Everyone has their own definition of anarchism. One I find generally useful is the first three paragraphs of the article Peter Kropotkin was asked to write for the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannicain 1905. This is the collection of volumes which (however repugnant we now find its sales techniques) is the place we look for a working definition of most things.

Kropotkin’s first paragraph said that:

ANARCHISM (from the Greek, contrary to authority), is the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being.

That’s his first paragraph, and of course he has the usual problem of anyone writing an encyclopaedia definition, he has to be concise, but at the same time, to bring everything in. So his second paragraph goes:

In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the State in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international — temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.”

Kropotkin was a scientist, a physical geographer in origin, and his third paragraph drew an analogy from physics and from biology, and you might even claim from structural mechanics and music. For he claimed that:

Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the Contrary — as is seen in organic life at large — harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the State.

These opening remarks express the kernel of his argument for society as opposed to the State, and for the community as opposed to the government.

Society or the State

The next stage in the argument for me, at least, was provided by the philosopher Martin Buber, who wasn’t an anarchist, although he had strong anarchist connections. He was the friend and executor of a German anarchist Gustav Landauer, who made a very profound remark, which I quote from Buber’s book Paths in Utopia (Routledge, 49). “The state”, said Landauer, “is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Buber wrote a brilliant essay called ‘Society and the State’ which was printed in English in the long-dead journal World Review in 1951, and printed in a book of his called Pointing the Way.

Buber begins by making a clear distinction between the social principle and the political principle, pointing out that “it is inherent in social structures that people either find themselves already linked with one another in an association based on a common need or a common interest, or that they band themselves together for such a purpose, whether in an existing or a newly-formed society.” And he then goes on to stress his agreement with the American sociologist Robert MacIver, that “to identify the social with the political is to be guilty of the grossest of all confusions, which completely bars any understanding of either society or the state”.

The political principle for Buber, just as for Kropotkin, is characterised by power, authority, hierarchy, dominion. He sees the social principle wherever people link themselves in the pursuit of a common need or interest. Then he has a very interesting flash of understanding, which I see endlessly illustrated in contemporary politics. What is it, Buber asks, that gives the political principle its ascendancy? His answer was: “The fact that every people feels itself threatened by the others gives the State its definite unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of self preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises … All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact, this excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we understand by political power. The measure of this excess which cannot, of course, be computed precisely, represents the exact differences between administration and government.” Buber calls this excess the “political surplus” and he observes that “its justification derives from the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis between nations and within every nation. The political principle is always stronger in relation to the social principle than the given conditions require. The result is a continuous diminution in social spontaneity.”

Neighbourhood and Association

I find this a devastating perception. And I think that a whole lot of people have always had an instinctive feeling that if any community can’t organise itself, it is going to find governmental bodies filling the vacuum. There has been at least sixty years of effort to establish local community associations as voluntary, democratic, all-embracing bodies able to become unifying influences in every locality. These efforts are reported in a new book called Enterprising Neighbours: the development of the Community Association movement published this year by the National Federation of Community Associations. David Donnison provides an interesting introduction welcoming the honesty of this history because its approach to several questionable assumptions that a whole lot of worthy grassroots organisers take for granted, primarily the idea that “people want to spend their time making friends with neighbours rather than because they have shared interests”.

We can define the two possibilities as communities of propinquity and communities of interest. In practice plenty of us belong, for different reasons, to both, fulfilling Kropotkin’s aspirations to “an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees” and so on. Students of the social problems that were said to arise in the vast new out-of town housing estates of the inter-war years, like Dagenham outside London or Wythenshawe outside Manchester, were apt to attribute them to the fact that huge new settlements of people who were strangers to each other found themselves living together in places without the familiar community facilities of the places they had come from, and thought that what was needed was a programme of community building.

The lessons were supposed to have been learned in the post-war programmes of New Towns which culminated with Milton Keynes. In practice the stop/go financing of the New Towns all through the fifties, sixties and seventies meant that the aspirations for synchronising new housing, new industry and social and community facilities seldom really happened as planned and as described in the publicity material. But I do think it is fair to say that the money invested in most of the New Towns on the funding of community facilities, including paying the salaries of people described as Community Development Officers or some similar title, was well spent, and contrasts favourably with the experience of the post-war versions of those pre-war out of town housing estates which we all know about: the places where we love to see television films of the blowing-up by public authorities (not anarchists) of tower blocks which won’t have been paid for until the early 2lst century.

All the same, the worthy citizens who organise local community associations, whom we all know, when they pause and reflect on their labours, talk wistfully of the apathy and indifference of the people all around. They are not angry, they are just regretful that other people don’t live up to a particular idea of society and community based on propinquity. It makes me ponder yet again, not only on the very significant observation I have quoted to you from Professor Donnison, but on Kropotkin’s aspirations for an anarchist society.

Milton Keynes and Music

This is why I need to tell you about my discovery of anarchy, in Kropotkin’s sense, in Milton Keynes. It is because I have been reading, with very great pleasure, the book The Hidden Musicians: music-making in an English town by Ruth Finnegan, published last year by Cambridge University Press. She is an anthropologist from the Open University, so the particular English town she describes is Milton Keynes. The immense advantage of her ethnographical approach is that she refrains from making those value assumptions about music that most people automatically assume. As we all know, people talk about ‘serious’ music, meaning the music they take seriously, and implying that all other music is somehow frivolous.

Professor Finnegan has, I am sure, her own musical preferences, but she does not allow them to intrude on her study of music-making. I am reminded of Mark Twain’s quip that “Wagner’s music isn’t really half as bad as it sounds”.

Salvation Army bands, the Sherwood Sinfonia, the families dressing up for the Country and Western night, church choirs, the Morris Men and a hundred rock groups are all music, and when you consider the people hiring venues, arranging gigs, negotiating with visiting soloists, drawing up programmes, ferrying their children to rehearsals and carting tons of equipment around, let alone packing in the audiences, you realise that a vast and hitherto unrecorded proportion of the population anywhere is directly involved in the activity of music-making. In fact you feel that the whole population in one way or another is indirectly involved.

This is a remarkable social fact: that music-making is, more than anything else you can think of quickly, the cement of society, the expression of that social spontaneity that Buber was looking for, the most immediate and accessible example of Kropotkin’s vision of the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new forms which answer best to the multiple aspirations of all.”

Professor Finnegan manages to sweep aside endless assumptions: the sociologists’ preoccupation with class, the distinctions we make between professional and amateur, and, above all, ideas about musical exclusiveness. The same busy performers can find themselves in a brass band one night, in a symphony orchestra another, and in an ad hoc jazz group at the weekend. This is the fluidity of involvement in changing communities that attracted Buber and Kropotkin. It’s nice to think that a valuable element of the community quotient of any society, East or West, can be expressed in termsof the sheer number of young people endlessly practising for their big performances in a local pub under the self deprecating group names they choose (Ruth Finnegan lists more than a hundred, of which a mild example is ‘Typical Shit’). This is the backhanded way in which shared enthusiasms hold communities together.

Let us take a look at some of the interlocking, mutually supportive communities that her book describes, seeing them as a measure of the community content of Milton Keynes.

The Music Subculture

She notes how we have a socially defined canon of ‘classical music’ epitomised by varying combinations of professional players, live, broadcast and recorded, which “implicitly moulded people’s views of music” but “there was also a whole grass-roots sub-culture of local classical music. Though perhaps `invisible’ to most scholars, in practice this was the essential local manifestation of the national music system … one aspect was the provision of audiences with the necessary skills of appreciation for professionals coming to give concerts locally, but it extended far beyond this to the whole system of local training, playing, actively practising musical groups and public performances by local musicians.”

One concrete example of this continuing tradition is the way in which printed scores and music parts, both vocal and instrumental, get passed on: “These were often borrowed rather than bought and when a local choir, say, found itself, as so often, singing from old and well-marked copies, it was easy to picture the earlier choirs 20, 30 or even 50 years ago singing from the self same copies — and repertoire — of classical choral music in the day when, perhaps, those parts cost just one penny.”

In Milton Keynes, as in anywhere else, the classical music tradition rests on highly trained specialist musicians, so it can be seen as a “high-art pursuit for the few”. But looking a little closer, Ruth Finnegan sees that local musicians “varied enormously in terms of educational qualifications, specialist expertise, occupation, wealth and general ethos.” Take the leading amateur orchestra, the Sherwood Sinfonia, where she found exceptions to the usual assumptions, “like the young sausage-maker, later music shop assistant, who besides being a Sherwood Sinfonia violinist was a keyboard player and composer with a local rock group, or pupils from local comprehensive schools not all in the ‘best’ areas.”

Take too the Brass Band world. Don’t be deceived by the way that people imply that that sector is ‘a world of its own’ confined to families where it had become a tradition. There is endless evidence of this in the tradition of Salvation Army bands, works bands or Boys’ Brigade bands, but we’re all familiar with great and famous performers who belonged as much to the allegedly incompatible groupings of the dance band, jazz group or symphony orchestra. In Milton Keynes, Ruth Finnegan found that no other musical groups, except possibly a few church choirs, had such solid links, sometimes actual instruments and sheet music from long before the new city was conceived: from the Woburn Sands Band of 1867, the Wolverton Town and Railway Band of 1908 or the Bletchley Boys’ Brigade Bugle Band of 1928. By the 1980s the constituents of, say, the Stantonbury Brass or the Bletchley Band and the new Broseley Brass had members of both sexes and all ages. Ruth Finnegan was assured that their political commitments were across the whole spectrum and the people involved included postmen, teachers, telephone engineers, motor mechanics, personnel managers, butchers, train drivers, clerks, labourers, storemen and shopworkers, “but also included computer engineers, a building inspector, a midwife and several schoolchildren”.

Forget your assumptions: the brass band world was more representative of class and occupation in Milton Keynes than any political group. And exactly the same was found to be true of the folk music world. One of the things she observed in local folk clubs was their relative transience: “There were others too, even less long-lasting, which for a time engaged people’s enthusiasm but faded out after a few years or months …” like the Concrete Cow Folk Club. One leading singer at the Black Horse in Great Linford explained that “anybody’s welcome to join in, play along, sing a song, add some harmony to a chorus or simply have a beer and listen”.

Change and Variety

This is a reminder of Kropotkin’s important stress on impermanence, and his insistence on “an infinite variety of groups … temporary or more or less permanent … an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium”. In the brass world we emphasise thecontinuity of tradition, in the folk world we love the way in which the mood and the venue change from pub to pub. I see, where I live in Suffolk, how as the venue changes, performers, some of them old friends, others complete strangers, adjust to the mood, the audience and the acoustics, and play along together, sometimes accompanying a singer none of them have met before, exchanging through gestures and eye-signals information about key and tempo, chords and harmony. It is exactly the same automatic reciprocity that you notice between the members of a string quartet, with the significant difference that people like the Amadeus had played together for forty years.

When the whole variegated patchwork of the folkweave pattern comes together, as in the Folk-on-the-Green Festival in Stony Stratford, they provide, as Ruth Finnegan comments, “a magnificent showpiece of local talent” bringing in other streams like Ceilidh bands to dance to, or the Morns-dancing groups. As one adherent told her, “by playing with other people you get another dimension to performance”.

Then she moves to the world of music theatre, meaning opera, the Gilbert and Sullivan light operas, musical plays — not so much ‘Oklahoma’ or ‘West Side Story’ as local groups could never afford the copyright fees involved, but old favourites and, for example, the series of musical plays based on local history which emerged on the Stantonbury Campus, one of which I have actually seen. It also covers the pantomimes put on at Christmas by every kind of group from schools to Women’s Institutes.

If your measure of the importance of music in human society is the sheer number of people involved in the actual production, music theatre must be the winner. Among performers it brings together both singers and actors, and it also calls for the utmost skill in scene designers, lighting electricians, painters and stage-hands, costume makers, and an enormous number of citizens involved in getting people to rehearsals, feeding and bedding them, booking halls, producing programmes, drumming up the audience and selling tickets. Many such ventures were conducted to raise funds for local causes, and Ruth Finnegan is eloquent about the meaning for the participants,

…local soloists flourished and even the less skilled chorus and small-part singers expanded, steeped in music for hours on end, attending constant rehearsals, studying their parts in every odd moment they could snatch from work or family — small wonder that one concluded ‘I ate, slept and dreamt music’. Some members had before had relatively little systematic musical experience, and for them such experience would be a revelation — as for the local plumber unable to read notated music who talked and talked of the joy of singing in operas and pantomimes and his discovery of the beauties of listening to music. For their regular audiences too, the public performances were not only grand occasions of theatrical display, marked by colour, movement, dance and dramatic as well as musical expression, but also an opportunity to hear well-known tunes and arrangements which even after the end of that year’s performance could remain in the memory to evoke that special experience and lay the foundation for looking forward to next year’s production.”

Fluidity and Movement

Then there’s the jazz world. The three best-known bands playing in Milton Keynes in the early 1980s were the Original Grand Union Syncopators, the Fenny Stompers and the T-Bone Boogie Band. Dr Finnegan discusses these three with a brief mention of dozens of others in the area. These groups won a huge reputation locally, with wildly unexpected combinations of performers and instruments. Talking of the T-Bone Boogie Band, she explains that “they presented themselves as a zany ‘fun band’, but their act followed many traditional jazz and blues sequences, with beautiful traditional playing interspersed with their own wilder enactments of blues. They spoke of these as ‘improvised out of nowhere, on the spur of the moment’, but they were in practice based on long hours of jamming together as a group.” She goes on to say that “they saw themselves as ‘a community band’, playing ‘to give other people enjoyment … and for our own enjoyment as well’, a hobby rather than professional enterprise. When they were approached by a recording company and offered money to go professional, they turned it down.”

Her account of the fluidity of the jazz groups sounds like Kropotkin describing his ideal society. She sees the actual instrumental composition of jazz groups as “more variable than in most other musical worlds” and that “jazz musicians were tied neither to written forms nor to exact memorisation, but rather engaged in a form of composition-in-performance following accepted stylistic and thematic patterns”.

For them, jazz was freedom, as compared with either classical music or rock. She says that “far more than other musicians they would break into smiles of recognition or admiration as one after another player took up the solo spot, and looked at each other in pleasure after the end of a number, as if having experienced something newly created as well as familiar. As one local jazz player put it, ‘we improvise, with the tunes used as vehicles, so everything the group does is original’. Local jazz musicians often belonged to several jazz bands, moving easily between different groups … jazz in Milton Keynes is more a series of venues than an integrated and self conscious musical world … and both the musical activity itself, and the shared skills, pride and conventions that constituted jazz playing seemed to be a continuing element in their own identity and their perceptions of others.”

Dissent and Co-operation

Then she moves to the country and western world, describing the Milton Keynes Divided Country and Western Club, going strong in Bletchley since the mid 1970s. The club’s name, she says, indicated certain options. One of these was in dress: ‘divided’ between those who chose to come dressed `just as you like’ and those who preferred `western dress’. Either was acceptable, and around half had opted for one or another version of ‘western’ gear which could range from a token cowboy hat or scarf or to the full regalia. “In contrast to rock and jazz events,” she explains, “the audience sitting round the tables was family based, with roughly equal numbers of men and women, several children, and people of every age from the twenties upwards, including middle-aged and elderly people; only the late teenagers were absent. It was a ‘family night out’ … the secretary welcomed individual visitors from other clubs to interest and smiles from his listeners — an established custom in country and western clubs, in keeping with their general atmosphere of friendliness and personal warmth”.

She makes it sound almost like a meeting of a religious sect like the Shakers in nineteenth century America: “As the evening went on, more and more people got up to dance, adding to and developing the music through their rhythmic movements in the dance — one of the age-old modes of musical expression and appreciation. The atmosphere was relaxed and unselfconscious. and most people whatever their age, sex or build looked remarkably carefree as they danced to the band — the middle-aged woman with her tight jeans, jersey and big leather belt over her well-rounded bulges, the visiting technician and grandfather with his broken smoke-stained teeth, gleaming gun and cowboy gear, the young wife out for the evening with her husband, drawn in by his general interest in country and western music and now sharing his enthusiasm – and scores of others.”

The country and western world was a co-existence of people interested in the ‘western’ aspects and those who most valued the music. This co-existence was summed up in the very name of the Milton Keynes Divided Country and Western Club, which as Dr Finnegan says, at first sight suggests dissension, but in practice symbolises fruitful co-operation and an ultimate sharing of interests between these wings of the country and western world.

She moves on to another musical scene, rock and pop, a catch-all phrase since meanings and definitions are always shifting with what Derek Jewell calls the continual flux of the vocabulary of popular fashion. Dr Finnegan describes how “Milton Keynes was swarming with rock and pop bands. They were performing in the pubs and clubs, practising in garages, youth clubs, church halls and school classrooms, advertising for new members in the local papers and lugging their instruments around by car or on foot. There were probably about 100 groups, each with their own colourful names and brand of music … From the amount of time, trouble and (in many cases) money the players invested in their music, and from their own comments, it was clear that they got great social and personal satisfaction from their band membership — ‘making people listen to what you say’ and ‘finding a way to express ourselves’ — rather than regarding it primarily as a profitable enterprise … The players’ ages, educational backgrounds and occupation were more varied than most of the generalisations about modern rock music and youth culture might suggest.”

She is greatly sceptical about the succession of scholarly writings about mass culture, one influential group seeing it as “essentially ruled by the market place, soporific and non-artistic, delivered by non-creative and commercialised performers to passive and brainwashed mass audiences,” another group of Marxist critics seeing it as dominated by a capitalist power elite, while yet another declares that it is a “cultural struggle” with “the working class struggling to assert their own radical claims against the capitalist world” — a form of working-class youth protest.

These views obviously aren’t convincing when applied to “the amateur grass-roots local performers and their face-to-face audiences,” but all the same, “local participants and observers were still to some extent affected by this series of assumptions and were prepared from time to time to make effective use of such images as their own publicity”.

Her own conclusion is that “the most prominent single characteristic of rock players in Milton Keynes — apart from their variety — was their interest in expressing their own views and personality through music-making: a stress on individuality and artistic creation which accords ill with the mass theorists’ delineation of popular music”. A striking feature she saw running through all the bands was a sense of personal pride and achievement. Her final word on them was that in such bands “their members felt they could really make some individual mark … in contrast to the hierarchies and insecurities of school, work or the social services, playing in a band provided a medium where players could express their own personal aesthetic vision and through their music achieve a sense of controlling their own values, destiny and self identity.”

Creativity

She goes on to discuss the processes by which musicians in Milton Keynes learned the techniques of their art, the nature of performances. Whether the performance was seen as an ‘engagement’, a ‘concert’, a ‘recital’, a ‘booking’ or a ‘gig’, there were several forms of social organisation required: “mechanisms to frame the occasion as somehow apart, prior preparation by organisers, and the crucial presence of an audience, not just as passive recipients but as active and experienced participants themselves playing an essential role in constituting the occasion as a musical event”. Then she moves to an analysis of composition, creativity and performance. A lot of musical composition happens in Milton Keynes in several ways. “The first is the well-known classical mode of prior-written composition by an individual. This mode is assumed to be the natural form of ‘composition’ in most serious writing about music.” A lot of that happens here, like the work of John Dankworth, working nationally and internationally, not primarily through local musical networks. There’s a lot of church composition, hymns and carols, and a lot of music written for local school music festivals, or for the big music dramas from the Stantonbury drama group.

But there are other models of composition which, she sees, “overlap and mutually enrich each other”. And she concludes that “once one understands the validity of differing systems for creating original music, each autonomous in its own terms, it becomes clear that there is indeed a remarkable amount of musical creativity and the grass roots. In all forms of music, but perhaps most strikingly of all in the prior-composition-through practice of rock groups, the local musicians are quite consciously and deliberately among the modernday musical composers.”

Pluralism and Commitment

I have quoted at length from Dr Finnegan’s account of the different musical worlds of Milton Keynes. She is well aware that there are others too. There’s the big range of Irish music, both associated with groups like the Erin Singers and the Green Grass Social Club as well as the St Patrick’s Day Mass of the Milton Keynes Irish Society. Or there’s the Austrian, Swiss and German music at the Bletchley Edelweiss Club, or the Milton Keynes Welsh Society, or the Hindu Youth Organisation that celebrated the Diwali Festival, or the Buddhist group associated with the Peace Pagoda, or the musical traditions of the Sikh community and the Muslim population, each with their own musical traditions. Or the Milton Keynes Pipe and Drum Band or the celebration of the Chinese New Year with dragon and drum beat. She stresses once again that “in the limited sense in which the metaphor of ‘musical world’ is meaningful, there is a plurality of such worlds in local music-making.”

Then she examines the home, the school and the churches, clubs and pubs, not only as the physical places for music making, but as providing “a complex of expected roles and opportunities for music” which continues year after year. After all “music does not just happen `naturally’ in any society, but has to have its recognised time and place, its organisation of personnel, resources, and physical locations”. And she has two chapters, one called `Working at it’ and another on `Small working bands’, which illustrate the huge time and effort that vast numbers of people, a much wider group than actual performers, put into making music happen. Once more, I can’t resist quoting from the book at length:

Not surprisingly some groups were more effective than others in attracting the necessary personnel, coping with the various constraints, and more or less meeting their participants’ aspirations, but even the smallest of them — the precarious church choir of four members as much as the 90-strong Milton Keynes Chorale — ultimately depended on the ordered commitment of its participants: without that none could continue.

When one thinks of local music, then, the correct impression should not be either of the ‘cultural desert’ that some picture, or of a set of smartly operated and highly efficient groups, or yet of the natural co-operation of communally oriented or selfless individuals, but rather a variegated landscape made up of a whole series of differing kinds of groups and activities, some tightly organised, visible and populous, others more informal, some struggling or on their last legs, some starting up and perhaps benefiting from the dissolution of others, some established but still vulnerable, some in direct competition with other groups at some times but joining in co-operative ventures at others, some lasting over the years, and some appearing for just one or two events then lapsing. In the rich tapestry that makes up local music, what all these groups and activities have in common-whether large or small, ‘successful’ or not, harmonious or quarrelsome or mixed — is the need for a constant input of organised co-ordinated effort from those who at one level or another participate in them.

Now where have you seen this kind of language before? Well precisely in Kropotkin’s definition of anarchism with which I began. Just to complete the saga, I will quote from Ruth Finnegan’s next paragraph,

“Many of the pictures we are given of cultural activity in this country rest on a top-down model (patronage coming from the state or the large commercial concerns) or on a model of culture, and more specifically music, as essentially and ideally the preserve of specialists or as primarily conducted through the mass media or large-scale professional concerts. Local music-making falls easily within none of these models. Nor does it fit the also common idea that amateur cultural activities are somehow natural, easy and carefree, costing nothing and outside the normal sphere of those who are interested in organisational processes. On the contrary, the organisational processes of effective work, decision making, communication, choice between alternative methods of achieving objectives, delegation of responsibilities and, above all, co-operation in the attaining of more or less agreed ends can all be found in the processes of running local amateur music — indeed they must be found there if it is to continue.”

My claim is that this book encapsulates a marvellous piece of research, described with great sensitivity, and beautifully written. Yet nearly everyone I know in Milton Keynes has never heard of this book published last year, and the one who had heard of it said, correctly, that it was so ludicrously expensive (£35) that he could never dreamof buying it. I myself have never seen it reviewed anywhere, yet I see it as the most enlightening piece of anthropological or sociological research that I have read for years. Obviously the price has nothing todo with any wishes of the author.

Yet if I were the marketing manager of the Cambridge University Press I would have instantly seen the opportunities of a paperback run-on, on newsprint if it’s any cheaper, of several thousand copies with big lettering on the cover saying ‘Music in Milton Keynes: the truth at last’, and I would have touted it around every bookshop andnewsagent in Bletchley, Stoney Stratford, Wolverton and central Milton Keynes, and would find that vast number of citizens would want to buy it, if only because on the evidence of this book a very big proportion of the people who live there are involved in one or another of these plural worlds of music in Milton Keynes.

The Lessons

I’ve just referred to a failure in marketing, and this gives me the chance to draw an obvious implication from this book. For ten years we have been lectured by our rulers about the virtues of the market economy, the alleged magic of the market, and this by a clever propaganda trick has been described as the enterprise culture. Now enterprise has nothing to do with making a profit by buying cheap and selling dear. In the very last paragraph of her magnificent book Ruth Finne an reflects that “the reality of human beings is to be found not only (maybe not mainly) in their paid employment or even their thought, but also in their engagement in recognised cultural practices … Among the most valued and, it maybe, most profoundly human of such practices in out society is that of music”.

If my purpose was just to write about her book, that is where I would end. But I want you to reflect on what an interesting world we would be living in if we organised everything the way we organise our music. I mentioned Martin Buber’s perception of the social principle as what happens wherever people “link themselves in the pursuit of a common need or interest” and Kropotkin’s concept of this kind of voluntary co-operation as a social structure which would “represent nothing immutable. On the contrary — as is seen in organic life at large” he went on ” — harmony would result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitude of forces and influences”, but above all, “would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes … temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes.”

Suppose this was the way we chose to organise our work, or our education or the production and management of housing, or our health services, or our transport, or any of the things that make life possible and enjoyable in Milton Keynes or anywhere else?

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

Министерство обороны США недавно обнародовало новый “оборонный” теоретический документ: “Поддержка глобального лидерства США: приоритеты обороны в XXI веке”. Я использую кавычки, потому что кажется не совсем корректно использовать слово “оборона” для описания документа, который – как и его предшественники – предполагает что-то вроде американского Тысячелетнего Рейха.

Наибольшее смещение акцентов находится в разделе “Проект удержания контроля вопреки проблемам недоступных/запретных территорий”. “Угрозой”, очевидно, считается то, что Китай и Иран “будут и впредь использовать нестандартные методы для борьбы с нашими средствами наращивания мощи”.

Эти опасения относятся к давно известному феномену, тому, который аналитики Пентагона называют “Булава Ассасина” – дешевое, доступное оружие, которое делает дорогие высокотехнологичные системы вооружения неэффективными и обходится по себестоимости дешевле, чем все позолоченные экскременты Пентагона. В контексте “недоступных зон” оно включает в себя дешевые противокорабельные мины, ракеты класса “земля-воздух” и противокорабельные, как например “Sunburn” (который по мнению некоторых может уничтожить или серьезно повредить носители летательных аппаратов).

Таким образом, Пентагон обозначает как “угрозу” способность любой страны эффективно защищать себя от атаки или же предотвращать размещение сил врага в каком-то месте для того, чтобы атаковать. Да, вы прочли это правильно: американская национальная безопасность находится под угрозой, когда кто-либо собирается защищать себя от атаки США. Это как в комиксе “Family Circus”: “Мама, он дал мне сдачи!”. Эти двойные стандарты в вопросах “национальной безопасности”, однако, свойственны не только Штатам, но и любому другому государству в мире.

Что можно сказать о ситуации, в которой Америка держит свой военный бюджет размером со все вместе взятые бюджеты всех остальных промышленно развитых стран, сохраняет военные базы в половине стран по всему миру, регулярно проводит интервенцию в другие страны с целью свержения правительства, окружает Китай сетью военных баз – и потом торжественно объявляет, что военное ведомство Китая якобы “гораздо больше, чем это предусмотрено его законными оборонительными потребностями”?

Учитывая, что США считают свои «законные оборонительные нужды» распространяющимися на военные расходы, превышающие соответствующие расходы десяти других сильнейших военных держав вместе взятых, и удержание за собой возможности предупредительного удара по любой стране мира, сложно предположить, каковы критерии Пентагона по определению «законных оборонительных нужд» Китая. Но можно уверенно сказать, что «законные» оборонительные силы не предполагают способность Китая защитить свою территорию от атаки со стороны главной актуальной угрозы для него: глобальной супердержавы, пытающейся превратить окрестности Китая в поле боя.

А что насчёт атаки на Саддама за то, что «развязал войну с соседями» — хотя США активно поддерживали его вторжение в Иран в 1980-х гг.? Не говоря уж об американских морпехах, вальсировавших то в, то из территорий большинства карибских «соседей» Америки в середине 20-го века. У них были «дети в пробирке» в Никарагуа и Коста Рике в 1930-х?

С точки зрения Вашингтона, любая страна, способная сопротивляться американской атаке или «бросить вызов» американским приказам (неважно, под прикрытием фигового листка Совета безопасности ООН или нет) — по определению, «угроза». И любая страна, нанёсшая заметный урон американским военным силам в процессе защиты себя от американского военного нападения, виновна в агрессии (против американских попыток «защитить нашу свободу», надо полагать).

Американское восприятие «самозащиты» и «агрессии» также искажено, как у нацистской Германии. Если единственный способ, которым вы можете «защитить себя» от «угрозы» со стороны другой страны — это отправиться на другой конец мира воевать с ней, потому что у неё нет логистической способности переправить военные силы дальше, чем на несколько сотен километров от своих границ, — а главная «угроза» состоит в её способности дать отпор, когда вы её атакуете — то вы должны знать: что-то здесь явно не так.

Статья впервые опубликована Кевином Карсоном, 13 января 2012.

Перевод с английского Tau Demetrious.

I’m tired of Obama’s supporters boasting–falsely–that he kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. First, the war isn’t over. Sectarian violence is still commonplace. The millions of refugees created by the U.S invasion in 2003 still have not returned home.

Second, Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops only because George W. Bush was forced by the Iraqi government, which is allied with Iran, to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) dictating a full withdrawal at the end of 2011. Bush wanted dozens of permanent bases but Prime Minister Maliki said no.

As 2011 wore on, Obama sent War Secretary Panetta to beg Maliki to “ask” that U.S. troops remain in Iraq. Maliki refused, especially after Muqtada al Sadr, the influential Shi’ite leader, threatened to resume his Mahdi Army’s resistance to U.S. occupation. Maliki also told Panetta there would be no U.S. bases.

Obama withdrew the troops because–despite his best efforts–he was ordered to do so under terms reluctantly agreed to by his predecessor.

Obama’s supporters should stop lying about how the U.S. occupation in Iraq ended.

A recent column in Investors Business Daily took up the task of comparing a few of the different iterations of “capitalism” that we hear discussed these days, “real capitalism,” “crony capitalism,” and “state capitalism.” Real capitalism, the kind favored by the author, is placed in opposition to the bailouts of Chrysler and GM, phenomena which the author must then somehow fit into his worldview of adulation for America’s corporate giants.

Since there is of course no way that Big Biz could really be the villain of the tale, could really be the true beneficiary of Big Government, he says, “It wasn’t so much an auto company bailout as a bailout of a union whose workers were averaging $70 an hour in wages and lavish vacation, pension, and health insurance benefits — which played a big part I nearly destroying the companies. “No, no, it couldn’t have been corporate welfare for the rich! No way — we know that they earn their keep. It was those darn workers again, always ruining “real capitalism” by trying to get something for nothing, perquisites like a survivable retirement and some decent health insurance; they ought to be ashamed. IBD demonstrates the lengths that capitalism’s many apologists will go to in order to disregard the conclusions that actual political economy presents about the relationship between capital and the state. They couldn’t very well admit that even their “real capitalism” is a system of privilege in contradiction to the free market, so when the basest, most obvious instances of privilege crop up, they’re forced to chalk them up to those nasty unions. Then they can comfortably call it “state capitalism” and go right back to defending the rich as innovators, entrepreneurs and hard workers. But despite all of these eager hymns to capitalism, they almost always tend to ignore the most deeply rooted forms of state granted privilege, handicaps on competition that don’t benefit labor but systematically disadvantage it. The lesson? Whenever some talking head tells you that “[t]oo few people in the federal government favor capitalism,” think for a bit on the aggregate effect of the many subsidies, licenses, regulatory burdens and other barriers to full competition. All of that is helping wage laborers more than corporate execs? Could’ve fooled me.

Exciting news from the Cato Institute: It has just issued its first ebook: Anarchism and Justice by Roy A. Childs Jr., a collection of writings by the great libertarian author and editor. Childs (1949-1992) was the long-time editor of Libertarian Review and the Lassez Faire Books catalog. He persuaded many young libertarians of market anarchism in the 1970s (me included) with his open letter to Ayn Rand, included in the volume. Also included is Roy’s refutation of Robert Nozick’s “invisible hand” theory of the emergence of the minimal state. George H. Smith contributed an introduction.

“We must start out as anarchists,” Roy writes, “and have the advocates of the state make out their case.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Anarchism and Justice
• Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand
• The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism: An Open Letter to Objectivists and Libertarians
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back
• Anarchist Illusions

The ongoing violent protests against American embassies throughout the Muslim world are almost entirely being attributed to anger over the anti-Islam YouTube video Innocence of Muslims.   But some news sources, including UK newspaper The Independent, are examining how the protests and attacks may be part of a planned response to U.S. foreign policy.  As many of the protests are happening in Yemen, I would strongly encourage C4SS readers to re-visit Jeremy Scahill’s excellent article Washington’s War in Yemen Backfires.  Scahill provides a detailed and compelling account of the US government’s ongoing aggression in Yemen, and how this violence motivates resentment of America and support for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The following article is translated into Spanish from the English original, written by Carlos Clemente.

En un artículo publicado recientemente en la versión online de la revista The Freeman, el abogado argentino Ariel Barbiero reúne una serie de argumentos que ejemplifican casi a la perfección la esencia intelectual del libertarismo vulgar en el cono sur.

El artículo arranca con lo que probablemente sea el cliché favorito de la derecha en Argentina: Hasta 1930 (año que marca el comienzo de la “Década Infame” con el golpe de estado de José Félix Uriburu a Hipólito Yrigoyen, desembocando en la “Revolución del ’43” y la irrupción de Juan Domingo Perón en el escenario político), el país era poco menos que un paraíso terrenal de los mercados libres (a continuación traducimos las palabras de Barbiero, cuyo artículo fue escrito en inglés):

Los argentinos empezamos muy bien. A la gente se le olvida que para 1928 el producto interno bruto de la Argentina era el sexto más alto del mundo. El ingreso per cápita era similar al de Alemania. La literatura y la música florecían… Los inmigrantes veían a la Argentina como un lugar donde el trabajo duro hacía prosperar a la gente… ¿Y qué hacía que esa prosperidad fuese posible? La buena tierra y el trabajo duro, por supuesto. Pero también los sabios principios y las nobles ideas… Antes del giro ideológico de los años ’30, los hombres que gobernaban y educaban a la Argentina habían acogido al libre comercio y creían que no podía haber progreso sin el respeto a los derechos de propiedad. Leían a Tocqueville y El Federalista. El debate era libre también, y a veces fiero, pero ya no se intercambiaban puñetazos, sólo ideas.

Lo que sigue invariablemente es una detallada descripción de los vicios colectivistas que se cometieron durante la era peronista y que siguen estando vigentes en el país hoy en día, en los cuales no vamos a hacer hincapié — el lector puede enterarse de ellos leyendo el artículo de Barbiero.

Versiones similares del mismo argumento se repiten ad nausean en los medios de la región.

Otro pensador que no nunca falla con este argumento es Mario Vargas Llosa. Por ejemplo, en declaraciones recientes al diario argentino La Nación, aseguraba que el peronismo es moralmente equivalente al nazismo y en seguida remataba con que la Argentina del siglo XX antes de Perón era “un país del primer mundo… que disfrutó de una prosperidad envidiable”.

En otras palabras, el peronismo es presentado como una especie de Pecado Original del Estatismo en lo que hasta entonces había sido el Jardín del Edén del Libre Mercado.

Obviamente, esta visión barre bajo la alfombra histórica toda referencia a las causas estructurales más profundas que crearon las condiciones propicias para que la demagogia peronista calara en la clase trabajadora argentina, a saber, el que dicha clase hubiese sido sistemáticamente explotada por intereses oligárquicos que desde la fundación misma del país hicieron uso del estado para imponer por la fuerza un sistema basado en el latifundio y la cartelización de la industria y el comercio. La noción romántica que Barbiero nos presenta del “respeto a los derechos de propiedad” adquiere un significado radicalmente distinto una vez que se reconoce la artificialidad de dichos derechos.

Pero lo que resulta verdaderamente insultante es el hincapié que hacen los libertarios vulgares en la Argentina de las primeras tres décadas del siglo XX. Dejemos que Barbiero se regocije todo lo que quiera con lamentaciones piadosas porque la gente no recuerda los récords de PIB que Argentina rompía por ese entonces; pero recordémosle a él también que esas cifras no se traducían exactamente en prosperidad para la gran mayoría de inmigrantes que supuestamente “veían a la Argentina como un lugar donde el trabajo duro hacía prosperar a la gente”: en realidad los inmigrantes estaban enzarzados desde principios de siglo en una fiera batalla contra la oligarquía con la aspiración de obtener condiciones de trabajo mínimamente dignas, batalla que fue liderada por la Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), de carácter predominantemente anarcosindicalista.

En su libro La FORA, Ideología y trayectoria del movimiento obrero revolucionario en la Argentina el historiador y activista Diego Abad de Santillán estima que durante el período comprendido aproximadamente entre las primeras tres décadas del siglo XX los militantes de la FORA sufrieron un total acumulado de medio millón de años de prisión, 5.000 habían sido asesinados por fuerzas militares o policiales, centenas de ellos habían sido deportados, decenas de miles de sus hogares habían sido allanados, y cientos de sus bibliotecas habían sido incendiadas.

Otra característica típica de muchos intelectuales “liberales” latinoamericanos es su ciega devoción hacia el aparato estatal y la élite intelectual de los Estados Unidos de América, idealizándolos como los guardianes supremos del imperio de la ley y los mercados libres. Barbiero despliega este prejuicio de manera elocuente cuando expresa su indignación hacia los catedráticos del derecho argentino que condonaron la decisión de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, durante la crisis financiera del 2002, de incautar las cuentas bancarias en dólares y cambiarlas forzosamente por bonos o pesos a menos de la mitad del valor de mercado del dólar, pero al mismo tiempo asegurándonos que:

Si uno le dijese a un profesor de derecho en Estados Unidos (incluso a un ‘liberal’ en el sentido estadounidense de la palabra) que el gobierno ha incautado los dólares en las cuentas bancarias privadas y que la Corte Suprema (después de hacer los cambios necesarios en su composición) ha justificado todo, se esperaría que el profesor levantase una ceja.

Vaya. La verdad es que no sé cuantas cejas profesorales se habrán levantado desde que se pinchó la burbuja inmobiliaria estadounidense en el 2008, pero por muchas que hallan sido lo cierto es que no pudieron impedir el desate de una ola de salvatajes bancarios que quizás equivalga a la confiscación y subsecuente transferencia forzosa de riqueza del contribuyente al sistema financiero que nación alguna haya impuesto en la historia de la humanidad.

Pero Barbiero nos reserva lo mejor para el final cerrando su artículo nada más y nada menos que con un sutil elogio al desastrosamente corrupto programa de privatización de Carlos Menem, que facilitó la apropiación de activos argentinos por parte de corporaciones extranjeras a una fracción de su valor; todo esto en el marco de un régimen de paridad cambiaria que fue la causa fundamental de la crisis financiera que precipitó la incautación de las cuentas denominadas en dólares denunciada por Barbiero.

Es imposible que la versión de libertarismo promovida por Barbiero tenga alguna posibilidad de obtener apoyo popular en América Latina, porque a fin de cuentas la gente capta la falsa retórica de “libre mercado” y se da cuanta de que no se trata de nada más que de neoliberalismo, osea, del saqueo estatista de la clase trabajadora para favorecer a los “empresarios” bien conectados con los políticos de turno.

Y aunque el enriquecimiento de políticos y sus amigotes a costillas del resto de la población también sean una cruda realidad de los gobiernos populistas de izquierda, las masas empobrecidas de América Latina seguirán prefiriendo esa versión del juego capitalista al neoliberalismo, simplemente porque el primero pesa menos sobre sus espaldas que el segundo.

Artículo original publicado por Carlos Clemente el 16 de septiembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

In a recent article published at The Freeman, Argentine lawyer Ariel Barbiero gives us a well written, comprehensive and prototypical example of Southern Cone vulgar libertarian thought, ebullient as it is these days after more than a decade of almost continuous left-wing electoral victories in national elections across the region.

The article starts off with what is perhaps the favorite cliché of the Argentine intellectual right: Up until 1930 (which marks the beginning of the “Infamous Decade” with the coup d’état against Hipólito Yrigoyen by José Félix Uriburu, ending with the “Revolution of ’43” and the irruption of Juan Domingo Perón in the political scene), the country was nothing short of a free-market paradise:

We Argentines started very well. People tend to forget that by 1928 Argentina had the sixth-highest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world. Income per capita was similar to Germany’s. Literature and music flourished… Immigrants viewed Argentina as a place where hard work made people prosper… What made that flourishing possible? Good land and hard work, of course. But also wise principles and noble ideals… Before [the ideological shift of the 1930’s], the men who governed and educated Argentina had embraced free trade and had thought that no progress was possible without respect for property rights. They read Tocqueville and The Federalist. Debate was free too, and sometimes fierce, but these men no longer exchanged blows, only ideas.

This is inevitably followed by an accurate and detailed description of the collectivist evils incurred during the Peronist era that survive in the country to this day, which the reader can get acquainted with by reading Barbiero’s article.

Similar versions of the same argument are repeated ad nauseam in the media across the region.

A good example is Peruvian Nobel laureate, neoliberal icon and cheerleader of the US invasion of Irak Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently claimed that Peronism was morally equivalent to Nazism, but was quick to point out that 20th-century Argentina before Perón was a “first-world country… enjoying an enviable prosperity”.

In short, Peronism is portrayed as a sort of Statist Original Sin committed in what hitherto had been a free-market Garden of Eden.

Obviously, the problem with this view is that it blatantly sweeps under the historical rug any reference to the deep structural causes that created the conditions for Peronist demagoguery to succeed in its seduction of the working class — namely its systematic exploitation by oligarchic interests who from the country’s foundation relied on the state for enforcing pervasive latifundia and cartelized industrial structures. Barbiero’s romantic notion of “respect for property rights” acquires a whole new meaning if one acknowledges their rather artificial nature.

The particularly stark peace-and-love incantations with which contemporary vulgar libertarians describe the early history of 20th-century Argentina add insult to injury. Let Barbiero indulge for as long as he wants in pious lamentations about how people forget the record-breaking Argentine GDP figures of 1928; but let’s in turn remind him that those figures were not exactly translating into prosperity for the majority of immigrants who supposedly “viewed Argentina as a place where hard work made people prosper” — as a matter of fact, from the beginning of the century they were engaged in a fierce battle against the oligarchy for obtaining minimally humane working conditions, a fight led by the anarcho-syndicalist national labor union FORA (Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation).

In his book The Ideology of FORA and the Trajectory of the Revolutionary Labour Movement in Argentina, historian and activist Diego Abad de Santillán estimates that during the period approximately comprehended by the first three decades of the 20th century, FORA militants suffered 500,000 years of accumulated time in prison, 5,000 of them had been killed by the military and police forces, hundreds had been deported, tens of thousands of their homes had been raided, and hundreds of their libraries had been burned down.

Another typical trait of Latin American vulgar libertarianism is a blind devotion to the state apparatus and intellectual intelligentsia of the United States of America as supposedly the supreme guardians of the rule of law and free markets, and Barbiero displays it eloquently by expressing his dismay at Argentine law scholars who condoned Argentina’s Supreme Court’s decision, during the financial meltdown the country was going through in 2002, to seize US-dollar bank accounts and forcibly exchanging them by bonds or pesos at less than half of the market value of the US dollar, but assuring us that,

If you tell an American law professor—even a ‘liberal’ in the American meaning of the word—that the government has seized dollars in private accounts and that the Supreme Court (after the necessary changes in its composition) has justified everything, you would expect to see him raising an eyebrow.

Heck, I don’t know how many professorial eyebrows have been raised since the American real estate bubble exploded in 2008, but they certainly didn’t stop politicians in the proverbial “Land of the Free” from launching a flurry of bank bailouts that amount to what perhaps is the largest confiscatory transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the financial system of any country in the history of humankind.

But the best must always be saved for last, and Barbiero does just that by closing his article with a veiled praise of Carlos Menem’s disastrously corrupt, IMF-sponsored “privatization” program that enabled politically-connected foreign corporations to seize Argentine assets for a fraction of their value — all this in the context of a dollar-peg monetary regime that was the fundamental cause of the financial meltdown and subsequent seizure of US-denominated bank accounts that Barbiero denounces in the first place.

There is no way that Barbiero’s brand of “libertarianism” has any chance to gain any popular support whatsoever in Latin America, because in the end people see through the false “free-market” rhetoric and realize that it is nothing else than neoliberalism, i.e., statist looting of the working class for the benefit of crony capitalists and politicians.

No wonder the impoverished masses of Latin America keep voting for populist, social-democrat regimes: as long as their choices are framed as limited to two equally statist systems, they will obviously prefer the one that weighs less heavily on their necks.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Mito del Peronismo Como Pecado Original.

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

En su Tercer Discurso ante la Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores sobre la Comuna de París en 1871, Karl Marx argumentaba que la organización cooperativa de la producción, si se expandiese hasta incluir toda la economía, equivaldría al comunismo

“Si las sociedades cooperativas unidas [regulasen] la producción nacional con arreglo a un plan común, tomándola bajo su control (…), ¿qué será eso entonces, caballeros, sino comunismo, comunismo ‘realizable’?”

Dos referencias del liberalismo decimonónico, John Stuart Mill y Herbert Spencer – este último frecuentemente caricaturizado como un crudo darwinista social de derechas – veían en semejante “mancomunidad cooperativa” (si se me permite el término) como el resultado natural y último de una economía de mercado.

De acuerdo con Marx, esto no ocurriría por sí sólo, en tanto que la clase capitalista permaneciera en su posición políticamente privilegiada. En tanto que la manufactura requiriese de bienes de capital caros, y el capital estuviera concentrado en las manos de la clase capitalista, la industria estaría gobernada por la tendencia creciente hacia el monopolio capitalista.

Y en efecto, la producción cooperativa del siglo XIX no reemplazó al capitalismo – porque los capitalistas controlaban el acceso al capital. De acuerdo con John Curl, un historiador de las cooperativas de trabajadores, la producción cooperativa sólo era viable en tanto que los medios primarios de producción fuesen herramientas de manufactura de múltiples usos en propiedad de trabajadores individuales. Ésta era la base de la producción cooperativa organizada por los owenistas en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, cuando trabajadores desempleados montaban tiendas cooperativas usando sus propias herramientas bajo un techo común. Cuando el sistema de fábrica dio lugar a un coste explosivamente creciente de la maquinaria de producción, este modelo quedó obsoleto – el principal motivo por el que los Knights of Labor (Caballeros del Trabajo) se hundieron en sus intentos de montar cooperativas de producción sobre el modelo owenista.

Los implosivamente decrecientes requisitos de capital hacen vano el control del acceso al capital por los capitalistas. El efecto es la erosión de las barreras al crecimiento exponencial de la economía cooperativa. Si el proceso de acumulación primitiva convirtió a los capitalistas y terratenientes en una clase rentista a través de su propiedad concentrada de los medios de producción, la efimerización de la tecnología tiene el efecto contrario. James Livingstone se refiere a ello como la “desacumulación primitiva” – “la conversión de mercancías básicas como la información y la música en bienes de los que podemos apropiarnos y que podemos distribuir sin la mediación del dinero y los mercados (…)” (“How the Left Has Won” [“Cómo ha ganado la Izquierda”], Jacobin, August 2012).

Además, la efimerización y la incrementada productividad del trabajo han dado lugar a una situación en la que la principal fuente de valor de cambio es la información y el conocimiento cercados, y las rentas de escasez artificial de estos insumos. El trabajo socialmente necesario y los insumos materiales – el verdadero coste de producción – son una parte cada vez menor del precio total de lo que consumimos. De ello se sigue que un libre mercado, derribando estos cercamientos, eliminará – o socializará – la mayor parte del valor de cambio de la economía y llevará la tasa de beneficio media mucho más cerca de cero.
Era esta efimerización, esta socialización de la productividad y la técnica, y la consecuente destrucción del valor de cambio, a la que Bastiat se refería cuando escribió en sus Armonías Económicas que “la función de la propiedad, o más bien del espíritu de la propiedad, es la continua expansión del dominio comunal”.

La creación del verdadero socialismo no es una cuestión de partidos políticos o revoluciones violentas. El socialismo es lo que está silenciosamente emergiendo a medida que las fuerzas del libre mercado – es decir, de la cooperación pacífica – destruyen el capitalismo.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 14 de septiembre de 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Alberto Jaura.

What is “Contract Feudalism”?

Elizabeth Anderson recently coined the term “contract feudalism” to describe the increasing power of employers over employees’ lives outside the workplace.

According to Anderson, one of the benefits that the worker traditionally received in return for his submission to the bosses’ authority on the job was sovereignty over the rest of his life in the “real world” outside of work. Under the terms of this Taylorist bargain, the worker surrendered his sense of craftsmanship and control over his own work in return for the right to express his “real” personality through consumption in the part of his life that still belonged to him. This bargain assumed,

the separation of work from the home. However arbitrary and abusive the boss may have been on the factory floor, when work was over the workers could at least escape his tyranny… [T]he separation of work from home made a big difference to workers’ liberty from their employers’ wills.[1]

Wage labor, traditionally, has involved a devil’s bargain in which you “sell your life in order to live”: you cut off the eight or twelve hours you spend at work and flush them down the toilet, in order to get the money you need to support your real life in the real world, where you’re treated like an adult human being. And out in the real world, where your judgment and values actually matter, you try to pretend that that other hellhole doesn’t exist.

At the same time, Anderson points out, this separation of work from home depends entirely on the relative bargaining power of labor for its enforcement. (I’ll return to this, the central issue, later on.)

The Shift in Power

But it’s apparent that the bargaining power of labor is shifting radically away from workers. For all too many employers, the traditional devil’s bargain is no longer good enough. Employers (especially in the service sector) are coming to view not only the employee’s laborpower during work hours, but the employee himself as their property. White collar and service workers are expected to live on-call 24 hours a day: that thing they used to call “home” is just the shelf they’re stored on when their owner isn’t using them at the moment. And the boss has a claim on what they do even during the time they’re not on the clock: the political meetings you attend, whether you smoke, the things you write on your blog — nothing is really yours. Most people who blog on political or social issues, probably, fear what might turn up if the Human Resources Gestapo do a Google on them. As for the job search itself — good God! You’ve got to account for every week you’ve ever spent unemployed, and justify what use you made of your time without a master. If you were ever self-employed, you might be considered “overqualified”: That is, there’s a danger you might not quite have your mind right, because you don’t need the job badly enough. Not to mention the questions about why you left your past job, the personality profiling to determine if you’re concealing any non-Stepford Wife opinions behind a facade of obedience, etc… It’s probably a lot like the tests of “political reliability” to join the old Soviet Communist Party.

Examples of contract feudalism have been especially prominent in the news lately. The example Anderson herself provided was of Michigan-based Weyco, whose president forbade his workers to smoke “not just at work but  anywhere else.” The policy, taken in response to rising cost of health coverage, required workers to submit to nicotine tests.[2]

Another recent example of “contract feudalism” is the saga of Joe Gordon, owner of the Woolamaloo Gazette blog, who was fired from the Waterstone’s bookstore chain when it came to his bosses’ attention that he’d made the occasional venting post after a particularly bad day at work.[3]

Yet another is a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that allowed employers to prohibit employees from hanging out off the job. Here is the gist of it, from a Harold Meyerson piece at the Washington Post:

On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that regulates employer/employee relations in the United States handed down a remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck  around in their workers’ lives when they’re off the job. They upheld the legality of a regulation for uniformed employees at Guardsmark, a security guard company, that reads, “[Y]ou must NOT… fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees or with co-employees.”[4]

The “Vulgar Libertarian” Response and its Errors

Many free market libertarians instinctively respond to complaints about such policies by rallying around the employer. One commenter, for example, said this in response to Elizabeth Anderson’s post at Left2Right blog: “It’s a free market. If you don’t like your employer’s rules, then work somewhere else.” One of the most common libertarian defenses of sweatshops, likewise, is that they must be better than the available alternatives, since nobody is forced to work there.

Well, yes and no. The question is, who sets the range of available alternatives? If the state limits the range of alternatives available to labor and weakens its bargaining power in the labor market, and it acts in collusion with employers in doing so, then the “free market” defense of employers is somewhat disingenuous.

I use the term “vulgar libertarian” to describe this “What’s good for General Motors” understanding of “free market” principles, which identifies the free market with the interests of employers against workers, big business against small, and the producer against the consumer. As I described it in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:[5]

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism  or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works” — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”

The fact is, this is not a free market. It’s a state capitalist system in which (as Murray Rothbard put it in “The Student Revolution”) “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.”[6] As Benjamin Tucker wrote over a century ago:

… It is not enough, however true, to say that, “if a man has labor to sell, he must find some one with money to buy it”; it is necessary to add the much more important truth that, if a man has labor to sell, he has a right to a free market in which to sell it, — a market in which no one shall be prevented by restrictive laws from honestly obtaining the money to buy it. If the man with labor to sell has not this free market, then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken from him. Now, such a market has constantly been denied, not only to the laborers at Homestead, but to the laborers of the entire civilized world. And the men who have denied it are the Andrew Carnegies. Capitalists of whom this Pittsburgh forgemaster is a typical representative have placed and kept upon the statute-books all sorts of prohibitions and taxes (of which the customs tariff is among the least harmful) designed to limit and effective in limiting the number of bidders for the labor of those who have labor to sell…

… Let Carnegie, Dana & Co. first see to it that every law in violation of equal liberty is removed from the statute-books. If, after that, any laborers shall interfere with the rights of their employers, or shall use force upon  inoffensive “scabs,” or shall attack their employers’ watchmen, whether these be Pinkerton detectives, sheriff’s deputies, or the State militia, I pledge myself that, as an Anarchist and in consequence of my Anarchistic faith, I will be among the first to volunteer as a member of a force to repress these disturbers of order and, if necessary, sweep them from the earth. But while these invasive laws remain, I must view every forcible conflict that arises as the consequence of an original violation of liberty on the part of the employing classes, and, if any sweeping is done, may the laborers hold the broom! Still, while my sympathies thus go with the under dog, I  shall never cease to proclaim my conviction that the annihilation of neither party can secure justice, and that the only effective sweeping will be that which clears from the statute-book every restriction of the freedom of  the market…[7]

But whatever restrictions could he possibly have been talking about? To read mainstream “free market” defenses of existing employment relations, you’d get the idea that the only restrictions on the freedom of the market  are those that hurt the owning classes and big business (you know, the “last persecuted minority”).

In fact, such vulgar libertarian apologetics share a very artificial set of assumptions: see, laborers just happen to be stuck with this poor set of options — the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider.

It’s the old nursery-tale of primitive accumulation. “ Lenin” of Lenin’s Tomb blog recalls being exposed to it in the government schools:

The illusion of a free and equal contract between employee and employer is one that exerts considerable hold, particularly given the paucity of industrial conflict over the last fifteen years. The thought that the situation  might be rigged in advance, by virtue of the capitalists control of the means of production, is so obvious that it eludes many people who otherwise place themselves on the Left.

In part, this is because people are prepared from an early age to expect and accept this state of affairs. In high school Business Studies class, I was shown along with my class mates a video sponsored by some bank which purported to demonstrate how the division of labour came about. It all took place, it seemed, in a relatively benign and peaceful fashion, with no intruding political questions or economic phases. From the cavemen to cashcards, it was really all about work being broken down into separate tasks which would be undertaken by those most able to do them. Then, finding contact with nearby villages, they would trade things that they were good at making for the things that the other villages were good at making… The only interesting thing about this propaganda video is that it raised not a single eyebrow — as how could it? One is led to expect to work for a capitalist without seeing anything necessarily unjust about it, and one has nothing to compare it to. The worker is taught to sell herself (all those job interview training schemes) without perceiving herself as a commodity.[8]

I had a similar reaction to all those passages on time-preference in Bohm-Bawerk and Mises that just accepted, as a matter of course, that one person was in a position to “contribute” capital to the production process, while another for some mysterious reason needed the means of production and the labor-fund that were so graciously “provided.”

The most famous critic of this nursery-tale, of course, was the state socialist Karl Marx:

In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original  sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its  labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.[9]

But the criticism was by no means limited to statists. The free market advocate Franz Oppenheimer wrote:

According to Adam Smith, the classes in a society are the results of “natural” development. From an original state of equality, these arose from no other cause than the exercise of the economic virtues of industry, frugality and providence…

[C]lass domination, on this theory, is the result of a gradual differentiation from an original state of general equality and freedom, with no implication in it of any extra-economic power…

This assumed proof is based upon the concept of a “primitive accumulation,” or an original store of wealth, in lands and in movable property, brought about by means of purely economic forces; a doctrine justly derided  by Karl Marx as a “fairy tale.” Its scheme of reasoning approximates this:

Somewhere, in some far-stretching, fertile country, a number of free men, of equal status, form a union for mutual protection. Gradually they differentiate into property classes. Those best endowed with strength, wisdom, capacity for saving, industry and caution, slowly acquire a basic amount of real or movable property; while the stupid and less efficient, and those given to carelessness and waste, remain without possessions. The well-to-do lend their productive property to the less well-off in return for tribute, either ground-rent or profit, and become thereby continually richer, while the others always remain poor. These differences in possession gradually develop social class distinctions; since everywhere the rich have preference, while they alone have the time and the means to devote to public affairs and to turn the laws administered by them to their own advantage. Thus, in time, there develops a ruling and property-owning estate, and a proletariat, a class without property. The primitive state of free and equal fellows becomes a class-state, by an inherent law of development, because in every conceivable mass of men there are, as may readily be seen, strong and weak, clever and foolish, cautious and wasteful ones.[10]

How We Got Where We Are Now

In the real world, of course, things are a little less rosy. The means of production, during the centuries of the capitalist epoch, have been concentrated in a few hands by one of the greatest robberies in human history. The peasants of Britain were deprived of customary property rights in the land, by enclosures and other state sanctioned theft, and driven into the factories like cattle. And the factory owners benefited, in addition, from near-totalitarian social controls on the movement and free association of labor; this legal regime included the Combination Acts, the Riot Act, and the law of settlements (the latter amounting to an internal passport system).

By the way: if you think the above passages are just Marxoid rhetoric, bear in mind that the ruling class literature of the early industrial revolution was full of complaints about just how hard it was to get workers into the  factories: not only were the lower classes not flocking into the factories of their own free will, but the owning classes used a great deal of energy thinking up ways to force them to do so. Employers of the day engaged in  very frank talk, as frank as that of any Marxist, on the need to keep working people destitute and deprive them of independent access to the means of production, in order to get them to work hard enough and cheaply enough.

Albert Nock, surely nobody’s idea of a Marxist, dismissed the bourgeois nursery-tale with typical Nockian contempt:

The horrors of England’s industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians — all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State’s primary intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State’s removal of the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system and the “industrial revolution” have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith’s economics are not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.[11]

Even in the so-called “free market” that supposedly ensued by the mid-19th century, the owners of capital and land were able to exact tribute from labor, thanks to a general legal framework that (among other things) restricted workers’ access to their own cheap, self-organized capital through mutual banks. As a result of this “money monopoly,” workers had to sell their labor in a “buyer’s market” on terms set by the owning classes, and thus pay tribute (in the form of a wage less than their labor-product) for access to the means of production. Thus the worker has been robbed doubly: by the state’s initial use of force to forestall a producer-owned market economy; and by the state’s ongoing intervention that forces him to sell his labor for less than his product. The vast majority of accumulated capital today is the result, not of the capitalist’s past labor and abstention, but of robbery.

So even in the so-called “laissez-faire” 19th century, as Tucker described the situation, the level of statist intervention on behalf of the owning and employing classes was already warping the wage system in all sorts of authoritarian directions. The phenomenon of wage labor existed to the extent that it did only as a result of the process of primitive accumulation by which the producing classes had, in previous centuries, been robbed of their property in the means of production and forced to sell their labor on the bosses’ terms. And thanks to the state’s restriction of self-organized credit and of access to unoccupied land, which enabled the owners of artificially scarce land and capital to charge tribute for access to them, workers faced an ongoing necessity of selling their labor on still more disadvantageous terms.

The problem was exacerbated during the state capitalist revolution of the 20th century, by still higher levels of corporatist intervention, and the resulting centralization of the economy. The effect of government subsidies and regulatory cartelization was to conceal or transfer the inefficiency costs of large-scale organization, and to promote a state capitalist model of business organization that was far larger, and far more hierarchical and bureaucratic, than could possibly have survived in a free market.

The state’s subsidies to the development of capital-intensive production, as the century wore on, promoted deskilling and ever-steeper internal hierarchies, and reduced the bargaining power that came with labor’s  control of the production process. Many of the most powerfully deskilling forms of production technology were created as a result of the state’s subsidies to research and development. As David Montgomery wrote in Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation,

[I]nvestigation of the actual design and use of capital-intensive, labor-saving, skill-reducing technology has begun to indicate that cost reduction was not a prime motivation, nor was it achieved. Rather than any such  economic stimulus, the overriding impulse behind the development of the American system of manufacture was military; the principal promoter of the new methods was not the self-adjusting market but the extra-market U.S. Army Ordnance Department… The drive to automate has been from its inception the drive to reduce dependence upon skilled labor, to deskill necessary labor and reduce rather than raise wages.[12]

Finally, the decision of neoliberal elites in the 1970s to freeze real wages and transfer all productivity increases into reinvestment, dividends, or senior management salaries, led to a still more disgruntled work force, and the need for internal systems of surveillance and control far beyond anything that had existed before. David M. Gordon’s Fat and Mean[13] refers, in its subtitle, to the “Myth of Managerial Downsizing.” Gordon demonstrates that, contrary to public misperception, most companies employ even more middle management than they used to; and a major function of these new overseers is enforcing management control over an increasingly overworked, insecure, and embittered workforce. The professional culture in Human Resources departments is geared, more and more, to detecting and forestalling sabotage and other expressions of employee disgruntlement, through elaborate internal surveillance mechanisms, and to spotting potentially dangerous attitudes toward authority through intensive psychological profiling.

The state capitalists, since adopting their new neoliberal consensus of the Seventies, have been hell-bent on creating a society in which the average worker is so desperate for work that he’ll gratefully take any job offered, and do whatever is necessary to cling to it like grim death.

To summarize…

… things didn’t just “get” this way. They had help. The reduced bargaining power of labor, the resulting erosion of the traditional boundaries between work and private life, and increasing management control even of time off the clock, are all the result of concerted political efforts.

The fact that we accept as natural a state of affairs in which one class has “jobs” to “give” and another class is forced to take them, for want of independent access to the means of productions, is the result of generations of ideological hegemony by the owning classes and their vulgar libertarian apologists.

Nothing in the present situation is a natural implication of free market principles. As Albert Nock wrote,

Our natural resources, while much depleted, are still great; our population is very thin, running something like twenty or twenty-five to the square mile; and some millions of this population are at the moment “unemployed,” and likely to remain so because no one will or can “give them work.” The point is not that men generally submit to this state of things, or that they accept it as inevitable, but that they see nothing irregular or anomalous about it because of their fixed idea that work is something to be given.[14]

Claire Wolfe pointed out, in her brilliant article “Dark Satanic Cubicles,” that there’s nothing libertarian about the existing culture of job relations:

In a healthy human community, jobs are neither necessary nor desirable. Productive work is necessary — for economic, social, and even spiritual reasons. Free markets are also an amazing thing, almost magical in their ability to satisfy billions of diverse needs. Entrepreneurship? Great! But jobs — going off on a fixed schedule to perform fixed functions for somebody else day after day at a wage — aren’t good for body, soul, family, or society.

Intuitively, wordlessly, people knew it in 1955. They knew it in 1946. They really knew it when Ned Ludd and friends were smashing the machines of the early Industrial Revolution (though the Luddites may not have  understood exactly why they needed to do what they did).

Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” Granted, the cubicles are more bright and airy; but they’re different in degree rather than in kind from the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Both cubicles and dark mills signify working on other people’s terms, for other people’s goals, at other people’s sufferance. Neither type of work usually results in us owning the fruits of our labors or having the satisfaction of creating something from start to finish with our own hands. Neither allows us to work at our own pace, or the pace of the  seasons. Neither allows us access to our families, friends, or communities when we need them or they need us. Both isolate work from every other part of our life…

We’ve made wage-slavery so much a part of our culture that it probably doesn’t even occur to most people that there’s something unnatural about separating work from the rest of our lives. Or about spending our entire working lives producing things in which we can often take only minimal personal pride — or no pride at all…

Take a job and you’ve sold part of yourself to a master. You’ve cut yourself off from the real fruits of your own efforts.

When you own your own work, you own your own life. It’s a goal worthy of a lot of sacrifice. And a lot of deep thought.

[A]nybody who begins to come up with a serious plan that starts cutting the underpinnings from the state-corporate power structure can expect to be treated as Public Enemy Number One.[15]

The chief obstacle to the latter process, she wrote, was “government and its heavily favored and subsidized corporations and financial markets…”

How Bad Do the Options Have to Be?

Now before we go on, as a market anarchist, I have to stipulate that there’s nothing inherently wrong with wage labor. And in a free market, employers would be within their rights to make the kinds of demands associated with contract feudalism.

The problem, from my standpoint, is that the reduced bargaining power of labor in the present labor market lets employers get away with it. What deserves comment is not the legal issue of whether the state should “allow” employers to exercise this kind of control, but the question of what kind of allegedly free marketplace would allow it.

The question is, just how godawful do the other “options” have to be before somebody’s desperate enough to take a job under such conditions? How do things get to the point where people are lined up to compete for jobs where they can be forbidden to associate with coworkers away from work, where even squalid, low-paying retail jobs can involve being on-call 24/7, where employees can’t attend political meetings without keeping an eye out for an informer, or can’t blog under their own names without living in fear that they’re a web-search away from termination?

I’m not a friend of federal labor regulations. We shouldn’t need federal regulations to stop this sort of thing from happening. In a free market where land and capital weren’t artificially scarce and expensive compared to labor, jobs should be competing for workers. What’s remarkable is not that contract feudalism is technically “ legal,” but that the job market is so abysmal that it could become an issue in the first place.

As Elizabeth Anderson already suggested in the quote above, the key to contract feudalism is the reduced bargaining power of labor. Timothy Carter puts the alternatives in very stark terms:

where the real power to gain a lion’s share of the mutual benefit lies: with the power to walk away. If one side can walk away from the table and the other side cannot, the party that can leave can get almost anything they want as long as they leave the other party only slightly better off than if there was no deal at all…

What creates an imbalance in the power to walk away? One situation is need. If one side has to make the exchange, their power to walk away is gone.

… For most people, a job is the ultimate need. It from the earnings of job that all other needs are satisfied.

So how can we make the exchange more fair?… The liberal answer is to have the government meddle in the labor-capital exchange…

There is another way. The need for government meddling could end if the balance of negotiating power between labor and capital were equalized. Currently, the imbalance exists because capital can walk away, but labor  cannot.[16]

For a Genuine Free Market

Contrast the present monstrous situation with what would exist in a genuine free market: jobs competing for workers, instead of the other way around. Here’s how Tucker envisioned the worker-friendly effects of such a  free market:

For, say Proudhon and Warren, if the business of banking were made free to all, more and more persons would enter into it until the competition should become sharp enough to reduce the price of lending money to the  labor cost, which statistics show to be less than three-fourths of once per cent. In that case the thousands of people who are now deterred from going into business by the ruinously high rates which they must pay for  capital with which to start and carry on business will find their difficulties removed… Then will be seen an exemplification of the words of Richard Cobden that, when two laborers are after one employer, wages fall, but  when two employers are after one laborer, wages rise. Labor will then be in a position to dictate its wages, and will thus secure its natural wage, its entire product…[17]

The authors of the Anarchist FAQ described the libertarian socialist consequences of Tucker’s free market, in even more expansive terms, in this passage:

It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers’ control but would in fact promote it (as well as logically requiring it). For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to: (1) demand and get  workplace democracy; and (2) pool their credit to buy and own companies collectively. This would eliminate the top-down structure of the firm and the ability of owners to pay themselves unfairly large salaries as well as  reducing capitalist profits to zero by ensuring that workers received the full value of their labour. Tucker himself pointed this out when he argued that Proudhon (like himself) “would individualise and associate” workplaces by mutualism, which would “place the means of production within the reach of all.”[18]

So instead of workers living in fear that bosses might discover something “bad” about them (like the fact that they have publicly spoken their minds in the past, like free men and women), bosses would live in fear lest workers think badly enough of them to take their labor elsewhere. Instead of workers being so desperate to hold onto a job as to allow their private lives to be regulated as an extension of work, management would be so desperate to hold onto workers as to change conditions on the job to suit them. Instead of workers taking more and more indignities to avoid bankruptcy and homelessness, bosses would give up more and more control over the workplace to retain a workforce. In such an economy, associated labor might hire capital instead of the other way around, and the natural state of the free market be cooperative production under the control of the producers.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Feudalismo de Contrato.

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

Em 1649 na colina de São Jorge na Inglaterra, como descrito no hino revolucionário “O Mundo Virado de Cabeça para Baixo,” um bando de camponeses sem terra que se denominavam de os Cavadores derrubaram cercados, construíram chalés para si próprios e começaram a amanhar a terra para cultivar alimento. O objetivo deles era dar exemplo para o povo da Inglaterra, lançar fora seus grilhões e reclamar seus vetustos direitos hereditários. Foram finalmente expulsos pelo Senhor do Solar local, mas sobrevivem na memória como heróis na sangrenta guerra de cinco mil anos entre os que asseveram ser donos da Terra e aqueles que nela vivem e trabalham.

Assim tem sido sempre, nessa antiquíssima guerra, desde a época quando as primeiras aristocracias fundiárias, por suposto direito de conquista, forçaram aqueles que trabalhavam a terra a pagar rent por ela. Vimos isso acontecer de novo ao longo do século vinte. Toda vez que o povo de um país do Terceiro Mundo como Guatemala ou El Salvador tentava devolver a terra a seus legítimos donos, os cultivadores, os Estados Unidos invadiam o país ostensivamente ou treinavam e armavam secretamente esquadrões da morte para deixar ativistas “desaparecidos” em valas com os rostos retalhados. A maior parte da inanição no mundo de hoje resulta não de insuficiente produção de alimento, mas de cerco de terra que anteriormente alimentava as pessoas que a trabalhavam — por oligargas fundiárias em conluio com agronegócios ocidentais — para produção de produtos destinados a exportação.

Hoje em dia outro grupo de heróis, dos quais os Cavadores da Colina de São Jorge se orgulhariam, está fazendo seu próprio esforço para conseguir justiça. Milhares de habitantes do povoado de Wukan, na província de Guandong, na China, estão protestando contra o furto de sua terra comunal por um governo local corrupto em concluio com incorporadores. Em sua própria reedição dos Cercados, A Comissão do Partido de Wukan decidiu vender a maior parte da terra comum da vila a um empreendimento de criação intensiva de porcos em confinamento de propriedade de uma ex-autoridade local.

A causa imediata do levante não foi o açambarcamento da terra em si. A vila já havia tido altercações com as autoridades a propósito, e tomado a terra de volta, em setembro último. O governo convidou o povoado a nomear negociadores — manobra, como vocês podem imaginar, para identificar os líderes do grupo. E com efeito o governo então prendeu os representantes. Foi a morte do principal representante, Xue Jianwan, em custódia da polícia — vocês que moram no Mississippi sabem o que é isso — que levou à maciça efusão de protesto.

O estado chinês reagiu com exatamente o tipo de pânico que vocês esperariam, tentando isolar Wukan do mundo exterior e subjugar pela fome os moradores rebeldes da vila.

Ocorre que é muito mais difícil manter as coisas em segredo em nossos dias do que nos dias dos Cavadores há quatrocentos anos. Simpatia pelos sitiados camponeses de Wukan espalhou-se pela população trabalhadora da China — e do mundo. A polícia tem tido de reprimir manifestações pró-Wukan por parte de trabalhadores de fábrica na capital da província de Guangzhou.

A simpatia recíproca entre trabalhadores migrantes e camponeses é compreensível. O mesmo que trabalhadores de fábricas desumanas disseram a Naomi Klein quando ela pesquisava para escrever seu No Logo, muitos deles prefeririram trabalhar a própria terra em suas vilas natais, com suas famílias — mas não há terra para trabalharem. Conseguem adivinhar por quê? A população trabalhadora chinesa, como a população da Inglaterra antes dela, foi expulsa da terra e levada para as fábricas como gado.

A heroica tomada de posição dos habitantes de Wukan, diferentemente da dos Cavadores da Colina de São Jorge, está sendo tuitada e blogada no mundo inteiro.

Enquanto isso, nos Estados Unidos, o movimento Ocupem vem empreendendo a campanha Ocupem Nossos Lares — como os Cavadores da Colina — como exemplo a ser propagado, e imitado, em toda parte. Há milhões de sem teto, e milhões de casas e edifícios comerciais vagos em poder dos bâncgsteres — e não há número bastante de ajudantes de xerife e policiais em formação para manter essas duas partes separadas. Quando pessoas sem teto ocupam casa de hipoteca executada, e mais tarde são expelidas, elas saem ganhando por causa do período de tempo durante o qual tiveram teto. E cada expulsão coloca a brutalidade filmada dos capangas de uniforme azul bem no centro do tribunal da opinião pública.

Graças ao poder das comunicações em rede, o slogan dos Trabalhadores Industriais do Mundo “Injúria a Um é Injúria a Todos” nunca esteve tão perto de tornar-se realidade. A injustiça não mais pode ser levada a efeito encoberta pelas sombras. Vocês apaniguados da classe dominante, vocês que reprimem seus irmãos e irmãs onde no mundo eles possam estar, tenham sempre em mente que os dias dos poderes aos quais vocês servem estão contados. Cuidem-se para não caírem um dia nas mãos de nossa justiça.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 27 de dezembro 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I gave my opinion of what was wrong with both mainstream libertarianism and mainstream liberalism (”wrong” in the sense to presenting an obstacle to an anti-authoritarian coalition of liberals and libertarians). In my last post, “Liberalism: What’s Going Right,” I discussed some reasons for hope within movement liberalism: some individuals who show signs of thinking outside the  box when it comes to abandoning the worst features of the liberal establishment and finding common ground with free market libertarians. Now I’d like to do the same thing on the libertarian side.

The following are tendencies and subgroups within the larger free market libertarian movement, loosely defined, that largely steer clear of “vulgar libertarianism” (i.e., pro-corporate apologetics under the cover of phony  “free market” rhetoric) and present some basis for a possible entente not only with liberalism but with the broader left. I may write additional, more detailed posts later on some of these groups, but my purpose here is just to  summarize them.

1. The movement with which I identify most closely as a libertarian, also probably the least important from the standpoint of actual influence, is the classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner,  Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty circle. I call us “classical” to distinguish us from modern, left-leaning followers of Murray Rothbard who also claim the individualist anarchist label–not because the latter are not entitled  either to that label or to our good fellowship, but because there are substantive differences and we need some verbal distinction to reflect them. The central difference is that we classical individualist anarchists still view our  free market libertarianism as a form of socialism, and have views on rent and profit that are closer to those of Tucker’s Boston anarchists than to the Austrianism of Rothbard. Modern adherents of this nineteenth century  radicalism include Shawn Wilbur, Joe Peacott, Joel Schlosberg, Matt Jenny, and Crispin Sartwell (although I’ve probably missed a few). R.A. Wilson, recently departed, promoted this version of anarchism in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (for example here).

On a related note, Larry Gambone of the Voluntary Cooperation Movement is heavily influenced by the mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Robert Owen, the direct European ancestors of American individualism.  Gambone played a large role in introducing Proudhon’s thought to modern North American anarchists (see his pamphlet “Proudhon and Anarchism“). He and Dick Martin, both in British Columbia, are the primary editors of Any Time Now.

2. The left-Rothbardians trace their origins to Murray Rothbard’s project, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, of an alliance with the New Left against the corporate state. Rothbard and other right-wing libertarians contributed  to the New Left journal Ramparts (home of David Hororwitz, before he became an odious neocon) and William Appleman Williams’ revisionist history study group Studies on the Left. Rothbard’s journal Left and Right, and the  early volumes of Libertarian Forum, were largely preoccupied with the New Left alliance.

Rothbard himself abandoned the project as hopeless after a few years, and moved rightward. But his close associate Karl Hess went on (for a while) to develop much closer ties of affinity to the left, participating in a  community technology project in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC and even joining the Wobblies. And another Rothbard associate, Samuel Edward Konkin III, founded the Movement of the Libertarian  Left as a vehicle for continuing Rothbard’s Old Right/New Left project. Konkin’s central contribution to what he called “Agorism,” the New Libertarian Manifesto (warning: pdf), is available at Agorisim.Info (with a lot of other  Konkin pamphlets as well). The current Alliance of the Libertarian Left and Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left include many of those who have preserved and continued this left-Rothbardian line of thought.

3. Geolibertarianism, or Georgism, is large; it contains multitudes. Founded (of course) by Henry George, it amounts to an whole libertarian movement of its own, with variants ranging pretty far to the left and right: from  Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov and Fred Foldvary on the right, to Ralph Borsodi and Michael Hudson on the left.

Georgism and individualist anarchism are both unlike mainstream contemporary libertarianism in that they remain much closer in spirit to the classical liberalism of Paine, Smith and Ricardo. Both retain the classical  political economists’ understanding, abandoned by the main line of marginalist economics, that “land is different” from other factors of production because, as Will Rogers said, “They ain’t making any more of it.”

The central idea is that land isn’t governed by the normal market mechanism that regulates the price of reproducible goods, by driving it toward production cost. The more social wealth increases, the more people and  dollars are bidding up the fixed supply of land, so that rents continue to rise relative to wages and more and more wealth disappears down the landlords’ rathole. The Georgist remedy is to eliminate all taxes on labor and capital, and put a “single tax” on the site value of land, so as to make unearned scarcity rent the main source of tax revenue. The effect is for the land currently being held out of use for speculative purposes to be put to use  by human labor, and for rents to fall relative to wages.

The most left-leaning version of Georgism is the geolibertarian agenda I mentioned in my earlier post: taxing land value, resource extraction, and carbon emissions and other externalities, funding a guaranteed minimum  income out of this rent collected by society, and then allowing progressive ends to be promoted entirely by the price incentives resulting from these policies, in a totally unregulated market. The idea is that in a society where workers have the bargaining power that comes with unlimited access to cheap land and a social dividend of ten or fifteen thousand bucks per capita, labor regulations will be superfluous. And in a society where  pollution is heavily taxed and the price of fossil fuels reflects high severance fees, the same is true of pollution laws. And so on, and so on.

I’m not a Georgist, for reasons that would require way too much digression to go into now. But George’s thought, in all its manifestations, has been an immensely positive leavening force on both left and right, bringing out  the best aspects of both communities. On the left, it softens the tendency to rely on the bureaucratic state, and promotes in its place an egalitarianism that works through the removal of privilege and the perfection of market mechanisms. On the right, it counteracts the instinctive tendency to rally to the defense of the rich and corporate interests.

Each of these movements, in its own way, offers some potential as a basis for common action with the left against the increasing authoritarian police state, and against the corporate-state nexus that dominates the economy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

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

Numa das mais bizarras exibições de autoritarismo desde que O Patriarca, de Filmer, rastreou o direito divino dos monarcas absolutistas Stuart até Adão, David Brooks (“O Problema do Seguidor,” New York Times, 12 de junho de 2012) lançou-se recentemente a uma diatribe por atacado contra a “cultura adversarial” e o ceticismo dela em relação à “autoridade justa” — expressão que ele não usa menos de seis vezes.

Surpreendentemente, o alegado detonador de sua irrupção — digo “alegado” visto devermos considerar a possibilidade de Brooks apenas não estar tomando seus medicamentos — é a qualidade dos monumentos públicos dos dias passados em comparação com os dos dias de hoje.

Se você for aos memoriais de Lincoln ou de Jefferson em Washington, tenderá a erguer o olhar para eles com admiração. Lincoln e Jefferson são apresentados como encarnações da autoridade justa. … Os monumentos construídos nos dias de hoje são, em sua maioria, inutilidades. Isso por nada dizerem quanto à autoridade justa. O memorial da Segunda Guerra Mundial é uma nulidade. Nada diz acerca da guerra, ou de por que o poderio estadunidense foi mobilizado para combater nela. … Por que os projetistas dos memoriais de nossos dias não conseguem pensar diretamente em autoridade justa?

Ora, será pelo fato de as gerações do passado terem sido melhores em polir esterco? Não, obviamente não é isso — pelo menos não se você for David Brooks. O motivo, tal como apresentado por Brooks em seu desabafo “O tempora O mores!” é “Vivemos numa cultura que acha mais fácil atribuir condição moral a vítimas do poder do que àqueles que detêm o poder,” com a complicação adicional de “nossa fervente devoção à igualdade” e incapacidade de “exaltar pessoas que são imensamente superiores a nós.”

Os estadunidenses, nestes dias de adesivos “Questione a Autoridade,” não mais “tentam distinguir autoridades justa e injusta,” e sim apenas se opõem à autoridade em geral.

O próprio Brooks não explica, realmente, seu critério para distinguir autoridade justa de injusta. Seus exemplos de “autoridade justa” geralmente coincidem com a lista liberal ou neoconservadora de Grandes Presidentes — deuses cívicos estadunidenses análogos a Enéas, Rômulo e Numa Pompílio nos livros de Lívio. Assim, talvez se possa razoavelmente suspeitar Brooks exiba a mesma falta de juízo crítico que atribui aos antiautoritários. É aposta razoável a “autoridade justa” de Brooks significar apenas “autoridade,” com exceção de um punhado de personagens execráveis como Nabucodonosor, Napoleão, Stalin e Hitler o quais são reconhecidos como injustos porque — ahn — nossas autoridades assim afirmam.

O ceticismo cabal em relação à autoridade, porém — a assunção de que toda autoridade é injusta — é, defensavelmente, mais justificável do que a assunção contrária da parte de Brooks. Brooks queixa-se de que “[a] antiga cultura adversária dos intelectuais tornou-se num cinismo adversarial de massa. A assunção comum é as elites estarem sempre escondendo algo.” Minha nossa, que surpreendente — como explicar alguém ter chegado a uma assunção como esta? Não terá sido por ter sido decepcionado vezes demais?

Para os estadunidenses igualitários, lamenta Brooks, as pessoas no topo “nem de longe são tão inteligentes ou tão ótimas ou tão puras ou tão sapientes em tudo quanto Eu.” Em vez de hierarquias administradas por “autoridade justa,” esses liliputianos acreditam que “[o] mundo todo deveria ser como a Internet — uma semianarquia zerada onde a autoridade é suspeita e cada indivíduo é rei.”

O que quer venha a ser o conservadorismo de Brooks, ele não é, certamente, hayekiano. Por definição, as pessoas no topo de grandes instituições hierárquicas são estúpidas. Isso nada tem a ver com as habilidades de nascença dos indivíduos que administram as coisas, e sim tem tudo a ver com a natureza da própria hierarquia.

As relações de autoridade tornam as pessoas estúpidas, e as instituições são muito incompetentes no tocante a agregar o conhecimento de seus membros. As hieraquias filtram o fluxo ascendente de informação porque (nas memoráveis palavras de R.A. Wilson) ninguém diz a verdade a um homem que empunhe uma arma de fogo. O poder cria comunicações de mão única — o pesadelo do ciberneticista, para citar Wilson de novo — de tal maneira que as pessoas em posição de autoridade atuam sem o feedback ambiental acerca dos efeitos de suas ações indispensáveis à sanidade. Nas palavras do teórico da organização Kenneth Boulding:

Há abundante evidência de quase todas as estruturas organizacionais tenderem a produzir falsas imagens no tomador de decisões, e de que quanto maior e mais autoritária for a organização, maior será a probabilidade de seus mais altos tomadores de decisão atuarem em mundos puramente imaginários.

Mais ainda, as pessoas no poder tendem a ser sociopatas porque, como Robert Shea destacou em “Império da Escória Ascendente,” as hierarquias institucionais selecionam esse tipo de gente. Não importa qual seja o propósito original de uma instituição, esta tenderá a ser administrada pelo tipo de pessoa cujas habilidades precípuas são competência em disputas internas e capacidade de ascensão implacável. Nenhuma pessoa pode simplesmente tornar-se Presidente dos Estados Unidos ou Executivo Principal das 500 da Fortune sem haver algo fundamentalmente errado com ela.

E a posse de poder, ela própria, torna adicionalmente patológicos aqueles que o detêm. O poder é a capacidade de externalizar o custo e a desagradabilidade das decisões para as costas dos outros. Os economistas dirão a você que a externalização — o desacoplamento de custos dos benefícios, de tal maneira que os tomadores de decisão colham os benefícios de suas decisões enquanto outras pessoas arquem com os custos — cria incentivos perversos. Esse é o ambiente onde as pessoas em posição de autoridade vivem em cada momento quando acordadas. Exercer poder-sem-prestação-de-contas sem experimentar as consequências torna a pessoa — qualquer pessoa — moralmente insana.

Brooks reclama que “Vastas maiorias de estadunidenses não confiam em suas instituições. E isso não principalmente por nossas instituições terem desempenho muito pior do que tinham em 1925 e 1955, quando gozavam de ampla credibilidade.”

Verdade. Contudo, Brooks ignora a possibilidade de aquelas instituições realmente não terem funcionado tão bem no passado. Talvez a falha resida na ingenuidade de nossos avós e bisavós, em vez de em nosso ceticismo.

A reclamação de Brooks referente à falta de fé nas instituições é reafirmação quase direta da afirmação de Samuel Huntington há quarenta anos em A Crise da Democracia. Os Estados Unidos haviam funcionado depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial como “a potência hegemônica num sistema de ordem mundial” só por causa de uma estrutura interna ao país de autoridade política na qual o país “era governado pelo presidente atuando com o apoio e a cooperação de indivíduos e grupos decisivos no Executivo, na burocracia federal, no Congresso e nos mais importantes empresas, bancos, escritórios de advocacia, fundações e mídia, constituintes do establishment privado.”

Se você gosta do mundo em que vivemos, moldado por esse establishment, que Deus tenha piedade de sua alma.

Dê uma lida no livro escolar didático oficial da história de Roma, com Rômulo e Numa e todos aqueles outros semideuses, e há ali uma história verdadeira sob a superfície. A história escrita por Lívio acerca da antiga República é descrição principalmente de uma guerra de classes entre plebeus e patrícios: Nobres e latifundiários gananciosos tentando expropriar a terra e transformar as pessoas ordinárias em locatários esmagados por rentismo e usura, e camponeses retaliando.

O mesmo é verdade na história dos Estados Unidos. Aqueles Pais Fundadores e Grandes Presidentes parecem poderosos, dignificados em seus pedestais, mas deem uma olhada subindo pelas vestes deles e notem que o traseiro deles é muito parecido com o de todas as outras pessoas. As reais ações de nossos Grandes Presidentes não resistem muito ao olhar perscrutador. Ideologias oficiais, cultos do Grande Líder e tudo, existem para legitimar sistemas de poder. E sistemas de poder existem para beneficiar algumas pessoas a expensas de outras.

Historiadores como Charles Beard e Merrill Jensen fizeram muito bom trabalho mostrando exatamente a quais interesses santos ilibados como George Washington realmente serviram. E Gabriel Kolko fez o mesmo em relação a Franklin Delano Roosevelt – FDR. George Washington só foi maior do que nossos políticos porque, através do telescópio da história, as coisas parecem maiores. Ele serviu aos interesses dos grandes barões de terras e a especuladores em títulos da guerra em Continentais, exatamente do mesmo modo que presidentes recentes serviram aos interesses do Goldman-Sachs. FDR combateu via Segunda Guerra Mundial para preservar um sistema de poder corporativo, e entrou em conluio com Churchill para estabelecer tal sistema de poder em dimensão mundial.

Noam Chomsky caracterizou a Guerra Fria, “como primeira aproximação,” como guerra pela União Soviética contra seus satélites e pelos Estados Unidos contra o Terceiro Mundo, justificada, de cada lado, pelo útil espectro da outra superpotência como ameaça oficial. Do mesmo modo que a União Soviética na Europa Oriental, o sistema corporativo estadunidense de poder mundial tem sido mantido por uma bota pisando uma face humana: infindáveis invasões, genocídios, golpes e esquadrões da morte, com tributo de milhões de vidas. Leia só“A Morte da Esperança,” de William Blum.

As pessoas acreditam que aqueles com autoridade detêm-na em benefício de si próprios, porque é o que acontece. E o mesmo acontecia, também, nos Bons Velhos Tempos. Embora Brooks deixe escapar o ponto, há uma estranha simetria entre “vítimas do poder” e “aqueles que detêm o poder.” Isso acontece porque o poder é sempre exercido de tal forma que cria vítimas. Há bom motivo para isso. As pessoas geralmente não têm de ser coagidas a fazer coisas que consultam seus próprios interesses. Alguém só exerce poder sobre outras pessoas quando deseja assaltá-las.

A história humana, da ascensão dos primeiros estados e dos primeiros sistemas de classe, tem sido uma guerra entre as pessoas que possuem o mundo e aquelas que vivem nele — e o objetivo dessa guerra tem sido compelir essas últimas a trabalhar em benefício daquelas primeiras. Se você não acha isso tão edificante quanto a versão Pequena Escola Vermelha da história estadunidense, ou acha que há alguma perda de inocência decorrente de descobrir que as instituições estadunidenses são (nas palavras de George Carlin) “um grande clube, e você e eu não pertencemos a ele” — aguente o tranco. Você também não acredita mais em Papai Noel e no Coelhinho da Páscoa.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 22 de junho de 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

In his Third Address to the International Workingmen’s Association on the Paris Commune in 1871, Karl Marx argued that the cooperative organization of production, if it expanded to include the entire economy, would amount to communism.

“If united co-operative societies [were] to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control … what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism?”

Two leading lights of nineteenth century liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer — the latter frequently caricatured as a crude right-wing social Darwinist — envisioned such a “cooperative commonwealth” (if you’ll pardon the term) as the ultimate natural outgrowth of a market economy.

According to Marx, this wouldn’t happen on its own, so long as the capitalist class remained in its politically privileged position. So long as manufacturing required expensive capital goods, and capital was concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class, industry would be governed by the increasing tendency toward capitalist monopoly.

And indeed, cooperative production in the 19th century didn’t replace capitalism — because the capitalists controlled access to capital. According to John Curl, a historian of worker cooperatives, cooperative production was only viable so long as the primary means of production were general-purpose craft tools owned by individual workers. That was the basis of cooperative production as organized by Owenites in the early- to mid-19th century, when unemployed workers set up cooperative shops using their own tools under a common roof. When the factory system resulted in an exploding cost of production machinery, this model became obsolete — the main reason the Knights of Labor foundered in its attempts to set up cooperative production on the Owenite model.

Imploding requirements for capital make capitalist control of access to capital worthless. The effect is to erode the barriers to exponential growth of the cooperative economy. If the primitive accumulation process turned capitalists and landlords into a rentier class through their concentrated ownership of the means of production, the ephemeralization of technology has the opposite effect. James Livingston refers to it as “primitive disaccumulation” — “the conversion of basic commodities like information and music into goods that we can appropriate or distribute without the mediation of money and markets …” (“How the Left Has Won,” Jacobin, August 2012).

Further, ephemeralization and the increased productivity of labor have result in a situation in which the main source of exchange value is enclosed information and knowledge, and artificial scarcity rents on those inputs. Socially necessary labor and material inputs — the actual cost of production — are becoming a smaller and smaller share of the total price of what we consume. It follows that a free market, by tearing down these enclosures, will eliminate — or socialize — the majority of exchange value in the economy and drive the average rate of profit much closer to zero.

It was this ephemeralization, this socialization of productivity and technique, and the accompanying destruction of exchange value, that Bastiat was referring to when he wrote in Economic Harmonies that “the function of property, or rather of the spirit of property, is continually to enlarge the communal domain.”

The creation of true socialism isn’t a matter of political parties or violent revolution. Socialism is what’s quietly emerging as the forces of the free market — i.e., of peaceful cooperation — destroy capitalism.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Efimerización: Un Arma Contra el Capital.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

For reasons that the numbers will make obvious, we decided to skip a week on the media coordinator update. Our submissions were down, and our pickups were … well, non-existent.

Now our submissions are back up (14,430 submissions to 2,762 publications in the last two weeks, weighted toward the end of the period), and I have at least one pickup to report (my “Election 2012: The Banality of Hyperbole” runs in today’s edition of Counterpunch).

The reasons for the drop-offs in both submissions and pickups are explicable and correctable:

We’ve had fewer submissions because we’ve had fewer authors regularly submitting content and because our content has been mostly “US-centric” (i.e. not submittable to newspapers worldwide).

We’ve had fewer pickups because of the aforementioned US-centrism, because our pieces have been running longer (for every 50 words over 500 in length, we exceed the length guidelines of, probably, 100 newspapers), and because we’ve become a little lax in the area of hanging our pieces on the popular “news hooks” that make them relevant and timely.

These are things we can fix. As a matter of fact, they’re things we are fixing right now.

So … have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week with a (hopefully) more exciting report.

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

*     *     *

What would life be like in a libertarian society — a society with a completely unregulated, laissez-faire market? One worry that many critics have is that, without the various government regulations that aim to protect the weak from being exploited by the strong, consumers would be at the mercy of producers, employees would be at the mercy of employers, debtors would be at the mercy of creditors, and tenants would be at the mercy of landlords.

Some libertarians, of a rightward-leaning bent, are unmoved by these criticisms, because they regard the regulations that currently exist as stacking the deck in favor of consumers, employees, debtors, and tenants. The removal of regulations, as they see it, would simply restore equality. Such libertarians reject the leftist notion of business interests as a powerful and potentially dangerous force in modern society; they tend instead to agree with Ayn Rand’s characterization of Big Business as “a persecuted minority.” (Rand also referred to the military-industrial complex as “a myth or worse.”) Leftists find this blindness to the power of business so baffling that they tend to dismiss libertarians as apologists for the ruling class.

But libertarians have not always been so friendly to business interests. Adam Smith fulminated against what he called the “mercantile interest”; more recently, libertarian authors like Karl Hess, Paul Weaver, and Mary Ruwart have denounced the pernicious effects of big business. (And even Ayn Rand was sensitive to the problem in her novels, though for some reason not in her nonfiction.)

I believe we are seeing the beginning of a resurgence, within the libertarian movement, of the egalitarian, compassionate, “bleeding-heart” libertarianism that characterized the libertarian movement through most of its history, from the Levellers of the 17th century to the individualist anarchists of the 19th century. When our opponents today charge us with elitism and lack of compassion, they are mostly wrong (for a discussion of why they are wrong, see my “Who’s the Scrooge? Libertarians and Compassion,” in Formulations, Vol. I, No. 2 (Winter 1993-94) — but there is an uncomfortable kernel of truth. Many libertarians in this century have been, in my view, insufficiently sensitive to the perspective of the poor, of laborers, of women, of minorities. But I view this as a historical aberration, brought about by the fact that a) the triumphant advance of socialism pushed libertarians into a century-long alliance with conservatives, and some aristocratic, patriarchal, un-libertarian attitudes rubbed off; and b) when the libertarians did re-emerge from the conservative movement in the last quarter of this century, they did so under the influence of Ayn Rand’s hard-edged ethic of rugged individualism. But these distorting influences are, I think, starting to fade, and the day of a “kinder, gentler,” green-spectacled libertarianism, truer to its historical roots, is beginning to dawn.

The new libertarianism, then, must take more seriously the left’s concerns, for in many ways they are its own concerns also. But can it answer them?

Consumers and Producers

In a free nation, will consumers be at the mercy of producers? With no government agencies to monitor quality control, prohibit price gouging, and the like, won’t it be easier for businesses to exploit their customers?

On the contrary, I think it will be less easy. The greatest threat to such exploitation is competition. The more businesses there are competing for customers, the more difficult it will be for any one business to get away with mistreating its customers.

Consider: The easier it is to start up a new business, the more new businesses there will be. So what determines how easy or difficult it is to start up a new business? Two factors: inherent transactions costs, and government regulations.

Government regulation has the same effect on the economy that molasses has on an engine: it slows everything down. The more hoops one has to jump through in order to start a new venture — permits, licenses, taxes, fees, mandates, building codes, zoning restrictions, you name it— the fewer new ventures will be started. And the least affluent will be hurt the most. The richest corporations can afford to jump through the hoops — they have money to pay the fees and lawyers to figure out the regulations. Small businesses have a tougher time, and so are at a competitive disadvantage. For the poor, starting a business is close to impossible. So the system favors the rich over the middle class, and the middle class over the poor.

In a free nation, by contrast, new businesses would be sprouting up at a rate we can barely conceive, and would be run primarily by the poor and the middle class. No company could afford to treat its customers like dirt, as so many companies do today, because it would be so much easier to start up a rival company that treated its customers better.

As for the other variable affecting ease of start-up, namely transactions costs, modern electronic communications technology will drastically lower such costs — so long as government refrains (as it would in a free nation) from interfering with networks like the Internet. In addition, the ease of organizing and coordinating a boycott against an obnoxious business is greatly reduced by the capacity for computer networking.

Many on both the left and the right are fearful of free trade because, while they grant that free trade lowers prices and so is beneficial to citizens in their role as domestic consumers, they fear that this benefit may be offset by the loss in income suffered by those same citizens in their role as domestic producers.

For example, suppose big corporations decide to cut costs by increasing their reliance on inexpensive foreign parts and labor. Domestic laborers and producers of parts will suffer an income loss as the price of their goods and services is pushed down by foreign competition. Ah, but that loss in income will be offset by lower prices? Well, that assumes that the corporations will pass their savings on to their customers. Will they?

That depends. If domestic competition is vigorous, then when MegaCorp tries to pocket its savings, another firm will muscle into the market to purchase those same foreign parts and labor and then undersell MegaCorp. And a third will enter to undersell the second. Any savings not passed along to consumers are like a giant magnet for entrepreneurs. Such competition will quickly ensure the transfer of MegaCorp’s savings from its hands to those of its customers.

But what if the domestic economy is highly regulated, and MegaCorp is largely insulated from the threat of competition? Then it can pocket the savings with impunity. Citizens will receive lower incomes in their role as producers, without seeing any compensating drop in prices in their role as consumers. In such a case, the protectionists are quite right to see free trade as a redistribution from small manufacturers to giant corporations. But the fault lies not with free trade (the presence of foreign competition) but with regulation (the absence of domestic competition).

Consumers would also find their privacy more secure in a free nation. In a free society, one might expect that businesses, unable to rely on as high a level of policing by government, but at the same time being freer to police on their own, would demand more from their customers in the way of IDs, credit checks, bonding, and the like. But it seems that the opposite is true: in the days when government’s leash was shorter and private enterprise’s leash was longer, businesses demanded far less security of their customers than they do now. As government has grown snoopier and more intrusive, the snoopiness and intrusiveness of private business has grown, not shrunk. It seems that the growth of government power fosters a kind of authoritarian culture that then infects the entire society. People who are used to being ID’d, stamped, and inspected by the government will not balk at similar treatment from their store or bank — particularly when thanks to governmental strangulation of competition, they have nowhere else to take their business.

Employees and Employers

In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers? The issue of racial and sexual discrimination in hiring I have dealt with elsewhere (“Good and Bad Collective Action,” Formulations, Vol. III, No. 1 (Autumn 1995)), so at present let me focus on the issue of how employees are treated once they are hired. Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that employees work in hazardous conditions (or sleep with the boss); or to fire without cause or notice. What would be the fate of employees without these protections?

I presumably don’t need to explain to readers of this publication why minimum wage laws hurt the poor. In any case, with more businesses competing for workers (just as they will be competing for consumers), wages will be driven up. More employees will be becoming employers anyway. And employers will be able to pay the new, higher wages because the economy as a whole will be more thriving and prosperous.

Employers will be legally free to demand anything they want of their employees. They will be permitted to sexually harass them, to make them perform hazardous work under risky conditions, to fire them without notice, and so forth. But bargaining power will have shifted to favor the employee. Since prosperous economies generally see an increase in the number of new ventures but a decrease in the birth rate, jobs will be chasing workers rather than vice versa. Employees will not feel coerced into accepting mistreatment because it will be so much easier to find a new job. And workers will have more clout, when initially hired, to demand a contract which rules out certain treatment, mandates reasonable notice for layoffs, stipulates parental leave, or whatever. And the kind of horizontal coordination made possible by telecommunications networking opens up the prospect that unions could become effective at collective bargaining without having to surrender authority to a union boss.

One beneficial result of a competitive economy would be a reduction in the petty tyrannies of the job world. Many workplaces are all too reminiscent of the comic strip “Dilbert,” with bosses micromanaging processes they do not understand. I once knew of a company that deliberately set its photocopier to be slower than average, as well as mandating that workers using the photocopy machine could copy only three pages at a time; the idea was to cut down on unneeded copying. But most of the copying was necessary, so employees had to waste time going through the line again and again.

A family member of mine once worked for a law firm that had clerical workers in two buildings, but lawyers in only one of them. In the building with no lawyers, the clerical workers had very little supervision: they were free to set their own priorities, to share tasks with each other as their schedules demanded, and so forth. As a result, they got much more work done, a lot more efficiently, than in the other building where the clerical staff was micromanaged by the lawyers. Such micromanagement is inefficient, but without a lot of competition managers can afford some inefficiency by indulging their desire for control. I think that, with more worker clout, the structure of the average workplace would change, with workers being given more authority to supervise themselves.

Debtors and Creditors

In a free nation, would debtors be at the mercy of creditors? Government currently offers to protect debtors by limiting the extent to which creditors can harass their debtors (no calls to the debtor’s place of work, no calls in the middle of the night), limiting the extent to which creditors can garnish their debtors’ wages, mandating that bad credit ratings expire after a certain period, and offering those crushed under a heavy burden of debt the chance to escape through bankruptcy. How would debtors fare without these protections?

Well, for one thing there would be fewer debtors in a free nation. With greater prosperity it would be easier for people to pay off their debts. The odds that a given defaulter is defaulting through dishonesty rather than bad luck would be significantly higher than it is in today’s society.

But there would still be some bad-luck debtors in a libertarian economy. How are they to be helped?

For one thing, I think a libertarian justice system would probably recognize some limitations on the right to garnish wages. Even when A has a right to recover some property in B’s possession, there are limits to the harm A can inflict in exercising this right. If you swallow my diamond ring, I do not have the right to cut you open to get it out, possibly killing you or causing serious injury. If you are trespassing on my property, I do not have the right to shove you off my front lawn and onto the street at the precise moment that a truck is coming that would flatten you. I think similar considerations would limit the percentage of a poor person’s wages that a wealthy creditor could legitimately claim. In addition, companies with obnoxious collection methods could be boycotted.

As for debt relief, I suspect that, with the explosion of prosperity that libertarian economic theory teaches us a free nation would see (and if libertarian economic theory is wrong the free nation movement is doomed anyway), the scope of private charity and mutual aid would dramatically increase, so that debtors would soon find their way out of debt in a manner that (unlike bankruptcy) would benefit both debtor and creditor.

Tenants and Landlords

In a free nation, would tenants be at the mercy of landlords? Government currently offers many protections to tenants — sometimes at serious cost to landlords (the movie Pacific Heights offering a chilling example). But what makes these laws seem necessary is the greater bargaining power that landlords typically have vis-à-vis tenants. And this, as in the previous cases, is the product of low competition due to a slow economy. So the government simultaneously “helps” tenants by means of rental laws, and “helps” landlords via regulations that strangle competition in the housing market. It’s the typical government trick: poison you, and then dole out the antidote.

In a libertarian society, landlords would have more freedom, but with landlords competing for tenants they would also face stronger economic incentives to please their tenants. Rental contracts would cease to be as one-sidedly favorable to the landlord as they often are today. Landlords might have the right to evict at will (subject to the ring-swallowing sorts of restrictions), but they might find themselves economically compelled to sign contracts waiving that right.

Beyond the Boss

Throughout our economy, economic relations have been forced into an authoritarian model closely similar to that of the reigning statist paradigm. Corporations pattern themselves along the lines of armies; supermarkets herd shoppers into long waiting lines for the privilege of buying their food; employers and landlords grow increasingly intrusive and controlling. But business acts like this for the same reason government does: lack of competition. The economy of a free nation will, I predict, see a complete restructuring of ordinary business relationships. These relationships will become more like relations among equal partners than like relations between superior and subordinate. Employees will be treated as independent contractors rather than as servants, and so forth. Power structures will become horizontal rather than vertical; communication and influence will be two-way rather than one-way. The concept of the boss will be obsolescent. D

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

Перефразируя столетней давности известное выражение социалистки Розы Люксембург «у нас есть выбор лишь между свободой и варварством», мы можем сказать: у нас есть выбор лишь между авторитарным институтом корпоративного государства и зарождающимся обществом самоорганизующихся сетевых добровольных ассоциаций свободных граждан.

Государство падёт и будет заменено обществом, в котором люди смогут свободно объединять усилия и навыки, как они считают нужным и обмениваться продуктами своего труда с равными им в правах людьми.

Или же, государство преуспеет — и породит из себя технофашистскую империю, окончательно упразднив человеческую свободу и уничтожив биосферу, что называется, синим пламенем. Теперь, когда конфликт уже начался, возврат к прежнему осуществить будет невозможно.

Винай Гупта, среди всего прочего специалист по безопасности, утверждает, что принятие NDAA (санкционирующего аресты без суда по множеству поводов) и закрытие сервера MegaUpload без судебного разбирательства свидетельствуют о приближении США к полноценному фашистскому государству.

Он не исключает возможность того, что когда правительства Испании и Греции ослабнут под влиянием сетевого противодействия, в Исландии наступит рай информационной свободы, а на юге начнется массовое отделение от неолиберального мира, Соединённые Штаты втянутся в страшную мировую войну подавления мятежей, используя воздушные удары, блокады, информационное воздействие, шпионские операции, беспилотники и технологии управления толпой для подавления свободного порядка. Уличные столкновения между бойцами спецназа и активистами движения «захватчиков» являются лишь репетицией, каковой была Испания для Второй мировой войны.

Даже если это произойдёт, я верю, что государство и все его авторитарные институты падут.

Поскольку локальные узлы самоорганизующейся сетевой структуры свободны действовать и создавать новое, не ожидая никаких разрешений от бюрократического аппарата, и любой другой узел сети тоже свободен учиться на примере и перенимать нововведения без разрешения, это позволяет в полной мере использовать преимущества гибкости сетевых организаций такими способами, которые совершенно недоступны авторитарным иерархиям.

Ранее мы уже видели такие примеры. Утилита DeSopa для браузера Firefox, позволяющая заходить на сайты по их IP-адресам в обход SOPA, была разработана ещё до того, как проект SOPA был представлен к принятию. Анонимус осуществил массированные DDOS-атаки в ответ на отключение сервера MegaUpload в тот же день, тогда как операция по отключению готовилась федеральными властями несколько месяцев. Прошлым летом, когда иранские власти предприняли попытку закрытия сети Tor, предоставляющей анонимный доступ и шифрованное соединение, разработчики в тот же день выпустили исправление, восстанавливающее её работоспособность.

Другие примеры гибкости — это молниеносное распространение «Арабской весны» по Среднему Востоку и Европе, а также быстрое прорастание лагерей движения «захватчиков» в сотнях городов по всему миру за считанные дни. Эти сетевые движения практически мгновенно реагируют на полицейские репрессии в каждом конкретном месте. Местные власти и национальные правительства обычно оказываются застигнутыми врасплох массовостью сопротивления на их собственной территории, так что вряд ли что-то могут предложить в помощь другим режимам, шатающимся под подобным полномасштабным прессингом. На ум приходит фраза: «Два, три, много вьетнамов».

Сопротивление также по мере сил способствует конфликтам между государствами, так как преимущество переходит от иерархий к сетям. Попытки американского государства добиться гегемонии для подавления сетевых восстаний сталкиваются с растущей антиамериканской коалицией небольших государств, спровоцированной господством одной империи. Технологические преимущества, порождаемые асимметрией войны, означают, что даже малые государства смогут разрабатывать эффективные методы взлома и противодействия американским технологиям мирового господства, при сравнительно небольших затратах. О чём свидетельствует недавно начавшаяся одержимость американских служб государственной безопасности идеей дешёвого оружия типа «булавы ассассина» и «локального отказа», которые потенциально угрожают их способности распространять свою власть на весь мир.

Как и утверждает Гупта, принципиально злая природа борьбы американского государства с повстанцами приводит к когнитивному диссонансу среди правителей, так как многие солдаты и полицейские становятся деморализованными из-за неспособности посмотреть в глаза правде о своей миссии наёмного убийцы государства (например Брэдли Мэннинг), становятся обеспокоены несоответствием между официальной пропагандой и тем, что видят их собственные глаза, также как доступ населения к неофициальным новостям и потоковому видео подрывает официальную трактовку событий. В связи с этим, руководство страны не может доверять мотивам своих солдат и других чиновников, или дать им полную автономию и нефильтрованное знание о реальности, которые требуются для эффективной сетевой борьбы.

Как отметил Джулиан Ассанж, в момент когда авторитарные иерархии атакуемы извне, они становятся более хрупкими и менее прозрачными для самих же себя.

Комбинация быстрой адаптации к изменяющимся ситуациям у сетевой структуры с деморализацией и внутренней непрозрачностью иерархий означает, как правило, что сетевые структуры остаются внутри того, что стратег Джон Бойд называет «НОРД-петлёй» иерархии: они держат противника постоянно в состоянии неравновесия и заставляют реагировать на ситуации, вместо того, чтобы создавать их.

В долгосрочном же периоде у государства нет жизнеспособной альтернативы сетевой структуре.

Статья впервые опубликована Кевином Карсоном, 12 ноября 2011.

Перевод с английского Tau Demetrious.

You know the quadrennial refrain: Americans are politically “polarized.” Half of us are ranting right-wing Torquemadists, the other half are raving left-wing Jacobins, and by implication the country faces a stark binary choice between those two approaches to government.

It’s caricature, of course. Most Americans — and I say this as a hardcore fringe radical! — are mired in the muddled middle, and this November’s presidential election presents those Americans, as usual, with a choice between two timid, ever-so-slightly right of center, non-entities whose only bankable promises are to not tinker much with the status quo.

No, you say? Obama and Romney are nothing at all alike? Well, let’s dispose of that in one swell foop and with one word: “Obamacare.”

“Conservative” Republican Mitt Romney beta-tested “Obamacare” as governor of Massachusetts — a decade and change after “conservative” Republicans proposed and backed its main feature, the “individual mandate” in 1993 (following 12 years of a Republican White House and right before the GOP’s first re-seizure of congressional control in 40 years; not exactly a timeframe in which Republicans could be reasonably described as playing defense, but rather a time when they were most apt to be out front with exactly what they really wanted).

“Liberal” Obama rammed the Romney 2006 / Gingrich 1993 proposal through Congress at the national level … and that makes him “the most left-wing president in American history.” So he must be replaced. By Romney. Some stark choice there, huh?

This alleged “polarization” between America’s major political parties is pure hooey, but it’s necessary to keeping the game interesting. After all, if the game gets too boring, people might decide to take away the Democrats’ and Republicans’ ball and go play something else.

Enter hyperbole. Whether it’s LBJ’s 1964 ad with the little girl getting vaporized in a thermonuclear explosion if Goldwater won, or Chuck and Gena Norris’s suggestion that Obama’s re-election might cue the extinction of freedom and “thousand years of darkness” which Old Testament prophet Ronald Reagan warned of, wild exaggerations about the existential importance of this year’s presidential beauty contest are the only way to “keep the skeer up.”

The hype has gotten so outrageous that it’s frankly becoming a huge tiresome bore. Every Democratic administration is “the most left-wing in history.” Every Republican administration is “trying to drag us back to the Middle Ages” (or at least to the pre-Martin-Luther-King era). But on even cursory examination, there’s so little light between the two offerings that Kate Moss would have a difficult time squeezing between them.

The prime directive for Republican and Democratic politicians — and for that matter, increasingly even among “third party” candidates” — is to not rock the boat. They’re all auditioning for the role of William F. Buckley’s archetypal conservative, seeking the job of standing athwart the train tracks of history yelling “stop!”

At 364 years of age, the Westphalian nation-state is a doddering, senile institution. It’s on its last legs. It no longer aspires to great new things, but merely hopes to hold on to what it has for as long as possible before it strokes out or just dies quietly in its sleep.

In terms of everyday exercise of power, it’s mostly been reduced in recent years to shuffling out on its front porch and yelling at the neighborhood youngsters — non-state peer networks actually doing everything the state has always claimed to do but failed miserably at — to get off its lawn.

Its elections, and the attendant hype, are the equivalent of waving its cane at said youngsters in a futile attempt to scare them out of knocking it down, breaking its hip and forcing it to listen to that new-fangled “jazz” music while it waits for an ambulance to pick it up and transport it to the nearest hospice facility.

The real question is not who runs the state for the next four years. The real question is what comes after the state. Everything else is just vaudeville, badly performed as a distraction from that question.

I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. — Ayn Rand

While libertarians all agree on the need for a drastic reduction in the size and power of the state, the libertarian movement has long been divided between the anarchists, who believe that the state should be done away with entirely, and the minarchists, who wish to reduce it to a few functions regarded as essential. This dispute also goes on within the Free Nation Foundation, whose membership (including the Board of Directors itself) is split on the issue of anarchism (also known as anarcho-capitalism, or market anarchism) vs. minarchism (also known as limited government). I welcome Adrian Hinton’s contribution as an opportunity to advance this discussion. [1]

What is Objective Law?

For Hinton, the chief defect of anarchism is its incompatibility (as he sees it) with objective law. Unfortunately, Hinton does not define the notion of objective law, but he gives us a few clues. He contrasts objective law with a system in which “anything goes;” in which individuals or groups can act in accordance with rules they simply happen to take a fancy to, unconstrained by the need to give rational justification.

I gather, then, that objective law is reliable and principled. Under a system of objective law, legal requirements will not simply arise or vanish with the whims of particular legislators or the shifting fortunes of pressure groups. There is some predictability to the law, with regard both to content and to enforcement; one can count on it. And the reason for this is that the requirements of objective law are grounded on reasons that are accessible and justifiable to rational human minds generally, regardless of personal emotional biases and idiosyncrasies.

If this is what objective law is, then I agree that objective law is a good thing. But is it true that objective law can be provided only by a governmental monopoly?

Objective Law Requires Competition

Consider the parallel case of objective science. Objectivity is a good thing in the sciences too; but how do we achieve it? We do not suppose that the way to get objective science is to put all scientific research into the hands of a single governmental monopoly; on the contrary, we recognize that it is only through allowing competition among scientific theories and scientific research programs that scientific objectivity is possible. As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, we learn the worth of our ideas by seeing how well they can withstand challenge, whether in the form of intellectual arguments or in the form of alternative experiments in action. A view that is insulated from critique is less well grounded, since we cannot tell whether it would have survived had critique been permitted. Nothing would be more deadly to scientific objectivity than monopoly control.

And as Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek have shown, this argument applies to the market for goods and services just as much as to the market for ideas; competition is a discovery procedure, a crucial source of information, but one whose data grow steadily less reliable as it falls under the direction and control of a centralized state. If this is true for ideas, goods, and services, why not for law as well?

Law Without the State

Hinton says that “anarchy would certainly mean in practice … to have no government.” If by “government” Hinton means the state, i.e., an agency holding a monopoly (or near-monopoly; no institution has ever held a genuine monopoly) on the use of force within a given territory, then it is trivially true that anarchism means having no government. Anarchy just is the absence of a government.

But Hinton’s phrasing — saying that the absence of government is what anarchism would mean “in practice” — leads me to suspect that he regards the absence of government as a result of anarchy rather than the same thing under another name. This suspicion is confirmed by his use of Ayn Rand’s phrase “competing governments” (a phrase rarely used by anarchists themselves) to describe the anarchist system; obviously by “competing governments” Hinton cannot mean competing states. My guess, then, is that by “government” Hinton means something like: an institution or set of institutions governing human activity through the application of rules. In short, by government he means something rather like law.

But does Hinton really mean to maintain that there would be no law, no legal system, in the absence of a centralized state (i.e., a territorial monopoly)? That would be a remarkable claim, for the overwhelming preponderance of historical and anthropological evidence verifies that law is far older than the state. Until recently, states were the exception, not the norm, in human society; and stateless societies have enjoyed quite sophisticated and long-lasting legal codes.

Of course, the fact that stateless legal systems exist does not show that they are particularly good. Admittedly, none of these stateless legal systems represents the libertarian ideal. Neither, however, does any state known to history. Which is better?

It might be thought that a monopoly system is better if only in virtue of being more reliable and predictable. If a single agency is charged with legislating and enforcing the rules of conduct in a given area, one can expect those rules to be reasonably uniform; whereas if many different agencies are producing law, one has little to count on.

But the historical record suggests otherwise. For example, the Law Merchant — the stateless system of commercial law that evolved during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance — was able to compete successfully with government courts precisely because it offered a more reliable and uniform system than could its state competitors. The reason is not difficult to find: a competitive, voluntarily funded system needs to please its customers, while a government monopoly, which forbids competition and extracts its revenues by force, faces no such incentive. (To offer a contemporary analogy: the reason no company offers triangular credit cards is not because card shape is regulated by the government but because customers would not purchase a card that would not fit in standard ATM machines. Standardization emerges because of market pressure, not at the barrel of a governmental gun.)

Hinton maintains that under anarchism, every individual “would have to either carry a gun at all times, or else join a private militia composed of such people. In other words, America would look rather like the Wild West.” To begin with, this might not be so bad; contrary to the Hollywood stereotype of lawlessness and violent shootouts, the reality of life on the frontier, today’s historians are discovering, was relatively peaceful and civilized — certainly a good deal more so than America today. An anarchist society could do worse than to imitate the so-called “Wild” West.

Leaving that aside, however, why should we assume that the options Hinton describes are the only ones? If shoes are not provided by a centralized governmental agency, we do not infer that everyone will either have to become his own cobbler or else join a shoe-manufacturing commune. Instead, we foresee a division of labor: some people will specialize in the making of shoes, which other people will purchase from them. Why not expect a similar development in the market for law?

Perhaps Hinton is assuming that an anarchist society could not afford a division of labor in the production of law, because the application of law typically requires the use of physical force, and if only some members of society are specializing in the use of physical force, then everyone else in society will be at their mercy. But if this is an objection to anarchy, why is it not a still stronger objection to the state, since the state, unlike a security agency under anarchy, is unchecked by any rivals and so is in an even better position to abuse its power?

Is Limited Government a Genuine Alternative?

Hinton envisions a minarchist utopia in which governmental actions are “rigidly defined, delimited, and circumscribed,” while the government itself is “like an impersonal robot,” operating free from any “touch of whim and caprice.” This sounds nice, but after all, the state is an institution with a definite nature, and the actions to be expected from it are determined by that nature and not by our wishes and fantasies. So the real question is whether it is realistic to expect this kind of automatic and impartial operation from a centralized monopoly.

But surely the verdict of public-choice economics is in the negative. The state is a human institution, peopled by individuals who respond to incentives. And, as Madison and Hamilton pointed out in The Federalist, in our choice of political institutions we cannot afford to assume that those we place in charge can be counted on to be wise and just. Power corrupts, because it attracts the corruptible. And the incentive system of a governmental monopoly is truly perverse. Imagine a state official who controls a million dollars in tax money. How is he motivated to spend it? In a competitive market he would be motivated to spend it in such a way as to please his customers (in this case, the taxpayers), but as things stand they have nowhere else to go. (If he is an elected official, perhaps they will have a chance to vote against him in a few years, but the franchise, with its all-or-nothing character, is a rather less effective mechanism for the expression of preferences than the market.) But if he is offered favors or bribes by special-interest groups, then he has an incentive to divert that money to their favored cause; after all, it isn’t his money, so he has nothing to lose.

Hinton may well reply that such problems are to be solved by a constitutional structure incorporating checks and balances. I agree. But I see anarchism as the logical conclusion of the checks-and-balances approach. The point of checks and balances is to put a brake on the tendency of political institutions to aggrandize power by arranging it so that a power grab by one part of the system will trigger opposition by other parts of the system. This was the idea behind the U. S. Constitution, with its federalism and division of powers. Unfortunately, it failed, as the supposedly antagonistic parts learned the benefits of working together to oppress the people. From an anarchist perspective, the problem with the minarchist version of checks and balances is that it does not go far enough; the opposing parts are too few in number, and too closely linked together in a single overarching institution.

I once opposed anarchism precisely because I was so convinced (largely as a result of reading Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine) of the importance of constitutional structure. I assumed (as Paterson had) that there is no constitutional structure under anarchy. But it now seems to me that precisely the opposite is true: the competitive market provides a much more sophisticated and complex constitutional structure than any state monopoly.

Hinton worries that, in an anarchist system, private courts “could freely dispense with such niceties as procedure or rules of evidence.” So they could. So could government courts (as indeed they often do). So long as humans possess free will, nothing can guarantee that they will act as they should. The fundamental question is this: under which system — market competition or government monopoly — is abuse of power more likely?

But the problem is not one of evil motivations alone. Even a state run by saints would face an informational problem. Just as the most well-intentioned central planner would be unable to make objective decisions about economic production, consumption, and distribution, because the information generated by the spontaneous market order would be inaccessible to him, so without the competitive, evolutionary process through which law originated and developed before the state, a centralized legislature would be unable to make objective decisions about which legal rules and procedures work best.

Resistance is Feudal

The history of Europe offers an instructive example. At the beginning of the Dark Ages, the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West, while still surviving in the East in the form of the Byzantine Empire. For the next thousand years, Europe was divided between these two regions. An observer at the start of this period might well have predicted that the East, not the West, would be the most successful. After all, the East had retained much of the classical learning that had been lost in the West; moreover, the institution of Roman law had been maintained in the East, while the West had become politically fragmented and decentralized. But this is precisely why the next step forward in civilization was taken by the West and not by the East. In the East, the state grew steadily more powerful, more centralized, more bureaucratic, and more oppressive. No rivals to its authority were permitted; even the Church was absorbed into it. Inefficient, stagnant, ossified, the Byzantine Empire became a brittle structure unable to withstand the steady advance of Turkish migrations. Even the classical heritage of Greco-Roman thought did the East no good, when the Emperor successfully issued an edict closing the schools of philosophy.

In the West, by contrast, there was no political monopoly. Power was divided among kings, nobles, free communes, and the Church. An adverse decision in the manorial court could be appealed to the royal court, or the merchant court, or the ecclesiastical court, and so on. (For details, see Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution.) Competition created the trial-and-error process through which common-law systems evolve and progress and adapt to the needs of the time. And it is because of the spaces of freedom that were opened up through this decentralized, competitive system that trade and culture began to flourish again in the West. (By contrast, in the East, Roman law — which originally had contained competitive, evolutionary elements, as Bruno Leoni shows in Freedom and the Law — became codified and static.)

Anarchy and Gang Warfare

Hinton offers two scenarios as a challenge to the defender of market anarchism. In the first scenario, Smith asks his security agency A to impose legal sanctions on Jones for an alleged robbery, and Jones asks his security agency B to protect him. Mustn’t such a situation inevitably lead to violent conflict between security agencies?

Perhaps, but it seems unlikely. Security agencies are not governments with a guaranteed supply of tax revenues. They depend on their customers, and so are much more responsive to customer demands. War is an expensive means of settling disputes, and even the most belligerent customer may think twice on receiving his monthly bill. Security agencies that settle their disputes by force rather than through arbitration will have to charge higher premiums, and so will lose customers to their competitors.

Does this guarantee that a system of competitive security agencies will never break down into warfare? No, nothing can guarantee that. All I am making is a comparative claim: competitive security agencies are far less likely than monopoly governments to resort to force.

Hinton’s second scenario concerns a demonstration by a Communist punk-rock militia, armed with submachine guns and singing the Internationale (that old punk-rock standard). Hinton asks what response, if any, the anarchist would regard as legitimate.

The first thing the anarchist would want to know is who owns the street where the demonstration is taking place. If the demonstrators have not obtained permission to be there, the owners would be within their rights to call in a security agency to eject the trespassers.

But perhaps the demonstration is taking place on public property. (I regard public property as a legitimate concept, though many market anarchists do not.) At that point, the question is whether the demonstrators are violating anyone’s rights. Certainly there can be no libertarian objection to their exercise of the right to bear arms, a right endorsed by minarchists and anarchists alike. The question is whether the demonstrators are threatening aggression. If so, it is legitimate to call in security forces to restrain them — and again, this is so both on anarchist and on minarchist premises. The anarchist position is not that “the Commie punks should have the freedom to do whatever they feel like.” Rather, anarchists hold that the Commie punks should have the freedom to do whatever they feel like so as long as they do not initiate force — whereas the minarchists wish to restrict not merely the use of initiatory force, but the use of defensive and rectificatory force as well. I do not see how this additional restriction can be morally justified. And in practical terms, granting one agency the right to use forms of defensive and rectificatory force denied to everyone else is extremely dangerous.

We welcome debate.

Notes:

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

La BBC de Londres reporta que “El Secretario General de Naciones Unidas ha exigido al presidente Alassane Ouattara, que cuenta con el apoyo de la comunidad internacional, investigar cientos de muertes atribuídas en parte a sus adeptos”. La violencia ha continuado en el país africano desde que Ouattara ganó unas elecciones el otoño pasado, quien ha sido popular desde hace mucho tiempo en el norte del país, controlado por fuerzas rebeldes.

El presidente en funciones para entonces, Laurent Gbagbo, se negó a dejar la presidencia, haciendo caso omiso de la fecha límite fijada para el 24 de marzo del año pasado por la Unión Africana. El inevitable resultado ha sido violencia y derramamiento de sangre en las calles de Abidján, centro urbano del país, mientras Gbagbo y sus acólitos acusaban a Ouattara y las fuerzas que lo respaldan de ser, entre otras cosas, encubridores de una maniobra francesa por ocupar el país. Independientemente de la veracidad de esa acusación o la legitimidad de la elección en disputa, se hace obligatorio revisar la reputación de estabilidad y paz de Costa de Marfil.

Con una infraestructura y economía que fueron la envidia de sus vecinos durante años, podría pensarse que no existían razones para que explotase una guerra civil en Costa de Marfil. Pero para los anarquistas de libre mercado, la polarización que existe en el país es consecuencia del estatismo de su programa económico.

La “liberalización de mercado” llevada cabo en el país, promovida como un modelo para el resto del continente africano y señalada como la causa fundamental de su “boom económico”, en realidad fue el típico proceso de privatización engañosa usado para drenar al país de sus recursos, tranfiriéndolos a élites favorecidas. A mediados de los 90, una “guía para invertir en empresas estatales” (un manual de “privatización” escrito por nada más y nada menos que Ernst & Young) indicaba que la mayoría de las empresas cedidas al “sector privado”, se dedicaban a la actividad industrial o agroindustrial.

Por supuesto, en un país en donde la riqueza está concentrada en la industria del cacao, solo los beneficios fueron privatizados, su mayoría en favor de accionistas franceses. En cambio, los costos de la infraestructura del país, la envidia del continente africano, fueron pagados por el trabajador marfileño. Para la clase dirigente, que se beneficia de la intervención estatal en la economía, la “privatización” y la “libre empresa” son conceptos totalmente distintos del significado que les da el anarquista de libre mercado.

En Costa de Marfil los plutócratas corporativos bien conectados cumplen el rol que antaño tenían los colonialistas franceses, capturando los beneficios producidos por sus exportaciones agrícolas. Si las clases trabajadores de Costa de Marfil están preocupadas por la posibilidad de la guerra civil y la ocupación, deberían preocuparse entonces por el estado en sí mismo sin importar quién loc controle.

Y a pesar de toda su palabrería acerca del “derececho popular a la autodeterminación”, las Naciones Unidas y la sagrada comunidad internacional no han dudado en hacer sus propias proclamaciones condescendientes acerca del futuro de Costa de Marfil.

Naturalmente, al consorcio internacional de bandas criminales que llamamos Naciones Unidas no se le ha ocurrido que la gente de Costa de Marfil pueda preferir escapar de las fronteras arbitrarias del África por sí misma. Ciertamente, el paradigma estatista no es compatible con la idea de que “autodeterminación” pueda significar algo más que la aceptación pasiva de un candidato aprobado por las Naciones Unidas o las líneas trazadas en un mapa por burócratas y administradores coloniales.

Los anarquistas de mercado, en cambio, mantienen que el estado es la fuente de la violencia y la explotación económica. Un mercado genuinamente libre que consista nada más que de intercambios voluntarios y mutuamente beneficiosos entre individuos es la verdadera vía hacia la atuodeterminación. El estado, que es la encarnación de la coerción legitimizada, permite a las élites arrasar con los recursos de una nación mientras confronta a sus habitantes entre sí.

El tipo de privatización aconsejada por el anarquista de libre mercado, en lugar de transferirle activos industriales a corporaciones jerárquicas y protegidas por el estado, haría dueño a cada trabajador, en lugar de utilizarlo como ficha de negociación entre poderosas mega-instituciones. Para la población marfileña, agotada y desmoralizada por un proceso político que no ha funcionado ni puede funcionar a su favor, la única salida viable es el proceso apolítico de educación y libre asociación.

Artículo original publicado por David D’Amato el 4 de abril de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.