Número considerável de comentadores libertários já dissertou acerca da enorme escala de subsídios e formas de proteção em favor das grandes empresas, da importância estrutural respectiva para a forma hoje existente de capitalismo corporativo, e para o estreito entrelaçamento de interesses da corporação e do estado na atual economia capitalista de estado. Prestamos menos atenção, contudo, no papel da coerção do estado no passado, em séculos anteriores, no assentamento dos fundamentos estruturais do presente sistema. À medida na qual as concentrações de riqueza e poderio corporativo dos dias de hoje constituem herança da injustiça passada chamo de o subsídio/a subvenção da história.

O primeiro e provavelmente mais importante subsídio da história é o furto da terra, pelo qual maiorias de camponeses foram privadas de seus justos direitos de propriedade e transformadas em arrendatárias forçadas a pagar aluguel com base em títulos artificiais de “propriedade” de elites privilegiadas pelo estado.

Obviamente, todos os tais títulos artificiais não fundamentados em apropriação por meio do trabalho individual são completamente ilegítimos.

Como Ludwig von Mises destacou em Socialismo, o funcionamento normal do mercado nunca resulta num estado de coisas no qual a maioria da terra de um país torna-se “propriedade” de diminuta classe de donos de terras ausentes e a maioria camponesa paga aluguel pela terra que lavra. Onde isso é encontrado, é resultado de coerção e roubo no passado.

Murray Rothbard, em A Ética da Liberdade, explicou a injustiça da propriedade de terras feudal:

Suponhamos porém que, há séculos, Smith estivesse cultivando o solo e portanto legitimamente possuindo a terra; e então que Jones apareceu e se instalou perto de Smith, reivindicando, por meio de uso de coerção, o título de propriedade da terra de Smith, e extraindo pagamento ou “aluguel” de Smith pelo privilégio de este continuar a amanhar o solo. Suponhamos que agora, séculos depois, os descendentes de Smith (ou, mesmo, outras famílias não aparentadas) estejam agora arando o solo, enquanto os descendentes de Jones, ou aqueles que tenham comprado seus títulos de propriedade, ainda continuem com a exação de tributos dos modernos cultivadores. Onde está o verdadeiro direito de propriedade, em tal caso? Deveria ficar claro que aqui . . . temos um caso de agressão contínua aos verdadeiros donos — os verdadeiros proprietários — da terra, os amanhadores, ou camponeses, da parte do possuidor ilegítimo, o homem cuja reivindicação original e contínua da terra e de seus frutos nasceu de coerção e violência. Do mesmo modo que o Jones original foi agressor contínuo contra o Smith original, os modernos camponeses sofrem agressão por parte do moderno detentor do título de terra derivado de Jones. Neste caso do que poderíamos chamar de “feudalismo” ou “monopólio da terra,” os donos de terra feudais ou monopolistas não têm direito legítimo sobre a propriedade. Os atuais  “arrendatários,” ou camponeses, deveriam ser os proprietários absolutos de sua propriedade e, como no caso da escravatura, os títulos de terra deveriam ser transferidos para os camponeses, sem indenização aos detentores de terras monopolistas.

Portanto, em vez de defender todos os títulos de terra existentes em nome da “inviolabilidade da propriedade” e protestar quando algum governo esquerdista institui reforma da terra que transfira títulos feudais de terra para os camponeses, Rothbard era a favor de 1) dividir as plantações do Sul e dar a escravos estadunidenses forros “quarenta acres e um burro,” e 2) transferir os latifúndios de oligarquias fundiárias sul-americanas para os camponeses.

No Velho Mundo, especialmente na Grã-Bretanha (onde começou a Revolução Industrial), a expropriação da maioria camponesa por uma oligarquia fundiária politicamente dominante teve lugar ao longo de diversos séculos nos períodos medieval tardio e auroral moderno. Começou com o cerco dos campos abertos na Idade Média tardia. Sob os Tudor, feudos da Igreja (especialmente terras monásticas) foram expropriados pelo estado e distribuídos à aristocracia fundiária. Os novos “proprietários” despejaram os camponeses ou passaram a cobrar-lhes aluguéis extorsivos.

Expropriação do Campesinato

O Parlamento da Restauração do século dezessete levou a cabo uma série de “reformas” da terra que aboliu completamente o arrendamento de terra feudal — mas só para cima. Havia duas maneiras pelas quais o Parlamento poderia ter abolido o feudalismo e reformado a propriedade. Ele poderia ter tratado os direitos de posse consuetudinários do campesinato como título genuíno de propriedade no sentido moderno, e em seguida abolido seus aluguéis. O que em realidade porém fez foi tratar os “direitos de propriedade” artificiais da aristocracia fundiária, da teoria jurídica feudal, como direitos reais de propriedade no sentido moderno; as classes fundiárias foram galardoadas com título legal pleno, e os camponeses foram transformados em arrendatários, de modo arbitrário, sem restrições consuetudinárias aos aluguéis que poderiam ser cobrados. O mais importante componente dessa  “reforma” foi o Estatuto de Fraudes de 1677, que revogou direitos de arrendamento de terra com base nos registros do solar, tornando-o não reivindicável em tribunais da corte.

Finalmente, os Cercos Parlamentares dos séculos dezoito e início do dezenove subtraíram do campesinato seus direitos às comuns. As classes proprietárias da Inglaterra viam a independência econômica proporcionada pelas comuns como ameaça, primeiro a oferta adequada de trabalho assalariado agrícola na própria terra da oligarquia fundiária, e depois a adequada oferta de trabalho em fábrica com disposição de trabalhar durante as longas horas com baixa remuneração demandadas pelos donos. A literatura das classes proprietárias da época foi muito explícita quanto a sua motivação: as classes trabalhadoras não trabalhariam duro o bastante ou barato o bastante enquanto tivessem acesso independente aos meios de subsistência. Elas teriam de ser tornadas tão pobres e esfomeadas quanto possível para se disporem a aceitar trabalho em que termos fosse-lhes oferecido.

Versão do mesmo fenômeno teve lugar no Terceiro Mundo. Em colônias europeias onde já vivia grande campesinato nativo, estados por vezes concederam títulos de estilo feudal a elites fundiárias para que coletassem aluguel dos que já viviam na terra e a cultivavam; bom exemplo é o latifundismo, que prevalece na América Latina até os dias de hoje. Outro exemplo é a África Oriental Britânica. Os 20 por cento mais férteis do Quênia foram açambarcados pelas autoridades coloniais, e o campesinato nativo foi despejado, para que a terra pudesse ser usada para lavoura com fins econômicos por colonos brancos (usando o trabalho do campesinato despejado, obviamente, para lavrar sua própria ex-terra). Quanto àqueles que permaneceram em sua própria terra, foram “encorajados” a entrar no mercado de trabalho assalariado por alentado tributo de valor único que tinha de ser pago em dinheiro. Multipliquemos esses exemplos por cem e teremos vaga ideia da enorme escala de roubo nos últimos 500 anos.

Contrariamente à versão rósea de Mises acerca da Revolução Industrial em Ação Humana, os donos de fábricas não foram de modo algum inocentes no tocante a tudo isso. Mises asseverou que os investimentos de capital sobre os quais o sistema de fábricas foi construído vieram em grande parte de trabalhadores diligentes e econômicos que economizaram seus próprios ganhos como capital de investimento. Na verdade, porém, eles foram parceiros menores das elites fundiárias, com muito de seu capital de investimento vindo ou da oligarquia fundiária Whig ou dos frutos do mercantilismo, da escravatura e do colonialismo externos.

Além disso, os empregadores das fábricas dependiam de rudes medidas autoritárias do governo para manter os trabalhadores sob controle e reduzir-lhes o poder de barganha. Na Inglaterra, as Leis de Instauração funcionaram como espécie de sistema de passaporte interno, impedindo os trabalhadores de viajar para fora da paróquia de nascimento sem permissão do governo. Desse modo os trabalhadores foram impedidos de “manifestarem-se por meio de presença ou ausência” na procura de empregos melhor remunerados. Poderíamos pensar que isso teria constituído desvantagem para empregadores em áreas insuficientemente povoadas, como Manchester e outras áreas do norte industrial. Mas não nos preocupemos: o estado veio em socorro dos empregadores. Como os trabalhadores estavam proibidos de migrar por iniciativa própria em busca de melhor paga, os empregadores ficavam liberados da necessidade de oferecer remuneração alta o suficiente para atrair agentes livres; em vez disso, eles conseguiam “contratar” trabalhadores leiloados pelas autoridades da Lei dos Pobres da paróquia, em termos estabelecidos por conluio entre as autoridades e os empregadores.

Discriminação Legalizada Contra os Trabalhadores Não Qualificados

As Leis da Associação, que proibiram os trabalhadores de associarem-se livremente para negociar com os empregadores, foram feitas cumprir inteiramente por meio de lei administrativa sem qualquer proteção do processo devido da lei consuetudinária. E só foram feitas cumprir contra associações de trabalhadores, não contra associação de empregadores (como colocação de “criadores de caso” em listas negras e fixação de salários). A Lei do Tumulto (1714) e outras leis de estado policial durante as Guerras Napoleônicas foram usadas para conter a ameaça de revolução doméstica, essencialmente tornando a classe trabalhadora inglesa em população inimiga ocupada. Tal legislação criminava a maioria das formas de associação.

Até associações fraternais para ajuda mútua, benefícios para sepultamento e doença e outras da espécie funcionavam enfrentando hostilidade do estado, de acordo com historiadores do movimento da sociedade amical tais como Bob James e Peter Gray. Nos termos da Lei da Associação, sociedades amicais estavam sujeitas a estreita supervisão judicial para evitar que a produção manual direta fosse organizada para escambo escambo entre os desempregados, ou que os benefícios da sociedade fossem desvirtuados tornando-se na prática seguro-desemprego para trabalhadores em greve. A Lei das Sociedades Correspondentes, aprovada mais ou menos na mesma época, proibia toda sociedade que ministrasse juramentos secretos ou fosse federada em escala nacional.

Portanto a Revolução Industrial foi, de fato, construída em cima de um sistema de servidão legal na qual diretamente implicados os empregadores. A forma tomada pelo sistema de fábricas seguramente reflete essa história. Numa Grã-Bretanha composta de pequenos proprietários camponeses, sem quaisquer restrições à livre associação, os trabalhadores teriam sido livres para mobilizar suas próprias propriedades como capital por meio de instituições de crédito mútuo. A propriedade de dono ausente e a hierarquia provavelmente seriam muito, muito menos prevalentes, e o sistema de fábricas, onde existisse, seria muito menos opressivo e autoritário.

Processo similar ocorreu na colonização de sociedades de colonizadores como Estados Unidos e Austrália, por meio do qual as potências coloniais e suas elites fundiárias tentaram reproduzir padrões feudais de propriedade. Em tais colônias, o estado deu-se preferência de propriedade de terra vaga e restringiu o acesso das pessoas a ela. Por vezes deu título de terra vaga a especuladores de terra privilegiados, que puderam cobrar aluguel daqueles que nela se haviam estabelecido (os legítimos donos).

E. G. Wakefield, precoce teórico do colonialismo britânico do século dezenove, defendia tal preferência com argumentos semelhantes àqueles com os quais as classes proprietárias e empregadoras da Grã-Bretanha haviam apoiado o Cerco: era mais fácil empregar trabalho não qualificado em termos favoráveis ao empregados. Na Inglaterra e nos Estados Unidos, ele escreveu:

Nas colônias, os trabalhadores disponíveis para serem contratados são escassos. A escassez de trabalhadores disponíveis para contrato é a reclamação universal das colônias. Ela é a única causa tanto dos altos salários que tornam o trabalhador colonial despreocupado, quanto dos salários exorbitantes que por vezes assediam o capitalista. . .

Onde a terra é barata e todos os homens são livres, onde todos os que assim desejarem possam obter um pedaço de terra para si próprios, não apenas o trabalho se torna muito caro, no tocante à parcela do produto apropriada pelo trabalhador, mas há a dificuldade de obter trabalho de equipe a qualquer preço que seja.

Consequentemente, “[p]oucos, mesmo dentre aqueles cujas vidas são inusitadamente longas, podem acumular grandes massas de riqueza.”

O discípulo de Wakefield, Thomas Merivale, escreveu acerca do “urgente desejo de obtenção de trabalhadores mais baratos e mais subservientes — de uma classe à qual o capitalista pudesse ditar as condições, em vez de estas serem ditadas a ele.”

A primazia em relação à terra foi elemento importante da política colonial no início da história dos Estados Unidos. Gary Nash, em Classe e Sociedade no Início dos Estados Unidos, descreveu doações de terras nos Estados Unidos coloniais comparáveis às de Guilherme I na Inglaterra depois da Conquista. Em New York, por exemplo, as maiores propriedades rurais doadas pela administração colonial britânica (depois de os Novos Países Baixos terem sido adquiridos nas Guerras Anglo-Holandesas) variavam de centenas de milhares a mais de um milhão de acres. Governadores continuaram a doar tratos de terra de centenas de milhares de acres a seus favoritos, até já bem dentro do século dezoito. Na administração do Governador Fletcher, cerca de três quartos da terra disponível foram concedidos a cerca de 30 pessoas.

Albert Jay Nock, em Nosso Inimigo, o Estado, argumentou que “desde a época do primeiro assentamento colonial até os dias atuais, os Estados Unidos vieram sendo vistos como campo praticamente sem limites para especulação em valores de aluguéis.” Muitas figuras de destaque nos períodos colonial tardio e inicial republicano foram preeminentes investidores nas companhias da grande terra, inclusive George Washington nas Companhias de Ohio, Mississippi, e Potomac; Patrick Henry na Companhia Yazoo; Benjamin Franklin na Companhia Vandalia, e assim por diante.

Em A Ética da Liberdade, Rothbard condenou tal primazia (“açambarcamento da terra, onde reivindicações arbitrárias de terra virgem são usadas para manter os primeiros transformadores fora daquela terra”) nas mesmas bases de sua crítica aos senhores de terra feudais. Ele recomendou a revogação de todos os títulos atuais relativos a terra vaga e não beneficiada, e abertura dela para livre estabelecimento. Além disso, em casos em que os atuais titulares de hipoteca e donos de terras rastreiam seu título a doações de terra pelo estado, prevaleceria a reivindicação daqueles que primeiro se estabeleceram na terra, ou de seus herdeiros e cessionários.

A Lei da Propriedade Rural de 1862, aparente exceção a essa tendência geral, foi em realidade apenas outra ilustração dela. A maior parte da terra, em vez de ser reclamada nos termos da Lei da Propriedade Rural, foi leiloada para o maior ofertante. Mesmo para terra coberta pela Lei, de acordo com Howard Zinn, a taxa de $200 dólares estava além do alcance de muita gente. Em decorrência, grande parte da terra não foi em absoluto ocupada com base em princípios lockeanos, e sim inicialmente foi para especuladores antes de ser dividida e revendida aos nela estabelecidos. E em comparação com os 50 milhões de acres cobertos pela legistlação da lei, 100 milhões de acres foram doados como terra para ferrovias durante a Guerra Civil — sem quaisquer ônus! Em outras palavras, as classes privilegiadas ficaram com o filé, e os que se estabeleceram ordinariamente ficaram com o osso.

Para Continuidade do Sistema

O que descrevi aqui são apenas os atos iniciais de coerção e roubo sobre os quais nossa forma hoje existente de capitalismo industrial foi fundada. Obviamente as coisas não pararam por aí. Uma vez o sistema estabelecido e em funcionamento, dependia dos esforços permanentes do estado para manutenção de uma estrutura legal de privilégio, baseada em direitos artificiais de propriedade e escassez artificial: fazer valer direitos de proprietário ausente no tocante a terra vaga e não beneficiada; barreiras à entrada no mercado para a indústria bancária tornar o crédito artificialmente dispendioso e escasso; os direitos artificiais de propriedade de patente e copyright; e por aí vai. E a partir do final do século dezenove a forma moderna de capitalismo corporativo dependia de intervenção ainda mais maciça do estado: subsídios para embarques de longa distância para tornar áreas de mercado e o tamanho das empresas artificialmente grandes; os efeitos cartelizadores de patentes e tarifas; e indústrias e setores inteiros da economia ou trazidos à existência ou com mercado garantido financiado pelo contribuinte pela economia de guerra perpétua posterior a 1941.

Contrariamente à mitologia popular, o Novo Pacto não constituiu distanciamento em relação a algum estado idílico preexistente de “laissez faire.” Nunca houve qualquer coisa remotamente parecida com laissez faire. O capitalismo — isto é, o sistema histórico existente tal como realmente se desenvolveu — tem tido muito pouco a ver com livres mercados e muito a ver com roubo e coerção.

Isso não quer dizer que todas as vias de progresso econômico por meio de empreendedorismo independente tenham sido eliminadas. Trata-se porém de uma luta muito mais morro acima do que ocorreria num livre mercado, e o campo está iniquamente inclinado em favor dos grandes agentes.

Ao buscarem instituir um genuíno livre mercado, os libertários não deveriam perder de vista esses fatos. Que lições deveriam os libertários aprender da descrição histórica acima?

Primeiro, nada há de “libertário” na tendência instintiva de acorrer em defesa dos títulos de propriedade hoje existentes sem levar em consideração a justiça. Como Karl Hess disse em O Fórum Libertário, já em 1969,

[O] libertarismo deseja promover princípios de propriedade mas . . . de modo algum deseja defender . . . toda propriedade que hoje é chamada de privada. Grande parte de tal propriedade é furtada. Muito dela é de direito questionável. Toda ela está profundamente imbricada com um sistema imoral e coercitivo de estado que tem consentido, se alicerçado e aproveitado da escravatura; que se tem expandido por meio de, e explorado, uma brutal e agressiva política externa imperial e colonial, e continua a manter as pessoas num relacionamento próximo do de servo-senhor com concentrações de poder político-econômico.

Segundo, ao defendermos reforma de livre mercado, temos de considerar o papel dessa herança histórica de injustiça (o subsídio da história) na determinação dos vencedores dentro do presente sistema. Uma “reforma de livre mercado” que simplesmente valide os beneficiários de passados roubo e privilégio, e ratifique o furto do passado do qual eles se beneficiam, meramente recompensará a injustiça e assegurará seus ganhos indevidamente obtidos.

De ponto de vista libertário ético, o modelo padrão de “privatização” (venda da propriedade do estado para uma corporação grande e com conexões políticas, em condições as mais vantajosas para a corporação) é portanto altamente questionável. Isso é especialmente verdadeiro ao se considerar que muito da propriedade foi criada, em primeiro lugar — a expensas do contribuinte — para o propósito precípuo de subsidiar os custos operacionais das grandes empresas. Grande parte da infraestrutura estatal de serviços públicos e de transporte no Terceiro Mundo foi criada, por encomenda das elites financeiras transnacionais, como precondição para investimento lucrativo de capital ocidental. E a odiosa dívida assim contraída, amiúde por ditaduras corruptas atuando em conluio com a finança global, é em seguida usada pelo Banco Mundial para chantagear aqueles países levando-os a vender por preço vil sua infraestrutura às mesmas corporações transnacionais para as quais criado para beneficiar — usualmente por muito menos do que o custo original.

Modelo Adequado de Privatização

O modelo de privatização de Rothbard é muito superior: anular os direitos de propriedade do estado e tratar a propriedade como sem dono, sujeita a ter de pronto nela estabelecidos aqueles que realmente nela mesclam seu trabalho. Isso significaria que universidades do estado seriam transformadas em propriedade dos alunos ou do corpo docente, como cooperativas de consumidores ou produtores. Empresas de serviços públicos do governo tornar-se-iam cooperativas de consumidores de propriedade dos usuários dos serviços públicos, e fábricas de proopriedade do estado seriam entregues à força de trabalho e reorganizadas como cooperativas de trabalhadores.

Temos também de ser cautos quanto aos argumentos pseudocoaseanos de que “não importa” de quem a propriedade originalmente tenha sido furtada, porque ela acabará nas mãos do proprietário “mais eficiente.” Esse é essencialmene o mesmo argumento usado para a desapropriação. Independentemente de nas mãos de quem a propriedade termine, os donos de direito e seus descendentes — que nunca receberam indenização — estão excluídos do valor do que foi furtado deles. E até os modos mais ineficientes de organizar a produção são bastante “eficientes,” comparativamente falando, quando se conta com a vantagem competitiva de trabalhar com propriedade furtada.

Ademais, não existe coisa tal como “eficiência” genérica; a eficiência depende da finalidade do proprietário. A mais eficiente técnica de agricultura de subsistência numa pequena gleba — economizando em terra mediante melhoramento do solo e adição de insumos intensivos de trabalho — é inteiramente diferente da de um oligarca feudal que produz com objetivo de comércio com acesso a mais terra furtada do que possa usar, e amiúde com a maior parte de sua terra furtada sem uso nenhum. De qualquer modo, o legítimo proprietário sem dúvida achará muito mais “eficiente” estar alimentando a si própruio em sua própria terra, do que morrendo de fome numa aglomeração urbana decrépita por não poder comprar nem o alimento mais barato oriundo daquelas “eficientes” plantações que ocupam a terra dele furtada.

O real sistema de economia política a que tantos apologistas da corporação se referem como “nosso sistema de livre mercado” tem-se na verdade caracterizado desde o começo pelo roubo. Precisamos ser cautos diante de “reformas de livre mercado” efetuadas pelos assaltantes. Elas equivalem, na prática, a permitir que os assaltantes — mãos ainda cheias de pilhagem — digam: “Tudo bem, não mais furtos, a partir de . . . agora!”

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 13 de outubro de 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Wayne Allyn Root, taking advantage of the name identification he received from being a proud part of the worst thing that the Libertarian Party has ever done, has written a column for FoxNews.com telling us why libertarians ought to vote for Mitt Romney. It’s very difficult to get through, especially given the wildly egotistical introduction (he even refers to himself as deserving the title “Mr. Libertarian”), but worth a read.

No, not for the reasons he wrote it. But because it’s an excellent example of what left-libertarians mean by the phrase “vulgar libertarian.”

Not a single one of Root’s complaints regarding Obama involves the state’s favored treatments of large businesses. In a particularly telling paragraph, Root states that:

This election is our LAST STAND to save America. Mitt understands that Obama’s rhetoric, constant threats against business, union favoritism, IRS intimidation, 60,000 new rules and regulations, stimulus to nowhere, never-ending unemployment and food stamps, the added taxes and regulations of ObamaCare, and the attempt to ban oil drilling and regulate the coal industry out of existence, have collectively ground the U.S. economy to a halt. We will not survive four more years of Obama as CEO of this economy.

While Root is concerned about all kinds of programs ostensibly designed to assist the poor or rein in big business, there is nothing in his list of horrors about state beneficiaries in high places. In Wayne’s world, the bailouts apparently never happened, insurance companies don’t benefit from people being literally forced to buy their product, and there’s no potentially ecologically devastating Keystone Pipeline involving massive violations of property rights via eminent domain or the threat of it. Nope, just a bunch of rich dudes trying to making an honest living while Obama ruins their party by oppressing them in order to serve the wishes of the (apparently pretty powerful!) poor.

Root seems psychologically incapable of even entertaining the idea that there might be systematic state distortions of markets that redistribute wealth upward rather than downward. When he says that “this election is about capitalism and Big Brother socialism,” you get the feeling that he thinks those are the only two alternatives of social organization.

He also parrots the typical conservative references to Jeremiah Wright, voicing fears that after being reelected, Obama will fully embrace his views. If this means that Obama will begin to agree that Christians should condemn the United States government for murdering innocent people, then perhaps I should drop my anti-voting stance and get out the vote for Obama.

Unfortunately, of course, this is frankly delusional on Root’s part. It is telling, though, that W.A.R. doesn’t even write one word about foreign policy, which should be one of the top (if not the top) issues for anyone whose views are remotely based around non-aggression. But hey, what does mass murder matter when there’s still food stamps?

That omission (as well as odd comments that do appear in the piece, like Root categorizing the President as “CEO of this economy”) might seem strange for a libertarian. Yet as he himself goes out of his way to remind us: “I’m not just a Libertarian. First and foremost, I’m a capitalist evangelist.”

If we were to remove the word “just,” I’d have to say that Root is certainly right in that self-description.

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

As Charles Johnson notes in The Clean Water Act Vs. Clean Water, asking the government for help is generally counterproductive, especially when it comes to addressing ecological concerns. Unfortunately, Johnson is also right in saying that market anarchists don’t talk about environmental concerns as much as they should. Many libertarians are right to see through the greenwashing propaganda used to support government legislation and corporate marketing, but end up also ignoring the real issues at hand. Free Market Environmentalism is certainly accurate in its analysis that protecting property rights is a core issue, as the violation of property rights contributes to most environmental degradation around the world. My fear is that this analysis is, more often than not, only used as a way to promote free market claims instead of highlighting the major issue here: environmentalism and property rights go hand and hand. Therefore every libertarian who cares about property rights should also care about environmental destruction, our increasing dependency on oil/fossil fuels, etc.

Land theft continues to be an issue, and environmentally careless corporations are seemingly above the law when it comes to property rights. The government is useless, completely catering to corporate interests—which is why libertarians should, once again, turn to radicalism as a means of getting things done. Addressing environmental concerns doesn’t mean advocacy for governmental policy—it means advocacy for action! Civil disobedience, grass roots organizing, and nonviolent direct action.

That’s exactly what’s happening in response to the southern extension of the Keystone XL pipeline stretching from Oklahoma to the Texas gulf coast.  People around the country are quitting their jobs and moving to east Texas, joining what many consider the most important environmental campaign happening right now. Tar Sands Blockade, “a coalition of Texas and Oklahoma landowners and organizers using nonviolent direct action to physically stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline,” has effectively delayed construction for over a month now, using a variety of tactics.

Stopping a multinational corporation from building a pipeline obviously isn’t easy, but that’s not to say the campaign isn’t winnable. TransCanada has reacted to the blockade with a “whatever it takes” sentiment in continuing the construction, with typical carelessness towards personal safety and legality. This has included employing torture tactics on blockaders:

Two blockaders who locked themselves to construction equipment in East Texas – Shannon Bebe and Benjamin Franklin – were subjected to pepper spray, arm-twisting, chokeholds and multiple uses of tasers to get them to unlock themselves.

The tree village where the main action is taking place currently is the equivalent of a police state; the tree sitters are subjected to 24 hour police surveillance by at least 5 to 7 officers at all times, with bright flood lights facing them. This has made direct support extremely difficult, and they’ve been denied food and water on several occasions. Oh, and if you were wondering who’s paying the cops to be around day and night, it isn’t the local sheriff’s department— it’s TransCanada! The foreign company has actually hired off duty officers for $30 an hour to police the tree village. Despite the emotional trauma the tree sitters endure, they remain confident. Two have stated they will stay blockading under these conditions “as long as it takes” and another jokingly, “until I die”.

TransCanada acquired the land through threat of eminent domain, bullying landowners into signing contractual agreements. They have also claimed “common carrier” status, an interesting legal loophole:

Common carrier status is granted by the Texas Railroad Commission, and allows corporations the power to seize private property by eminent domain. But in Texas, all TransCanada had to do to apply as a common carrier was simply fill out a government form for a permit, known as the T-4 form, and check a box labeled “common carrier.”

This claim was disputed in court, which actually ruled against TransCanada, concluding that the permit was not sufficient grounds for eminent domain. They haven’t had to deal with this yet, however, since most of the residents signed contracts.  Now blockaders are trespassing on “TransCanada’s property”, which they have used as grounds to file several lawsuits. A recent legal suit used the term “eco-terrorists” to describe the blockaders:

Under the auspices of nonviolent direct action, the Defendants, all of whom are members of, affiliated with, or acting under the banner of the Tar Sands Blockade group, have engaged in acts of eco-terrorism through their coordinated, orchestrated and ongoing unlawful conduct and have trespassed on Keystone’s property, have interfered with construction of Keystone’s pipeline and/or threatened additional interference with construction of Keystone’s pipeline in an attempt to deny Keystone use of Keystone’s valid right of way.

Just to be clear, there is nothing good about this pipeline. This is a foreign company building a for-profit export pipeline, exposing the environment to the risk of water contamination, likely to destroy more jobs than it creates, and is openly violating the rights of indigenous peoples and American land owners. Not to mention the likelihood of a spill is seemingly inevitable, “According to TransCanada the Keystone 1 pipeline was predicted to spill once every seven years. It spilled 12 times in its first year and it has spilled more than 30 times over its lifetime.” Tar Sands has also been doing most of their own media coverage because of the police state that surrounds the blockade, most journalists are denied entry or arrested:

Allow us to paint the full picture of what’s happening here: we’ve got a multi-national corporation that has come into Texas, expropriated private land by eminent domain, and hired local law enforcement as a private security force to set up an occupied police state at the tree blockade. They’ve been employing torture tactics, charging peaceful protestors with trumped up felonies, and have orders to handcuff anyone, including New York Times journalists, who attempt to get close enough to even cover the story.

The interesting thing about Tar Sands is it’s diverse group of activists— from tea party conservatives defending property rights, to ex-Obama supporters betrayed by the approval of the pipeline, and radical environmentalists who more or less do these sorts of actions for a living. As they approach nearly 40 days of resistance, the campaign continues to grow in awareness and membership. In writing this article I hope to at least make one thing clear to libertarians: we can and should engage ourselves in the environmental movement. Environmentalism is radicalizing in a libertarian way—more mainstream activists are realizing the ineffectiveness of government and turning to direct action. Both libertarians and environmentalists can agree on the alternative solutions, like Johnson suggests, “stop caring so much about what’s legal and what’s illegal, consider some countereconomic, direct action alternatives to governmental politics, and perform some Guerrilla Public Service.”

My support for this campaign brings to mind an inspiring Camus quote, “If we are to fail, it is better, in any case, to have stood on the side of those who choose life than on the side of those who are destroying.” Win or lose, the Tar Sands campaign is part of something bigger. A tree sitter’s report from day 37 captures this sentiment perfectly:

While I am confident that our new friends in the trees are well aware of the situation they have put themselves into, I can’t in good conscious let their sacrifice be taken for granted by those who haven’t experienced state repression firsthand. In the coming weeks as we see our friends in the trees facing extreme thirst, starvation, isolation, and lawsuits at the hands of these police, it is my hope that we can indeed unmask the state’s monopoly on violence against us and begin to finally understand the scope of the power structures we are resisting so that we may move forward towards a livable world. And perhaps then may we learn what it means to fight for our lives.

 Environmental action has never seemed as urgent or important to me until the Tar Sands campaign, happening roughly two hours east of the DFW metroplex where I live. Visiting once on a weekend between school and helping with the blockade has been a truly humbling experience that I wish everyone could be a part of. There are many ways to participate in the blockade. Blockaders need the love and support of anarchists and libertarians alike, they face horrible amounts of injustice at the hands of the state for simply doing what’s right.

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

Num artigo no Huffington Post o economista e no passado caxias da política neoliberal Jeffrey Sachs (“O Engodo Orçamentário e o Declínio dos Estados Unidos,” 23 de julho) reclama das vezes em que Obama deixou-se dobrar — e também reclama pelo mesmo motivo de outros Democratas do establishement — pelos Republicanos.

“Nos Estados Unidos, estadunidenses super-ricos levaram a melhor sem esforço. Nosso país é gerido por milionários e bilionários e, para milionários e bilionários, o resto do país que se dane.”  O país é de propriedade de “os ricos e as corporações multinacionais.”

Ele acusa os Democratas (“o Partido Democrático de propriedade de Wall Street”) de conluio para criar esse estado de coisas. Ele vem sendo o partido dos bancos desde que “o moderno Partido Democrático foi recriado por Bill Clinton e Robert Rubin.”

Sachs também menciona, utilmente, que “viajo pelo mundo como parte de meu trabalho…” De fato. Hoje em dia ele se engaja em viagens de ricaços pelo mundo com pessoas “progressistas” como Bono (que, aliás, já deixou claras suas credenciais “progressistas” ao destacar a censura chinesa à Internet como modelo a ser usado pelos nazistas do copyright da Associação da Indústria de Gravação dos Estados Unidos/Associação Cinematográfica dos Estados Unidos para suprimir o movimento de compartilhamento de arquivos).

Sem embargo, algumas das viagens mais antigas do Sr. Sachs, lá nos anos noventa, envolveram facilitar a entrega da Rússia a exatamente o mesmo tipo de cleptocracia de quadrilhas bancárias do qual ele agora reclama em relação aos Estados Unidos. Na verdade, ele pressionava no sentido dos mesmos tipos de “reforma de livre mercado” neoliberal na Rússia que o supramencionado Bob Rubin ajudou Clinton a forçar dentro dos Estados Unidos.

E tenhamos em mente que aquilo que Sachs fez cessar era, plausivelmente, muito mais crível como política de genuíno livre mercado do que aquilo que ele colocou em seu lugar. O programa de privatização de Gorbachev envolvia converter a indústria estatal em cooperativas de trabalhadores autogeridas, em algo como o modelo de socialismo de mercado iugoslavo. E, na Polônia, o Solidariedade estava fazendo pressão pela reorganização da indústria estatal ao longo de linhas similares de cooperativas, administradas pelos sindicatos na forma de um modelo sindicalista. Era o modelo de Rothbard para privatizar a indústria estatal em países anteriormente de socialismo de estado: tratar a propriedade do estado como sem dono e deixar os trabalhadores que efetivamente a usavam tomar posse dela. Esse era o modelo proposto por David Ellermann, à época no Banco Mundial.

Sachs não acatou nenhuma dessas propostas daqueles que desqualificou como “imbecis da autogerência.”  O que ele queria era “capitalismo normal” segundo o modelo corporativo estadunidense, com um mercado de ações e pencas de mestres em administração de empresas empregados para despojar haveres, reduzir capital humano e presentearem-se a si próprios com multimilhões de bônus em rublos.

De acordo com Naomi Klein, em A Doutrina do Choque, a “privatização” levada a efeito por Yeltsin, sob a benévola supervisão do Sr. Sachs, teve lugar desta forma:  Os ministros de estado russos transferiram enormes fundos públicos para bancos de propriedade dos oligarcas — eles próprios figuras de proa do estado e da antiga liderança do Partido Comunista. Os bancos dos oligarcas, por sua vez, conduziram os leilões de privatização da indústria estatal — e eles próprios ofereceram os lances, usando os fundos apropriados fraudulentamente recebidos do governo. Klein referiu-se a isso como “a mineração predatória a céu aberto de um estado industrializado.” Isso, aliás — e a suspensão pela força, por Yeltsin, do parlamento, e seu governo por decreto — deixou amplamente de ser mencionado pelos mesmos indivíduos que atualmente guincham a propósito do autoritarismo de Putin. A diferença é que Yeltsin era o capanga deles.

Em suma, depois da queda da Cortina de Ferro, Jeffrey Sachs ajudou a fazer com o povo do antigo bloco soviético o que Pinochet havia feito ao Chile. As pessoas tiveram sua revolução roubada de sob elas por Sachs e os de sua laia.

É engraçado como certos “Progressistas” conseguem ser bem progressistas principalmente antes de serem postos no poder (como o Sr. Esperança e Mudança em 2008), ou depois de saírem dali (Sr. Sachs) — e não quando efetivamente estão no poder. Geleia ontem e geleia amanhã(*) — mas nunca geleia hoje. Engraçado, o efeito que o poder parece ter sobre os ideais “progressistas” dos que o detêm. (* A expressão em inglês é jam tomorrow, ‘geleia amanhã’, significando promessa nunca cumprida. Vem de Lewis Carroll, ‘Através do Espelho e o que Alice Encontrou Ali’. A rainha diz a Alice que, por dois centavos, ela teria geleia um dia sim, um dia não. E isso seria feito da seguinte maneira: geleia ontem, e geleia amanhã. Com isso, ter geleia hoje quebraria a regra de a geleia só estar disponível um dia sim, um dia não, e portanto geleia hoje seria sempre impossível. Ver Wikipedia, ‘Jam tomorrow’.)

A gente quase começa a desconfiar ser impossível conseguir qualquer coisa progressista por meio do exercício do poder estatal.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 28 de julho de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

I have a favorite spiel I keep in reserve for bureaucratic functionaries in government agencies and the corporate world — or just brown-nosing coworkers — who say “we have these rules and procedures for a reason.” Yeah, there’s a reason, all right. The reason is that the people who make the rules and procedures don’t trust you.

In every case, your direct contact with the situation and your skills and experience acquired dealing with similar situations over time make you better equipped to decide how to handle a situation than those who make the rules and procedures governing that situation. Nevertheless, those making the rules and procedures are afraid to trust you with discretion to use your own judgment or to apply your experience, skills and direct knowledge of the situation. They assume that were you given such discretion, you’d just use it to screw them — your superiors — over. That’s because they know your interests are diametrically opposed to theirs. They make a living screwing you over every minute of every day. And they’re afraid you know it.

The lack of trust built into authority relationships, essentially, makes human capital unusable.

Apologists for “the rules” like to spin them as necessary, inevitable, rational — and obvious — responses to some impersonal state of affairs. But they are not. They are responses to “reality” as it exists in the skewed and heavily filtered perception of legislators, bureaucrats and bosses. The decision-making process itself is distorted by the institutional mindset of the decision-makers — which, in turn, reflects the unstated assumption that the only feasible solution to any problem is one administered by people like themselves, and fully consistent with their existing level of power. Any feedback they receive on the effects of their decisions is distorted by the phenomenon remarked on years ago by R.A. Wilson: Nobody tells the truth to someone with a gun (or the power to fire them).

Hierarchical institutions are machines for telling naked Emperors how great their clothes look, and those at the top of such hierarchies live in almost entirely imaginary worlds. They tend to communicate better with their peers at the tops of other pyramids than with their subordinates below them in their own pyramids. That means most of their decisions will be based on “best practices,” as reported to them by those at the tops of other pyramids who are as clueless as they are about the internal workings of their own organizations.

Put all this together, and we get a situation in which authority relations almost completely divorce both decision-making power and incentives from those with the actual knowledge and experience to do a job. That’s why just about every activity in our society, except those done by self-organized groups of people acting to meet their own needs cooperatively, seems to be done as inefficiently as humanly possible. Our every dealing with a large hierarchical institution seems like a scene out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where those with the common sense to fix a problem quickly and easily are constrained by a lot of Weberian bureaucratic work rules apparently designed to prevent anyone from ever doing anything.

When things do get done, it’s because the people doing the job have the common sense to ignore the rules and falsify the paperwork afterward. Indeed the fastest way to paralyze an organization, as anyone knows who’s ever engaged in a work-to-rule strike, is for the people doing the work to stop using their own judgment and obey all the rules on paper.

Society is able to function, despite the stupid rules made by stupid people in authority, only because smart people treat authority as damage and route around it.

The central problem of our society is that it’s ruled by a class of people — bureaucrats, landlords, usurers, rentiers — who live off those who actually know how to do stuff. Because they make their living robbing us, they can’t trust us to use our own knowledge to do our jobs. As a result, a major part of the total economic activity of our society is guard labor that serves no productive purpose, but rather prevents those engaged in productive labor from throwing off the rentiers who feed off their sweat and blood.

The solution is abolish coercive authority, and the ruling class that extracts rents through authority, and vest full decision-making power (along with the full fruit of their own labor) in those who know how to do the job. Without authority, there is no conflict of interest. Without authority, those who have knowledge and experience can be trusted to use it, because they do not exist in a zero-sum relationship with the institutions they serve.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Por qué no podemos llevarnos bien: problemas del agente-principal y de conocimiento bajo la autoridad.

Publicly built highways are not an expression of the free market was originally posted to the Art of the Possible blog by Jackson.

My friend Alex Marshall, in his newest post up on Governing magazine, asks “What’s up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?” Alex is highly critical of right-wing libertarians whose policy preferences are a simple Rorschach test of their own personal biases – people who label their preferences with the language of freedom, individualism and happiness, whereas any policy they dislike is labeled “socialism” or “tyranny”. Thus, if these people like to drive big cars, then any government action that supports their ability to drive big cars is a bold stroke for glorious emancipation, whereas any policy that interferes with their ability to drive big cars is a form of Stalinism so black that even Stalin himself would have thought it excessive. I encourage you to read the whole post. This is how it starts:

Building a road is a manifestation of power, particularly state power. Carving a road across multiple jurisdictions and property lines — not to mention varying terrain — can be done only by an institution that can override the wishes of any one individual.

This was true in the days of the Roman Empire, when mighty roads were built so well that many of them still exist. And it’s true today. In the exercise of that authority, local, state and federal governments spent more than $150 billion on roads in 2005, according to the most recent federal Highway Statistics report. That’s comparable to what we spend annually on waging war in Iraq.

Given all this, I find it exceedingly strange that a group of conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks — groups that argue for less government — have embraced highways and roads as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living. In the same breath, they usually attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains. They seem to see a highway as an expression of the free market and of American individualism, and a rail line as an example of government meddling and creeping socialism.

I should add, Alex is the author of “How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken“. Chapter Six of this book will have especial interest for anyone who reads Art Of The Possible. This chapter, titled “The Master Hand“, focuses on the role that government plays in shaping cities:

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

I should add, before I read this book I already had a keen understanding of the extent to which cities were shaped by their economies, and I appreciated the irony of the saying that all cities are similar yet each is historically unique and a product of circumstance. However, this book brought home to me the extent to which every era has its dominant modes of transportation, and how cities are very much shaped by the constraints and possibilities of those modes. Alex puts the issue well in the concluding chapter:

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

In his post over at Governing magazine, Alex is critical of the Reason Foundation’s love affair with the automobile:

Some typical highway-oriented papers on Reason’s Web site include “How to Build Our Way Out of Congestion” and “Private Tollways: How States Can Leverage Federal Highway Funds.” Rail transit is taken on in papers with titles such as “Myths of Light Rail Transit,” and “Rethinking Transit ‘Dollars & Sense’: Unearthing the True Cost of Public Transit.” I didn’t see any papers about unearthing the true cost of our public highway network.

These are the “the autonomists”, that is, “libertarians who have embraced highway spending”. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a group that calls itself “libertarian” trying to decipher the best of two competing policies. It is common, nowadays, to use the word “libertarian” to mean “someone loyal to the classical liberal tradition”, and there is a strain of thought in classical liberalism, going back to Jeremy Bentham’s work on social utility, that laws should do the greatest good for the greatest number. Put another way, government exists to serve the people. The construction of infrastructure, or the provision of a public service, is one of the ways in which government can be useful to the general public. But why would the Reason Foundation suggest that a system of transportation which revolves around cars involves less government support than a system of transportation that revolves around trains?

Alex, in his current post on Governing magazine, is critical of those libertarians who have a blind spot regarding their own dependence on government (or rather, those libertarians who have a blind spot about how much government is involved in the particular solution that they favor). They (those particular libertarians) sometimes sound as if their favored solution is individualistic, whereas everyone else’s solution is socialism. Isn’t there something juvenile about depending on someone (or some institution) yet denigrating their (its) value?

We might ask if there is even any truth to the basic premises from which the Reason Foundation seems to proceed when addressig transportation issues. Is it correct to suggest that mass transit forecludes private-sector competition, whereas solutions that favor automobiles foster competition? Is regional transportation systems even a type of activity in which private-sector competition will be more effective than government action? There are, of course, many instances where government action creates disutility (the War On Drugs destroys people’s lives), but there are also cases where government action offers clear benefits to the vast majority of a population. The point can be made more clear with a quote from Friedrich Hayek’s book, “The Road To Serfdom“. This is from pages 41-44:

It is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of [socialist] planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument is in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are. It is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It does not deny, but even emphasizes, that, in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required and that neither the existing nor the past legal rules are free from grave defects. Nor does it deny that, where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity. Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition’s being supplanted by inferior methods of co-ordinating individual efforts. And it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. Indeed, one of the main arguments in favor of competition is that it dispenses with the need for “conscious social control” and that it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it.

The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action. But there is good reason why the negative requirements, the points where coercion must not be used, have been particularly stressed. It is necessary in the first instance that the parties in the market should be free to sell and buy at any prices at which they can find a partner to the transaction and that that anybody should be free to produce, sell and buy anything that may be produced at all. And it is essential that the entry into the different trades should be open to all on equal terms and the law should not tolerate any attempts by individuals or groups to restrict this entry by open or concealed force. Any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bring about an effective co-ordination of individual efforts, because price changes then cease to register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a reliable guide for the individual’s actions.

This is not necessarily true, however, of measures merely restricting the allowed methods of production, so long as these restrictions effect all potential producers equally and are not used as an indirect way of controlling prices and quantities. Though all such controls of the methods of production impose extra costs (i.e., make it necessary to use more resources to produce a given output), they may well be worthwhile. To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services – so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.

…There are, finally, undoubted fields where no legal arrangements can create the main condition on which the usefulness of the system of competition and private property depends: namely, that the owner benefits from all the useful services rendered by his property and suffers for all the damages caused to others by its use. Where, for example, it is impracticable to make the enjoyment of certain services dependent on the payment of a price, competition will not produce the services; and the price system becomes similarly ineffective when the damage caused to others by certain uses of property cannot be effectively charged to the owner of that property. In all these instances there is a divergence between the items which enter into private calculation and those which affect social welfare; and, whenever this divergence becomes important, some method other than competition may have to be found to supply the services in question. Thus, neither the provision of signposts on the roads nor, in most circumstances, that of the roads themselves, can be paid for by every individual user. Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.

To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to supplement it where it cannot be made effective, to provide the services which, in the words of Adam Smith, “though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals” – these tasks provide, indeed, a wide and unquestioned field for state activity. In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjust legal framework as much as any other. Even the most essential prerequisite of its proper functioning, the prevention of fraud and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means yet fully accomplished object of legislative activity.

Do systems of regional transportation meet the requirements that Hayek sets out here for “conditions in which competition will be effective”?

I have to admit, I am puzzled by the intensity with which the crew at the Reason Foundation seems to want to see private-sector roads come into existence in the US. Hayek wrote that where “it is impracticable to make the enjoyment of certain services dependent on the payment of a price, competition will not produce the services”. The folks at the Reason Foundation seem to want to jump through a great many hoops so that America can have private sector roads. In my opinion, this is an area of policy where government action is clearly more practical than any attempt to arrange circumstances so as to allow private-sector actors to take control of the provisioning of services. For that matter, I can more easily imagine competing train services offering mass transit than I can imagine competing roads offering some benefit to those in a region who need to use that region’s system of transportation. The only purpose that I can see for allowing private-sector actors to gain control over the roads is to allow a few businesses to enrich themselves, in near monopoly conditions, at the general expense.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008.

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

(* Do poema de Tennyson A Investida da Brigada Ligeira, inspirado em um dos episódios mais desastrosos de toda a história militar britânica. Ver por exemplo http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carga_da_Brigada_Ligeira)

Não é fácil calar-me. Tendo a ser o primeiro a dar opinião, certa ou errada, e não há muita coisa que me faça não agir assim nessa área.

Tenho de confessar, contudo, ter ficado, por um momento, sem fala e de queixo caído com a rematada ousadia de uma pesquisa da Notícias da CBS na Internet acompanhando a história de dois homens sentenciados, na terça-feira, no Reino Unido (“Britânicos pegam 4 anos de prisão por postagens de protesto no Facebook,” em 17 de agosto): “São quatro anos de prisão pena muito severa para uma postagem no Facebook?”

Realmente nem tenho de tratar da questão das respostas dos leitores (embora, enquanto escrevo, 50% dos respondentes nauseabundamente declaram-se por “Que nada, o castigo é justo”). A única coisa possivelmente mais apavorante do que a pergunta ela própria formulada de cara limpa é a ausência, entre as respostas de escolha múltipla, da opção “você por acaso está doido? Prisão? Por umapostagem no Facebook?”

Amigos, isto não é uma situação limite — “fogo num teatro repleto” ou “palavras de  ódio” faladas enquanto brandidos coquetéis molotov. É claro caso de pessoas sentadas em frente de computadores, digitando coisas para serem lidas por outras pessoas sentadas em frente de outros computadores.

Nem, aparentemente, o Serviço de Promotoria da Coroa recorreu matreiramente a acusações de “conspiração” ou lançou mão de outras formas de esperteza para fazer parecer que se tratava de coisa diferente de expressão verbal. As acusações foram formuladas de maneira simples, sendo o alegado crime “incitação à desordem.”

Como escrevi alhures, a guerra pelo futuro da humanidade — uma guerra que se desencadeia há séculos, uma guerra na qual os lados são, um, o estado contra todo mundo mais, o vencedor toma tudo, e o que está em jogo é nada menos do que um futuro dominado pelo totalitarismo e, o outro, a mais ínfima das probabilidades de criação de uma sociedade livre — ao longo do ano passado ou em torno disso foi eviscerada até reduzir-se a sua essência de guerra de informação. As armas do estado são muito reais e suas vítimas ainda estão rubras de sangue, mas a batalha será ganha ou perdida em nível de controle de informação e de comunicação.

Embora eu acredite firmemente que apenas um resultado — o fim o estado-nação westfaliano — seja possível, fico surpreso com a velocidade com que os estados estão confirmando minha estimativa da situação mediante descerem à tática do desespero: O ataque frontal.

No decurso de apenas um ano, ou em torno disso, as revelações do Wikileaks e o affaire Bradley Manning levaram o governo dos Estados Unidos a afastar-se da abordagem tradicional de “controle dos danos” diante de revelação de segredos de estado embaraçosos e a adotar uma política de impedir a todo custo a investigação do estado pelo público.

No decurso de meros meses, fomos da condição de “democracias ocidentais” admoestadoras do regime de Mubarak no Egito por ele vedar acesso à Internet para conter uma revolução, à condição da burocracia do Transporte Rápido da Área da Baía de San Francisco que bloqueou o acesso a telefones celulares para que sua autoridade não seja “questionada.”

Em questão de poucas semanas a condição da “mídia social” foi duplamente transformada — primeiro, de “um livre mercado de ideias” para local potencialmente perigoso no qual prisioneiros podem cometer abusos, e agora disso para um lugar onde comunicar-se pode tornar alguém num prisioneiro.

Tudo o que precede, naturalmente, auxiliado pela mídia cãozinho de colo, com súbito consternado interesse em “grupos de aglomeração súbita-ação-dispersão” e com temeridade para formular perguntas tais como “são quatro anos de prisão pena muito severa para uma postagem no Facebook?” como se a resposta correta pudesse concebivelmente ser qualquer coisa outra que “você por acaso está doido?”

As coisas certamente ficarão piores antes de melhorar, mas a catinga do medo circunda o estado e seus defensores. E por bom motivo. Eles estão vivendo na protelação de um tempo que já se esgotou.

Artigo original afixado por Thomas L. Knapp em 17 de agosto de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen a lot of alarmism over Disney’s buyout of Lucasfilm. That’s to be expected, of course. As someone who hates large corporations, copyright, and copyright-enabled corporate control of information, I sympathize — believe me.

The fears of Star Wars fans — probably a majority — that Disney will kiddify Star Wars and turn Leia into Snow White are also predictable. What’s interesting, though — the dog-bites-man story — is the number of fans who are optimistic. Whatever corporate copyright lockdown Disney puts the franchise under couldn’t possibly be worse than what George Lucas has done. The Disney acquisition actually offers to breathe new life into the Star Wars universe. The fan community is awash with excited speculation about what might be in store for the third (Episodes VII-IX) trilogy, and whether the Grand Admiral Thrawn novels — an authorized part of the Lucas empire, but never yet authorized for film — might be translated into film. Heady stuff, if you’re a Star Wars fan.

The thing is, corporate mergers and acquisitions shouldn’t be necessary for this kind of stuff to happen. There’s already a huge fanfic community — operating on the barest edge of legality if at all — of Star Wars fans writing more creative stuff than Lucas ever dreamed of. In a free market, any big film company (or small indy film producer) that wanted to turn this stuff into a movie would be free to do so, without asking Lucas’s permission or paying him a single penny. If it weren’t for the dead hand of copyright wielded by George Lucas, there would probably already be Thrawn films in existence, along with every other permutation of the Star Wars fictional universe imaginable.

Historically, literature was governed by the same folk ethos as travelling blues singers playing juke joints and riffing off each other’s material. Can you imagine what the Shakespeare corpus would look like if he’d had to buy out the copyrights of Petrarch and all the other writers he mined for story ideas? Disney — a company which is now at the forefront of attempting to destroying the very idea of the public domain — was itself built on reworking (usually not for the better) public domain material originating with the Brothers Grimm, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling and Hans Christian Andersen.

So the actual situation is that mergers between giant corporations, wielding totalitarian information control, are — unfortunately — necessary to artificially recreate the situation that would naturally exist without the state-enforced totalitarian “intellectual property” monopolies.  Of course it would be far better to eliminate copyrights and patents altogether. But that’s going to happen with or without this particular corporate acquisition. As Cory Doctorow said, the desktop computer is a machine for copying bits instantaneously and at zero marginal cost. Any industry whose business model is based on preventing bits from being copied is too stupid to survive.

Frankly, I’m not that concerned about the merger. It’s only significant to the extent that it’s a cartel for pooling copyrights. And copyright is in the process of becoming completely and utterly unenforceable anyway — taking corporate dinosaurs like Lucasfilm and Disney into the ashheap of history along with it.

In the meantime, maybe we can expect some great films.

The following article was written by William Gillis and published on his blog, Human Iterations, September 19th, 2011.

I’m feeling profoundly under the weather so it’s as good a time as any to indulge in that most venerable of radical pastimes, ranting about Star Wars.

I discovered Star Wars the same way any poor eight-year-old did in the early 90s, through the comics section at my local library. Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi were richly watercolored and stunning in their scope. And eventually I got bored enough to follow up on their source films. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Star Wars was an acceptable geekdom in the otherwise harsh projects. Star Wars was gangsta. And the root of this I suspect lies in its dramatically different character from Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the myriad superheroes and chain-mail wearing dragon-slayers cranked out monthly. Star Wars feels familiar.

Having turned to the comics section only after exhausting the rest of the stacks, I was knowledgeable enough to recognize the technological trappings as laughable, but gracious enough to appreciate the sly self-effacing shrug in “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The realism of Star Wars is its resonance with our common experience of ‘how reality works.’ Reality is complicated, gritty, lived-in, with more components than you can ever experience or understand. Obi-Wan and Luke don’t know the names of all the alien species dicking about in Wuher’s cantina and it wouldn’t occur to them to try. The galaxy is a big place. And the Empire’s success in this context is awe-inspiring and despair-inducing even while being obviously incomplete. Star Wars is what the world looks like to kids dealing dope on street corners. Scraping by in the chaotic brutal periphery, proud of the various impressions of home and community found there, using fantastic tools without the slightest understanding of how they work, in awe of the state while waking up every morning simmering in hate for it. Star Wars creates an environment in which the colors are brighter but everything else is the same. And then it wraps us up in the fantasy of meaningful resistance.

Maintaining this essential “tone” of Star Wars has been probably the most uproarious issue in the last three decades of popculture. Everyone knows the prequels dropped the ball, although the list of widely identified missteps is a bit shallow in description (more on that later). But Star Wars has been grappling with this burden from the very beginning. Some poor sod at Marvel Comics is told “we’ve got a license” and all of a sudden he’s forced to make difficult decisions about what would best signify the “star warsness” of a story as opposed to a Buck Rogers story. It’s not enough to draw some familiar outfits or even capture the characters’ voices, what fans are addicted to is the feel of the world. And it’s an inarguable fact that almost everyone has been failing to nail that in one way or another ever since.

I’m not going to suggest that my extensive fandom (which collapsed before high school) or presumed media studies prowess grants me perfect depth in analysis. Every writer and artist that’s worked on Star Wars has brought their own subjective lens and I’m not immune. But I do have one very simple point that I think should unarguably frame the issue:

The most potent and successful component of Star Wars was the taste of reality that suffused its fantastical nature.

Lucas believed his winning formula was the genre mixing pot, something he struggled to stir up in the prequels and Lucasfilm has slightly more successfully adopted as their guiding light in the T-Cannon. But this is wrong. Objectively and empirically wrong.

And now, in recognizing that, I’d like to talk about what can and could have been done to save the taste we all long for and yet have all but given up on re-experiencing.

Let’s start with Return of the Jedi. I’ve held onto an idealization of RotJ for far too long, mostly through the way my earlier experience with Dark Empire and Ian McDiarmid’s starkly redeeming performance in most of the prequels set the Emperor front and center in my head. But the too cool for school bros that kvetched obnoxiously about the Ewoks not being uber badass mech-driving Wookies actually had a point. Lucas had a really good idea with the Ewoks — a tiny band of dismissably cute primitives ends up being critical in the Empire’s downfall — but he focused too much on them and too little on the unavoidably eye- and mind-catching rebel fleet. The Ewoks go from being a realistically unexpected counterpoint to an off-tone chirpy Fern Gully fairy tale.

In the process we’re denied a chance to soak up the random realness of the assembled rebel fleet (either before battle or during). The sudden diversity we glimpse finally has the opportunity to sell the notion of the Rebellion. We want to see a whole variety of aliens, capital ships and one-off fighters. Even an eight-year-old can’t swallow the idea of the near monolithic resistance army almost as clean-cut as the Imperials.

You see this is where Star Wars inevitably loses me, and where I think it also begins to lose everyone else whether or not they fully recognize it. Simply put the actual ranks of the Rebellion are portrayed as nearly as white (human) and clean-cut as the Empire. Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie in so far as they aren’t are an exception against that backdrop. And in being allowed to be that exception they’re implicitly an elite. RtoJ does some nice things to consciously try and rectify all this: introducing the Mon Calamari, Lando’s Sullustan copilot, sticking a Dressellian into the mission briefing, making the Endor strike team extras scruffy hippies with beards, long hair and varying baggy clothes. But it doesn’t go anywhere far enough. And the moment the continuity of novels and comics picked up after the second Death Star gets vaporized that same unimaginative, undetailed, monolithic interpretation of the Rebellion (and the war) started spiraling out of control. The Rebellion immediately became The New Republic and all of a sudden the whole damn struggle wasn’t about overthrowing totalitarianism and breakin’ the law as one pleases but rather restoring the rightful regime. The Empire half-collapses and The New Republic steps in to take over. A very conventional war is fought for five or six years and then there’s a single galactic congress and a single galactic military and everything is essentially the same as under the Empire except shit gets voted on. Everything from there on out is basically a Star Trek story minus the scientists.

(It’s a pretty obvious reality that the Star Wars tone cannot allow for the existence of scientists. Most writers, no matter how stupid, have caught on to the paradigm dissonance it would create and stepped aside. Indeed the best explicitly banished science out to the fringes of Star Wars history. One of my favorite summations was the throw away factoid that no one knows how hyperdrive works and no one cares. Sadly in both our world and theirs the mindset of science is alien and unrealistic to the average person. Star Wars has tinkerers and engineers but the horizon of its aspirations is the horizon of the capitalist and working man. This is why midiclorians were so repulsive to the fans. And why building a ridiculously scaled up blaster to shoot rebellious planets was more swallowable than discovering e=mc^2 and carpet bombing them with nukes.)

Star Wars took a turn for the suck a long time ago and those mistakes have been continuously compounded by everyone writing in its world since. The stream of what revamps writers are caught in showcases the growing desperation to get back to the roots. The obvious piece of advice: Stop Writing About Han, Luke and Leia! Keep characters obscure rather than dynastic and focus on separate concurrent sagas about little people! Is a waste of breath — we’re talking about space-fantasy genre trash after all.

But it’s worth asking the question, hypothetically what developments after Endor would still retain the rich Star Wars feel?

To answer that I think it’s necessary to get a tad political.

First I’d like to point out a number of positive things about the prequels that were entirely new yet felt solidly Star Wars: Shitty battle droids produced en mass by rich people to create their own private armies? Fucking good idea. Palpatine’s slow machevellian rise to power. The Republic deteriorating to showing its inherent unviability. The Jedi being scared and reflexively conservative. A local dispute with a WTO/IMF stand-in. Secession. Shiny things with a hint of decay… Granted, Lucas screwed up and made things ridiculously dynastical, rammed the camera directly at big issue stuff (battles, debates, etc) rather than dancing around the periphery, and thought things like slapstick, 50s kitch, and cheesy romance were the perfect additions to his formula. Oh and neutering Iain McDiarmid’s menace with a silly latex-and-force-lightning debacle and hell, shitty dialogue mixed with shitty, shitty acting. But mainly he fucked up at something that was a good idea and one that he actually meant to accomplish: Moral quagmire. Every once in a while the prequels stop fearfully candy coating everything and start to embrace the theme that shit is fucked up and folks can’t be sure anything they do means a damn. The inescapable point of any hypothetical Star Wars prequels was always going to be how ridiculous the notion of a monolithic purely good team is. When Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan speaks of the Old Republic he does so with some obvious nostalgia, but it’s also clearly tempered with depression, not at the impediments to its restoration, but at the realization that it was an unworkable delusion.

So here’s my proclamation: The Rebel Alliance is not some orderly conspiracy by political powers to restore the Republic, rather it has to be an alliance of rebels emerging in different places and different contexts for vastly different reasons. Oh there’s rebellion everywhere, proles shouting “five-oh” and taking out stormtroopers in back alley shoot outs, terrorist cells blowing up upper class human civies on Eridu, businessmen hiring pirates to attack Imperials getting to close to their illegal bacta operation. There’s slave rebellions on Kashyyyk and secret worker councils in the Kuat shipyards and speciesist underground armies and liberal dumbfucks on Alderaan and ideologues of Every Conceivable Stripe. Roving clusters of buddy fighter pilots making attacks where they can, working off of one or two official contacts with other resistance groups. Shit is complicated. So the Yavin 4 resistance was largely humans bankrolled by rich core world dissidents (Alderaan, Chandrilla…) and they may have been a logistical center best tied to the other groups. But they’re dwarfed by all different kinds of actions and uprisings. Slowly growing more tied together and making some serious gains but suffering starker attrition as they do.

I’m partial to the notion that Palpatine, being Sith and a genius, was irreplaceable. If keeping a Galactic Empire tied together was remotely feasible without massive psionic magic the Republic would have become an Empire long ago. And I’m partial to the notion that the Imperial Navy was crippled at Endor. So even while many, many people and classes were indebted and dependent on the Empire their hold was shattered in much of the galaxy immediately following Endor, including Coruscant (that’s what you get when you build your ridiculous city planet on top of miles of lumpenproles). The Imperial power structures that manage to persist (economic, political and military) end up splitting in a variety of ways. In many cases the regional governors assume sovereign control over their territories. The Imperial Navy as a whole probably holds together quite well, lumping up in one or at most two broad regions.  Maybe there’s some epic civil war, maybe not.  However you cut it “Empire” is a self-evidently outdated word. A regional body (probably over a chunk of the core) faced with fraying effects all around needs an ideological narrative to even make sense. Notions of purity, elitism and order have to be harped on much, much harder (causing openly recognizable inefficiencies in some respects). Everywhere else Imperial structures persist by means of superficial shifts matched with appeals to Old Republic “great civilization” narratives.

For the vast majority of the galaxy the collapse of the Empire means a sudden return to local governance. Corrupt administrators, republican governments, traditional rulers, gangsters, warlords, corporate operations… With a ton of un-ruled marketplaces as well as idealic fringe communities as well.

It’s utterly preposterous to assert the Rebel Alliance would hold together in these conditions. Until Endor there had never been anything close to a single coherent “rebel fleet”. Ackbar is sick of all your traps. (Also your non-traps. The only decent genders have tentacles.) He’s going home to Mon Calamari. Obviously. Because that’s his motivation. Or if he has an ideological one for the shape of the galaxy as a whole (communist!, anarchist!, libertarian!, fish-philosophy!) then fine, he has that, but there’s just no way in hell it’s going to be uniformly shared by all the different components of the rebellion. The vast majority are just doing it for their homeworld, or their families or revenge or general insurrectionary spirit. Sure some rich planets that have fallen from the Empire’s grace long in an abstract way for the privileges they had under the Republic — but they just broke the back of the only military force anywhere near capable of bringing everyone else in line.

Nobody gives two shits what some human in a big robe says on the remains of a looted Coruscant. (And oh yeah, there’s a massive amount of looting/piracy in the immediate aftermath of Endor as the luckiest dispossessed start divvying shit up and entropic egalitarian forces rush back into the market.) Cooperation? Don’t shit me. Everyone remembers what everyone else got up to under the Empire. And they all restructured differently. Everyone in power fears every other new planetary power for either being an iota too radical or an iota too conservative.  Between such parties setting up even the loosest of galactic federations makes no sense. There isn’t an overarching enemy to be fought against, it’s not even clear who still is “Imperial” and who isn’t, but there are uncountable threats springing up all over the place as well as rubble and workcamp files to be sorted through back home. The Alliance was a success, now it’s over.

That said undoubtedly some groups forged in the rebellion would continue kicking. Whether through shared ideology or simply having no home to return to. Some folks like Wedge and Hobbie would cluster in different ways, decide on targets/priorities and keep fighting.  But there is absolutely no simple big picture. There are no maps of the galaxy half in red and half in blue, gradually ceding to blue.

And Leia is most definitely not elected Chancellor of Everything from media popularity and hero worship. (Star Wars doesn’t have a galactic press or internet in any relevant way, it’s not a sedate information-age setting. Kids fix their father’s landspeeder and deal deathsticks out by the slave pens. Remember, it’s the sort of world where “I just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the senate” makes sense. Where Leia has to personally drag a little bit of data from one star system to another with a whole fucking starship. Folks aren’t checking live feeds on space-twitter.)

That said, Star Wars is an optimistic bit of fantasy and I have some optimistic paths the galaxy could take without chucking all sense of gritty reality.

First, Luke actually trains Leia. They gather, inspire and collaborate with other force sensitives. And then search for surviving Jedi knowledge, vanquish local evils and forge their own way. Not at the center of things, but at the periphery. The Jedi remain a faint, passing legend for a long time. They do not chuck Star Destroyers around with their minds. Nor are there creatures that block their access to the energy field of life itself. They do not set up shop on Yavin IV just because we’ve seen it before and anything that’s been seen has to have its backstory explained (missing the whole point!). They are wanderers. Healing and freeing. And no longer chained to the flag of a centralized government or reactionary tradition they slowly start to make progress in aggregate. There is no Jedi council or even an order. No one Jedi ever encounters or even learns of, much less communicates with, more than a tiny fraction of their kin. But dictators, oligarchs, gangsters and politicians dissolve in their wake and more utopian, collectivist societies emerge.  (Also, incidentally, Ben’s impression in the force never goes away.  That’s not something unique, it’s just what happens to every damn Jedi who meditates on what life wants rather than what they want.  Vader was surprised by this because he hadn’t finished developing as a Jedi.)

Second, trade becomes impossible to regulate. Smugglers and other agorists proliferate wildly until their various mutual-aid networks become the most stable galaxy-spanning social institutions. Taxation is impossible for the same Iain Banks space-is-3D reasons — at least without the sort of massive capital investment that disappeared with the Empire.  Entities like the Trade Federation can only emerge in the context of a larger state.  Asteroid bases and hijacked capital ships go from obscure relay points to major conduits of culture and civilization.  A proliferation of small non-localized pirates is certain, but this isn’t impetus for the creation of large scale governance because there’s nothing a government could do any better than mutual aid / insurance networks.  All this erodes the hell out of regional governments and core worlds with unsustainable cultures suffer badly.  (Poor Coruscant was always going to end up another Nar Shadda.)

The long term future of the Star Wars galaxy is in space, even more so than before.  A populace split more fairly between sedentary planet-sized governments / collectives and flowing circuits of the cheerfully nomadic free-wheeling traders criss-crossing the stars. The peace that is ushered in hardly complete, but it’s better regulated and more egalitarian than the Republic ever was.

Writers have always assumed the Republic arose from colonizers attempting to keep in contact and assert control during an era in which space travel was less well known.  A time where the relatively few ships that existed were financed by institutions.  In which the galaxy was a lot emptier for travelers with possible dangers around every corner. Over its existence those initial conditions have slowly changed.  I like this interpretation because it gives meaning and substance to the massive social shift Palpatine wrought. The Empire was an intelligent if desperate attempt to adapt the Republic’s outdated mechanisms and drive to deal with the now teeming and highly connected galaxy.

Basically a totalitarian Empire makes sense, a rotting and unsustainable Republic makes sense, a teemingly complex anarchic and increasingly more nomadic post-collapse culture also makes sense.  But a more or less decent galactic-sized democracy instantly formed and accepted out of the goodness of all the Rebels’ hearts?  Totally unbelievable.  And basically a stubborn Liberal lack of imagination.

In short the only believable future is one in which the death-stick dealing teens win. The world doesn’t go back to bureaucrats, committees, corporate laws, and stodgy religious institutions.  Or if it starts to the forces leading that push are fought just as furiously as the Empire was. The only new world coming is one of the Han Solos and Lando Calrissians. The grubby working class, the petty criminals and entrepreneurs. Frequently sketchy, but basically decent.

The major upsets when they exist are not from the development of new scientific breakthroughs (pah!) but from discovery of new functions in the ancient tech everybody is already walking on. Or the discovery of ancient unknowably storied locales like Korriban. (Indiana Jones tapped the same Lucas genius for making you feel like there was too much rich context to ever pick apart.) There are no Sith because the Sith with their very specific historical greviance (christ it’d be nice if the piling up KOTOR era stuff managed some tangible motivations beside the over-harped and cartoonish “hate makes you powerful” shit) died with Palpatine. Rather there are Jedi who fuck up, Jedi who disagree on bad days, and psychopaths who were lucky enough to be successful at moving the nickle around with their minds when they were eight.  Shit can get dramatic, stakes can get relatively big scale, but not so big — the empire’s dead and with it the only time in thousands of years there was even the economic capacity for things like Death Stars much less the social context to apply it meaningfully. On the whole the Galaxy starts living a bit more nomadic and anarchic like The Culture except without any conscious or noticeable moral enlightenment. Factions jockey back and forth. Local powers try to act imperialistically. Ideologies clash and shift. The Jedi go on. Quietly. Less perceptibly.

That’s how Star Wars ends in my head.

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

Leitor de uma de minhas colunas anteriores (“Outra Observação Estúpida de Mitt — Mas Quem Está Contando,” C4SS 10 de setembro de 2011 ) publicada num jornal local reclama que o Centro por uma Sociedade sem Estado é “organização de extrema esquerda que promove radicalismo trabalhista e anarquia.” Ocorre que caracterizar uma posição como de “extrema esquerda” ou “que promove radicalismo trabalhista e anarquia” não é o mesmo que responder a ela com base em lógica e evidência.

Por definição, qualquer caracterização de em que lugar os argumentos recaem no espectro político toma como ponto pacífico a assunção tácita do ponto de referência conhecido como “majoritário” ou “centrista.” E, por definição, qualquer coisa classificada como “majoritária” ou “centrista” em qualquer sistema de poder recai dentro do espectro de posições compatíveis com a preservação de tal sistema de poder. Qualquer “reforma” que envolva fazer ajustes nas margens da estrutura de poder sem modificá-la fundamentalmente, e possa ser implementada pelas mesmas classes de pessoas que hoje administram o presente sistema, será classificada como “moderada.” Qualquer proposta que envolva mudar a estrutura fundamental de poder e tirar do poder os grupos que a gerem será chamada de “radical.”

Qualquer sistema inclui um aparato de reprodução cultural que tende a criar os tipos de “recursos humanos” que aceitam como normal e dada a estrutura de poder sob a qual vivem.

Tenhamos presente, porém, que a estrutura de poder corporativa-estatal não surgiu natural ou espontaneamente. Surgiu por meio da aplicação consciente e maciça de poder político no decurso dos últimos 150 anos. Da Era Dourada em diante o estado interveio maciçamente no mercado para criar uma sociedade dominada por organizações centralizadas gigantescas, como os órgãos de governo e as corporações, e mais tarde pela educação estatal centralizada, grandes universidades, e fundações sem fins lucrativos. Quando essa economia industrial centralizada criada pelo estado e subsidiada pelo estado viu-se afligida por capacidade excessiva e subconsumo crônicos, o estado voltou-se para políticas de manter as coisas em funcionamento. Incluindo uma economia doméstica centrada em gastos federais para absorver excedente de capital por meio de projetos de gastos estatais maciços tais como o Sistema de Rodovias Interestaduais, um complexo industrial-militar que devorou enorme quantidade de excesso de produção industrial, e uma política externa voltada para incorporar pela força os mercados e recursos do planeta inteiro como escoadouro para excesso de capital e produção.

Na época em que o sistema estava sendo imposto pelo estado houve resistência de larga escala por parte de uma população em geral que não aceitava aquilo como normal. Dos anos 1870 até a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a maioria da população recusava-se a aceitar como normal uma situação na qual trabalhava como assalariada de grandes hierarquias autoritárias. Movimentos tais como o movimento fazendeiro populista e os Cavaleiros do Trabalho equivaleram a quase uma insurreição, e medidas tais como a repressão pós-Haymarket e a supressão de Cleveland da Greve Pullman constituíram uma contrarrevolução.

Depois de derrotada a insurreição, os burocratas de colarinho branco que controlavam hierarquias corporativas e estatais adotaram um sistema educacional voltado para processar pessoas de modo a elas aceitarem a estrutura de poder como normal. O movimento oficial de educação pública, os defensores do “100% de estadunidensismo” e coisas da espécie, voltados para criar “recursos humanos” que estivessem “ajustados” para aceitar autoritarismo e hierarquia como normais, e para “obedecer” a quaisquer ordens oriundas de um apparatchik atrás de uma escrivaninha — numa sala de aula, numa fábrica, ou num gabinete do governo.

E foram muito bem-sucedidos, como exemplificado por esse leitor.

“Emancipem-se da escravidão mental. Só vocês próprios poderão libertar as próprias mentes.”

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

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.