Equality is an ideal upheld by a number of ideologies, but nowadays it is seldom associated with libertarianism or classical liberalism. Indeed, both libertarians and their critics typically think of equality as an ideal in tension with the ideal of liberty as libertarians understand it.

But what is meant by “equality”? Some thinkers draw a distinction between formal equality and substantive equality, where formal equality means something like mere equality before the law—the same laws applying equally to everyone—while substantive equality requires abolishing, or at least greatly reducing, differences in wealth, opportunity, or influence.

The latter sort of equality—we might also call it socioeconomic equality—is obviously incompatible with libertarianism, at least if such equality is sought through coercive legislation. [1] Legislation aiming at socioeconomic equality is rejected by libertarians as an unwarranted and socialistic interference with the property rights of individuals.

Equality before the law, by contrast, is generally embraced by libertarians. But by itself there is nothing especially libertarian about it. Anatole France once wryly remarked that the law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, a line often invoked by socioeconomic egalitarians scornful of merely formal equality. But libertarians have equal reason to find such formal equality inadequate. As economist Murray Rothbard noted: “[T]he justice ofequality of treatment depends first of all on the justice of the treatment itself. Suppose, for example, that Jones, with his retinue, proposes to enslave a group of people. Are we to maintain that justice requires that each be enslaved equally? And suppose that someone has the good fortune to escape. Are we to condemn him for evading the equality of justice meted out to his fellows?” [2]

If neither substantive socioeconomic equality nor formal equality before the law captures what libertarians think matters in politics, it’s tempting to conclude that equality is not a central libertarian value at all.

Yet earlier thinkers in the libertarian tradition placed far more emphasis on equality. Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence famously wrote that “all men are created equal”; in the original draft he went still further, writing that ‘from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable,” thereby making equality the basis and foundation of our rights. [3] What sort of equality is Jefferson talking about?

It is generally recognized that John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government stands foremost among those “elementary books of public right” on which Jefferson relied in writing the Declaration; and Jefferson’s notion o f equality is indeed derived directly from Locke’s. Locke defines a “state . . . of equality” as one “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection . . . .” [4]

In short, by the equality of men Locke and Jefferson meant not that all men are or ought to be equal in material advantages, but that all men (today it would be all persons, regardless of gender) are equal in authority. To subject an unconsenting person to one’s own will is to treat that person as one’s subordinate—illegitimately so, if we are all naturally equal. Hence any interference with another person’s liberty violates the Lockean conception of equality: “[B]eing all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. . . . And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.” [5]

No wonder, then, that Jefferson should find it natural to maintain, a century later, that human equality is the foundation of our rights against one another.

Locke in turn was simply developing the ideas o f an earlier group of English radicals with the decidedly egalitarian name Levellers. These Levellers, whose leaders included John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton, emerged during the English Civil War of the 1640s as the first mass libertarian movement. “Levellers” was not actually their preferred name for themselves; indeed, they penned tracts with titles like A Manifestation from [Those] Commonly (Though Unjustly) Styled Levellers and The Levellers (Falsely Socalled) Vindicated. Their discomfort with the name stemmed from the fear that they might be interpreted as demanding the forcible abolition of inequalities in wealth, a goal they expressly repudiated: “We profess therefore that we never had it in our thoughts to level men’s estates, it being the utmost of our aim that the commonwealth be reduced to such a pass that every man may with as much security as may be enjoy his propriety [i.e., his own property].” [6]

Yet the name “Leveller” suited them nonetheless, for while they did not seek socioeconomic equality, they were passionately devoted to equality in authority. Overton, for example, maintained that “by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom,” so that “bellows-menders, broommen, cobblers, tinkers, or chimney-sweepers” are “all equally freeborn” with “the greatest peers in the land.” John Locke Hence, Overton inferred, ” No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s,” and every man is “a king, priest and prophet in his own natural circuit and compass, whereof no second may partake but by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural right and freedom it is.” [7]

This form of equality goes well beyond mere equality before the law. If the rulers of a state require that everyone worship Shiva, then in some sense they are treating all the citizens equally (assuming they also worship Shiva themselves); but they are nevertheless not respecting equality in authority, because they are arrogating to themselves, and denying to others, the authority to decide whether Shiva will be worshipped. Rather than merely requiring the equal application of the laws, equality in the libertarian sense places restrictions on the content of those laws as well, ruling out forcible subordination of any kind. This point of view is entirely consistent with the legitimate defensive use of force; such force restores equality in authority rather than violating it. But any initiatory use of force involves treating other people as though they were “made for one another’s uses,” and so is forbidden as an affront to human equality. Those who see only two forms that equality can take—substantive socioeconomic equality and formal equality before the law—have neglected the possibility of libertarian equality, which is substantive but not socioeconomic.

Libertarian Equality

What are the political implications of this third kind of equality? The upshot of libertarian equality, equality in authority, is that government can possess no rights that its subjects lack—unless they freely surrender such rights by “deputation, commission, and free consent.” Since I have no right over anyone else’s person or property, I cannot delegate to government a right over anyone else’s person or property. As nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat eloquently stated:

If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force—for the same reason—cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. [8]

While libertarians disagree with one another as to how much, if any, of one’s natural liberty it is proper or needful to surrender to government, all libertarians agree in seeking to minimize the inequalities in authority existing between the average person on the one hand and the functionaries and privileged beneficiaries of the state on the other.

Neither socioeconomic equality nor equality before the law measures up to the radicalism of libertarian equality, because neither socioeconomic equality nor equality before the law goes so far as to call into question the existing power structure. Both forms of equality call on the rulers to ensure that equality (of the favored form) prevails among the ruled, while assuming all along an inequality in authority between rulers and ruled. (The fact that the ruled are eligible for elective office does not erase this inequality, since those who make it into the ranks of the rulers must necessarily be a small minority of the populace.) As philosopher Antony Flew writes, under a system of governmental regulation “what the various ruling elites determine to be fitting . . . may or may not turn out to be equality between all those who are so dependent. But as between those who give and those who receive the commands . . . there can of course be no equality at all.” [9]

Libertarian equality, by contrast, involves not merely equality before those who administer the law, but equality with them. Government must be restrained within the Thomas Jefferson moral bounds applicable to private citizens. If I may not take your property without your consent, neither may the state.

Hence it is libertarianism, not statist socialism, that deserves the title radical egalitarianism. Liberty is the truest form of equality. [10]

Notes: 

[1] It’s worth remembering that pursuing socioeconomic equality through peaceful and voluntary means is entirely compatible with libertarianism. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Roderick T. Long and Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” www.charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarianfeminism.
[2] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles; with Power and Market: Government and the Economy, scholars’ edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004), p. 1219, http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chapl6d.asp.
[3] Thomas Jefferson, Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence (emphasis added), http://classicliberal.tripod.com/jefferson/origdecind.html.
[4] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government II. 4, www.lonang.com/exlibris/locke/loc-202.htm.
[5] Locke, ibid., II. 6.
[6] A Manifestation from Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne, Mr. William Walwyn, Mr. Thomas Prince, and Mr. Richard Overton (Now Prisoners in the Tower of London), and Others, Commonly (Though Unjustly) Styled Levellers (1649),www.constitution.org/lev/eng_lev_ll.htm.
[7] This passage is from what is perhaps the most delightfully titled political treatise ever written:

Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, Shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and All Other Usurpers and Tyrants Whatsoever; Wlierein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms and Properties of Mankind are Discovered and Undeniably Maintained; the Late Oppressions and Encroachments of the Lords over the Commons Legally (By the Fundamental Laws and Statutes of This Realm, As Also By a Memorable Extract Out of the Records of the Tower of London) Condemned; the Late Presbyterian Ordinance (Invented and Contrived by the Diviners, and By the Motion of Mr. Bacon and Mr. Tate Read in the House of Commons) Examined, Refuted, and Exploded, As Most Inhumane, Tyrannical and Barbarous, by Richard Overton, Prerogative Archer to the Arbitrary House of Lords, Their Prisoner in Newgate, for the Just and Legal Properties, Rights and Freedoms of the Commons of England (1646), www.constitution.org/lev/eng_lev_05.htm.

For further discussion of Overton see Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, “Self-Ownership and Consent: The Contractarian Liberalism of Richard Overton,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall 2000, pp. 43—96, www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_1 /15_l_2.pdf.
[8] Frederic Bastiat, The Law, trans. Dean Russell (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1998 [1850]),www. econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss2a. html.
[9] Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 12.
[10] For a fuller discussion of libertarianism’s egalitarian dimension, see Roderick T. Long, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal,” Mises Daily Article, October 16, 2001, http://mises.org/story/804.

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

Nunca es posible entender del todo los problemas en los que se encuentra una persona, o la influencia que esos problemas puedan tener en la decisión de alguien que se quita la vida, pero no es descabellado pensar que la sentencia de 35 años de prisión y la multa de un millón de dólares que gravitaba sobre la cabeza de Aaron Swartz hayan sido un factor significativo en su elección.

Tal como se lo planteaba John Kerry a un comité del senado estadounidense (al que él después sería electo) en 1971, “¿Cómo se le pide a un hombre que sea el último en morir en nombre de un error?”.

Esa fue una de las primeras preguntas que inundaron mi mente la semana pasada cuando escuché que Swartz se había ahorcado en su departamento de Brooklyn.

Con solo 26 años de edad Swartz ya había vivido una vida llena de logros, desde ser el coautor del estándar RSS (la herramienta primaria para sindicar contenido web) a los 14 años hasta ser el fundador de Infogami, que luego se fusionó con la popular red social Reddit, y ser co-fundador de “Demand Progress”, una organización promotora la libertad de Internet.

La sentencia de prisión y la multa emanaron de su intento por cumplir con la misión declarada de una organización sin fines de lucro de “ayudar a la comunidad académica a tomar ventaja de la rápida evolución de las tecnologías de información y redes”: Descargó cuatro millones de artículos académicos de JSTOR a través de una cuenta del MIT con la intención de hacerlas universalmente disponibles vía tecnología P2P.

Para esto fue acosado hasta la muerte por la fiscal estadounidense Carmen Ortiz y los fiscales adjuntos Stephen P. Heymann y Scott L. Garland, aunque el mismo JSTOR declinó litigar civilmente y desde entonces ha dado acceso público a millones de esos artículos.

Sinceramente espero que Swartz pase a la historia como la última víctima de la guerra sobre la “propiedad intelectual” — una guerra de 300 años que para todos los propósitos prácticos terminó hace años con el triunfo de las fuerzas de la libertad y la total derrota de aquellos cuyas fortunas dependen del poder del estado para extraer rentas del uso que la gente hace de sus propios cuerpos y mentes.

Desde el estatuto de la reina Ana de Inglaterra de 1710, los rentistas han estado dando peleas cada vez más espúreas para mantener y beneficiarse de la ficción de la “propiedad intelectual”. Incluso en una época en la que las imprentas eran escasas y los medios electrónicos inexistentes, la exigibilidad era imposible. A lo más que podían aspirar era a desanimar el copiado de las obras “dando el ejemplo” con el castigo de algunos de los infractores prominentes.

El amanecer de la era de Internet fue el Appomatox de las guerras de “propiedad intelectual”. Los equipos para copiar data y los canales para distribuirla ya son asequibles de forma barata y globalizada. En las “naciones avanzadas” representan una inversión prácticamente trivial, y en el “Tercer Mundo” representan una inversión factible.

Las persecuciones y los enjuiciamientos de infractores de “propiedad intelectual” como Jammie Thomas e innovadores de la distribución como Aaron Swarz ni siquiera llegan al nivel de escaramuzas de retaguardia o medidas desesperadas de último recurso en esta guerra. Se asemejan más bien al asesinato de Abraham Lincoln por parte de John Wilkes Booth después del rendimiento de Lee, o la amenaza de ataques “werewolf” en la Alemania ocupada al final de la segunda guerra mundial. No podrán alterar el resultado. Son arrebatos rabiosos y asesinos que surgen como consecuencia de negarse a la realidad.

Se. Acabó. El. Copyright. Y a las patentes les queda poco. La única esperanza de las viejas compañías de medios es renunciar a sus fallidos monopolios y redes de extorsión creados por el estado, y aprender de una vez por todas como generar beneficios a través del intercambio voluntario.

Artículo original publicado por Thomas L. Knapp el 13 de enero de 2013.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

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 Ethics of Labor Struggle” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “The Ethics of Labor Struggle“.

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

This pamphlet by mutualist writer Kevin Carson lays out a defense of wildcat unionism, without government privilege, without government control, and without top-heavy bureaucracy. Government labor regulations, supposedly crafted to help workers unionize, have in fact domesticated the labor movement and brought it under government control, while establishment unionism has forgotten the most powerful strategies that unions had at their disposal before government patronage; networked guerrilla unionizing tactics, minority unionism, solidarity strikes, and direct action on the shopfloor.

Networked resistance against the Empire goes far beyond guerrilla warfare in the military realm. There is a wide range of ruling elite lit­er­ature of the dangers of “netwar’ to the exist­ing sys­tem of power, along with an equal volume of lit­er­ature by the Em­pire’s enemies celebrating such net­work­ed resist­ance. Loose, ad hoc coalitions of affinity groups, organ­iz­ing through the Internet, could throw to­geth­er large dem­on­strations at short notice, and “swarm’ the gov­ern­ment and mainstream media far beyond their cap­ac­ity to absorb. The post-Seattle move­ment con­firm­ed such elite fears. One quest­ion that’s been less looked into, though, is the extent to which the ideas of net­worked resistance and asymmetric warfare are appli­c­able to labor relations. . . .

Whatever value the Wagner regime had for us in the past, it has outlived. If labor is to fight a successful count­er­offensive, it has to stop playing by the bosses’ rules. . . .

Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory To Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors

When I was given the title “Ethical Assumptions of Economics,” my first thought was to say, “economics has no ethical assumptions.” But then I thought this might not be the best way to earn my keep here. So I’m going to talk about some senses in which economics might have implications for ethics.

There are these two terms that we often hear as characterizing Austrian economics. One is “value-freedom,” or Wertfreiheit. Wertfreiheit does not mean free in a valuable way; it just means a description that doesn’t involve evaluation. To be value-free is simply to describe things, to tell how things are, without advocating any particular point of view.

And closely related is this notion of “value-subjectivism,” the notion that Austrian economics in some sense recognizes only subjective values, only the values to the participants whose actions are being described or explained, and doesn’t evaluate their actions.

Well, if Austrian economics is value-free and value-subjectivist, then it might seem as though it couldn’t have much in the way of implications for ethics. But there are several respects in which ethics and economics nevertheless interestingly interact.

First, it’s worth pointing out that economics is often presented in ways that are perhaps not completely value-free. For example, words like “welfare” and “property” and so forth tend to have value connotations. Now you can try to interpret them value-neutrally, but ordinarily when we say that such-and-such promotes social welfare, it sounds like we’re in favor of it — since we are part of society, and we do care about our own welfare. And when we say that something is someone’s property, that often implies that it’s their legitimate property, and so calling something someone’s property might imply that they ought to have it, not just that they happen to possess it.

You might think this can be used to bias the discussion, but medicine’s a value-free science too; strictly speaking, in purely descriptive terms, medicine is indifferent between health and sickness — it just wants to describe what causes what — but since as a matter of fact practitioners of medicine are practicing it in order to promote health, naturally they’re going to describe it in such a way, where it’s understood that all the participants in the discussion agree that they’re trying to promote health rather than promoting sickness.

Objective Value

There’s perhaps a deeper worry that’s raised by the Greek philosopher Socrates in a couple of Socratic dialogues that are attributed to Plato (but it’s not clear whether they’re really by Plato or not), the Hipparchus and the Eryxias, where he explores the meanings of certain economic concepts like “wealth” and “profit,” and gives something like an argument that these can’t really be value-neutral terms.

Socrates asks the person he’s talking with, “how would you define profit?” And the person answers, “getting more in exchange for less.” You put in a smaller amount, and you get back a greater return than you put in. That’s profit. (Now this doesn’t really distinguish between profit and interest, risk premium, and all that, but never mind.)

Socrates says — translating his example into our money — “if I gave you one $10 bill, and you gave me three $1 bills back, I wouldn’t think I’d made a profit, even though I’d gotten more in exchange for less — I’d given only one bill and I got three back.” So what matters is the value of the bills, and the fact that a $10 bill is more valuable than a $1 bill. You can’t just describe the exchange in terms of empirical mass quantities; you have to describe it in terms of value. You don’t really profit unless you’re getting something of greater value.

And of course Socrates wants to spin this into, ultimately, a moral argument that you don’t really benefit from what you get unless what you get really is of greater real value. So if I get a lot of money by cheating you, then since cheating you is a great harm to my soul and is not outweighed by the benefit of the money I get, I haven’t really profited.

It’s clear enough what someone like Mises would say to this. He’d say: well, it’s certainly true that you can’t define profit in terms of just getting more physical things in exchange for fewer physical things; but you don’t have to interpret it in terms of objective value — you can interpret it in terms of subjective value. You get a profit, not if you get things that are genuinely objectively better in return, but if you get things you value more instead of what you value less.

Part of the reason Socrates and Mises disagree here is that Socrates thinks that valuing something more involves judging that it’s better, and these judgments can be true or false. And what you really want is not to get what you think is better; what you really want is to get whatever is better. And that whole way of thinking is something that Mises opposes, so they’re not really going to see eye to eye here.

Value Subjectivism

Is Austrian economics committed to rejecting any kind of objective morality?

We can distinguish between two kinds of value-subjectivism. You can have explanatory value-subjectivism, which simply means that in explaining someone’s actions, you appeal to their evaluations, not yours — just as in explaining someone’s actions you appeal to their beliefs and not yours. If you see someone walking out on a bridge, and you know the bridge is unsafe and is likely to collapse, but they don’t know that, then in interpreting why they’re doing what they’re doing you shouldn’t attribute to them your belief that the bridge is unsafe if they don’t have that belief. If you try to explain their action by appealing to your belief that the bridge is unsafe, your explanation isn’t going to be any good.

So likewise, if you’re explaining their actions you also have to appeal to their values. Suppose that you hate vanilla ice cream, and you see someone trying to get some. What they’re doing would make no sense if you assumed that they share your value. Instead, your evaluation of their taste in ice cream doesn’t make any difference to explaining — whether they’re right or wrong to like vanilla ice cream, nevertheless the fact that they like it is what explains their going after it.

So explanatory value-subjectivism doesn’t say anything one way or the other about whether there is such a thing as objective value; it just says that if you’re going to explain people’s actions, you explain them in terms of their desires, not yours.

Normative value-subjectivism, on the other hand, means that there are no objective values, that there is nothing to value over and above just whatever any person happens to want. There’s no right or wrong way to want things; you can’t be right or wrong about your ultimate desires.

So these are two different things, and you can see that at least it’s not obvious that explanatory value-subjectivism entails normative value-subjectivism.

Now Mises seems to have thought it did, and I think his reason for thinking this is not just that he somehow confused two kinds of subjectivism; I think there’s a deeper reason he thought this. The fact that Mises thinks that these two go together, and that both explanatory value-subjectivism and normative value-subjectivism are true, helps to explain why a lot of people interpret Austrian economics as being against any kind of objective value.

Rothbard, on the other hand, accepted explanatory value-subjectivism. He thought that in explaining people’s actions, or in trying to understand and describe economic behavior, you appeal to their beliefs and desires, not yours — but he thought normative value-subjectivism was false. He thought that there was, on the basis of philosophical arguments — the kinds of arguments he gives for example in his book The Ethics of Liberty, where he tries to develop a libertarian theory of rights — he thought you could give arguments to establish that certain values were objectively valid. But he thought those arguments didn’t make any difference to how you interpreted people’s economic behavior.

If economics is value-free in the sense that it doesn’t presuppose any particular values, as Mises and Rothbard both seem to agree about economics, you might wonder how economics can serve as a basis for advice. Economists are often called upon to give advice; how can they do that? Well, there are several different possibilities.

Mises’s view is that it’s impossible to give advice about ultimate goals — except in terms of just saying, “well, I like this goal, you should pursue that,” but you can’t really give any reasons, Mises thinks, for ultimate goals. But given a certain ultimate goal, you can give reasons for adopting certain means to it. And economics is useful for that. Economics can tell us what sorts of actions tend to have what sorts of consequences. So if you happen to want to have, or want to avoid, certain consequences, then the economist can tell you what things to do that are likely to get you the consequences you want and to avoid the consequences you don’t want.

Although you might be in the field of medicine working on germ warfare, in which case you’re interested in causing sickness, most doctors, most of the time, are interested in curing disease, we hope, and so if you go to a doctor for advice, the doctor can just assume that what you want is what will promote health.

But of course it’s not part of the medical expertise to tell you whether health is a good thing. Nowhere in medical school can you learn any reason for thinking health is a good thing. That’s not a medical question. Mises would say it’s not an answerable question at all; others might say, well yes, maybe it is an answerable question, but at any rate it’s not a medical question — maybe it’s a philosophical question or a theological question or something like that.

Socrates used to say that the doctor can tell you what’s likely to make you live or die, but the doctor can’t tell you whether you’d be better off alive or dead. That goes outside of the doctor’s area of expertise. The philosopher tells you whether your life is worth living or not: “the unexamined life is not worth living,” so if you’re not examining your life, you’re better off dead. That’s what Dr. Socrates would say.

Mises thinks economics can tell us how to pursue the ends we happen to have, and given that most people prefer prosperity to poverty and cooperation to chaos, Mises thought that there’s some general, all-purpose advice that economists can give.

Rothbard went further. In the last chapter of Power and Market, Rothbard says that although economics per se can’t give us positive ethical advice — it can’t tell us what goals to aim at — it can criticize certain goals as being incoherent. And although I say that Rothbard here is going beyond Mises, in a sense Rothbard would think of himself as continuing what Mises was doing, even if Mises didn’t call it this. So for example Mises argues that socialist calculation is impossible: you cannot rationally allocate resources in a socialist economy. Well, suppose that was your goal — to rationally allocate resources in a socialist economy. It certainly seems relevant to find out that the goal is impossible. If the goal is impossible, then it seems like you don’t have any good reason to pursue it.

This is a way of criticizing ends: not criticizing ends on the grounds that they’re bad, that it would be a bad thing to achieve this goal, but rather to argue that the goal can’t be achieved at all. So in the last chapter of Power and Market, Rothbard runs through what he calls various positions of “anti-market ethics,” and tries to refute various positions on the grounds that they posit goals that are somehow economically impossible, or logically incoherent, or in one way or another can be shown not to be possible. But he doesn’t think that economics can per se give us positive goals to aim at, or show us what is really worthwhile; he thinks you have to do philosophy for that. That’s why he only does this criticism of ethical theories in Power and Market, and you have to go to The Ethics of Liberty to get his positive ethical arguments.

Positive Ethics

The question is: can economics or praxeology give us anything more than that? Can it give us any implications for positive ethical theorising? What more can it tell us about ethics? I’m going to explore some various possibilities. If you’re hoping that I’m going to derive an ethical system from the axioms of praxeology for you today, well — we don’t have time for that! So I’m just going to give various suggestions about various issues.

First of all there’s this big dispute between Mises on the one hand and Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School, on the other. Menger had a category of what he called “imaginary goods.” He said that in order for something to be a good, it has to meet a certain number of criteria, one of which is that it has to be suitable for achieving certain goals or satisfying certain human needs. But, he says, there are some things that don’t really satisfy any human need, while you think they do — like fake cures, things that are supposed to cure you but they don’t really work; he seems for some reason to have included cosmetics in this category; you might wonder about that. But anyway, he thinks various things that don’t really meet any human need are not real goods, they’re imaginary goods, because although they may be suitable means to certain goals, those goals are not in fact genuine human needs.

Mises thought this was a horrible mistake. Mises said the economist has no business pontificating about whether these are genuine needs or not; if you want to explain human behavior, what we think of the person’s desires is irrelevant. If you want to understand the market for horoscopes, or if you want to understand the market for something genuinely valid, it doesn’t make any difference. As long as people think horoscopes are valuable, then they’ll be willing to pay for them, and if they don’t think they’re valuable, then they won’t, regardless of whether they really are valuable or not. Mises thought this category was irrelevant for economics.

But he didn’t just think it was irrelevant for economics, he thought it was irrelevant, period. It wasn’t just that classifying something as an imaginary good was a job for the philosopher rather than for the economist; Mises thought that it wasn’t a job for anybody — because he thought the only way we can make mistakes is about means. We can’t evaluate ends as right or wrong. Our ends are just whatever we want. If you want to justify what you’re doing, you have to appeal to some further end you have. Why am I walking over here? In order to get to the chair. Why do I want to get to the chair? In order to sit down. Why do I want to sit down? Well, at some point you just have to end with “because I want to, and that’s that,” Mises thought.

Mises thought the ultimate goal is not capable of being rationally assessed. The only things you can criticize are people’s means. The only mistakes you can make are about the means to your ends, not about the ends themselves.

However, there’s a distinction which Mises doesn’t consider which might complicate this. It’s the distinction between instrumental means and constitutive means. And here’s a way of thinking about this. Suppose that I want to play the Moonlight Sonata; and so I save money to buy a piano, and to buy sheet music, and to take piano lessons and so forth, so that I’ll be able to play the Moonlight Sonata. These are all means to the end of playing the Moonlight Sonata; if you ask me why am I saving this money, why am I buying a piano, etc., I would say these are all means to my ultimate goal, which is to play the Moonlight Sonata.

But now suppose you come upon me in the middle of playing the Moonlight Sonata, and I’m hitting a particular note. And you ask me: “Why are you hitting that particular note? Is it just that you find that note valuable in and of itself?” And I would answer: “No, I’m playing that note because I want to play the Moonlight Sonata, and I can’t play the Moonlight Sonata without playing that note at that point.” Well, in a sense, then, playing that note is a means to playing the Moonlight Sonata; but it’s not a means in the other way. It’s not a means that’s external to the end; it’s a means that’s part of the end.

When a means is external to or merely instrumental to an end, then it would make sense to say, “I wish I could have the end without having to go through all these means.” I wish I could be at the top of the mountain without having to climb all this way up, or I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having to save all this money to buy a piano. But it doesn’t make any sense to say, “I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having to play all these notes” — because the Moonlight Sonata just is those notes in that order.

So there are cases where a means can be a constitutive part of the end rather than being an external means to it. And a lot of things that Mises considers ultimate ends you might think are really means, but they’re constitutive means rather than instrumental means. So then the question is: well, can we deliberate about constitutive means? How do we determine whether something is a constitutive means to an end? It seems it’s not a matter of cause and effect any more; it’s more a matter of logical or conceptual analysis.

Why does Mises think that if you’re an explanatory value-subjectivist, you have to be a normative value-subjectivist? I think that his reason comes in his two-step argument for why he thinks explanatory value-subjectivism implies utilitarianism. (Both these steps, I think, are denied by Rothbard.) So first he thinks that explanatory value-subjectivism implies normative value-subjectivism: if you can only explain things in terms of people’s subjective values, then you have to give up the idea of there being any objective standard of value. I’ll say in a minute why I think he thinks that. Second, he thinks that that position in turn implies utilitarianism.

And you might think that’s very odd; because you might think that if someone says economics implies utilitarianism, it sounds like they think that economics implies a positive ethical theory — because we usually think of utilitarianism as a particular ethical theory, a theory that says that certain things are objectively good. The standard versions of utilitarianism, like John Stuart Mill’s version, assert that a certain goal — human welfare, happiness, pleasure, satisfaction — is intrinsically valuable and worth pursuing, objectively so. And then our job is to pursue it.

Clearly Mises can’t mean that. Since Mises thinks that there are no objective values, when Mises embraces utilitarianism he can’t be embracing the view that human welfare is an objective value. What Mises means by “utilitarianism” is a little bit different from the kind of utilitarianism that people like John Stuart Mill advocate. By “utilitarianism” Mises means something like simply giving people advice about how to achieve the goals they already have. So you’re not necessarily endorsing their goals, but utilitarianism says that really the only real role for any kind of evaluation is simply to talk about means to ends, because you can’t evaluate the ends.

And I think we can see both why he thinks explanatory value-subjectivism implies normative value-subjectivism, and why he thinks that in turn implies utilitarianism of his sort, in this quote from Theory and History:

All nonutilitarian systems of ethics look upon the moral law as something outside the nexus of means and ends. The moral code has no reference to human well-being and happiness, to expediency, and to the mundane striving after ends. It is heteronomous, i.e., enjoined upon man by an agency that does not depend on human ideas and does not bother about human concerns.

So that’s the position that Mises thinks he’s attacking. He’s attacking the view that the proper moral code is completely independent of what actually makes people happy or what they actually happen to want.

And in a sort of slap at Kant, he calls this sort of thing “heteronomous.” Now the term “heteronomous,” which is supposed to be the opposite of “autonomous” — “autonomous” means somehow governed by a law you give to yourself, and “heteronomous” means governed by a law imposed on you from something else — Kant had used the term “heteronomous” to mean following your inclinations, which are external to and distinct from your rational will, and therefore you’re acting heteronomously when you obey your inclinations. Now Mises is sort of turning Kant’s terminology upside-down here.

But Mises thinks it’s presumptuous to tell people that they ought to be pursuing something completely unrelated to anything they actually happen to want, desire, or have any motivation or personal reason to pursue. Now I think the reason he thinks that is that if you think that all action, as praxeology teaches, is a matter of pursuing ends, and the ends you pursue are your own — you can’t pursue someone else’s end unless it also happens to be your own end — then it just doesn’t even make sense to demand of people that they pursue some end that they have no motivation for, no interest in, no personal reason to pursue.

So you might say that he’s relying on something like the “ought implies can” principle — that it doesn’t make sense to demand that you morally ought to do something unless you can do it. If I said, “you are morally obligated all to fly up to the ceiling right now,” that wouldn’t make any sense, to say that you ought to do it or that you should feel guilty for not doing it, because you don’t have the choice, you don’t have any control over whether you do that or not. I think that Mises thinks that because our actions can only be actions aiming at ends that we have — we can’t perform an action without aiming at some end, and the end has to be an end we’ve got — it just doesn’t make any sense to demand of us that we act in accordance with some objective code of ethics.

However, I think that what he’s really arguing for here is better understood as a kind of ethical internalism rather than genuine normative value-subjectivism. Ethical internalism is the view that you can’t have any moral duties that you don’t have any motivation to pursue. Now that’s a broad family of theories, because according to some theories the moral duty just gives you a motivation, whereas for other theories, no, you’ve already got your motivations, and the moral duty can’t get its foot in the door unless you’ve already got one. Those are very different kinds of internalism. But still the internalists all agree that there are no moral duties without some corresponding motivation on your part. And I think that Mises is really arguing forthat. But it’s important to see that that’s not the same thing as normative value-subjectivism, because it might be that, given your motive, and given some appropriate story, the moral duty really is an objective one.

And likewise, the reason he thinks that this has to be purely utilitarian, that there can’t be any actions that are right or wrong in themselves, but only as part of promoting some further goal, is that he thinks all action has to have a means-end structure. But again, you can have a means that is constitutive rather than instrumental. If I’m playing this particular note because I want to play the Moonlight Sonata, then that note is a means to playing the entire sonata, but it’s not an external one. Likewise, people who say a certain action is morally right in and of itself might mean that it isn’t an external or instrumental means to some further goal, but is just part of, say, the good life.

The Goal of Happiness

Now something like Mises’s view was recently defended by Leland Yeager in a book called Ethics As Social Science, where he accepts Mises’s view that ultimate goals cannot be rationally assessed. He says: therefore, ultimate goals are rationally arbitrary, but the means to those goals aren’t, and therefore the advantage of utilitarianism of Mises’s sort, which simply says, “promote whatever satisfies human desires,” is that it’s the best theory because it minimises the amount of ethical arbitrariness. All that’s arbitrary is just this ultimate goal, happiness; but although it’s arbitrary, it’s not terribly controversial: most people are pro-happiness. Whereas if you add more intrinsic values in addition to happiness, things like moral duties and so forth, then you’re increasing the number of ultimate ends. And since ultimate ends are rationally arbitrary, your theory is getting more arbitrary the more of those you add.

I’m not so sure about that; if you really think the whole thing rests on an ultimate thing that’s arbitrary, I’m not sure that whether it’s one or many makes that much difference. But at any rate, the assumption that you can’t rationally assess ends is something that I’m not convinced of. There’s something called reflective equilibration, which is the idea that you weigh various beliefs and values and judgments against each other and see whether they conflict with each other. If they conflict with each other then you revise them to make them not conflict. And so if you’ve got some ultimate end, you can’t assess it as a means to some further end, perhaps, but you can assess it by whether it fits in consistently with everything else. Now that’s a kind of assessment. You might think it’s a kind of wimpy assessment, but it’s an assessment.

We started off with Socrates, and Socrates has to come in again. There’s this tradition I call the eudaimonic tradition, from the Greek word for happiness or well-being, eudaimonia. And this is a tradition that runs through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and it runs on through the medieval philosophers and the Scholastics, Aquinas and so forth; in fact it’s the dominant ethical tradition of the first 2,000 years of Western philosophy. It’s not until after the end of the Middle Ages that it begins to be whittled away by new theories. And this is the view according to which there is an ultimate good, which usually gets called “happiness” — but that can be somewhat misleading, because it’s not a pleasant feeling of satisfaction, although it may involve that — but it’s a state of your life objectively going well, your life being an objective success, something like your being successful at living a good human life: that’s what eudaimonia is. That’s the ultimate good.

And morality is not just an instrumental means to that good; it’s actually part of it. Morality stands to the ultimate human good as playing one note stands to playing the whole sonata — or actually, probably as playing two-thirds of the sonata stands to the whole sonata (or if you’re a Stoic, as playing the entire sonata stands to playing the entire sonata).

And there are some interesting connections between this tradition and Austrian economics, simply because Austrian economics in a way indirectly grows out of this tradition. The earliest forerunners of Austrian economics are the late Scholastics, who developed a subjective theory of value in the explanatory sense of “subjective,” and they developed many of the early theories and early parts of what would later go on, running through the French School, finally to become the Austrian School. And if you look at Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought, there’s a long section on how cool the Scholastics were. So from the fact that the Scholastics are forerunners of Austrian economics, and the Scholastics are coming at the tail end of this tradition that runs back to Socrates and Aristotle and so forth, I think it’s not that surprising that there are some commonalities.

For this tradition means-end analysis is central: we evaluate things in terms of their being means to ends. But each person has an ultimate end. And this ultimate end isn’t just feeling satisfied or something like that; it’s an objective state of human flourishing. And we can talk about wrong ends as well as wrong means, because those wrong ends are really misidentified constitutive means. So in other words, if you wrongly value something as an end, what’s really going on is that you are taking it to be a constitutive part of your ultimate good when it isn’t.

Now according to this tradition, why do they say that we have just one ultimate end? Why not say that we have lots, that there are lots of things we want: ice cream, fame, not being killed? We’ve got all these different things, but why suppose that they’re all constituents of some big super-end? Well, I think part of the reason they think this is: what happens when you make trade-offs? Suppose there are two ultimate ends you have: ice cream and fame. Those are two ultimate ends you have, and they come in degrees. (That’s why I didn’t use not being killed, because that’s less a matter of degree.) So you want more ice cream, and you want more fame. And sometimes those go together, like winning an ice-cream-eating contest. But still there are lots of cases where these goals might conflict, and so you have to do trade-offs, and decide between them.

If you’re deciding between them, that’s an action. Actions have to have a means-end structure, right? So if you’re trying to decide how to trade off between ice cream and fame, then doing that must be a means to some end. Well, what is the end? It can’t be the end of maximizing the ice cream, because you haven’t decided whether that’s what you’re going to do. It can’t be the end of maximizing fame, because you haven’t decided that. It can’t be the end of getting the maximization of both, because it’s a trade-off — that’s impossible. Instead, you’re trying to maximize something of which these two are parts, some general, overall satisfaction — that’s what you’re trying to maximize. You might wonder whether “maximize” is even the right word, but anyway you’re trying to promote some good that includes both of these intrinsic good; these are intrinsic parts of your overall good. And it’s that sort of thing that leads the eudaimonists to think that whenever you’re acting, you’re always promoting some ultimate good of yours, some ultimate end or aim.

Why not just say that the ultimate aim you’re pursuing is some psychological state, like pleasure? We know how John Stuart Mill would have analyses this; he’d say, well, you like ice cream because ice cream isn’t really your final end, ice cream promotes pleasure. And you like fame because it also gives you pleasure. And so it’s really pleasure that’s the ultimate goal, and ice cream and fame are simply means to that. And then your trade-off is just to determine which one will give you the most pleasure.

Or as Mises puts it, Mises talks about getting rid of uneasiness. And sometimes he seems to mean this in a purely formal sense: simply getting something that satisfies you more instead of something that satisfies you less, getting something you prefer over something you “dis-prefer,” to use a Stoic term. (Actually to misuse it, in this context.) But sometimes Mises talks as though there’s this feeling you get of uneasiness: which of the various things I can choose will make this feeling go away? Getting rid of that horrible feeling of uneasiness is the goal. Sometimes Mises sounds like that, sometimes he doesn’t.

At any rate, you might say: why not take that view? Why not say that our ultimate goal is some psychological feeling like pleasure, or decreasing felt uneasiness, or something like that, and that everything else we do is a means to that?

Well, here’s the problem with that view. Suppose I buy life insurance. And you ask me, why am I doing that? And I say: so that my loved ones will do well after my death. So it looks like I’m treating buying life insurance as a means to my loved ones’ doing well after my death. Now this is either an ultimate goal of mine, or it’s a means to some further goal. Well, whichever one it is, this is not a feeling. And it’s also not the cause of a feeling. Unless you’re assuming that you’re looking down from heaven after you’re dead — or up, if things go worse — but anyway you’re hanging around after death and seeing your loved ones doing well, and you’re getting a charge out of that. But it seems like you don’t have to assume that you’re actually going to experience your loved ones’ doing well in order to buy life insurance. People who don’t believe in an afterlife, or people who believe in an afterlife where they’re off somewhere not being involved with human concerns, still buy life insurance. So it seems that this is something we do that is not a means to pleasure.

Now obviously someone could say: well, wait a second, you get pleasure out of the thought that your loved ones will do well after your death, right? Yeah, that’s true. So here’s something, the belief that my loved ones will do well. And that causes pleasure. And maybe that’s part of my reason for buying life insurance. But is it really plausible to say it’s really that belief rather than their actually doing well? Because one isn’t a means to the other. Your loved ones’ doing well in the future can’t be a cause of your belief that they’ll do well now, unless you believe in backward causation. So even if you believe that the belief is part of your goal, there’s still the goal of their actually doing well too — unless you think you don’t really have that goal at all, you really just have the belief as your goal.

Suppose I offer you a magic pill that costs half the cost of the life insurance. And this magic pill will make you believe that your loved ones will do well after you’re dead. And so you can either have the life insurance for $100, or this pill for $50. If all you care about is the belief that your loved ones will do well, then you’d take the pill over the life insurance. Well, from the fact that presumably at least a lot of people would buy the life insurance rather than the pill, that suggests that they care about their loved ones’ actually doing well.

And likewise Aristotle thinks that this is naturally the way we think. He raises the question: can people’s welfare be affected after they’re dead? And he didn’t believe in an afterlife, at least not a personal afterlife — he thought there was some aspect of you that lived on, but it wasn’t your personal identity — so he wasn’t talking about an afterlife. He thought that if there’s something you cared about, a loved one or some project, and right after you die the project either succeeded or failed, he thought that would make some difference to how we evaluate the success of your whole life.

So our ultimate good, according to this tradition, is not pleasure — although pleasure’s part of it, pleasure’s one of the things we care about, relief from felt uneasiness is great, but it’s not the only thing that we actually pursue.

Aristotle would say that your life’s being an objective success includes the well-being of your friends. It’s not that the well-being of your friends causes you some jollies — it does, sure, but that’s not all there is to it. In fact, he would say that the welfare of your friends causes you pleasure because it’s part of your good, not vice versa — that pleasure is a byproduct of getting what you think is good rather than the opposite.

Rights and Utility

Okay, let me finish up with a largely unrelated question — though it’s not completely unrelated, because these all interconnect. The question is about the relation between rights and utility.

The question is whether rights derive from utility — in other words, is the reason that we have rights the fact that rights are a strategy that’s most likely to promote either our personal self-interest or social welfare (you can take either an egoistic or a universalistic version of utilitarianism) — is that the ultimate foundation of rights? Or are our rights completely independent of utility? There are those who think that our rights are completely based on utility, that the only grounding for rights is that they somehow are strategies for promoting human welfare, either one’s own or everybody’s. And in some sense Mises seems to think something like that. On the other hand, you might think rights are completely independent of utility, that rights just are what they are, regardless of their results. Maybe Walter Block thinks that, I’m not sure. Rothbard is often said to have thought that, but if you read The Ethics of Liberty it’s not so clear; there is some sort of eudaimonic thing going on in the background there, with the Aristotelian stuff in the early chapters.

I want to end by giving some quick reasons why I think that it’s a mistake to think either that rights depend wholly on utility or that rights are wholly independent of utility.

Here’s why I think rights can’t depend wholly on utility: because whatever we choose, we choose either as an ultimate end or as a means — in economic terms, either as a producer’s good or a consumer’s good. Either you choose it as some ultimate thing you want for its own sake, or you choose it as a means to producing some further thing. So if any sort of utilitarianism is true, then morality is a producer’s good, not a consumer’s good. And it’s solely a producer’s good; I mean, everyone agrees that it’s partly a producer’s good. Everyone agrees that one of the things about morality that’s good is that it has good results. But if you’re a utilitarian, you have to think that morality is not a constitutive means to the good, it’s simply a purely instrumental means.

Why is that problematic? Well, nearly all sophisticated utilitarians — and this definitely includes Mises — think that it’s not a good strategy to promote human welfare to constantly be deciding everything on a case-by-case basis. Most sophisticated utilitarians are some kind of rule-utilitarians, or indirect utilitarians. They think that you have to commit yourself to some general set of principles or values. You can’t just decide everything that comes up on a case-by-case basis. The best way to achieve long-term results of the kind you want is to commit yourself to acting in a principled fashion.

Here’s an example that John Hospers, a former Libertarian Party candidate for President, gives in one of his books. He says: suppose you’re an umpire in a game, or a referee, and you’re making decisions, making calls — “he’s safe,” “he’s out,” — and you suddenly begin to reflect philosophically while you’re standing out there, and you think, “What’s the purpose? What’s my purpose here as a referee? Well, my purpose is to facilitate the game going well. What’s the purpose of the game?” And suppose that you conclude that the purpose of the game is to give pleasure to the spectators. I don’t know whether that’s the right story about the purpose of the game, but suppose that’s what you conclude. Then you might conclude: “Well, then, when I give my calls and decide who’s safe and who’s out, I should make whatever call will be most pleasing to the spectators. And so I won’t pay any attention to the actual rules of the game; I’ll just consider: is it a home game or an away game? How happy are the people in the stands going to be with my ruling?”

Now this might maximize spectator pleasure in the short run, but soon it’ll become obvious that winning or losing in this game no longer depends at all on the skill and abilities of the players. The players can just do any darn thing, and you’ll automatically rule in favor of team A if there are more people in the stands favoring team A. Once it turns out that you’re ruling in this manner, all the fun’s going to go out of the game for the spectators. If you’re constantly ruling with an attempt to please the spectators, that’s going to end up in the long run making the spectators very unhappy. You’re much more likely to please the spectators in the long run if you just stick to the rules of the game.

Likewise, most utilitarians think that you’re more likely to promote human welfare in the long run if you stick to definite rules. And libertarian utilitarians think these definite rules include rules of property rights and non-aggression and so forth, that sticking to those in the long run causes more happiness, because people can count on having their rights respected, they’re not constantly worried that suddenly their rights are going to be overridden for social utility, and so forth. So they’re going to be better off.

So what most utilitarians say is that you should behave as if you valued these rules for their own sake, even though you really value them just for the sake of utility. But my worry is: what does it mean to say that you should value something as if it were valuable for its own sake? I mean, either you value it for its own sake or you don’t. If you value it for its own sake, then you’ll choose it if it competes with some other value; if you don’t value it for its own sake, then you’ll give it up if you find some other way of promoting the same goal. If your only reason for respecting rights is to promote social utility, then you’d be irrational not to give up rights in any particular case when you could promote social utility otherwise. So my worry is that this rule-utilitarianism or indirect consequentialism or whatever you want to call it is praxeologically unstable.

However, I also think there are good praxeological reasons not to think that rights are completely independent of utility. And that’s because given precisely the view I discussed earlier, according to which whenever you’re doing trade-offs between different things, where you’ve got different ends, you have to regard them as different parts of an overarching end. Well, unless rights are the only thing you care about, the only value you have — and I’ve sometimes told Walter that that’s his view (although it isn’t really, but it’s fun to say that) — unless rights are the only values you have, then you have to say: here are a bunch of values, there’s the content of justice or rights, but there are also these other values, and they all have to fit together. And if all your values have to fit together, then it doesn’t really make sense to think that you can sort of separate one off and completely decide it without paying attention to any of the rest of them. I think each part of your value system has to have its content at least responsive to the other parts.

And this is what the Greeks called “unity of virtue.” Now people often say that the unity of virtue just means that if you have one virtue, you have to have them all; but I think the real core of the view is that the content of any one virtue is partly determined by, or responsive to, the content of the other virtues. Your account of what justice requires can’t be completely independent of your account of what courage requires, or your account of what generosity requires, or your account of any other virtue.

Listen to the archived media version of this speech in Mises Media.

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s Authority is the Enemy of Rationality, 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!

In a recent column (“Aaaron Swartz and Intellectual Property’s Bitter Enders“), C4SS Media Director Thomas Knapp recalls John Kerry’s question about the Vietnam War: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Like America’s war to prop up the regime of Japanese collaborationist generals and Mekong delta landlords in Saigon, the war for artificial scarcity in ideas was doomed from the beginning. A war to stop an entire population from doing what it’s dead set on doing is doomed to fail — even when you refer to the “strategic hamlets” as “paywalls” or “walled gardens.”

As Tom writes, the “Intellectual Property War” is

“a 300-year war that, for all practical purposes, ended years ago in triumph for the forces of freedom and a total rout of those who rely, for their fortunes, on the power of the state to extract rent on people’s use of their own minds and bodies.”

That’s exactly right. The war is already over. As Tom argues elsewhere, the proprietary content industries and their lobbyists are like Japanese soldiers entrenched in the jungles of Indonesia twenty years after Hiroshima, still waiting for reinforcements. The Leviathan of artificial scarcity, the monstrous system of economic exploitation based on extracting rents from the use of information, is already dead. Michael Eisner, Bill Gates, Bono, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, the RIAA and MPAA, are just maggots squirming in the rotting carcass.

NYU’s Danah Boyd (“Processing the loss of Aaron Swartz,” January 13) argues that the Justice Department and MIT persecution of Aaron Swartz was driven entirely by the desire to make an example of him: “the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were pwned.”

But this was utterly futile. It’s the academic paywall model itself that is p0wned. The “lesson” of the Maginot Line was simply: “Don’t attack billions of tons of steel-reinforced concrete, machine guns and heavy howitzers head-on.” And General von Manstein learned that lesson quite effectively, routing around the whole mess in the Ardennes offensive of 1940.

The “lesson” of the Swartz prosecution, likewise, is “don’t download four million files from JSTOR in order to make a big statement.” But in the meantime, I imagine grad students with JSTOR memberships quietly download more PDFs than that for friends every single year.

I’m a good example of this. As an independent scholar, I’m not going to pay for a JSTOR membership. And I’m sure not going to buy articles behind a paywall for $20 or more a shot. Prohibitions on downloading and copying academic articles are no different in kind from feudal rules against owning a private hand mill in order to avoid the lord’s fee for milling one’s corn. I’ve got plenty of friends in academia with JSTOR privileges who are willing to do me a favor, especially if I chip in a couple of bucks for their time and trouble.

As Cory Doctorow once wrote, the computer is a machine for copying bits at zero marginal cost, and a business model that depends on stopping people from copying bits is doomed to failure. So the people who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death did so, not even in the realistic hope of victory, but out of the same vindictive impulse that drives a defeated invader to inflict one more indignity on the violated country on its way out. Aaron Swartz was not the last man to die for a “mistake,” but — let us hope — the last atrocity inflicted by a criminal aggressor.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Sobre la Profunda Insensatez de la Muerte de Aaron Swartz.
• Portuguese, Da Completa Falta de Sentido da Morte de Aaron Swartz.

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 Joseph R. Stromberg‘s “Land to the People Who Till It!” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Joseph R. Stromberg‘s “Land to the People Who Till It!”

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

Market Anarchist Joseph R. Stromberg takes on the Land Monopoly, and examines how political expropriation, the tax economy, and political constraints on workers’ access to small-scale land ownership have combined to create an economy of dependence, employment and top-down capitalism.

“Where resources are ‘open,’ few will work for big enter­prises, and the latter will (if they can) institute some form of slavery. One never finds free land, free peasants, and non-working owners together. Why? Because where pol­it­ic­al leverage allows, aspir­ing lords and rent-seekers will eliminate the free land, the free peasants, or both. Enter­prisers in colonies have always want­ed regul­ar supplies of cheap labor for their projects. Aided by col­on­ial administrators with the same assumptions, they gradually over­came native economic in­dep­endence. Land was the key.  No matter how hard natives work­ed on their holdings, colonialists decried their ‘idleness’ — and their unciv­il­iz­ed fail­ure to work for wages. Colonial bureaucrats and em­ploy­ers saw a definite connection between small-scale land­own­er­ship and independence, and resolved to cut that independence short….

“I doubt we are necessarily better off merely because of em­ploy­ment. We need to know more, including why particular sets of choices exist in the first place. Back in the ’60s, Selective Serv­ice used to ‘channel’ us into the ‘right’ occupations by threaten­ing to draft us. What if proletarianization is not the ideal form of hum­an life? What if a complex division of labor is merely useful or con­ven­ient, but not a moral imper­at­ive? What if most of us are hirelings, well paid or otherwise, and then we learn what that status amounts to? Unfreedom arises both from direct, forcible coercion and from institutional arrangements that make people dependent. Freedom requires that we not be menaced by latent unknown powers. Freedom in this sense is liberty — a shared civic or public good. Like many real public goods it is not provided by the state, indeed the state may be its chief enemy….”

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

De Amerikaanse website Daily Kos publiceerde onlangs opnieuw een populaire column met als titel “75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America” door iemand die schrijft onder het pseudoniem ‘TheNewDeal00’.

Het gaat hier niet om slechts “75 voorbeelden van socialisme”, nee, het zou hier gaan om “verbeteringen”. Als je de lijst afgaat kom je begrippen tegen zoals “Leger/Defensie”, “Oorlog”, “Het Pentagon”, “Homeland Security”, enzovoorts. Allemaal instituties die betrokken zijn bij het vermoorden en gevangen nemen van mensen in binnen- en buitenland. Aan de positieve draai die aan elk voorbeeld is gegeven, is te merken dat we hier te maken hebben met een hoogst onbuigzame sociaaldemocraat die wordt geplaagd door de karakteristiek van een stuk plexiglas: Ga je eraan buigen, dan breekt het. Een democraat die alle overheidsfuncties als “progressief” beschouwt.

Dit soort sociaaldemocraat is helaas geen uniek exemplaar. Het gaat hier om een heel bepaald soort democraat wiens visie op vooruitgang bestaat uit regulering: alle regulering is positief, want deze is – per definitie – bedoeld om het bedrijfsleven onder controle te houden. Alles waarin de staat voorziet wordt gezien als socialisme. Dit was vooral de visie van Arthur Schlesinger Jr., die de staat en het bedrijfsleven beschouwde als twee tegenovergestelde krachten. Hij identificeerde het Amerikaans Liberalisme – lees: progressivisme, sociaaldemocratie – als een idealistische beweging die de kracht van de overheid gebruikt om de excessen van het bedrijfsleven te bedwingen.

Maar functies die eigendom van de staat zijn, door belastingheffing worden gefinancierd en onder controle staan van de overheid, zijn niet per se ‘socialistisch’. In feite is immer groeiende overheidsbemoeienis met de economie juist een belangrijke karakteristieke eigenschap van het monopoliekapitalisme. De meeste overheidsfuncties steunen juist het bedrijfsleven, in plaats van deze af te remmen. Als we de lijst van TheNewDeal00 bekijken, zien we dat de meeste van de overheidsfuncties op de een of andere manier de structurele voorwaarden voor het staatskapitalisme behouden.

Het mag duidelijk zijn dat begrippen als “Defensie” en “Oorlog” gebruikt worden om kapitalisme aan de rest van de wereld op te dringen – het garandeert multinationale bedrijven toegang tot de felbegeerde grondstoffen van andere landen en zij fungeren als spreekwoordelijke stok achter de deur van de Wereldbank, IMF, WTO, GATT en allerhande akkoorden aangaande ‘intellectueel eigendom’. De reden dat de VS jarenlang dictators in Latijns Amerika, de Filipijnen, Iran, Zuid Vietnam, Indonesië en Congo heeft gesteund was om de wereld veilig te stellen voor de zakenwereld middels dwang.

De samenwerking – of, zo u wilt, samenzwering – tussen de industrie en militaire machten speelt nog altijd een vitale rol voor het bedrijfsleven onder het huidig kapitalisme. Defensie kan naar believen technologie opkopen met gemeenschapsgeld wanneer de commerciële vraag niet voldoende is om de industrie te behouden. De belastingbetaler betaalt toch wel!

Al was het maar omdat er zoveel sociaaldemocratische naïviteit mee is verbonden, blijft mijn favoriete instelling toch wel die van het snelwegnetwerk: “gecreëerd voor eenieders gebruik”. En, leuk om te weten, een Republikeinse president maakte dit belastinggefinancierde project mogelijk. Maar dat waren andere tijden, voordat de Republikeinse Partij hondsdol werd en daarvan nooit meer is genezen.

Dit Interstate Highway systeem werd aangelegd onder supervisie van de Minister van Defensie (!) – en voormalig CEO van General Motors – Charles Wilson. Charles Wilson is beroemd om zijn uitspraak “What’s good for America, is good for GM”. Het belangrijkste effect van de interstates was om de kosten van distributie te verlagen, hetgeen zorgde voor een kunstmatige groei van marktoppervlaktes voor bedrijven. Hierdoor kregen de grotere bedrijven ook de mogelijkheid om lokale winkels over te nemen. Dan zijn er ook nog de regionale tolvrije wegen, de top prioriteit van Amerikaanse regionale overheden. Al die wegen zijn eigendom van onroerend goed ontwikkelaars. Deze gesubsidieerde wegennetwerken zijn verantwoordelijk voor het veroorzaken van de provinciale monocultuur, de excessieve groei van steden en de auto-cultuur.

Land- en tuinbouw subsidies? Alleen de meest naïeve progressieveling denkt dat dit geld gaat naar boeren die geen deel uitmaken van multinationale bedrijven als Monsanto, Cargill en Archer Daniels Midland.

Openbare scholen en gevangenissen? De eerste overheidsscholen werden in de 19^e eeuw gebruikt om toekomstige fabrieksarbeiders te leren op tijd te komen, en in een rij te staan. Te eten en te urineren na het geluid van een bel en om bevelen te aanvaarden van autoritaire figuren achter bureaus. De primaire functie van school is om kinderen te veranderen in volgzame arbeidersbronnen, net slim genoeg om hun werk te doen, maar niet slim genoeg om hun bazen te kunnen vervangen, zulks vanuit de filosofie dat de arbeider liever niet al teveel zelfstandig kan of wil denken.

Wanneer scholen mislukken en geen volgzame werknemers kunnen produceren, dan neemt het rechtssysteem het over om sociale controle te handhaven. Dankzij het krachtig optreden tegen drugs, ook wel “The War On Drugs” genoemd, wordt de bevolkingsgroep met het meest potentieel om zich te verzetten – afro-Amerikanen uit de binnensteden – onder sterk toezicht gehouden (ongeveer een derde deel van de afro-Amerikaanse mannelijke bevolking is verstrengeld in een onderdeel van het Amerikaans rechtssysteem). De VS heeft een grotere gevangenisbevolking dan China, waarvan het overgrote deel producten fabriceert voor het bedrijfsleven.

Politie en Homeland Security? Wie waren het ook alweer die traangas, pepperspray en rubberen kogels afvuurden op Occupy activisten?

Naïeve sociaaldemocraten als TheNewDael00 bezorgen zichzelf een slechte naam door dit soort dingen te schrijven. Het toont maar weer eens aan dat sociaaldemocratie NIETS te maken heeft met het authentieke Links.

Authentieke Linksen hebben een heel andere kijk op dit soort zaken. Marx noemde de staat een Uivoerend Comité van de Heersende Klasse. Engels schreef dat in de meest geavanceerde staat van het kapitalisme de kapitalisten de overheid gebruiken om de economie te sturen wanneer zij dat niet kunnen met commerciële middelen. De nationalisatie van de spoorwegen, telegrafen en mijnbouw onder het idee van sociaaldemocratie was volgens Engels een functie van de kapitalistische staat. Evenals die van de verzorgingsstaat.

De Nieuw-Links historicus Gabriel Kolko beweert dat het handhaven van gereguleerde kartels concurrentie beperken, en dat het beschermen van monopolistische markten tegen concurrentie de primaire functie is van de regelgevende overheid. Neomarxist James O’Connor schreef dat de overheid zo langzamerhand de bedrijfskosten heeft gesocialiseerd – of, zoals Noam Chomsky het stelt: het risico is gesocialiseerd en de winsten zijn geprivatiseerd.

Markt anarchisten, en vooral linkse markt anarchisten zoals mijn vrienden bij The Centre for a Stateless Society en ikzelf, begrijpen hoe de overheid in elkaar zit. Het is geen bescherming tegen commerciële krachten, maar een instrument ter bevordering van commerciële krachten. De centrale functie van de staat is om concurrentie te beperken, het creëren van kunstmatig eigendom en het biedt de economisch heersende klasse de mogelijkheid tot rent-seeking. Onze economie, in zijn formele structuur, is een samenspanning van ‘big business’ en ‘big’ overheid. Liberalen die de overheid socialistisch vinden, en sociaaldemocraten die de kapitalistische staat verwarren met socialisme zijn allemaal dienaren van de multinationale zakenwereld, zonder dat zij dat doorhebben.

Originele artikel geplaatst op 6 December 2012 door Kevin Carson

C4SS Media would like to present one of our signature political position pieces, from C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier:

The C4SS Media team is working on generating weekly content for the C4SS YouTube channel. If you are interested in helping this project or staying up to date, email us — under the subject line: C4SS Media Support — at faq@c4ss.org or subscribe today.

It’s never really possible to understand all of a person’s problems or how those problems might play into the decision to take his or her own life, but it’s a good bet that the 35-year prison sentence and $1 million fine hanging over Aaron Swartz’s head played a significant role in his choice.

“How,” John Kerry asked a committee of the US Senate (to which he himself would later be elected) in 1971, “do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

That question was among the first that came to mind last week when I heard that Swartz had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

Swartz was 26 and had already lived a life packed with accomplishments, from co-authoring the RSS standard (the primary tool for syndicating web content) at 14 to founding Infogami, which later merged into the popular Reddit social site, to co-founding the Internet freedom organization Demand Progress.

The threatened prison sentence and fine emanated from his attempt to fulfill a non-profit organization’s own stated mission of “helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies”: He downloaded four million scholarly articles from JSTOR via an MIT account with the intention of making them universally available via P2P technology.

For this, he was hounded to his death by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorneys Stephen P. Heymann and Scott L. Garland, even though JSTOR itself declined to pursue civil litigation and has subsequently made millions of those articles publicly available.

I sincerely hope that Swartz will go down in history as the last casualty of the war over “intellectual property” — a 300-year war that, or all practical purposes, ended years ago in triumph for the forces of freedom and a total rout of those who rely, for their fortunes, on the power of the state to extract rent on people’s use of their own minds and bodies.

Since England’s “Statute of Anne” in 1710, the rentiers have been fighting increasingly dubious battles to maintain and profit from the fiction of “intellectual property.” Even at a time when printing presses were rare and electronic media non-existent, enforcement was impossible. The best they could hope for was to discourage copying by “making an example” of a few of the most prominent scofflaws.

The dawn of the Internet Age was the Appomattox of the “intellectual property” wars. The equipment for copying data and channels for distribution of that data are now cheaply and globally available. They represent a nearly trivial investment in “advanced” nations, and a doable investment even in the “Third World.”

The persecutions and prosecutions of “intellectual property” scofflaws like Jammie Thomas and distribution innovators like Aaron Swartz don’t even rise to the level of rearguard actions or last-ditch measures in this war. They’re more along the lines of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln after Lee’s surrender, or the threatened “werewolf” attacks in occupied Germany at the end of World War II. They will not and cannot affect the outcome. They’re just murderous tantrums in lieu of facing reality.

Copyright. Is. Over. And patent is on its last legs. The old media companies’ only chance of survival is to give up their failed state-created monopolies and protection rackets, and figure out how to generate profits through voluntary trade instead.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Aaron Swartz y las Tozudez Irracional de la Propiedad Intelectual.

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 Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “They Who Marry Do Ill” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “They Who Marry Do Ill“.

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“The question now becomes: What is the growing ideal of human society, unconsciously indicated and un­con­scious­ly discerned and illuminated? By all the readings of progress, this indication appears to be the free individual; a society whose economic, political, social and sexual organization shall secure and constantly increase the scope of being to its several units; whose solidarity and continuity depend upon the free attraction of its component parts, and in no wise upon compulsory forms.

“Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear. . . But it is neither the religious nor the civil ceremony that I refer to now . . . . The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me . . . whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, con­tract­ed publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which is detrimental to the growth of individual character. . . . I am [not] in the least con­cern­ed with the success of the marriage. . . . I am concerned with the success of love. And I believe that the easiest, surest and most applicable method of killing love is marriage. I believe that the only way to preserve love in anything like the ecstatic condition which renders it worthy of a distinctive name . . .  is to maintain the dist­anc­es.

“That love and respect may last, I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities. Have no common possessions with your lover more than you might freely have with one not your lover. Because I believe that marriage stales love, brings respect into contempt, outrages all the privacies and limits the growth of both parties, I believe that ‘they who marry do ill. . . .’”

The lecture reprinted in this booklet was originally delivered by Voltairine de Cleyre at the Radical Liberal League, a social and intellectual dis­cuss­ion group in Philadelphia, on April 28, 1907. The next year, the text of the lecture was reprinted in Mother Earth II.11 (January 1908).

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was a popular Anarchist and feminist writer, speaker and activist. Her contemporary and friend Emma Goldman called her “the most gifted and bril­liant anarchist woman America ever produced.” She pub­lish­ed tracts, dialogues, and stories in Liberty, Twentieth Century, Free Society and Mother Earth, and she worked closely with libertarian com­mun­ists, market anarchists, and mutual­ists within the Phila­delph­ia social an­arch­ist movement, but refused to commit herself to economic blueprints — first calling herself an “individualist” and later an “Anarchist, simply, without economic label attached,” adopting a plural­ist­ic view of economic arrangements in any future free soci­ety.

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

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

Doy por hecho que ningún político es merecedor de otra cosa que no sea desprecio y escarnio, de que casi la totalidad de ellos representan un sistema de poder y privilegio que equivale al robo legalizado a gran escala. Bueno, dicho esto, los republicanos — por su alucinante habilidad para apartarse de la realidad — podrían conseguir el premio a los más desconectados de ésta.

En un execrablemente ridículo artículo de opinión en el Washington Post (“Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight.” 28 de noviembre), el hombre que trabajó como jefe de estrategia de la campaña de Romney, Stuart Stevens, señala que su hombre “llegó a la mayoría de cada grupo económico excepto en aquellos con ingresos familiares inferiores a 50.000 $ al año.”

Dado este hecho, argumenta Stevens, “cualquier partido que capte a la mayoría de la clase media debe de estar haciendo algo bien.” El argumento de Stevens refleja otra observación estúpida de hace meses desde la parte de Romney, la metedura de pata de Romney y el 47 por ciento, las lecciones políticas por las cuales los republicanos están, obviamente, superados (no es que eso sea algo malo).

La campaña, a través de su candidato, decía que la gente pobre vota a los demócratas porque son dependientes del gobierno. Ahora, Stevens sugiere que la gente que trabaja duro y gana un buen dinero apoya las políticas republicanas. La ironía, por supuesto, es una que los anarquistas de mercado continuamente plantan en la cara de este tipo de insultos imbéciles a los trabajadores pobres — que la versión republicana (y casualmente demócrata) de la “empresa libre” es una baraja con las cartas marcadas que sistemáticamente perjudica al trabajo en favor del capital.

Los privilegios estatales rodean a la gran empresa, protegiéndola de la competencia y dejando a los trabajadores a merced de jefes que pueden pagarles unos centavos por dólar producido como salario. Los ricos pueden recostarse y llevarse lo mejor de la parte dura del trabajo, gracias a las cesiones de terreno, los subsidios (directos e indirectos), los contratos con el gobierno y una combinación de costosas obligaciones normativas para proteger de la competencia los intereses económicos de las élites.

La pomposidad de insinuar que a los republicanos les va bien sin los votos de esas sucias masas que ganan menos de 50k es asombrosa. Stevens se podría beneficiar de sostener el sistema económico de “ideales republicanos” contra un legítimo — y actualmente, por supuesto, estrictamente hipotético — mercado liberado, especialmente cuando los ingresos medios por persona en este país son unos 40.000 $.

Si lo hiciera, le podría quedar claro (aunque uno pueda dudarlo) que, como dijo Ezra Heywood, “los ricos ya han sido los sujetos  de la caridad el tiempo suficiente”. Los anarquistas de mercado eliminarían los privilegios de las fuerzas poderosas e influyentes  dentro de la economía para así disolver el sistema capitalista en favor de una competencia y unos mercados realmente libres. El  intercambio voluntario y la cooperación, cuando son liberados de los grilletes de lo que los anarquistas una vez llamaron “legislación de clase,” no son sólo inocuos, sino una gran bendición.

Republicanos, demócratas y el resto de las partes constituyentes del sistema político sirven a estos abusivos privilegios — ese es fundamentalmente su trabajo. En lugar de concederles deferencia o incluso atención, debemos ponernos manos a la obra para crear la sociedad en la que queremos vivir de manera común, con nuestros amigos y vecinos, desechando la política práctica por un tiempo, incluso para siempre.

Artículo original publicado por David S. D’Amato el 01 de diciembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Tomás Braña.

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 Inefficiency of Capitalism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Inefficiency of Capitalism“.

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

Capitalism sells itself as a system of production that exacts severe social and personal costs in the name of rewarding efficiency, economic rationality, and the production of value above all else. But while the costs are real, the rewards are illusory. From contemporary mutualist author Kevin Carson, this booklet examines how capitalism fails to produce even on its own terms — how diseconomies of scale and pervasive knowledge problems cause highly centralized firms constantly divert resources, hobble efficiency, and destroy value while manufacturing managerial waste and hierarchical social control. The “Calculation Problem” pioneered by laissez-faire economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek in fact reveals the inefficiency all forms of bureaucratic consolidation — not only that of state central planners, but also of corporate bosses and gatekeepers propped up by government power. The only way for markets to become more efficient is for them to become more humane — by allowing irrational centralization to collapse under its own weight, and to be replaced by disintermediation, bottom-up diffusion of economic power and decentralized worker ownership of the means of production.

“The general lines of the rational-calculation argument are well known. A market in factors of production is necessary for pricing production inputs so that a planner may allocate them rationally. This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation under intervention, or state capitalism. . . . Entire categories of goods and production methods have been developed at enormous expense, either within military industry or by state-subsidized R&D in the civilian economy, without regard to cost. Subsidies to capital accumulation, R&D, and technical education radically distort the forms taken by production. . . . Blockbuster factories and economic centralization become artificially profitable, thanks to the Interstate Highway system and other means of externalizing distribution costs. This also describes quite well the environment of pervasive irrationality within the large corporation: management featherbedding and self-dealing; ‘cost-cutting’ measures that decimate productive resources while leaving management’s petty empires intact; and the tendency to extend bureaucratic domains while cutting maintenance and support for existing obligations. . . .

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

Dear C4SS Supporters,

I apologize for the long break between updates — things were fairly quiet at the Center around the holidays, and I had a cross-country move to attend to which ended up resulting in about a week sans Internet. Since the last update, I’ve submitted 9.084 Center op-eds to 2,762 publications worldwide, and have noted seven pickups and one citation of Center material:

• On December 6 (I missed this pickup earlier), Utah’s Salt Lake City Weekly published Kevin Carson’s “Why Romney Never Saw it Coming,”, which was in turn cited on December 26 in the same paper by Edward Cheadle in “Power Deludes.”
• On December 24, Jeremy Weiland’s “Some Unions are More Collusive Than Others” appeared in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight.
• Also on December 24, Carlos Clemente cracked open Spain’s media for the Center when El Libreprensador published his “El Gobierno argentino contra el Grupo Clarín.”
• Florida’s Hernando Today ran Kevin Carson’s “Why I Don’t Much Like Liberals” on December 26.
• My own “2012: Maybe the Mayans Were Right” ran in the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on December 31 and in Los Angeles, California’s Eastside News on January 3.
• Kevin Carson’s “Authority is the Enemy of Rationality,” ran (as “The Hierarchy Machine: Authority is the Enemy of Rationality”) in OpEd News on January 11.

As of today, the Center has identified 673 “mainstream media” reprints and citations of its material since we began tracking them in mid-2010. My goal — a bit more ambitious than the numbers and the trend beg for, but hey, let’s aim high! — as media coordinator is to get that number to 1,000 by the middle of 2013. You can help us achieve that by pointing out our material to YOUR local newspaper, and by supporting our work as we continue to solicit and publish the work of market anarchist writers.

Have a great weekend!

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

This piece over at Cubik’s Rube reminded me of something I have been wanting to write about for a while. James is worried that the atheism+ idea that Blag Hag wrote about, and that I linked to on Wed, will be just one more divide in a movement that already has plenty of “splits, schisms, and dichotomies.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about big tents and factions since the group I was working with disintegrated. I think one of our core problems was that we tried to be too much of a big tent, or at least we went about it the wrong way. We knew that people in the group had different political views, theories of change, and ways of working. We had different backgrounds and life experiences — age, gender, race, class, religion. And rather than tackling those differences head on, we avoided talking about them. It was a huge mistake. And we ended up bleeding people anyway.

If you spend any time studying social justice movements from the past, you will soon learn how many of them fell apart or were co-opted because different groups sold each other out. White workers threw black workers under the bus with the unions. Black men threw women under the bus with voting. White women threw women of color under the bus with the feminist movement. Trans people got thrown under the bus by the GLB community. And on and on.

And in the end, while there may be a few beneficiaries here and there, we all lost. We find ourselves fighting the same battles all over again. Clearly, we can’t just all break off into little affinity groups that only think about ourselves. Our liberation is tied together in a very real way.

At the same time, whenever you get people together that have wildly different backgrounds, privileges, interests, communication styles… you are going to spend a huge amount of your time just keeping the group together. If you don’t spend the time, you will lose people. But if you spend all your time dealing with those things then people will feel like you aren’t moving toward your goal. And you will lose people that way too. Not to mention that the most marginalized people will be FUCKING EXHAUSTED trying to beat their heads against everyone else’s blindnesses.

And let us throw in another conundrum while we are at it. In that atheism+ post, she inserts a long quote about how many of the people who have gotten involved in the atheist movement are people who are not affected by any other type of prejudice/oppression. Being an atheist is the one little speed-bump on the otherwise smooth road of their lives. And they are wholly uninterested in having their other privileges questioned.

It is pretty much impossible for me to work with anyone who can only see their little corner of the universe and stay willfully blind about everything else. That doesn’t mean I won’t talk to them. I just can’t work with them. But as infuriating as it is for me to deal with people who can only see the one thing that affects them, it would be so much worse if they were coming in to white knight on some issue that they have not experienced and do not understand.

As (I believe it was) @manowax said at the Words, Beats & Life teach-in, ”You have to have a vested interest to make change.” If atheist prejudice is the only thing that those people can see that they have a vested interest in, then that is what they should focus on. It is when something isn’t just an “issue” but your everyday life that you will see it through to the end. What choice do you have?

It reminds me of the beginning of this civil rights roundtable when they ask the participants to talk about why they are there. James Baldwin talks about being “born a negro.” Poitier says, “I became interested in civil rights struggle out of a necessity, to survive.” Belafonte talks about inheriting the struggle from his parents and grandparents. But Brando talks about Rosa Parks and Heston about talking to people at cocktail parties. Balwin, Poitier, and Belafonte spent their lives struggling for their rights as human beings. Heston went back to cocktail parties and shilling for the NRA.

So there is nothing wrong with spending your time on the things that affect you, but somehow we also have to find ways to help people see how all the different struggles are connected. At the very least, we need to figure out how to stop throwing each other under the bus.

I should say here that I don’t think there is anything wrong with getting involved in a struggle where you are not the most affected. But I do think we need to understand how that struggle is connected to our own. We should be very careful about how we get involved and realistic about how dedicated we are to the issue, to the people, to the community. We can’t just drop in for a year and then skip out to a masters program, patting ourselves on the back the whole way.

So where does that leave us?

I think we should stop trying to have big tents. We need to focus on understanding our interests and how they connect. We should be building small, close-knit groups and a lot of little bridges.

In other words, stop seeing different experiences, backgrounds, and struggles as divisive and start seeing them as connective. Blag Hag is a bridge between feminists and atheists. Not all atheists are going to examine their other privileges. Not all feminists are going to examine theirs. But many will understand. That bridge is the beginning of how we are going to stop throwing each other under the bus.

We don’t need to worry that our movements will be divided. Large organizations only erase differences that shouldn’t be erased and grow hierarchies that shouldn’t be seeded. Successful social movements of the past have usually been made up of small, tight-knit communities and groups. They have been made up of people with long relationships and a lot of earned trust and respect. It wasn’t a thousand people who started the freedom rides. It was a handful. But that handful sparked something and others followed.

I think it is o.k. if we work on the issues that most affect us and with people that we like, understand, and respect. But we all have to take on the work of pushing to understand how the struggles are connected. And we have to make sure that we aren’t taking the easy way out by avoiding the uncomfortableness that comes from working with people whose cultures, experiences, marginalizations, etc. are difficult for us. We need to constantly be confronting ourselves.

The good news is that most of us are a part of many communities and struggles. So we can all be bridges. We can all work on the things that most affect us. We can all help each other to understand how those struggles are connected. We can work towards the same thing from different angles. Our work will be stronger for it.

When uniformed thugs from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Erika Andiola’s home and abducted her mother and brother, the first media notes on the event identified Andiola as a prominent “immigration reform” activist and suggested petitioning prominent kingpins in the government immigration and “homeland security” racket for their release.

While I sympathize with Andiola’s specific predicament, I’m saddened to see her wasting her time agitating for political band-aids like the DREAM Act, which is just another regulatory scheme cobbled together by politicians. It’s no different in principle than the Arizona-specific legislation which singled her out for college scholarship ineligibility and then made her unemployable as an “illegal immigrant.”

At first glance, the DREAM Act looks like an improvement on the current repressive immigration regimes of both the federal government and those of several states like Arizona. It supposedly exempts immigrants who arrived in the US as minors (Andiola came to America at the age of 11), from ICE’s reign of terror if they jump through various political hoops such as service in the US military and/or enrollment in and graduation from government-approved indoctrina … er, “higher education” … programs.

But there are several major problems with the DREAM Act.

The first is that, as described above, it’s a nasty piece of extortion from top to bottom. Immigrants should not, any more than people born inside the imaginary lines (“borders”) drawn by our dominant street gang, be required to render service to that gang in return for being left alone.

The second is that the politicians who draft, and the goons who enforce, state regulatory schemes can’t be trusted to go by their own rules in any case. If they could, this wouldn’t even be an issue, seeing as how the US Constitution specifically and indisputably forbids the federal government to involve itself in immigration at all, apart from levying a maximum ten dollar tax on each immigrant. By what logic would we expect ICE to abide by subordinate rules like the DREAM Act when its very existence is a violation of “the Supreme Law of the Land?”

While it’s possible that the several states would develop similarly stump-stupid immigration rules if left to do so as the US Constitution requires, chances are that at least some of them would compete to entice immigrants rather than terrorize them with onerous impositions like Arizona’s SB 1070, which was sold as an “enforcement” hook for those federal rules (I’ve personally dubbed it “the Know-Nothing Appeasement Act”).

But even devolution to the state level is insufficient to guarantee the rights of America’s immigrants. The only real solution, as with every other social problem, is to abolition of the state itself.

Shiny badges and expensive offices notwithstanding, ICE is no less a criminal enterprise than Los Zetas or the Gambino family, and its abduction of Andiola’s family no less a crime. It’s time to recognize that and respond accordingly. “Reform” of the existing system through the DREAM Act or other political legerdemain would be meaningless window-dressing.

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 Fred Schulder’s “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Fred Schulder’s “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization“.

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