The Libertarian Alliance was kind enough, in 2006, to publish my pamphlet Contract Feudalism: A Critique of Employer Power over Employees. [1] Since then, Paul Marks, a Conservative councillor on Kettering Borough Council, has taken the trouble to reply to it with a pamphlet of his own: A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism. [2]

As grateful as I am for the attention, I hesitate to undertake a response. Mr. Marks’ effort has been lionized in the libertarian blogosphere. For example, Stephan Kinsella of Mises Blog calls it “a brilliant, solid, and interesting analysis” of my pamphlet, [3] and Perry De Havilland of Samizdata praises Mr.. Marks for being “in splendid and splenic form.”[4] One of the commenters at Samizdata dismisses me as a “yapping Pomeranian” in comparison to Mr. Marks’ “English mastiff.” Nevertheless, even though I take my life into my own hands in confronting this formidable mastiff, I feel I owe him some sort of response as a matter of courtesy.

Contract Feudalism Restated

Toward the beginning of his critique (I say toward the beginning because it’s the first substantive comment following a rambling dissertation on assorted topics like the semiotics of the Voluntary Cooperation Movement emblem), he asks just what “contract feudalism” is supposed to mean (followed by another rambling tangent on the historical meaning of the term “feudalism”.) Contract feudalism,” put simply, refers to the persistence of superior-subordinate relations reminiscent in substance to those under previous regimes of status, but under the guise of a de jure regime of contract. Lysander Spooner put it pretty well in Natural Law:

“In process of time, the robber, or slaveholding, class – who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth – began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class – their former owners – for just what the latter might choose to give them. Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative – to save themselves from starvation – but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the landholders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor”. [5]

Although Spooner’s primary focus was on agricultural wage labor, rather than the industrial and service kinds that predominate in our economy, the basic principle of labor’s dependency when it has been separated from the means of production and subsistence is essentially the same. A worker who is utterly dependent on employment, in a market where those in search of employment outnumber the available openings, is dependent on the whims of an employer for his food and shelter. The greater his dependence, the greater the degree of his subjection to his employer’s whims, both on and off the job.

At one point in his critique, Mr. Marks sums up my article in these words (p. 4):

“Some employers even demand that their employees do not express opinions that they do not like – otherwise they fire you and you have to go and work for less money”. Err yes, and Mr Carson’s point is?”

My point, the central theme of my original pamphlet, was to examine the reasons that employers are in a position to make such demands in the first place. My point was that the state intervenes in the market to make the means of production artificially scarce and expensive compared to labor, so that workers are competing for jobs rather than the reverse, and employers rather than workers have the primary weight in setting the conditions of the employment relationship.

Mr. Marks goes on, in the following passage, to betray even further his almost total incomprehension of what he has chosen to “critique” (p. 4):

“…[Life] sucks…. It even “sucks” for Prince Charles and other people of great inherited wealth–they still age… and go through all the pain and humiliation that this means. And if they live long enough they get to see all their closest friends (as well as their parents and other relatives–sometimes even their own children) die.

As for people who are born without wealth and can think of no way of making a lot of money, their lives tend to be even worse than the lives of people who are neither born with a lot of money or who think of way [sic] of earning a lot.”

Calling it “irrelevant” begs the precise point at issue. But this is hardly cause for surprise, since Mr. Marks shows an almost total unawareness, anywhere in his “critique,” of the actual points made in the paper he is critiquing. His reference to “irrelevance” is in fact quite ironic, given that most of his own paper is completely irrelevant to any of the points made in mine.

On the latter point, the utter irrelevance of his “critique” to any actual arguments in my pamphlet, he spends almost an entire column – in a pamphlet of three two-column pages–analyzing the hidden meaning of the Voluntary Cooperation Movement’s logo. He devotes an even larger number of column inches to an amateur diagnosis of the temperamental or psychiatric causes behind my views – most of them, apparently, boiling down to a feeling on my part that “life sucks,” or a Gnostic predilection for assuming that, behind any unpleasant state of affairs, there lurks an injustice. My alleged response to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, to the impossibility of our both eating and having our cake, is the spoiled child’s lament that “life isn’t fair,” that therefore “it must be someone’s fault” – and my solution is to “plot against the owners of the means of production.”

So what is the central point of my original article? Let’s go back to Mr. Marks’ concession in the quote above, that even if life sucks for everybody (p. 4):

As for people who are born without wealth and can think of no way of making a lot of money, their lives tend to be even worse than the lives of people who are neither born with a lot of money or who think of way of earning a lot.”

The point of my original article was precisely why this state of affairs is relevant – which relevance Mr. Marks simply denies, with almost nothing in the way of substantive argument to support his bare assertion.

Whether the fact of being born without wealth, or the scarcity of means of making money, is “relevant” (although Mr. Marks uses the term without an object, I assume he means “relevant to questions of justice”), depends on the cause of that state of affairs. Most of my original article was taken up, not with mere assertions that life sucks worse for the non-wealthy, but with substantive arguments as to how most people came to be born with little wealth, and why they face limited opportunities for obtaining it, and the injustice of the process by which their lives were thereby caused to “suck.” I’m amazed that Mr. Marks would take it upon himself to write a “critique” of an article whose central arguments he made such manifestly little effort to understand.

Libertarianism and Scarcity

The reason that things “suck” (as Mr. Marks puts it) for the average person even more than for the wealthy, I argued, is that the state intervenes in the economy on behalf of the owners of land and capital, to make land and capital artificially scarce and thereby to enable their owners to charge artificial scarcity rents for access to them. I did not simply assert this, but devoted some space to detailed arguments in support of my thesis.

Mr Marks’ entire response to this argument, on the other hand, amounts to little more than a simple gainsaying, coupled with a straw man characterization of my position (p. 2):

“Neither land nor capital are [sic] “artificially scarce” – they are just scarce (period). There are billions of people and only a certain amount of land and machinery. [T]he idea that land and capital are only scarce [emphasis mine] compared to the billions of people on Earth because of either wicked governments or wicked employers (or both) is false.”

First, simply to get the second part of Mr. Marks’ statement out of the way, I nowhere asserted that all scarcity of land and capital is artificial. I argued only that they were more scarce, as a result of state-enforced privilege, than they would otherwise be, and that returns on land and capital were therefore higher than their free market values. In any case, as Franz Oppenheimer observed, most of the scarcity of arable land comes not from natural appropriation, but from political appropriation. And the natural scarcity of capital, a good which is in elastic supply and which can be produced by applying human labor to the land, results entirely from the need for human labor for its creation; there is no fixed limit to the amount available.

But getting to his main point, that land and capital are not artificially scarce, I’m not sure Mr. Marks is even aware of his sheer audacity. In making this assertion, he flies in the face of a remarkable amount of received libertarian wisdom, from eminences as great as Mises and Rothbard. As a contrarian myself, I take my hat off to him.

Still, I wonder if he ever made the effort to grasp the libertarian arguments, made by Rothbard et al, that he so blithely dismisses. Is he even aware of the logical difficulties entailed in repudiating them? Does he deny that state enforcement of titles to land that is both vacant and unimproved reduces the amount available for homesteading? Does he deny that the reduced availability of something relative to demand is the very definition of “scarcity,” or that the reduction of supply relative to demand leads to increased price? Or is his argument rather with Rothbard’s moral premises themselves, rather than the logical process by which he makes deductions from them? I.e., does he deny that property in unimproved and vacant land is an invalid grant of privilege by the state, and thereby repudiate Locke’s principle of just acquisition?

It seems unlikely, on the face of things, that Mr. Marks would expressly repudiate Mises and Rothbard on these points. After all, elsewhere in his critique he cites Human Action and Man, Economy and State as authorities. Perhaps he just blanked out on the portions of their work that weren’t useful for his apologetic purposes.

In any case, if he does not repudiate either Rothbard’s premises or his reasoning, Mr. Marks has dug himself into a deep hole. For by Rothbard’s Lockean premises, not only the state’s own property in land, but “private” titles to vacant and unimproved land, are illegitimate. Likewise, titles derived from state grants are illegitimate when they enable the spurious “owner” to collect rent from the rightful owner – the person who first mixed his labor with the land, his heirs and assigns. And the artificial scarcity of land resulting from such illegitimate property titles raises the marginal price of land relative to that of labor, and forces labor to pay an artificially high share of its wages for the rent or purchase of land.

Time Preference and Capital

Likewise, in the case of capital, Mr. Marks asserts that interest rates, “[i]n reality… are determined by time preference” (or, he adds, by risk premium). In stronger terms, he characterizes as “bullshit” the argument that interest rates, absent the licensing of banks, would fall to a “very low level.” (I can’t resist pointing out, by the way, that Mr. Marks conflates time preference with abstinence and sacrifice in a way that surely has Bohm-Bawerk spinning in his grave).

Now, in the past I have specifically acknowledged the existence of time preference as a component of gross interest.6 But time preference is a dependent variable, depending on the wealth, and the economic security and independence, of the individual. The person who owns his own home and means of livelihood free and clear, and possesses sufficient savings as a cushion against economic uncertainty or temporary unemployment, will have a time preference far less steep than that of another person who owns no property, has no savings, and will be homeless and hungry if he misses next week’s pay check and is unable to pay rent and buy groceries. Thus, the distribution or concentration of property ownership will affect the prevailing time preference among laborers, and with it the originary rate of interest. Any state policy that affects the distribution of property, therefore, will affect the level of time preference. And it is my belief that in a society of widely distributed property ownership, with high rates of free and clear home ownership, and with high rates of self-employment or cooperative enterprise ownership, the steepness of the average worker’s time preference would be much, much lower.

But even aside from the steepness of time preference itself, on what grounds can Mr. Marks deny that the gross interest rate includes, in addition to time preference, monopoly premiums resulting from state-enforced entry barriers in the credit industry? Such a denial is – what’s the word? ah, yes – bullshit.

Murray Rothbard himself pointed to exactly that kind of monopoly premium, resulting from precisely analogous entry barriers, in the life insurance industry. By mandating levels of capitalization beyond those required by purely actuarial considerations, the state reduced the number of firms competing to supply life insurance and enabled them to charge a monopoly price for the service. That’s exactly what Benjamin Tucker described the effect of state banking law: by mandating capitalization requirements for institutions in the business of making secured loans, over and above the collateral provided as security of individual loans, the state enabled banks to charge a monopoly rate of interest for secured loans. That seems fairly straightforward and simple to understand – but perhaps not.

The Historical Record in Fact and Fiction

In some cases, Mr. Marks displays an almost preternaturally poor level of reading comprehension. For example, my original article (p. 4) included this quote from Albert Nock:

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

Here’s what Mr Marks (p. 2) gets from it:

“Mr. Nock does not mention any real industrialists (at least not in the quote given) there is no mention of (say) Mr Wedgewood or Mr Arkwright, instead Mr. Nock mentions Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind and Mr Plugson – all of whom were characters from Dickens (not real people). I suppose this is done to generate hatred of factory owners and their “starvation wages…””

Surely anyone with a normal capacity for reading comprehension would infer that Nock intended this paragraph as a critique of Dickens. The evils of the factory system, and of the colorfully named characters associated with it in Dickens’ fiction, were not the result of “laissez-faire,” or of “rugged individualism,” or of the political economy that Dickens so despised. After all: where, as Nock asked, did those things even exist in England? Even the factory owners, Nock argued, were guilty only of taking advantage of a pre-existing situation: the creation of a propertyless class of wage laborers by assorted land expropriations of early modern times.

The closest Mr. Marks gets to directly addressing my arguments in a substantive way is in a brief allusion to my discussion of primitive accumulation, the process by which (among other things) “the land in England was stolen from the peasants.” While conceding that it “may be true,” he challenges its relevance on the basis of the Norwegian example. Nothing like Enclosures or other abrogations of traditional peasant land tenure occurred in Norway, he says, and yet wage labor came to predominate there.

I can’t speak to that specific example, not being sufficiently familiar with Norwegian history to comment on issues of land tenure in that country. I will point out, though, that one swallow does not a summer make. And I did not argue that land expropriation was the sole cause of the wage system’s predominance. In denying that land expropriation alone was responsible for the wage system, Mr Marks resembles Lincoln’s Jesuit who, accused of murdering twelve men and a dog, triumphantly produced the dog in court.

In any case, even if I can’t competently address the Norwegian example, I do at least know something about the history of land tenure in Great Britain – the original seat of the Industrial Revolution from which industrialism spread to other countries (including Norway). And in that country, the predominant sentiment of the propertied classes of the time (the “owners of the means of production”) was clearly in favor of land expropriation as a way to extract more effort from the peasantry on terms more favorable to the owning classes.

The contemporary literature of the propertied classes’ was full of explicit commentary to that effect.

“It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work? … As they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; …but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get… Those that get their living by their daily labour… have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure… To make the society happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor..”. [Mandeville, Fable of the Bees]

“… to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from rest and sleep, in order to procure the common necessities of life.” [1739 pamphlet]

“That mankind in general, are naturally inclined to ease and indolence, we fatally experience to be true, from the conduct of our manufacturing populace, who do not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week, unless provisions happen to be very dear… I hope I have said enough to make it appear that the moderate labour of six days in a week is no slavery… But our populace have adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege of being more free and independent than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of our troops, may be of some use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors… It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days”. [“Essay on Trade and
Commerce” (1770)]

“[E]very one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” [Arthur
Young]

“…the use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence.” [The Board of Agriculture
report in Shropshire (1794)]

“[Leaving the laborer] possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings [means that] the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work. [Commercial and
Agricultural Magazine” (1800)]

“[Among] the greatest of evils to agriculture would be to place the labourer in a state of independence”. [Gloucestershire
Survey (1807)]

According to other commentary in the Board of Agriculture reports of the time, Enclosures would force laborers “to work every day in the year,” and cause children to “be put out to labour early”; the “subordination of the lower ranks of society… would be thereby considerably secured.” [7]

Those are all pretty frank admissions of purpose. In a Scooby Doo cartoon, this is about where the villain would add: “…and it would have worked, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.” This commentary came, I stress once again, not from followers of John Ball and Wat Tyler, not from True Levelers, not from the partisans of Thomas Paine, but from the propertied and employing classes of the time who carried out and directly benefited from the Enclosures. The propertied classes clearly believed that they were robbing the peasantry in order to make them work harder, while paying them less.

Legitimate and Illegitimate Ownership

Mr. Marks also concedes, half-heartedly, that some “taxes and regulations” might act as partial barriers to self-employment (although he denies in the next breath that “it is just these taxes and regulations that lead to most people working for wages”). But he asks, rhetorically, how employment regulations could be the fault of the employer, when such regulations are all the work of tree-hugging hippie types who “are under the delusion that there is or should be something called a ‘balance of power’ between the buyer and seller of a good or service, and that if there is not a contract is ‘unfair’.” I wonder if Mr. Marks is familiar with Adam Smith’s dictum that “[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters.” Those tree-hugging hippies merely illustrate the “Baptist” side of the classical “Baptists and bootleggers” paradigm; or as Roy Childs put it, liberal intellectuals are the running dogs of big business.

Mr. Marks also asserts that “action against the owners of the means of production [would] make life even more shit than it is now.” Apparently Mr. Marks is either assuming the justice of those owners’ property, or simply glossing over the whole question of justice in ownership. As Karl Hess pointed out almost forty years ago, libertarianism does not defend property as such.

If Mr. Marks’ policy is the reflexive defense of all property titles without regard to questions of justice in acquisition, then he might just as well have made the same argument in the context of the state-owned means of production in the old USSR. After all, wasn’t that exactly what privatization amounted to: action against the (state) owners of the means of production? If Mr Marks means to say that a just basis for property rights is no better, in its effects, than an unjust basis, then that’s a remarkable assertion indeed.

Rothbard himself, whom Mr. Marks is so fond of quoting, took in contrast something of a ruat coelum approach – “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall” – to “action against the owners of the means of production,” when those owners’ titles were illegitimate.

But in fact, in the majority of cases, I favor no action against the existing owners of capital. I prefer simply to open up the capital markets to free and full competition, and eliminate the scarcity rents accruing to the present owners’ property. The result will be that the portion of current profits which are a rent on artificial scarcity will evaporate; and the portion of their assets’ present value, which is the capitalized future earnings from such rents on privilege, will simply drop through the floor. When they are thus cut off from monopoly profits and from direct infusions of cash from the government teat, and the value of their assets falls to reflect the loss of their monopoly returns, it is they who will be selling off those assets.

Excuses, excuses

I’m not surprised at Mr. Marks’ reflexive defense of all de jure property titles, without regard to their justice. In numerous online venues, following the publication of his “critique,” he ventured gratuitous assessments of my motives, speculating that whatever changes were made in the current state of affairs, I would still be looking for excuses to blame the wealthy for the plight of the poor. For example, he writes in the commend thread to de Havilland’s Samizdata post,

…we… know… that Carson and co would be denouncing contract feudalism… regardless of whether there was a government subsidy for the company or not.

And again:

If the land could be proved to have been passed down (or sold) from the first occupyers… [sic] Mr. Carson and co would still find some reason to attack business enterprises over the “wage system”.

I am tempted, in similar spirit, to speculate on Mr Marks’ motivation. I am tempted to speculate that he is constantly on the lookout for “excuses” to defend the justice of property titles held by the existing propertied classes, to defend their profits as the result of superior productivity in the competitive marketplace, and to defend their wealth as the result of past superior virtue. I am tempted to speculate that he would “find some reason” to do so regardless of the facts of the case. That would be a reasonable assumption, given that one of the major constituencies of the Tory Party he has been elected to represent [8] is the several thousand people who own most of the land of Great Britain. It’s tempting to suspect that he would “find some reason” to wax eloquent over the sanctity of “private property rights” even if the current landlords could be shown to have inherited the land in unbroken succession from one of William the Conqueror’s barons, and that their tenants could trace an unbroken ancestral line to the peasants who worked the land at the time of the Conquest. I could engage in such speculation – but, as Richard Nixon would say, that would be wrong.

Notes:

[1] Kevin Carson, Contract Feudalism: A Critique of Employer Power over Employees, Economic Notes No. 105, London, Libertarian Alliance, 2006.

[2] Paul Marks, A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s ‘Contract Feudalism’, Economic Notes No. 108, London, Libertarian Alliance, 2007.

[3] Stephan Kinsella, ‘A Critique of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism’, Mises Blog, 21st June 2007, retrieved 25th February 2008, http://blog.mises.org/archives/006766.asp.

[4] Perry de Havilland, ‘A critique of a critique’, Samizdata, 21st June 2007, retrieved 25th February 2008, http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2007/06/a_critique_of_a.html.

[5] Lysander Spooner, Natural Law, 1892, retrieved 25th February 2008, http://jim.com/spooner.htm

[6] Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Fayetteville, Arkansas, Booksurge, 2007, chapter 3.

[7] Carson, ibid., ch, 4.

[8] ‘Councillor Paul Marks’, Kettering Borough Council website, 2008, retrieved 8th March 2008,

A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism was originally published in the 2007 issue of Economic Notes No. 108 by the Libertarian Alliance, written by Paul Marks.

The views expressed in this publication are those of its author, and not necessarily those of the Libertarian Alliance, its Committee, Advisory Council or subscribers.

At the 2006 Libertarian Alliance/Libertarian International annual conference I received a buff coloured folder, when I finally got around to reading the contents of the folder (on the train going home) I found, amongst other things, a pamphlet by Mr Kevin Carson, Contract Feudalism: A Critique of Employer Power over Employees (Economic Notes No. 105, Libertarian Alliance, London, 2006), the following is what I thought of it.

On the front cover of the pamphlet were the words “Liberty, Equality, Cooperation” and a symbol the letter “A” is a circle. The symbol is, historically, the sign of compulsory communal anarchists, the people who want to rename the state “the people” or “the community” but still want a collective power to order individuals about. As for the words “cooperation” and “equality”, liberty allows people to cooperate or not as they so choose (they must accept the consequences of their choice).

If people choose to cooperate by some people accepting wages from other people that is one way to cooperate, it in no way violates the nonaggression principle. And if people choose to cooperate by being members of a cooperative (such as the John Lewis Partnership) that is another way to cooperate which also in no way violates the nonaggression principle.

Whether employer-employee firms or cooperatives prosper more will be decided by the market – i.e. by the prices and quality of goods that they offer and the choices of customers (the choices of customers are all the term “market forces” actually means).

As for the word “equality” this can mean equality under the law (the real law—the non aggression principle) in which case a person who is starving to death is the equal of a billionaire, or it may mean material equality—i.e. equality of income or wealth.

If “equality” means equality of income or wealth this may mean either mean people voluntarily choosing to join an egalitarian community (whether religious, as with monks and nuns, or secular) in which case we can expect at most about 5% of the population in such communities (the percentage of the Jewish population of Israel in various forms of communal communities at the height of these highly subsidized and favoured communities), or it may mean some form of compulsion—as the symbol of the letter “A” in a circle would suggest. It is this compulsion (the desire to loot the property of the owners of the means of production and prevent by violence individuals owning the means of production in future) which is the reason why the symbol of a letter “A” in a circle should not appear on a Libertarian Alliance publication—it has historically been a symbol of evil. True anarchists (i.e. people who do not wish to rename the State “the people” or whatever, but wish to get rid of it altogether) have, as far as I know, no symbol.

As for the contents of the pamphlet: The word “feudalism” is used a lot, but it is not clearly defined anywhere. Normally when people talk of “feudalism” they do not mean the feudal system of government (a system that, for example, existed on the island of Sark until this year—when the mega rich Barclay twins and their friends in the British government and the European powers-that-be insisted that democracy and “human rights” be introduced), they mean serfdom.

Serfdom, keeping people from birth to the land or other place of employment by the threat of violence goes back (at least—actually it occurred in many societies before this) to the Roman Empire. The Emperor Diocletian (a man of peasant origins himself) ordered (to make the collection of tax less difficult) that all peasants remain on the land that they were born on, and he and later Emperors ordered that most people in the towns keep to the occupations of their fathers—both orders (like Diocletian’s price controls) were backed by threats of violence.

Although the Roman Empire collapsed the idea of serfdom did not die with it. Some have claimed that after the Norman Conquest as many as 1 in 3 English people (or even more) were reduced to the level of serfdom, although this institution went into decline after the Black Death. As for compelling people, by the threat of violence, to undertake the occupations of their fathers—there were statutes past in England as late as the time of Elizabeth the First (although “Good Queen Bess” had no great administrative structure to enforce her statutes).

What all of this has got to do with agreeing to work for a someone in return for wages Mr Carson does not explain. I suppose that if a factory worker or household servant (or whatever) signed a contract to work for a certain amount of time and then did not turn up for work they could be sued for breach of contract—but, in practice, employers tend to take not turning up for work as simply a de facto resignation.

It is when a lot of money has been paid in advance for work that has either not been done or has been done very badly that be sue. For example, if someone paid to have a diamond cut and it was not cut (or was cut wrong) they might sue, but if someone said “come and work in my factory for X amount of money” and the person did not turn up or came for a while and then stopped coming the employer would take that as a de facto resignation (although a rude one—as the person had not bothered to say that he had resigned).

Of course some governments do not allow an employer to hire a new worker to replace someone who has decided not to turn up for work (this is a matter of the concept of a “strike”) and many governments do not allow an employer to clear people who are obstructing the entrance to their place of business (the military term “picket” is used in relation to this). But I do not see how these weird regulations are the fault of the employer.

The regulations are created by people who are under the delusion that there is or should be something called a “balance of power” between the buyer and seller of a good or service, and that if there is not a contract is “unfair”. Some (by no means all) of the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages held that a “just” price or wage might be somehow different from a free one, because of such “unfairness” (see the first volume of Rothbard’s history of economic thought for the many Schoolmen who did NOT fall into this error). “But Mr X will starve to death unless Mr Y employs him”—first of all Mr X will NOT starve to death, and secondly it would make no difference, in economic principle, if he was going to starve to death – there would still be no economic case for a regulation (not that Mr Carson supports government regulations—he has other ideas in mind).

Overall I am led to conclude that Mr Carson’s use of the term “contract feudalism” does not mean anything—he is just using the word “feudalism” as a “boo word” and trying to transfer the dislike people have for the word “feudalism” with serfdom (although in some feudal lands there was no serfdom) to a dislike of the practice of some people paying other people money to work for them—either on their farms, or factories or homes, or whatever.

However, Mr Carson does make other claims. For example, he claims that governments sometimes subsidise business enterprises either directly or indirectly (for example building roads is a subsidy for auto companies like G.M.)—this is true, but in no way relevant. Say company X gets a million Dollars from the taxpayer, very wicked, but this in no way gives the employees of company X any rights over the company—all it gives them is the duty (like that of all other citizens) to demand that the subsidy to company X be stopped (even if it means lower wages or unemployment for them).

On page 6 of his pamphlet Mr Carson “land and capital” are “artificially scarce”. This was my first real indication of what he “was on about”. Neither land nor capital are “artificially scarce”—they are just scarce (period). There are billions of people and only a certain amount of land and machinery. True, industrial capital can be increased over time, and it is even possible that the amount of land will be increased (say by the use of the seas, of by the settlement of outer space), but the idea that land and capital are only scarce compared to the billions of people on the Earth because of either wicked governments or wicked employers (or both) is false.

Also on page 6 of pamphlet Mr Carson quotes Benjamin Tucker as saying that if the government allowed anyone to set up a bank, interest rates would fall to “less than three fourths of one per cent” (this is somehow connected with the “labour cost”).

In reality interest rates are determined by time preference i.e. the price that people will charge to lend out some of their income (rather than spend it or hoard it)—the price they will charge for not having this money for a certain period of time (and the risk, in the case of default, that they will never get it back).

Other people borrow the money, either for consumption or for investment. And depending on how long they want the money for and what the chances are they will pay it back they pay various rates of interest.

Banks (and other financial institutions) are middle men in these transactions. Of course banks and other such do try and lend out more money than really exists (via fractional reserve games) and governments support them in this (seeking the old dream of investment being greater than real savings—i.e. the dream of “lower interest rates”), but this just leads to the boom-bust cycle which is not exactly good for the economy (see Murray Rothbard’s The Panic of 1819 [PDF] and America’s Great Depression [PDF], or Ludwig Von Mises’ Theory of Money and Credit or Human Action—along with many other works by these and other writers).

The idea that if only one did not need a license to lend out money interest rates would fall to some very low level is false. In fact “false” is to mild a word, it is (to use a word supported by the Yale university philosopher Harry Frankfurt) “bullshit”.

Of course, as a libertarian, I support people being allowed to use as money anything they choose to use (and support contracts being honoured). If people choose gold (of a certain purity) fine, ditto silver or any other commodity—even bits of paper with designs on. If that is what people agree to use in a particular contract (as in “I agree to give you X number of pairs of shoes of a certain type in return for Y number of bits of paper with certain designs printed on them”) that is fine. But none of this alters the fact that (silly, and eventually destructive, games aside) interest rates are a matter of the time preference of savers and borrowers (no more to do with “three fourths of one per cent” or “labour cost” than they are to do with the tooth fairy).

On page 4 of his pamphlet Mr Carson quotes from Albert Nock. Mr Nock does not mention any real industrialists (at least not in the quote given) there is no mention of (say) Mr Wedgewood or Mr Arkwright, instead Mr Nock mentions Mr Bounderby, Mr Gradgrind and Mr Plugson—all of whom were characters from Dickens (not real people). I suppose this is done to generate hatred of factory owners and their “starvation wages” (which were, in fact, higher than general wages had ever before been in history and saved the rising population from real starvation—even almost 60 years ago this was known, see T.S. Ashton’s The Industrial Revolution (1948)).

Mr Nock also mentions that the land in England was stolen from the peasants. This may be true (although the story is a bit more complicated than that as even in Anglo Saxon England a lot of land belonged to big landowners rather than peasants), but it does rather miss the point.

Take the example of Norway—a nation of several million people, just over the North Sea from England. In Norway the land was never stolen from the peasants nor were they ever reduced to serfdom. This did not alter the fact that over time (and with an expanding population) most people became employees of industrial and service enterprises (and, of course, there had always been farm labourers, domestic servants and many other employees). Indeed wages in 19th century Norway were lower than those in England or the United States.

I think that the centre of Mr Carson’s pamphlet is to be found on page 5, where he quotes Claire Wolfe.

First we are told that the Luddites who smashed machines “may not have understood why they needed to do what they did”. Of course they did not “need to do it”, hand loom weavers had benefited from a bottle neck when spinning got mechanized and weaving was not (before that they were poor) when weaving got mechanized most of the hand loom weavers got out competed (apart from a few who carried on specialised trades—mostly for wealthy customers). This was not a plot by nasty industrialists (anymore than the mechanization of spinning had been)—cheaper prices attracted the customers (most of whom were poor) so the handloom weavers lost out. Should the poor have forced to carry on paying higher prices just to benefit the hand loom weavers?

As for workers in general smashing up machines, the only way this might lead to an increase in wages is if so many attackers are (quite rightly) killed by people defending their property that a labour shortage results. More likely the smashing is going to lead to a fall in wages (due to the damage done to the economy) over what they otherwise would have been.

Overall wages over the long term can not be increased by smashing machines, any more than they can be “strikes” (with employers being prevented from hiring other people), “pickets” (obstruction) or minimum wage statutes or other regulations. Such actions can only make overall wages and conditions lower than they otherwise would have been – as well as increasing unemployment (over what it would have been). This is basic economics which is taught by such works as Ludwig Von Mises’ Human Action, Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State or even works such as Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (although the The Strike-Threat System by that old enemy of the colour bar in South Africa, W.H. Hutt, is well worth a look).

Claire Wolfe goes on to say (with Mr Carson’s clear support in the rest of his pamphlet) that “Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to5 boxes sucks”.

Well yes. I would be the last one to dispute that it “sucks”—life “sucks”. It “sucks” even for those “noble savages” the hunter-gather bands that Prince Charles goes to see and praises to the skies (before heading back to his Palace). It even “sucks” for Prince Charles and other people of great inherited wealth—they still age (in body and mind) and go through all the pain and humiliation that this means. And if they live long enough they get to see all their closest friends (as well as their parents and other relatives—sometimes even there own children) die.

As for people who are born without wealth and can think of no way of making a lot of money, their lives tend to be even worse than the lives of people who are either born with a lot of money or who think of way of earning a lot. This is all true—and in no way relevant.

There is no hope in life and, if the atheists are correct no hope after it either. This is true (but yet again) in no way relevant. So life is shit—so what? Unless the claim is that if only it was not for the nasty owners of the means of production life would be less shit—but this claim is false, indeed action against the owners of the means of production will make life even more shit than it is now.

If Mr Carson wants a life that “sucks” less, well he could think of a way to earn a lot of money, or marry a rich person (or whatever). Or, of course, he could kill himself. (The great way out for those who do not wish to tolerate the shitness of life anymore —as long as they can find the courage for the misnamed “cowards way out”.) As long as he does not violate the nonaggression principle I wish Mr Carson luck in his efforts to make his and other people’s lives “suck” less. However, I believe him to be operating under a basic error.

This error is that life is “naturally good” (or words to that effect) and that if it “sucks” it must be someone’s fault. Perhaps those nasty owners of the means of production who keep us (say) as “wage slaves” or in a state of “contract feudalism”.

The trouble with this is that it is nonsense. Life is not naturally good, it is naturally shit. Nasty, brutish and short (to quote Hobbes, although I oppose Thomas Hobbes on most matters), and if one manages to survive for a few decades one has the experience of physical and mental decay. Some people decay quicker than others, but all people (even the richest) decay and undergo (if they live long enough) all the other pains and humiliations that make up “life”. Certainly life is not all bad—but the idea that the bad in it can be reduced by some plot against the owners of the means of production is false.

Indeed (as argued above) “false” is much too mild a word for the ideas expressed in Mr Carson’s pamphlet. The whole work is part of that legion of works that offer false hope to suffering people. “Hit these people [in this case the owners of the means of
production] and you and your loved ones will suffer less”, “follow my cunning scheme and interest rates will be virtually nothing and both land and capital will no longer be scarce”, “life is naturally good – and it is only because of the evil them than it sucks, hit them and all will be well”.

Let us say that, for example, in 1874 government in Britain had been abolished. Let us also assume that the claims of anarchists (real anarchists—not compulsory communal anarchists who wish to rename the state not get rid of it) that chaos would not have resulted are correct.

What would have happened? Well people would have been a bit better off —but not much (as government only amounted to a few per cent of output in 1874 and there were few nonaggression principle violating regulations).

Most people were poor in 1874 not because of some wickedness of employers, or even because of big government—they were poor because that was the level of economic development (no great “artificial scarcity”). And this was also true in the United States—in spite of the dreams of Tucker, and (rather later) Nock.

Today getting rid of government (as long as it did not result in chaos) would improve matters much more (as government is much bigger now than it was in 1874—so the gap between what our lives are and what they could be is much bigger), indeed even radically reducing government would greatly improve life (because government is now vast and its taxes, spending and regulations extend into almost every aspect of civil society). However, life would still be imperfect—it would still “suck”.

It might be bearable for some of us (I suspect that I would have a job I could live with—rather than not have one, which is my present situation). But I am sure that Mr Carson would still be able to find things to complain about.

“To buy my own space ship, I have to work on this bloody base on Mars for a whole year—and it sucks”.

This is not really an argument about economics. Mr Carson is a man who compares life as it is to what he would like it to be in an ideal utopia—real life does not measure up, so some group of people must be to blame. Like many people before him Mr Carson has chosen employers.

“Some employers even demand that their employees do not express opinions that they do not like—otherwise they fire you and you have to go and work for less money”. Err yes, and Mr Carson’s point is?

What you say, how you dress and so on are part of the “conditions of employment”. Some employers offer you better conditions (for example they do not care what you say outside work), but less money—and some employers offer a lot of money, but want you to be a “credit to the enterprise” and not (for example) go around calling black people “niggers” (even when you are not at work).

Some people are lucky and find employers who offer them a lot of money and do not care how they dress or what they say (at least when they are not at work). Or they manage to be self employed.

However, self employment is a hard life for many people (it depends on what sort of people they are, and many other factors—for example your customers may demand that you do not call people niggers, or they may demand that you do). And even if there were no government taxes and regulations that hit self employed folk hard (and I admit there are many) it would still be a hard life – a life that most people would not choose.

Good luck to Mr Carson if he seeks to be fully self-employed (in any enterprise that does not violate the non aggression principle) and good luck to him in opposing any taxes and regulations that make it harder for people to be self employed.

But please do not let him think that it is just these taxes and regulations that lead to most people working for wages.

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

Feudalismo de Contrato (PDF) foi originalmente publicado na edição de 2006 de Notas Econômicas No. 105 pela Aliança Libertária, escrito por Kevin Carson.

O que é “Feudalismo de Contrato”?

Recentemente, Elizabeth Anderson cunhou a expressão “feudalismo de contrato” para descrever o crescente poder dos empregadores sobre as vidas dos empregados fora do local de trabalho.

De acordo com Anderson, um dos benefícios que o trabalhador tradicionalmente recebia em troca de sua submissão à autoridade dos chefes no emprego era soberania sobre o resto de sua vida no “mundo real” fora do trabalho. Nos termos dessa barganha taylorista, o trabalhador abria mão de seu senso de perícia profissional e controle de sua própria obra em troca do direito de expressar sua personalidade “real” por meio de consumo na parte de sua vida que ainda pertencia a ele. Essa barganha assumia

a separação do trabalho em relação ao lar. Por mais arbitrário e abusivo que o chefe pudesse ter sido no chão de fábrica, quando o trabalho acabava os trabalhadores podiam pelo menos escapar da tirania dele… [A] separação de trabalho e lar fazia grande diferença na liberdade dos trabalhadores em relação aos desejos de seus empregadores. [1]

O trabalho assalariado, tradicionalmente, tem envolvido um pacto com o diabo no qual você “vende sua vida para poder viver”: você extirpa as oito ou doze horas que passa no trabalho jogando-as na privada e dando a descarga, a fim de obter o dinheiro de que precisa para manter sua vida real no mundo real, onde é tratado como ser humano adulto. E no mundo real, onde sua opinião e seus valores realmente importam, você tenta fingir que aquele outro lugar opressivo não existe.

Ao mesmo tempo, destaca Anderson, essa separação de trabalho e lar depende inteiramente do poder de barganha relativo da força de trabalho para que sua observância seja compelida. (Voltarei a este ponto, a questão central, mais tarde.)

O Deslocamento do Poder

É porém óbvio que o poder de barganha da força de trabalho está sendo radicalmente alijado dos trabalhadores. Para demasiados trabalhadores, o tradicional pacto com o diabo não mais basta. Os empregadores (especialmente no setor de serviços) estão cada vez mais vendo como sua propriedade não apenas a capacidade de trabalho do empregado durante as horas de labor, como também o próprio empregado. Espera-se que trabalhadores de escritório e de serviços estejam de plantão 24 horas por dia: aquela coisa que eles costumavam chamar de “lar” é apenas a prateleira onde ficam guardados quando seu dono não os está usando no momento. E o chefe tem ascendência sobre o que eles fazem mesmo durante o tempo fora do horário de trabalho: as reuniões políticas das quais você participa, se você fuma, as coisas que você escreve em seu blog — nada é realmente seu. A maior parte das pessoas que bloga acerca de questões políticas ou sociais teme o que possa acontecer se a Gestapo de Recursos Humanos googlá-la. Quanto à procura de emprego ela própria — bom Deus! Você tem de descrever cada semana durante a qual ficou desempregado, e justificar que uso fez de seu tempo sem patrão. Se você alguma vez foi autônomo, poderá ser considerado “superqualificado” : Isto é, há o perigo de você não estar realmente firme em sua decisão, já que não precisa do emprego tão ardentemente. Para não mencionar as perguntas acerca de por que você saiu do emprego anterior, o delineamento de perfil para determinar se você não estará escondendo qualquer opinião diferente das de uma Esposa de Stepford por trás de uma fachada de obediência, etc… É algo provavelmente muito parecido com os testes de “fidedignidade política” para ingressar no antigo Partido Comunista Soviético.

Exemplos de feudalismo de contrato têm aparecido com especial destaque no noticiário recentemente. O exemplo que a própria Anderson ofereceu foi o da Weyco, com sede em Michigan, cujo presidente proibiu seus trabalhadores de fumar “não apenas no trabalho mas em qualquer outro lugar.” Essa política, adotada como resposta ao custo ascendente da cobertura de saúde, exigia que os trabalhadores se submetessem a testes de nicotina. [2]

Outro recente exemplo de “feudalismo de contrato” é a saga de Joe Gordon, dono do blog Woolamaloo Gazette, demitido da rede de livrarias Waterstone quando chegou ao conhecimento de seus chefes que ele havia afixado o ocasional texto de desabafo depois de um dia particularmente difícil no trabalho. [3]

Outro caso ainda é o da Junta Nacional de Relações do Trabalho (NLRB) ao decidir que os empregadores tinham permissão para proibir empregados de se descontraírem fora do local de trabalho. Eis aqui a essência da coisa, de um artigo de Harold Meyerson no Washington Post:

Em 7 de junho três Republicanos nomeados para a junta de cinco membros que regulamenta as relações empregador/empregado nos Estados Unidos baixaram notável estipulação que expande os direitos dos empregadores de interferir nas vidas de seus trabalhadores quando fora do emprego. Eles confirmaram a legalidade de uma regulamentação para empregados uniformizados da Guardsmark, empresa de guardas de segurança, que reza:  “[V]ocê NÃO pode… associar-se/criar amizade, quando em serviço ou de folga, encontrar-se social/romanticamente, ou tornar-se excessivamente afável para com os empregados do cliente ou para com colegas empregados.” [4]

A Reação do “Libertarismo Vulgar” e Seus Erros

Muitos libertários de livre mercado reagem instintivamente a reclamações acerca de políticas dessa espécie cerrando fileiras em torno do empregador. Um comentador, por exemplo, diz o seguinte em resposta à postagem de Elizabeth Anderson no blog EsquerdaADireita: “Trata-se de um livre mercado. Se você não gosta das regras de seu empregador, vá trabalhar em outro lugar.” Uma das defesas libertárias mais comuns de locais de trabalho em condições aviltantes, analogamente, é a de que eles só podem ser melhores do que as alternativas disponíveis, visto que ninguém é forçado a trabalhar ali.

Bem, sim e não. A questão é, quem estabelece o espectro das alternativas disponíveis? Se o estado limita o espectro das alternativas disponíveis para a força de trabalho e debilita o poder de barganha dela no mercado de trabalho, e age em conluio com os empregadores ao fazê-lo, então a defesa de “livre mercado” dos empregadores torna-se um tanto não cândida.

Uso a expressão “libertário vulgar” para descrever aquele entendimento dos princípios do “livre mercado” do tipo “O que é bom para a General Motors,” que identifica o livre mercado com os interesses dos empregadores contra os trabalhadores, das grandes empresas contra as pequenas, e do produtor contra o consumidor. Como descrevi em Estudos em Economia Política Mutualista:[5]

Os apologistas libertários vulgares do capitalismo usam a expressão “livre mercado” de maneira equívoca: parecem ter dificuldade em lembrar-se, de um momento para o seguinte, de se estão defendendo na realidade o capitalismo hoje existente ou princípios do livre mercado. Assim tomamos [um] artigo de gabarito padrão… argumentando que os ricos não podem ficar ricos a expensas dos pobres, porque “não é assim que o livre mercado funciona”— assumindo implicitamente que temos um livre mercado. Quando questionados, eles admitem de má vontade que o presente sistema não é um livre mercado, e que inclui muita intervenção do estado no interesse dos ricos. Logo porém que acham que podem safar-se impunes, voltam a defender a riqueza das corporações hoje existentes com base nos “princípios do livre mercado.”

O fato é, não temos livre mercado. É um sistema capitalista de estado no qual (como disse Murray Rothbard em “A Revolução dos Estudantes”) “nosso estado corporativo usa o poder coercitivo da tributação ou para acumular capital corporativo ou para diminuir os custos corporativos.”[6] Como Benjamin Tucker escreveu há mais de um século:

… Não é bastante, por mais que seja verdade, dizer que “se um homem tiver força de trabalho para vender, terá de encontrar alguém com dinheiro para comprá-la”; é indispensável acrescentar que, muito mais importante do que isso, se um homem tem força de trabalho para vender, tem o direito a um livre mercado onde vendê-la — um mercado onde ninguém seja impedido, por leis restritivas, de obter honestamente o dinheiro para comprá-la. Se o homem com força de trabalho para vender não tiver esse livre mercado, então sua liberdade é violada e sua propriedade virtualmente tomada dele. Ora, tal mercado tem sido constantemente negado, não apenas aos trabalhadores em Homestead, mas aos trabalhadores de todo o mundo civilizado. E os homens que o têm negado são os Andrew Carnegies. Capitalistas dos quais esse senhor das forjas é representante típico colocaram e mantiveram nos códices legais todos os tipos de proibições e tributos (dos quais a tarifa alfandegária conta-se entre os menos danosos) projetados para limitar, e eficazes em limitar, o número de ofertantes em busca da força de trabalho daqueles que têm força de trabalho para vender…

… Que Carnegie, Dana e Companhia primeiro assegurem toda lei em violação da igualdade de liberdade ter sido retirada dos códices legais. Se, depois disso, quaisquer trabalhadores interferirem com os direitos de seus empregadores, ou usarem a força contra inofensivos “fura-greves,” ou atacarem vigias de seus empregadores, sejam esses detetives da Pinkerton, assistentes de xerifes, ou a milícia do Estado, eu próprio prometo que, como anarquista e em consequência de minha fé anarquista, estarei entre os primeiros a voluntariar-me como membro de uma força para reprimir esses perturbadores da ordem e, se necessário, varrê-los da terra. Enquanto porém essas leis invasivas permanecerem, terei de ver todo conflito envolvendo uso de força que surja como consequência de uma violação original da liberdade por parte das classes empregadoras e, se alguma varredura for feita, que possam ser os trabalhadores quem empunhe a vassoura! Ainda assim, embora minhas simpatias se dirijam pois para o oprimido, nunca deixarei de proclamar minha convicção de que nenhum aniquilamento de uma das partes poderá assegurar justiça, e que a única varredura eficaz será aquela que apague dos códices legais toda restrição à liberdade do mercado… [7]

De que restrições, entretanto, poderia ele estar falando? Ao ler defesas convencionais do “livre mercado” no tocante às relações de emprego hoje existentes, você ficaria com a ideia de que as únicas restrições à liberdade do mercado são aquelas que prejudicam as classes proprietárias e as grandes empresas (você sabe, a “derradeira minoria perseguida” ).

Na verdade, tal apologética libertária vulgar partilha de um conjunto muito artificial de assunções: veja,simplesmente ocorre os trabalhadores se verem diante desse conjunto escasso de opções — as classes empregadoras não têm nada a ver com isso. E simplesmente acontece as classes proprietárias terem todos esses meios de produção nas próprias mãos, e simplesmente acontece as classes trabalhadoras serem formadas de proletários sem propriedade forçados a vender sua força de trabalho nas condições dos proprietários. A possibilidade de as classes empregadoras poderem estar diretamente implicadasem políticas do estado que reduziram as opções disponíveis para os trabalhadores é ridícula demais para sequer ser cogitada.

É a velha história para crianças da acumulação primitiva. “Lenin,” do blogTúmulo de Lenin, recorda-se de ter sido exposto a ela nas escolas do governo:

A ilusão de um contrato livre e igualitário entre empregado e empregador exerce forte influência, particularmente dada a escassez de conflito industrial nos últimos quinze anos. A ideia de que a situação possa ter sido manipulada de antemão, em virtude do controle dos meios de produção pelos capitalistas, é tão óbvia que escapa à atenção de muitas pessoas que sob outros aspectos se posicionam na Esquerda.

Em parte isso ocorre porque as pessoas são preparadas, desde tenra idade, para esperar e aceitar esse estado de coisas. Nas aulas de Estudos de Negócios do curso médio, foi mostrado a mim, e a meus colegas de classe, um vídeo patrocinado por algum banco, o qual procurava mostrar como veio a acontecer a divisão do trabalho. Tudo havia acontecido, parecia, de maneira relativamente benigna e pacífica, sem a interferência de questões políticas ou fases econômicas. Do homem das cavernas aos cartões de débito, tudo em realidade se limitou a o trabalho ser decomposto em tarefas separadas que seriam empreendidas pelos mais capazes de desempenhá-las. Em seguida, entrando em contato com vilas próximas, eles trocariam os bens para cuja feitura eram hábeis pelas coisas para feitura das quais as outras vilas eram hábeis. A única coisa interessante acerca daquele vídeo de propagando é que ele não fez levantar nenhum sobrolho — como era possível? É-se levado a trabalhar para um capitalista sem ver nada necessariamente errado a respeito, e a pessoa não tem nada com que comparar aquilo. O trabalhador aprende a vender-se (todos aqueles esquemas de treinamento para entrevistas de emprego) sem perceber-se a si próprio como mercadoria. [8]

Tive reação semelhante diante de todas as passagens acerca de preferência de tempo em Bohm-Bawerk e Mises que simplesmente aceitaram, como coisa natural/esperada, que uma pessoa estavaem posição de “contribuir” com capital para o processo de produção, enquanto outra, por algum motivo misterioso, precisava dos meios de produção e do financiamento do trabalho tão generosamente “proporcionados.”

O mais famoso crítico dessa história para crianças, naturalmente, foi o socialista de estado Karl Marx:

Em tempos de há muito idos havia dois tipos de pessoas; um, o da elite diligente, inteligente e, acima de tudo, frugal; o outro, biltres preguiçosos, gastando sua subsistência, e mais ainda, em vida desregrada. A lenda do pecado original teológico certamente conta-nos como o homem veio ser condenado a comer seu pão com o suor de seu rosto; mas a história do pecado original econômico revela-nos haver pessoas para as quais isso de modo algum é essencial. Pouco importa! Assim veio a ocorrer que o primeiro tipo acumulou riqueza, e o último tipo por fim nada mais tinha para vender a não ser seu próprio couro. E desse pecado original data a pobreza da grande maioria que, a despeito de todo o seu trabalho, até agora nada mais tem para vender senão a si própria, e a riqueza dos poucos que aumenta constantemente embora desde há muito eles tenham parado de trabalhar. [9]

A crítica, porém, de modo algum é feita só pelos estatistas. O defensor do livre mercado Franz Oppenheimer escreveu:

De acordo com Adam Smith, as classes numa sociedade são resultado de desenvolvimento “natural.” A partir de um estado original de igualdade, elas surgiram sem outra causa a não ser o exercício das virtudes econômicas da industriosidade, frugalidade e previdência…

[A] dominação de classe, nessa teoria, é o resultado de uma diferenciação gradual a partir de um estado original de igualdade e liberdade, sem implicação nele de qualquer poder extraeconômico…

Essa prova assumida está baseada no conceito de uma “acumulação primitiva,” ou um suprimento original de riqueza, em terras e propriedade móvel, surgida de forças puramente econômicas; doutrina com razão escarnecida por Karl Marx como “conto de fadas.” Seu esquema de raciocínio aproxima-se do seguinte:

Em algum lugar, em algum país espaçoso e fértil, determinado número de homens livres, de condição igual, formam uma associação para proteção mútua. Gradualmente eles se diferenciam em classes do ponto de vista da propriedade. Aqueles melhores dotados de energia, descortínio, capacidade de poupar, industriosidade e cautela vagarosamente adquirem quantidade básica de propriedade real ou móvel; enquanto os estúpidos e menos eficientes, e aqueles dados a incúria e desperdício, permanecem sem posses. Os abastados emprestam sua propriedade produtiva aos de menos recursos em troca de tributo, em forma de aluguel do solo ou de lucro, e tornam-se em decorrência continuamente mais ricos, enquanto que os outros sempre continuam pobres. Essas diferenças de posse gradualmente desenvolvem distinções de classe social; visto que em toda parte os ricos têm preferência, na medida em que só eles dispõem do tempo e dos meios para dedicarem-se aos assuntos públicos e para moldar as leis por eles administradas em proveito próprio. Assim, ao longo do tempo, desenvolve-se uma classe dominante e dona de propriedades, e um proletariado, uma classe sem propriedades. O estado primitivo de confrades livres e iguais torna-se um estado de classes, por lei inerente de desenvolvimento porque, em toda massa concebível de homens há, como facilmente se pode ver, fortes e fracos, ajuizados e insensatos, precavidos e desperdiçadores. [10]

Como Chegamos A Onde Estamos Hoje

No mundo real, obviamente, as coisas são um pouco menos róseas. Os meios de produção, durante os séculos da época capitalista, têm-se concentrado em poucas mãos graças a um dos maiores assaltos da história humana. Os camponeses da Grã-Bretanha foram privados de direitos consuetudinários de propriedade da terra, por meio de cercos e outros furtos sancionados pelo estado, e tangidos para as fábricas como gado. E os donos de fábricas beneficiaram-se, adicionalmente, de controles sociais próximos do totalitarismo em relação ao movimento e à livre associação dos trabalhadores; esse regime legal incluiu asLeis da Coalizão, a Lei do Tumulto, e a lei dos assentamentos (esta última equivalendo a um sistema de passaporte interno).

A propósito: se você acha que as passagens acima são apenas retórica marxoide, tenha em mente que a literatura da classe dominante do início da revolução industrial estava cheia de queixas acerca do quanto era difícil obter trabalhadores para as fábricas: não apenas as classes mais baixas não afluíam para as fábricas por vontade própria, como as classes proprietárias gastaram muita energia pensando em maneiras de forçá-las a fazer isso. Os empregadores da época lançavam-se a conversa muito franca, tão franca quanto a de qualquer marxista, acerca da necessidade de manter as pessoas trabalhadoras destituídas e de destituí-las de acesso independente aos meios de produção, a fim de fazê-las trabalhar arduamente o bastante por preço módico o suficiente.

Albert Nock, que seguramente ninguém sonhará pudesse ser marxista, desqualificou a história para crianças burguesa com típico menosprezo nockiano:

Os horrores da vida industrial da Inglaterra no último século dão azo a permanente argumentação por parte dos viciados em intervenção positiva. Trabalho infantil e trabalho de mulheres nas moendas e minas; Coketown e o Sr. Bounderby; salários de inanição; horas assassinas; condições de trabalho aviltantes e perigosas; navios segurados excessivamente, de tal maneira que valiam mais afundados do que flutuando, tripulados por rufiões — tudo isso eloquente mas insinceramente atribuído a um regime de escabroso individualismo, competição desabrida, e laissez-faire. Isso é óbvio absurdo, pois tal regime nunca existiu na Inglaterra. Tudo se deveu à precípua intervenção do Estado por meio da qual a população da Inglaterra foi expropriada da terra; devido à remoção, pelo Estado, da terra da competição com a indústria em busca de força de trabalho. Nem tiveram o sistema de fábricas e a “revolução industrial” qualquer coisa a ver com criar aquelas hordas de seres miseráveis. Quando o sistema de fábricas surgiu, aquelas hordas já estavam lá, expropriadas, e foram para as moendas em troca de qualquer coisa que o Sr. Gradgrind e o Sr. Plugson de Undershot lhes desse, porque não tinham escolha a não ser mendigar, furtar ou morrer de inanição. Sua miséria e degradação não eram de ser encontradas à porta do individualismo; eram de ser encontradas em nenhum outro lugar que à porta do Estado. A economia de Adam Smith não é a economia do individualismo; é a economia dos donos de terras e de moendas. Nossos entusiastas da intervenção positiva farão bem em ler a história das Leis dos Cercos e a obra dos Hammonds, e em tirar suas conclusões a partir daí. [11]

Mesmo no assim chamado “livre mercado” que pretensamente se teria seguido em meado século 19, os donos de capital e terra conseguiam cobrar tributo da força de trabalho, graças a uma estrutura legal geral que (entre outras coisas) restringia o acesso dos trabalhadores a seu pequeno capital auto-organizado por meio de bancos mútuos. Como resultado desse “monopólio do dinheiro,” os trabalhadores tiveram de vender sua força de trabalho num “mercado de compradores” em condições estabelecidas pelas classes proprietárias e pois pagar tributo (em forma de salário inferior ao produto de seu trabalho) para acesso aos meios de produção. Portanto o trabalhador foi assaltado duplamente: pelo uso inicial da força pelo estado para impedir uma economia de mercado centrada no produtor; e pela permanente intervenção do estado que o obriga a vender sua força de trabalho por menos do que seu produto. A vasta maioria do capital acumulado hoje é resultado, não do trabalho e da frugalidade do capitalista no passado, e sim de assalto.

Ora pois, mesmo no assim chamado século 19 do “laissez-faire,” como Tucker descreveu a situação, o nível de intervenção estatista no interesse das classes proprietárias e empregadoras já distorcia o sistema de salários encaminhando-o para todo tipo de rumos autoritários. O fenômeno do trabalho assalariado só existiu na medida em que resultado do processo de acumulação primitiva por meio do qual as classes produtoras haviam, em séculos anteriores, sido roubadas de sua propriedade em termos de meios de produção e forçadas a vender sua força de trabalho nos termos dos chefes. E graças à restrição do estado ao crédito auto-organizado e ao acesso a terra não ocupada, que permitiu aos donos de terra e capital artificialmente escassos cobrar tributo para acesso a eles, os trabalhadores viram-se diante da permanente necessidade de vender sua força de trabalho em condições ainda mais desvantajosas.

O problema foi exacerbado durante a revolução capitalista de estado do século 20, por níveis ainda mais altos de intervenção corporatista, e pela resultante centralização da economia. O efeito dos subsídios do governo e da cartelização regulamentadora foi o de disfarçar ou transferir os custos de ineficiência da organização de larga escala, e promover um modelo de organização de negócios capitalista de estado muito maior, e muito mais hierárquico e burocrático, do que aquele que teria conseguido sobreviver num livre mercado.

Os subsídios do estado para desenvolvimento da produção capital-intensiva, à medida que o século avançava, promoveram desqualificação profissional e hierarquias internas cada vez maiores, e reduziram o poder de barganha que advinha do controle, pela força de trabalho, do processo de produção. Muitas das mais poderosamente profissionalmente desqualificadoras formas de tecnologia de produção foram criadas como resultado dos subsídios do estado para pesquisa e desenvolvimento. Como escreveu David Montgomery em Forças da Produção: História Social da Automação Industrial,

[I]nvestigação do real projeto e uso de tecnologia capital-intensiva, poupadora de trabalho, redutora de qualificação profissional, tem começado a indicar que a redução de custos não era motivação precípua, e nem era conseguida. Em vez de tal estímulo econômico, a mais importante motivação por trás do desenvolvimento do sistema estadunidense de manufatura era militar; o principal promotor dos novos métodos não era o mercado capaz de ajustar-se a si próprio, mas o extramercado Departamento de Artilharia/Arsenal do Exército dos Estados Unidos… O empuxo para automatizar foi, desde o início, o empuxo para reduzir dependência de mão-de-obra qualificada, para desqualificar profissionalmente a mão-de-obra necessária, e não o para aumentar os salários. [12]

Finalmente, a decisão das elites neoliberais nos anos 1970 de congelar os salários reais e transferir todos os aumentos de produtividade para reinvestimento, dividendos ou salários de gerência superior levou a uma força de trabalho ainda mais insatisfeita, e à necessidade de sistemas internos de vigilância e controle muito além de qualquer coisa que existira antes. Gordo e Mesquinho, de David M. Gordon[13], refere-se, em seu subtítulo, ao “Mito do Enxugamento Gerencial.” Gordon mostra que, contrariamente à percepção equivocada do público, as empresas, em sua maioria, empregam ainda mais gerência intermediária do que antes; e uma das principais funções desses novos supervisores é aumentar o controle da gerência sobre uma força de trabalho cada vez mais sobrecarregada de trabalho, insegura, e ressentida. A cultura profissional nos departamentos de Recursos Humanos está, cada vez mais, engrenada para detectar e sustar sabotagem e outras expressões de insatisfação do empregado, por meio de sofisticados mecanismos de vigilância interna, e para identificar atitudes potencialmente perigosas em relação à autoridade por meio de delineamento intensivo de perfil psicológico.

Os capitalistas de estado, desde a adoção de seu novo consenso liberal dos anos Setenta, resolveram a todo custo criar uma sociedade na qual o trabalhador médio esteja tão desesperado por trabalho que gratamente aceite qualquer emprego oferecido, e faça o que for necessário para agarrar-se a ele como a uma tábua de salvação.

Para resumir…

… as coisas não simplesmente “ocorreram” desse modo. Elas tiveram ajuda. O poder de barganha reduzido da força de trabalho, a resultante erosão dos limites tradicionais entre trabalho e vida privada, e o crescente controle da gerência mesmo sobre o tempo de folga são, todos, resultado de esforços políticos concertados.

O fato de aceitarmos como natural um estado de coisas no qual uma classe tem “empregos” para “ dar” e outra classe é forçada a aceitá-los, por falta de acesso independente aos meios de produção, é resultado de gerações de hegemonia ideológica pelas classes proprietárias e seus apologistas libertários vulgares.

Nada na presente situação é implicação natural dos princípios do livre mercado.Como escreveu Albert Nock,

Nossos recursos naturais, embora muito exauridos, ainda são abundantes; nossa população é muito escassa, algo entre vinte a vinte e cinco pessoas por milha quadrada; e alguns milhões dessa população estão no momento “desempregados,” e com probabilidade de assim permanecerem porque ninguém irá ou poderá “dar-lhes trabalho.” O ponto não é que os homens generalizadamente se submetam a esse estado de coisas, ou que o aceitem como inevitável, e sim que eles nada veem de irregular ou anômalo nisso por causa da ideia neles instilada de que o trabalho é algo a ser dado. [14]

Claire Wolfe destacou, em seu brilhante artigo “Sombrios Cubículos Satânicos,” nada haver de libertário na cultura hoje existente de relações de emprego:

Numa comunidade humana saudável, os empregos nem são necessários nem desejáveis. Trabalho produtivo é necessário – por razões econômicas, sociais e até espirituais. Os livres mercados são também algo estupendo, quase mágicos em sua capacidade de satisfazer biliões de necessidades diversas. Empreendedorismo? Excelente! Mas empregos – partir para um cronograma fixo para desempenhar funções fixas para outrem, dia após dia, por um salário – não são bons para corpo, alma, família ou sociedade.

Intuitivamente, sem palavras, as pessoas sabiam disso em 1955. Elas sabiam disso em 1946. Elas realmente sabiam disso quando Ned Ludd e amigos despedaçavam as máquinas do início da Revolução Industrial (embora os Ludditas possam não ter entendido exatamente por que precisavam fazer o que fizeram).

Empregos são maçantes. O emprego corporativo é fastidioso. Passar a vida enfiado em caixas das 9 às 5 é uma porcaria. Cubículos cinzentos são apenas uma versão atualizada dos “sombrios moinhos satânicos” de William Blake.Certo, os cubículos são mais iluminados e arejados; são porém diferentes mais em grau do que em natureza dos moinhos da Revolução Industrial. Ambos, cubículos e moinhos sombrios, significam trabalhar nos termos de outras pessoas, para os objetivos de outras pessoas, com sujeição ao arbítrio de outras pessoas. Nenhum desses dois tipos de trabalho usualmente resulta em tomarmos posse dos frutos de nosso trabalho ou termos a satisfação de criar algo do começo ao fim com nossas próprias mãos. Nenhum dos dois nos permite trabalhar em nosso próprio ritmo, ou ao ritmo das estações. Nenhum dos dois nos permite acesso a nossas famílias, amigos ou comunidades quando necessitamos deles ou eles necessitam de nós. Ambos isolam o trabalho de todas as outras partes de nossa vida…

Tornamos a escravatura dos salários parte tão inconsútil de nossa cultura que provavelmente nem ocorre à maior parte das pessoas haver algo de anormal em separar o trabalho do resto de nossas vidas. Ou em passar nossas vidas de trabalho inteiras produzindo coisas que nos dão apenas satisfação pessoal mínima – ou nenhuma satisfação…

Arranje um emprego, e você terá vendido parte de você próprio a um dono. Você terá acabado de excluir-se dos reais frutos de seus próprios esforços.

Quando você é dono de seu próprio trabalho, é dono de sua própria vida. É objetivo digno de muito sacrifício. E de muita reflexão profunda.

[Q]ualquer pessoa que comece a apresentar algum plano sério que comece por derruir os alicerces da estrutura de poderio estado-corporação pode esperar ser tratada como Inimiga Pública Número Um  [15]

O principal obstáculo para esse último processo, escreveu ela, eram “o governo e seus fortemente favorecidos e subsidiados corporações e mercados financeiros …”

O Quanto Têm de Ser Ruins as Opções?

Antes de prosseguirmos, como anarquista de mercado tenho de deixar claro não haver nada inerentemente errado no trabalho assalariado. E, num livre mercado, os empregadores estariam dentro de seus direitos ao fazerem os tipos de exigência relacionados com o feudalismo de contrato.

O problema, de meu ponto de vista, é que o poder reduzido de barganha da força de trabalho no presente mercado de trabalho permite aos empregadores tirarem proveito indevido disso. O que merece comentário não é a questão legal de se o estado deveria “permitir” aos empregadores exercerem esse tipo de controle, e sim a questão de que tipo de mercado pretensamente livre permitiria isso.

A questão é, o quanto terão de ser execráveis as outras “opções” para que a pessoa fique desesperada o bastante para aceitar emprego nessas condições? Como é que as coisas chegam ao ponto de as pessoas fazerem fila para competir por empregos onde elas poderão ser proibidas de convívio com colegas fora do trabalho, onde até empregos reles de vendedor, com baixa remuneração, poderão envolver ficar disponível 24 horas por dia, 7 dias por semana, onde os empregados não podem participar de reuniões políticas sem ficar de olho para ver se não há algum informante, ou não podem blogar usando o próprio nome sem viver com medo de estarem à distância de uma pesquisa na web da demissão?

Não sou amigo das regulamentações federais do trabalho. Não deveríamos precisar de regulamentações para impedir que esse tipo de coisa acontecesse. Num livre mercado onde terra e capital não fossem artificialmente escassos e dispendiosos em comparação com o trabalho, os empregos deveriam estar competindo por trabalhadores. O surpreendente não é que o feudalismo de contrato seja tecnicamente “legal,” e sim que o mercado de trabalho seja tão execrável que se torna o primeiro problema carente de resolução.

Como Elizabeth Anderson já sugeriu na citação acima, o segredo do feudalismo de contrato é o poder reduzido de barganha da força de trabalho. Timothy Carter coloca as alternativas em termos bem nítidos:

onde reside o real poder de ganhar uma parte do leão do benefício mútuo: no poder de levantar e sair. Se um lado tem o poder de sair da mesa e o outro lado não tem, a parte que tem o poder de sair pode obter quase tudo o que deseje desde que deixe a outra parte apenas ligeiramente melhor do que se não houvesse acordo nenhum…

O que cria desequilíbrio no poder de sair da sala? Uma das situações é a necessidade. Se um dos lados precisa de chegar a um acordo, seu poder de sair da sala acabou.

… Para a maior parte das pessoas, um emprego é a necessidade máxima. É a partir do que ganham graças ao emprego que todas as outras necessidades são satisfeitas.

Assim, pois, como podemos tornar o acordo mais justo?… A resposta dos liberais é o governo intervir na negociação trabalho-capital…

Há outro caminho. A necessidade do governo se intrometer desapareceria se o equilíbrio do poder de negociação entre trabalho e capital fosse equalizado. Atualmente, o desequilíbrio existe porque o capital pode abandonar a mesa, mas o trabalho não pode. [16]

Por um Genuíno Livre Mercado

Contrastemos a presente monstruosa situação com aquela que existiria num genuíno livre mercado: empregos competindo por trabalhadores, em vez do contrário. Eis como Tucker concebeu os efeitos favoráveis ao trabalhador de tal livre mercado:

Para, digamos, Proudhon e Warren, se a atividade bancária fosse livre para todos, cada vez mais pessoas a desenvolveriam, até que a competição se tornasse aguda o suficiente para reduzir o preço de emprestar dinheiro até o custo do trabalho, que as estatísticas mostram ser menos de três quartos de um por cento. Nesse caso os milhares de pessoas que hoje são dissuadidos de desenvolverem negócios pelas ruinosamente altas taxas que precisam pagar pelo capital com o qual começar e conduzir negócios veriam suas dificuldades removidas… Então se veria um exemplo das palavras de Richard Cobden que, quando dois trabalhadores procuram um empregador, os salários caem, mas quando dois empregadores saem à cata de um empregado, os salários sobem. O trabalhador estará então em posição de ditar seu salário e, portanto, assegurará seu salário natural, seu produto inteiro… [17]

Os autores de Perguntas Frequentes Anarquistas descreveram as consequências socialistas libertárias do livre mercado de Tucker em termos ainda mais amplos, na seguinte passagem:

É importante observar que, devido à proposta de Tucker de aumento do poder de barganha dos trabalhadores por meio de acesso ao crédito mútuo, seu anarquismo individualista não só é compatível com o controle pelos trabalhadores como, na verdade, o promoveria (bem como o requereria logicamente). Pois se o acesso ao crédito mútuo aumentasse o poder de barganha dos trabalhadores até o ponto que Tucker disse aumentaria, eles conseguiriam: (1) exigir e obter democracia no local de trabalho; e (2) juntar seu crédito para comprar e ter a propriedade de empresas coletivamente. Isso eliminaria a estrutura de cima para baixo da empresa e a capacidade dos proprietários de pagarem-se a si próprios salários injustamente altos, bem como reduziria os lucros do capitalista a zero mediante assegurar que os trabalhadores recebessem o valor pleno de seu trabalho. O próprio Tucker destacou isso quando argumentou que Proudhon (como ele próprio) “individualizaria e associaria” locais de trabalho por meio de mutualismo, o que “colocaria os meios de produção ao alcance de todos.” [18]

Portanto, em vez de os trabalhadores viverem com medo de os chefes poderem descobrir algo “ruim” acerca deles (como o fato de eles terem dito publicamente o que pensavam no passado, como homens e mulheres livres), os chefes viveriam com medo de os trabalhadores pensarem coisas más a respeito deles a ponto de levarem sua força de trabalho para outro lugar. Em vez de os trabalhadores ficarem desesperados para manter o emprego a ponto de permitir suas vidas privadas serem regulamentadas como extensão do trabalho, a gerência estaria tão desesperada para manter os trabalhadores que mudaria as condições do emprego para adaptá-las a eles. Em vez de os trabalhadores aceitarem cada vez mais humilhações para evitarem falência e falta de teto, os chefes abririam mão cada vez mais de controle sobre o local de trabalho a fim de reterem a força de trabalho. Em tal economia, os trabalhadores associados poderiam contratar capital em vez do contrário, e o estado natural do livre mercado poderia ser a produção cooperativa sob controle dos produtores.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson 15 de setembro de 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Notas: [Por favor veja os links no original]

[1] Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Aventuras em Feudalismo de Contrato’,EsquerdaADireita, 10 de fevereiro de 2005

[2] ‘Proibição de Fumo na Empresa Significa Nas Horas de Folga, Também’, New York Times, 8 de fevereiro de 2005

[3] Patrick Barkham, ‘Blogador Demitido por Expressar Opiniões Abertamente’, The Guardian, 12 de janeiro de 2005

[4] Harold Meyerson, ‘O Grande Irmão No e Fora do Emprego’, Washington Post, 10 de agosto de 2005

[5] Autopublicado. Fayetteville, Ark., 2004

[6] O Libertário, 1o. de maio de 1969

[7] ‘A Lição de Homestead’, Liberdade, 23 de julho de 1892, em Em Vez de um Livro(Gordon Press facsímile da Segunda Edição, 1897, 1972), pp. 453-54.

[8] ‘Capitalismo e Falta de Liberdade’, Túmulo de Lenin, 1o. de abril de 2005

[9] Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels, Capitalvol. 1, vol. 35 das Obras Escolhidas de Marx e Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1996) pp. 704-5.

[10] Franz Oppenheimer, O Estado, tradução de John Gitterman (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1997), pp. 5-6.

[11] Albert Nock, Nosso Inimigo, o Estado (Delavan, Wisc. Hallberg Publishing Company, 1983), p.106n.

[12] (Knopf, 1984)

[13] (Free Press, 1996)

[14] Nosso Inimigo, o Estado, p. 82.

[15] Claire Wolfe, ‘Sombrios Cubículos Satânicos’, Loompanics Unlimited 2005Catálogo Principal

[16] Timothy Carter, Alternativas ao Salário Mínimo’, Liberal Livre, 11 de abril de 2005

[17] “Socialismo de Estado e Anarquismo,” Em Vez de um Livro, p. 11.

[18] “G.5 ‘Benjamin Tucker: Capitalista ou Anarquista?’” Perguntas Frequentes Anarquistas

So the political right is mad that the government didn’t share everything they knew about Benghazi, eh? Tell me again why Bradley Manning is in prison? Why does the US want to “talk to” Julian Assange? What is wrong with Wikileaks?

If Lindsey Graham and John McCain want to get to the bottom of the Benghazi scandal, they should stop the crackdown on whistleblowers and instead listen to what they are saying. Of course this isn’t the case. Graham and McCain aren’t interested in exposing the truth about Benghazi or anything else the government is involved in. Rather, they are using this situation for political gain.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

If the local bakery won’t come down from $2.99 for a loaf of bread and I’m only willing to pay $1.99, no biggie — the deal doesn’t happen.

If a writer won’t let his new novel go for an advance of less than $20k and the publisher won’t come up from $10k, same thing — that novel doesn’t get published (at least not by that publisher).

But when a bunch of bakers won’t take less than $X per hour for their labor, and the bakery owner won’t pay more than $Y, all of a sudden it’s “the labor unions have strangled Hostess” and “[w]orkers … have allowed union leaders to persuade them to destroy their jobs.”

Damn union workers! Who the hell do they think they are, having their agents bargain for a good deal and walking away if they don’t get it. Don’t they know that they should just gratefully accept whatever they are offered and consider themselves lucky?

Anti-union propagandists love to bellyache that “unions have been given special immunity by corrupt left wing politicians,” and they’re right (see Wagner Act, the). But they forget the “special immunity” given to employers by corrupt right-wing politicians (see Taft-Hartley Act, the). State intervention in labor markets cuts both ways, and damages those markets both ways too.

Absent such state intervention, unions are just market actors — no different in principle than any other such actors. You can be pro-market or you can be anti-union, but you can’t be both.

Karl Kraus, one of the most brilliant authors of those semantic condensations known as aphorisms, wrote, “An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.” That’s the perfect aphorism! It expresses the sense, wit, paradox, a half-truth and of course, a truth and a half. But perhaps the best definition is that of Nilt Ejam, “An aphorism is a big delight in a small space.” Correct. Without the  satisfaction of a witticism, the taste of the bon mot, or a hyperbole, a phrase remains an observation, it maintains the level of a mere reflection. The success of aphorisms lies instead in aberration and paradox, or the capacity to condense larger philosophical and moral principles.

Oscar Wilde, a brilliant libertarian mind, made an art of producing sketches of complacent vacuity (“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.”) and humorous judgments about the virtue of vice (“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”). In the context of political thought, there is one idea more than any other that can boast of many witty aphorisms: anarchism. This must be said in praise of anarchist thinkers, who are able to condense knowledge and principles in formulas that taking up little space, produce much delight: “Anarchy is order” – for example.

That motto, the relish of which is in the apparent paradox, is by the man who first dared call himself ‘anarchist’ in a positive sense, specifically Pierre J. Proudhon. Who does not know the slogan, also by the typesetter from  Becancon: “Property is Theft”? The phrase is delicious, in fact, without doubt, it’s short and contains a dose of truth that goes from half a unit to one and a half.

To the disgrace of anarchists however, it must be said that very often they know no more than the aphorisms of their authors. So there are self-styled anarchist partisans, who despite being almost literate, are convinced that Proudhon was opposed to free trade. Some others, able to add two plus two, know that twenty five years after having given to history and T-shirt manufacturers that motto, the Frenchman came along with a powerful defense of private property. The latter, armed with such rudimentary knowledge, are the architects of that harebrained theory whereby there would be two Proudhon’s, one opposed against the other, corresponding to the young anti-proprietarian and the mature free-trader.

These people may well speak with the character from Wilde’s aphorism, the one who loves to talk about nothing, because it’s the only thing he knows anything about. Patience. If they had taken the trouble to read a few more lines they would have understood that in 1840 [1] the author responded to the question “What is property?” and acted as an earnest theorist of natural law, denying by its very nature the idea that this was a natural  right, concluding that it was instead an act of abuse and a pillar of exploitation. In 1865 [2] there was not a change of perspective, but one of method. In his own words:

The only thing we know about property and for which we can distinguish it from ownership is that it is absolute and abusive; very well: precisely in its absolutism and its abuse, to say nothing worse, that we must seek its own ends.[3]

“Must seek its own ends.” The approach is no longer ontological, but utilitarian. Since the State, the second and the largest pillar of exploitation, is even more abusive, the full sovereignty that the individual has over a piece of property, may play for him a defensive role. Property is a counterweight to the abuse of the state. Proudhon in fact, had already identified well in advance the risks associated with a complete abolition of private property. That’s all. He even anticipated Ludwig Von Mises in highlighting that without a free market it was impossible to define the value of goods and ensure their allocation, all issues over which any attempt to question the devotees of the aphorisms, obtains a change of subject, perhaps another aphorism. There are people who confuse the free market with capitalism.

Those same people that are appalled with this defense of property as an anti-state argument, are not bothered at all when some anarchist comes in defense of the state as a function of an anti-capitalist agent, as championed by some of the stars of international anarchism like Noam Chomsky [4] or Hakim Bey. [5] The idea that in addition to a liberal and a socialist one, there exists an anarchism with a statist soul is a new acquirement, and a concept that as well as being better tolerated than propertarianism, also enjoys the merit of originality.

Another formula of success is owed to Mikhail Bakunin and relates to the precarious balance in which the first two principles of the revolutionary triad, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity prove to be, since the great Mother of the Enlightenment gave birth to her three bastard children: liberalism, socialism and anarchism. The Russian says:

Freedom without socialism leads to privilege, to injustice, and socialism without freedom leads to slavery and brutality.

Hard to blame him. Between Marxist promises of a farewell to the realm of necessity and capitalist pledges of an always better distributed freedom, the only prophecy that has been fulfilled is this one by the Russian anarchist. However, if you think about it, you understand how this balance is maintained, and it is necessary to presuppose what Rocker called “voluntary socialism”.

In fact, Bakunin is a collectivist, although he discards centralization and safeguards the property which is fruit of individual work. The question, from the logical point of view, is put exactly in the wake of what the psychologist Paul Watzlawick has called, “confusion between garlic and love”. [6]

The disappointed wife, says, in fact, to her husband: “If you really loved me, you would eat garlic voluntarily.” The problem is not garlic or socialism, which can be liked or not, but the claim that those who do not appreciate the one, the other, or both, not only have to allow the thing in question to be administered, but that they should also take it with pleasure.

It has to be made clear that the paradoxical intimation, i.e., the pretense of authority over something that should be spontaneous, is considered one of the most pathological forms of communication. So behind this well-known aphorism, on whose absolute truth nothing can be argued in descriptive terms, is however implied at a prescriptive level, nothing more than the most extreme variation on the theme of confusion between love and  garlic, in other words the exhortation to behave spontaneously.

Bakunin says, “We want freedom and equality.” We want garlic! Moreover, since, “no man can emancipate himself without emancipating together all the men around him,” he orders every other man to, “be free” that is contradictory, “don’t follow any orders.”

The two giants of anarchism, Proudhon and Bakunin, spent many nights drinking cups of tea and coffee (the lovers of aphorisms know that the Russian agitator wanted it “black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell “) and arguing their methods of implementation of a free society. The Frenchman saw a self-organization among individuals and composite groups that would have gradually eroded the spaces of statehood, the Russian a violent revolution that would have replaced the society of inequality with a new society without classes (“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion”).

This sort of “voluntary socialism”, which in Peter Kropotkin becomes real anarchist communism, requires the assumption of a benign anthropology, which characterizes somewhat all classical anarchism. This can be then considered a secularization of Christianity. In fact while the first two elements of the revolutionary triad , Freedom and Equality will be claimed as “rights”, Brotherhood is an ethical imperative, and upon an ethical imperative, nothing better than a religion can be founded. Nietzsche could well say that anarchism is “Platonism for the poor” (another wonderful aphorism).

This conception, in addition to being inconsistent from a logical point of view, shows many things. Firstly the apparent equidistance between liberalism and socialism which the Bakuninian slogan seems to reveal on its surface, is absolutely false, since there is a clear bias towards collectivism. [7]

As the paradox demonstrates in fact, the revolutionary from Prjamuchino offers his own revolutionary triad, which are the means to produce liberty in socialism and socialism in liberty: “poison, noose and knife.” In this regard, the aphorism by free-market anarchist David Friedman, comes to our rescue by highlighting the fallacy of this reasoning:

Under any institutions, there are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends: love, force, and trade.[8]

Love of course works, but, as the voluntary self-administration of garlic, it cannot be imposed. It only works with those who already appreciate garlic. Force also works. Poison, noose and knife ran the whole world for the “ancient regime” and in countries in which property was abolished, even beyond. You can not however define as “anarchist” the condition of shoving garlic down the throats of the recalcitrant.

All is left is trade, or the arrangement by which A agrees to help B to achieve his purpose if the latter helps him to realize his own. The idea that goals and preferences may be different, is not however acceptable to those who believe that social happiness is an indisputable and uniform recipe: like garlic for everyone. Bakunin rejects trade and pursues the principal two systems, the first, insufficient, an the second, inconsistent.

George Orwell incidentally, points out well the close connection between “love” and “power” when he writes:

(…) public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not,” the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason,” he is under continuous pressure to make him behave exactly the same way as everyone else. [9]

This moral coercion, real power imposed on individuals, which seems to be accepted by Bakunin within certain limits, and by Kropotkin wholesale, shows that a stateless society is not necessarily a free society. Therefore aphorism fans, can even memorize the truth and a half contained in the Bakuninian exhortation, “Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow man? Then, make sure that no one has the power, ” but they will forget that the community, society itself, is still a power.

It is here that Proudhon comes out with extraordinary relevance. Devoid of prophetic enthusiasm, free from messianic dressing, insensitive to the charms of the end of history, he proposes a self-organization that is realized through free association and free contracts. Here there is no confusion therefore between love and garlic. The community thus conceived is made up by a network of voluntary agreements by which individuals and workers’ associations (mutualism) – but also social groups and local governments (federalism) – are connected to each other by regulating their own interests independently. Proudhon embraces, the second option proposed by Friedman: trade. Garlic for those who want it, fresh breath for others.

Also, regarding the idea of building communism based on “brotherhood”, Proudhon argued that it is like trying to, “build a house starting from the dormer.”

Some aphorism connoisseur not completely inexperienced could, highlighting the common basis between the mutualist conception described above and economic liberalism, dare to stand up and denounce in Proudhon an imbalance that is exactly the opposite of Bakunin’s. That would be terrible in his eyes, because denouncing the liberal ethos implies denouncing the “free market”, and everyone in his class knows, that the free market means “capitalist exploitation”.

“Extreme” economic liberalism then, the only true liberalism, is in fact Murray Rothbard’ s anarcho-capitalism , a sort of taboo for left-anarchists. [10]

This front row anarchist however, could only make a good impression in a class of dunces. In fact, the balance between freedom and equality is not pursued by Proudhon in a static synthesis between the two elements in opposition, but actually in a dynamic equilibrium, a tension constant and unsolvable. That’s the way life is.

Only dead things are given and finite. The best metaphor is the one about the tightrope walker whose rod swings up and down in seemingly random ways, but instead is dictated by the ever-changing circumstances, which if fixed in advance, would hurtle the acrobat to the ground. No palingenesis. “The antonymous terms” – Proudhon said – “attain no more resolution than opposite poles of an electric battery destroying each other”. “Self-government of the producers” is therefore, a pluralistic decentralized socialism, i.e. a system of equilibrium in which everyone gets the same benefits in return for the same services. A system that is essentially “egalitarian” and “liberal.”

Years later, Francesco Saverio Merlino will express himself in similar terms. Socialism – Merlin says, is the condition of equality in access to credit and to the means of production without the “capitalists”, understood here as a political caste connected to the state, preventing free competition and producing legal monopolies and parasitic incomes.

This is a perspective by which socialism is not the overthrow of liberalism, but something beyond it. [11] With all due respect to the advocates of imbalance. The same things could be said in his country, producing less outrage, by the editor of “Liberty” Benjamin Tucker, the American anarchist strongly attached to his self-definition of “socialist”.

As for Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, a political ideology that proposes the abolition of the state and its replacement with the free market, the fact that these pro-capitalists consider Proudhon a noble reference does not imply completely similar views. It is clear that anarcho-capitalism turns upside-down the Frenchman’s concept of property. The latter considering it an abuse, conceived of it as a means. The aims are to ensure freedom and fairness. The “orthodox” anarcho-capitalists, considering it as a natural right, make of its defense an end.

According to the “libertarian” view, the sacredness attributed to property entails questionable consequences. So if a monopoly is born out of a legitimately acquired property, or if the owner on the basis of legitimate acquisitions, constitutes an illiberal domain (i.e, forcing all human capital on his property – for example, individuals who make up the population of his private city – on a diet based on garlic), that however it should be defended from any group of “bandits” that was intent on reconstituting conditions of greater equity.

This “liberism” was peeled off from “liberalism” and runs alone. The relationship between the mutualist vision derived from Proudhon and “classic” anarcho-capitalism is therefore not very close. One example is the following excerpt by a contemporary neo-mutualist, Kevin Carson, a ‘”left wing” member of that “free trade” galaxy which is stigmatized as a friend of capital by those who fed on aphorisms, continue to confuse free market and capitalism:

Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by  continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.[12]

These sentences seem taken from a pamphlet from any of the activists scattered along the spectrum that goes from more “retro” communist anarchism, to a more “à la page” insurrectionalism. All people who take seriously the words by the good old dandy, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

However known aphorism repeaters, which are not always ashamed to be accompanied by the most backward and xenophobic reactionary right-wingers, united by the hatred for liberal globalization and bourgeois modernity [13], often reveal (especially in Europe) an attitude of outrage against those who set themselves out, with an open mind and with an experimental disposition, to handle the delicate matter of free trade. Whomever confronts the liberal mindset, is more of a pariah than a heretic, an untouchable guilty of renouncement. An Italian online encyclopedia for this purpose coined the definition of “pseudoanarchico” (false anarchist). It is in short a revisionist, if not an anarcho-capitalist in disguise. These little priests of the “circled A” must have read some critical aphorism by Noam Chomsky [14] ignoring that the well-known linguist however, defines himself as “founded in the origins of liberal thought.”

In other words, libertarians sometimes appear to distribute anarchists patents, based on others’ agreement with their own bagful of aphorisms. Sometimes even with the orthodoxy – understood in aphoristic terms, of course – of their acquaintances. It is legit to have doubts about the logic of this type of judgment. Mephistopheles, who Goethe deems “part of the force that constantly pursues evil and always creates the good”, is a character whose acquaintances you could not really define as good company. Where he uses to stay, good companies are rarities. But from sulfur, says the great German, come good things. It should be noted rather, that Judas Iscariot attended what were said to be irreproachable people.

In conclusion, if you abandon some dusty catechism, you might even venture some daring idea. “It ‘s looking for the impossible that man has always made the possible.” That’s Bakunin.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Amore, aglio e anarchia.

Notes:

[1] Proudhon, P.G., Che cos’è la proprietà, Laterza, Bari, 1978  (IT. ED.)

[2] Proudhon, P.G., La teoria della proprietà, Seam, Roma, 1998 (IT. ED.

[3] Cit. in Treglia, E., Proprietà e anarchia in Proudhon, Edizioni La baronata, Lugano, 2007, pag. 19

[4] (…) the anarchist vision, in almost every variety, has looked forward to the dismantling of state power. Personally, I share that vision, though it seems to run counter to my goals. Hence the tension to which I referred. My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to “roll back” the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights.(http://www.chomsky.info/books/prospects01.htm)

[5] Bey’s anti-globalization ideology goes as far as to set up a facile opposition between globalization (‘sameness’) and the nation-state (‘difference’???). Bey states: “Like religion, the State has simply failed to ‘go away’ — in fact, in a bizarre extension of the thesis of ‘Society against the State,’ we can even reimagine the State as an institutional type of ‘custom and right’ which Society can wield (paradoxically) against an even more ‘final’ shape of power — that of ‘pure Capitalism.’” (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Anonymous__The_Continuing_Appeal_of_Nationalism_among_Anarchists.html )

[6] Watzslavick, P., Istruzioni per rendersi infelici, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1984, (IT. ED.)

[7] On these issues, some authors able to go beyond the aphorisms have focused their critical attention. Michel Onfray, for example, writes:

Bakunin differs from Marx only by means, not for the purpose. In the two thinkers you can find the same sacrifice to teleology, the same optimism, the same Hegelian belief in the possibility of a end and accomplishment of history, an identical communion in hatred for private property inherited from Rousseau, from which both take borrow their critique of modernity, their ridiculous discrediting for the technique. Both believe in the whole man, freed from its alienations for the simple fact that he moves in a classless society.We know the story  (translated from: “La politica del ribelle”, ponte delle Grazie, 1998, Milano, pag. 92) IT.ED.

 Massimo La Torre, for his part, says,

Sorry to say, but in Bakunin we can found a critique of democracy and of the parliamentary system similar to the anti-modern and anti-egualitarian one of political romanticism. (translated from: Reasoning, discuss, act publicly, negotiate (II)”A City” n. 88 September 2000

[8] Friedman, D., L’ingranaggio della libertà, Liberilibri, Macerata, 1997, pag. 36 IT.ED.

[9] Cit. in Woodcock, G., L’anarchia. Storia delle idée e dei movimenti libertari, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1977, pag. 73 IT.ED.

[10] Rothbard, M., Per una nuova libertà. Il manifesto libertario, Liberilibri, Macerata, 1996 IT. ED.

[11] Merlino, F. S. , Pro e contro il socialismo, Esposizione critica dei principi e dei sistemi socialisti, Milano, 1987, p. 41

[12] Cit. in Sheldon, R., Libertarian Left. Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal, AmericanConservative,http://www.amconmag.com/blog/libertarian-left

[13] Fraqueille, M., A destra di Porto Alegre, in Libertaria, 1-2004, 24-37

[14] For example, “Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history” (http://www.zcommunications.org/anarcho-capitalism-in-my-opinion-is-a-doctrinal-system-which-if-ever-implemented-would-lead-to-fo-by-noam-chomsky)

The following article has also been translated into English, written by Luigi Corvaglia.

Karl Kraus, uno dei più brillanti autori di quelle condensazioni semantiche note come aforismi, scrisse che “Un aforisma non è mai una verità: o è una mezza verità o è una verità e mezzo.” E’ l’aforisma perfetto! Vi si ritrova il senso, l’arguzia, il paradosso, la mezza verità e, ovviamente, la verità e mezzo. Ma la definizione migliore è forse quella di Nilt Ejam: “un aforisma è molto sfizio in poco spazio”. Esatto. Senza il gusto del bon mot o di una iperbole, una locuzione rimane un’osservazione, si mantiene al livello di semplice riflessione. Il successo degli aforismi risiede invece nel grottesco e nel paradosso oppure nella grande capacità condensativa di ampi principi filosofici e morali.

Oscar Wilde, splendida mente di libertario, ne fece un’arte producendo schizzi di autocompiaciuta fatuità (“Amo molto parlare di niente. È la sola cosa su cui so tutto.”) e umoristiche sentenze sulla virtù del vizio (“La moderazione è una cosa fatale. Nulla ha più successo dell’eccesso.”). Nell’ambito del pensiero politico c’è un’idea che più di ogni altra si può gloriare di molti arguti aforismi: l’anarchismo. Ciò va detto ad onore dei pensatori anarchici, in grado di condensare principi e saperi in formule che, occupando poco spazio, producono molto sfizio. “L’anarchia è ordine”, ad esempio.

Il motto, il cui gusto è nell’apparente paradosso, si deve all’uomo che per primo osò definirsi “anarchico” in senso positivo, cioè Pierre J. Proudhon. E chi non conosce lo slogan, sempre del tipografo di Becancon, “la proprietà è un furto”? La frase è sfiziosa, appunto, non c’è alcun dubbio, è breve e contiene una dose di verità che va dalla mezza unità all’unità e mezza.

A disonore degli anarchici, però, va detto che molto spesso dei loro autori non conoscono più degli aforismi. Così ci sono sedicenti partigiani dell’anarchismo, alcuni perfino in grado di leggere e   scrivere, che sono convinti, sulla scorta di tale affermazione, che Proudhon fosse avverso al libero scambio. Qualche altro, capace di far di conto, sa che, venticinque anni dopo aver regalato alla storia ed ai fabbricanti di T-shirt quel motto, il francese si è prodotto in un’apologia della proprietà privata. Quest’ultimi, forti di tali rudimentali conoscenze, sono gli artefici della balzana teoria per cui esisterebbero due Proudhon l’uno contro l’altro armati corrispondenti al giovane anti-proprietarista e al maturo liberista.

Questa gente può ben discorrere col personaggio dell’aforisma di Wilde, quello che ama parlare di niente, perché è l’unica cosa di cui sa  tutto. Pazienza. Se si fossero presi la briga di leggere qualche riga avrebbero capito che nel 1840 [1] l’autore rispondeva alla domanda “Che cos’è la proprietà?” e lo faceva da giusnaturalista, negando, proprio in quanto tale, l’idea che questa fosse un diritto naturale, concludendo che è invece un atto d’abuso e un pilastro dello sfruttamento. Nel 1865 [2] non è avvenuto un cambio di prospettiva, ma di metodo. Lasciamo parlare il diretto interessato:

l’unica cosa che sappiamo della proprietà e per la quale possiamo distinguerla dal possesso è che essa è assoluta e abusiva; benissimo: appunto nel suo assolutismo, e nei suoi abusi, per non dire peggio, che dobbiamo cercare i suoi fini. [3]

“I suoi fini”. L’approccio non è più ontologico, bensì interessato all’utile. Poiché lo Stato, secondo e maggior pilastro dello sfruttamento, rappresenta un abuso ancora più grande, la piena sovranità che l’individuo ha su una porzione di materia può svolgere per questi una funzione difensiva. La proprietà è un contrappeso all’abuso statale. Proudhon, insomma, aveva già individuato con largo anticipo i rischi connessi ad una totale abolizione della proprietà privata. Tutto qui. Aveva perfino anticipato Ludwig Von Mises nell’evidenziare come senza libero mercato fosse impossibile definire il valore dei beni e provvedere alla loro allocazione, tutti problemi sui quali ogni tentativo di interrogare i devoti degli aforismi ottiene un cambio del discorso, magari un altro aforisma. Ci sono persone che confondono libero mercato e capitalismo.

Quelle stesse persone che sembrano scandalizzarsi davanti a questa difesa della proprietà in funzione anti-statale, non si scompongono affatto davanti alla difesa dello Stato in funzione anti-capitalistica operate da alcune star dell’anarchismo internazionale come Noam Chomsky [4] o Hakim Bey. [5] Che accanto a quelle liberale e socialista nell’anarchismo esistesse anche un’anima statalista è acquisizione nuova e concetto che, oltre ad essere più tollerato del proprietarismo, gode anche del pregio dell’originalità.

Un’altra formula di successo si deve a Michail Bakunin e ha per oggetto il precario equilibrio nel quale dimostrano di trovarsi i primi due principi della triade rivoluzionaria, Libertà, Eguaglianza e Fraternità, dacché la grande Madre del secolo dei Lumi partorì i loro tre figli bastardi: liberalismo, socialismo e anarchismo. Dice il russo:

La libertà senza il socialismo porta al privilegio, all’ingiustizia; e il socialismo senza la libertà porta alla schiavitù e alla brutalità.

Difficile dargli torto. Fra promesse marxiste di addio al regno delle necessità e promesse capitalistiche di libertà sempre meglio distribuite, l’unica profezia ad essersi avverata è quella dell’anarchico russo. Se, però, ci si riflette, si capisce come il mantenere questo equilibrio presupponga quello che Rocker definì “socialismo volontario”.

In effetti, Bakunin è un collettivista, per quanto rigetti la centralizzazione e salvaguardi la proprietà dei frutti del lavoro individuale. La questione, dal punto di vista logico, si pone esattamente nel solco di ciò che lo psicologo Paul Watzlawick ha definito “confusione fra aglio e amore” [6].

Dice, infatti, la moglie delusa al marito: “se tu mi amassi veramente, mangerestivolontariamente l’aglio”. Il problema non è l’aglio o il socialismo, che possono piacere come no, ma che si pretenda da coloro i quali non apprezzano l’uno, l’altro o entrambi, che non solo si facciano somministrare la cosa in oggetto, ma lo facciano anche con piacere.

E’ da chiarire che l’ingiunzione paradossale, cioè la pretesa d’imperio di qualcosa che dovrebbe essere spontaneo, è considerata una delle forme più patogene di comunicazione. Dietro questo noto aforisma, sulla cui assoluta veridicità in termini descrittivi nulla si può obiettare, è sottesa, invece, a livello prescrittivo, proprio la più estrema delle variazioni sul tema della confusione fra amore e aglio, cioè l’esortazione a comportarsi spontaneamente.

Bakunin dice: “desideriamo la libertà e l’uguaglianza!”. Desideriamo l’aglio! Del resto, siccome “nessun uomo può emanciparsi altrimenti che emancipando con lui tutti gli uomini che lo circondano”, egli ordina ad ogni altro uomo “sii libero”, cioè, contraddittoriamente, “non farti ordinare nulla”.

I due giganti dell’anarchismo, Proudhon e Bakunin, passarono molte notti a bere bicchieri di tè e tazze di caffè (i cultori degli aforismi sapranno che l’agitatore russo lo voleva “nero come la notte, dolce come l’amore, caldo come l’inferno”) e litigare proprio sui metodi di realizzazione della società libera. Il francese vedeva un’auto-organizzazione fra individui e gruppi diversi e compositi che avrebbe eroso gradualmente gli spazi della statualità, il russo una rivoluzione violenta che avrebbe sostituito la società della diseguaglianza con una nuova società senza classi (“La passione per la distruzione è anche una passione creativa”).

Questa sorta di “socialismo volontario”, che in Petr Kropotkin diviene vero e proprio comunismo anarchico, necessita del presupposto di una antropologia benigna e caratterizza un po’ tutto l’anarchismo classico. Questo può quindi essere considerarato una laicizzazione del cristianesimo. Infatti, mentre i due primi elementi della triade rivoluzionaria, Libertà e Eguaglianza, si pretendono “diritti”, la Fratellanza è un imperativo etico, e su un imperativo etico si fonda niente più che una religione. Poteva ben dire Nietzsche che l’anarchismo è “platonismo per i poveri” (altro splendido aforisma).

Questa concezione, oltre ad essere incongruente dal punto di vista logico, dimostra molte cose. La prima è che l’apparente equidistanza fra liberalismo e socialismo che lo slogan bakuniniano sembra palesare in superficie, si rivela assolutamente fallace, visto un netto sbilanciamento verso il collettivismo [7].

A dimostrazione del paradosso, il fatto che anche il rivoluzionario di Prjamuchino ha da proporre una sua triade rivoluzionaria, quella degli strumenti atti a  produrre la libertà nel socialismo e il socialismo nella libertà: “veleno, cappio e coltello”. A tal proposito ci viene in soccorso per mettere in evidenza l’aporia di questo ragionamento, l’aforisma dell’anarchico ultra-liberista David Friedman:

Ci sono solo tre modi per indurre gli altri a fare ciò che vuoi: l’amore, la forza, lo scambio. [8]

L’amore, di certo, funziona, ma, come la volontaria auto-somminitrazione di aglio, non può imporsi. Funziona solo con coloro i quali l’aglio già lo gradiscono. La forza funziona anch’essa. Veleno, cappio e coltello hanno gestito il mondo per tutto l’ancient regime e, nei paesi in cui la proprietà è stata eliminata, anche oltre. Non si può comunque definire “anarchica” la condizione di infilare l’aglio giù per il gargarozzo ai recalcitranti.

Rimane solo lo scambio, cioè l’accordo per cui A  acconsente ad aiutare B a realizzare il suo scopo se questi aiuta  A a realizzare il suo. L’idea che gli scopi e i gusti possano essere diversi non è, però, accettabile per chi ritiene che la felicità sociale stia in una ricetta uniforme e indiscutibile: aglio per tutti. Bakunin rigetta lo scambio e persegue i primi due sistemi, il primo, insufficiente, il secondo, incongruente.

George Orwell ha puntato bene su questo aspetto facendo anche notare la stretta connessione fra “amore” e “forza” quando ha scritto:

L’opinione pubblica è meno tollerante di qualsiasi sistema di leggi. Quando gli esseri umani sono governati da un potere che impone loro di “non fare” questo o quello, possono concedersi una certa dose di eccentricità; quando sono governati, almeno in teoria, dall’ “amore” e dalla “ragione, l’individuo è sotto una continua pressione intesa a ottenere che si comporti e pensi esattamente come tutti gli altri. [9]

Questa coercizione morale, vera forza che si impone sugli individui, che Bakunin, entro certi limiti, e Kropotkin, in toto, sembrano accettare, dimostra che una società senza stato non è necessariamente una società libera. Così, schiere di cultori dell’aforisma potranno anche mandare a memoria la verità e mezza contenuta nell’esortazione bakuniniana “Vuoi rendere impossibile per chiunque opprimere un suo simile? Allora, assicurati che nessuno abbia il potere”, ma si scorderanno che la comunità, lo collettività sono comunque un potere.

E’ qui che Proudhon viene fuori nella sua straordinaria attualità. Scevro da entusiasmo profetico, libero da abiti messianici, insensibile al fascino della fine della storia, egli propone un autogestione che si realizza mediante libere associazioni e liberi contratti. Qui non si cade, quindi, nella confusione fra amore e aglio. La società così concepita risulta costituita da una rete di liberi accordi mediante cui i singoli e le associazioni operaie (mutualismo), ma anche i gruppi sociali e gli enti locali (federalismo), si collegano fra loro regolando i propri interessi in piena autonomia. Proudhon abbraccia, cioè, la terza opzione proposta da Friedman, lo scambio. Aglio per chi lo vuole, alito fresco per gli altri.

Riguardo, poi, all’idea di costruire il comunismo sulla “fratellanza”, Proudhon affermava che è come pretendere di “costruire la casa a partire dall’abbaiono”.

Qualche conoscitore di aforismi non totalmente sprovveduto potrebbe, sulla scorta delle evidenziate comuni basi fra la concezione mutualista appena descritta e il liberalismo, ardire ad alzare la mano e denunciare in Proudhon uno sbilanciamento esattamente opposto rispetto a quello di Bakunin. Ciò sarebbe terribile ai suoi occhi, perché denunciare un ethos liberale implica denunciarne il “liberismo” e, tutti lo sanno nella sua classe, il liberalismo è “sfruttamento capitalistico”.

Il liberismo “estremo”, che poi sarebbe l’unico vero liberismo, infatti, è l’anarco-capitalismo di Murray Rothbard, una sorta di moloch per gli anarchici “di sinistra” [10].

Questo anarchico del primo banco però, potrebbe far bella figura solo in una classe differenziale. Infatti, l’equilibrio fra libertà e eguaglianza non viene da Proudhon ricercato in una statica sintesi fra i due elementi in antitesi, bensì, appunto, in un equilibrio dinamico, una tensione costante e irrisolvibile. La vita è così.

Solo le cose morte sono date e finite. La miglior metafora è quella dell’equilibrista la cui asta si muove in su e in giù in modi apparentemente casuali, ma invece dettati dalle sempre mutevoli contingenze e che, se fossero fissati in anticipo, farebbero rovinare a terra il funambolo. Nessuna palingenesi. “Le antinomie – diceva Proudhon – non si risolvono più di quanto non si distruggano le polarità opposte di una pila elettrica”. L’ “autogoverno dei produttori” costituisce, quindi,  un socialismo pluralista decentralizzato, cioè un sistema di equilibri in cui ognuno ottiene gli stessi vantaggi in compenso degli stessi servigi. Un sistema essenzialmente “egualitario” e “liberale”.

Anni dopo sarà Francesco Saverio Merlino a esprimersi in termini simili. Il socialismo, diceva Merlino, è la condizione di eguaglianza nell’accesso al credito ed ai mezzi di produzione senza che i “capitalisti”, intesi qui come una casta politica innervata allo stato, impediscano la libera concorrenza e producano monopoli legali e rendite parassitarie.

E’ questa un’ottica in cui il socialismo non è affatto rovesciamento del liberalismo, bensì suo superamento. [11] Con buona pace dei fautori dello sbilanciamento.  Le stesse cose poteva dire nel suo Paese, e con minor scandalo, il direttore di “Liberty”, Benjamin Tucker, anarchico statunitense tenacemente attaccato alla sua definizione di “socialista”.

Quanto all’anarco-capitalismo rothbardiano, un’ideologia politica che propone l’abolizione dello Stato e la sua sostituzione col libero mercato, il fatto che questi filo-capitalisti considerino Proudhon un nobile riferimento non implica la totale comunanza di vedute. E’ chiarissimo che l’anarco-capitalismo ribalta la concezione della proprietà del francese. Quest’ultimo, considerandola un abuso, la concepisce come un mezzo. I fini sono quelli di garantire la libertà e l’equità.  Quelli, gli anarcocapitalisti “ortodossi”, considerandola un diritto naturale, della sua difesa fanno  un fine.

Nella concezione libertarian, infatti, la sacralità attribuita alla proprietà comporta conseguenze discutibili per cui, se un monopolio nasce da una proprietà legittimamente acquisita o se il proprietario costituisce sulla base di legittime acquisizioni un dominio illiberale (volesse, cioè, obbligare tutte le pertinenze umane della sua proprietà – ad esempio gli individui che compongono la popolazione della sua città privata – ad una dieta a base di aglio), esso andrebbe comunque difeso dall’eventuale gruppo di “banditi” che ritenesse di ricostituire condizioni di maggiore equità.

Questo “liberismo” si è scollato dal “liberalismo” e corre da solo. La parentela fra la visione mutualista di derivazione proudhoniana e l’anarco-capitalismo “classico” è, quindi, non strettissima. Ne è un esempio il seguente stralcio di un neo-mutualista contemporaneo, Kevin Carson,  esponente dell’ “ala sinistra” di quella galassia “liberale” che viene  stigmatizzata come amica del capitale da coloro i quali, nutriti ad aforismi, continuano a confondere libero mercato e capitalismo:

Il capitalismo, venuto su come una nuova società di classe direttamente dalla vecchia società di classe del Medioevo, è stato fondato su un atto di rapina, tanto massiccio quanto la precedente conquista feudale della terra. E ‘stato sostenuto fino ad oggi dall’ intervento dello Stato che continua a proteggere il suo sistema di privilegi, senza il quale la sua sopravvivenza sarebbe inimmaginabile. [12]

Questi periodi  sembrano estrapolati da un pamphlet di uno qualunque degli attivisti che si disperdono lungo lo spettro che va dal comunismo anarchico più retrò all’insurrezionalismo più à la page. Tutta gente che prende sul serio la frase del buon vecchio dandy “La moderazione è una cosa fatale. Nulla ha più successo dell’eccesso”.

Eppure, i noti ripetitori di aforismi, che non sempre si vergognano di accompagnarsi ad esponenti della destra identitaria più retriva e xenofoba, cui sono accumunati dall’odio per la globalizzazione liberale e per la modernità borghese [13], palesano spesso un atteggiamento di scandalo dinanzi a chi si pone con mente aperta e disposizione sperimentale a maneggiare la scottante materia del libero scambio. Chiunque si confronti col pensiero liberale, più che eretico è un paria, un intoccabile colpevole di abiuria. Un’enciclopedia online ha coniato a tal fine la definizione di pseudoanarchico. E’, insomma,  un revisionista, quando non un anarco-capitalista sotto mentite spoglie. Questi pretenzoli dell’ A cerchiata devono aver letto qualche aforisma critico di Noam Chomsky [14] ignorando che il noto linguista si definisce comunque “fondato nel pensiero liberale delle origini”.

Insomma, i libertari sembrano talvolta distribuire patenti di anarchismo in base all’aderenza delle altrui dichiarazioni con il proprio bagaglio di aforismi. Talvolta, addirittura, con la ortodossia – in termini aforistici, s’intende – delle loro frequentazioni. Sulla logica di questo tipo di giudizi è lecito nutrire qualche dubbio. Mefistofele, che Goethe vuole “parte di quella forza che persegue costantemente il male e realizza sempre il bene”, non si potrebbe certo definire personaggio dalle buone frequentazioni. Dove alloggia lui sono rare. Ma da quello zolfo, dice il grande tedesco, vengono buone cose. Da notare, piuttosto, che Giuda Iscariota frequentava, si dice, persone irreprensibili.

In conclusione, se si abbandonasse qualche catechismo polveroso, si potrebbe anche azzardare qualche ardita idea. “E’ ricercando l’impossibile che l’uomo ha sempre realizzato il possibile”. E’ di Bakunin.

Note:

[1] Proudhon, P.G., Che cos’è la proprietà, Laterza, Bari, 1978

[2] Proudhon, P.G., La teoria della proprietà, Seam, Roma, 1998

[3] Cit. in Terglia, E., PropriSetà e anarchia in Proudhon, Edizioni La baronata, Lugano, 2007, pag. 19

[4] L’ideale anarchico, qualunque sia la sua forma, ha sempre aspirato, per definizione, verso uno smantellamento del potere statale. Io condivido questo ideale. Eppure, esso entra spesso in conflitto diretto con i miei obiettivi immediati, che sono di difendere, ossia rinforzare certi aspetti dell’autorità dello Stato. Oggi, nel quadro della nostra società, credo che la strategia degli anarchici sinceri debba essere di difendere certe istituzioni dello Stato contro gli assalti che subiscono, pur sforzandosi di costringerle ad aprirsi a una partecipazione popolare più ampia ed effettiva.(http://www.ecn.org/contropotere/press/298.htm)

[5] Bey’s anti-globalization ideology goes as far as to set up a facile opposition between globalization (‘sameness’) and the nation-state (‘difference’???). Bey states: “Like religion, the State has simply failed to ‘go away’ — in fact, in a bizarre extension of the thesis of ‘Society against the State,’ we can even reimagine the State as an institutional type of ‘custom and right’ which Society can wield (paradoxically) against an even more ‘final’ shape of power — that of ‘pure Capitalism.’” (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Anonymous__The_Continuing_Appeal_of_Nationalism_among_Anarchists.html)

[6]  Watzslavick, P., Istruzioni per rendersi infelici, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1984,

[7] Su tali aspetti, autori libertari capaci di andare oltre gli aforismi hanno puntato la loro attenzione critica. Michel Onfray, ad esempio, scrive:

Bakunin si differenzia da Marx per i soli mezzi, non per i fini. Nei due pensatori si ritrova lo stesso sacrificio alla teleologia, all’ottimismo, la stessa credenza hegeliana nella possibilità di una fine e di un compimento della storia, un’identica comunione nell’odio per la proprietà privata ereditato da Rousseau, dal quale entrambi prendono in prestito la loro critica della modernità, il loro ridicolo discredito gettato sulla tecnica. Ambedue credono all’uomo totale, liberato dalle sue alienazioni per il semplice fatto di muoversi in una società senza classi. Conosciamo la storia (“La politica del ribelle”, ponte delle Grazie, 1998, Milano, pag. 92)

[12] Cit. in Sheldon, R., Libertarian Left. Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal, American Conservative, http://www.amconmag.com/blog/libertarian-left

[13] Fraqueille, M., A destra di Porto Alegre, in Libertaria, 1-2004, 24-37

[14] [Ad esempio “L’anarcocapitalismo, secondo me, è un sistema dottrinale che, se mai implementato, porterebbe a forme di tirannia e oppressione che hanno pochi uguali nella storia dell’umanità”

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

In his 1965 essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Murray Rothbard presents an iconoclastic political spectrum to discuss how the historical libertarian left became perverted and tempted by promises of power. His spectrum continues to elicit confusion concerning his placement of state socialism in the middle.

Harkening back to a classical approach, Rothbard identifies the left with liberty and the right with statism:

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.

More novel is where Rothbard places the state socialist movement on his spectrum:

Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

This is all well and good but valid criticisms readily arise. Libertarians might find it strange to orient themselves closer on the spectrum to state socialists and furthest away from conservatism, which in most forms seems no worse than totalitarian communists who would presumably be in the middle. Conservatives might take offense at being described as further from libertarianism than communist rulers or even Marx, who advocated dissolution of the state but also an emergency dictatorship and the abolition of voluntary exchange. And anti-authoritarian leftists and well-meaning state socialists might also protest, as many are accustomed to seeing Stalinism as a species of the extreme right, somewhere in the proximity of Nazism, rather than a centrist position on any scale.

Indeed, one could make a strong case that the 20th century communist regimes rival the worst governments in history, that many of them easily compare to the most reactionary states in their hostility to liberty. Lenin and Stalin waged wars of extermination against dissidents and party enemies.Mao committed cultural genocide and starved tens of millions with his agricultural policies. On a per capita basis, Pol Pot was easily as murderous and totalitarian as any rightwing regime in the history of humanity. These appraisals could find agreement from libertarians and “small-government” conservatives, but also well-intentioned socialists and anarchists of all stripes.

Within the United States, it was not so much communism, but progressivism, that wedged itself between Jeffersonian liberalism and Hamiltonian conservatism to become the middle-of-the-road American ideology, dedicated to libertarian goals through rightwing means. In Wilson, FDR, and even the modern Democratic Party, we see some libertarian rhetoric persist and most of the collectivist rhetoric is about elevating the common person, the worker, the poor and middle class, against the royalist rich. Yet a radical reading of American history demonstrates that just as in the rest of the world, the middle-of-the-road ideology yielded some of the worst authoritarianism and state violence ever perpetrated by the U.S. government. Those who could plausibly be called progressive Democrats (or modern liberals) were principally responsible for U.S. entry into World War I, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. The American progressives and their New Deal and Great Society successors have had a dismal civil liberties record, from the Palmer Raids and Sedition Act to Japanese Internment and surveillance on the antiwar movement, from FDR banning marijuana to Obama’s kill list and indefinite detention. The corporate state was at least as much the darling of the middle-of-the-road progressives as it was the design of America’s more consistent conservative statists.

What gives? Can Rothbard’s spectrum be salvaged despite the tendency of “middle-of-the-road” state socialists to be responsible for some of the greatest crimes against liberty and human rights?

The key to understanding this paradox is to appreciate that the conservative right and libertarian left have always agreed on one thing that the middle-of-the-road socialists have attempted to deny: the true nature of the state. The state is about privilege. It is about power. It is about class stratification, redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, war, torture, tribalism writ large, prisons, police, borders, and control. The state is the negation of liberty, as Mises said. For this reason the libertarians have always opposed statism. For the same reason, the monarchists, theocrats, mercantilists, and feudal lords always favored statism.

The state socialists want the state to be something it cannot be—an engine of humanitarian equality, a bulwark of peace, a tool of worker’s liberation, a break on corporate and religious privilege, a tribute to the international brotherhood of man. Insofar as the state expands its power, liberal ends become more elusive. So the state socialist continues pushing for more interventions, more crackdowns, more taxes, more regulations, more penalties. It never works. The harder you try to turn the state into something it isn’t, the more you will see it for what it really is.

Achieving monarchism or fascism through the state is a much easier project than achieving liberation and equality with it. Propping up unearned wealth is an expensive political program, but states have managed to do it for centuries. Dismantling privilege and leveling the playing field are another matter. When the state only needs to please the elite, there is some limit to its rapaciousness. When it is allegedly geared toward supporting the masses, it must maintain all the costly and vicious apparatuses of the conservative state—taxes, armies, police, borders, and bureaucrats—but it must do even more. To trick the people into thinking it rules on their behalf it must adopt a welfare state. To put in a more earnest attempt it needs to utilize even more violent means. The more people try to  turn the state into something it is not, the worse it becomes. This is not always because state socialists have abandoned their ideals and become corrupted by power, although that is a large part of the story. But even if they remain true believers, statists acting out of genuine conviction in an impossible plan can do just as much damage, refusing to give up on their fantasy and making the problem worse with every expansion of power pursued in the guise of empowering the powerless. Whereas the conservative authoritarians must only go so far to get their way, the state socialist gets further from her goal the more she sees conservatives means employed to achieve her liberal ends. This is because conservative means can only yield anti-liberal ends.

Once in a while, a persecuted group actually overthrows a regime and comes out on top. But then they become the ruling class. They can decide to rule as their predecessors did, which is bad enough, or they can try in earnest to achieve the impossible: liberation through enslavement, peace through war, or equality through the greatest institution of privilege of all time, the monopoly on violence known as the state. Thus do all leftist middle-of-the-road attempts become at best a carbon copies of conservative rule, at worst an unlimited orgy of state violence and oppression aiming for a categorical impossibility.

It is sometimes said of the conventional American left-right spectrum that all you see in the middle of the road is roadkill. This is even truer of Rothbard’s left-right spectrum. Nothing is deadlier than the pursuit of liberal ends through conservative means. While state socialists are truly in the middle of the road, they have the most naive and distorted understanding of the workings and movement of traffic. They must make their decision: liberal means through liberal ends or conservative means through conservative ends. Dancing in the center divide is bound to get someone killed.

Por Nicolás Morás

No se trata de un artículo filosófico, de un pedido de que nos elijas para nada.

Esto es la historia de la profanación del simple término que describe mi ideología y la invitación a que no te quedes con la versión oportunista del significado del libertarismo.

Dedicado a Juan Gar, Moctezuma Mortera, Ignacio Pablo Rico Guastavino, Gustavo Fernández, Ramiro Voigt, Jim Bell y a la memoria de Roy Childs y Frederic Bastiat.

Carta a cualquier curioso sobre la relación del liberalismo y el libertarismo, y el fantasma “anarco-capitalista” :

El liberalismo clásico

Es el precursor del movimiento anarquista. En general, los preceptos de los liberales que estudiaron el funcionamiento del estado dictan que el estado no es necesario, que sus funciones sí, pero esas funciones son tergiversadas y pervertidas por la existencia del gobierno y que deben pasar a otro poder, sea privado o civil.

Algunos ejemplos de grupos de acción liberal son los Levellers de la guerra civil inglesa que dieron origen al radical Club Whig, la Sociedad de Librepensadores que timonó Condorcet e influyó en el jacobinismo revolucionario francés, los granjeros que se instalaron en Pennsylvania, las brigadas de Lois Blanqui inspiradas por los liberales ricardianos (laboristas) que lucharon en la Revolución europea de 1833 y la Anti-Corn Law League, organización inglesa que luchó por liberar el comercio de granos y erradicar la planificación imperialista en Inglaterra y en las colonias.

Nombres clave

David Ricardo. Economista, observador de los daños que los monopolios generan en la economía y la sociedad, autor de la primera Teoría del Valor Trabajo. Thomas Paine , revolucionario, decepcionado profundamente con la aristocracia esclavista y puritana que tomó el control de Estados Unidos, escritor de La Edad de la Razón, continuador de la tradición anti-clerical de los liberales franceses. Paine mantuvo el primer gran debate sobre filosofía política de la historia moderna, defendiendo la Revolución francesa con su ensayo Los Derechos del Hombre en respuesta a las Reflexiones del teórico reaccionario Edmund Burke.

William Godwin y Mary Wollstonecraft, pareja de pensadores amigos de Paine, él jurista pionero que ideó varias de las garantías procesales y derechos humanos (Teoría de la Justicia Política) que hoy conocemos como establecidos y primer “anarquista” auto-denominado, ella ideóloga y agitadora de la Emancipación femenina en Inglaterra y Francia. Jean Baptiste Say, divulgador económico francés que sistematizó la obra de Smith y llegó a las primeras conclusiones sobre el efecto descentralizador de la competencia en el mercado.

Mariano Moreno, abogado del Río de la Plata que luchó por la liberación sudamericana, liberar a los esclavos, indemnizar a los indígenas y abolir el control de cualquier gobierno sobre el comercio (Representación de los Hacendados) y asesinado por los conservadores rumbo a una misión en Gran Bretaña.

Jakob Mauvillon, economista alemán que afirma que la apertura a competencia de todos los servicios que ofrecía el gobierno significaría el acceso a estos por parte de toda la población a corto plazo. Thomas Hodgskin, profesor inglés, activista anti-militar (An Essay on Naval Discipline) y defensor del proletariado y del mercado Laissez Faire como vía al socialismo.

Frederic Bastiat (no se puede reseñar la grandeza de Bastiat en pocas palabras), Herbert Spencer sociólogo y científico inglés que señaló la corrupción natural de las instituciones burgués y el peso insoportable del estado sobre el ciudadano en The Man vs The State cuyo primer capítulo relata la tendencia de los conservadores a secuestrar las etiquetas liberales. Digamos que Spencer es un antecesor mío y que, tristemente, la historia de la lucha por la libertad es cíclica. William Lloyd Garrison, comerciante anti-esclavista norteamericano, Henry George, político y economista americano y probablemente el máximo referente del agrarismo (single tax). Antoine Destutt de Tracy, diplomático francés, creador de los conceptos de Super Estructura e Ideología de clase (Eléments D’Idéologie).

Auberon Herbert, periodista inglés, propulsor del axioma Self-ownership (derecho supremo del individuo a gobernarse a sí mismo). John Stuart Mill, economista y sociólogo británico que escribió el ensayo más conocido en defensa de la libertad individual: On Liberty; también escribió sobre la ética y las reglas que deben organizar una sociedad libre y pacífica (Harple Principe = No Agresión) y la dignidad de la mujer y la necesidad de igualar derechos (Sometimiento de la mujer). Richard Cobden, político de la liga Anti Corn Law. Gustave de Molinari, economista belga anti-imperialista que resume la inutilidad del estado y los vicios ideológicos de los estatistas en Les Soireés y “La Producción de Seguridad”, mentor de Paul Emile De Puydt y aventurero que creía en que la gente debe organizarse deacuerdo a sus creencias en distintos territorios (Panarquía).

En paralelo a estos 70-80 años de liberalismo clásico, a mitad del Siglo XIX Pierre-Joseph Proudhon funda el Mutualismo, una escuela económica anarquista, con particular énfasis en la desaparición del lucro y el interés y la realización de un mercado libre e integrativo. En 1848 estallan revueltas anarquistas urbanas en Francia y Alemania y los primeros sindicatos de ayuda mutual.

Albert Libertad, Emile Armand, Errico Malatesta, Mijail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin y Anselme Bellegarrigue harán al Anarquismo europeo, que va desde los atentados periódicos contra los militares y aristócratas del momento hasta las parodias de Oscar Wilde a la sociedad burguesa pasando por las orgías de Armand, los comedores solidarios, la batalla en La Internacional de los Trabajadores contra el marxismo y el combate sindical… ¡A las barricadas!.

Retomando nuestra vía

El libertarismo, en breve, es la reformulación de las ideas y acciones del Movimiento Liberal que se da en el contexto de la Guerra Civil Estadounidense y de la demostración empírica de que las leyes estatales son instrumentos de los grupos de poder y que el crimen sistemático es el combustible de los gobiernos para sobrevivir y mantener la supremacía.

El movimiento libertario es puramente liberal, porque toma las banderas de la necesidad del mercado libre y de la libertad económica como vía a una mucho mejor distribución de la riqueza, la emancipación de los trabajadores, y la única forma justa de organizarse económicamente.

Por supuesto, tiene varias propuestas mutualistas sobre la transición, perspectivas sobre la revolución, aportes puntuales sobre la aberración de la esclavitud, el feminismo, la compatibilidad con el socialismo, la ecología, etc.

El contacto entre el pensamiento liberal y el alborotado nacimiento del anarquismo en Europa desemboca en el Anarquismo Bostoniano, primera generación Liberalismo Libertario.

Algunos nombres: Henry Thoreau, novelista, autor de Desobediencia Civil, panfletista en contra del imperialismo, ecologista; Josiah Warren, educador, fundador de la colonia anarquista liberal Modern Times, que funcionó a la perfección durante décadas hasta que el gobierno de Nueva York decidió disolverla, inspirador de Spooner.

Lysander Spooner, propietario de la empresa ilegal American Letter Company, que compitió contra el monopolio postal del gobierno, jurista que describió a la perfección la invalidez del constitucionalismo en No Treason : The constitution of no authority, la invalidez de los delitos sin víctimas que le dan poderes coercitivos horrorosos a la “comunidad ” en “Los Vicios no son Delitos” y detalló la posibilidad del juicio por jurados para mantener el orden sin necesidad de un estado. Benjamin Tucker, principal difusor del siglo, creador del periódico Liberty que reunió a todos los referentes libertarios de la época y desencadenó centenares de protestas obreras. Voltairyne De Cleyre y Emma Goldman, fundadoras de la lucha por los derechos de las mujeres en Estados Unidos; la primera vindicó la rebelión armada contra los políticos y la segunda, entre otras cosas, propuso la expropiación de la propiedad capitalista en una frase célebre: “Exije trabajo. Si no te lo dan, pide pan, si no hay pan ni trabajo, roba el pan y hazte de las herramientas”.

El inicio de los nacionalismos, el engrandecimiento de las corporaciones en Estados Unidos, la represión bestial a los insurgentes anarquistas y la llegada de la Social-Democracia (falsa izquierda, preservación del sistema capitalista) al poder en gran parte de occidente liquidaron los logros y adhesiones de la primera generación libertaria, que se levantó furiosamente con la Masacre de Haymarket e inundó universidades, fábricas y tabernas en el reluciente imperio yanqui y falleció con sus miembros, cada vez más reprimidos, cada vez más censurados.

Pasó mucho tiempo, es la década de 1940 y se da el capítulo de otra historia, una historia ajena a nosotros, la historia de uno de nuestros enemigos que es la derecha extrema estadounidense, representada por el Partido Republicano moderno y pocos órganos más (Ku Kux Klan por ejemplo) y la toma de posiciones que validan el crecimiento del poder estatal.

Es sabido que el estado es un consorcio de corporaciones económicas y culturales, pero depende del color político el grado en que cumpla sus roles. Los “progresistas” querrán un estado que se diga benefactor social, precursor de la tolerancia y la paz entre clases, y los conservadores asumidos con mucho menos lucidez apuestan a no disimular al Estado Policía que nos reprime, secuestra, tortura, asesina, espía, bombardea y censura.

Dentro de la familia derechista, un grupo de personas que perdieron representatividad y no les interesa avalar la campaña expansionista del Imperio se abre del Partido y forma nuevos institutos.

En esa misma etapa la palabra “liberal” en inglés pasó a ser sinónimo de “social-demócrata” por el uso descarado que le dieron los partidarios de Franklin Roosvelt.

Quedaba un término dando vueltas para que lo expropien estos derechistas con complejo de culpa que no quisieron ser conocidos como “conservatives” y a su vez intentaron identificar su concepto de “libertad” (a grosso modo, suplir gradualmente las funciones “protectoras”, represivas y benefactoras del estado por la acción “privada” en vez de oponerse de por sí a todas esas injusticias) y esa palabra era “Libertarian”.

Puntapié de la profanación : Leonard Read fundó la Foundation for Economic Education (1946), paradigma del seudo-libertarismo en el siglo XX.

A esta altura, lector, tal vez aburrido, llegamos al punto de lo que actualmente algunos conocen como “Libertarianismo”.

Otro proceso que se da en Estados Unidos, es la guerra académica de los representantes de la Escuela Austríaca de Economía -economía no matemática, los aprioris sobre el valor subjetivo de los productos y reducto ideólogicos de los mejores economistas privatistas del siglo XX – que llevan Ludwig Von Mises y Friedrich Von Hayek contra el “socialismo”. Son dos conservadores expatriados de Austria durante la segunda guerra mundial apologistas de la “Sociedad Abierta ” (osea, el bloque autoritario hipócrita anglo-estadounidense, exactamente el mismo que los verdaderos libertarios intentaron e intentamos abolir).

La década del 50 es la década de la consolidación de esta seudo-ideología, y también la del auge de la novelista Ayn Rand, que pretende mezclar ingenuamente la defensa de la economía corporativista con la oposición a varios poderes del estado y funda el “Objetivismo”, una secta amparada en un contexto donde Joseph Mc Carthy y la CIA festejan la Guerra Fría pudiendo espiar, secuestrar, torturar, asesinar y exiliar intelectuales, artistas y trabajadores de izquierda portadores de la desgracia de pisar “suelo americano”.

La población del “libertarianismo” de derecha es heterogénea, son estudiantes de cátedras de los austríacos, lectores de novelas de Rand, medianos empresarios caídos en desgracia por las acciones pro-sindicatos de gestiones demócratas, cientos de conservadores decepcionados por la administración Eisenhower y republicanos de la línea del eterno candidato Barry Goldwater.

Actualmente, no es muy diferente la procedencia de adhesiones, ni la cantidad (una minoría absoluta de la población).

En 1960 aproximadamente surge una figura clave, un personaje controvertido por donde se lo mire, Murray Rothbard, economista austríaco e historiador, un hombre culto que conoce al verdadero libertarismo pero a su vez milita en las filas de la derecha privatista y religiosa que proclama ese término.

Rothbard se esfuerza por difundir y por acercar dicho engendro sectario a las posturas anti-sistema originales.

Publica decenas de artículos, escribe La Ética de la Libertad y “Manifiesto Libertario: Hacia una Nueva Libertad” (uno de los libros que recopilan sucesos del nacimiento del libertarismo y por el cual descubrí a Lloyd Garrison y Spooner) y en el contexto de la Guerra de Vietnam llama a sus seguidores jóvenes a aliarse con los jóvenes de la New Left para unir fuerzas en contra de esa guerra y para la lucha de los derechos civiles de los negros.

El principal error de Rothbard es intentar reducir la filosofía libertaria a una oposición gente-gobierno, y aunque repito, es culto, también es oportunista y sin ningún remordimiento cita a Benjamin Tucker (que denunció al sistema laboral capitalista con todas sus fuerzas durante años, participando de cuanta rebelión pudo) al lado de su propuesta austríaca bendiciendo al trabajo asalariado y la “caridad privada”.

Los pseudo-libertarios tienen un punto en común: Adoran simplificar ideas, reducirlas hasta que pierden sentido, tachar de “puristas” a los que mantienen los valores originales y se atreven a pensar el futuro y actuar en el presente a partir de la coherencia.

Calculo que sus alteraciones psicológicas incluyen creer que “difundir” es convencer a gente que no es libertaria de que en realidad lo es.

Acelerador

Se acaban los 60, Rothbard trabajó en el periódico Left & Right junto a Karl Hess.

Karl Hess escribía discursos para Goldwater, conoció la literatura libertaria gracias a Rothbard, inspiró la organización combativa de jóvenes y campesinos en todos sus destinos, (Young Libertarians National Union por ejemplo).

Publicó el panfleto radical Death of Politics en la revista Playboy y concretó así sus pretensiones de inspirar la acción directa desencadenando marchas de protesta y manifestaciones estudiantiles en la Costa Oeste durante todo 1969.

Es un total converso del conservadurismo al anarquismo libertario que vivió martirizado y perseguido por las instituciones del régimen: se le persiguió con la excusa de que evadía impuestos, lo expropiaron y le prohibieron el uso de dinero y la salida del país.

Hasta el último de sus días dio batalla, aquí algo de material en castellano sobre él #1.

Es 1970. ¿Que pasó? ¿Las cosas parecen ir bien?

Unos cuantos derechistas recién salidos del Partido Republicano fundan el Libertarian Party, lo inscriben en California y se dedican a promulgar las virtudes del minarquismo (recortar al estado, no eliminarlo), el electoralismo (utilizar los métodos formales del estado para cambiarlo) y privatismo (bendecir a las empresas privadas sin reparar en las legítimas o ilegítimas ni su relación con el estado).

Murray Rothbard al principio se mofa de esta iniciativa y la totalidad de los rothbardianos derechistas se afilian #2.

Pasaron 41 años y esta sucursal menor de la derecha americana no logró absolutamente nada, ni un mísero diputado, y esto es un hecho que consta en los datos del Colegio Electoral de Estados Unidos y cualquier fuente, incluyendo las partidarias.

Gracias a Dios, o mejor dicho, gracias a Hess, muchos jóvenes libertarios saben de qué se trata el Movimiento, saben como funciona el sistema corporativista, militar-industrial e incluso, contra la tendencia de la Guerra Fría, miran al sur y saben que en Latino America se esta peleando frontalmente contra el colonialismo.

Dos de ellos son Roy Childs y Samuel Konkin.

El primero se dedicó a la batalla intelectual para demostrar qué es el mercado libre, la relación estrecha y de necesidad mutua que hay entre corporaciones y estado, nuestra propuesta contra la explotación y armó trincheras en Reason Magazine y Laissez Faire Books.

Su trabajo más identitario es Big Bussines: The Rise of American Statism, ensayo que revisa la historia económica estadounidense y corrobora que, como sentenciaron los primeros libertarios, el Mercantilismo bélico y los negociados políticos fueron y son los pilares de la “gran potencia americana”. Contó con la ayuda de las investigaciones de Gabriel Kolko, historiador de la escuela marxista y filosóficamente libertario.

Samuel Edward Konkin III ni lento ni perezoso organizó la oposición contra el Libertarian Party y sistematizó la Contra-Economía (Agorismo) como desestabilizadora contra los poderosos.
La Contra Economía significa comprar, vender, trabajar, colaborar, trocar, etc… evadiendo la mayor cantidad de regulaciones e impuestos y reglas sobre pseudo-propiedad intelectual.

Konkin relata la perversión de Rothbard y los seudo-libertarios en varios textos y su principal obra es el “manual” agorista New Libertarian Manifiesto. #4

En 1990 algunos agoristas crearon un frente .net para la lucha anti-sistema, el Crypto-anarquismo, sumamente molesto y preocupante para el FBI.

Un crypto-anarquista famoso es Jim Bell, héroe y mártir de la causa, autor del popularísimo ensayo Assesination Politics.

Todas sus garantías judiciales fueron violadas, fue acusado injustamente de varios delitos e imputado por actos de rebeldía contra oficinas del gobierno, fue torturado en los interrogatorios e incluso mandado a matar, reinsertado varias veces en la cárcel.

Recién a principios de este año (2012) fue liberado y pese a todo no lo lograron callar y promete la arremetida. #5

***

El último fenómeno al que apostaron hoy los “libertarians” derechistas es Ron Paul, un diputado republicano de 70 años que durante tres décadas intenta la presidencia o imponer el patrón oro sin resultado alguno. Como cualquier diputado republicano, Paul es constitucionalista, tiene tintes racistas, es xenófobo, cobra un sueldo del estado, etc… y ni siquiera tiene éxito. #6

Extra

Con el surgimiento del LP uno de sus candidatos, David Nolan, creo un “Test” difundido por ciertos intentos de demagogos locales. El Test de Nolan se basa en 10 o 20 preguntas que supuestamente te definen políticamente y deriva directamente de la tendencia histórica reduccionista y tergiversadora que intenta medir al “libertarismo” en grados de aceptación del estado como único canon… ocultando la naturaleza anarquista del libertarismo. #7

En Hispanoamérica, nuestro “hemisferio”, tenemos pequeños hoyos de seudo libertarismo, cada uno condimentado por las peculiaridades de la derecha de cada país.
Acá en Argentina, el (en formación hace años, pre) Partido Liberal Libertario en el cual colaboré activamente en tiempo pasado y la Juventud Liberal Latinoamericana financiada por la hayekiana Fundación Friedrich Naumann (a su vez irónicamente nutrida de fondos del gobierno alemán).

En Brasil, “Libertarios”.

En España, colaboradores de Libertad Digital (diario nacionalista de Federico Jimenez Losantos, al cual también envié material, adeptos a las clases de Huerta de Soto y el Instituto Juan de Mariana, y el Partido de la Libertad Individual, cortado por la misma tijera que el LP americano y el PLL argentino.

En México, Perú y Costa Rica, varios casos similares.

En Estados Unidos la casta intelectual “libertariana ” de derecha se concentra en varias fundaciones conservadoras (Cato Institute, Rand Institute, etc…, la oxidada Reason Magazine) pero los “anarco-capitalistas” tienen su hogar en el millonario Mises Institute, dirigido por los discípulos de Rothbard.

Lew Rockwell (asesor de Paul, promotor del LP), Jeff Tucker y Thomas Woods (referentes asumidos de la derecha católica estadounidense), Tom Di Lorenzo (“historiador” que reivindica al sur esclavista como “menos malo” en la Guerra Civil), Walter Block (autor del patético concepto de “esclavitud voluntaria” y de su teoría sobre la privatización del mundo entero) y Hans Hermann Hoppe (neo-nazi, así tal cual lo lees, ideólogo de exterminar de manera privada inmigrantes, homosexuales y otros “inferiores” por parte de la comunidad de propietarios).

Basta con leerlos para darte cuenta de lo que son. # 8, #9 y #10

En el foro Razón, Diversión y Libertad #11 tenemos archivados varios disparates de los filibusteros en cuestión y también material en castellano, inglés y francés sobre diversidad de temas.

Los verdaderos libertarios en la actualidad anidaron en los círculos voluntaristas (tendencia pacífica), grupos agoristas (#12), proyectos colonizadores (Free State Proyect www.freestateproject.org), el evento de diversión y difusión Libertopia, anual y con más de cien mil visitantes en 2011 (#13) y la blogósfera de Alliance of Libertarian Left.

Recayó la epopeya de regar mentes e incentivar a la juventud hacia el amor por la libertad y la oposición al sistema en Roderick Long, Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, Jeff Rigenbach, George Smith, Wendy Mc Elroy y Sharon Presley entre otros sobrevivientes que exponen las innumerables propuestas libertarias, los análisis de la realidad y la reinvención y vanguardia de esta cosmovisión en el Centro para una Sociedad Sin Estado (#14) y pocos medios más.

Aquí un libertario actual (Smith) evoca un típico diálogo con un seudo-libertario partidista (partyarch) #15

Well, la narración termina y se viene la invitación

Hay poca gente, como vos, que tuvo contacto con algún seudo libertario y probablemente tenga una pésima impresión de lo que es el liberalismo libertario.

Ya me crucé bastantes.

O estás en duda, porque te hacen agua estas consignas prefabricadas, pero realmente albergas un sentimiento anti-estado. Lector, quiero que me leas atentamente, si llegaste hasta aquí es por algo: yo soy uno de los servidores de el Movimiento Libertario actual, para mi “activismo” consiste en asistir a cada movida anti-sistema que veo justa, conversar con cada socialista, comunista o curioso que quiere saber en vez de insultarlo con la soberbia de mis ex-amigos macarthistas, traducir textos, ayudarte a entender, invitarte a participar, etc.

Junto a mi, si sabes inglés, tienes:

www.all-left.net
www.c4ss.org (Centro por una sociedad sin estado)
www.alf.org (feministas libertarias)
www.agorism.info (seguidores de la teoria contra-economica)
www.jimbell.com (sitio de nuestro compañero preso, cyber-activista, agorista, mártir)
www.strike-the-root.com
www.praxeology.net/molinari

Pero también hay información en español valiosa diseminada en editorialinnisfree.blogspot.com.es, ordenvoluntario.org y enemigosdelestado.com.

Material excelente en kill-lois.blogspot.com, mutualismo.org , anarcocapitalismo.wordpress.com (no te engañes, el autor es realmente anti-corporativo pero le gusta el termino) y libertarismoperu.wordpress.com.

Para cualquier cosa que quieras hacerme llegar a mi y a varios camaradas puedes mensajearnos vía:

www.facebook.com/libertadhumanidad
www.facebook.com/groups/libertarismo
y elultraliberal@gmail.com

Existimos los anti-fascistas, anti-imperialistas, ateos y agnósticos, pro-elección, feministas, enemigos de las corporaciones, bohemios, amigos del lumpen y camaradas de los que están encerrados, artistas, locos y cuerdos, anti-racistas, ciudadanos del mundo y principalmente flacos que tenemos muchas ganas de mandar al carajo este sistema opresor y enfermo.

Salud y Libertad.

Nicolás Morás es un anarquista liberal argentino, articulista de Enemigos del Estado, colaborador de Editorial Innisfree y Orden Voluntario y dirigente de la organización estudiantil Izquierda Libertaria en San Carlos de Bariloche.

Referencias

#1 www.kill-lois.blogspot.com.ar/2008/07/karl-hess-un-hroe-libertario.html

#2 www. spaz .org/~dan/individualist-anarchist/software/konkin-interview.html

#3 www.praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm

#4 www.enemigosdelestado.com/construyendo-nuevo-movimiento-libertario/

#5 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

#6 liberalismodemocratico.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/el-ron-paul-que-ustedes-no-quieren-conocer/ (esta fuente linkea algunos proyectos de ley estatista de Paul, desde un punto de vista ultra-conservador que lo celebra)

#7 http://www.liberallibertario.org/home/index.php/mapa-de-la-politica

#8 www.mises.org

#9 www.lewrockwell.com

#10 www.tomgpalmer.com/2005/07/01/hans-hermann-hoppe-and-the-german-extremist-nationalist-right/

#11 www.facebook.com/groups/libertarismo

#12 www.agorism.info

#13 www.libertopia.org

#14 www.c4ss.org

#15 http://anarcocapitalismo.wordpress.com/dialogos-del-partido-george-smith/

The general lines of Ludwig von Mises’s rational-calculation argument are well known. A market in factors of production is necessary for pricing production inputs so that a planner may allocate them rationally. The problem has nothing to do either with the volume of data or with agency problems. The question, rather, as Peter Klein put it, is “[h]ow does the principal know what to tell the agent to do?”

This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation under interventionism, or state capitalism. (By state capitalism, I refer to the means by which, as Murray Rothbard said, “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs,” in addition to cartelizing markets through regulations, enforcing artificial property rights like “intellectual property,” and otherwise protecting privilege against competition.)

Rothbard developed the economic calculation argument in just this way. He argued that the further removed the internal transfer pricing of a corporation became from real market prices, the more internal allocation of resources was characterized by calculational chaos.

Mises’s calculation argument can be applied to the large corporation—both under state capitalism and to some extent in the free market—in another way not considered by Rothbard. The basic cause of calculational chaos, as Mises understood it, was the separation of entrepreneurial from technical knowledge and the attempt to make production decisions based on technical considerations alone, without regard to such entrepreneurial considerations as factor pricing. But the principle also works the other way: production decisions based solely on input and product prices, without regard to the details of production (the typical MBA practice of considering only finance and marketing, while treating the production process as a black box), also result in calculational chaos.

The chief focus of this article, however, is Mises’s calculation argument in the light of distributed information. F. A. Hayek, in “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” raised a new problem: not the generation or source of data, but the sheer volume of data to be processed. In so doing, he is commonly understood to have opened a second front in Mises’s war against state planning. But in fact his argument was almost as damaging to Mises as to the collectivists.

Mises minimized the importance of distributed information in his own criticisms of state planning. He denied any correlation between bureaucratization and large size in themselves. Bureaucracy as such was a particular rules-based approach to policy-making, in contrast to the profit-driven behavior of the entrepreneur. The private firm, therefore, was by definition exempt from the problem of bureaucracy.

In so arguing, he ignored the information and coordination problems inherent in large size. The large corporation necessarily distributes the knowledge relevant to informed entrepreneurial decisions among many departments and sub-departments until the cost of aggregating that knowledge outweighs the benefits of doing so.

Try as he might, Mises could not exempt the capitalist corporation from the problem of bureaucracy. One cannot define bureaucracy out of existence, or overcome the problem of distributed knowledge, simply by using the word “entrepreneur.” Mises tried to make the bureaucratic or non-bureaucratic character of an organization a simple matter of its organizational goals rather than its functioning. The motivation of the corporate employee, from the CEO down to the production worker, by definition, will be profit-seeking; his will is in harmony with that of the stockholder because he belongs to the stockholder’s organization.

By defining organizational goals as “profit-seeking,” Mises—like the neoclassicals—treated the internal workings of the organization as a black box. In treating the internal policies of the capitalist corporation as inherently profit-driven, Mises simultaneously treated the entrepreneur as an indivisible actor whose will and perception permeate the entire organization. Mises’s entrepreneur was a brooding omnipresence, guiding the actions of every employee from CEO to janitor.

He viewed the separation of ownership from control, and the knowledge and agency problems resulting from it, as largely nonexistent. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping, which made possible the separate calculation of profit and loss in each division of an enterprise, has “reliev[ed] the entrepreneur of involvement in too much detail,” Mises writes in Human Action. The only thing necessary to transform every single employee of a corporation, from CEO on down, into a perfect instrument of his will was the ability to monitor the balance sheet of any division or office and fire the functionary responsible for red ink. Mises continues:

It is the system of double-entry bookkeeping that makes the functioning of the managerial system possible. Thanks to it, the entrepreneur is in a position to separate the calculation of each part of his total enterprise in such a way that he can determine the role it plays within his whole enterprise. . . . Within this system of business calculation each section of a firm represents an integral entity, a hypothetical independent business, as it were. It is assumed that this section “owns” a definite part of the whole capital employed in the enterprise, that it buys from other sections and sells to them, that it has its own expenses and its own revenues, that its dealings result either in a profit or in a loss which is imputed to its own conduct of affairs as distinguished from the result of the other sections. Thus the entrepreneur can assign to each section’s management a great deal of independence. The only directive he gives to a man whom he entrusts with the management of a circumscribed job is to make as much profit as possible. An examination of the accounts shows how successful or unsuccessful the managers were in executing this directive. Every manager and submanager is responsible for the working of his section or subsection. . . . His own interests impel him toward the utmost care and exertion in the conduct of his section’s affairs. If he incurs losses, he will be replaced by a man whom the entrepreneur expects to be more successful, or the whole section will be discontinued.

Capital Markets as Control Mechanism

Mises also identified outside capital markets as a control mechanism limiting managerial discretion. Of the popular conception of stockholders as passive rentiers in the face of managerial control, he wrote:

This doctrine disregards entirely the role that the capital and money market, the stock and bond exchange, which a pertinent idiom simply calls the “market,” plays in the direction of corporate business. . . . In fact, the changes in the prices of . . . stock and of corporate bonds are the means applied by the capitalists for the supreme control of the flow of capital. The price structure as determined by the speculations on the capital and money markets and on the big commodity exchanges not only decides how much capital is available for the conduct of each corporation’s business; it creates a state of affairs to which the managers must adjust their operations in detail.

One can hardly imagine the most hubristic of state socialist central planners taking a more optimistic view of the utopian potential of numbers-crunching.

Peter Klein argued that this foreshadowed Henry Manne’s treatment of the mechanism by which entrepreneurs maintain control of corporate management. So long as there is a market for control of corporations, the discretion of management will be limited by the threat of hostile takeover. Although management possesses a fair degree of administrative autonomy, any significant deviation from profit-maximization will lower stock prices and bring the corporation into danger of outside takeover.

The question, though, is whether those making investment decisions—whether senior management allocating capital among divisions of a corporation or outside finance capitalists—even possess the information needed to assess the internal workings of firms and make appropriate decisions.

How far the real-world, state capitalist allocation of finance differs from Mises’s picture is suggested by Robert Jackall’s account in Moral Mazes of the internal workings of a corporation (especially the notorious practices of “starving,” or “milking,” an organization in order to inflate its apparent short-term profit). Whether an apparent profit is sustainable, or an illusory side effect of eating the seed corn, is often a judgment best made by those directly involved in production. The purely money calculations of those at the top do not suffice for a valid assessment of such questions.

One big problem with Mises’s model of entrepreneurial central planning by double-entry bookkeeping is this: it is often the irrational constraints imposed from above that result in red ink at lower levels. But those at the top of the hierarchy refuse to acknowledge the double bind they put their subordinates in. “Plausible deniability,” the downward flow of responsibility and upward flow of credit, and the practice of shooting the messenger for bad news, are what lubricate the wheels of any large organization.

As for outside investors, participants in the capital markets are even further removed than management from the data needed to evaluate the efficiency of factor use within the “black box.” In practice, hostile takeovers tend to gravitate toward firms with low debt loads and apparently low short-term profit margins. The corporate raiders are more likely to smell blood when there is the possibility of loading up an acquisition with new debt and stripping it of assets for short-term returns. The best way to avoid a hostile takeover, on the other hand, is to load an organization with debt and inflate the short-term returns by milking.

Another problem, from the perspective of those at the top, is determining the significance of red or black ink. How does the large-scale investor distinguish losses caused by senior management’s gaming of the system in its own interest at the expense of the productivity of the organization from losses occurring as normal effects of the business cycle? Mises of all people, who rejected the neoclassicals’ econometric approach precisely because the variables were too complex to control for, should have anticipated such difficulties.

Management’s “gaming” might well be a purely defensive response to structural incentives, a way of deflecting pressure from those above whose only concern is to maximize apparent profits without regard to how short-term savings might result in long-term loss. The practices of “starving” and “milking” organizations that Jackall made so much of—deferring needed maintenance costs, letting plant and equipment run down, and the like, in order to inflate the quarterly balance sheet—resulted from just such pressure, as irrational as the pressures Soviet enterprise managers faced from Gosplan.

Shared Culture

The problem is complicated when the same organizational culture—determined by the needs of the managerial system itself—is shared by all the corporations in a state-induced oligopoly industry, so that the same pattern of red ink appears industry-wide. It’s complicated still further when the general atmosphere of state capitalism enables the corporations in a cartelized industry to operate in the black despite excessive size and dysfunctional internal culture. It becomes impossible to make a valid assessment of why the corporation is profitable at all: does the black ink result from efficiency or from some degree of protection against the competitive penalty for inefficiency? If the decisions of MBA types to engage in asset-stripping and milking, in the interest of short-term profitability, result in long-term harm to the health of the enterprise, they are more apt to be reinforced than censured by investors and higher-ups. After all, they acted according to the conventional wisdom in the Big MBA Handbook, so it couldn’t have been that that caused them to go in the tank. Must’ve been sunspots or something.

In fact, the financial community sometimes censures transgressions against the norms of corporate culture even when they are quite successful by conventional measures. Costco’s stock fell in value, despite the company’s having outperformed Wal-Mart in profit, in response to adverse publicity in the business community about its above-average wages. Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher snidely remarked, “At Costco, it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.” Nevertheless, in the world of faith-based investment, Wal-Mart “remains the darling of the Street, which, like Wal-Mart and many other companies, believes that shareholders are best served if employers do all they can to hold down costs, including the cost of labor” (Business Week Online, April 12, 2004).

On the other hand, management may be handsomely rewarded for running a corporation into the ground, so long as it is perceived to be doing everything right according to the norms of corporate culture. In a New York Times story that Digg aptly titled “Home Depot CEO Gets $210M Severance for Sucking at Job,” it was reported that departing Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli received an enormous severance package despite abysmal performance. It’s a good thing he didn’t raise employee wages too high, though, or he’d be eating in a soup kitchen.

As you might expect, the usual suspects stepped in to defend Nardelli’s honor. An Allan Murray article at the Wall Street Journal noted that he had “more than doubled . . . earnings.”

But Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog, whose sources for obvious reasons prefer to remain anonymous, pointed out some inconvenient facts about how Nardelli achieved those increased earnings:

• His consolidation of purchasing and many other functions to Atlanta from several regions caused buyers to lose touch with their vendors . . . .
• Firing knowledgeable and experienced people in favor of uninformed newbies and part-timers greatly reduced payroll and benefits costs, but has eventually driven customers away, and given the company a richly-deserved reputation for mediocre service . . . .
• Nardelli and his minions played every accounting, acquisition, and quick-fix angle they could to keep the numbers looking good, while letting the business deteriorate.

In a follow-up comment directed to me personally, Blumer provided this additional bit of information:

I have since learned that Nardelli, in the last months before he walked, took the entire purchasing function out of Atlanta and moved it to . . . India —Of all the things to pick for foreign outsourcing.

I am told that “out of touch” doesn’t even begin to describe how bad it is now between HD stores and Purchasing, and between HD Purchasing and suppliers.

Not only is there a language dialect barrier, but the purchasing people in India don’t know the “language” of American hardware—or even what half the stuff the stores and suppliers are describing even is.

I am told that an incredible amount of time, money, and energy is being wasted—all in the name of what was in all likelihood a bonus-driven goal for cutting headcount and making G&A [general and administrative] expenses look low (“look” low because the expenses have been pushed down to the stores and suppliers).

More than one observer has remarked on the similarity, in their distorting effects, of the incentives within the Soviet state-planning system and the Western corporate economy. We already noted the systemic pressure to create the illusion of short-term profit by undermining long-term productivity.

Consider Hayek’s prediction of the uneven development, irrationality, and misallocation of resources within a planned economy (“Socialist Calculation II: The State of the Debate”):

There is no reason to expect that production would stop, or that the authorities would find difficulty in using all the available resources somehow, or even that output would be permanently lower than it had been before planning started . . . . [We should expect] the excessive development of some lines of production at the expense of others and the use of methods which are inappropriate under the circumstances. We should expect to find overdevelopment of some industries at a cost which was not justified by the importance of their increased output and see unchecked the ambition of the engineer to apply the latest development elsewhere, without considering whether they were economically suited in the situation. In many cases the use of the latest methods of production, which could not have been applied without central planning, would then be a symptom of a misuse of resources rather than a proof of success.

As an example he cited “the excellence, from a technological point of view, of some parts of the Russian industrial equipment, which often strikes the casual observer and which is commonly regarded as evidence of success.”

To anyone observing the uneven development of the corporate economy under state capitalism, this should inspire a sense of déjà vu. Entire categories of goods and production methods have been developed at enormous expense, either within military industry or by state-subsidized R&D in the civilian economy, without regard to cost. Subsidies to capital accumulation, R&D, and technical education radically distort the forms taken by production. (On these points see David Noble’s works, Forces of Production and America by Design.) Blockbuster factories and economic centralization become artificially profitable, thanks to the Interstate Highway system and other means of externalizing distribution costs.

Pervasive Irrationality

It also describes quite well the environment of pervasive irrationality within the large corporation: management featherbedding and self-dealing; “cost-cutting” measures that decimate productive resources while leaving management’s petty empires intact; and the tendency to extend bureaucratic domain while cutting maintenance and support for existing obligations. Management’s allocation of resources no doubt creates use value of a sort—but with no reliable way to assess opportunity cost or determine whether the benefit was worth it.

A good example is a hospital, part of a corporate chain, that I’ve had occasion to observe first-hand. Management justifies repeated downsizings of nurses and technicians as “cost-cutting” measures despite increased costs from errors, falls, and MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) infections that exceed the alleged savings. Of course the “cost-cutting” justification for downsizing direct caregivers doesn’t extend to the patronage network of staff RNs attached to the Nursing Office. Meanwhile, management pours money into ill-considered capital projects (like remodeling jobs that actually make wards less functional, or the extremely expensive new ACE unit that never opened because it was so badly designed); an expensive surgical robot, purchased mainly for prestige value, does nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by scrubbing in an extra nurse. But the management team is hardly likely to face any negative consequences, when the region’s three other large hospitals are run exactly the same way.

Such pathologies, obviously, are not the result of the free market. That is not to say, of course, that bigness as such would not produce inefficiency costs in some firms that might exist under laissez faire. The calculation problem (in the broad sense that includes Hayekian information problems) may or may not exist to some extent in the private corporation in a free market. But the boundary between market and hierarchy would be set by the point at which the benefits of size cease to outweigh the costs of such calculation problems. The inefficiencies of large size and hierarchy may be a matter of degree, but, as Ronald Coase said, the market would determine whether the inefficiencies are worth it.

The problem is that the state, by artificially reducing the costs of large size and restraining the competitive ill effects of calculation problems, promotes larger size than would be the case in a free market—and with it calculation problems to a pathological extent. The state promotes inefficiencies of large size and hierarchy past the point at which they cease to be worth it, from a standpoint of net social efficiency, because those receiving the benefits of large size are not the same parties who pay the costs of inefficiency.

The solution is to eliminate the state policies that have created the situation, and allow the market to punish inefficiency. To get there, though, some libertarians need to reexamine their unquestioned sympathies for big business as an “oppressed minority” and remember that they’re supposed to be defending free markets —not the winners under the current statist economy.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of Kevin Carson’s “The Inefficiency of Capitalism”.

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

Primeiro foi o Tenente John Pike da polícia da Universidade da Califórnia em Davis, cujo saque rápido do spray de pimenta relegou-o a uma vida inteira de saber que toda pessoa com quem interagir o verá secretamente como mais baixo do que uma solitária no cólon de Satã. Seu comportamento truculento, nacionalmente visto, e subsequente transformação em ícone nacional do mal eletronicamente divulgado foi uma advertência para toda a cultura da polícia — provavelmente a primeira lição a penetrar fundo mostrando que as coisas agora são diferentes.

Agora é o Governador do Kansas Sam Brownback. Sua pequena marcha da vergonha começou quando Emma Sullivan, estudante do último ano do colegial, tuitou observações depreciativas a respeito do comparecimento dele ao programa Juventude no Governo. A diretora de comunicações de Brownback, Sherienne Jones-Sontag, descobriu o tuíte numa pesquisa na Internet colocando o nome de Brownback, e foi choramingar para as pessoas do Juventude no Governo. O Juventude no Governo, por sua vez, foi choramingar para a diretora do colégio de Emma.

A diretora dela, alérgica a controvérsias, como os burocratas em toda parte — especialmente quando atinjam pessoas que controlam seus financiamentos — ficou possessa. Depois de passar-lhe um pito, determinou que Emma escrevesse uma carta de desculpas. Inclusive discriminou os pontos a serem abordados.

Mesmo que a história terminasse aqui, essa seria perfeita ilustração do narcisismo e senso de direito de posse das pessoas em posição de autoridade. Eis aí um sujeito em cargo de poder, cercado de bajuladores lambebotas e vacas de presépio eles próprios com enorme poder, que ganha mais dinheiro do que Deus. E quando uma colegial escarnece dele, ele corre em lágrimas soluçando convulsivamente por causa disso — como uma menininha da escola dominical calçando sapatinhos com alças que acaba de ver algum vagabundo expor suas partes privadas no parque. Oh, pobre, pobre homem!

Antigamente, a coisa teria acabado aqui. Só Emma e seu círculo imediato teriam sabido, e ela provavelmente teria acabado escrevendo a carta.

Mas não acabou. A história dela atingiu os blogs, distribuidores de súmulas e agregadores de notícias como um tsunami, e a conta dela no Twitter subiu de trinta para (enquanto escrevo) 14.220 seguidores. Há um par de dias, eram apenas 5.000. A história esparramou-se pelo longo fim de semana de Ação de Graças antes do pedido de desculpas dela ter o prazo vencido. Estimulada pela explosão de apoio público, e com o altivo apoio da mãe, Emma recusou-se a pedir desculpas. “Eu o faria de novo.” Essa é a diferença entre um político viscoso e uma jovem corajosa.

Agora Brownback, diante de todo o ridículo, está tropeçando todo em si próprio tentando recuar. Como é típico dos de sua laia, reagiu como uma barata correndo para baixo da geladeira quando a luz da cozinha se acendeu. Mas viscoso até o fim, está pedindo desculpas — não por si próprio — mas por “sua equipe,” que “exagerou na reação.” Que maçada! Eu não comeria nenhuma comida que minha equipe me trouxesse, se fosse ele. Se porém esse é o modo pelo qual ele normalmente trata as pessoas, provavelmente vem, sem saber, consumindo fluidos corporais há anos.

Os Pequenos Eichmanns do distrito escolar local, sem dúvida descansando seguramente na crença de terem pachorrentamente movido o Affaire Sullivan da caixa de entrada para a caixa de saída e mantido a máquina do estado funcionando azeitadamente, tiveram péssima surpresa. E como os burocratas de toda parte, entraram em modo pleno de controle de danos. Eis aqui a declaração oficial deles:

“O distrito não censurou a Srta. Sullivan nem infringiu sua liberdade de expressão. Não é exigido dela que escreva carta de desculpas ao governador.”

Ah, vocês querem dizer que foram pegos com a mão na cuia, certo?

Jones-Sontag, em comentários subsequentes para o Daily Star de Kansas City disse que aquele era um “momento de aprendizado” para os estudantes acerca do uso da mídia social. Era importante, disse ela, os estudantes aprenderem “o poder da mídia social,” porque a coisa continua lá para sempre.

Certo, foi um momento de aprendizado, mas não do tipo que ela pensa. Para os estudantes, foi um momento de aprendizado que ensinou exatamente o oposto do que as Fábricas de Processamento de Recursos Humanos têm tentado ensinar todos esses anos: Eles aprenderam “o poder da mídia social” de expor perversidades dos altos níveis. Aprenderam que tal exposição é uma danada de uma grande clava que eles podem pegar para bater no alto da cabeça de poderosas instituições, para igualar um pouquinho as coisas. E o fato de que a mídia social “é duradoura … na Internet” foi mais uma lição para as autoridades públicas do que para os estudantes: Estamos de olho em vocês, e não há onde se esconder.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 29 de novembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Left-libertarians are sometimes known to stick on distinctions and the definitions of words. We contest commonly understood definitions of political ‘rightism’ and ‘leftism;’ we question the terms used in conventional economic debates over ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism,’ ‘free trade agreements,’ ‘intellectual property,’ ‘privatization’ and ‘private ownership’ of the means of production. We have been known to do funny things with verb tenses when it comes to ‘freed’ markets; we brandish subscripts and three-way distinctions at the drop of a hat. Most famously left-wing market anarchists insist that we defend ‘free markets’ but not ‘capitalism’ – insisting that these are not synonyms, and drawing a sharp analytic distinction between the market form of exchange, and conventionally capitalist patterns of economic ownership and social control.

There are some interesting discussions to be had about that distinction; but to-day I’d like to expand on a distinction sometimes left out in discussing distinctions between the “markets” that left-libertarians defend and the “capitalism” that we condemn – two different senses that are often jammed together within the first half of that distinction – within the concept of market relationships. The distinction between the two is crucial, and both advocates and critics of market economics have neglected it much too often: when we talk about “markets,” and “free markets” especially, there are really two different definitions we might be working with – one broad, and one narrow.

What is “a market,” ultimately? It is a set of human relationships. And it is a notion with a certain history and familiar examples. But in modern social and economic debates, “market” has taken on meanings far beyond any concrete marketplace. What has been abstracted away, and what has been held as essential? The kind of relationships we are likely to have in mind varies, depending on which elements of marketplaces we have chosen to focus on – in particular, whether we focus (1) on the elements of individual choice, negotiated contracts and free competition; or (2) on the elements of quid pro quo exchange and commercial relationships.

Focusing on (1) gives us a concept of markets as free exchange. When market anarchists talk about markets, or especially about “the market,” we often mean the sum of all voluntary exchanges – and when we speak of freed markets, we mean the discussion to encompass any economic order based – to the extent that it is based – on respect for individual property, consensual exchange, freedom of association, and entrepreneurial discovery. So to say that something ought to be “left up to the market” is simply to say that it should be handled as a matter of choice and negotiated agreements among free individuals, rather than by coercive government.

Focusing on (2) gives us quite a different concept, markets as the cash nexus. We often use the term “market” to refer to a particular form of acquiring and exchanging property, and the institutions that go along with it – to refer, specifically, to commerce and for-profit business, typically mediated by currency or by financial instruments that are denominated in units of currency. Whereas free exchange is a matter of the background conditions behind economic and social agreements (that it is mutually consensual, not coerced), the cash nexus is a matter of the terms of the agreements themselves – of agreeing to conduct matters on a paying basis, in a relatively impersonal quid-pro-quo exchange.

Now one of the central points of free market economics is that “markets” in these two senses are positively interrelated. When they take place within the context of a system of free exchange, there can be a positive, even essential role for social relationships that are based on the cash nexus – producing, investing, buying and selling at market prices – in the sustaining and flourishing of a free society. But while linked, they are distinct. Markets taken broadly – as free exchange – can include cash-nexus relationships – but also much more. Free exchange may, in fact, include many features that compete with, limit, transform, or even undermine impersonal cash-nexus relationships in particular domains. Family sharing is part of a free market; charity is part of a free market; gifts are part of a free market; informal exchange and barter are part of a free market. In a freed market there would be nothing to outlaw the features of business as usual in our actually-existing economy – wage labor, rent, formalized business organizations, corporate insurance, corporate finance and the like would all be available as theoretically possible market outcomes.

But so would alternative arrangements for making a living – including many arrangements that clearly have nothing to do with business as usual or capitalism as we know it: worker and consumer co-ops, community free clinics and mutual aid medical coverage are examples of voluntary exchange; so are wildcat, voluntary labor unions. So are consensual communes, narrower or broader experiments with gift economies, and other alternatives to prevailing corporate capitalism. This broad definition of markets is so broad that you might suggestively describe a fully free market, in this sense, as the space of maximal consensually-sustained social experimentation.

But while the freedom and growth of spaces for economic and social experimentation is always something to be desired and defended from a libertarian standpoint, the value of a cash nexus, in economic and social relationships, depends entirely on the social context within which it is embedded. Free-market anticapitalists have pointed out the central role that “pro-business” government intervention has played in shaping our daily encounters with bills and business, livelihoods and labor, commodities and consumption. Political privileges to corporate business models, government monopolies and captive markets are deeply entrenched, centrally positioned, pervasive in the actually-existing corporate economy, and overwhelming in scale. Moreover, interlocking government interventions systematically act to restrain, crowd out, bulldoze or simply outlaw less hierarchical, less commercial, grassroots or informal-sector alternatives to corporate-dominated rigged markets for daily needs, whether in making a living, or in housing, or health care, or access to credit, or mutual aid, insurance and crisis relief.

These deep, structural features of the economy shove us into labor, housing and financial markets on artificially desperate terms; they deform the markets we are pushed into through an intense concentration of resources in the hands of the privileged, without the fallback of small-scale enterprise and grassroots alternatives that might otherwise prove far more attractive. Left-libertarians insist on the importance of this point because in discussions of market economics it is so easily missed, mistaken simply as business as usual and everyday life in a market economy. But when it is missed, people who oppose the worst inequities of the rigged-market system too easily blame the inequities on the freedom, or unregulatedcharacter, of market institutions; while those who wish to stand up for freed markets find themselves on the defensive, trying to defend indefensible institutions when they should be pointing out that their worst features are the product of market constraints.

When leftists complain about commercialism gone mad, about the looming presence of bosses and landlords and debts in our day-to-day lives, about the crises that workers face every month just to pay the rent or the medical bills, we must realize that they are talking about real social evils, which arise from markets in one sense, but not in another. They are talking, specifically, about what the cash nexus is made into by political privileges and government monopolies, when competing alternatives among businesses, and competing alternatives to conventional business models, have been paralyzed, crowded out, or simply outlawed by the actions of the corporate state. And they are talking about social relationships that libertarians need not, and should not, waste any energy on defending. Whatever positive and liberating roles cash-nexus relationships may have in the context of free exchange – and it is important that they have many – they can just as easily become instruments of alienation and exploitation when forced on unwilling participants, in areas of their life where they don’t need or want them, through the immediate or indirect effects of government force and rigged markets.

Suppose we grant, for argument’s sake, the modest explanatory claim about the dominant players in the capitalist economy – from the business practices of Fortune 500 corporations, to our daily confrontations with employers, landlords or financial corporations. Their size, competitive dominance, and much of their everyday business practices, are substantially the result of the subsidies they receive, the structural privileges they enjoy, and the political constraints on competing businesses, or more informal, less commercial alternatives to their business just as such – competitors who might check them, unseat them, or simply dissolve the need for them in the first place. In an age of multitrillion-dollar bank bailouts, it is not hard to accept that much of actually-existing fortunes and business as usual in the corporate economy as we know it – specifically including much of the abusive power condemned by critics on the Left – are not the result of serving willing customers or ruthlessness in market competition; they are to a great extent the product of exploiting political constraints forged by the alliance of interests between big government and big business.

Even if you accept this explanatory claim, you may may still wonder why left-libertarians insist as confidently that we do that uncontrolled economic competition will not only alter the position of these incumbents, perhaps with some ceteris paribus tendency towards less concentrated wealth and less corporate or businesslike arrangements in economic life – but will positively and qualitatively transform the economic landscape. Left-libertarians are radicals and typically quite optimistic that from fully liberated market processes will naturally emerge the grassroots, alternative economies that they favor, with qualitative social shifts away from (among other things) wage-labor, landlordism, corporate ownership, large firms and to some significant extent corporate commerce as a whole. This is a strong claim, stronger than the explanatory claim alone – call it the bold predictive claim – not only about ceteris paribus tendencies, but about the prospects for mutualistic economies to arise from freed market processes, and to bring about the greater economic equality, social equality, cultural progress, and ecological sustainability that left-libertarians promise to achieve through libertarian means.

Of course, as I have argued at length, there is a straightforward case for a possibility claim that they might arise. A “market economy” in the broad sense need not be an economy dominated by cash nexus relationships, and people might choose to adopt any number of radical experiments. And as as left-libertarians have repeatedly pointed out, the empirical fact that a qualitatively different economy hasn’t yet arisen cannot be explained simply by the dynamics of free markets – we don’t have a free market, and the actually-existing dominant model is (as we have granted) dominant precisely because of the regressive redistribution of wealth and the political constraints that state capitalism has imposed.

The boldness of the bold predictive claim comes, I’d argue, from the combination of two distinct elements of the left-libertarian position. The first – the economic tendency claim – involves a cluster of empirical observations and theoretical developments in economics. It is, really, not so much a single critical claim or a unified theory, as a sort of research programme for a mutualistic market economics, drawing attention to a number of areas for study and discussion. If the modest explanatory claim demonstrates some ceteris paribus tendency towards a weaker and more unstable position for corporations, and towards greater roles for anti-capitalist, non-commercial, informal-sector or independent alternatives, then the stronger economic tendency claim would draw attention to factors affecting the strength of the tendency, and the strength or weakness of countervailing factors that might keep ceteris from staying paribus after all. Areas it marks out for attention include principal-agent problems and knowledge problems in large organizations or hierarchical relationships; the assumption of risk, time horizons, transaction costs and other factors in conventional corporate forms and also in alternative, non-corporate models of ownership, management and financing; the possible shifts in risk tolerance, consumption spending, or interest in social capital under conditions of greater freedom and less precarious material conditions; and many other questions for detailed empirical research that I can only hint at within the scope of this essay.

But in addition to the empirical research programme the economic tendency claim suggests, left-libertarians also defend a second, normative claim, drawing on the possibility of less hierarchical, less formalized, and less commercialized social relationships, and the desirability of conscious, concerted, campaigns of stateless social activism to bring about the social conditions we value. Left-libertarians do not only suggest that employers, management hierarchies, or conventional commercial enterprises will tend to face certain ready-made economic difficulties and instabilities in a freed market; we aim to make ourselves and our neighborhoods more difficult to deal with, by consciously organizing and becoming the alternatives we hope to see emerge. Our leftism is not a research programme only, but an activist manifesto.

The shape of a free society is formed not only by anonymous economic tendencies and “market forces,” but also by conscious social activism and community organizing. “Market forces” are not superhuman entities that push us around from the outside; they are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from our own economic choices. We are market forces, and in markets broadly understood as spaces of freewheeling social experimentation, it is in our hands, and up to us, to make different choices; or shift the range of choices available, through the creative practice of hard-driving social activism, culture jamming, workplace organizing, strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, divestiture, the development of humane alternatives, counter-institutions, and the practice of grassroots solidarity and mutual aid.

This is, of course, simply to state the normative claim; I’ve only outlined the conclusion, not (yet, here) given an argument in its favor. Left-libertarians’ case for stateless social activism rests on a set of arguments that I can only hint at within the space of this essay, but the normative defense of a broadly leftist programme of social and economic activism may draw support from (1) independent ethical or social considerations in favor of greater autonomy, less hierarchical, less privileged, less rigid, more participatory and more co-operative social relationships. And it may draw support also from (2) arguments in favor of a “thick” conception of libertarianism, drawing from and mutually reinforcing integrated commitments to a radical anti-authoritarianism, and to concerns about broad social dynamics of deference, privilege, participation and autonomy.

At any rate, the normative and activist element of left-libertarian claims about freed markets may help explain the strength of the bold predictive claim, as follows. Market anarchists’ inquiries under the economic tendency claim give us reasons to suggest, more or less strongly, that getting rid of rigged markets and interlocking radical monopolies would be sufficient to bring about a sort of laissez-faire socialism – the natural tendency of freed markets may well be for ownership to be more widely dispersed and for many forms of concentrated social or economic privilege, stripped of the bail-outs and monopolies that sustained them, to collapse under their own weight. But left-libertarians see freed markets as characterized not only by laissez-faire socialism, but also entrepreneurial anti-capitalism: whatever reasons we may have to predict that some concentrations of economic or social power may not simply collapse on their own, left-libertarians, drawing on the resources of grassroots, nonviolent social activism, intend to knock them over. The strength of the predictive claim, then, comes from its double origins: it is both a prophecy about the likely effects of market freedom; and a radical proposal about what to do with what remains.

Per the request of BHL, the comments will be turned off here so that they can be redirected to the original article.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, O Ousado e o Desejável: Profecia e Proposta.

The connection between political and economic disenfranchisement is little understood — or perhaps more accurately misunderstood — in the United States. The astounding inequality of wealth in the nation is considered to be the result of free and fair competitive markets, so one must not ask whether there has been foul play. The question of a class system, contained in both political and economic institutions, is certainly not to be broached.

Nevertheless, celebrity academic Cornel West has the utter impudence (thank goodness) to introduce some of the more unnerving realities of extreme inequality (“Cornel West Calls Obama a ‘Rockefeller Republican in Blackface,'” Nonprofit Quarterly, November 13).

Here is another one percent datum: The lower fifty percent of households in the U.S. hold a mere one percent of the total wealth. Professor West says such a condition threatens an arbitrary, autocratic “crypto-fascist America.” He may be right, or else we may in fact have such an authoritarian state, one in which democracy and social mobility are used cynically to mollify the people.

The very idea of economic freedom has been tainted by the deceitful rhetoric of government and corporate overlords. The free market that anarchists have in mind, the one scarcely ever defended by these statesmen and bosses, is nothing if not egalitarian. It means equal access — guaranteed by the absence of privilege — to the horn of plenty that is the natural world, which we now find cornered behind the patronage of the state. And the state (government, as it were) is the great minion of the capitalist class, its custodian, preserver and raison d’etre. Economic domination and political domination are fastened, indeed require one another, for the simple reason that there is naturally a profusion of the things human beings actually need to live and thrive, particularly so in a world as technologically sophisticated as our own. The wretched poverty that defines contemporary life is the progeny of the authoritarian idea made manifest.

Anarchist Henry Addis treated the straitening of economies over one hundred years ago: “Imagine a condition of freedom, a condition in which every one has an equal opportunity with every one else. Superabundance of the requisites of life, culture and refinement, would soon exist.” A facile, naive explanation it may seem, utopian almost, but it only stands to reason if we should investigate the economics of the day even at all. From a practical, utilitarian standpoint — independent of the fact that individuals should be regarded and treated as individual sovereigns — competitive markets are equitable and “spread the wealth.”

Free access to capital and free movement of people and goods would assure the widest dissemination of resources compatible with liberty. While an honestly free, competitive system would not promise absolute equality of material conditions for all (nothing but the most totalitarian dystopia could), it would raze the profit system as we now know it. The high, extractive profits of the monopoly economy of privilege are of course the mirror image of the pauperdom it occasions. Lofty mounds of accumulated wealth for some obviously means miserable impoverishment for most.

An economic system that exalts the reciprocal aspects of human relationships, abolishing special privilege, is a fair system of trade and harmonious coordination — really, it is hardly to be called a “system” at all. Only violent, arbitrary stockades can hold up such unstable heaps of wealth. Remove the barriers, allow competition fully, and wealth will surge forth and circulate as a natural and inevitable result.

In his contribution to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians seminar on left-libertarianism (“Query for Left-Libertarians,” November 11), Daniel Shapiro confessed to puzzlement over our prediction that there would be less bossism in a freed market. First of all, he argues, if workers were free to sell their shares in a cooperative, it’s unlikely that most workers would keep all their investments in the firm they worked for. They would likely sell some of their shares in the cooperative, to reduce the risk of having all their eggs in one basket. And retiring workers will cash out their shares. And aside from the creeping tendency toward absentee ownership and demutualization in cooperatives, Shapiro raises the further question of the firms that aren’t cooperative to begin with — even if they’re a smaller share of the economy than at present. What’s to stop either demutualized cooperatives or conventional business firms — both of which are presumably motivated primarily by maximizing shareholder value — from adopting significant levels of hierarchy and managerialism? Even if hierarchy carries certain inefficiency costs, economies of scale mean that bossism and hierarchy may be the least inefficient form of organization, given sufficient firm size for maximum efficiencies.

First of all, to start with Shapiro’s argument on the alienation of shares in a cooperative: As a matter of purely technical nitpicking, a worker cooperative can be set up with bylaws that prohibit demutualization, and simply require worker buyins as a condition of membership without creating marketable shares.

But second, Shapiro seems to be assuming without warrant that a very high proportion of the characteristics of our reality under state capitalism would be conserved in a freed market, aside from the narrowest consideration of the specific changes he wants to address. It reminds me of Ralph Kramden’s boast to Norton, in anticipating the outcome of one of his get-rich-quick schemes: “Norton, when I’m a rich man, I’ll have a telephone installed out here on the fire escape, so I can discuss my big business deals when I have to sleep out here in the summer.” Ralph was imagining his reality as it would be with the one specific change he was considering, in isolation from everything else and neglecting the likelihood of other associated changes or ripple effects. And that’s what Shapiro’s doing.

Shapiro seems to assume an economic model in which ownership is expressed through marketable shares, the economy tends to be organized around large market areas with mostly anonymous economic transactions occurring mainly through the cash nexus, etc.

And he explicitly assumes (point three) that current firm size and market structure represents economies of scale that are inherent in production technology.

All the secondary assumptions he makes about the kinds of specialized knowledge a boss must have about consumer demand and the marketplace, it seems, reflect the primary assumptions above about the continuity of the hypothetical economy with the conditions of the one we live in.

None of these assumptions are warranted, in my opinion.

First of all, economies of scale would probably be achieved at a fairly modest size. Given advances in small-scale manufacturing technology like desktop machine tools, permaculture, and the like, and given the economies of localized, lean, demand-pull distribution systems over the old supply-push mass production model, it seems likely a large share of present consumption needs would be met by garage factories serving small town or urban neighborhood-sized markets. In this case the typical production unit would not be something even as large and formal as the Northwestern plywood cooperatives, but rather small artisan shops.

In this case it seems a major share of production would take place in family-owned firms or small partnerships. And in a left-libertarian version of the free market, there’s no inherent reason even larger worker-owned firms would organized along the lines of what we consider the conventional shareholder model. They might well be incorporated under bylaws with inalienable residual claimancy (with prorated pension rights on retirement) vested in the current workforce. There’s no obvious reason a libertarian law code, based on the precedents of free juries of a vicinage, would not recognize this as the basis of ownership. This is especially true, given the larger emphasis given to occupancy as the basis of property under both mutualistic and radical Lockean variants of left-libertarianism.

Under these conditions, most of the skills associated with marketing under the present model of capitalism would probably be obsolete. In most cases, the artisan machinists in a small town or neighborhood factory would have the same first-hand knowledge of the markets they serve as artisans did before the rise of the factory system.

And the incentives to what we think of as conventional marketing rules would be far weaker under this model. Most of them currently stem from the nature of mass-production technology and the enormous capital outlays it requires for machinery. Because of these huge capital outlays, it’s necessary to maximize capacity utilization to minimize unit costs — and therefore to find ways of creating demand to guarantee the wheels keep turning. The history of 20th century mass-production capitalism was one of finding expedients to guarantee absorption of output — if necessary, by the state either destroying it or buying it up via the permanent war economy and the automobile-highway complex.

But in an economy where production machinery is cheap and general purpose, and can quickly switch between short batches of a variety of products in response to shifts in demand, these pressures do not exist. When capital outlays and overhead costs are low, the minimum revenue stream required to avoid going further in the hole is much smaller. And at the same time, the distinctions between “winners” and “losers,” between being “in business” and “out of business,” are also much lower.

Since the currently prevailing firm size and model of production and distribution is a suboptimal way of doing things, subsidized and protected by the state, it follows that bossism is — in the words of Peter Drucker — a way of doing as efficiently as possible something that ought not to be done at all. We start out with the structural assumptions of an economy in which wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small plutocratic class of investors through a long series of robberies (aka “primitive accumulation“), and the state’s economic policy was aimed at guaranteeing the profits of this investor-robber class and enabling it to extract maximum rents from the productive elements of society.

Given the fact of an economy organized into a relatively small number of large, hierarchical firms, authoritarianism may well be the most efficient means for overcoming the inefficiencies of a system that was authoritarian to start with. In like manner, Soviet economic reformers under Brezhnev sought the most efficient way of running an economy organized around industrial ministries and central planning by Gosplan.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, detailed a long series of models for land tenure, in which landlords allowed peasants various shares of their total product in order to maximize production — and hence the rents they were able to extract from that production. But all these forms of tenure were limited by one overriding concern: the need of the landed classes to extract rents. Absent these considerations, the most efficient expedient would have been simply to vest full ownership of all land in the people working it and abolish manorial land titles and rents altogether. No doubt a slave cotton plantation in the Old South would have had drastically increased output had the land been given to the cultivators and had they been given full rights to their product. But from the perspective of a plantation owner, the only form of production less efficient than slavery is having to do an honest day’s work himself.

Corporate capitalism is organized around the imperatives, not of maximizing efficiency, but of maximizing the extraction of rents. When maximum extraction of rents requires artificial imposition of inefficiency, the capitalists’ state is ready and willing.

If we start from the assumption of a system organized around absentee investors and self-aggrandizing managers, the most efficient model for organizing production may be very inefficient indeed for extracting rent from those who produce value. The divorce of ownership and control from both effort and situational knowledge creates enormous knowledge and incentive problems, in which those doing the work and who know best how to do the job have no rational interest in maximizing their own output. Whatever human capital they contribute to increased productivity will simply be expropriated in the form of management salary increases, bonuses and stock options. Under these conditions, a hierarchy is necessary to extract effort from those whose rational interest lies in minimizing effort and hoarding private knowledge.

Shapiro makes the unwarranted assumption — essentially the legitimizing ideology of the Michael Jensen model of capitalism — that shareholder value is the chief motivator in conventional corporate capitalism. It’s more likely in my opinion that this is nothing but a legitimizing myth to justify the power of management — the real interest being served in managerial capitalism. Management under corporate capitalism justifies its power in the name of the shareholder, in the same way that management under Soviet state socialism justified its power in the name of the people or the working class. In both cases, the reality was a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a large mass of theoretically absentee-owned — but de facto owned by them — capital, and maximizing their own interests while claiming to serve some mythical outside constituency.

Shareholder capitalism is, pure and simple, a fairy tale. The “market for corporate control” was a reality for a relatively brief time after the introduction of junk bonds, but corporate management — with its insider control of the rules — quickly gamed corporate bylaws to avert the threat of hostile takeover. Since then corporate takeovers have in fact been friendly takeovers, acts of collusion between managements of the acquiring and acquired firms.

Corporate management’s maximization of quarterly earnings figures — what it calls “shareholder value” — is real. But it’s motivated entirely by corporate management’s desire to game its own bonuses, not by external pressure. And it actually involves the long-term destruction of shareholder value to achieve illusory short-term returns — much like eating seed corn, or burning every stick of furniture in your house in order to minimizing this month’s heating bill. And management uses the legitimizing myth of shareholder ownership as a way of protecting itself against genuine stakeholder ownership, which would maximize output for everyone.

There’s a wide body of literature (see especially the work of Sanford, Hart and Grossman) arguing that efficiency and output are maximized when ownership rights in the firm are vested in those who create its value. In an age of declining costs of means of production and increasingly skilled labor, an ever-growing share of the book value of the firm reflects not the investment of capital by absentee owners, but the human capital — tacit, job-related, distributed knowledge of the kind Hayek wrote about. But workers will not contribute this knowledge, or contribute to productivity, under the Cowboy-CEO model of capitalism, because they know that any contribution will be expropriated by management in the form of downsizings, speedups and bonuses. So a class of parasitic managerial bureaucrats operates corporations with the short-term mentality of an Ottoman tax farmer, in order to maximize its short-term interests, but justifies it in terms of “shareholder value.” Shareholder ownership — the myth that they work for the shareholders rather than being de facto residual claimants themselves — is the legitimizing ideology that corporate management uses as a defense against more efficient distribution of control rights among stakeholders within the firm.

Under a genuinely freed market in which the ownership of land and capital reflected rules of just acquisition and the cost of inefficiency were not subsidized, most bosses would find themselves faced with the imperative of doing a productive days’ work.

Steve Horwitz (“On the Edge of Utopianism,” Nov. 12),  after some kind words for the left-libertarian project and stating his areas of commonality with us, continues:

The problem I often see in left-libertarian writing is the sense that the world of freed markets would look dramatically different from what we have. For example, would large corporations like Walmart exist in a freed market? Left-libertarians are quick to argue no, pointing to the various ways in which the state explicitly and implicitly subsidizes them (e.g., eminent domain, tax breaks, an interstate highway system, and others). They are correct in pointing to those subsidies, and I certainly agree with them that the state should not be favoring particular firms or types of firms. However, to use that as evidence that the overall size of firms in a freed market would be smaller seems to be quite a leap. There are still substantial economies of scale in play here and even if firms had to bear the full costs of, say, finding a new location or transporting goods, I am skeptical that it would significantly dent those advantages. It often feels that desire to make common cause with leftist criticisms of large corporations, leads left-libertarians to say “oh yes, freed markets are the path to eliminating those guys.” Again, I am not so sure. The gains from operating at that scale, especially with consumer basics, are quite real, as are the benefits to consumers.

Even as I agree with them that we should end the subsidies, I wish left-libertarians would more often acknowledge that firms like Walmart and others have improved the lives of poor Americans in significant ways and lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty in some of the poorest parts of the world. Those accomplishments seem very much in tune with the left-libertarian project. To argue with such confidence that firms in a freed market would be unable to take advantage of these economies of scale might be cold comfort to the very folks who left-libertarians are rightly concerned about.

Horwitz states his overall difference in emphasis from left-libertarians thusly:

Eliminating every last grain of statism does not magically transform everything we might not like about really existing markets into a form that will match the goals of the traditional left. One grain of statism doesn’t mean that the really existing world won’t essentially look like it does when markets are freed. My own conviction is that the underlying market processes carry more weight than the distorting effects of the state along more margins than the left-libertarians believe. I might well be wrong, but I worry that the promise of more transformation than a left-libertarian world can deliver repeats the very same utopianism that has plagued the left historically.

My impression of the economy we have is just the opposite. Any single monopoly or privilege, considered in isolation, has such huge centralizing effects that it’s difficult to imagine just how libertarian and decentralized things would have been without it. Just consider market economies as they would have developed without the cumulative effects of land expropriation in late medieval and early modern times, land expropriations and preemption of vacant land around the world, and ongoing enforcement of absentee title to unimproved land. Or imagine labor relations if the Industrial Revolution had developed without the Combination Laws, the internal passport system of the Laws of Settlement combined with parish workhouse slave markets, and all the other totalitarian social controls on free association from the 1790s through the 1820s. Or the role of “intellectual property” in promoting market cartelization, oligopoly, planned obsolescence, and what our economy would look like absent those cumulative effects. Or the railroad land grants, civil aviation system and Interstate Highway System. Or Cleveland’s intervention in the Pullman Strike, assorted state declarations of martial law in the Copper Wars, and Taft-Hartley. And now consider the synergies that result from all of them put together.

I think it’s more accurate to say our state capitalist economy possesses enormous continuities from the feudal-manorial system, and that it differs from a freed market to almost the same extent the Soviet economy did. Whatever market elements there are exist only within the interstices defined almost entirely by structural privilege, artificial scarcity, and artificial property rights.

To take Walmart in particular, consider all the structural presuppositions behind it. First, it presupposes the creation of a continental-scale corporate economy, largely through the efforts of the state (like the railroad land grants, the use of patents as a tool for market cartelization, etc.). Second, it presupposes the use of patents and trademarks by corporate headquarters to control outsourced production by sweatshops around the world. The Walmart model is only relevant when the main model of production is sweatshops on the other side of the world exporting their output to the U.S. via container ship, and “warehouses on wheels” distributing that output via a nationwide wholesale model that presupposes a high-volume national highway system.

Imagine a counter-example: An economy in which neighborhood garage shops — organized on essentially the same micromanufacturing model as the job shops in Shenzhen — are able to produce identical industrial goods, or generic spare parts, free from corporate “intellectual property” restrictions, for sale in retail outlets on Main Street in the same town. Just about everything Horwitz presupposes in his statement about the benefits of Walmart would be completely irrelevant.  John Womack, one of the early celebrants of lean production, argued that trans-oceanic supply chains were incompatible with the lean model. The same is true of “warehouses on wheels.” These distribution models simply shift mass production’s enormous warehouses full of inventory to the supply and distributino chains. Walmart is, essentially, the leanest possible way of organizing distribution in an economy that is organized on completely contrary principles.

So I think left-libertarians’ fundamental area of disagreement with Shapiro and Horwitz is that our model of freed markets isn’t a slightly tweaked, somewhat more leftish variant on the existing model of corporate capitalism. It implies a revolution in the basic structure of our economy.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Libertarismo de Esquerda: Nada de Senhores, Nada de Chefes.

In an important essay, “Corporations versus the Market, or Whip Conflation Now,” Roderick Long has identified a fallacy committed by both defenders and critics of libertarianism. Those who commit this fallacy identify too closely the institutions of a libertarian society with those of capitalism as it now exists. In doing so, they are blind to the manifold ways corporations, privileged by the state, distort a genuinely free market. Because of this distortion, left libertarians prefer to call what they want a “freed” market rather than a “free” market. (It should be noted, though, that a freed market is a species of free market.  The left libertarians’ preference for the term “freed” hardly suggests that they would not also support a free market that arose without ever suffering from the distortions they deplore.)

I was pleased — not to mention honored — to see my work included in Vol. 3 (The New Anarchism: 1974-2008) of Robert Graham’s anthology “Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.” It’s grouped together, in a section entitled “Libertarian Alternatives,” with Murray Bookchin, Graham Purchase and Adam Buick, among others.

But I’d hate for anyone to get the impression that my “free market anti-capitalism” is sui generis. In fact for well over a decade it’s been “steam engine time” for left-wing free market analysis. And the intellectual foundations of our thought go back very far indeed.

First, the classical liberalism of two centuries ago was in many ways a left-wing critique of the large landed and mercantile interests. Classical liberalism and classical socialism were very closely related in their origins, and the two currents often overlapped considerably. Although the “Ricardian socialist” label conventionally ascribed to him is somewhat misleading, Thomas Hodgskin — one of the major influences on my own thought — was in fact both a classical liberal in the tradition of Adam Smith and an anti-capitalist who gave lectures in radical political economy to the London Mechanics Institution.

Since then there has been a broad current of thought that is both socialistic in its objectives and free market libertarian in its praxis; it has included the individualist anarchists of Benjamin Tucker’s “Liberty” group, figures like Dyer Lum and Voltairine de Cleyre on the border between individualist anarchism and labor radicalism, and Georgists and quasi-Georgists ranging from Henry George himself to Franz Oppenheimer, Albert Jay Nock and Ralph Borsodi.

Second, the modern libertarian movement has had left-leaning strands. As far back as the late ’60s, in the mainstream American libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess were seeking areas of commonality with the libertarian wing of SDS, and with revisionist scholars like William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko and David Horowitz (long story), in critiquing the fundamentally statist character of American corporate capitalism. Or as Rothbard put it, in “The Student Revolution”: “… our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs.”

And third, even as I was groping toward what I eventually labeled “free market anti-capitalism,” I found many others on the same path. My first close affiliation in the anarchist milieu was with Ed Stamm’s affinity group, the Voluntary Cooperation Movement — a major component of which was the revived Proudhonian mutualism promoted by Larry Gambone at Red Lion Press. Jonathan Simcock, editor of Total Liberty in the UK — while not an avowed individualist anarchist — provided a clearinghouse for surviving members in the individualist anarchist community. In the U.S., Joe Peacott of the Boston Anarchist Drinking (B.A.D.) Brigade adhered to the original, anti-capitalist version of individualist anarchism. To the extent that you could squeeze the rather prickly and irascible Fred Woodworth of Tucson’s The Match! into any particular category, individualist anarchism is probably it.

Meanwhile Auburn University philosophy professor Roderick T. Long had already been evolving from a fairly orthodox Rothbardianism toward a left-wing free market critique of capitalism. His former grad assistant Charles Johnson, a left-wing social anarchist in his origins, was — although never embracing Rothbardianism as such — influenced by Long in adopting a free market critique of capitalism.

Long, Johnson, and other leftward-evolving Rothbardians like Brad Spangler (founder of Center for a Stateless Society) have since coalesced — along with assorted individualist anarchists (like yours truly), Georgists and others disgruntled with the conventional libertarian right (like C4SS Media Director Thomas Knapp ) into a large and loosely organized movement that includes the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and C4SS. We include Sheldon Richman (who published or wrote a great deal of left-libertarian commentary at The Freeman, and now edits Freedom Monthly), Gary Chartier of La Sierra University who has written a considerable body of left-libertarian books and articles, and a whole community of excellent writers who engage in free market critiques of capitalism and anarchist critiques of state and cultural authoritarianism: David D’Amato, Ross Kenyon, Anna Morgenstern, Keith Taylor, James Tuttle and Darian Worden, among many others (to whom I apologize for leaving out).

During the same period Shawn Wilbur has amassed an impressive body of scholarly analysis and recovered an enormous collection of mutualist and individual anarchist literature from the early and mid-19th century.

In the UK, Sean Gabb has created a welcoming space for left-libertarian commentary at the Libertarian Alliance. From the Randian community, Objectivist Chris Sciabarra and post-Objectivist Arthur Silber have developed the neglected anti-corporatist and culturally libertarian aspects of Ayn Rand’s thought.

And it’s hardly as if this mushrooming tendency is limited to the ALL/C4SS community or even to the legacy libertarian movement. As I said earlier, it’s steam engine time for critiques of the corporate welfare state, corporatism and crony capitalism. They can be found in Dean Baker‘s The Conservative Nanny State and Naomi Klein‘s The Shock Doctrine, among other places. Even the Koch Brothers, of all people, pay lip-service to them.

What all this amounts to, I think, is that the raw materials for a free market critique of capitalism from the Left have been lying to hand for a long time. The problem was that the old broadcast/gatekeeper media culture erected enormous transaction cost barriers against aggregating these raw materials into a coherent school of thought. Bits and pieces of this free market anti-capitalist analysis were picked up and developed by larger pre-existing schools of thought, but for the most part they groped their way around separate parts of the elephant. The people who were most likely to develop all these bits and pieces into a coherent whole were largely limited to angry letters to the editor and photocopied ‘zines.

The rise of the Worldwide Web, and the near-zero transaction costs of aggregating ideas, changed all this. Throughout history, there have always been those who (pick your cliche) saw the fnords or glitches in the Matrix — who saw the internal contradictions in the ruling class ideology, and attempted to recuperate its concepts as a weapon against the system of power. From the mid-90s on, everyone capable of putting two and two together has been doing so — and rapidly making the acquaintance of all the others who’ve been drawing the same conclusions. Since then, we’ve been coalescing like a liquid metal Terminator into a self-conscious movement, dedicated to using the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house.

The following article is translated into Spanish from the English Original, written by Sheldon Richman.

Una elección más que dejamos atrás, y mucha gente sigue regocijándose en el esplendor de la democracia. Ya sabes, ese tipo de personas (Chris Matthews de MSNBC es un ejemplo prototípico) que piensa que no hay nada mejor en la vida que ser capaz de votar por la persona que regentará el gobierno. (A veces hasta dicen “conducir el país”).

“Considérate afortunado”, nos dicen. “En otras partes del mundo la gente no puede hacer lo que para ti es un derecho”. Esto implica que el elemento más importante que le falta a a la vida de esa gente es el derecho a acercarse a las urnas para depositar su voto, y de esta manera “ejercer su voz” en cuanto a quién “los liderará”. Yo diría que en realidad ellos carecen de cosas más importantes; al fin y al cabo un solo voto rara vez hace la diferencia.

Mírate en el espejo. Si esa persona que ves se hubiese quedado en casa el día de las elecciones, Barack Obama habría sido reelecto de todas maneras. No importa que si varios millones de personas que votaron por Obama se hubiesen quedaron en casa, hubiese ganado Mitt Romney. Ninguna persona en particular controla varios millones de votos. Cada individuo decide por él o por ella misma si acude a los centros de votación o no, y nadie decide por alguien más. Por lo tanto, tu voto no cuenta.

Es así como ésta diferencia entre las sociedades que votan para decidir quienes son sus “líderes” y aquellas que no lo hacen no es tan grande como parece. ¿Hay alguna otra diferencia que podría ser más significativa?

He aquí una posibilidad: La libertad de expresión, o el derecho a decir lo que quieras. Para muchos libertarios civiles este derecho es lo que distingue a un país libre de uno que no lo es. Cada persona tiene derecho a expresar su opinión. Mientras esto sea verdad, somos gente libre. O al menos eso es lo que nos dicen.

Es cierto que los estadounidenses podemos expresar nuestras opiniones sin temer que el gobierno tome represalias contra nosotros, y eso está muy bien. Lo mismo no puede decirse de Corea del Norte, o Cuba o Arabia Saudita, o incluso de algunos países democráticos. ¿Pero es esto lo que realmente hace que un país sea libre?

No estoy convencido. Por supuesto que es bueno poder expresarse en contra de las políticas del gobierno. ¿Pero cuán efectivo es? Yo odio el hecho de que el gobierno de los Estados Unidos tenga soldados alrededor del mundo. Detesto que los militares ocupen Afganistán y se inmiscuyan en guerras civiles. Me horroriza el hecho de que el presidente tenga una lista de personas a asesinar de la que escoge objetivos humanos, para después despachar vehículos no tripulados a control remoto para matarlos con misiles Hellfire, asesinando a mucha gente inocente en el proceso, las más de las veces. Yo hablo y escribo sobre esas cosas todo el tiempo. ¿Y de qué ha servido? Ambos candidatos presidenciales apoyan estas políticas, por lo que hubiesen continuado independientemente del ganador de las elecciones.

La libertad de expresión, entonces, no es la panacea que nos han hecho creer. Quizás la gente de Corea del Norte, Cuba o Arabia Saudita y otros países por el estilo no ganarían tanto como nos gustaría creer si esa libertad fuese respetada por los tiranos que los rigen.

De hecho, hay una libertad aún más importante de la que no disfrutan, y de la que los estadounidenses tampoco disfrutamos: La libertad de desligarnos del estado. Si piensas que la libertad de hablar contra el estado es importante, deberías pensar en la importancia de la libertad de poder salirse totalmente del sistema estatal.¡Esa sí que sería una libertad de verdad!

La libertad de desligarte del estado significa que nadie pueda forzarte a participar en ninguna actividad gubernamental que objetases. Si quisieras encargarte de manejar tus ahorros para la jubilación, podrías salirte de la seguridad social. Si quisieras encargarte de comprar servicios de salud por tu cuenta, podrías desligarte de Obamacare o Medicare. Si no quisieras ayudar a la agroindustria o a Wall Street, podrías elegir no financiar esquemas de subsidio o salvatajes bancarios. Y así sucesivamente.

Piénsalo: si la guerra de los vehículos no tripulados contra los niños de Afganistán, Yemen y Somalia te parece repulsiva, podrías rehusarte a pagar por ella. Si al pensar cómo soldados trogloditas rompen puertas durante redadas nocturnas en Afganistán te produce escalofríos, podrías retirarles tu apoyo financiero. Si crees que la guerra contra ciertos productores, vendedores y consumidores de drogas es inmoral, simplemente podrías decir no a aquellos que la perpetran.

Esto no se desharía del estado inmediatamente, tal como nos gustaría a los anarquistas. Pero seguramente sería mucho mejor de lo que tenemos ahora.

Artículo oroginal publicado por Sheldon Richman, el 11 de noviembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

Conservative? Still disheartened by the election? This column is for you. More specifically, it’s for you if you are the more serious kind, and were already upset about Romney getting the nomination. The kind who still agrees with Barry Goldwater that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

My aim is simple. I wish to convince you that your values are not best advanced by caring about whether or not some establishment Republican presenting himself as a conservative wins an election. In fact, it’s best that you forget both conservatism and elections altogether. Your core values are best advanced by converting to and promoting anarchism, thereby situating yourself as a part of the radical left.

This no doubt sounds absurd. Yet it is exactly the transition many have made. Among them is Karl Hess, the man who wrote that legendary Goldwater speech and whose words still burn in the hearts of many dedicated conservatives. When making the shift from author of the 1960 and 1964 Republican Party platforms to author of anarchist texts with titles like “Neighborhood Power” and “The Death of Politics,” Hess found that the first push came from “the familiar ring of what was being said there. Decentralization. The return to the people of real political power — of all power.”

As a former conservative, I know that your concerns about states’ rights and local governance are genuine, and not thinly-veiled covers for bigotry. You know better than some bureaucrat in Washington what’s best for your community. The problem is not in your zeal on these issues, but in not taking it further.

Why states’ rights instead of no states at all? Bureaucrats in Anchorage, Oklahoma City, Montgomery, or wherever your state government operates might know your community better than ones in Washington, but they don’t know it as well as you do. The need for self-determination goes all the way down.

Whatever good your state and local governments can do, your community can do better all on its own. If you need speed bumps on your street, install them. You shouldn’t have to waste time groveling before city council.

If you’re worried about how that might play out with large-scale problems, I recommend reading about the Common Ground Collective’s efforts after Hurricane Katrina. More recently the same resolve is being shown by Occupy Sandy in New York.

Some of you might think that’s all well and good, but still feel uncomfortable about the “thereby situating yourself as a part of the radical left” part. After all, you believe in free markets. Yet as odd as it may sound, that’s exactly why you ought to find common cause with the radical left.

Someone like you, who might have participated in the original anti-bailout Tea Parties, or at least sympathized with them, probably doesn’t have to be told that big government tends to help big business at the expense of everyone else.

Imagine what a world where we actually had a free market might be like. It seems at least reasonable to consider the idea that corporate power would completely collapse without the active support it gets from government.

Limousine liberals aren’t just talking down to everyone about how much we need more government out of some messiah complex (though there’s also that). They want to stay in a position where they can talk down to people.

If you really want to scare that intersection of the liberal and business elite, by the way, try supporting a local unionizing campaign like those conducted by Industrial Workers of the World. Well-to-do Democratic politicians might have an interest in pandering to rigidly bureaucratic unions that waste their members’ funds on campaign contributions. However, they probably won’t be too excited about a fighting union that sees the government as categorically opposed to its goals and gives out a pamphlet called “How to Fire Your Boss” [PDF].

I don’t expect you to go from Vice Chair of your local GOP committee to hoisting the black flag overnight because of this column. All the same, I do hope it interests you enough to start looking for more information about whatever’s keeping you from making that move.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Querido Conservador Estadounidense.

One of the things that is going to make things difficult for the two “major parties” going forward is the conflation problem.

The conflation problem is an idea popularized by Roderick T. Long: it is when people conflate two disparate or conflicting ideas as a “package deal” and argue for or against the whole package on the grounds of being for or against one piece of the package. The context he usually uses this in is that of free-markets being conflated with the sort of “pro-business ” intervention of modern capitalism, but it applies most to democratic/republican politics. Especially in the US where we have such a strict two-party electoral system, rather than a parliamentary system.

Political parties are agglomerations of disparate demographic groups with their own outlook and agendas. The job of the party is to tie all these groups together with some sort of mythos that makes them feel united ideologically. There’s no reason for the “fiscal conservatives”, the “gun nuts” and the Christian fundamentalists to be united in one package. Nor is there any reason for civil liberties, “nanny-statism” and “welfare statism” to be united necessarily. The Democratic party has come up with a better story tying their demographics together, but that story is also a lie. Groups that don’t absorb the whole inconsistent “package deal” are portrayed as “kooks” or “radical fringe” because their very existence threatens the gossamer web of the party’s mythology.

What the two parties either don’t realize, or are afraid to acknowledge, is that the kooks are becoming the largest demographic. The Republican strategy so far has been to “double down” on their rhetoric. What this does is force the Democrats to shift rightward, in order to capture people who are marginally Democrats but don’t buy the traditional democratic package deal.

Where this has gone wrong for the Republicans is that most people who aren’t Christian fundamentalists can’t stand them anymore and are not willing to swallow that bitter pill in order to get the rest. So the Democrat’s “rightward shift” has actually destroyed the Republican party for now. What it’s also done is alienate the part of the Democratic party that think things like civil liberties and peace are actually important. There is a gap to exploit, but neither the Republican or Democratic party, at this point, can fill the gap without abandoning a ruling class agenda.

That gap will continue to grow as more people lose faith in “the story” and start to develop their own opinions about various issues. One thing for sure, the 2012 election was a referendum against Christian fundamentalism. The short-lived return of theocracy in the USA has come to an end.

As for “fiscal conservatism”, that’s an idea that needs a lot of unpacking. Given a certain level of government spending, it has to be paid for either with visible taxation or with deficit spending. Yes, higher taxes overall are bad, but all spending is essentially covered by one tax or another. Deficit spending is a regressive tax, first off because it’s initially covered by inflation, regardless of how that debt eventually gets paid. And the interest goes largely into the hands of the wealthy and the banks (i.e. the wealthy), who are the ones who buy huge amounts of t-bills to hedge their investment portfolios. In a sense it’s a form of “reverse robin-hood” redistribution. One interesting feature of the Democratic “rightward shift” is that they have pointed out that the Republicans seem to always rack up massive deficits. As for cutting spending, the Republicans always seem to go after social services and “welfare” as the first, sometimes only, areas to cut. Those add up to a tiny sliver of overall spending. So what’s the story demographically? There’s not much in the Republican program for the average middle class person. They personally won’t see much in the way of a tax break, and they’ll end up paying more in “hidden taxes” because of the deficits. It’s great for the wealthy, for a few reasons. They pay less taxes, they profit off the eventual interest on the t-bills, and having less people on welfare also drives average wages down, given a significant enough level of unemployment. The wealthy are a tiny voting bloc. However the wealthy also spend a lot more on campaign propaganda. And who is this propaganda targeting? The segments of the middle class that will vote against their economic interests. This tends to be racists/xenophobes and Christian fundamentalists. Even though to the middle class, welfare doesn’t put a noticeable dent in their income, and more white people than black people are on welfare, the anti-welfare rhetoric portrays a myth of inner cities full of unemployed “minorities” buying gold chains and lobsters with their “welfare checks”, then going down to the club to take drugs and have unprotected sex, after which they will abort the fetuses at taxpayer funded clinics, presumably.

Neither party, at least lately, has shown any interest in seriously cutting the largest segments of the budget. To their credit, the Democrats are at least a bit more willing to let the major beneficiaries of our current government pay for it themselves. That is to say, if anything, they are more fiscally responsible than the Republicans. Their overall strategy is an ancient and hallowed one: Panem et Circenses. Bread and circuses for the masses, and let the rich at least partially fund their own interests. The republican strategy seems to be: We’re going to send you to die, we’re not going to let you enjoy your spare time, and we’re going to make you pay the bills for it too. Because we’re better than you, and you couldn’t even tie your shoelaces without someone like us showing you how. Wow, how surprising that message isn’t resonating with the population at large.

In some sense the myth of the Republican party as relatively pro-big-business is correct, in that they are against everyone else. And the Democratic party is the moderate Republican party of 1976.

For everyone else, there’s Nobody. Nobody stands for the person who doesn’t want the government in their bedroom, kitchen or living room. Nobody is for the person who is compassionate for the poor, but doesn’t want to pay for war. Nobody is for the person that doesn’t want to support the rich but wants to become rich from his own efforts. Nobody is for the person who realizes that if we get rid of big business, big government and big agriculture, environmental destruction wouldn’t be a big problem. Nobody is for the person that wants to live simply, and simply live, without someone trying to prevent him or her “for their own good.” And, like it or not, more and more people are becoming nobodies.