C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “The Subsidy of History” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “The Subsidy of History“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

This article – excerpted from Kevin Carson’s groundbreaking essay “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” (2001) – examines capitalist eco­nom­ic privilege through the lens of the historical dispossession of workers and peasants, and the radically deformed markets dynamics struct­ur­ed by these systematic, consolidating transfers of wealth – opening up discussions on the role of the state in forging and shaping corporate power and in driving workers into sweat­shop labor; as well as the trans­formative possibilities of decentral­iz­ed, liberated markets freed from state-capitalist exploit­ation.

“Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a rul­ing class established itself by force, and then com­pel­led the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, in­clud­ing cap­it­al­ism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of rob­bery as mass­ive as feudalism. It has been sus­tain­ed to the present by contin­u­al state inter­ven­tion to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable. The current structure of capital own­er­ship and org­an­iz­ation of production in our so-called ‘market’ eco­n­omy, re­flects coercive state intervention prior to and ex­trane­ous to the market. From the outset of the industrial re­vol­ut­ion, what is nostalgically called “laissez-faire” was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to sub­sid­ize ac­cum­ulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work disci­pline. . . .”

“A world in which peas­ants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was free­ly available to laborers through mutual banks, productive tech­n­ology was freely avail­able in every country without pat­ents, and every people was free to develop locally without col­on­ial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, own­ed and controlled by those who did the work – as dif­fer­ent from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery. . . .”

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-capitalism, the in­div­idualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com and frequently publishes short columns and longer research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

Being a libertarian means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. That doesn’t mean it should be understood as involving support for capitalism.

Whether this claim makes any sense at all depends, of course, on what you mean by “capitalism.” For some people, perhaps, the term just refers to free exchange. And if that’s all you intend when you talk about “capitalism,” you’re quite right that there’s no real conflict between what you’re talking about and a sensible libertarianism.

But people very often have some other senses of the word in mind when they employ it. For instance: mainstream print and electronic media regularly use “capitalism” to refer to “the economic system we have now.” And it’s relatively common to hear “capitalism” employed as a synonym for “dominance of workplaces and society by capitalists — by the owners of substantial capital assets.” Libertarian principles as I understand them entail support for capitalism in neither of these senses.

To a very significant degree, the economic system we have now is one from which peaceful, voluntary exchange is absent. An interlocking web of legal and regulatory privileges benefit the wealthy and well connected at the expense of everyone else (think patents and copyrights, tariffs, restrictions on banking, occupational licensing rules, land-use restrictions, etc.). The military-industrial complex funnels unbelievable amounts of money — at gunpoint — from ordinary people’s pockets and into the bank accounts of government contractors and their cronies. Subsidies of all kinds feed a network of privileges businesses and non-profits. And the state protects titles to land taken at gunpoint or engrossed by arbitrary fiat before distribution to favored individuals and groups. No, the economies of the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, at least, aren’t centrally planned. The state doesn’t assert formal ownership of (most of) the means of production. But the state’s involvement at multiple levels in guaranteeing and bolstering economic privilege makes it hard to describe the economic system we have now as free. So if “capitalism” names the system we have now, anyone who favors freedom has good reason to be skeptical about capitalism.

The privileges that mark the existing economic order, whatever we call it, inure disproportionately to those with the most political influence and the greatest wealth. And the network of privileges preserved by the state tends in various ways to boost the privileges of capitalists in the workplace. As regards the workplace: state-secured privilege reduces the possibility of self-employment (by raising capital requirements and otherwise increasing costs of entry, while simultaneously reducing the resources people might be able to use to start and maintain their own businesses). It also imposes restraints on union activity that reduces workers’ capacity to bargain effectively with employers. By reducing alternatives to paid work and reducing workers’ collective bargaining opportunities, the state substantially increases employers’ leverage. In short: dominance of workplaces and of society by “capitalists” is incomprehensible in anything like its current form without attention to the state’s mischief. Again, if this is “capitalism,” proponents of freedom have no reason to embrace it.

It’s certainly conceivable that someone could argue that, while “capitalism” is frequently used for objectionable social phenomena, it is just as frequently employed for an economic system to which freedom is truly central. I am not sure either what the relevant proportions are or what weight should be attached to particular instances of using “capitalism” in one way or the other. I am quite sure, however, that the negative usage has been around for a long time (“capitalist” in the pejorative sense was employed by enthusiastic advocates of free markets like Thomas Hodgskin in the first half of the nineteenth century) and is very common today. Indeed, all too frequently, I fear, when “capitalism” is employed in a positive sense, it’s used as a “package deal” concept (as Roderick Long has helpfully emphasized) that somehow means both “free exchange” and either “the status quo,” “rule by capitalists,” or both. It’s tainted. And when people in the streets of countries throughout the developing world chant out their opposition to “capitalism” — meaning, in reality, not genuine freedom but rather imperial dominance by the USG and its allies — I think it’s vital for libertarians to be able to make clear that the system of statist oppression the protestors are naming isn’t the one advocates of freedom favor.

Contributors to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, commentators on Faux News, and (other) spokespersons for the political and economic elite may continue to use “capitalism” for whatever it is they say they favor. They’re not libertarianism’s natural allies, and there’s no reason for libertarians to emulate them. Support for free (or freed) markets is quite consistent with enthusiastic anti-capitalism.

Ésta es la segunda entrada de una serie escrita por Carlos Clemente como asignatura en un curso sobre introducción al anarquismo en el Centro para una Sociedad sin Estado (C4SS). Para la primera entrada, hacer click aquí. Para la tercera, aquí.

***

Para mí, la agresión es la iniciación de violencia hacia una persona o su propiedad. Iniciar una pelea a los puños, robar, cometer un fraude o lanzar una guerra de conquista son casos obvios de agresión, y obviamente distintos de otras formas de influencia negativa sobre los demás. Puede que a uno le moleste que su vecino escuche música a todo volumen durante la noche, que le repugnen los modales en la mesa de la persona con la que uno esté cenando, o que le horrorice la adicción a la pornografía del prógimo. Pero difícilmente podría argumentarse que uno se siente agredido en ninguno de éstos casos. Esa ha sido siempre mi opinión sobre estos temas, por lo que fue una sorpresa agradable encontrar que coincide con la posición anarquista al respecto.

La difinición de lo que constituye una agresión se ve influenciada por cuestiones culturales. Supongamos que los miembros de una nación hipotética consideran de manera unánime, y por razones religiosas, que el adulterio es una aresión, y que por lo tanto condonan la acción violenta que cualquier persona pueda cometer contra un cónyugue adúltero, entendiéndola como legítma autodefensa.

Esta práctica es claramente inaceptable desde una perspectiva anarquista. Pero además, el anarquista nos instaría a estudiar cuidadosamente a esa nación para determinar si en realidad sus ciudadanos condonan unánimemente la agresión contra el adulterio, o si se trata de que un subgrupo de ellos controla al estado y lo usa para imponer agresivamente ésta idea a los demás.

Por otro lado, el anarquista nos diría que a pesar de tratarse de una práctica moralmente inaceptable, la intervención de un estado extranjero en dicha nación, con el objetivo declarado de acabar con dicha práctica, generaría más problemas que los que puede resolver. Nos diría que la misión podría fácilmente ser capturada por los que controlan el estado en la nación invasora para convertirla en una agresiva aventura de conquista que los beneficiaría a elllos a expensas de los ciudadanos tanto de la nación invasora como de la invadida. En una situación extrema como el holocausto Nazi de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el anarquista apoyaría la invasión aliada de Alemania por razones exclusivamente pragmáticas, ya que en un mundo en el que los estados han logrado monopolizar el poder militar, puede que un estado sea la única entidad capaz de parar las horrorosas masacres perpetradas por cualquier otra de ellas. Pero incluso en esa situación, el anarquista mantendría una postura vigilante ante la posibilidad de que el estado invasor terminase utilizando la situación para fines políticos innobles.

Los anarquistas están particularmente interesados en estudiar una manera aún más fundamental en la que se relacionan el concepto de agresión y la cultura de una nación: la maquinaria propagandística usada por los estados para manipular la manera en que la gente percibe ciertas acciones agresivas como autodefensivas. La actual invasión de Iraq y Afganistán liderada por los Estados Unidos fue agresivamente publicitada por los invasores como una defensa legítima ante una inminente ola de ataques terroristas que serían patrocinadas por los estados de las naciones invadidas. Y la gente fue especialmente receptiva a ese argumento debido al trauma producido por los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en la ciudad de Nueva York.

Grandes empresarios trabajan de la mano de políticos en el mundo entero para promover la versión neoliberal del “libre mercado”, cuando en realidad lo que buscan imponer es un agresivo sistema de subsidios, licencias, patentes y otras formas de privilegio estatista que concentra el poder económico en unas pocas empresas en cada industria para el detrimento de trabajadores, consumidores y contribuyentes. Para un ejemplo sumamente incisivo y actual que ilustra el abuso propagandístico del estado para ocultar simultáneamente sus prácticas imperialistas y de privilegio a empresarios domésticos bien conectados, ver este reciente artículo escrito por Glenn Greenwald sobre el rol de los Estados Unidos en la crisis egipcia.

UK prime minister David Cameron has promised to support a referendum on the UK’s future within the European Union if and when he wins the general election in 2015. Politicians across Europe are reacting negatively to Cameron’s speech, citing their support for the Union’s economic, social, and political cooperation. My question to them would be: Why must this cooperation be directed by a centralized power?

The concept of cooperation is misunderstood by many. Cooperation is based on the realization of individual actors that a peaceful and joint venture is beneficial to all parties. Having a leader in this case could arguably be more beneficial but delegating all decision-making powers to one actor hardly seems a necessary prerequisite to calling something cooperative. Yet pro-Europe politicians maintain the opinion that a centralized institution is necessary to foster interdependence. Either this means individuals are too dense to realize the advantages of cooperation or that there is no actual beneficial outcome to be attained. Either way, calling this situation “cooperation” is very troubling.

Supra-national politics is not the only area in life where the meaning of cooperation has been skewed. Apologists for capitalism rightly claim that economies require cooperation between labor and capital. However, they continue by saying that owners of capital must receive exclusive decision-making powers to make the cooperation fruitful.

The same principle exists in our culture’s view of romantic unions. No matter if you’re gay or straight there is always the question of, “Who wears the pants in this relationship?” We thus arrive at the worrying conclusion that the concept of cooperation has been entirely corrupted by viewing the delegation of authority as a prerequisite for its existence.

Although it is unclear what Cameron’s own opinion on the matter is — whether he would vote for the UK to stay in, or get out of, the European Union — it is clear that he dislikes the direction in which the EU is heading. He says, “Put simply, many ask, ‘Why can’t we simply have what we voted to join; a common market?’” After all, the European Union is based on the European Economic Community, often known as the Common Market by the English-speaking world. If there are benefits to cooperation between governments and individuals across national borders then the only acceptable function of the European Union would be to help governments and individuals realize these benefits.

Of course this whole issue would be irrelevant if there weren’t national economic and migratory borders to start with. However, this idea is conveniently left out of the discussion for obvious reasons.

It also brings up another issue of supra-national organizations: Whether they eliminate borders or rather expand them? On a related note: Are the anti-EU sentiments of many Europeans a sign of a new anti-authoritarian movement or merely symptoms of fervent nationalism? These are the questions we should really be asking. How about a referendum on them, Mr. Cameron?

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A Corrupção da Cooperação.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Sheldon Richman’s “From State to Society: How and How Not to Privatize” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Sheldon Richman’s “From State to Society: How and How Not to Privatize“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

“It’s not privatization per se, but free competition through voluntary exchange, that is desirable. It matters little whether the government calls people who perform its functions public employees or private contractors. When a company becomes a monopoly government con­tractor, to that extent it is an arm of the state rather than a private firm. For that reason such ersatz ‘privatization᾿ devic­es as contracting out the operation of prisons and charter schools merely blur the line between ‘private’ and ‘public’ sector – in the nature of corporatism – and undermine the case for the genuine divestiture of state­held assets. . . .

“Since government possession of state assets orig­inated in one form of usurpation or another, the requirement that they be bought back is unjust. It may be argued that the revenue could be used to benefit the general public . . . but political incentives tend to work in the other direction. Politicians will see the new revenue as an oppor­tunity to launch new programs that offer benefits to well­-organized interest groups. . .

“Better, then, that state assets be seen as existing in a state of non­ownership . . . and opened to homesteading . . . . Government elementary and secondary schools could be turned over to the people who work in them or the students’ parents, or both groups, who would be free to decide how to run them — without tax money. A government university could become the property of its students, mem­bers of its faculty and staff, or both. Some schools might organize as joint stock companies with tradable shares, while others might become consumer or producer coöperatives. Competition would determine which forms best satisfied con­sumers and attracted capable producers . . . .

“From State to Society” was originally published online on October 1, 2012, as the lead essay of a month-long Cato Unbound symposium on “How and How Not to Privatize,” together with fellow participants Leonard Gilroy, Dru Stevenson, and Randal O’Toole.

Sheldon Richman is a contemporary left-libertarian writer, speaker, and editor of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Future of Freedom, currently living near Little Rock, Arkansas. Richman also spent over a decade as editor of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, from the late 1990s to 2012; during his tenure the magazine became one of the most important print outlets for left-wing market anarchist writing, publishing key essays by writers such as Kevin Carson, Joseph Stromberg, and Charles Johnson, as well as many important articles from his own pen.

The healthcare industry is a textbook example of what Ivan Illich (in Tools for Conviviality) called a “radical monopoly.” The central function of the government’s “safety” and “consumer protection” regulations, in most cases, is either to exclude competing providers of a good or service from the market, to circumscribe the areas of competition between them, or to set a floor on the capitalization required for doing business and thus impose a mandatory minimum overhead. The overall effect, as Paul Goodman put it in People or Personnel, is to create a 300% or 400% markup in the cost of doing anything, and render us all dependent on institutional providers with bureaucratic cultures and high overhead costs. By mandating centralized, high-tech, and skill-intensive ways of doing things, the state makes it harder for ordinary people to translate their own skills and knowledge into use-value. Tollgates are erected between effort and consumption, so that it becomes harder to meet our subsistence needs through our own direct labor or through barter with other small producers outside the wage system. As a result, “decent poverty becomes impossible.”

For example, schooling becomes something you can only get from somebody with a degree from a teacher’s college, according to a state-prescribed curriculum. According to Illich in Deschooling Society, the first thing students learn at school is to confuse process with substance, and to view almost every form of consumption good imaginable as something properly provided by a professionalized institution. Self-treatment, self-education, etc., are things that only dangerously irresponsible people do. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, public school Home Ec curricula threw their weight behind the creation of mass consumer society, teaching students that home-baked bread, home-canned vegetables, and home-sewn clothing (in fact, pretty much homemade anything) was old-fashioned and grounds for suspicion by right-thinking people.

In the field of housing, around a third of which was still self-built in the U.S. as late as the 1940s, self-building is virtually illegal thanks to local housing codes set by licensed contractors and their lobbyists. This despite the fact that the available technology for self-building (modular houses, “cob” building, etc.) is far more user-friendly than it was sixty years ago.

And in healthcare, state intervention artificially skews the model of service toward the most expensive kind of treatment. For example, the patent system encourages an R&D effort focused mainly on tweaking existing drugs just enough to claim that they’re “new,” and justify getting a new patent on them (the so-called “me too” drugs). Most medical research is carried out in prestigious med schools, clinics and research hospitals whose boards of directors are also senior managers or directors of drug companies. And the average GP’s knowledge of new drugs comes from the Pfizer or Merck rep who drops by now and then.

The professional licensing cartels outlaw one of the most potent weapons against monopoly: product substitution. Right-wing libertarians are fond of using “food insurance” to illustrate the effect of third-party payment: if there were such a thing as grocery insurance, with low deductibles and a flat premium, people would be buying a lot more filet mignon and a lot less hamburger. The problem is that we’ve got a medical licensing system that criminalizes the sale of hamburger and mandates the sale of filet mignon. While healthcare consumers fall into many tiers of income, the state mandates only one tier of service regardless of ability to pay.

Much of what an MD does doesn’t actually require an MD’s level of training. Unfortunately, no matter how simple or straightforward the specific procedure you need done, you have to pay for an MD’s level of training. The medical, dental and other lobbies make sure that legislation is in place prohibiting advance practice nurses or dental hygienists from performing even the most basic services without the “supervision” of an MD or DD.

In an open-source healthcare system, someone might go to vocational school for accreditation as the equivalent of a Chinese “barefoot doctor.” He could set fractures and deal with other basic traumas, and diagnose the more obvious infectious diseases. He might listen to your cough, do a sputum culture and maybe a chest x-ray, and give you a round of zithro for your pneumonia. But you can’t purchase such services by themselves without paying the full cost of a college and med school education plus residency.

The government having made some aspects of treatment artificially lucrative with its patent system and licensing cartel, the standards of practice naturally gravitate toward where the money is. The newly patented “me too” drugs crowd out drugs that are almost (if not entirely) as good, so that the cost of medicine is many times higher than necessary. The licensing cartel requires diagnosis and treatment by someone with an MD’s level of training, when something much less might be all that’s needed.

Result: radical monopoly. The state-sponsored crowding-out makes other, cheaper (and often more appropriate) forms of treatment less usable, and renders cheaper (but adequate) treatments artificially scarce.

I’m very big on the idea of reviving the mutuals or sick-benefit societies that working people organized for themselves, back in the days before the state and the capitalist insurance companies conspired to destroy them. One small-scale attempt at doing this sort of thing is the Ithaca Health Fund, created by the same people involved in Ithaca Hours.

But such things alone are not enough. The problem with such systems is they handle only the financing end of things, while delivery of service is still under the control of the same old institutional culture. Any real solution will have to involve cooperative control over the provision of healthcare itself, as well.

Imagine, for example, a cooperative clinic at the neighborhood level. It might be staffed mainly with nurse-practitioners or the sort of “barefoot doctors” mentioned above. They could treat most traumas and ordinary infectious diseases themselves, with several neighborhood clinics together having an MD on retainer (under the old “lodge practice” which the medical associations stamped out in the early 20th century) for more serious referrals. They could rely entirely on generic drugs, at least when they were virtually as good as the patented “me too” stuff; possibly with the option to buy more expensive, non-covered stuff with your own money. Their standard of practice would focus much more heavily on preventive medicine, nutrition, etc., which would be cheap for members of the cooperative who didn’t have to pay the cost of an expensive office visit to an MD for such service. Their service model might look much more like something designed by, say, Dr. Andrew Weil. One of the terms of membership at standard rates might be signing a waiver of most expensive, legally-driven CYA testing. For members of such a cooperative, the cost of medical treatment in real dollars might be as low as it was several decades ago. No doubt many upper middle class people might prefer a healthcare plan with more frills, catastrophic care, etc. But for the 40 million or so who are presently uninsured, it’d be a pretty damned good deal.

Ésta es la primera de una serie de entradas escritas por Carlos Clemente como asignaturas en un curso de introducción al anarquismo en el Centro para una Sociedad sin Estado (C4SS). Para la segunda entrada, hacer click aquí.

***

Hace algo más de un año terminé una especie de año sabático que me tomé para no hacer absolutamente nada aparte de descansar, recargar las pilas, y aclarar bien qué es lo que realmente quería hacer con mi vida.

Una de las pocas cosas que sí hice durante ese año fue comenzar a practicar Tai Chi Chuan, Nei Kung y meditación taoísta. Y ahora que sé un poco más sobre el tema, estoy seguro de que tuvo un impacto importantísimo en mi evolución desde entonces.

Para los antiguos maestros chinos, el despertar político complementaba al despertar moral y espiritual. Veían en las artes marciales más que una herramienta en esa forma extrema de conflicto político que es la guerra: también eran un vehículo para alcanzar un estado superior de conciencia, de conexión con el cosmos que espontáneamente moldearía un carácter virtuosos en el guerrero. Lo llamaban el estado de la “acción si esfuerzo” (wu-wei), que a su vez era considerado como la clave para la armonía socioplítica, la paz y la prosperidad de los pueblos.

De hecho, empecé a practicar Nei Kung dos años antes de tomar mi año de descanso, y ahora creo que fue el principal disparador de un instenso proceso de transformación personal que llegó a su clímax durante dicho año. Al principio, mientras más practicaba Nei Kung, más sentía esa astilla en mi mente: una disatisfacción profunda con la ciudad en la que vivía y el trabajo al que me dedicaba, a pesar de los privilegios materiales que me brindaban. Una sensación vaga, pero persistente, de que los dos representaban algo que estaba retorcidamente mal en el mundo. Ésa sensación fue la que definitivamente me convenció de que tenía que pasar la página y dejarlo todo atrás.

Mi curiosidad incial con el taoísmo empezó muchos años atrás, pero se limitó exclusivamente a sus prescripciones en cuanto a salud y vitalidad física. El único texto sobre taoísmo que leí por esos días fue un libro sobre filosofía médica China de un autor bastante new age, por lo que nunca me hubiese podido imaginar el impacto que el Nei Kung iba a tener en la manera como abordaría la espiritualidad o la política.

El antiguo maestro taoísta Zhuangzi creía que la debilidad del hombre provenía principalmente de su naturaleza social, que lo hace excesivamente dependiente del lenguaje y de nociones socialmente construídas del bien y del mal, distrayéndolo de su brújula moral interna. Quizás por eso, en esa época al entrenamiento físico daoísta se le denominaba “entrenamiento interno”, la meditación presumiblemente formaba parte importante del mismo, y su objetivo principal era “vaciar la mente” de esas construcciones sociales para permitirle a uno reconectar con una profunda fuente de intuición moral esclarecedora.

Durante este largo proceso de despertar he explorado temas que en otro momento solía descartar debido a sus connotaciones sociales negativas. Por ejemplo, si un autor era considerado por la mayoría como “extremista”, simplemente lo descartaba sin ni siquiera leer o escuchar una palabra sobre su discurso.

Pero si lo que Zhuanzi decía es verdad, debe haber sido el Nei Kung lo que destapó mi curiosidad hacia movimientos políticos alternativos.

Ha sido un camino intelectual largo y tortuoso, en el que descubrí mucha gente interesante y movimientos con los que, para mi sorpresa, terminé simpatizando mucho más de lo que jamás hubiese podido con ninguno de los movimientos políticos dominantes hoy en día que conozco.

Sin embargo, la mayoría de la gente y los movimientos políticos que descubrí no me terminaban de cuadrar del todo. Por ejemplo, gente como G. Edward Griffin, Adrian Salbuchi, Alex Jones y otros dentro de lo que se podría denominar el movimiento anti “Nuevo Orden Mundial” en mi opinión hacen críticas muy acertadas sobre cómo funciona el mundo, pero también estoy en desacuerdo con muchas de sus ideas en economía, su tendencia a ir demasiado lejos con las teorías conspirativas, y en el caso de Adrian Salbuchi, sus opiniones sumamente conservadoras en cuanto a los derechos de los homosexuales y otros temas sociales importantes.

No fue hasta hace poco que me encontré con un movimiento con el que me siento plenamente identificado en prácticamente todos los temas que plantea: el mutualismo, una variedad de anarquismo también conocida como “libre mercado anticapitalista,” o como una rama de lo que suele llamarse “libertarianismo de izquierda.”

No voy a expandirme sobre las particularidades del mutualismo en esta entrada. Eso lo haré durante las próximas semanas, publicando en este blog las asignaturas de un curso que voy a tomar en el centro Centro para una Sociedad sin Estado (Center for a Stateless Society). El link anterior es un buen lugar para empezar a aprender sobre el tema, pero antes quiero aclarar algo: el anarquismo no es lo que la mayoría de la gente cree que es. Estoy seguro que cualquier persona que se tome el tiempo para leer la literatura básica sobre el tema se dará cuenta que el anarquismo no tiene nada que ver con las connotaciones negativas con las que normalmente se le asocia. De nuevo, la actitud correcta en estos temas es la de Zhuangzi: abordarlos con una mente abierta, sin dejarse llevar por arrebatos prejuiciosos.

Hay decenas de variedades de anarquismo esparcidas por el mundo, muchas en confrontación ideológica entre ellas mismas, pero en lo que todas coinciden es que la sociedad funcionaría mucho mejor sin la institución que conocemos como el estado.

Si tu reacción inicial es pensar que se trata de otra forma más de utopianismo, ten en cuenta que la mayoría de los autores anarquistas que he leído son muy claros en rechazar la noción de utopía desde el principio. Según su manera de ver las cosas, en una sociedad anarquista seguiría existiendo el crimen, el desperdicio y la injusticia, pero reducidos a su mínima expresión, ya que ellos ven en el estado a la causa institucional básica de estos problemas sociales.

También puede que seas de la opinión de que el estado contribuye al bien de la sociedad en el sentido en que la mayoría de los movimientos políticos de izquierda lo proponen, y que eliminarlo ocasionaría un caos social. A ésto solo puedo responder que el mutualismo puede ser un campo interesante para explorar argumentos opuestos a esa creencia, e ideas alternativas sobre organización social que buscan alcanzar los objetivos con los que tanto te identificas a través de medios totalmente diferentes, o incluso opuestos, a los que estás acostumbrado a considerar.

En cualquier caso, si haz leído hasta aquí sin que te ahuyentasen mis esotéricas cavilaciones taoístas, estoy seguro que podrás tolerar mis reflexiones anarquistas… aunque no estés de acuerdo con absolutamente nada de lo que digo.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, Roderick Long, and Randolph Bourne’s “No Matter Who You Vote For, The Winner Is Always The Government” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Charles Johnson, Kevin Carson, Roderick Long, and Randolph Bourne’s “No Matter Who You Vote For, The Winner Is Always The Government“.

$1.25 for the first copy. $1.00 for every additional copy.

This is a booklet against elections, parties, constitutional government and voting. It reprints eight essays on Anarchist politics by Charles W. John­son, Kevin Carson, and Roderick T. Long – and a special guest ap­pear­ance by Randolph Bourne – on the failure of electoral politics, the structural limits that quarantine and neutralize any threat of reform from within party politicking, and the pos­si­bil­ity and promise of radical activism and d.i.y. social trans­form­at­ion, beyond the quagmire of majoritarian votes, party politick­ing, political lobbying, legalistic reforms and elected government.

“I am boycotting the election today. I hope that you will too. I will not vote for any candidate for political office, Demo­crat, Republican, or other, no matter what promises they make, and no ma­tter what party they come from. I do not sup­port them as candidates, and I do not support the oligarchical political machine they represent. If the last few election cycles prove anything, they prove that power-plays beat promises every time.

“It’s not just a few radicals who have notic­ed some­thing is deeply wrong; it’s not just a handful of mal­contents who know that we need a radically different direction, away from the insane and de­structive Beltway consensus — away from this govern­ment’s wars, this government’s bail-outs, this government’s secret surveillance, catastrophic economic polices, shameless fear-monger­ing and con­stant, unremitting power-grabs. But people have HOPE’d and parties have CHANGE’d and if it all accomplished anything at all, it was only to prove that we’re never going to get any­thing but more of the same as long as we maintain a false hope in elect­or­al politics.

“If what you want is social progress, there is no shortcut around prin­c­ipled agitation, grass­roots social move­ments, com­mun­ity organ­iz­ing, civil dis­obed­ience and direct action. There is no low-calorie political sub­sti­tute for D.I.Y. social transformation. Elect­ions and party pol­i­tick­ing are no way to make a revolution. They’re not even a way to make small change. . . .”

CONTENTS

1. “Don’t Vote.” Charles W. Johnson. Rad Geek People’s Daily weblog. November 2, 2010.
2. “‘Funding?’ More like, ‘Is.’” Charles W. Johnson. Rad Geek People’s Daily, May 24, 2012.
3. “The Joke of Democratic Accountability,” Kevin A. Carson. Center for a Stateless Society column, September 27, 2012.
4. “Tea and Sympathy,” Roderick T. Long. Austro-Athenian Empire, April 18, 2009.
5. “I am shocked!—shocked!—to find that politics is going on in here!” Charles W. Johnson. Rad Geek People’s Daily weblog. February 25, 2008.
6. “The Party State.” Selections from The State (1919) by Randolph S. Bourne, and from “Show Me What Elected Government Looks Like. . .” by Charles W. Johnson in the Rad Geek People’s Daily weblog, August 28, 2012.
7. “The Statist ‘We Don’t.’” Charles W. Johnson. Rad Geek People’s Daily. September 17, 2008.
8. “Counter-Economic Optimism.” Charles W. Johnson. February 7, 2009.

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

Iedere steun aan wetgeving aangaande het verbod van wapenbezit betekent dat daarmee de overheid meer respect krijgt dan zij in werkelijkheid verdient. De overheid is een institutie welke wordt bestuurd en bevolkt door mensen met hun eigen belangen en persoonlijkheid. Zijn zij werkelijk slimmer, meer competent, of minder geneigd tot de escalatie van geweld dan het gemiddelde individu?

Op zijn minst zijn institutionele belangen in combinatie met de moeilijkheid om overheidsdienaren ter verantwoording te roepen – niemand is ooit verantwoordelijk, wij hebben het immers steevast ‘met zijn allen’ gedaan – ingrediënten welke de overheid gevaarlijker maken. De wetten die door hen worden uitgevaardigd maken hen zelfs tot een nog grotere bedreiging voor de publieke veiligheid. Gewapende wetsdienaren doen invallen in de huizen van mensen als deze worden verdacht van het bezit van niet-goedgekeurde medicijnen, hun bankier niet afbetaald hebben, of op het onjuiste adres verblijven. Mochten deze wetsdienaren zich tijdens hun adrenalinerush bedreigd voelen, dan zijn zij gemachtigd hun wapen af te vuren op de doodsbange bewoners en hun huisdieren – en komen daar mee weg. Ik voel mij zeker niet veiliger in de wetenschap dat zij de enigen zijn die legitiem wapens en munitie kunnen aanschaffen.

Verspreiding van de middelen tot het verdedigen van lijf en goed onder vreedzame individuen en gemeenschappen maken het leven veiliger door het terugbrengen van de macht van (en vermeende noodzaak daarvoor) deze gewapende beschermers.

Uiteraard is niet iedereen ‘gemiddeld’, en vuurwapengeweld gepleegd door burgers is beangstigend. Maar in de meeste gevallen is de initiatie van geweld een teken van onevenwichtige machtsverdeling, meestal afgedwongen door en in het voordeel van de overheid, omdat deze beschikt over het geweldsmonopolie.

Grote(re) schietpartijen vinden niet altijd, maar wel vaak plaats in instituties met een rigide hiërarchie alwaar een door het systeem machteloos en murw gemaakt individu het plegen van geweld beschouwt als middel tot machtsuitoefening door verovering. Dergelijke vanuit frustratie ontstane motieven kunnen worden beperkt door het wijd verspreiden van individueel recht, gebaseerd op respect voor autonomie en het cultiveren van individuele verantwoordelijkheid ten faveure van afgedwongen (blinde) gehoorzaamheid.

Toegegeven, niet elke schietpartij voldoet aan dit patroon, en helaas valt te betwijfelen of welke samenleving dan ook moord volledig kan voorkomen of verbannen. Maar het is wel mogelijk om het aantal slachtoffers te verminderen. De beste manier om dat te bereiken is om de afstand tussen burger en de handhavende macht te verkleinen door het aanmoedigen van de bevolking tot het nemen van de eigen verantwoordelijkheid voor zelfverdediging, in plaats van het bellen naar – en wachten op – wetsdienaren. Het recht op wapenbezit kan daarbij helpen en het wapen ter verdediging fungeert tevens als afschrikmiddel tegen de initiatie van geweld.

Het meeste dodelijk geweld dat gepleegd wordt door burgers vindt plaats in gebieden die gebukt gaan onder geïnstitutionaliseerde discriminatie. Economische segregatie leidt ertoe dat achterstandswijken de slechtste scholen krijgen, het laagste niveau van investeringen en de zwaarste last waar het gaat om gevaren voor het milieu. Het gaat hier meestal om plaatsen met een hoge concentratie van kansarme minderheidsgroeperingen, officieus gediscrimineerd door de machthebbers.

Het hedendaagse overheidsbeleid – uitgevoerd door de geweldsmonopolist wie wel wapens mag dragen – transformeert stedelijke gebieden tot slagveld van drugsoorlogen terwijl lokale bestuurders het probleem trachten te isoleren tot bepaalde wijken, waardoor het potentieel van een open en vreedzame ontwikkeling van de samenleving wordt gefrustreerd. Tegenstanders van deze onbalans kunnen hiervan leren – van links tot rechts.

Terwijl wij streven naar een samenleving van de menselijke maat – die niet bereikt kan worden zonder het cultiveren van respect voor vrijheid en autonomie – zouden wij ook respect moeten hebben voor het recht op wapenbezit voor alle verantwoordelijke individuen. Het is verbazingwekkend dat nog maar sinds kort het recht op verdedigen van lijf en goed enigszins verruimd is – maar je hebt wel pech gehad als de crimineel opponent gewapend is. Als handvuurwapens worden beschouwd als gemeengoed maar gevaarlijk, in plaats van mysterieuze bron van verboden macht, dan zullen zij mogelijk met een veel groter verantwoordelijkheidsbesef worden gehanteerd.

Het alternatief voor meer vrijheid en veiligheid is een samenleving die meer weg heeft van een gevangenis met zwaar bewapende paramilitairen als bewakers, waar ‘niet aangepasten’ in aanmerking komen voor ‘geestelijke hulp’. De weg naar meer verantwoordelijkheid, rekenschap en menselijke maat wordt daarentegen gevonden in het streven naar vrijheid.

Originele artikel geplaatst op 18 Januari 2013 door Darian Worden.

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

For most of the 20th century, American libertarians were mostly seen as — and mostly saw themselves as — defenders of capitalism. Was that an accurate view of 20th century libertarians were about? If accurate, is that a good thing about libertarianism, or a defect that should be amended and avoided?

Well, it depends. Specifically, it depends on what you mean by “capitalism.” Now, I’ve had something to say about this before, and my friend Gary Chartier has broached the subject here at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, but I think the ground might be worth covering again in some more detail. (Partly because it may help as an introduction to where I come from on questions of freed markets, economic privilege, social justice, et cetera; and partly because some of the comments on Gary’s earlier post lead me to believe that a closer approach to the definitional question might help clear up communication.) First, though, let’s take a bit of a detour — to New York City.

About a year ago, the Wall Street Journal‘s Metropolis blog ran an item by Aaron Rutkoff on zoning and advertising in Times Square, called “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal.” As it turns out, the bright lights and “colorful corporate orgy” of Times Square advertising — as paradigmatic a symbol of American capitalism as you could hope for — is the result, not of unfettered free-market commercialism, but of a detailed set of mandates handed down in New York City’s special zoning ordinance for the “Special Midtown District:”

For those with the stomach to navigate the bureaucratic language, the zoning regulations make for interesting reading. What appears totally haphazard to the untrained tourist’s eye is actually planned down to the last square foot, with copious rules about how much of any surface must be covered in signage.

Own a building on Broadway but detest the flashing lights? Too bad. As the code states:

There shall be a minimum of one #illuminated sign# with a #surface area# of not less than 1,000 square feet for each 50 linear feet, or part thereof, of #street# frontage.

There are instructions for precisely which direction Times Square’s signage must face and extraordinarily detailed diagrams for how the brightness of mandatory illuminated displays shall be measured.

Does your building feature a blinking sign? The rules require that the unlit phase not exceed three seconds. When can the bright lights be switched off? No earlier than 1:00 a.m.

–Adam Rutkoff, “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal,”
Wall Street Journal Metropolis blog, 12 August 2010

The WSJ decided to sum up their findings by saying:

In a way, the zoning code governing the signs is wonderfully ironic. The bright lights of Times Square, one of the most visible and iconic testaments to the city’s hyper-capitalist verve, are maintained not by Adam Smith’s invisible hand but by little-known government regulations.

–Adam Rutkoff, “Good Taste in Times Square? It’s Illegal,”
Wall Street Journal Metropolis blog, 12 August 2010

Well. Whether or not something comes off as “ironic” depends upon your expectations; and on this point, I guess it may not be surprising that my expectations are not the same as those at the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I would say that a story like that of the Times Square zoning code is not only not especially “ironic;” it’s really paradigmatic — a illustratively typical example of how large-scale, in-your-face commerce typically works in these United States, and how it interacts with the corporate economy throughout the world. That’s why I have often referred to myself (following the example of Kevin Carson) a “free market anticapitalist” — because I believe in a really broad and radical version of property rights and market freedom in economic ownership and exchange, but (unlike, say, the Wall Street Journal) I think that the features conventionally associated with American capitalism — large-scale, top-down firms, the predominance of wage labor, corporate domination of economic and social life, the commercialization of social space etc. — are as often as not the products of state intervention, not of market dynamics. And, further, that a genuinely and consistently freed market would tend to undermine the prevalence and significance of these features in everyday life.

But “free market anticapitalism” is a term that raises eyebrows. Mainly because it doesn’t seem to make any sense. The reason I use it is because of the eyebrows it raises — not because I enjoy confusion or confrontation for its own sake, but because I think that existing ideas about the relationships between markets and capitalism are already confused, and that a superficial overlap in language tends to obscure the confusions that already exist. In particular, the term “capitalism” is used by almost all sides in economic debates as if it were obviously the ideal governing libertarian policy proposals, and is debated over both by nominal pro-”capitalists” and by nominal anti-”capitalists” as if it were perfectly obvious to everyone what it means.

But really the term has a lot of different shades of meaning, which are distinct from each other, and some of which are even mutually exclusive. [1] And as often as not it seems that debates about “capitalism” involve more than one of them being employed — sometimes because each person is talking about a different thing when she says “capitalism,” but they think that they are fighting about a common subject. And sometimes because one person will make use of the word “capitalism” in two or more different senses from one argumentative move to the next, without noticing the equivocation. At the expense of oversimplifying a very large and tangled literature, [2] there are at least four major definitions that have been attached to the term:

1. Free Enterprise. This is a relatively new usage (coming mainly from libertarian writing in the 1920s-1940s). “Capitalism” has been used by its defenders just to mean a free market or free enterprise system, i.e., an economic order — any economic order — that emerges from voluntary exchanges of property and labor without government intervention (or any other form of systemic coercion). This is the meaning that is almost surely most familiar to those who spend much time reading libertarian economic writing; it is offered as, more or less, a stipulative definition of the term in Friedman, Mises, et al.
2. Pro-Business Political Economy. “Capitalism” has also been used, sometimes by its opponents, and sometimes by beneficiaries of the system, to mean a corporatist or pro-business economic policy — that is, to active government support for big businesses through instruments such as government-granted monopolies, subsidies, central banking, tax-funded infrastructure, “development” grants and loans, Kelo-style for-profit eminent domain, bail-outs, etc. Thus, when a progressive like Naomi Klein describes government-hired mercenaries, paramilitary torture squads or multigovernment financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, as examples of the political economy of “disaster capitalism,” capitalism here must mean something other than markets left free of major government intervention. Rather, this is the state intervening, with a very heavy hand, to promote the interests of a particular class of economic players, or promoting a particular form of economic activity, as a matter of policy. This second meaning of capitalism is, of course, mutually exclusive with the first meaning — state-driven corporatism necessarily consists of projects funded by expropriated tax dollars, or regulations enforced from the barrel of a gun, and so to be a “capitalist” in the sense of a free marketeer means being an “anti-capitalist” in the sense of opposing the corporate state, and being “pro-capitalist” in the sense of state “growth” policy means coming out against “capitalism” in the sense of genuinely free markets.
3. The Wage-Labor System. “Capitalism” has also been used to refer to a specific form of labor market, or a distinctive pattern of conditions facing ordinary working people — one in which the predominant form of economic activity is the production of goods or the performance of services in workplaces that are owned and managed, not by the people doing the work on the line, but by an outside boss. In this third sense, you have capitalism when most workers areworking for someone else, in return for a wage, because access to most of the important factors of production is mediated through a business class, with the businessmen and not the workers holding legal titles to the business, the tools and facilities that make the shop run, and the residual profits that accrue to the business.  Workplaces are, as a result, typically organized in hierarchical fashion, with a boss exercising a great deal of discretion over employees, who are generally much more dependent on keeping the job than the boss is on keeping any one worker. (This sense is most commonly seen in Marxian writing, and in older writing from the radical Left — including a great deal of pro-market writing from Anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.)
4. Profit-Dominated Society. Finally, the term “capitalism” is very often used (outside of the debating circles of libertarian economists, this is in fact probably the modal use of the term) loosely to mean something like the commercialization of everyday life — that is, a condition in which social interactions are very largely mediated through, or reshaped by, overtly commercial motives, and most or all important social and economic institutions are run primarily on a businesslike, for-profit basis.

It’s important to note, then, that while “capitalism” in the first two senses — that of the freed market, and that of pro-business politics — are mutually exclusive, “capitalism” in the latter two senses areconceptually independent of the political oppositions involved in the first two senses of the term. In concept, a fully free labor market might develop in any number of directions while remaining a free market — you might have a market dominated by big corporations and traditional employer-employee relationships; or you might have worker co-ops, or community workers’ councils, or a diffuse network of shopkeeps and independent contractors; or you might have a pluralistic mish-mash of all these arrangements, without any one of them clearly dominating. (The most likely outcome will depend in part on pre-existing patterns of ownership, the strength and direction of people’s preferences, the direction of entrepreneurial innovation, etc. etc.) Similarly, interventionist states might intervene either against, or in favor of, “capitalism” in the latter two senses — when states adopt heavy-handed “growth” policies and prop up corporate enterprise, they are attacking the free market, but they may very well be entrenching or expanding workplace hierarchy, concentrations of economic ownership, or commercial motives and activities, at the expense of other patterns of ownership, or other forms of peaceful activity, that might be more common were it not for the intervention.

I point all this out, not because I intend to spend a lot of time on semantic bickering about the Real Meaning of the term “capitalism,” or because I think that (say) the disagreements between libertarians and progressives can all be cleared away by showing that one of them is using “capitalism” in the first sense, while the other is really using “capitalism” in the second, third or fourth. Rather, I think the distinction is worth making precisely in order to avoid semantic bickering, and thus to get clear on where the areas of substantive disagreement, and the best topics for productive argument, actually are. A lot of time to get to the real argument you first need to be willing to say, “OK, well, I see that you are complaining about ‘capitalism’ in the sense of the corporate status quo, but that’s not what I mean to defend. What I’m defending is the free market, which is actually radically different from the status quo; no doubt you disagree with that too, but for different reasons; so let’s get on with that.”

And I point it out also — to come back to the bit about “Libertarian Anticapitalism,” with which I began this piece — because it is only once we have disentangled the distinct senses of the term “capitalism” that certain kinds of positions about market economies can begin to make sense. I have a self-interested motive here — for my own position is one that typically gets blanked out when one doesn’t break down this sort of distinction among different meanings of the term. That is, roughly, the position of the mutualist and individualist Anarchists — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, Gertrude Kelly, Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre, et al. In conventional debates over capitalism, we are usually offered two major positions — the position of the pro-capitalist Right, and the position of the state socialists. But both positions, in spite of their policy-level disagreement, have a very important economic claim in common: they typically take it more or less for granted that free markets, just as such, tend to produce capitalism in our third sense and our fourth. Call this the Capitalist Causal Hypothesis:

(CCH) If you have “capitalism” in sense 1 (an economy without intense, extensive, and ongoing government intervention), then you’ll naturally tend to get “capitalism” in senses 3 and 4 (large-scale concentrations of ownership, a for-profit corporate economy, a wage-labor system, etc.).

The pro-capitalist Right likes the outcome, and the state socialist does not, so the one uses it as a reason to endorse “capitalism” and the other as a reason to reject it. (Conventional liberals typically split the difference by calling for a mix of pro-business regulation and anti-business regulation, in order to get a properly managed form of capitalism, with political forces in place to countervail against its worse tendencies.) But what of those who reject the causal claim asserted by (CCH)? For an individualist like Tucker, “capitalism” in the sense of wage-labor and commercialism has been largely upheld, and sustained by “pro-business” government intervention, not by free market processes — in particular, by the economic structure created by Tucker’s Big Four monopolies and their modern descendents, by the funnelling of resources into the military-industrial complex, by trillion-dollar bail-outs and pervasive, intense hyperregulation of the economic prospects of the poor and marginalized. Thus, the argument goes, the natural tendency of the free market is actually anti-capitalistic, in the sense of knocking out the political privileges that hold up the economic status quo, of dissipating large-scale economic inequalities, undermining rather than entrenching monopolies, cartels, and accumulated fortunes, and freeing up workers to make independent livings through a rich set of non-corporate, grassroots alternatives to the corporate-capitalist economy (e.g. co-ops, worker-owned shops, independent contracting and homesteading, mutual aid associations, etc. etc. etc.). It is only in virtue of “capitalism” in the second sense, state capitalism or business privilege, that actually-existing capitalism, in the latter two senses, flourishes and grows.

Now, whether Tucker’s position (or mine) is the right one or the wrong one is of course a matter for considerable debate, and it will depend on laying out some conceptual issues and a lot of empirical evidence that I haven’t even begun to touch on in this post. But my first interest is that the position should be made intelligible, so that we can begin to discuss what would support the claim, or cut against it. Before you can debate whether or not a claim like (CCH) is true, you first have to establish that there really are two distinct terms on either side of the conditional operator, and that someone might either assert or deny that they are connected just like that. To be able to do that, it will help a lot to make it as clear as possible, in our terminology or at least in the process of our conversations, that “a free market” is not just the same thing as businessmen being left alone to do whatever they please; that it means ownership and economic freedom for everyone, and may well encompass forms that may look nothing like conventional corporate enterprises or business-as-usual today; that it is quite possible that many critics of “capitalism” may be pointing to very real social evils, while misdiagnosing the causes; and that many of the evils most commonly ascribed to “capitalism,” and thus blamed on the free market, really are not the results of market activities, but the results of “capitalism” in quite a different sense — in the sense of government-backed commerce and politically-enforced corporate privilege.

Footnotes:

The following article was written by Kevin Carson and published on his blog Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, May 5th, 2008.

Michael Shermer. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

If you can get past the flaws in Shermer’s book (things others might prefer to think of as my fixations, hangups, and dead horses), it’s quite an enjoyable read.

But given my obsession with the ubiquity of vulgar libertarianism, comparable to Captain Ahab’s with Moby Dick, I can’t refrain from pointing out the flaws.

Before I say a lot of nasty things about Shermer’s ideological assumptions, I have to make the disclaimer up front that he comes across as thoroughly decent and likeable on a personal level. That he takes for granted certain ideological assumptions that I have long since declared war on is no reflection on him as a human being. Shermer states, as one of his fundamental guiding principles, a dictum of Spinoza’s: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” I’ll try to keep to that spirit as closely as I can in discussing my caveats about Shermer’s book.

Nevertheless, Shermer displays a considerable vulgar libertarian element in his background assumptions. His writing, over and over, tacitly equates the phenomena of existing corporate capitalism to the “free market.” He constantly uses things like Bill Gates, Wal-Mart, and other transnational corporations to illustrate the principles of the “market,” and treats them as living embodiments of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. He equates “the market” to the existing corporate economy, quoting attacks on the evils of corporate power and then “proving” they can’t be right because “that’s not how the market works.” Implicit in his rejection of The Corporation, of Chomsky and Zinn, is the assumption that the present system, the one they’re attacking, is the market.

A parallel theme is alleged popular hostility or resistance to “free market economics,” which he assumes is motivated by irrationality. A particularly atrocious example (I’m tempted to call it a howler) occurs on page 16:

Folk economics leads us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin, and mistrust the invisible hand of the market. What we do not understand we often fear, and what we fear we often loathe. (As oneNew Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”)

There you have it: invisible hand = excessive wealth = Bill Gates. Anybody who has problems with Bill Gates and excessive wealth must harbor an irrational fear and/or hatred for “the invisible hand of the market.” After all, it’s not like Gates could have gotten so rich by any other means, like the visible hand of the state’s “intellectual property” [sic] monopoly, could he? And we know all those other billionaires got rich through the operation of the “free market.” I mean, we hear it from neoliberal politicians and commentators at MSNBC every friggin’ day, so it must be true. This all reminds me of Dick Cheney in 2000 boasting, of Halliburton’s wealth, that “Government had nothing to do with it.”

The public mindset isn’t really all that irrational, if you keep in mind that their hostility is not so much to free markets, as to what has been called “free markets” by the usual gang of corporate apologists.

I’m about as close to a free market fundamentalist as you can get. But if I thought the “free market” meant what Tom Friedman and other neoliberal politicians and talking heads meant by it, I’d hate it more than anybody.

The average person sees Wal-Mart, Microsoft, downsizings, oil company profits, offshoring, and all the other unsavory phenomena of the corporate global economy defended in “free market” language, and his response is “if that’s the free market, then the free market be damned.” It’s essentially the same reaction as Huckleberry Finn’s. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas’s “property rights” in Jim. He took the slave system’s ideological self-justification at face value–and then said “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the “free market.” And his response is the same: “If this is the free market, I’ll go to hell.”

Shermer asks why people reject Adam Smith’s theory of economics, despite its being so profound and proven. The answer just might be that the rhetoric of free markets, so closely associated with Adam Smith, has been misappropriated to defend a system of corporate power far closer to what Smith condemned than to what he supported. Adam Smith, like the other early classical liberals, was a revolutionary thinker who attacked the entrenched privileges of the landed oligarchy and the mercantile capitalists. It’s almost impossible to go to a mainstream “libertarian” website these days without seeing the thought of Adam Smith misappropriated to defend the modern institution most closely resembling the landed interests and privileged monopolists of the Old Regime: the giant, state-subsidized, state-protected corporation.

As I suggested earlier, most people who display egalitarian reactions against existing inequalities and concentrations of wealth may well believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But that’s only because the rhetoric of “free markets” has been perverted, for the most part, by apologists for those concentrations of wealth which result from privilege and other forms of state intervention. What they hate, they rightly hate. They’re wrong to believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But it’s hard to blame them, when you can’t turn on the TV or read an editorial page without seeing a fundamentally statist economic system of special privilege and protection for big business and the rich described as “our free market system.”

In fairness to Shermer, he sometimes tips his hat to the existence of things like corporate welfare, but for the most part he treats it as a minor deviation from a corporate economy that is, on the whole, a pretty close approximation of the “free market.” If you eliminated the subsidies to military contractors and agribusiness, what you’d wind up with is, in all its essentials, something pretty much like the economy we actually have: a global economy dominated by a few hundred corporations.

For example, he condemns the popular, zero-sum view of foreign trade as an “abandonment of free market principles.” And he cites Nobel laureate Edward Prescott on the foolish popular belief that it’s “government’s economic responsibility to protect U.S. industry….”

But in fact, the overwhelming bulk of the transnational corporate economy is a zero-sum game.

For starters, the main purpose of the World Bank and foreign aid over the past sixty years has been to subsidize the export of capital and offshoring of production from the West, by funding the transportation and utility infrastructure necessary for capital investment overseas to be profitable. The bulk of the U.S. military budget is taken up by the Navy, whose primary purpose is to keep the sea lanes open. No less an authority than Adam Smith argued that such expenses should be borne by those actually engaged in foreign trade. The United States has systematically intervened over the past century to keep landed oligarchies in power, to thwart land reform, and generally–whether by coup or by death squad– to make the world safe for Enclosure. Between this, and the helpfulness of authoritarian regimes in keeping labor docile, supplying sweatshop industry has been supplied with a labor force eager (or rather desperate) to work on whatever terms are offered.

But if that’s for starters, it’s still barely a start. The elephant in the living room is the role of “intellectual property” [sic] in the transnational corporate economy. Despite Prescott’s exasperated lament quoted above, the central function of government in the present system of global trade is to protect transnational capital from competition. One of the most important functions of the GATT Uruguay Round’s industrial property provisions, with their long patent terms, is to lock Western TNCs into control of the current generation of production technology, and thus to prevent the emergence of native-owned competition and lock Third World countries into a permanent position of supplying sweatshop labor and raw materials. It’s also probably not a coincidence that all the profitable sectors in the corporate global economy are those whose business models are dependent either on IP (entertainment and software), direct subsidies (armaments and aviation), or both (agribusiness, biotech, electronics). “Intellectual property” serves exactly the same protectionist function, for transnational corporations in today’s global economy, that tariffs served for the old national industries.

The corporate global economy, in other words, is a statist construct to its very core, and has no more to do with “free markets” than Stalinism had to do with workers’ power. And Shermer explicitly refers to agreements like CAFTA asexamples of “free trade.” The primary practitioners of the “mercantilist zero-sum protectionism” he decries are the transnational corporations themselves. It’s no wonder the public hates “free trade,” if it hears it identified with such practices.

Fortunately, given my background as both a dissident free market libertarian and a dissident libertarian socialist, I’m pretty good at “eating what I want and spitting out the rest,” even when it’s embedded in an ideological framework I disagree with. I’ve had to do this with thinkers ranging from Marx to Mises. And once you get past my hangups, there’s a lot of useful and fascinating material in Shermer’s book, presented in a very engaging manner.

If you enjoy the work of Desmond Morris and similar evolutionary approaches to human social behavior, you should thoroughly enjoy this book. Shermer discusses the apparent irrationalities of human economic behavior, and how the same behavior would make perfect sense from the standpoint of the behaviors selected for in a small primate hunter-gatherer group.

I especially enjoyed his discussions of egalitarianism and reciprocity, and found much of it relevant to the material I posted earlier in draft Chapter Eleven: The Abolition of Privilege.

My main disagreement with Shermer on this subject is with his assumption that such predispositions are contrary to the ideally rational behavior of a utility-maximizing market actor.

He is not entirely wrong on this, of course. There are some ingrained human cognitive biases that do result in irrational behavior.

But for the most part, I believe human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism work entirely with the grain of a genuine market. The real-world phenomena that people condemn, on the basis of values of reciprocity and egalitarianism, in fact result from violations of genuine market principles.

In Chapter Eleven, I discussed why I believe a genuine market, absent the zero-sum effects of privilege, would result in a comparatively egalitarian outcome. The human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism do not operate at cross-purposes to the market, but are the behavioral basis for it. Reciprocity and equal exchange are the normal outcomes of a market operating free from interference. People are most likely to say “That’s not fair” precisely when equal exchange has been thwarted, and a zero-sum situation created in its place, by state intervention on behalf of the privileged.

A good example comes immediately after the Bill Gates howler quoted above.

In most countries, [consternation over income polarization] leads to political policy to raise the poor and lower the rich, because during our evolutionary tenure we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose) world, in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss….

Today, however, we live in a nonzero world….

Um, no. We would live in a nonzero world, if we actually had a free market. What we have, however, is a system of political capitalism in which the state has systematically intervened in the market to raise the rich and lower the poor; to subsidize the operating costs of big business; to enforce artificial property rights like patents and copyright, and absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land that ought to be open to homesteading; and otherwise to protect giant corporations from the competitive dangers of a genuine market. In such an environment, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that fortunes in the billions or hundreds of millions have been acquired at somebody’s expense. It’s entirely reasonable, when you see a turtle on a fencepost, to suspect he didn’t climb up there on his own.

I hope my Van Helsinglike fixation on the vampire of vulgar libertarianism hasn’t obscured the real value of this book. Even if I just can’t let the neoliberal ideology go, it’s really not central to the book. What is central is the evolutionary roots of human economic behavior, a subject on which Shermer provides a wealth of information. The information itself, for the most part, can stand by itself without regard to Shermer’s ideological framework. I found much of it, particularly the parts on reciprocity and egalitarianism, to be quite useful–although perhaps not for the purposes the author intended. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And if I could enjoy it, with my neurotic obsessions, surely any normal person will enjoy it that much more.

My first book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Blitzprint 2004, CreateSpace 2007; Kindle edition) has been translated into Polish through the gracious efforts of a collective of translators including Krzysztof Śledziński. You can download it for free in pdf format at their site or by clicking on the image below.

Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Polish translation

In the new Sundance film Dirty Wars, Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill bring to light the brutal and often hidden reality of America’s “war on terror.” I saw the film on Monday night at a sold out showing.

Dirty Wars follows intrepid investigative war reporter Jeremy Scahill as he exposes covert military operations that are “hidden in plain sight.” Where many liberals and progressives stopped talking about the war after Obama’s election, Scahill illuminates the horrors of these wars that have escalated in secret under Obama.

The story begins in Afghanistan as Scahill travels into rural Afghanistan to interview a family that was terrorized by a night raid. This family had no connections to the Taliban, yet US troops flew into their home during a party and murdered several people, including an Afghan police officer and multiple pregnant women. The US government attempted to cover up these murders.

In his investigation Scahill discovers that this night raid, and others like it, were conducted by the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Scahill’s investigations find JSOC conducting covert warfare not just in Afghanistan, but around the globe. and particularly in Yemen and Somalia. Yet his reports garner indifference from Congress and the mainstream media and denials from the administration.

Even if you’ve never read Scahill’s work, you’ve probably heard of JSOC — because after JSOC killed Osama bin Laden, Congress and the mainstream press stopped ignoring JSOC and started praising them.

And that’s part of why this film is so important. It reveals the horrors associated with unaccountable violence that has been glorified in our culture. For example, while only one member of Congress listened to Jeremy Scahill testify on the horrors of night raids, a litany of members of Congress have praised JSOC since the bin Laden raid.

But another reason this film is incredibly important is that it tells a compelling and moving story. It may be easy to dismiss the killing of civilians when they are simply numbers or “collateral damage.” But the victims here are not just being talked about. Rather, Scahill meets with the families of the victims. Viewers see the corpses of children, and hear family members and friends describe what the wars have done to them.

The film features Scahill not just as a writer and researcher, but as narrator and main character. Scahill stated that this was not the original plan, and that he ordinarily does not like being featured in his stories. However, I am glad that this approach was taken. The specific tragedies, war crimes, and covert operations discussed in the film could all be discussed as distinct stories that are tied together as part of a broader social and political problem. But I suspect that this might be less interesting to those who do not care much about politics or imperialism. This film ties everything together into a story of Jeremy’s quest for the truth. And that makes an already powerful movie even more compelling and accessible.

Dirty Wars is a truly incredible movie. I am still awestruck at the quality of the footage the filmmakers managed to gather in truly dangerous war zones. The soundtrack was superb, with moving music by the Kronos Quartet. But most importantly, this film tells a story we all need to hear. If you want to understand what the US government is doing across the globe, you must watch Dirty Wars.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson’s “The Free Market as Full Communism: Two Essays on Mutual Ownership & Post-Scarcity Market Anarchism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Free Market as Full Communism: Two Essays on Mutual Ownership & Post-Scarcity Market Anarchism“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

This collection includes two provocative essays by contemporary mutualist writer Kevin Carson. “Who Owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism,” explores the radical possibilities for market exchange and competition freed from capitalistic privilege and the burdens of artificial scarcity. “Capitalism Without Capitalists?” asks whether mutualistic markets will be driven to recreate the capitalist model by competitive logic, or whether peer production, decentralized ownership and unprivileged market exchange can bring about alternative incentives, and dynamics that disperse, rather than concentrating, wealth and progress.

“Just about everything we identify as problematic about corporate capitalism . . . results from the socialization of cost and risk and the privatization of profit. Why haven’t the cybernetic revolution and the vast increases in productivity from technological progress resulted in fifteen-hour work weeks, or many necessities of life becoming too cheap to meter? The answer is that economic progress is enclosed as a source of rent and profit. . . .

“As surprising as it might seem, there’s a strong parallel between this free market vision of abundance and the Marxist vision of full communism. Commons-based peer production is the core around which the post-capitalist economy will eventually crystallize. . . .”

“Bill also underestimates the different competitive dynamic that would result from a radically decentralized market. We are currently at one extreme of the pole: a centralized economy with production for large, anonymous commodity markets. A mutualist free market would be much closer to the other pole: a decentralized market of production for local use. . . .”

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-capitalism, the individualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com.

The following article was written by Mike Reid.

Right now in Canada, thousands of indigenous people and their supporters are rising in protest against a long train of government abuses. The latest insult is a new federal law that many see as being designed to help crony capitalists rob the indigenous people of their remaining land.

The protest movement is called Idle No More, and it reflects longstanding aboriginal traditions of limiting centralized authority, and relying instead on voluntaryism and polycentrism as organizing principles.

Thousands of protestors are holding drum circles and round dances in the streets, a few have blockaded rail lines and highways, and one is now in her seventh week of fasting and holding political meetings.[1]

Establishment outlets like the National Post have frequently decried the protestors’ unwillingness to come up with a unified leadership who can control all this rabble and issue some unified demands to the federal government.

But the mainstream expectation that the protestors ought to coalesce into a single body with one authority making decisions for all totally misses the point. The protestors’ key demand is the right to make one’s own decisions.

Idle No More and the Refusal to Centralize

Aboriginal people are the most regulated, the most impoverished, and the most frequently imprisoned group of humans in Canada. You can see all the economic and social horrors of welfare totalitarianism playing out in aboriginal communities across the country, complete with oil companies gaming the system for fun and profit.

A great deal of the urgency and passion of Idle No More comes from these ongoing economic and social crises, and a great deal of the desultory mass-media chatter about it concerns proposals for various schemes of redistribution. But the refusal of protestors to unite around a single banner, tactic, or leader points to a much more fundamental challenge and a much more radical goal.

There are at least three important sources of Idle No More’s refusal to submit to any single vision.

The first is an important background fact that many non-aboriginal observers simply fail to comprehend: the sheer diversity of indigenous communities in Canada. There are 50-some languages [2], more than 600 legally defined reserve communities, and three quasi-racial government categories of indigenous persons (“Indians,” “Inuit,” and “Metis”), each subjected to a slightly different flavor of genocidal oppression and paternalistic welfare. Furthermore, many thousands of aboriginal persons live outside the government definitions.

It’s impossible to describe this enormous variety of cultures, regulations, and aspirations in any quick way, let alone create some simple, unified list of demands or grievances shared by all peoples.

Idle No More is not an orchestrated demonstration by a formal organization somehow representing everyone at once. It is a spontaneous uprising of many different peoples with many different visions and tactics, who nonetheless sense a shared opportunity to challenge the colonial statist quo.

Second is the influential tradition of nonviolent, distributed leadership in many indigenous communities.

Most radically, many hunter-gatherer people like the Dene and the Ojibwa simply had no tradition of coercive authority before Europeans imposed it on them. There were, of course, respected leaders and elders, but they didn’t have the power to force anyone to obey them.

Every day, each individual was free to listen to whatever person seemed to know most about that day’s challenges. And if you thought you had a better idea, nobody could stop you from setting out on your own and trying it.

These traditions of nonviolent authority extended even to child-raising. Children in such cultures learned discipline from example, hard work, and philosophical study, not from the back of a father’s hand. Of course, that all changed with the rise of compulsory Indian schools.

Now, precontact North America was not a libertarian utopia. The native peoples occasionally killed, robbed, and enslaved each other just as humans always have.

But the solutions they found to the universal challenge of how to organize society were usually a lot closer to the ideas of Western voluntaryists than they were to those of Western statists. Indeed, north of the militaristic Aztec empire, there were no states in the Americas before Columbus first planted his cross and declared the land for Spain. [3]

A few months after Idle No More began, the federal government made a great show of meeting with democratically elected native chiefs in order to find out what “the aboriginals” want. But the government fails to understand that the modern institution of the elected chief with coercive powers over his people is merely a European fantasy written into colonial law.

Indeed, my old Cree teacher once explained to me that, in her dialect, the word for an important leader is “okimaw,” and the word for a chief is “okimakan,” with that “kan” suffix meaning roughly “a thing made in imitation of.”

Politicians, in that sense, are imitations of leaders.

Now, sometimes modern chiefs have the support of their constituents, and sometimes they don’t. But as aboriginal activists call on their various traditions for inspiration, they don’t see much reason to obey any singular, permanent leadership issuing demands and negotiating with the feds on their behalf. If the chiefs go in a direction the activists don’t want to go in, the activists will feel perfectly within their rights to go on without them.

Third, regardless of what form of organization they prefer for themselves, most people in aboriginal communities believe they retain the right of self-determination vis-à-vis the colonial state. That is, they don’t think the central government has the right to decide where or if their kids go to school, how the laws will be enforced, and what people can do with their own land.

The treaties that past aboriginal leaders signed with the British crown are important to any legal discussion of their present relationship with the Canadian state. But most aboriginal persons regard these treaties as agreements between sovereign nations — not as declarations of total surrender and eternal submission to the wisdom of the colonial state.

In that sense, modern aboriginal organizations might properly wield powers analogous to the rights of nullification and secession that Tom Woods advocates for states within the USA. The smaller-level organizations aren’t perfect, but they may provide some refuge from federal tyranny.

Self-Determination and Federal Law

Among its many provisions, the new federal law, Bill C-45, makes it slightly easier for reserve politicians to lease reservation land to outside companies. [4] As laws governing indigenous people in Canada go, it’s not an especially evil one. Maybe it will make it easier for the crony capitalists to rob them, or maybe it will make it easier for indigenous people to develop real free markets for themselves. The possible economic outcomes are not the fundamental point.

The point, from the perspective of many protestors, is that the federal government wants to impose this law on all 600+ reserves “for their own good.” The point is that indigenous people, in Canada and the world at large, are sick and tired of having things done to them or done for them.

Among all the other demands in Idle No More — for the repeal of Bill C-45, for the enactment of some other law, for the return of stolen territory, or for the paying of reparations — you can hear this steady undertone: They are seeking a path back to autonomy and self-determination. They are fostering a resurgence of the principle that no authority has the right to force all people to conform to one vision of justice, economy, or culture.

Notes:

[1] There is of course no central information storehouse for this decentralized movement. You can find regular news and commentary on the leftist site Rabble.ca, but much of the discussion and organization by protestors themselves is happening on national and local Idle No More Facebook pages, and on Twitter, hashtag #IdleNoMore. Indeed, the movement name comes from the hashtag used by the original founders.

[2] Depending on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect.

[3] There may have been some states in the southern United States in the long millennia before European colonization, but those civilizations had passed away well before 1492.

[4] Bill C-45 makes it so that instead of needing a majority of all band members to lease the land, you just need a majority of all members who show up to vote.

Mike Reid teaches anthropology in Winnipeg. His libertarian anthropological perspective on current events has appeared in the Mises Daily, the Freeman, Whiskey & Gunpowder, Heartland’s FIRE Policy News, and Ontario History. He also manages, writes, edits, and creates ebooks for Invisible Order. Check out his website, SocialBulldozer.com. Follow him on Twitter. Send him mail.

The most important thing in trying to establish Anarchy is to rid the minds of my fellows of the belief in the necessity of government. The next thing in point of importance is to get them to do something to help on the propaganda; to cease advocating and upholding law; to stop patronizing legal institutions when by association the necessity for so doing can be removed; to openly defy, or to ignore such laws as interfere more directly with their personal liberty.

— Henry Addis, “How to Get Anarchy”, THE FIREBRAND (Feb. 23, 1896)

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kerry Thornley, Mary Ruwart, Karl Hess Jr.’s “Market Anarchy, Ecological Order: Three Libertarian Views on Environmental Protection” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kerry Thornley, Mary Ruwart, Karl Hess Jr.’s “Market Anarchy, Ecological Order: Three Libertarian Views on Environmental Protection“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

This booklet brings together three essays from the left-libertarian tradition on emerging ecological orders and environmental protection in a freed-market society. The first, “A Libertarian Technology of Ecology” was originally published in the Summer 1969 issue of The Innovator: Applications, Experiments, and Developments in Liberty, a radical libertarian newsletter that ran from 1964-1969. The article was signed by “Ho Chi Zen,” a pen name commonly used by Kerry Thornley (1938-1998), a market anarchist author, counterculture publisher, and Nonprophet of Discordianism. The second, “Environmental Destruction” is excerpted and abridged from “Destroying the Environment,” Chapter 8 of Mary Ruwart’s book, Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression (1993). The third, “Deeper Ecology and Deeper Markets” was originally published as “Closing the Green Gap of Market Liberalism,” in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (December 1994), by Karl Hess, Jr. (Karl Hess IV), a left-market anarchist, a noted libertarian ecologist and champion of appropriate technology (and son of the ground-breaking left-libertarian radical and political theorist Karl Hess, Sr.).

“Conservation is often considered a statist bugaboo but, in fact, the problem of ecological upset is a real one — made all the more pressing by the fact that statist solutions of increased legal restriction do not work. Those who do the most polluting and destroying also have the most political influence in a society where government and business are interdependent partners. What is needed, instead of more laws cranked out by conditioned reflex, is the same kind of rational, scientific and cybernetic epistemology that is now used in DISCOVERING ecological problems, but not in solving them! Doubtlessly, such spiraling cycles of thought, experimentation, and data collection on the subject would transcend the legalistic, regulatory solutions in short order. . . .” —Kerry Thornley

“While the market of global process and exchange is essential to the well­being of society, it is not sufficient for most people’s happiness. The market that matters most to people lies closest to home, the marketplace where people gather to exchange in voluntary fashion everything from cash to good ideas to friendship to mutual aid and cooperation. It is the deep market of community, the cooperative flip side to the market of competition and impersonal economic forces. Therein lies the challenge to both greens and market liberals—how to save the marketplace from both the state and the impersonal market. Free marketeers must look beyond market gimmicks to solve festering environmental problems in a manner still con­sistent with liberty. The new environmental commons of ecolog­ical processes and unbounded communities of plants and ani­mals demand solutions that encompass and yet go beyond ord­inary markets and property rights. The environmental commons is a challenge to community—or, in the absence of community, a challenge that will be eagerly taken up by a centralized state in search of an equivalent to militarism. . . .” —Karl Hess, Jr.

In Les Misérables, an obsessed French police officer, Javert, relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean, a man who represents no danger to society but whose minor infraction brought down the wrath of the brutal government, including 19 years of hard labor and lifetime parole.

America, too, has its Javerts. Zealous and ruthless federal prosecutors have the power to torment people for trivial or imagined offenses, threatening them with decades of barbaric confinement. The consequences can be tragic even when case is not seen through to completion. Take the example of Aaron Swartz.

Swartz, an acclaimed programming prodigy, faced 13 counts under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and, if convicted, could have faced 35 years in federal prison and a million-dollar fine. Earlier this month the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, and assistants Stephen P. Heymann and Scott L. Garland refused a plea bargain with no jail time.

On January 11 Swartz hanged himself. He was 26.

“He was killed by the government,” the Chicago Sun-Times quoted Robert Swartz, father of Aaron, as saying after the funeral. (Aaron publicly spoke of being depressed.) A family statement added, “The U.S. Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.”

What did this young man do to prompt this relentless pursuit? Using the MIT computer network, he downloaded too many published scholarly articles (over four million) from JSTOR, a nonprofit database of academic journals, which charges nonacademics for access. Among his methods, Swartz planted a laptop in a closet at MIT without permission.

For this he was threatened with decades of imprisonment and the life-long stigma of being a felon. Perpetrators of financially significant crimes with victims are not treated so harshly. Why did this happen?

“He was being made into a highly visible lesson,” civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate told Declan McCullagh of CNET.com. “He was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious — politically-ambitious — U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights.”

Even though Swartz was charged under an anti-hacking statute, he was not accused of hacking anyone’s computer. With unauthorized software, he simply used his own computer to download more published articles than allowed. According to Wired’s David Kravets, “The government … has interpreted the anti-hacking provisions to include activities such as violating a website’s terms of service or a company’s computer usage policy.… The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in limiting reach of the CFAA, said that violations of employee contract agreements and websites’ terms of service were better left to civil lawsuits.”

Unfortunately, that ruling applies only in the ninth circuit. “The Obama administration has declined to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court,” Kravets writes, where it could be affirmed and applied nationwide.

Had that happened, there might have been no case against Swartz, because JSTOR did not want to sue him, even though he crashed its servers, and he agreed not to distribute the material. (MIT had not declined to prosecute.) Subsequently, JSTOR opened its database to the nonacademic public.

So why make an example of Swartz? He was a highly public figure in the movement to safeguard the free flow of information on the Internet. Among his accomplishments was his help in defeating bills in Congress that would have given the executive branch broad authority to shut down websites accused of containing copyrighted material. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) had the backing of powerful industries, such as Hollywood, but a grassroots effort led by Swartz and others forced withdrawal of the bills — a big setback for those who use “intellectual-property” laws to impede the sharing of information.

Swartz previously ran afoul of the government when he provided free access to records in a public federal court database. (The government requires payment by the page.) But no charges were filed.

Swartz was a passionate champion of technology’s power to liberate and democratize. He vowed to fight anything which threatened that potential. This offended powerful vested interests.

A few days after Swartz took his own life, Javert — I mean Ortiz — dropped the charges.

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s Libertarian Self-Marginalization, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

We hope to improve our presentation and production value, but in the meantime: Release Early, Release Often!

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Anthony Gregory & Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “What Is It That Government Has Built?” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Anthony Gregory & Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “What Is It That Government Has Built?”

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

This booklet brings together two recent essays on the corporate state and the production of state capitalism. If corporate liberals insist that we recognize how much government has built the business environment that surrounds us, then surely the next question to ask is – What is this corporate economy that the capitalist state has built?

“There is a deeper truth in Obama’s comments. Many businesses do not merely benefit from state intervention, but would sink without it. Big business’s dependence on government has only increased as government has grown. Yet liberals like Obama and Warren rarely confront the corporate interests that most rely on Washington’s redistribution of wealth to the powerful and socialization of risk. They love taking credit for subsidizing American businesses, but never address (or admit any responsibility for) the full reality of the corporate state. Perhaps they don’t want the inequality they decry traced back to them. . .” – Anthony Gregory

“Libertarians don’t do their cause any good at all when they try to defend big business on free enterprise grounds. There is no free enterprise at that level. No business is going to become big, in this economy, without approval from the gatekeepers. Free enterprise is a system which never existed, except for brief periods of time during historical social unrest. Once an elite is re­established, it’s back to the game. . . . It’s a crooked game and it’s the functional equivalent of Yaldabaoth’s ‘ersatz reality’ in certain neo­gnostic formulations. They replace our real life, our real myths, our real economic and social relations, with a pre­manufactured, pre­designed substitute that keeps us trapped in the spectacle of an honest world, but it’s all just flash and hot air.” – Anna O. Morgenstern

Anthony Gregory, a Research Editor at the Independent Institute and a blogger at The Huffington Post, is a libertarian activist, writer, and musician. He claims to be an anarcho­capitalist, but market anarchists get along with him anyway.

Anna O. Morgenstern, a Contributing Writer at the Center for a Stateless Society, has been an anarchist of one stripe or another for almost 30 years. Her intellectual interests include economic history, social psychology and voluntary organization theory.