rectificational redistribution is also important.

Massive injustice lies at the root of much of the contemporary distribution of wealth. Land theft is the most obvious example. But other kinds of aggression — the internal passport system implemented in eighteenth-century England, for instance, or the engrossment of unowned land by state fiat — have also served to deprive ordinary people of resources and opportunities. The beneficiaries of this kind of aggression have varied to some extent, but they have consistently belonged to politically favored groups — they’ve been either members of the power elite or their associates.

People deserve compensation for the losses they have suffered at the hands of those who prefer the political to the economic means of acquiring wealth. It is obviously not possible to correct all historical injustices. But when those injustices have systematically benefited some identifiable groups at the expense of others, radical correction is possible and entirely warranted. That’s why Murray Rothbard argued that slaves should be entitled to the plantation land on which they worked: their putative “owners” had not used their own labor, or the labor of free people cooperating with them, to cultivate the land; rather, those who cultivated it for the members of the plantocracy did so at gunpoint. Thus, the land was reasonably regarded as unowned prior to the cultivating work of the slaves, who should have been treated as, in effect, homesteading it — and who obviously deserved compensation for the theft of their labor by their “owners.”

In the same way, independent farmers turned into serfs by violence deserved, Rothbard believed, to receive title to the land on which they worked, while the aristocratic proprietors of the latifundia on which they worked deserved precisely nothing in compensation for land to which they weren’t entitled in the first place. Military contractors, research universities, and other entities largely supported by the state’s theft of land and resources might well, he and Karl Hess suggested, be treated as unowned and capable of being homestead by their workers or others. And it would be easy to argue along similar lines that those prevented from homesteading unowned land by means of its legal engrossment should be allowed to claim it. And so forth.

The means of rectificational redistribution is the reallocation of unjustly acquired or retained property titles. The direct agents are the people who homestead property newly acknowledged to be unowned or who claim property unjustly taken from or denied to them or their predecessors in interest, while those who work to ensure the denial of recognition or protection to unjust titles are the indirect agents. The rationales for rectificational redistribution include both the injustices of the titles to the property rectificational redistribution reallocates and the claims to compensation of those deprived of title to their own property or unjustly prevented for claiming unowned property by the power elite. While it is not a source of independent justification for reallocating title, the greater dispersion of wealth this kind of redistribution effects can be welcomed by libertarians both in virtue of the benefits it confers on economically vulnerable people and because of its contribution to greater social stability.

Libertarianism as a Redistributive Project

Libertarian redistribution is just because it employs voluntary or rectificatory means and because it is undertaken by non-state actors. It does not require any sort of global consequentialist justification. And it serves to empower ordinary people and compensate them for injustice.

Statists might reflexively dismiss libertarian redistribution because it isn’t undertaken by the state. But, if they did, they would owe us an explanation: why should they be concerned primarily about means? Statists ordinarily argue for redistribution either as a means of reducing economic vulnerability or as a way of fostering economic equality, understood as valuable in its own right. But libertarian redistribution would certainly achieve the former goal and would likely promote the latter, too. So statists opposed to libertarian redistribution would seem to have fetishized statist means—and to care more about these means than about the purported ends of statist policies.

Libertarians rightly reject statist redistribution as a variety of slavery. But they have every reason to embrace solidaristic, transactional, and rectificational redistribution. A libertarian commitment to redistribution helps clearly to identify libertarianism as a species of genuine radicalism that challenges the status quo, undermines hierarchy, exclusion, and poverty, and fosters authentic empowerment.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Libertários por redistribuição.
• Greek, ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑΚΟΙ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΑΝΑΔΙΑΝΟΜΗ.

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

Есть замечательная фраза о том, как на самом деле работает капитализм в реальном мире (я не уверен, кто первым её произнес, но подозреваю что Ноам Хомский): «Социализация рисков и издержек, и приватизация прибылей».

Это довольно хорошее описание того, что делает государство в системе ныне существующего капитализма, в отличие от свободного рынка. Почти всё, что мы связываем с проблематикой корпоративного капитализма — эксплуатация труда, загрязнение окружающей среды, плановое захоронение опасных отходов, экологическая катастрофа, безоглядное исчерпание природных ресурсов — всё это результат социализации издержек и рисков и приватизации прибыли.

Почему же последовавшие в результате технического прогресса кибернетическая революция и громадный прирост производительности не привели человечество к пятнадцатичасовой рабочей неделе или к радикальному удешевению подавляющего большинства необходимых для жизни вещей? Ответ в том, что экономический прогресс идёт как источник для ренты и прибыли.

Социализм является естественным следствием свободной рыночной конкуренции. За краткое время инноватор получает большую прибыль в награду за то, что стал первым на рынке. Затем, по мере того как конкуренты перенимают инновацию, конкуренция сводит эти прибыли к нулю, а цена стремится к новому, более низкому уровню издержек, ставшему возможным благодаря этой инновации (эта цена включает, разумеется, эксплуатационные расходы производителя и амортизацию капиталовложений). Поэтому на свободном рынке экономия затрат труда, требуемого для производства любого данного товара, быстро социализируется в форме уменьшенных затрат труда на покупку.

Только когда государство насаждает искусственные дефициты, искусственные права собственности и барьеры для конкуренции, для капиталиста становится возможным присваивать часть экономии издержек в качестве постоянной ренты. В этих условиях капиталисту позволено осуществлять монопольное ценообразование. То есть вместо того чтобы под действием конкуренции назначать цену своих товаров в соответствии с истинными издержками их производства (включая затраты на своё проживание), капиталист ориентируется в ценообразовании на способность покупателя платить.

Эта форма огораживания с помощью «интеллектуальной собственности» является причиной того, почему компания Nike может заплатить владельцу потовыжималки несколько баксов за пару кедов, а затем выставить их за 200 долларов. Основная часть денег, которые вы платите, — это не реальная стоимость труда и материалов, а плата за торговый знак.

То же верно в отношении искусственного дефицита земли и капитала. Как заметили Давид Рикардо и Генри Джордж, существует некое рентное накопление на основе естественного дефицита земли как непроизводящего товара. Среди последователей Джорджа есть существенные разногласия: есть сторонники мютюэлистского принципа «захвата и использования» и другие либертарии, занятые вопросами, возможно ли и как избавиться от этих рент естественного дефицита. Но искусственный дефицит, основанный на частном огораживании и удерживании вне использования свободной и неулучшенной земли, или на квази-феодальных правах лордов изымать ренту от законных владельцев, собственно обрабатывающих пахотные земли, — огромный источник несправедливой ренты, возможно основная часть от общей ренты на землю. И вне зависимости от других шагов, которые мы можем предлагать, все принципиальные либертарианцы являются сторонниками отмены этого искусственного дефицита и — по меньшей мере — того, чтобы позволить рыночной конкуренции со стороны свободных земель снижать размер ренты на землю до её уровня при естественном дефиците.

Мы также приветствуем открытие источника кредитования для нестеснённой рыночной конкуренции, отмену входных барьеров для создания кооперативных организаций, выдающих займы, и отмену законов о легальных тендерах всех видов, чтобы рыночная конкуренция свела на нет основную часть от общей процентной ставки на деньги.

Но требование социализации ренты и доходов может негативно рассматриваться капиталистами как «классовая борьба», их вполне устраивает социализация операционных издержек. Главная причина того, что современное производство так централизовано, а компании и рыночные ниши так велики, в том, что государство субсидирует транспортную инфраструктуру за счёт общественности, и поддерживает искусственно низкие затраты на доставку товаров на дальние расстояния. Это делает масштабных неэффективных производителей искусственно конкурентоспособными против малых производителей на местных рынках, в которые они вторгаются с помощью государства. Вот почему у нас есть гигантские розничные сети, выжимающие местных торговцев из бизнеса, с помощью их международных оптовых операций «складов на колёсах» для распространения товаров, произведённых на потовыжималках Китая.

За последние сорок лет происходила потеря биоразнообразия, сведение лесов и загрязнение углекислым газом, поскольку экосистема в целом является не имеющей владельца свалкой, а не регулируемой общественной собственностью. Государство обычно присваивает «право собственности» на леса, залежи полезных ископаемых и прочее — зачастую в ущерб местному населению, проживающему на этих территориях — а затем даёт привилегированный доступ добывающим отраслям, которым позволяется копать карьеры для добычи ресурсов, не покрывая полностью все издержки, при этом возникающие.

Может показаться удивительным, но есть сильное сходство между этим свободнорыночным видением изобилия и марксистским видения полного коммунизма. Карл Менгер писал, что экономические товары (т.е. товарах, подлежащих экономическим расчётам ввиду их дефицитности) могут становиться неэкономическими (т.е. что их избыток и близкие к нулю издержки производства сделают стоимость расчётов выше, чем стоимость производства, если таковая будет). Это похоже на широкий диапазон мнений среди социалистов в движении свободной культуры/открытого исходного кода/P2P (торрентов). Они видят коммунистическую модель производства, осуществляемую в Linux и других разработках с открытым исходным кодом, как ядро новой посткапиталистической постдефицитной социальной формации. Во многом подобно тому как капиталистическое производство началось на малых островах внутри более крупных феодальных экономик, а затем стало ядром новой доминирующей социальной формации, основанное на общей собственности производство равными участниками является ядром, вокруг которого со временем кристаллизуется посткапиталистическая экономика.

И мы, сторонники свободного рынка, также являемся информационными коммунистами. Мы хотим, чтобы преимущества знаний и технологий были полностью социализированы. Наибольшая единичная доля прибыли в текущей модели корпоративного капитализма — внедрённые ренты на искусственный дефицит знаний и технологий.

В обществе, где больше не субсидируются отходы и планируемое исчезновение, где нет барьеров для конкуренции, чтобы социализировать все преимущества технологического прогресса, мы вероятно сможем насладиться нашим нынешним уровнем жизни при пятнадцатичасовой рабочей неделе. И в обществе, где доминирующим способом производства является ремесленное производство с помощью дешёвых CNC-механизмов общего назначения (как Кропоткин предвидел столетие назад в его книге «Поля, фабрики и мастерские»), разделение труда и дихотомия между умственным и физическим трудом будет гораздо менее выраженной.

Вместе эти два следствия свободнорыночной конкуренции в социализации прогресса приведут к обществу, напоминающему не анархо-капиталистическое видение мира, принадлежащее братьям Кох и Халлибертон, а скорее видение Маркса коммунистического общества изобилия, в котором каждый может «делать сегодня одно, а завтра другое, утром охотиться, днём рыбачить, пасти скот вечером, критиковать после ужина, как мне вздумается, не становясь никогда ни охотником, ни рыбаком, ни пастухом, ни критиком».

Статья впервые опубликована Кевином Карсоном, 12 сентября 2012.

Перевод с английского Tau Demetrious.

In a particularly myopic example of confusing America’s monopoly capitalism with a free market, Philip Caper (published at Truthout) argues that “full-blown market-based competition doesn’t work” when it comes to health care. One wonders how he might know that, given that what we’re seeing now (and have been seeing for decades) is just about as plainly constrained and engrossed by the rich and powerful as a system of delivering health care products and services could be. Now, as a criticism of corporate capitalism and the collusion between the state and capital, Caper’s would be close to the target. “The pricing of health care services,” Caper says, “is so complicated and irrational that it is impossible to determine in advance what the costs of treatment will be.” True enough, and that’s the predictable result of annulling the real free market’s price mechanism, which functions only when buyers and sellers are allowed to move freely with their resources.

Out of control costs and the low quality that Caper complains of are features of monopolism, of a capitalist package of policies that includes patents on drugs and supplies, lofty legal/regulatory barriers to market entry, and outright prohibitions against many organizational models for offering health care. Caper writes, “The next time somebody tells you we need more competition in health care, just remember that what you’re hearing is the sound of smoke being blown in order to create a smokescreen.” Right, the Big Business lobbies that tailor U.S. health policy only want you to think they believe in competition. And Caper ate it up. Writing in 1893, market anarchist William Bailie had already answered Caper’s shallow understanding of genuine competition:

We are told that competition among the capitalists leads also to low wages, to lying, adulteration, and all manner of deception; . . . Also it is said that competition is the parent of monopoly, that it drives the capitalists to combine, and gives us the trusts by means of which they rob the people with impunity. But this kind of reasoning is superficial. . . . where [competition] is assailed today, a close analysis reveals, not the evil effect of competition, but the need of more liberty.

Mitt Romney has come under fire for comments he made at a fundraiser last spring that recently surfaced on the internet. They express his fear that a major roadblock for his campaign will be the poorest 47% of Americans, whom he states “believe that they are entitled” and will “vote for the President no matter what,” because Romney will “never convince them to take personal responsibility for their own lives.”

Romney is certainly right that there exists an entitlement class with strong political power, but he’s wrong about who it is. Also, while Obama doesn’t have anything to fear from the real one, neither does Romney.

In the 2008 financial collapse, many of those 47% that Romney spoke of lost their jobs. There was a social safety net for them to fall back on, but it was nothing compared to the $700 billion that large banks received in bailouts or the $25 billion that went to the auto industry.

Large banks and auto manufacturers are far from the only members of this entitlement class of government dependents, however. An exhaustive list would span several volumes, but two of the most notable members are big pharmaceutical companies and what President Eisenhower referred to as “the Military-Industrial Complex.”

Romney would likely respond as he did in a 2008 Republican primary debate, telling us not to “turn the pharmaceutical companies into the bad guys,” given the crucial service they provide. Indeed, that modern medicine is able to save the lives of countless people every day is a miracle. It would just be nice if large pharmaceutical companies didn’t try to prevent that.

A very basic lesson of economics is that competition leads to lower prices, whereas monopolies are able to extract higher prices at the expense of consumers. Through drug patents, pharmaceutical companies depend on government to maintain monopolies over specific products. This protection from competition is further bolstered by the FDA, which is regularly dominated by the leaders of the very industries it’s supposed to regulate. Inevitably, the costs of regulation are easily absorbed by larger companies, who benefit from driving potential competitors out of the market.

It’s not just that pharmaceutical companies feel entitled to use the government to sell at prices much higher than they could ever hope to in a freed market. They also do so literally at the expense of many people’s lives.

Another industry steeped in government dependency and profit from death is defense contracting. Every dollar spent on a bomb, tank or predator drone goes in someone’s pockets. As you might expect, the market for civilian tanks isn’t especially profitable. Large weapons contractors and mercenaries (like the ones currently occupying Iraq) are completely dependent on government in a way that even the other industries mentioned are not: For the very existence of a demand for their product.

Let’s reflect on what it really means to feel “entitled.” Remember that when opponents of the bailouts voiced disagreement, they were quickly shut down by claims that certain financial institutions were “too big to fail.” In other words, when they take risks and make mistakes, paying for those mistakes themselves is unthinkable. Holders of patents view their monopoly status as a fundamental right, equating competition to theft. No matter how large the deficit looms, we are told that cuts to military spending must be completely off the table.

Take a second and ask yourself who has more of an “entitlement” mentality: These industries, or people who accept food stamps because it’s preferable to starving?

Whether or not Romney or Obama would have any success in trying to convince the real entitlement class “to take personal responsibility for their own lives,” neither seems to have any interest in doing so. Both support the bank bailouts, continued war, and the patent system.

That’s because while the groups I’ve mentioned are dependent on government, those wanting to fill the seats of government are in turn dependent on them. This can be seen from even a moment’s glance at each candidate’s list of top donors.

One conclusion that might be made from this is the need to reform the system and “get the money out of politics.” However well intentioned, this response is mistaken.

The very existence of a centralized power structure incentivizes using it to concentrate benefits and disperse costs. A market free from a wealthy entitlement class can only come from one completely free from government.

The distinction between the state, or “public” sector, and the “private” sector economy, is universal in commentary and policy analysis. But in the case of the corporate economy, it’s almost meaningless. First of all, the large corporation cannot be called “private property” in any meaningful sense. And second, the relationship between the corporate economy and the state resembles nothing so much as an interlocking directorate.

1. The idea of the large corporation as the “private property” of its shareholders is, in most cases, utter nonsense. Berle and Means, in The Modern Corporation and Private Property, pointed this out as long ago as 1932. Even right-leaning libertarian defenders of the corporation are forced, against their instincts, to minimize the shareholder’s real ownership ties to the corporation.

The orthodox teaching among Mises’ followers is that of the “entrepreneurial corporation”: the corporation is not a managerial bureaucracy, but a simple extension of the entrepreneur’s will, subject to his absolute control through the magic of double-entry bookkeeping. For instance, in “Sean Gabb’s Thoughts on Limited Liability,” Stephan Kinsella started out by citing Hessen’s defense of the corporation as a simple contractual device by which the owners of capital manage their joint property, no different in principle from a partnership.

But in the same article Kinsella, in order to justify shareholder limited liability, suggested that the difference between shareholder and lender was only one of degree, and that the shareholder was simply another class of contractual claimant (as opposed to residual claimant, or owner). He was forced, in fact, to retreat to an argument very like that of Berle and Means: that the shareholder’s “property” in the corporation is largely fictitious, and that real ownership is associated with control.

What are the basic rights of a shareholder? What is he “buying” when he buys the “share”? Well, he has the right to vote–to elect directors, basically. He has the right to attend shareholder meetings. He has the right to a certain share of the net remaining assets of the company in the event it winds up or dissolves, after it pays off creditors etc. He has the right to receive a certain share of dividends paid IF the company decides to pay dividends–that is, he has a right to be treated on some kind of equal footing with other shareholders–he has no absolute right to get a dividend (even if the company has profits), but only a conditional, relative one. He has (usually) the right to sell his shares to someone else. Why assume this bundle of rights is tantamount to “natural ownership”–of what? Of the company’s assets? But he has no right to (directly) control the assets. He has no right to use the corporate jet or even enter the company’s facilities, without permission of the management. Surely the right to attend meetings is not all that relevant. Nor the right to receive part of the company’s assets upon winding up or upon payment of dividends–this could be characterized as the right a type of lender or creditor has.

In the comments below, he added:

I think the manager is more analogous to a sole proprietor. They have similar control in making policy, hiring and directing employees. You [quasibill] think the shareholder and proprietor have more in common–becuase they are both “owners”.

And in a comment at my blog, he wrote:

It is bizarre that there is this notion that owners of property are automatically liable for crimes done with their property… Moreover, property just means the right to control. This right to control can be divided in varied and complex ways. If you think shareholders are “owners” of corporate property just like they own their homes or cars–well, just buy a share of Exxon stock and try to walk into the boardroom without permission.

In fact even the right to elect the Board of Directors, the only real right of control possessed by shareholders, is largely symbolic. Corporations are generally controlled by inside directors who engage in mutual logrolling with the CEO, and a proxy fight by shareholders is usually doomed from the outset.

The threat of hostile takeover, of which corporate defenders have made so much in their arguments for “a market in corporate control,” was in fact a significant threat only for a limited time in the early- and mid-80s, immediately following the junk bond innovation in corporate finance. Even then, arguably, the hostile takeover was the action, not of investors, but of the management of the acquiring corporation acting in their own interests. In any case, corporate management quickly altered the internal rules of corporate governance to make hostile takeover extremely difficult through such devices as “poison pills,” “greenmail,” and “shark repellent.” As a result, from the late ’80s on, most takeovers were friendly actions, made in collusion with the management of the acquired firm.

The dominant model of MBA behavior since the 1980s, arguably, amounts to management promoting its own interests at the expense of the shareholder: starving, milking, and asset-stripping, and generally gutting the long-term productivity of the enterprise, in order to inflate artificially high short-term numbers, and game their own bonuses and stock options.

That’s why the big retailers have essentially stripped themselves of human capital. Thirty years ago if you walked into a store, you were likely to be served by career employees who knew the product lines and customer tastes inside and out. Today if you go into Lowe’s and need help, the likely response from the minimum-wage high school kid is “I dunno. I guess if you don’t see it, we ain’t got it.” That’s why, when you go into a hospital, your nurse is likely to have eight patients (and your orderly ten, fifteen, or even thirty patients), and you can expect to go five days without a bath or linen change, and shit the bed waiting 45 minutes for a bedpan. And you’d better count on getting an MRSA infection before you get out. An MBA is someone who would break up all the furniture in his house and burn it in the fireplace, and then brag about how much he’d saved on the heating bill this month.

Generally speaking, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy operates in the corporation: corporate management will always have an advantage over those on the outside it allegedly “represents,” in gaming the internal rules to thwart outside control.

To summarize this portion, the corporation in practice is simply a free-floating aggregation of unowned capital, controlled by a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy which exercises all the material rights of control without ever having acquired an “ownership” right by any legitimate means (i.e., by actually buying into the equity it controls and uses to feather its own nest).

The obvious comparison is to the thousands of industrial enterprises in the Soviet state economy. They were theoretically the “property” of the people or the workers, who exercised no actual control over them. In practice, they were controlled by the upper levels of the Party and state apparatus, a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy which milked the state economy to support their lavish lifestyle of dachas, fancy cars and GUM department store privileges.

The modern corporate enterprise is not the legitimate property of anyone. It isn’t the “property” of the shareholders at all, in any meaningful sense. And although it’s the de facto property of the managers who loot it for their own benefit, it doesn’t belong to them in any legitimate sense.

2. The boundary between the corporate economy and the centralized state, likewise, is largely fictitious.

If we went back in time seven hundred years, it would be meaningless to ask whether some great feudal lord was a “private” landowner, or part of the state. In that society, the landowning classes were the state, and the state was the landowning classes’ rent collection agency. The great landlords, under the Old Regime, controlled the commanding heights of the state apparatus; the king and his nobles owned the land of the entire realm in feudal legal theory, and used the state’s coercive power to extract rents from the people actually living on and working the land.

Under modern state capitalism, likewise, the management of the corporate economy and the management of the state apparatus consist largely of the same rotating pool of personnel.

A typical pattern is for the same individual to go from being a director or vice president in some large corporation, to being an under-sectetary or assistant secretary or deputy agency chief appointed under some administration, and then back to being a director or senior manager in a large corporation. The interlocking directorate system, that ties together the large banks and industrial corporations, also includes the state. It’s hard not to think of Marx’s catchy little phrase: “executive committee of the ruling class.”

At the same time, the several hundred dominant firms in the corporate economy, and the structure of power they constitute, depend on ongoing state intervention for their continued existence. The state subsidizes their operating costs, to the extent that for many of the Fortune 500 the total sum of direct and indirect corporate welfare exceeds their profit margin; if state subsidies and differential tax advantages were eliminated, they would immediately start bleeding red ink and sell off subsidiary enterprises at fire sale prices until we had a Fortune 50,000. And with the collapse of profitability and share value that would result from the extraction of the government teat, it’s likely that many of those enterprises would be bought up at pennies on the dollar by their own workers, or simply abandoned to workers (like the recuperated enterprises of Argentina).

The stability of corporate oligopoly markets, and the administered (or “cost-plus markup”) pricing that they makes possible, depend on the cartelizing effect of state regulations in protecting the large corporations from full-blown market competition.

This is true, especially, of so-called “intellectual property,” which is the biggest single tool for cartelizing industry. AT&T was built on the foundation of the Bell Patent Association. Numerous industries have created cartels by the exchange or pooling of patents (for example, Westinghouse and GE cartelized the home appliance industry in the 1920s by pooling their patents). The American chemical industry was created almost from scratch during WWI, when the Justice Department seized German chemical patents and distributed them among the fledgling American chemical firms. Alfred Chandler’s account of the dominant firms in the early consumer electronics industry consists almost entirely of which patents were owned by which firm.

The dominant sectors in the global corporate economy depend almost entirely on a business model based not just on copyright and patent ownership, but on the draconian upward ratcheting of IP law under the Uruguay Round of GATT and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: entertainment, software, electronics, biotech, and pharmaceuticals. They would not exist in a remotely recognizable form without these state-enforced monopolies.

International IP law, specifically the long terms of patents, locks transnational corporations into control of the latest generation of production technology, and effectively relegates Third World countries to the supply of sweatshop labor for Western-owned capital.

Intellectual property plays the same central protectionist role in today’s corporate global economy that tariffs did for the old national corporate economies.

Most safety and quality regulations serve in practice to limit competition in terms of the features covered by those regulations. The minimum standards enforced by the regulations usually become a maximum. Their effect is exactly the same as if all the firms in an industry got together to formulate an industry quality and safety code in order to reduce quality and safety competition to a manageable level, except that by acting through the state they avoid the destabilizing possibility of defection by individual firms. And in practice, safety and quality regulations absolve the corporation from meeting any standard of civil liability higher than the state’s dumbed-down, lowest common denominator regulatory standard. Under the common law of nuisance, as it existed into the early nineteenth century before the courts eviscerated it to make it more “business-friendly,” a firm was liable for any harm it caused–period. Today, if a firm pollutes the air or water in a manner that causes objective harm, but falls within the limits set by the EPA, it can use those limits as a fig-leaf to escape tort liability for the harm it does. Monsanto has attempted to use FDA standards as a club to suppress commercial free speech, arguing that it should be illegal to advertise milk as free from recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone; it is libelous, they say with a straight face, to suggest there is something deficient in practices which fully meet FDA standards.

On the most general scale, Gabriel Kolko argued that it was the Clayton Antitrust Act which first made stable oligopoly markets possible. Its prohibition of “unfair competition” made destabilizing price wars illegal for the first time, and for all intents and purposes placed each industry under a government-sponsored trade association.

The best analogy I’ve ever seen for understanding the close ties between the state and the corporate economy, and their conjunction in a single state capitalist ruling class, was thought up by Brad Spangler, in “Recognizing Faux Private Interests that are Actually Part of the State“:

Let’s postulate two sorts of robbery scenarios.

In one, a lone robber points a gun at you and takes your cash. All libertarians would recognize this as a micro-example of any kind of government at work, resembling most closely State Socialism.

In the second, depicting State Capitalism, one robber (the literal apparatus of government) keeps you covered with a pistol while the second (representing State-allied corporations) just holds the bag that you have to drop your wristwatch, wallet and car keys in. To say that your interaction with the bagman was a “voluntary transaction” is an absurdity. Such nonsense should be condemned by all libertarians. Both gunman and bagman together are the true State.

The implication of this, he followed up elsewhere, is that “the true state is the entire political class, the parasitic net beneficiaries of the coercive apparatus of government.” And more specifically, “corrupt government ‘privatization’ schemes that benefit large corporations are thus seen as mere transfer of assets to a different arm of the political class…” In fact he cited Murray Rothbard’s argument, which I plan to treat more fully in a future post, that corporations that get the majority of their profits from state intervention should simply be regarded as state enterprises and expropriated by their own workers, transformed into genuine private property in the form of worker cooperatives.

Update:  TGGP, in a comment to another thread, posted a link to an excellent piece at 2Blowhards I’d forgotten about:  “The New Class and Its Government Nexus, Part I.” It described the New Middle Class as  a collection of,

financiers, senior corporate and government bureaucrats, and professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), all of whom collect high incomes without being required to put their own money at risk. These people make up most of the people in the top 10% of the income distribution, and a very high percentage indeed of people in the top 1% of the income distribution. (Another, much smaller chunk, of the people in the top 10% and the top 1% are entrepreneurs, who are assuredly not members of the New Class; they are economic experimenters and risk takers, as their high bankruptcy rate demonstrates.)

This ties in with what I said above.  Corporate management, through its control of organizations, collects all the benefits of actual property ownership.  But because what it exercises is mere control over property that really isn’t owned by anybody, it has none of the risk of personal loss that comes from having actually invested their own resources by buying into the property (holding, at best, stock options that are a tiny fraction of the equity they control).

I believe this was one of Mises’ criticisms of the Lange model of market socialism:  the manager of a state-owned enterprise was not a genuine entrepreneur, even when he had administrative incentives to maximize the profits of the enterprise, because all he risked was loss of future income; he didn’t risk the value of the enterprise itself, because he hadn’t invested his personal wealth in it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Setor “Público” versus “Privado”.
• Greek, «Δημόσιος» τομέας vs. «Ιδιωτικός» τομέας.

The reigning king of intellectual “property” litigiousness looks to be on the receiving end for a little of what it’s been dishing out. Per Tom’s Guide:

Switzerland’s Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or Swiss Federal Railway service, has accused Apple of copying the design of the Swiss Federal Railway service clock. Apple’s version of this clock appears in the iPad’s Clock app, which debuted as part of iOS 6, the latest version of Appe’s mobile operating system. According to MacRumors, the trademark and copyright for the clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker, is owned by the Swiss Federal Railways service.

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

Hay una frase que describe maravillosamente como funciona el capitalismo en el mundo real (no estoy seguro a quién fue que se le ocurrió, pero la asocio con Noam Chomsky): “La socialización del costo y el riesgo, y la privatización de los beneficios”.

La frase es una muy buena descripción de lo que hace el estado en el capitalismo de la vida real, en oposición directa al libre mercado. Prácticamente todo lo que consideramos problemático del capitalismo corporativo (la explotación de los trabajadores, contaminación, desperdicio y obsolescencia planificada, devastación ambiental, la depredación de los recursos) resulta de la socialización de los costos y los riesgos y la privatización de los beneficios.

¿Por qué se da el caso de que la revolución cibernética y los vastos incrementos de productividad derivados del progreso tecnológico no se han traducido en semanas de trabajo de 15 horas, o en la práctica anulación del costo de muchas de las necesidades de la vida? Pues porque el progreso económico es sistemáticamente acaparado como fuente de renta y de beneficio.

La consecuencia natural de la competencia de mercado sin bozal es el socialismo. Por un tiempo limitado el innovador obtiene una alta rentabilidad como premio por ser pionero del mercado. Después, a medida que los competidores adoptan la innovación, la competencia baja esa rentabilidad hacia cero y el precio gravita hacia el nuevo y más bajo costo de producción que surge gracias a ésta innovación (dicho precio incluye, por supuesto, el costo del mantenimiento y amortización de los desembolsos de capital del productor). Es así como en un mercado libre la disminución de las horas de trabajo requeridas para producir cualquier producto es rápidamente socializada en forma de un menor número de horas requeridas para comprarlo.

Es solo cuando el estado impone escaseces artificiales, derechos de propiedad artificiales y barreras a la competencia que le es posible al capitalista apropiarse de una parte de la disminución en el costo de producción como renta permanente. Bajo estas condiciones, al capitalista se le habilita para cobrar precios monopólicos. Osea, en lugar de ser forzado por la competencia a cobrar un precio igual al costo de producción (costo que incluye su propio sustento), puede escoger un precio basado en la capacidad de pago del consumidor.

Esa forma de acaparamiento, vía “propiedad intelectual”, es la razón por la que Nike puede pagar un par de dólares por zapato producido con mano de obra esclava y venderlos el par de zapatos al consumidor final por 200 dólares. La mayor parte de lo que paga el consumidor se debe a la marca del producto en lugar del costo en horas de trabajo y materiales.

Lo mismo sucede con la escasez artificial de la tierra y el capital. Tal como David Ricardo y Henry George observaron, existe una renta ocasionada por la escasez natural de la tierra como bien no-reproducible. Existe un considerable nivel de desacuerdo entre los georgistas, los mutualistas que abogan por el uso y ocupación de la tierra, y otros libertarios sobre si se debe remediar el problema de la escasez natural de la tierra y cómo hacerlo. Pero la escasez artificial, basada en el acaparamiento privado de tierra vacante y sin inversiones productivas, o en derechos de terratenientes cuasi-feudales que extraen renta de los dueños legítimos de las tierras que trabajan, es una enorme fuente de renta ilegítima — probablemente la mayor parte de la renta derivada de la tierra. Y sin importar qué otras medidas propongamos, los libertarios fieles a nuestros principios estamos todos a favor de abolir esta fuente de escasez artificial y como mínimo, dejar que la libre competencia reduzca las rentas de la tierra hacia su valor de escasez natural.

También estamos a favor de abrir la oferta de crédito a la total competencia de mercado, aboliendo barreras a la entrada para la creación de instituciones cooperativas de crédito, y aboliendo las leyes de moneda de curso legal de todo tipo para que la competencia de mercado pueda eliminar la mayor porción de los intereses cobrados por el dinero.

Pero mientras el demandar la socialización de la renta y los beneficios es condenada por los capitalistas como “guerra de clases”, están perfectamente de acuerdo con la socialización de sus costos de operación. La razón principal por la que la producción moderna es tan centralizada y el tamaño de las empresas y mercados tan grande, es que el estado ha subsidiado sistemáticamente la infraestructura de transporte a expensas del público general, haciendo artificialmente barato el transportar bienes a larga distancia. Esto hace a los productores grandes e ineficientes artificialmente competitivos contra los productores pequeños en los mercado locales que invaden con la ayuda del estado. Es por esto que tenemos tantas cadenas gigantes sacando del mercado a los comerciantes locales, usando un modelo de negocio de “depósito sobre ruedas” que internaliza la distribución al por mayor para vender bienes producidos con mano de obra esclava en China.

La pérdida de biodiversidad, deforestación y polución ha ocurrido porque el ecosistema como un todo es un basurero sin dueño, en lugar de un comunal regulado. El estado típicamente impide la propiedad de los bosques, los depósitos minerales, etc., muchas veces en detrimento de los pueblos indígenas locales que habitan éstas áreas, y luego le facilita acceso privilegiado a las industrias extractivas que proceden a depredar los recursos sin internalizar los verdaderos costos en los que incurren.

Aunque pueda sorprender, hay un paralelo entre esta visión de abundancia basada en el libre mercado y la visión marxista del comunismo integral. Carl Menger escribió sobre los bienes económicos (aquellos que están sujetos a cálculo económico debido a su escasez) que se transforman en no-económicos (debido a que su abundancia y costo de producción casi nulo haría que el costo de su contabilización fuese mayor que el de producción). Esto tiene un paralelo en una corriente predominante del pensamiento socialista en el movimiento de la cultura libre, el código abierto y el P2P. Ellos ven el modo de producción comunista practicado por Linux y otros desarrolladores de código abierto como la base de una forma social post-capitalista y post-escasez. Así como la producción capitalista empezó en pequeñas islas dentro de la economía feudal y después se convirtió en el núcleo de un nuevo y dominante sistema social, la producción basada en los comunales y las redes punto a punto es el núcleo alrededor del cual la economía post-capitalista eventualmente se cristalizará.

Y los partidarios del libre mercado también somos comunistas de la información. Queremos que los beneficios del conocimiento y la técnica sean totalmente socializados. La mayor parte de los beneficios bajo el modelo actual de capitalismo corporativo está conformado por las rentas generadas por la escasez artificial del conocimiento y la técnica.

En una sociedad en la que el desperdicio y la obsolescencia planificada no estén subsidiadas, y en la que no existiesen barreras a la competencia socializadora de los beneficios del progreso tecnológico, probablemente podríamos disfrutar de nuestra calidad de vida actual con una semana laboral de 15 horas. Y en una sociedad donde la forma dominante de producción fuese artesanal con máquinas-herramienta CNC baratas y de uso múltiple (tal como lo anticipó Kropotkin en “Máquinas, Fábricas y Talleres”), la división del trabajo y la dicotomía entre trabajo mental y físico sería mucho menos pronunciada.

Tomados conjuntamente, estos dos resultados de la competencia de libre mercado que socializan el progreso harían emerger una sociedad que no se parecería a la visión anarco-capitalista de un mundo propiedad de los hermanos Koch y Halliburton, sino más bien a la visión de Marx de una sociedad comunista de abundancia en la que uno podría “hacer una cosa hoy y otra mañana, cazar en la mañana, pescar en la tarde, criar ganado hacia la caída del sol, criticar después de la cena, tal como y tengo una mente, sin nunca convertirme en cazador, pescador, pastor o crítico.”

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 12 de septiembre de 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente