There’s a wonderful phrase for how capitalism works in the real world (I’m not sure who first came up with it, but I associate it with Noam Chomsky): “The socialization of risk and cost, and the privatization of profit.”

That’s a pretty good description of what the state does under actually existing capitalism, as opposed to the free market. Just about everything we identify as problematic about corporate capitalism — the exploitation of labor, pollution, waste and planned obsolescence, environmental devastation, the stripping of resources — results from the socialization of cost and risk and the privatization of profit.

Why haven’t the cybernetic revolution and the vast increases in productivity from technological progress resulted in fifteen-hour work weeks, or many necessities of life becoming too cheap to meter? The answer is that economic progress is enclosed as a source of rent and profit.

The natural effect of unfettered market competition is socialism. For a short time the innovator receives a large profit, as a reward for being first to the market. Then, as competitors adopt the innovation, competition drives these profits down to zero and the price gravitates toward the new, lower cost of production made possible by this innovation (that price including, of course, the cost of the producer’s maintenance and the amortization of her capital outlays). So in a free market, the cost savings in labor required to produce any given commodity would quickly be socialized in the form of reduced labor cost to purchase it.

Only when the state enforces artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, and barriers to competition, is it possible for a capitalist to appropriate some part of the cost savings as a permanent rent. The capitalist, under these conditions, is enabled to engage in monopoly pricing. That is, rather than being forced by competition to price her goods at the actual cost of production (including her own livelihood), she can target the price to the consumer’s ability to pay.

That form of enclosure, via “intellectual property,” is why Nike can pay a sweatshop owner a few bucks for a pair of sneakers and then mark them up to $200. Most of what you pay for isn’t the actual cost of labor and materials, but the trademark.

The same is true of artificial scarcity of land and capital. As David Ricardo and Henry George observed, there is some rental accruing on the natural scarcity of land as a non-reproducible good. There’s considerable disagreement among Georgists, mutualist occupancy-and-use advocates, and other libertarians as to whether and how to remedy those natural scarcity rents. But artificial scarcity, based on the private enclosure and holding out of use of vacant and unimproved land, or on quasi-feudal landlord rights to extract rent from the rightful owners actually cultivating arable land, is an enormous source of illegitimate rent — arguably the major share of total land rent. And regardless of any other steps we may be advocate, principled libertarians are all in favor of abolishing this artificial scarcity and — at the very least — letting market competition from vacant land drive down land rent to its natural scarcity value.

We favor, as well, opening up the supply of credit to unfettered market competition, abolishing entry barriers for the creation of cooperative lending institutions, and abolishing legal tender laws of all kinds, so that market competition will eliminate a major portion of total interest on money.

But while demanding the socialization of rent and profit may be frowned upon by capitalists as “class warfare,” they’re totally OK with the socialization of their operating costs. The main reason modern production is so centralized and both firms and market areas are so large, is that the state has subsidized transportation infrastructure at the expense of the general public, and made it artificially cheap to ship goods long distance. This makes large-scale, inefficient producers artificially competitive against small-scale producers in the local markets they invade with the state’s help. That’s why we have giant retail chains driving local retailers out of business, using their own internalized “warehouses on wheels” wholesale operations to distribute goods manufactured by sweatshops in China.

The past forty years’ loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and CO2 pollution has occurred because the ecosystem as a whole is an unowned dump, rather than being a regulated commons. The state typically preempts “ownership” of forests, mineral deposits, etc. — often to the prejudice of indigenous peoples already inhabiting the areas — and then gives privileged access to extractive industries that are able to strip mine them of resources without internalizing the actual costs incurred.

As surprising as it might seem, there’s a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism. Carl Menger wrote of economic goods (i.e., goods subject to economic calculation because of their scarcity) becoming non-economic goods (i.e., that their abundance and near-zero production cost would make the cost of accounting greater than the production cost, if any). This parallels a major strain of thinking among socialists in the free culture/open source/P2P movement. They see the communist mode of production practiced by Linux and other open-source developers as the kernel of a new post-capitalist, post-scarcity social formation. Much as capitalist production started out in tiny islands inside the larger feudal economy and later became the core of a new, dominant social formation, commons-based peer production is the core around which the post-capitalist economy will eventually crystallize.

And we free marketers are also information communists. We want the benefits of knowledge and technique to be fully socialized. The largest single share of profit under the current model of corporate capitalism is embedded rents on the artificial scarcity of knowledge and technique.

In a society where waste and planned obsolescence were no longer subsidized, and there were no barriers to competition socializing the full benefits of technological progress, we could probably enjoy our present quality of life with a fifteen-hour work week. And in a society where the dominant mode of production was craft production with cheap, general-purpose CNC machine tools (as Kropotkin anticipated over a century ago in Fields, Factories and Workshops), the division of labor and the dichotomy between mental and physical labor would be far less pronounced.

Taken together, these two outcomes of free market competition in socializing progress would result in a society resembling not the anarcho-capitalist vision of a world owned by the Koch brothers and Halliburton, so much as Marx’s vision of a communist society of abundance in which one may “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

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Translations for this article:

• Spanish, ¿Quién se Apropia del Beneficio? El Libre Mercado como Comunismo Integral.
• Russian, Кто владеет прибылью, или Свободный рынок как полный коммунизм.
• Deutsch, Wer aneignet sich den Mehrwert? Der Freimarkt als vollständiger Kommunismus.
• Portuguese, O livre mercado como comunismo pleno.

I first began blogging on the first anniversary of 9/11, and over the succeeding years I’ve blogged a fair bit about 9/11 – how it shows both the power and the impotence of the state; how it feeds the Higgs cycle of ratcheting intervention; how the pre-9/11 mindset is the only realistic one; how it illustrates Aristotle’s superiority to both Seneca and D. H. Lawrence; and how both the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and their critics are confused.

On this latest anniversary I want to talk about how the state breeds war – both in the sense of provoking attacks like 9/11, and in the sense of generating its own misguided responses, like the Iraq war.

Governments engage in war so frequently that people forget to be puzzled at the phenomenon. Yet, given reputation effects, the choice of violence over cooperation tends to be a costly one, as even so pessimistic a thinker as Hobbes acknowledges:

He therefore that breaketh his covenant, and consequently declareth that he thinks he may with reason do so, cannot be received into any society, that unite themselves for peace and defence, but by the error of them that receive him; nor when he is received, be retained in it, without seeing the danger of their error; which errors a man cannot reasonably reckon upon as the means of his security: and therefore if he be left, or cast out of society, he perisheth; and if he live in society, it is by the errors of other men, which he could not foresee, nor reckon upon; and consequently against the reason of his preservation; and so, as all men that contribute not to his destruction, forbear him only out of ignorance of what is good for themselves.

If cooperation tends to be a stable equilibrium, why is interstate conflict so frequent? The answer, I suggest, is that the nature of the state ordinarily allows it to reap the benefits of warfare while socialising the costs. Since the state acquires its war revenues by compulsion (via taxation), and its soldiers too (via indentured-servitude contracts at best and conscription at worst), while the electoral means for providing negative feedback are too occasional and indiscriminate to be terribly effective, the state is able to shift the costs of war onto its own populace. (Thus Bentham well described war as a crime “committed by the ruling few in the conquering nation, on the subject many in both nations.”)

Wars are expensive, both in blood and in treasure; if the taxpayers who provide the treasure were free to choose which governmental functions to fund (as the customers of other service providers are, and as taxpayers have been in stateless or semi-stateless societies) – and if the soldiers who provide the blood had the same freedom to quit their jobs as other employees do – such socialisation of costs would be much harder to pull off; but as things stand, those who bears the costs have no right of exit.

The benefits of war to the state, on the other hand, are usually enormous, even if it doesn’t win (so long as it is not actually conquered), inasmuch as wars and other national emergencies give it an excuse to expand its powers – expansions that, ratchet-like, rarely fall back to their original levels after the crisis has passed. Not for nothing did Randolph Bourne declare war “the health of the state.” Moreover, given its access to the means of education and propaganda, the state can convince its populace that they too benefit from the war; witness the widespread belief in the U.S. that World War II helped the economy, despite all evidence to the contrary.

This isn’t to say that nonstate actors never choose violent conflict; of course they do. Particularly in societies with “macho” mores, cultural factors that push toward violence can often prevail against the economic incentives that push toward peace. In stateless and semi-stateless societies, however, at least the economic incentives push away from war (whether they prevail or not), rather than toward it as they do under states; and in time such incentives can actually overcome the macho mores. As evidence, consider medieval Iceland and pre-Norman England, societies that began in cultural conditions that one might expect to be maximally uncongenial to peace, given the strong social support for a code of honour that included the obligation to participate in bloodfeud; yet the institution of composition or wergild (requiring the payment of hefty compensation to the victim’s family) succeeded in undermining those mores, as the high monetary cost of restitution deterred homicide, while the tempting financial bonanza of accepting the restitution rather than pursuing vendetta gradually wore away the honour-based incentives that had sustained the bloodfeud. More recently, (PDF) Somalia during its stateless period has achieved a lower level of violence than either its (economically and culturally comparable) state-ridden neighbours or its former state-ridden self.

There’s a great scene in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles when an African chief, hearing about the death toll of World War I, asks Indy how the European powers can possibly afford such a war – how can they afford to pay the massive restitution for all the thousands killed? Indy is shocked at the notion of restitution: is this chief so primitive that he actually puts a monetary price on human life? Indy’s mentor (implausibly, Albert Schweitzer) responds that it’s better than not valuing it at all.

The 9/11 attacks were a textbook example of the warfare state in operation. As with Pearl Harbor six decades earlier, the U.S. government’s arrogant interventions around the world had made such an attack a virtual inevitability. (For every jihadi who joins the fight against the U.S. because “they hate our freedom,” a hundred join because “they hate our bombs.”) And of course the primary victims of the blowback from such interventions are the innocent victims of terrorist reprisals. (9/11 was relatively unusual in that the state establishment got hit as well; yet even so, the political class as a whole clearly benefited on balance through its expanded powers.)

Even leaving aside both moral considerations and the risk of blowback, the U.S. government’s interventions all around the world are bloody expensive; if you saw such costs itemised in a monthly bill, you’d quickly cancel the premium service and stick with the basic. If taxpayers had a choice about whether to fund military interventions, with the decision to go to war impacting the pocketbooks of the decisionmakers, those interventions wouldn’t happen – and so blowback like 9/11 would be prevented as well. And when the state responds to such attacks with a vaguely related war in Iraq, one that lasts far longer than the taxpayers’ enthusiasm for it, that too is made possible by effective lack of exit (as is its avoidance of mass customer defections in the wake of the phantom-WMD scandal).

As for the Iraqi civil war that the U.S. invasion sparked off, we can thank the institution of the state for that one too, since the chief factor that drives such conflict is the expectation that there will arise, or will continue to be, a state apparatus, and the corresponding fear that someone else’s gang will end up in charge of it.

Getting better candidates into power instead of worse ones isn’t completely hopeless as a strategy for furthering peace; but it’s a band-aid at best. It’s a bit like kicking out James II and putting in William of Orange – it focuses on changing the personnel when what really needs changing is the system.

As long as our political institutions have a captive customer base and can acquire resources and labour by compulsion, they will be able to socialise the costs of going to war while reaping the benefits; and so long as this is so, the choice to engage in violence will be less costly to them than it would be to an honest enterprise – and when the state’s costs of violence are lowered, the state will sooner or later buy more violence, be its president an Obama or a McCain.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008

The questions below, which I received from a liberal curious about left-libertarianism, are fairly typical. The common thread running through the left-libertarian response is that most of the evils currently remedied by the state result from state intervention in the first place.

1. If government provided no safety net for the poor, what would happen to the 100+ million Americans with an IQ under 90, to the millions of Americans who can’t work because of cancer, heart disease, etc., to even the millions with graduate degrees who can’t find a job, and to America as a country?

Government policies increase the basic threshold of subsistence for the worst off enormously, making comfortable poverty impossible (see, for example, Charles Johnson, “Scratching By,” The Freeman, December 2007). If government didn’t enforce absentee title to vacant and unimproved land against “squatters,” building codes whose main economic effect is to criminalize cheap vernacular building technologies or new low-cost/high-efficiency techniques the incumbent contractors don’t want to compete with, licensing regimes that impede independent production by unlicensed cabs, home daycare and the like, there would be a huge reduction in the marginal cost of both survival and comfortable subsistence. As I mention below, these same forms of exploitation drastically reduce the material resources and leisure available to working people for developing their own self-organized solidaristic safety net.

2. If this room were filled with chronically unemployed people: people with IQs under 90, who are old and/or with severe heart disease or cancer, how would you explain to them that you oppose a government safety net: No unemployment, subsidized housing, health care, or public transportation?

Government policies (like those mentioned above) promote inflation of land values, and make housing more expensive by restrictions on building techniques. Subsidized housing is a way of ameliorating the most destabilizing effects of this for the worst off, without killing the golden goose for the politically connected real estate industry. Since the subsidies go directly to the real estate folks, they’re making money at both ends.

Healthcare costs are jacked up by all sorts of artificial scarcity rents and privileges.

Subsidized public transportation would be far less necessary if subsidized monoculture and sprawl didn’t first make cars a necessity and make feet and bikes useless.

3. In the pre-industrial age, it was possible for most willing workers to find sustainable employment. But in the information age, being willing isn’t enough. In the modern era, can you point to one of the world’s 200 nations that have no government-mandated safety net and yet doesn’t have huge numbers of people living painfully destitute lives while others live in grandeur?

The very concept of “sustainable employment” reflects an economic model created by the state in the first place. Much of the current dichotomy between grandeur and destitution reflects scarcity rents on forms of artificial property enforced by the state. The mass-production industrial model, where product-specific capital assets are extremely expensive so that only the rich can afford to buy them and then hire people for wages, is something the state had a huge role in creating. As we see a technological shift toward lower-cost, general-purpose capital assets (essentially a reversal of the shift from affordable craftsmen’s tools to expensive machinery that resulted in the wage/factory system in the first place), much of the rationale behind dependence on wage labor will disappear. The lower the cost of subsistence, and the lower the capital outlay for becoming a producer, the more blurry the boundary between being employed/in business and unemployed/out of business will become. And the lower the costs of subsistence and the lower the costs of capital equipment for self-provisioning in the informal sector, the more the share of total provisioning that will shift from wage labor to the informal sector.

4. Eliminating a safety net for the poor is an experiment unproven in modern society. The government-mandated safety net is certainly not a model of cost-efficiency but are you willing to take the risk that if we eliminate it, we won’t end up with a society in which our children will see people on the streets dying of starvation or with cancer writhing in agony?

Writers like Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson describe elaborate self-organized safety nets — cooperatives, mutuals, friendly societies, etc. — created by workers for themselves. These met a huge volume of needs. But their effectiveness was limited by the fact that they existed in a society — like ours — of privilege and artificial property rights. The effectiveness of the self-organized welfare state was limited by the resources of an exploited class. In a freed market, where labor is not burdened by such parasitic rent extraction by the privileged, the working class would have a lot more resources to devote to a mutual/cooperative welfare state.

In general, artificial scarcities and artificial property rights are the main source of the overclass’s ill-gotten wealth, and the main reason for the underclass’s poverty. Government systematically redistributes income upward to the classes that control it. The welfare state is a way of giving just enough of it back to the hardest-hit to prevent destabilizing levels of homelessness and starvation from imperiling the system.

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

Es irónico que los delirantes monetarios de izquierda, como yo, y los delirantes monetarios de derecha, como los fanáticos del oro seguidores de von Mises, les cueste tanto llevarse bien. Los izquierdistas, o bien todos los que seguimos la tradición de William Greene y Benjamin Tucker, argumentamos que el monopolio estatal del dinero le permite a la banca cobrar un precio monopólico por el crédito, y de esa manera mantiene artificialmente altos los costos de acceso al capital para los trabjadores. El resultado es que los medios de producción se tornan artificialmente caros y escasos, lo que coloca a los trabajadores en una posición de negociación desventajosa respecto a sus empleadores.

Los derechistas argumentan que el sistema de banca central abarata artificialmente el crédito, que es la causa fundamental de que la economía esté dominada por los sectores bancario, de seguros y de bienes raíces, y de que sea tan propensa a las burbujas. Acusan a izquierdistas como nosotros de sufrir “delirios monetarios” (a pesar de que desde el punto de vista de los economistas convencionales, ellos son tan delirantes como nosotros) y de querer crear prosperidad a partir de la creación de dinero inorgánico inflacionario.

Pero no es así. Aún cuando Murray Rothbard, discípulo de von Mises, fue uno de los que despreció las propuestas de banca mutual por considerarla inflacionaria, ésta se basa en una crítica del monopolio monetario idéntica a la crítica que Rothabrd hizo del monopolio en la industria del seguro de vida. Según él, las regulaciones estatales imponen requerimientos de capitalización mucho más altos de lo que se necesitarían por consideraciones puramente actuariales, funcionando como una barrera a la entrada que reduce el número de empresas competidoras en la industria y les permite cobrar un prima monopólica de precio a sus clientes.

Eso es exactamente lo que hacen las leyes estatales de licenciamiento bancario: Imponen requerimientos mínimos de capital incluso para los bancos que sólo emiten créditos respaldados por colateral. Ésto significa que es ilegal que un grupo de personas comunes y corrientes formen una cooperativa bancaria que emita poder de compra respaldado por las propiedades de sus miembros, sin interés, al menos que éstos sean capaces de recaudar millones de dólares para constiuír las reservas de capital. Por ésto, no les queda otra que pagarle una tasa de interés monopólica a un banco capitalista que emite crédito respaldado por sus propiedades.

Y cualquier emprendimiento que implique emitir crédito respaldado por ingresos futuros sin mantener reservas de capital, como las redes de crédito mutual propuestas por Tom Greco, corre el riesgo de ser clausurado por “carecer de licencia” (aunque tengo la esperanza de que pronto puedan operar con impunidad encubiertos por darknets encriptados).

El dinero emitido por los bancos capitalistas es inorgánico, creado de la nada, como bien lo dicen los derechistas. Cuando la Reserva Federal reduce los requerimientos de reserva bancaria, aumenta la cantidad de dinero que los bancos pueden crear a costo cero, y prestar cobrando interés. Por ésto es que el dinero es artificialmente barato de producir para el cartel bancario privilegiado que lo crea, pero al mismo tiempo, es artificialmente caro para aquellos que dependen de los bancos como fuente de crédito. Gracias a las leyes estatales de moneda de curso legal y la imposición de licencias bancarias, los bancos están en una posición monopolística, con el poder de cobrar interés sobre dinero que crean de la nada y sin incurrir en absolutamente ningún costo adicional.

El precio que cobran no tiene ninguna relación con el costo de proveer sus servicios. Ésta es la peor de todas las posibles combinaciones de resultados que pueden surgir en un sistema monetario estatista. Si el estado crea oferta monetaria de la nada, sería mucho menos destructivo que simmplemente lo depositase en las cuentas corrientes de la gente sin cobrar ningún interés (como lo proponen los promotores del Crédito Social), o si lo gastase en compras de bienes y servicios. Pero no: El estado crea dinero de la nada, pero delega la tarea en una clase de parásitos privilegiados que cobra precios de usura por llevarla a cabo. Es un perfecto ejemplo de lo que los derechistas de falso “libre mercado” (como lo es la gente del AEI, Heritage y el Adam Smith Institute) llaman “privatización” en un sistema estatista, consistente en sumar un estrato adicional de bocas nominalmente “privadas” que alimentar, por encima de los burócratas estatales. En términos prácticos, el componente privado de esas “asociaciones público-privadas” es simplemente una parte más del estado.

Así que en realidad, tanto los delirantes monetarios de izquierda como los de derecha tienen la razón. ¡Que el amor florezca entre todos los delirantes monetarios!.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 26 de abril de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

Available as a ready-to-print zine (PDF).

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, a book I’ve seldom seen libertarians mention without a sneer. But in fact it is a mostly excellent book.

Ehrenreich went “undercover” to document the lives of the working poor and the Kafkaesque maze of obstacles they face: the grindingly low wages; the desperate scramble to make ends meet; the perpetual uncertainty; the surreal, pseudo-scientific job application process; the arbitrary and humiliating petty chickenshit tyrannies of employers; the techniques of intimidation and normalisation; the mandatory time-wasting; the indifference to employee health; the unpredictably changing work schedules, making it impossible to hold a second job; etc., etc.

None of this was news to me; I’ve lived the life she describes, and she captures it quite well. But it might well be news to those on the right who heroise the managerial class and imagine that the main causes of poverty are laziness and welfare.

Of course the book has its flaws. One is the author’s attitude toward her “real” working-class colleagues, which sometimes struck me as rather patronising. The other – and this is what invokes the libertarians’ sneers – is her economically clueless, hopelessly statist diagnosis and proposed solutions. She thinks the problems she talks about are caused by “the market,” an entity concerning whose operations she has some strange ideas. (For example, she thinks the reason housing prices are so high is that both the rich and the poor need housing, and so the prevailing prices are determined by the budgets of the rich. She notes in passing that this effect doesn’t seem to apply to food prices – even though both the rich and the poor presumably need food too – but seems blissfully untroubled by the inconsistency in her theories.) And her suggestions for fixing the problem include a higher minimum wage (a “remedy” that would throw many of the objects of her compassion out of work) and more public assistance.

But Ehrenreich’s misguided diagnoses and prescriptions occupy at most a tenth of the book. The bulk of the book is devoted to a description of the problems, and there’s nothing sneerworthy about that. And libertarians will win few supporters so long as they continue to give the impression of regarding the problems Ehrenreich describes as unimportant or non-existent. If you’re desperately ill, and Physician A offers a snake-oil remedy while Physician B merely snaps, “stop whining!” and offers nothing, Physician A will win every time.

So if Ehrenreich’s solutions are the wrong ones, what are the right ones? Here I would name two.

First: eliminate state intervention, which predictably works to benefit the politically-connected, not the poor. As I like to say, libertarianism is the proletarian revolution. Without all the taxes, fees, licenses, and regulations that disproportionately burden the poor, it would be much easier for them to start their own businesses rather than working for others. As for those who do still work for others, in the dynamically expanding economy that a rollback of state violence would bring, employers would have to compete much more vigorously for workers, thus making it much harder for employers to treat workers like crap. Economic growth would also make much higher wages possible, while competition would make those higher wages necessary. There would be other benefits as well; for example, Ehrenreich complains about the transportation costs borne by the working poor as a result of suburbanisation and economic segregation, but she never wonders whether zoning laws, highway subsidies, and other such government policies have anything to do with those problems.

Second: build worker solidarity. On the one hand, this means formal organisation, including unionisation – but I’m not talking about the prevailing model of “business unions,” conspiring to exclude lower-wage workers and jockeying for partnership with the corporate/government elite, but realunions, the old-fashioned kind, committed to the working class and not just union members, and interested in worker autonomy, not government patronage. (See Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business for a history of how pseudo-unions crowded out real ones, with government help.) On the other hand, it means helping to build a broader culture of workers standing up for one another and refusing to submit to humiliating treatment.

These two solutions are of course complementary; an expanded economy, greater competition among employers, and fewer legal restrictions on workers makes building solidarity easier, while at the same time increased solidarity can and should be part of a political movement fighting the state.

That’s the left-libertarian movement I’d like to see. And people keep telling me it doesn’t exist. Good lord! I know it doesn’t exist; why else would I be urging that it be brought into existence?

Of course I’m also told that it can’t exist. Libertarians tell me it won’t work because leftists don’t care enough about liberty; leftists tell me it won’t work because libertarians don’t care enough about the poor and oppressed. In short, each side insists that it’s the other side that won’t play along.

Now the answer to this is that some will (and have) and some won’t – but that we should do what we can to increase the number who will. So here’s a general challenge.

If you’re a libertarian who thinks leftists don’t care about liberty, why not become a leftist who cares about liberty? That way there’ll be one more. Or if you’re a leftist who thinks libertarians don’t care about the poor and oppressed, why don’t you become a libertarian who cares about the poor and oppressed? Once again, that way there’ll be one more. And in both cases there’ll also be one fewer libertarian of the kind that alienates leftists by dismissing their concerns, and likewise one fewer leftist of the kind that alienates libertarians by dismissing their concerns.

*     *     *

This brings me to another issue I’ve been meaning to blog about.

[F. A.] Hayek famously argued that the concept of “social justice” was meaningless, because society is not a moral agent that could be guilty of injustice. But the concept of social justice need not imply that “society” in the abstract is responsible for anything. To condemn social injustice is simply to say that there are systematic patterns of exploitation and oppression in society, and that individuals are responsible either for unjustifiably contributing to this situation, or unjustifiably failing to combat it, or both.

But, the libertarian may object, are these problems really issues of justice?

Well, Aristotle distinguishes between “general” justice on the one hand and “special” or “particular” justice on the other. General justice is concerned with interpersonal moral claims in general: it’s the entire interpersonal dimension of morality, “the whole of virtue in relation to another.” Special justice is concerned with a particularsort of moral claim, the sort that nowadays we would call “rights”; Aristotle lists what one is owed in virtue of being a citizen under the constitution, what one is owed as a result of a contractual agreement, and what one is owed by a wrongdoer as a result of having been a victim of illegal injury, as examples of special justice.

Special justice obviously corresponds more or less to the realm of libertarian rights, while general justice corresponds to interpersonal morality more generally. Where libertarians most crucially depart from Aristotle is in regarding only special justice as legitimately enforceable, whereas Aristotle also regarded parts (not all) of general justice as legitimately enforceable. Still, even Aristotle agreed that some aspects of general justice (generosity, for example) are not properly enforceable, and that special justice was especially the concern of law.

Now it’s often assumed that libertarians can properly have no use for left-wing concepts of “economic justice” and “social justice.” But many of the concerns that left-wingers treat under these heads actually are, directly or indirectly, questions of libertarian rights, since many of the disadvantages that burden the poor, or women, or minorities, are indeed the result of systematic violence, definitely including (though not necessarily limited to) state violence. So many issues of “social justice” can be accepted by libertarians as part of special justice.

Now it may still be true that some issues of “social justice” go beyond libertarian rights and so beyond special justice. But these may still properly be regarded as issues of justice if they fall under general justice. Even in cases where treating one’s employees like crap violates no libertarian rights and so should not be legally actionable, for example, it still violates interpersonal moral claims and so may be regarded as in this broader sense an issue of justice. Thus there’s no reason whatever for libertarians to surrender the concept of social justice to the statist left, or to let the concept stand as an obstacle to cooperation with the not necessarily or not irretrievably statist left.

The following article is translated from the English original, written by Thomas L. Knapp.

Primero que nada debo confesar que soy un fanático de Apple desde hace muchos años. Compré mi primera Macintosh en 1994, y desde entonces me he decantado por las Macs en lugar de las PCs con Windows e incluso de las cajas Linux siempre que he podido. En mi opinión, el etos de diseño de Apple es de primera. Los aparatos que fabrican suelen ser innovadores y quizás ninguna otra empresa se merezca más que ella el muy usado y abusado adjetivo “amigable al usuario”.

Dicho esto, como empresa Apple se ha desviado bastante del buen camino–exactamente del camino indicado por el seminal y revolucionario comercial “1984” de Macintosh–durante los últimos años. A medida que pasa el tiempo Apple parece menos enfocada en su habilidad para crear productos que cambian el juego competitivo, y cada vez más empeñada en usar el poder del gobierno para prevenir que ese juego se desenvuelva sin trabas.

El veredicto del juicio del mes pasado, en el que Apple logró que la firma coreana de electrónica Samsung fuese sancionada por, entre otras cosas, violar una patente de Apple sobre la forma de las computadoras en formato tablet, es solo la punta de un gran témpano de hielo que se extiende bajo el océano de la historia reciente.

Apple demandó a la ciudad de Nueva York (“La Gran Manzana”) por un logo en forma de manzana.

Ha demandado a otras empresas por el uso de la letra “i” minúscula y la palabra “pod”.

Demandó a Digital Research por copiar el “look and feel” de MacOS — un “look and feel” que Apple había robado de Xerox Alto/Star.

Demandó a Psystar por fabricar hardware que podría funcionar con MacOS X.

Una obvia primera reacción hacia gran parte de estos litigios es darse cuenta de lo frívolos que son. Una empresa que pretende tener el derecho exclusivo para producir dispositivos cúbicos con esquinas redondeadas… vaya. Yo acabo de pasar por mi cocina y encontré cuatro de esos dispositivos, ninguno de ellos fabricados por Apple. Y reclamar la propiedad de la letra “i” parece… bueno, una pretensión un poco amplia.

Pero sería un error enfocarse en la frivolidad de los argumentos de Apple. Tal como lo señalael crítico de la “propiedad intelectual” Stephan Kinsella, “el problema no es que hayan patentes de baja calidad, o que las empresas ejerzan las patentes incluso cuando no tienen intención de fabricar los productos patentados, ni que los estándares de las leyes que rigen a las patentes sean ambiguos, o que los términos de las patentes sean demasiado largos. El problema verdaderamente serio lo causan las patentes de alta calidad, creadas para cubrir los productos existentes de empresas incumbentes, que las usan para aplastarle la cabeza a sus competidores”.

En este último caso, Apple ha exigido directamente que los consumidores estadounidenses compren sus productos en lugar de los de Samsung, y ha contado con los recursos para llevar a cabo esa exigencia. No porque los productos de Apple sean más baratos que los de Samsung. Tampoco porque los dispositivos de Apple sean de mejor calidad que los de Samsung en un aspecto u otro. Sino porque los amigotes de Apple en el gobierno tienen pistolas y las apuntaron hacia Samsung para que entendiese que no puede ofrecernos sus productos.

En algún momento a Apple le va a salir el tiro por la culata.

Internamente, no hay incentivo, no hay sentido de urgencia para innovar cuando uno no siente que tiene que hacerlo. La aparente habilidad para obligar al mercado a comprar tus productos se traduce, en términos de cultura empresarial, en una falta de disposición para gastar dinero y horas hombre mejorando esos productos.

Externamente, las fuerzas de mercado tienden a resurgir independientemente de las barreras que el proteccionismo capitalista pone en su camino. Los monopolios que Apple cree que se ha asegurado eventualmente se harán obsoletos debido a la acción de competidores jóvenes y hambrientos que no tienen amigos en Washington.

Mientras tanto, esperemos que Apple vea la luz, detenga su gradual tendencia a explotar al consumidor, y vuelva a ser una empresa que triunfa sobre la base de crear productos excelentes.

Artículo original publicado por Thomas L. Knapp el 6 de septiembre de 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

A few days ago C4SS’s Thomas Knapp (“The R3VOLution That Wasn’t,” September 5, 2012) nudged Ron Paul supporters to recognize that not only is Paul not going to “restore the old American republic and lead you to liberty” — but that it never could’ve happened.

“The deck was thoroughly stacked. Against Paul, against you, against any threat to a status quo which has calcified over the last 120 years… [into] a process that inevitably produces two look-alikes. That status quo may break or crumble under external pressure, but it will never soften to internal re-shaping of the type that a Republican presidential campaign proposes.”

He called on them to “abandon politics” — including expedients like “auditing the Fed, resurrecting ‘states rights,’ [and] attempting to appeal to a base of social conservative voters who fear freedom so deeply that they’ll swallow anything the GOP establishment feeds them.”

Indeed. It’s time for “progressives” within the Democratic Party — at least those for whom the label means more than upper-middle class managerial liberalism, kinder and gentler corporate rule, and a global Empire operating under cover of a UN Security Council fig leaf — to learn a similar lesson.

If the GOP political deck is stacked against any principled challenge from within, consider the fruitless task the political road has presented for progressives. Barack Obama, using the most progressive-sounding rhetoric of any Democratic candidate since JFK and LBJ, was elected in a landslide victory. The coattail effect brought significant increases in the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress — including a supposedly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Obama’s election was widely hailed as a transformative event comparable to FDR’s election.

Obama came in following a campaign full of populist rhetoric against the banksters and Wall Street, and promises to dismantle or radically scale back the post-911 national security state. Even I was taken in to some extent. At the very least, it seemed plausible we might see something comparable to the Church Commission’s post-Watergate rollback of the police state.

So what steak did we get to go along with all that sizzle? In just about every aspect of policy, the Obama administration has amounted to Bush’s third term. In some cases Obama’s policy initiatives were thwarted by an unprecedented level of obstruction, including record use of the filibuster, by the opposition. This use of the filibuster itself can be take as an indication of the reception any fundamental challenge to the status quo can expect from now on. The opposition’s ability to peel off members of the ostensible majority means any future coalition for change will require closer to a two-thirds Senate majority — something not seen in eighty years — to be filibuster-proof.

But despite the Obamabots’ framing, Obama was not simply a sincere reformist thwarted by GOP obstructionism. He was actively complicit with the existing system — not only by refraining from the use of his administrative authority and veto power in cases where it was perfectly feasible, but in the provisions of policies he himself drafted.

Despite minor tinkering around the edges, Geithner’s version of TARP was essentially the same as Paulson’s: Buying up toxic assets — with money borrowed at interest — to prevent a deflation in the value of the paper assets owned by the banksters. That’s essentially what Alexander Hamilton did in paying off at face value Continental war bonds actually worth only a few cents on the dollar of their nominal value.

Obamacare essentially did for the health insurance industry what Bush’s Medicare D did for the drug industry: Gave it a guaranteed market, at taxpayer expense. And in Summer 2009, the very time he was publicly demanding a public option, he was privately assuring industry lobbyists that a public option wouldn’t be on the table and that Medicare wouldn’t use its bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices.

Obama has declined to prosecute torturers, supported telecom immunity for illegal wiretapping, deported an unprecedented number of immigrants on his own initiative, and enthusiastically escalated drone attacks in an undeclared perpetual war. With the fanatical support of RIAA/MPAA shill Joe Biden, the administration has negotiated a series of treaties aiming to effectively put the Internet under totalitarian lockdown in order to enforce digital copyright.

The things that had to come together for the election of such a “progressive”-sounding president, with such a huge majority, were comparable to the alignment of forces required to produce the Kwisach Haderach in “Dune.” So by the “progressive” playbook, I suppose the only proper response to Obama is to begin the sisyphean task of working toward a more successful attempt forty years from now — and hoping their new Messiah doesn’t turn out to be a sellout or a liar.

No. With all the resources wasted on trying to influence a rigged system, playing by the rules of a house that always wins, we could far more easily build the kind of society we want, here and now, without waiting to elect a government to give us permission.

This article was originally published by Gary Chartier on the Libertopia Underground, September 7th, 2012.

People who want to live in a society organized on the basis of peaceful, voluntary cooperation don’t want to be ruled by monopolists—by states. State authority is illegitimate, unnecessary, and dangerous.

But that obviously leaves open the question: what do we do now, while we’re still under the state’s rule, to make our lives more bearable and help to dismantle the state?

One answer, for a lot of people, is: vote. And that’s an answer about which I’m increasingly skeptical.

In The Conscience of an Anarchist, I talk about electoral politics as offering one avenue for positive social change. I’m not saying it can’t play that role. But I am saying there are good reasons to pursue alternatives.

Some people oppose voting because they think it’s immoral, as if the sheer act of voting placed an imprimatur on the political process or as if the voter were responsible for everything someone for whom she voted did in office. I think that’s silly. Voting can be a defensive act; the harmful results of decisions made by politicians can reasonably be treated as unaccepted, unwelcome side-effects of voters’ choices; and politicians have to be seen as responsible for their own actions. The problem with voting isn’t that it’s inherently wrong; no doubt, in principle, voting or even campaigning for office could be a reasonable defensive act.

But even if that’s true in principle, the reality is that there’s good reason not to vote.

Start out with the ineffectiveness of voting.

As we’ve seen in previous elections, governments can determine the outcomes of elections by eliminating some people from the voter rolls. And this means, in practical terms, that the victims of the drug war and other campaigns against victimless actions will be poorly positioned to influence electoral outcomes. The deck starts out stacked against anyone who wants to roll back state policies responsible for unjust imprisonment. The effect is similar to the one exerted when death penalty opponents are prevented from serving on juries; the full range of conscientious positions isn’t represented.

Campaign advertising is often deceptive and manipulative. Like other lies that don’t involve the fraudulent transfer of title, advertising ads shouldn’t be actionable at law, but that doesn’t mean they’re not harmful. Many voters depend on them, often to the exclusion of other sources of information, with the result that lies are persistently disseminated and electoral outcomes distorted.

Politicians themselves like, too, or cast their positions in ways likely to mislead the unwary. Consider candidate Barack Obama’s appeals to the peace vote, and his seeming opposition to the growth of the national security state. Politicians say what they think voters want to hear; but, once in office, they can be counted on to do whatever they think will boost their chances of reelection, help them raise money, and benefit their cronies.

And of course there’s the fact that votes often don’t count because elections can easily be stolen; just ask Coke Stevenson. That’s especially true now that hackable electronic voting devices are increasingly common. And counting errors can occur even when people act in good faith, too (thanks to Sam Hays for this point).

Gerrymandering decreases the likelihood that the outcome of a given election will be dependent on individual votes, and it’s been common as long as there have been electoral contests. But even in its absence, the likelihood that your vote will determine the outcome of a race is very small indeed when the number of relevant votes is large.

Suppose it does: what then? It’s clear that the outcome of a race may make little difference at all. Most politicians operate within fairly narrow ideological confines, and are most unlikely to do particularly radical things. The sorts of people who are likely to become successful politicians are unlikely to rock the boat—and are, indeed, likely to be unprincipled and ambitious. But even if a genuinely radical politician is elected, that doesn’t mean that radical changes will be enacted. After all, once in office, a politician becomes the target of enthusiastically rent-seeking elites and their cronies, who will be adept at influencing her or his actions to their benefit.

And even if a politician doesn’t bend to the will of any of these various interest groups, there’s the obvious fact that individual politicians have considerable difficulty accomplishing things. A legislator is only one member of a sizeable group, many of whose members will be largely uninterested in basing decisions on principles, especially defensible ones, so the odds that a continuingly principled radical legislator will be able to make substantive change happen are very low. The odds that an elected executive will be a principled radical are even lower, given that more people have to be satisfied to ensure that a successful campaign for governor or president is managed and funded, and more principles will often have to be sacrificed to win a campaign for executive office. But, again, once in office, a radical executive would have no choice but to work with a legislature that was unlikely to be radical at all.

A further problem: a genuine radical, someone who really cared about making the world a better place, might find the temptation to use power, not to liberate people, but to control and manage them, almost irresistible. Even in the absence of effective manipulation by special interests, the desire to change the world by force could corrupt an initially principled politician.

In short, therefore, there is little reason to believe that voting will effectively lead to the actual enactment of policies that enhance freedom and justice. We may sometimes, rarely, see, ex post, that it did; but as a general ex ante policy, it’s safe to assume it won’t. Emma Goldman was surely right: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

Even if you have doubts about the effectiveness of voting, there will be good reason to avoid it.

Doing so can be a useful means of protest—an expression of one’s disgust at the limited options, the deceit, the hypocrisy of campaigns and the aggression and manipulation, the theft and murder, of governing. And it can give one a great opportunity to highlight the awfulness of the state. Imagine people’s reactions when they see you wearing a sticker that says, “I’ve avoided voting. Have you?”

It’s especially useful to avoid voting because of the rush of team spirit that accompanies every election campaign. If you’re going to vote for a politician, you should at least hold your nose. But otherwise sane and sensible people fall victim to charisma and breathe in the seductive pheromones of murderers and thugs. They announce, without a second thought, that their candidate is wise and good and heroic. They cheer for their team’s inanities, and dramatically exaggerate the good any rational person could expect an election might accomplish. If you want to avoid being caught up in mass hysteria, stay away from the ballot box.

Electoral democracy helps to convince ordinary people that they are the state’s masters rather than its subjects. It conceals factional disputes within the power elite and frames them as popular contests in which the people’s will is done. It deceives people into supposing that they really have consented to the state’s dictates, and prompts them to dismiss critics of the status quo with shibboleths like, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Refusing to vote helps to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes.

Just say “no.” This year, vote for nobody.

The following article is translated into Spanish from the English original, written by Darian Worden.

A medida que los titulares sobre la boda real inglesa se desvanecen, es importante echar un vistazo a las libertades que se pisotearon para crear un día perfecto para la realeza.

En los días anteriores a la boda, una buena cantidad de predios ocupados y centros sociales fueron sometidos a redadas, y sus habitantes fueron detenidos por grandes escuadrones de policías. Además, un miembro del grupo teatral callejero The Love Police fue detenido por conspiración de causar disrupción pública y ruptura de la paz. La actividad policial fue publicitada como si estuviese dirigida a disuadir a los anarquistas en su intento de arruinar la fiesta real. No queda claro en qué medida la actitud de la policía se debió a su celo por resguardad la santidad del espectáculo nupcial o si las redadas fueron más que nada una excusa para quebrar la oposición al estado. Por supuesto, cualquiera sea la razón de fondo, siempre habrá una rama del complejo policial-industrial que necesitará encontrar amenazas públicas para justificar su presupuesto.

Aunque la idea de la realeza sea un anacronismo, desafortunadamente no lo es la obsesión con proteger a las élites del libre albedrío de la la gente de a pie. Cuando se trata de garantizar que la gente importante la pase bomba, se espera que la gente a la que se juzga como menos importante cargue con una buena parte de los costos de la fiesta. Puede que contribuyan a través de sus impuestos, siendo detenidos o abusados, pero pueden simpre contar con que los que están por encima de ellos en la jerarquía social les harán saber qué tanto les interesan sus problemas.

Un gran espectácuo público le proporciona una perfecta excusa a los que están a cargo para atacar a sus opositores. Al actuar como si la represión de los disidentes se tratase en realidad de un asunto de seguridad pública, se les facilita la tarea de presentar su misión de preservarse en el poder como si se tratase de proteger al público. La disrupción de la oposición anarquista y de izquierda radical en la víspera del Primero de Mayo es muy conveniente para las autoridades, ya que ésta, por ser la fiesta tradicional de los trabajadores, es usada frecuentemente como fecha de protesta. Ésto debe haber sido de especial interés para las autoridades británicas dado el alto nivel de ajitamiento político que el país vivió el año pasado.

Cualquiera que sean las otras motivaciones del estado, siempre debe tenerse en cuenta que los miembros de la fuerza policial y sus proveedores quieren que se les pague. Un mayor número de amenazas se traducen simpre en presupuestos más gordos para ellos. Y alguien siempre pujará por obtener contratos de suministro de equipos de vigilancia y detención.

La observación que Thomas Paine hiciese en 1776 parece tener hoy más vigencia que nunca: “Un hombre honesto es más valioso para la sociedad, y ante los ojos de Dios, que todos los rufianes coronados que hayan vivido jamás”. Al menos la existencia de la oposición a la ostentosa exhibición de elitismo es una buena señal.

Artículo original publicado por Darian Worden el 29 de abril de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I tried to describe some of the features of conventional libertarianism and conventional liberalism that inhibit an anti-authoritarian coalition between them. In this post, I’d like to mention some promising trends within liberalism that offer hope for common ground with libertarians.

At the most modest level, I’ve been encouraged in some ways by Obama’s insurgency against Clinton, who personifies the most objectionable features of establishment liberalism. Obama’s preference for working with the  market mechanism instead of through the administrative state (purportedly resulting from the influence of Austan Goolsbee on his economics staff), seems on the whole to be a positive sign.

Of course Obama and Goolsbee are a mixed bag. The positive note is tempered somewhat by Goolsbee’s part in the NAFTA flap. Assuming there’s some fire behind that smoke, his fondness for NAFTA suggests he conflates “markets” way too much with the existing corporate system. His idea of “democratizing markets,” as Daniel Koffler describes it in the link above, relies heavily on subsidies to higher education, which sounds too much like both the New Labour and New Democratic approach: Accepting corporate domination and meritocracy as given, and using education as a social engineering tool to turn everyone into managers. The danger is that Goolsbee’s affinity for “markets” will translate, not into taking  big business off the government teat, but into simply splitting the difference with the Reagan/Thatcher version of banana republicanism – in other words, the DLC model of kinder and gentler neoliberalism.

I also confess to being a bit sick of Obama’s whole Oprah/New Age/”Law of Success” shtik about everybody just getting along, and transcending partisan differences, and all that happy crappy. I might be in a bit more conciliatory mood after the bleeding heads of every billionaire and Fortune 500 CEO in America are mounted on pikes along Wall Street. We’ll just have to wait and see. As for Oprah’s recycled version of the old “name it  and claim it” gospel, I care a lot less about whether the board rooms “look like the rest of America,” than about the power those boardrooms exercise in the first place.

Still, there’s the possibility that with Obama’s more genuinely left-wing (as opposed to liberal) voting record, and the influence of Goolsbee’s market-friendliness, he might just manage to combine them in a novel way that promotes egalitarian goals outside the conventional liberal box. The combination of pro-market and left-leaning rhetoric, taken at face value, offers at least a hope of the kind of thing Jesse Walker mentioned (“How to be a  Half-Decent Democrat“) as a way for Democrats to attract libertarian votes,

Don’t be a slave to the bureaucracy. Look, I don’t expect you to turn into a libertarian. But there are ways to achieve progressive goals without expanding the federal government, and if you’re willing to entertain enough of those ideas, you’ll be more appealing than a “free-market” president who makes LBJ look thrifty. You could talk about the harm done by agriculture subsidies, by occupational licensing, by eminent domain, by the insane tangle of patent law. And no, I don’t expect you to call for abolishing the welfare state — but maybe you’d like to replace those top-heavy bureacracies with a negative income tax?

Consistently applied, what this suggests is essentially the geolibertarian approach of replacing the administrative and regulatory state with Pigovian taxation of negative externalities and economic rents, and replacing the welfare state bureaucracy with a basic income funded by taxation of rents and externalities.

Although Obama’s departures from establishment liberalism are modest at best, the same tendencies show themselves much more strongly elsewhere within the traditional liberal camp.

RFK, Jr. is a good example. He refers to markets in a positive way, but (unlike Obama and Goolsbee) sharply distinguishes the free market from corporate capitalism. In fact he demonizes the corporate economy in terms of free market principles,

You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public.

… Free markets, when allowed to function, properly value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste – pollution – by reducing, reusing, and recycling…

The truth is, I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer.

Corporate capitalists don’t want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.

Let’s not forget that we taxpayers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put George W. Bush in the White House.

Even better, Dean Baker has explained how the conventional “liberal” vs. “conservative” scripting on economic issues gets everything exactly backward:

Political debates in the United States are routinely framed as a battle between conservatives who favor market outcomes, whatever they may be, against liberals who prefer government intervention to ensure that  families have decent standards-of-living. This description of the two poles is inaccurate…

It is not surprising that conservatives would fashion their agenda in a way that makes it more palatable to the bulk of the population, most of whom are not wealthy and therefore do not benefit from policies that distribute income upward. However, it is surprising that so many liberals and progressives, who oppose conservative policies, eagerly accept the conservatives’ framing of the national debate over economic and social policy. This is comparable to playing a football game where one side gets to determine the defense that the other side will play. This would be a huge advantage in a football game, and it is a huge advantage in politics. As long as liberals allow conservatives to write the script from which liberals argue, they will be at a major disadvantage in policy debates and politics. The conservative framing of issues is so deeply embedded that it  has been widely accepted by ostensibly neutral actors, such as policy professionals or the news media that report on national politics. For example, news reports routinely refer to bilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA or CAFTA, as “free trade” agreements. This is in spite of the fact that one of the main purposes of these agreements is to increase patent protection in developing countries, effectively increasing the length and force of government-imposed monopolies. Whether or not increasing patent protection is desirable policy, it clearly is not “free trade.” It is clever policy for proponents of these agreements to label them as “free  trade” agreements…, but that is not an excuse for neutral commentators to accept this definition….

Unfortunately, the state of the current debate on economic policy is even worse from the standpoint of progressives. Not only have the conservatives been successful in getting the media and the experts to accept their framing and language, they have been largely successful in getting their liberal opponents to accept this framing and language, as well. In the case of trade policy, opponents of NAFTA-type trade deals usually have to explain how they would ordinarily support “free trade,” but not this particular deal. Virtually no one in the public debate stands up and says that these trade deals have nothing to do with free trade….

Testify!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

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

Desde la revolución agrícola, la historia puede conceptualizarse como una carrera armamentista defensiva-ofensiva entre tecnologías creadoras de abundancia y estructuras sociales de expropiación.

Hasta la aparición de la agricultura la sociedad humana nunca pudo producir un excedente suficientemente grande como para soportar una organización social mucho más sofisticada que el grupo cazador-recolector. La agricultura fue la primera tecnología creadora de abundancia suficientemente productiva para soportar clases parasitarias a gran escala. Con la agricultura nació la superestructura de reyes, curas, castas marciales y terratenientes que ordeñaron a las clases productivas como vacas.

Aparentemente ahora nos estamos acercando al final de un intervalo de aproximadamente diez mil años comprendido entre dos hitos. El primer hito fue la aparición de la primera teconología de la abundacia: la agricultura.

Desde entonces hemos estado inmersos en la mencionada carrera armamentista. A veces las tecnologías creadoras de abundancia producen un aumento en el excedente social tan drástico que a la superestructura de clases se le dificulta expropiarlo en su totalidad, lo que se traduce en un aumento de la calidad de vida del ciudadano de a pie, como cuando en la Edad Media el arado y la rotación de cultivos causaron un masivo aumento en la productividad agrícola, los artesanos de las ciudaes libres desarrollaron nuevas tecnologías de producción, y la decadencia del feudalismo resultó en la reducción de las rentas y la emancipación de hecho de grandes sectores del campesinado. Otras veces la superestructura de clase corre con ventaja y las cosas empeoran para el ciudadno común: como en el caso de la represión de las ciudades libres por la monarquía absolutista, lo que Immanuel Wallerstein llamó “el largo siglo dieciseis”, y los Cercamientos.

Estamos llegando al segundo hito, en el que las tecnologías creadoras de abundancia alcanzarán un punto de despegue a partir del cual las superestructuras de expropiación no podrán crecer a la par que la curva de producción.

El intervalo entre los dos hitos ha sido relativamente breve cuando se lo compara con los cientos de miles de años que el homo spaiens ha existido en más o menos lo que es su forma actual, y los millardos de años durante los cuales el sol será capaz de soportar la vida humana. En ese contexto, dicho intervalo puede ser visto como un breve período de ajuste inicial en las etapas tempranas de la productividad humana. El estado fue una anomalía en esta etapa de la explosión tecnológica, en la infancia de la raza humana, a través del cual las clases parasitarias fueron capaces de aprovecharse brevemente de la revolución en la productividad y capturarla como fuente de ingreso.

Hace unos cuarenta años estaba de moda decir que la humanidad estaba entrando en la Era de Acuario. Y en cierto sentido los años 70 en verdad fueron el comienzo de una nueva era de liberación humana, con el nacimiento de dos tecnologías creadoras de abundancia (la computadora personal y las máquinas-herramienta de bajo costo controladas numéricamente) que eventualmente nos liberarán del estado corporativo y sus escaseces artificiales.

La aparante reacción de las décadas que han pasado desde entonces (el neoliberalismo del Consenso de Washington, el Reaganismo y el Tatcherismo, el estado policial de la Guerra Contra las Drogas y la Guerra Contra el Terrorismo, el sueño mojado neconservador de un Reich Milenario regido por un Único Superpoder, el Digital Millenium Copyright Act) puede ser visto como una reacción desesperada del estado corporativo, las últimas convulsiones de un sistema moribundo, un último esfuerzo por parte de los creadores de escasez artificial para suprimir las fuerzas que los destruirán.

Éste último esfuerzo no triunfará. Lo que los sistemas P2P le han hecho a la industria de la música, y lo que Wikileaks le ha hecho al estado nacional de seguridad, son solo pequeños destellos de lo que las tecnologías creadoras de abundancia y libertad harán a las viejas instituciones autoritarias. Sistemas de encriptamiento y darknets están destruyendo el poder de las industrias de la música, editorial y cinematográfica para recolectar rentas sobre lo que ellos llaman “propiedad intelectual”, y eliminando las transacciones económicas como base de soporte de la burocracia. Nuevas tecnologías de producción física, al extraer mayores cantidades de producto de cada vez menor cantidad de insumos, están inutilizando a las enormes cantidades de tierra y capital en poder de las clases privilegiadas como fuente de ingreso. La gente de a pie, con medios baratos de producción física e informacional, pronto seremos capaces de satisfacer nuestras necesidades a través de la pacífica producción e intercambio trabajando una fracción de las horas necesarias actualmente, y sacarnos de encima el peso de mantener a los rentistas de la sociedad.

Si ésta versión de la historia de la humanidad es válida, estamos recién terminando el amanecer de la infancia de la humanidad, y entrando en la larga tarde de su madurez.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 1 de mayo de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

To see the real value of revolutionary parties, programs, and regimes, you need only look at the recent massacre of more than thirty platinum mine workers by the South African regime. Although likened in the media to the Sharpeville massacre, the bloodbath at Marikana was motivated not by race but by class and by economic exploitation.

The platinum workers’ uprising was a reaction against corruption in the National Union of Mineworkers, the largest member organization of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, closely allied with the ANC regime). Former NUM president Cyril Ramaphosa, now a millionaire, sits on the board of directors of the London-based Lonmin corporation which owns the mine where the massacre took place. “Labor leaders” like Ramaphosa, the NUM, and the ANC regime itself — and the mining companies and other economic interests allied with them — have simply replaced the National Party of the Afrikaner regime as the new ruling class. The new face of power is black rather than white, and it cloaks itself in the radical leftist slogans of the old ANC. But beneath the surface “the hands are Esau’s, but the voice is Jacob’s.”

This was followed early this week by a massacre of striking mine workers at the Aurora gold mine — which is owned by the nephew of the president and the grandson of Nelson Mandela.

The lesson? So long as power and hierarchy exist, they will be used by those at the top to live off the sweat and blood of those at the bottom. This is as true of self-proclaimed workers’ and socialist regimes as of any other kind. The only use for power is exploitation. And the very existence of power will transform those who wield it into exploiters, whether you call them “capitalists” or use some other name.

From its origins, the state has been the instrument by which priest-kings, latifundia owners and slave masters, feudal landlords, and capitalists have lived off the labor of the producing classes. In the nineteenth century, with the birth of a large-scale consciousness of this history of class exploitations, the first deliberate movements arose to seize the state and govern in the name of the exploited. But when these workers’ parties came to hold state power, they immediately became a new ruling class. Because that’s all state power is good for: Robbery and exploitation.

In the words of a joint statement by several South African anarchist groups (“ANC Throws Off its Mask! Workers Murdered!” August 20, 2012), “The ANC promised to change the system. Instead, it became part of the system. … Marikana shows the true nature of the state/ government, no matter what party: a bloodthirsty killing machine for the rich black and white ruling class. … Elections do not change the system. Joining the government and becoming a politician is no solution…. A new political party — even a ‘left’ or ‘workers’ party — is no solution. All the political parties are no solution.”

The solution is not to seize the state, to seize control of the hierarchies controlling the dominant political and economic institutions, nor to displace the existing ruling class in control of them. So long as these hierarchies exist, they’ll simply create new ruling classes to replace the old ones. The only solution is to secede from their rule, to bypass them, to make them obsolete, to build a new society in which they are no longer needed.

Another excellent essay by David Pollard on a strategy for defeating the present corporatist system.

The third way to bring about major global change is incapacitation — rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive. This is the method that disease uses to prey on fragile and vulnerable organs, that parasites and venomous creatures use to weaken and sometimes kill their (much larger) hosts, that terrorists use to paralyze their enemies, and that innovative businesses use to undermine, render obsolete and supplant bigger, less flexible businesses. For those of us with neither the patience or religious fanaticism to wait for a global natural catastrophe, nor the naivety to believe in a successful ‘popular’ revolution, this third way is the only way to change, and save, our beleaguered planet.

….Actions that are aimed to incapacitate are called guerrilla (meaning ‘little war’) actions. Since the Vietnam war debacle in the 1960s the very term has struck fear in the hearts of the power elite, because they know that, in today’s heavily concentrated, centralized, interconnected, ‘grid-locked’ society, this is where they are most vulnerable, most powerless to defend themselves.

This is a time-honored strategy in many different left-decentralist traditions, and passes under a variety of names. Perhaps the most well-known is the Wobbly slogan “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” Proudhon expressed something like it in General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, as the mutualist economy growing within the statist one until the former eclipsed the latter. The political would eventually be absorbed in the economic and social, and the distinction between public and private would wither away. Paul Goodman described the process this way:

A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.

This statement by Gustav Landauer is also a good one:

The State is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behavior, we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another…

The process of incapacitation, as Pollard describes it, has four components:

1. Identify the vulnerabilities: Fragility, overconcentration, ignorance, arrogance, lack of diversity, centralization, lack of redundancy, popular disgust, anxiety, dissatisfaction or apprehension, ill-preparedness, lack of agility, overcomplexity (left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing), lack of imagination and creativity, etc.

2. Acquire resources stealthily: Put together what you need without letting your target know you’re doing so, or even what you are capable of doing with them.

3. Develop solutions that exploit the vulnerabilities.

4. Rigorously assess the likelihood of those solutions working effectively (incapacitating the incumbent power), and deploy only the high-probability solutions, quickly, before the incumbents have time to react and defend themselves.

In Part Two, Pollard describes in detail some non-violent ways of fighting this guerrilla war.

The focus will be on new technology, new infrastructure, new models and new processes that replace the vulnerable ones that are the causes of so many of today’s global problems — and ensuring that these replacements are Open Source, and stay in the hands of all the world’s people.

As a paradigm for the successor society, Pollard cites the “village society” advocated by Freeman Dyson in his mind-blowing Wired interview. The villages, based on decentralized energy and information technology, and open-source innovation (including biotech, which I find problematic), will be able to sustain themselves and network with each other independently, for the most part, of the existing corporate economy.

Pollard insists, perversely, on referring to the process of incapacitation and replacement as “the collapse of the market economy.” But in my view, the successor society he envisions has a much stronger and more legitimate claim to the “market” label than does the present corporate society he aims to replace. For example, consider this passage:

The first part of this guerrilla undermining of the corporatist-controlled ‘market’ economy — the ‘making free’ of information — is already underway. The war for free information between corporatists and people is occurring on multiple fronts: The attempt by large corporations to patent everything so it cannot be used by the people without paying an exorbitant and prohibitive fee; the attempt by large corporations to ban file-sharing without first paying extortion to the intellectual property ‘owner’ (little of which actually goes to the artist); the attempt to make more of the information on the Internet ‘pay for itself’. But the people are winning this guerrilla war.

Although Pollard conflates “corporate-controlled” with “market,” in any war “between corporatists and people” the latter have by far the better claim to genuine free market credentials. In most of the cases he lists in the passage above–patents on technology, file-sharing–it’s clearly the corporations who are at war with the “market economy,” and the people who are defending it.

I do have some doubts concerning the presumed illegitimacy of making the Internet “pay for itself”; the “cost principle,” that the consumers of goods and services should pay the cost of providing them, has a venerable individualist anarchist pedigree. But I strenuously oppose attempts at a corporate “enclosure” of the Internet by the information equivalent of absentee landlords; far better to treat it as a social commons. Nevertheless, to the extent that services cost something to provide, somebody has to pay for them–and that somebody should be the beneficiary.

Apparently, Pollard makes the common mistake of confusing the market with the cash nexus. Writing almost 36 years ago, Karl Hess proclaimed in The Libertarian Forum:

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

Or as Jesse Walker put it once on the LeftLibertarian discussion list:

I have a fondness for libertarian socialists of the Paul Goodman/Colin Ward type — the kind who see market exchanges and non-market forms of voluntary cooperation as interpenetrating each other, rather than regarding the cash nexus as overwhelming everything it touches.

Of course, I prefer to use the term “market” to encompass all forms of voluntary interactions, whether monetized or not. But the point is that a society based on market interaction might well look more like something designed by Ivan Illich than by Milton Friedman; a little more like The Farm than Galt’s Gulch; a little more…. well, you get the idea.

Pollard’s post contains an oddly disturbing anecdote. At a public informational event on wind power, presented by the Canadian government, Pollard describes the bizarrely negative reactions of one (to say the least) rather exercised fellow:

One extremely agitated gentleman kept trying to sabotage the day’s events. Having all these local, piecemeal energy producers was ‘grossly inefficient’, he said, and for that reason (and because they are ‘eyesores’) they should be banned, in favour of large mega-farms of energy owned by private industry. Private industry would pick more ‘efficient’ sites, get economies of scale, and they ‘knew the business’ and would be motivated by profits to run these farms in a more businesslike way.

Again, the alternative energy advocates (aside–a big aside–from their government funding) were far more on the side of free markets than was that scary specimen.

Besides being so far off the high end of Adorno’s F-scale as to be positively radioactive (is there such a thing as a Type-AAA personality?), that poor guy is utterly wrong. The distribution of energy through centralized networks is extremely costly and inefficient. With decentralized production of energy at the point of consumption, on the other hand, almost nothing is lost in transmission. If decentralized energy production were as “grossly inefficient” as he makes out, it wouldn’t have to be banned; it would lose out to more efficient competition from the utility dinosaurs. On the other hand, if centralized energy production for the grid is so “efficient,” why is it one of the most subsidized industries in existence? And while we’re at it, private citizens voluntarily cooperating to produce their own energy is “private industry.” It’s a hell of a lot more “private” than corporations that can’t survive without suckling at the government teat. They “know the business” all right: like a rich courtier of Louis XIV, they know how “profitable” it is to have the king’s ear.

Pollard continues:

This guy was utterly outnumbered on Saturday, but watch out — as word gets out that we can all be energy self-sufficient, and own our own ‘utility’, getting energy at cost (which is plummeting), the energy companies will join the war on the other side. They have billions to lose, and will not stand idly by as the peasants take back the means of their own production.

Ain’t that the truth! As the public utilities start to lose ground to people producing their own energy for themselves, we can expect them to discover all sorts of ways that this threatens the “public safety” and “general welfare.” It will likely follow a pattern similar to that of imported prescription drugs, which bogus “free market” advocates want to prohibit on grounds of “safety.” Even at present, many localities have “safety codes” requiring houses to be hooked up to the grid. Ernest Callenbach, in the fictional setting of Ecotopia Rising, described a further escalation of the same phenonmenon, as an increasingly desperate corporate system lashed out against the human-scale society replacing it.

“Public safety” and “general welfare” are the last refuge of scoundrels.

NOTE: 

Dave Pollard, in response to my criticisms of his use of the term “market,” pointed out:

I try to always use “market” in quotes to indicate its (mis-)use as a euphemism for unregulated oligopoly. I love the idea of a free market for regulating prices.

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

Uno de los requerimientos para un nuevo “tratado de libre comercio” entre la Unión Europea e India es la “exclusividad de datos”, lo cual destripará la indusria de medicamentos genéricos del gigante asiático.

la “exclusividad de datos” significa que los ensayos clínicos llevados a cabo por una empresa antes de mercadear un producto no aplican para obtener la aprobación gubernamental en términos de seguridad o eficacia para la versión genérica del medicamento. Cualquier empresa que quiera mercadear la versión genérica de un medicamento patentado tendrá que llevar a cabo sus propios ensayos clínicos como condición. Ésto contradice directamente uno de los argumentos comunmente esgrimidos por los apologistas de las patentes: que éstas son un antídoto contra los secretos industriales porque supuestamente requieren un mayor grado de apertura por parte de los productores como requisito para obtenerlas.

La “exclusividad de datos” es una sentencia de muerte no solo para aquellos que no pueden pagar tributo a los dueños de patentes monopólicas concedidas por el estado, sino también para las gentes de Suráfrica y Brasil, países en los que la disponibilidad de medicamentos baratos para tratar el VIH depende de la producción de genéricos en India.

No nos engañemos: Los que llaman “tratado de libre comercio” a esta abominación son unos embusteros. Es como decir que las Leyes de Núremberg fueron una declaración de derechos civiles. La gente de la industria farmacéutica y sus lacayos en Washington y Bruselas se vanaglorian cada vez que la frase “libre comercio” sale de sus inmundamente mentirosas bocas.

Los que argumentan que las patentes son necesarias para recuperar la inversión realizada en desarrollar nuevos medicamentos se equivocan. El sistema de patentes sesga los esfuerzos de investigación y desarrollo hacia la burla de las propias reglas del sistema.

En primer lugar, se ha producido un dramático alejamiento del desarrollo de medicinas fundamentalmente nuevas, porque es mucho más efectivo invertir en hacer pequeñas modificaciones en las fórmulas de medicamentos cuyas patentes están a punto de expirar de manera que éstas puedan re-patentarse.

En segundo lugar, una gran parte de la investigación básica en la que se basa el desarrollo de medicamentos es financiada por el estado en universidades públicas. Aproximadamente la mitad del costo total de investigación y desarrollo de medicamentos es cubierto por el contribuyente. Y en los Estados Unidos, bajo los términos de legislación aprobada en los años ochenta, las patentes sobre medicamentos desarrollados con dinero del contribuyente son literalmente regaladas (transferidas sin contraprestación financiera alguna) a las compañías farmacéuticas que las producen y mercadean.

Tercero, la mayor parte del costo de investigación y desarrollo de medicamentos se genera no por los ensayos clínicos llevados a cabo para probar un medicamento antes de mercadearla, si no por los gastos incurridos por las empresas farmacéuticas en apropiarse de las patentes de todas las alternativas posiblemente competitivas.

Otro ejemplo de éste fenómeno son las patenets sobre “variedades de alto rendimiento” de Monsanto, supuesto beneficio de la “Revolución Verde”. A dichas variedades, como lo señala Frances Moore Lappe, les correspondería más bien el nombre de “variedades de alta respuesta”. Osea, dichas variedades no son especialmente fuertes o fáciles de recuperar bajo las condiciones normales experimentadas por campesinos locales en régimen de subsitencia, como lo son las variedades desarrolladas en el curso de varias generaciones para resistir las condiciones locales. Por el contrario, fueron manufacturadas para producir altos rendimientos bajo condiciones artificiales como la aplicación sumamente instensiva de fertilizantes sintéticos y sistemas de irrigación subsidiados por el estado.

Dicho de otra manera, las semillas de “alto rendimiento” modificadas genéticamente como las producidas por Monsanto, están idealmente adaptadas a las necesidades del monocultivo de gran escala en plantaciones propiedad de una variedad de oligarquías terratenientes en el tercer mundo, por lo general robadas a campesinos cuyos derechos de propiedad tradicionales sobre las tierras en régimen de subsitencia fueron anulados. Las semillas de Monsanto están pensadas para un modelo de negocio muy particular, artificialmente rentable gracias al estado en detrimento de la producción de subsistencia.

La consecuencia práctica es trasladar la producción de un régimen ampliamente distribuído de pequeñas parcelas de tierra en régimen de substistencia a la producción comercial de gran escala para la exportación a mercados urbanos. Bajo la presión de ser expropiados (básicamente una versión moderna de los cercamientos) y competidores subsidiados por el estado, montones de personas que una vez fueron capaces de alimentarse a sí mismos haciendo uso de su tierra ahora carecen del poder de compra para comprar alimentos producidos en las plantaciones monocultivistas de los oligarcas.

Y para colmo, las patentes de Monsanto, que criminalizan el guardar semillas, aseguran que éstas se mantegan suficientemente caras como para que a cualquier pequeño productor le sea imposible comprarlas.

Los apologistas de la “propiedad intelectual” suelen decir que la violación de los “derechos de propiedad intelectual” y las patentes es “robar”. Pero en realidad lo que es cierto es justamente lo contrario: la “propiedad intelectual” es un robo descarado. Pero además, es un asesinato.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 11 de mayo de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

Up-front disclaimer: I’m a long-time Apple fanboy. I bought my first Macintosh in 1994, and ever since then I’ve defaulted to Macs versus Windows PCs and even Linux boxes when I’ve been able to get one. To my mind, Apple’s design ethos is top-notch. Their stuff is usually innovative and always, always, always, to drag out an old phrase, “user friendly.”

That said, as a company Apple has come a long way in the wrong direction — exactly the opposite direction from that indicated in the seminal, game-changing Macintosh “1984” commercial — over the last few years. As time goes on, Apple seems to rely less and less on its ability to create a groundbreaking product, and more and more on its ability to use the power of government to prevent others from doing likewise.

The verdict in last month’s patent lawsuit — in which Apple managed to have Korean electronics firm Samsung sanctioned for, among other things, violating an Apple patent on the shape of tablet computers — is just the tip of an iceberg extending well below the waterline of recent history.

Apple once sued New York City (“the Big Apple”) over an apple-shaped logo.

It has sued other companies over the use of the lower-case letter “i” and the word “pod.”

It sued Digital Research for copying the “look and feel” of MacOS — a “look and feel” which it had itself stolen from Xerox Alto/Star (even going so far as to raid Xerox to staff the original Mac design team).

It sued Psystar for manufacturing hardware which could run MacOS X.

An obvious first reaction to much of this litigation is to notice how frivolous it is. A company claiming an exclusive right to make cuboid devices with rounded corners? Really? I just walked through my kitchen and counted four such devices, none manufactured by Apple. Claiming ownership of the lower-case letter “i” seems … well, a bit broad, don’t you think?

It would be a mistake to focus on the frivolity of Apple’s claims, though. As “intellectual property” critic Stephan Kinsella points out, “[t]he problem is not low-quality patents, nor patent trolls, nor software patents, nor unclear nonobviousness standards, nor an incompetent PTO, nor too-long patent terms, nor inadequate prior art databases — though these are all problems. The problem is good patents, high quality patents, issued to cover existing products of existing companies, who use them to bash their competitors over the head.”

In this latest case, Apple has straightforwardly demanded that American consumers buy its devices rather than Samsung’s, and has the wherewithal to enforce that demand. Not because Apple’s devices are cheaper than Samsung’s. Not because Apple’s devices are better than Samsung’s in this way or that. Because, and only because, Apple’s friends in government have guns and they are pointing those guns at Samsung and telling Samsung it can’t even offer you its products.

At some point, this approach will inevitably backfire on Apple.

Internally, there’s no incentive — no sense of urgency — to remain innovative when you don’t think you have to. The ability to seemingly lock down a market to your old products translates, in internal culture, into an unwillingness to spend money and man-hours improving those products.

Externally, market forces have a tendency to out regardless of the speed bumps that capitalist protectionism puts in their way. The monopolies Apple believes it has secured will eventually be circumvented or made obsolete by young, hungry competitors who don’t yet have friends in Washington.

In the meantime, here’s hoping that Apple will see the light, halt its ongoing degeneration into a sleazy protection racket, and return to being a company that thrives on the basis of great products.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, ¿Se Está Pudriendo La Manzana de Apple?

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

Resaltando a China como ejemplo, la BBC reporta que “el índice de precios alimenticios de la Organización para la Agricultura y la Alimentación de las Naciones Unidas llegó a su máximo nivel desde que fue creado en 1990”. “A medida que suben los precios”, el autor de la nota afirma que “también lo hace la pobreza”. Sólo en los primeros meses del año, algunos mercados asiáticos han experimentado subidas de hasta diez por ciento en los precios locales de los alimentos, lo que según algunas estimaciones, potencialmente podría sumergir a 65 millones de personas en la pobreza.

A pesar de que muchos observadores y comentaristas no dudan en exhortar a los gobiernos a que actúen, postulando los típicos argumentos de “falla de mercado”, el probelma alimenticio mundial es una característica de la intervención estatista. Tal como lo observó el profesor Siva Vaidhyanathan (respecto a las leyes de propiedad intelectual), “Las industrias productoras de contenido tienen interés en crear escasez artificial a través de cualquier medio legal y tecnológico que tengan a su disposición”.

Y lo mismo se aplica a proveedores de alimentos básicos cuyo interés es asegurarse que dependamos exclusivamente de ellos para la nutrición que necesitamos para sobrevivir. Si unas cuantas empresas agroindustriales y un puñado de mayoristas y minoristas, todos subsidiados y protegidos por el estado, pueden unilateralmente controlar la oferta, podrán también exigir que se les pague cualquier precio que se les antoje. Ésta propensidad a crear industrias cada vez más cartelizadas con cada vez menos “competidores” es endémica del capitalismo de estado, pero no es una característica de los mercados genuinamente libres.

Los mercados libres, al contrario, dividen y moderan el poder de mercado negando protecciones y privilegios especiales y abriendo la competencia a una gran variedad tanto de entrantes como de métodos. Solo cuando la fuerza de la ley neutraliza las amenzadas potenciales al poder corporativo (con, entre otros impedimentos, estándares de “seguridad” y “protección al consumidor”) es que los capitanes de industria pueden ascender a las cumbres del poder en el mercado.

La idea de que los conglomerados monstruosos que caracterizan al capitalismo corporativo le temen a las regulaciones de salud y seguridad, es un lugar común. Sinembargo, éstas regulaciones son las que impiden la proliferación de chiringuitos de alimentos en cada esquina, que florezcan los pequeños productores locales que no pueden hacerle frente al costo de saltar sobre la madeja de obstáculos arbitrarios e injustificados que la clase política les pone en el camino.

Las élites poderosas hacen lobby a favor de nuevas leyes que restrinjan las opciones del consumidor, impiediendo que la gente decida con quién hacer negocios. Lo que hoy pagamos por la comida está bastante disasociado de lo que cuesta producirla. Mientras un mercado verdaderamente libre ejercería la presión adecuada para reducir los precios hasta que reflejasen el verdadero valor de un producto, las restricciones a la competencia impuestas por el capitalismo de estado permiten que las grandes corporaciones expriman a los consumidores.

En lo que representa una ruptura aún más flagrante con la verdadera disciplina del mercado, el subsidio a los medios de transporte crea incentivos para que la mayoría de nosotros consumamos alimentos producidos a cientos o miles de kilómetros de distancia en lugar de a cientos ó miles de metros de distancia. Por eso es que cuando suben los precios del petróleo, los precios de la comida se disparan. Sin verdaderas alternativas a la basura producida en masa por los conglomerados agro-industriales fortificados por el estado, no existe un incentivo real para proveer al indefenso consumidor con nada que se acerque a ser un buen producto a buen precio.

En lugares como China y el Sudeste asiático, los gobiernos han prácticamente regalado las tierras que eran cultivadas por campesinos locales durante miles de años, tierras que alimentaban a sus familias y comunidades, a las grandes empresas agroindustriales. El estado y sus favoritos no tienen argumentos justificables para relcamar para sí esas tierras bajo ningún estándard mínimamente sólido de derechos de propiedad; pero la ética del estado nunca ha ido más allá de la máxima que dice que “el que tiene el poder para hacer lo que le dá la gana en favor de sus intereses, que lo haga”.

La escasez de los alimentos y el aumento de sus precios que comienzan a dibujar una crisis alimentaria global, son creación del estado, un fenómeno que existe de manera totalmente independiente de nada que pueda llamarse “fuerzas de mercado” con un mínimo de honestidad intelectual. Los anarquistas de mercado removerían las restricciones y la coerción del sistema de producción de alimentos y permitirían que el intercambio volutnario alimentase al mundo.

Lejos de pintar un paraíso utópico, los anarquistas de mercado argumentan que sin la escasez artificial creada por el estado en favor de buscadores de renta privilegiados, la gente de todo el mundo podría proveer de buena alimentación a sus familias trabajando una fracción del número de horas que tienen que trabajar hoy en día. Podemos implorar a los miembros de la élite política para que “arreglen” el problema que crearon, o podemos permitir que la cooperación y el comercio verdaderamente libre, y a escala verdaderamente humana, satisfaga las necesidades de la gente.

Artículo original publicado por David D’Amato el 13 de mayo de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

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

En un admirable momento de franqueza, Thomas Friedman dijo una vez que “para que el globalismo funcione, Estados Unidos no puede tener miedo de actuar como el super-poder todopoderoso que es. La mano oculta del mercado nunca podrá funcionar sin otra, igualmente oculta, pero en forma de puño… Y el puño oculto que mantiene al mundo seguro para que las tecnologías de Silicon Valley florezcan no es otra cosa que el ejército, la fuerza aérea y la marina estadounidenses”.

Por muy poderoso que pueda parecer este orden corporativo global, haríamos bien en recordar que en realidad es muy vulnerable. Sólo es tan fuerte como su eslabón más débil.

La manifestación más reciente de su vulnerabilidad fue demostrada por la aparente secesión de Islandia, durante uno de esos breves y dluídos períodos en los que los gobiernos sucumebn a las presiones populares que arrementen contra el orden corporativo global. Un referéndum reciente rechazó un gigantesco y hamiltoniano salvataje bancario, calcado del modelo TARP estadounidense.

Y mientras tanto, uno de los movimientos más poderosos del mundo en pro de la libertad de información obligó al Althing (parlamento) islandés a establecer a Islandia como un refugio para la libertad de información. La Iniciativa Islandesa para Medios Modernos (IIMM), introducida hace más de un año con amplio apoyo en el Althing, fue aprobada unánimemente en Junio del año pasado. La iniciativa, según Birgitta Jonsdottir, miembro del Althing, es hacer de Islandia un “refugio para la libertad de información, la libertad de expresión y de discurso”. En particular, esto significa que el país se convertiría en un lugar seguro para que gente de otros países instale servidores y cuelgue contenido digital que sus gobiernos puedan querer bloquear.

Uno de los principales activistas y organizadores tras la iniciativa que coopera cercanamente con Birgitta es Smari McCarthy de la P2P Foundation, a quien conozco a través de Internet. Smari hace mención específica de la meta de proveer servicios de hosting para los que denuncian actos de corrupción y revelan secretos estatales. Y será un refugio para evadir leyes esquizofrénicas de difamación como las de Inglaterra, toda vez que alguna corporación como Trafigura quiera hacer uso de una “súper orden judicial” para impedir que salga a la luz pública una pregunta comprometedora, como la que en su momento hizo un miembro de la Cámara de los Comunes.

Ha habido algo de especulación sobre si los planes de liberar la información en Islandia incluyen el repudio de los derechos de “propiedad intelectual” promovidos por el paradigma del Consenso de Washington. ¿Se convertirá Islandia en la base de operaciones para el sucesor de The Pirate Bay tanto como para el de Wikileaks?.

Atacar la política de propiedad intelectual no parece estar en los planes inmediatos de política pública en Islandia. Aparentemente, los promotores de la IIMM decidieron que atacar frontalmente a los derechos de propiedad intelectual tendría un efecto negativo sobre el resto de sus esfuerzos.

Pero yo estoy familiarizado con lo que escribe McCarthy y con los grupos que frecuenta, y él tiene una visión escencialemente negativa de los derechos de propiedad intelectual. El movimiento que impulsa a la IIMM incluye a activistas que abogan por la abolición de los derechos de propiedad intelectual tanto como por la libertad de información. Y McCarthy conoce a varios miembros del Althing que favorecen disminuír significativamente la versión maximalista de las leyes de copyright predominante en los Estados Unidos.

Algunos de los artículos preliminares de la nueva constitución se escribieron con un lenguaje que ofrece grandes esperanzas en cuanto a la lucha por los derechos digitales. La versión preliminar del Artículo 26 (la numeración actual puede cambiar en el futuro) dice así: “Todos pueden crear, buscar, recibir, almacenar y diseminar información”.

Cabe recordar que no es necesario repudiar al copyright como concepto para quebrar la exibilidad práctica de los derechos de copyright. Tal como lo señala Cory Doctorow, la computadora personal es una máquina para copiar bits, y cualquier modelo de negocio que dependa de impedirle copiar bits a la gente está condenado al fracaso. Exigir el copyright digital es simplemente imposible dentro de los principios tradicionales que hasta hoy han regido dicho concepto, y requiere un bloqueo totalitario de los medios de comunicación impuesto por un superpoder y sus secuaces, sin precedente alguno desde el viejo imperio soviético.

Simplemente restablecer las doctrinas tradicionales del uso justo y la primera venta, implicaría la muerte del principio de copyright en la práctica. Éstos principios son los que regían en la ley de copyright para los medios impresos en los Estados Unidos alrededor de 1980, y que regían también la vieja legislación del tema en España, por lo cual Estados Unidos y otros países del aquelarre del DRM amenazaron en convertirla en un Estado Paria.

Incluso las nuevas provisiones legales islandesas que eliminan la responsabilidad legal de los ISPs en cuanto a copyright lastimaría bastante su exigibilidad. Y es poco probable que las cortes sean más propensas a alinearse con intentos de cerrar ISPs a través de amenazas legales sin atenerse al debido procedimiento en casos de supuesta “piratería”, que en casos de difamación y revelación de secretos de estado. Simplemente eliminando la habilidad de las industrias de contenido de reclutar a los ISPs como cómplices será un gran paso adelante.

Podemos apostar a que, incluso sin legislación adicional, Islandia será una sede bastante poco amigable para los nazis del copyright.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 28 de mayo de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

“I told you so” isn’t a very gentle or polite opening for a conversation, so let’s just forget that I told you so both in 2008 and 2012 and treat those campaigns as phases you had to get through on your own, without distraction and paying no heed to naysayers, to get where you are now. The average Ron Paul supporter’s energy and dedication certainly commands my respect and, I think, the respect of most others whose path toward freedom didn’t take them down that road.

Hopefully, you can now see that Ron Paul is not going to restore the old American republic and lead you to liberty. Hopefully, you can see now that not only is it not going to happen, but that it never was going to happen.

The deck was thoroughly stacked. Against Paul, against you, against any threat to a status quo which has calcified over the last 120 years (starting with the introduction of “ballot access” laws to narrow the November choice to two, and the evolution of primaries and conventions toward a process that inevitably produces two look-alikes).

That status quo may break or crumble under external pressure, but it will never soften to internal re-shaping of the type that a Republican presidential campaign proposes.

Where to go from here? That is the question.

As a first step, I propose that you examine the two Paul presidential campaigns, with the benefit of hindsight and an eye toward identifying their essentials. You’ll find that much of what you held dear back then can be jettisoned — the partisan and political compromises bolted onto the campaign’s libertarian superstructure as armor or camouflage for the purpose of “working within the system.” Now that you’re about to abandon politics, you won’t need those things any more.

Auditing the Fed, resurrecting “states rights,” attempting to appeal to a base of social conservative voters who fear freedom so deeply that they’ll swallow anything the GOP establishment feeds them … those tactics did not serve you well where you were, and you won’t need them where you’re going.

Did I say you’re about to abandon politics? Yes, I did. Six years, $70 million, numerous lawless actions on the part of the Republican establishment and two heart-breaking failures to penetrate the GOP’s national convention, with a candidate eminently qualified for the presidency by what you thought were the relevant standards, should be enough to convince you that “working within the system” isn’t going to get the job done. Welcome to the real world.

The good news is that in that real world, you’re part of the majority. Most Americans either won’t or can’t participate in the state’s quadrennial “election” ritual. President Barack Obama took office with the express consent of less than one in four Americans. Nearly as many voted for someone else. More than twice as many voted for no one at all.

While it’s true that most of those non-voters are at best only marginally conscious of the significance of their abstention, neither are they fully invested in the system you sought to reform and now understand you must abolish. Even if they haven’t joined your army, they’re bona fide potential recruits, unlike the diehard Republican voters you’ve spent the last six years hectoring for support.

The first step, of course, is to become one of those non-voters.

The second step? Status esse delendam: The state must be destroyed.

If not now, when? If not you, who?

The R3VOLution is dead. Long live the revolution.

To what extent should libertarians concern themselves with social commitments, practices, projects, or movements that seek social outcomes beyond, or other than, the standard libertarian commitment to expanding the scope of freedom from government coercion?

Clearly, a consistent and principled libertarian cannot support efforts or beliefs that are contrary to libertarian principles — such as efforts to engineer social outcomes by means of government intervention. But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, then what should libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commitments that pursue their ends through noncoercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slowdowns and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action? Which social movements should they oppose, which should they support, and toward which should they counsel indifference? And how do we tell the difference?

In other words, should libertarianism be seen as a “thin” commitment, which can be happily joined to absolutely any set of values and projects, “so long as it is peaceful,” or is it better to treat it as one strand among others in a “thick” bundle of intertwined social commitments? Such disputes are often intimately connected with other disputes concerning the specifics of libertarian rights theory or class analysis and the mechanisms of social power. To grasp what’s at stake, it will be necessary to make the question more precise and to tease out the distinctions among some of the different possible relationships between libertarianism and “thicker” bundles of social, cultural, religious, or philosophical commitments, which might recommend integrating the two on some level or another.

The forms of “thickness” I am about to discuss should not be confused with two other kinds of commitments, one tightly and one loosely connected to libertarianism: those logically entailed by the philosophy itself (what I call “thickness in entailment”), such as opposition to private aggression, and those that relate simply to being a good person (“thickness in conjunction”), such as being a loving parent. As an example of the first category, it might be argued that libertarians ought to actively oppose certain traditional cultural practices that involve the systematic use of violence against peaceful people — such as East African customs of forcing clitoridectomy on unwilling girls or the American and European custom of judges and juries ignoring the facts and the law to acquit or reduce the sentence for men who murdered unfaithful wives or their lovers. Principled libertarianism logically entails criticism of these social and cultural practices for the same reason that it entails criticism of government intervention: because the nonaggression principle condemns any violence against individual rights to life, liberty, and property, regardless of who commits it, and not just forms that are officially practiced by government.

Between the tightest and the loosest possible connections, at least four other kinds of connections might exist between libertarianism and further social commitments, offering a number of important, but subtly distinct, avenues for thick libertarian analysis and criticism.

Thickness for Application

First, there might be some commitments that a libertarian can reject without formally contradicting the nonaggression principle, but which she cannot reject without in fact interfering with its proper application. Principles beyond libertarianism alone may be necessary for determining where my rights end and yours begin, or for stripping away conceptual blinders that prevent certain violations of liberty from being recognized as such.

Consider the way in which garden-variety political collectivism prevents many nonlibertarians from even recognizing taxation or legislation by a democratic government as being forms of coercion in the first place. (After all, didn’t “we” consent to it?) Or, perhaps more controversially, think of the feminist criticism of the traditional division between the “private” and the “political” sphere, and of those who divide the spheres in such a way that pervasive, systemic violence and coercion within families turn out to be justified, or excused, or simply ignored as something “private” and therefore less than a serious form of violent oppression. If feminists are right about the way in which sexist political theories protect or excuse systematic violence against women, there is an important sense in which libertarians, because they are libertarians, should also be feminists. Importantly, the commitments that libertarians need to have here aren’t just applications of general libertarian principle to a special case; the argument calls in resources other than the nonaggression principle to determine just where and how the principle is properly applied. Thus the thickness called for is thicker than logical entailment, but the cash value of the thick commitments is the direct contribution they make toward the complete application of the nonaggression principle.

Thickness from Grounds

Second, libertarians have many different ideas about the theoretical foundation for the nonaggression principle — that is, about the best reasons for being a libertarian. But whatever general foundational beliefs a given libertarian has, those beliefs may have some logical implications other than libertarianism alone. Thus there may be cases in which certain beliefs or commitments could be rejected without contradicting the nonaggression principle per se, but could not be rejected without logically undermining the deeper reasons that justify the nonaggression principle. Although you could consistently accept libertarianism without accepting these commitments or beliefs, you could not do so reasonably: Rejecting the commitments means rejecting the proper grounds for libertarianism.

Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. Social systems of status and authority include not only exercises of coercive power by the government, but also a knot of ideas, practices, and institutions based on deference to traditionally constituted authority. In politics these patterns of deference show up most clearly in the honorary titles, submissive etiquette, and unquestioning obedience traditionally expected by, and willingly extended to, heads of state, judges, police, and other visible representatives of government “law and order.” Although these rituals and habits of obedience exist against the backdrop of statist coercion and intimidation, they are also often practiced voluntarily. Similar kinds of deference are often demanded from workers by bosses, or from children by parents or teachers. Submission to traditionally constituted authorities is reinforced not only through violence and threats, but also through art, humor, sermons, written history, journalism, child-rearing, and so on.

Although political coercion is the most distinctive expression of political inequality, you could — in principle — have a consistently authoritarian social order without any use of force. Even in a completely free society, everyone could, in principle, still voluntarily agree to bow and scrape and speak only when spoken to in the presence of the (mutually agreed-on) town chief, or unthinkingly agree to obey whatever restrictions and regulations he tells them to follow in their own business or personal lives, or agree to give him as much in voluntary “taxes” on their income or property as he might ask. So long as the expectation of submission and the demands for wealth to be rendered were backed up only by verbal harangues, cultural glorifications of the wise and virtuous authorities, social ostracism of “unruly” dissenters, and so on, these demands would violate no one’s individual rights to liberty or property.

But while there’s nothing logically inconsistent about a libertarian envisioning — or even championing — this sort of social order, it would certainly be weird. Noncoercive authoritarianism may be consistent with libertarian principles, but it is hard to reasonably reconcile the two. Whatever reasons you may have for rejecting the arrogant claims of power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats — say, for example, the Jeffersonian notion that all men and women are born equal in political authority and that no one has a natural right to rule or dominate other people’s affairs — probably serve just as well for reasons to reject other kinds of authoritarian pretension, even if they are not expressed by means of coercive government action. While no one should be forced as a matter of policy to treat her fellows with the respect due to equals, or to cultivate independent thinking and contempt for the arrogance of power, libertarians certainly can — and should — criticize those who do not, and exhort our fellows not to rely on authoritarian social institutions, for much the same reasons that we have for endorsing libertarianism in the first place.

Strategic Thickness — The Causes of Liberty

Third, there also may be cases in which certain ideas, practices, or projects are entailed by neither the nonaggression principle nor the best reasons for it, and are not logically necessary for its correct application, either, but are preconditions for implementing the nonaggression principle in the real world. Although rejecting these ideas, practices, or projects would be logically compatible with libertarianism, their success might be important or even necessary for libertarianism to get much purchase in an existing statist society, or for a future free society to emerge from statism without widespread poverty or social conflict, or for a future free society to sustain itself against aggressive statist neighbors, the threat of civil war, or an internal collapse back into statism.

To the extent that other ideas, practices, or projects are preconditions for a flourishing free society, libertarians have strategic reasons to endorse them, even if they are conceptually independent of libertarian principles.

Thus, for example, left-libertarians such as Roderick Long have argued that libertarians have genuine reasons to be concerned about large inequalities of wealth or large numbers of people living in absolute poverty, and to support voluntary associations, such as mutual-aid societies and voluntary charity. Not because free market principles somehow logically mandate some particular socioeconomic outcome; and not merely because charity and widespread material well-being are worth pursuing for their own sake (which they may be). Rather, the point is that there may be a significant causal relationship between economic outcomes and the material prospects for sustaining a free society.

Even a totally free society in which large numbers of people are desperately poor is likely to be in great danger of collapsing into civil war. A totally free society in which a small class of tycoons owns 99 percent of the property and the vast majority of the population own almost nothing is unlikely to remain free for long if the tycoons should decide to use their wealth to purchase coercive legal privileges against the unpropertied majority — simply because they have a lot of resources to attack with and the majority hasn’t got the material resources to defend themselves.

Now, to the extent that persistent, severe poverty, and large-scale inequalities of wealth are almost always the result of government intervention, it’s unlikely that totally free societies would face such dire situations. Over time, many if not most of these problems would likely sort themselves out spontaneously through free-market processes, even without conscious anti-poverty activism.

But problems of poverty or economic inequality are still likely to be extremely pressing for societies like ours, which are not currently free, but which libertarians hope to help become free. Certainly in our unfree market there are widespread poverty and large-scale inequalities of wealth, most of it created by the heavy hand of government intervention in the form of direct subsidies and the creation of rigged or captive markets. Those who now enjoy the fruit of those privileges will continue to exercise some of the tremendous advantage they enjoy in material resources and political pull to pressure government into perpetuating or expanding the interventions from which they benefit. Since libertarians aim to abolish those interventions, it may well make good strategic sense for them to support voluntary, nongovernmental efforts that work to undermine or bypass consolidated political-economic power. Otherwise we will find ourselves trying to fight with slingshots while freedom’s enemies fire back with bazookas.

Thickness from Consequences — The Effects of Liberty

Finally, there may be social practices or outcomes that libertarians should (in some sense) be committed to opposing, even though they are not themselves coercive, because 1) government coercion is a precondition for them and 2) there are independent reasons for regarding them as social evils. If aggression is morally illegitimate, then libertarians are entitled not only to condemn it, but also to condemn the destructive results that flow from it — even if those results are, in some important sense, external to the actual coercion.

Thus, for example, left-libertarians such as Kevin Carson and Matt MacKenzie have argued forcefully for libertarian criticism of certain business practices — such as low-wage sweatshop labor — as exploitative. Throughout the twentieth century most libertarians rushed to the defense of such practices on the grounds that they result from market processes and are often the best economic options for extremely poor people in developing countries. The state-socialist solution of expansive government regulation of wages and conditions would, it is argued, distort the market, violate the rights of workers and bosses to freely negotiate the terms of labor, and harm the very workers that the regulators professed to help.

The problem with trying to use free market economic principles in the defense of such labor practices is that those practices arose in markets that are far from being free. In Carson’s and MacKenzie’s view, while twentieth-century libertarians were right to claim that existing modes of production should not be even further distorted by expanded government regimentation, too many believed that those modes would be the natural outcome of an undistorted market. Against these confusions, Carson and MacKenzie have revived an argument drawn from the tradition of nineteenth-century free-market individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, who maintained that prevailing government privileges for business — monopoly, regulatory cartelization of banking, manipulation of the currency, legal restrictions and military violence against union strikers, politicized distribution of land to connected speculators and developers, and more — distorted markets in such a way as to systematically push workers into precarious and impoverishing economic arrangements and to force them, against the backdrop of the unfree market in land and capital, to make ends meet by entering a “free” job market on the bosses’ terms.

On Tucker’s view, as on Carson’s and MacKenzie’s, this sort of systemic concentration of wealth and “market” power can only persist as long as the government intervenes to sustain it. Free-market competition would free workers to better their own lives outside traditional corporate channels and would allow entrepreneurs to tear down top-heavy corporate behemoths through vigorous competition for land, labor, and capital.

Thus to the extent that sweatshop conditions and starvation wages are sustained, and alternative arrangements like workers’ co-ops suppressed, through dramatic restrictions on property rights throughout the developing world — restrictions exploited by opportunistic corporations that often collaborate with authoritarian governments — libertarians, as libertarians, have good reasons to condemn the social evils that arise from these labor practices. Thus libertarians should support voluntary, state-free forms of solidarity — such as private “fair trade” certification, wildcat unionism, or mutual-aid societies — that work to undermine exploitative practices and build a new society within the shell of the old. There is every reason to believe that in a truly free market the conditions of ordinary laborers, even those who are very poor, would be quite different and much better.

I should make it clear, if it is not yet clear, that I have not attempted to provide a detailed justification for the specific claims I have made on behalf of “thick” commitments. Just which social and cultural projects libertarians, as libertarians, should incorporate into theory and practice remains to be hashed out in a detailed debate.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of Charles Johnson’s “Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin“.

Translations for this article:

• Deutsch, Libertarismus durch dick und dünn.

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

Tom Geohegan (en su libro Were You Born in the Wrong Continent?) defiende las ventajas del modelo socialdemocrático europeo versus el modelo neoliberal estadounidense. Por supuesto, la derecha siempre se sentirá impulsada a defender el honor del modelo de capitalismo salvaje estadounidense que ha prevalecido desde aproximadamente 1980 como si se tratase del “libre mercado” del que ellos tanto hablan.

Nosotros desde la izquierda de libre mercado señalaremos siempre que lo que los cometaristas de la CNBC y los columnistas del Wall Street Journal llaman “libre mercado”, es cualquier cosa menos eso.

La crítica de Geohegan en este sentido se complenta bien con la nuestra. Muchos de sus comentarios en el libro sigieren que el capitalismo neoliberal estadounidense no solo es estatista, sino que es tan estatista como el sistema socialdemócrata alemán (incluso si hacemos la medición en términos de tamaño y costo total del aparato estatal).

Por ejemplo, los estadounidenses pagan aproximadamente cuatro quintas partes de lo que pagan los europeos occidentales en impuestos. ¿Pero tienen los estadounidenses una red de seguridad social, o beneficios sociales, o un sistema de salud de pagador único equivalente a las cuatro quintas partes de lo que reciben los alemanes?

Geohegan tampoco tiene pelos en la lengua para recordarnos que lo que pasa por “reforma de libre mercado” en los Estados Unidos no implica reducir los gastos o la intervención del gobierno en la economía, sino simplemente cobrar tantos o más impuestos al público en general para luego transferirle el dinero a capitalistas parasitarios. Para usar un ejemplo particularmente odioso, en lugar de usar los ingresos fiscales del gobierno para financiar un sistema carcelario estatal, el neoliberalismo los usa para pagarle a corporaciones como Wackenhut, que administran cárceles privadas bajo regímenes monopolísticos implementados en gran parte gracias a los esfuerzos de lobby de la propia Wackenhut.

De hecho, Medicare y Madicaid gastan más per cápita para cubrir aproximadamente la mitad de los costos totales de salud que lo que gastan los gobiernos europeos occidentales en cubrir los costos totales de sus sistemas de pagador único. Pero por supuesto, mientras la prestación de servicio esté en manos de corporaciones técnicamente “privadas” (que perciben prácticamente todos sus ingresos a costa del contribuyente), nadie osa calificar al sistema de salud estadounidense como “socializado”.

Y es que eso es lo que significa “privatizar” para el típico charlatán de “libre mercado” en la Heritage Foundation o el AEI: en lugar de gravar a los ciudadanos para organizar un servicio público a través de burócratas gubernamentales que opera como un monopolio legal, proponen gravar al ciudadano para contratar a una empresa privada que preste el servicio. Una empresa privada que gracias a licitaciones no competitivas y una madeja de protecciones legales, termina operando como un monopolio y tiene los mismos incentivos perversos para maximiar costos que un contratista de defensa o una empresa pública de agua o electricidad. Y la carga impositiva puede que termine siendo mayor, porque en lugar de pagarle a un montón de burócratas de cuello blanco con clasificaciones GS, hay que pagarle a un montón de robots corporativos de cuello blanco, además del mega sueldo del CEO y los dividendos de los accionistas. El contribuyente corre con los gastos en los dos sistemas, pero con la “reforma de libre mercado” tiene que mantener a dos clases parasitarias en lugar de a una sola.

En conclusión, se le llama “socialismo” sólo cuando el dinero se le da a la gente pobre. Si el dinero se le da a corporaciones, eso es “pro-negocios”. Y “pro-negocios”, por supuesto, significa “libre mercado” en la jerga del libertarismo vulgar de derechas.

Yo no soy un socialdemócrata o un promotor del estado del bienestar. Nadie que desee promover el modelo alemán en los Estados Unidos contaría con mi apoyo. Pero si alguien osa llamarse libertario, no puede pretender engañar a nadie con el cuento de que el sistema estadounidense es menos estatista que el alemán solo porque un mayor número de los parásitos estatales se viste de traje y corbata. Y nadie debería asombrarse de que si se les da la opción de escoger entre dos sistemas igualmente estatistas, la mayoría de los estadounidenses se dacantarían por el que le brindase atención sanitaria garantizada y seis semanas de vacaciones al año. Yo definitivamente haría lo mismo: si estamos escogiendo entre dos opciones con el mismo nivel de estatismo, por supuesto que escogería el que carga menos peso sobre mis hombros.

Lo que a mi de verdad me gustaría es tener menos estatismo (o mejor aún, la eliminación total del estado) y más libertad. Pero aquellos que dicen ser promotores de la libertad deberían seguir la regla de oro del marketing según la cual uno debe ofrecer algo más atractivo que la competencia al cliente, no menos. Y un sistema en el que el estado nos asalta para beneficiar a las empresas Fortune 500 en lugar de mamás solteras y desempleados, no es más atractivo. Si ustedes ven eso como la base del movimiento libertario les deseo buena suerte, porque van a necesitar mucha de ella.

Artículo original publicado por Kevin Carson el 31 de diciembre de 2011.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.