C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford.

… Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration increases.

What happens when a firm grows so large, its internal operations so insulated from the price system, that the diseconomies of scale begin to outweigh the economies? Well, that depends on the institutional context. In a free market, if the firm doesn’t catch wise and start scaling back, it will grow increasingly inefficient and so will lose customers to competitors; markets thus serve as an automatic check on the size of the firm.

But what if friendly politicians rig the game so that favoured companies can reap the benefits associated with economies of scale while socialising the costs associated with diseconomies of scale? Then we might just possibly end up with an economy dominated by those bloated, bureaucratic, hierarchical corporate behemoths we all know and love. …

Ready to Print Zine PDF

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Paul Krugman recently argued that “Conquest Is for Losers” (New York Times, December 21) like Vladimir Putin: “You can’t treat a modern society the way ancient Rome treated a conquered province without destroying the very wealth you’re trying to seize. And meanwhile, war or the threat of war, by disrupting trade and financial connections, inflicts large costs over and above the direct expense of maintaining and deploying armies. War makes you poorer and weaker, even if you win.”

When aggressors profit in today’s world, they “invariably do so in places where exploitable raw materials are the only real source of wealth,” fueled by looting of lucrative portable goods like diamonds and ivory. But the interconnected, intangible wealth of modern finance cannot be plundered that way. Putin’s invasion of Crimea was an easy win militarily, but promptly became an economic liability, compounded by the cutoff of Russia’s economy from global financial support.

This excellent summary of the benefits of economic cooperation, with division of labor and heterogeneity of wealth, is welcome from the economist who wrote on September 14, 2001 that “the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good” since “the destruction isn’t big compared with the economy, but rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending;” and stated on CNN that “if we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.” (He has since said that he “joked” in the latter case, but the 9/11 version isn’t quite as funny.)

Neoconservatives, Krugman notes, unabashedly appreciate Putin’s methods as blunter versions of their own (while ignoring their military Keynesianism). Such parallels are inevitable in state economies. Other alphabet-soup agencies may be softer than the KGB, but its “violence and threats of violence, supplemented with bribery and corruption” remain their only source of wealth. Another column with the same thesis (“Why We Fight,” August 18) notes “it’s very hard to extract golden eggs from sophisticated economies without killing the goose in the process.” These shifts toward heterogeneity and decentralization, aided by such nascent possibilities as cryptocurrency, make it ever harder to loot wealth and also harder to tax it.

The twentieth-century Keynesian state was built on an industrial economic base tied to large-scale raw inputs, including the oil Krugman aptly points out as an unspoken rationale for ISIS. In a final irony, nobody was more prescient on the need to transcend the fossil-fuel economy than that stalwart of the libertarian movement which is often dismissed as a front for Big Oil, Karl Hess. In the 1980 Academy Award-winning documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, he observed: “Solar energy has a very broad implication. It falls over the entire earth. It’s very decentralized. If energy can be picked up from any point on the Earth, it suggests to you that you don’t need central mechanisms; that you can produce important things at a local level.” Thus “the Sun says ‘freedom.’ ” And so does the liberated economy it would fuel.

Rand Paul recently suggested that cigarette taxes played a role in the NYPD killing of Eric Garner. This has sparked much ridicule from people supportive of cigarette taxes and taxation in general. Are they right? Is Rand Paul right? This post seeks to offer an opinion on that question.

To begin with, the confrontation might never have happened without Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes. And that would not have been considered a crime without taxation on cigarettes. It’s true that the cops may have still stopped him for another reason or just to harass him, but the likelihood was increased by cigarette taxes.

It’s true that cigarette taxes didn’t literally kill Eric Garner. They did however contribute to the context in which he was killed. When you empower police through compulsory taxation laws; you set up a situation where they may have to forcibly subdue violators. And the act of tax evasion is not a violent one. A person may resist the imposition of a tax with violence, but that doesn’t mean the initial act of refusing to pay a tax is itself violent.

The reason we libertarians oppose compulsory taxation is that we object to the use of force against peaceful people. If the analysis above is correct; tax evaders fall into the category of peaceful persons qua tax evaders. And therefore cannot be justly coerced into paying taxes. Not even taxes with good intent and cause in mind.

The sin kind of taxes leveled on cigarettes are also a particularly loathsome form of taxation. It financially penalizes people who choose to keep buying large quantities of the good being taxed. It’s usually motivated by puritan standards too. The notion that people should meet a state enforced standard of moral or health purity.

Using force to impose such a standard is particularly galling. It would be bad enough for people to receive undue nagging social pressure to enforce purity standards, but the use of physical force to enforce them is even more odious. Such a thing needs to be opposed by liberty lovers everywhere. And we left-libertarians can lead the way.

Some suggestions for working on this issue include peaceful agorist black market activity, educational work, and civil disobedience like occupying congress person’s offices. All of which have been done before with some success. I encourage people to get started on this project today. And to help bring sin taxes to an end. You can trying hooking up with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left or this site, The Center for a Stateless society to assist in the efforts mentioned above.

Novos indícios de derramamento de sangue na “trégua de Natal” da Primeira Guerra Mundial fortalecem — em vez de enfraquecer — seu exemplo de paz.

O jornal Telegraph do Reino Unido relata o incidente (“A trégua de Natal de 1914 foi quebrada quando francoatiradores alemães mataram dois soldados britânicos“, 22 de dezembro) a partir de registros históricos. Na linha de frente na França, o sentinela britânico Percy Huggins foi morto por um francoatirador alemão; o líder de seu pelotão Tom Gregory retaliou e foi abatido por outro atirador.

Isso pode não se encaixar na imagem sentimentalizada da trégua, mas tirá-la do pedestal a torna mais relevante ao nosso mundo imperfeito. Bertrand Russell observou que “admitir em teoria que há ocasiões em que é apropriado lutar e que na prática que essas ocasiões são raras” produz muito menos guerras reais do que a ideia de que “em teoria não há ocasiões em que é adequado lutar e que na prática essas ocasiões são muito frequentes”.

A quebra da trégua neste caso permaneceu como ponto isolado; ela permaneceu em vigor nos dois lados, mesmo quanto as tropas estavam a menos de 1,5 km de distância. A influência de uma Brigada de Guardas “extremamente profissional” manteve as tensões locais altas desde o começo, com a rejeição imediata do pedido alemão de cessar-fogo.

Também é instrutivo observar o aspecto “olho por olho” do caso, impulsionado por retaliação a agressões específicas e não pela situação geral de guerra (a indicação de um dos francoatiradores que agiria fez com que uma terceira morte fosse inevitável). É necessário alguma coisa para fazer com que as hostilidades se espahem mais rapidamente que a tolerância, sem observar a regra do “olho por olho”. O que seria essa coisa? A política.

Emma Goldman argumentava que sem a rejeição do movimento socialista à ação direta em prol de uma dependência de meios políticos, “a grande catástrofe teria sido impossível. Na Alemanha, o partido tinha 20 milhões de adeptos. Que poder para evitar a declaração de hostilidades! Mas, por um quarto de século, os marxistas haviam treinado os trabalhadores a serem obedientes e patriotas, a dependerem de atividades parlamentares e a confiar cegamente em seus líderes socialistas. Agora, a maioria desses líderes deu as mãos ao Kaiser (…). Em vez de declarar greve geral e paralisar as preparações para a guerra, eles aprovaram o orçamento governamental para o massacre”. Somente o detonador da rivalidade entre líderes nacionais poderia transformar o assassinato de um arqueduque numa disputa que multiplicaria os três mortos causados pela morte de Percy Huggins em 15 milhões de vítimas.

Em sua carta final, Huggins disse a sua família: “Eu anseio pelo dia em que este terrível conflito acabará. Vocês consideram a guerra uma coisa terreível, mas a imaginação não consegue captar os horrores do conflito que podem ser vistos no campo de batalha e são indescritíveis; rezo para que esta seja a última guerra da história”. Um século de avanços em comunicações globais e comércio dá aos soldados Huggins de hoje ampla base com a qual coexistir sem políticos e meios de verificar a confiança alheia. Não devemos esperar mais um século para chegar à “última guerra da história”.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce a new interdisciplinary, open-access libertarian academic journal, the MOLINARI REVIEW, edited by me.

We’re looking for articles, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, broadly understood as including classical liberalism, individualist anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcha-feminism, panarchism, voluntaryism, mutualism, agorism, distributism, Austrianism, Georgism, public choice, and beyond – essentially, everything from Emma Goldman to Ayn Rand, C. L. R. James to F. A. Hayek, Alexis de Tocqueville to Michel Foucault.

(We see exciting affiliations among these strands of the libertarian tradition; but you don’t have to agree with us about that to publish in our pages.)

Disciplines in which we expect to publish include philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, theology, ecology, literature, and law.

We aim to enhance the visibility of libertarian scholarship, to expand the boundaries of traditional libertarian discussion, and to provide a home for cutting-edge research in the theory and practice of human liberty.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed. We also plan to get our content indexed in such standard resources as International Political Science Abstracts and The Philosopher’s Index.

The journal will be published both in print (via print-on-demand) and online (with free access); all content will be made available through a Creative Commons Attribution license. We regard intellectual-property restrictions as a combination of censorship and protectionism, and hope to contribute to a freer culture.

We’re especially proud of the editorial board we’ve assembled, which at present includes over sixty of the most prestigious names in libertarian scholarship.

The journal’s Associate Editor is Grant Mincy (a Fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society), whose pathbreaking work in the field of anarchist environmentalism you should check out here and here.

For more information on the journal, including information on how to submit an article, check out our website. (Information on subscribing, or ordering individual copies, will be available later.)

We’re excited about this new publishing opportunity, and we hope you’ll help us make it a success!

A new finding of bloodshed in WWI’s “Christmas truce” on the cusp of its hundredth anniversary strengthens, rather than undermines, its example for peace.

The UK’s Telegraph reports (“Christmas truce of 1914 was broken when German snipers killed two British soldiers,” December 22) the incident, pieced together from historical records. On the front lines in France, British sentry Percy Huggins was felled by a German sniper; his platoon leader Tom Gregory retaliated against that sniper, only to be outgunned by another.

This may not fit the sentimentalized image of the truce, but taking it off such a pedestal makes it relevant to our messy world. Bertrand Russell noted that to “admit in theory that there are occasions when it is proper to fight, and in practice that these occasions are rare” yields far less war in practice than to “hold in theory that there are no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are very frequent.”

The truce’s breakdown in this case remained an isolated flashpoint; it held on both sides, as close as under a mile away. The influence of an “incredibly professional” duty-bound Guards Brigade kept local tensions high from the beginning, with immediate rejection of Germans’ bid for a cease-fire.

Also instructive is the clear tit-for-tat aspect, driven by retaliation for specific aggressions rather than by general warlikeness. (One sniper indicating more made a third death inevitable.) Something needs to tip the balance to make hostility spread faster than toleration. That something, in one word: Politics.

Emma Goldman contended that without the socialist movement’s turn away from direct action and toward a reliance on political means, “the great catastrophe would have been impossible. In Germany the party counted twelve million adherents. What a power to prevent the declaration of hostilities! But for a quarter of a century the Marxists had trained the workers in obedience and patriotism, trained them to rely on parliamentary activity and, particularly, to trust their socialist leaders blindly. And now most of those leaders had joined hands with the Kaiser … Instead of declaring the general strike and thus paralysing war preparations, they had voted the Government money for slaughter.” And only the tripwire pitting of national leaders against each other could turn the assassination of an archduke into a feud that would multiply the tripling of Huggins’s death five-million-fold.

In his final letter, Huggins told his family: “I long for the day when this terrible conflict will be ended. You consider war a terrible thing but imagination cannot reach far enough for the horrors of warfare that can be seen on the battlefield are indescribable and I pray this may be the last war that will ever be.” A century of advance in global communications and commerce gives today’s Hugginses ample basis to coexist without politicians and the means to verify trust. It should not take another century to reach “the last war that will ever be.”

Sulla scia della rivolta di Ferguson, Barack Obama ha chiesto centinaia di milioni di dollari per armare la polizia di videocamere da installare sulla divisa. Questo, pensa lui, è un modo di responsabilizzare la polizia. E ha ragione. Aumenta la “responsabilità” che già si vede nella giustizia locale. Rende la polizia responsabile agli occhi del sistema, che è ed è sempre stato a loro favore. E fa crescere la responsabilità dei cittadini agli occhi delle forze eteree addette alla sicurezza e alla criminalizzazione della vita di tutti i giorni.

A settembre, il dipartimento della giustizia ha pubblicato un rapporto sull’efficacia di queste videocamere. Lungi dall’avere un effetto disciplinante sugli agenti, le videocamere incentivano la prepotenza. Lo sceriffo Douglas Gillespie commenta così:

Durante l’esperimento [con le videocamere], alcuni poliziotti di carriera hanno voluto indossare le videocamere per provarle, e la loro reazione è stata molto positiva. Dicono cose come: “È incredibile come le persone rigano dritto quando gli dici che questa è una videocamera, anche quando sono ubriachi.” Sappiamo anche che la stragrande maggioranza dei nostri agenti fanno un buon lavoro, e le videocamere lo dimostrano. ~ Douglas Gillespie, Sceriffo, Dipartimento di Polizia Metropolitana di Las Vegas.

Secondo questa analisi, involontariamente foucaltiana, dal punto di vista dell’agente il cittadino “riga dritto” quando è sorvegliato.

Da notare l’espressione “dal punto di vista dell’agente”. Ciò che non viene preso in considerazione, mai, è il punto di vista del cittadino. Il cittadino esiste come persona soggetta al potere del punto di vista dell’agente, perché il punto di vista dell’agente è considerato, in primo luogo, giusto. È il cittadino che dev’essere sorvegliato e tassato. Questa mossa serve a sorvegliare noi. È un sistema che parte dal principio secondo cui le istituzioni rappresentano il bene, e il cittadino che disobbedisce si oppone sempre a queste istituzioni. Obbedire alla polizia: esiste una descrizione più banale, più semplice dell’applicazione della legge? Loro sono gli agenti della legge, l’istituzione evidente della giustizia penale.

Si informa il cittadino della registrazione, e con questo semplice fatto l’agente impone il suo punto di vista su tutti quelli che poi rivedranno la scena. Ma chi la vedrà? Sempre che non venga distrutta, sempre che non scompaia miracolosamente, sarà il sistema della giustizia penale a vederla. Un uomo in stato di ubriachezza sta già violando la legge. Già questo lo condanna per oltraggio a pubblico ufficiale. Ciò che viene fuori dal video non è una prova neutrale. Non esistono prove neutrali quando il sistema indaga su uno dei suoi agenti. Non osserviamo lo svolgersi dei fatti da un punto di vista obiettivo e neutrale. Altrimenti non sarebbe possibile determinare la giustizia in un senso o nell’altro. Al contrario, noi osserviamo i fatti attraverso il resoconto che ci viene dato. Quello che è aggressione per uno, è difesa della legge per un altro. L’autodifesa di uno diventa la resistenza all’arresto dell’altro.

Quando diciamo che questa sorveglianza porterà gli agenti a comportarsi entro i limiti delle procedure legali, dobbiamo aggiungere che porterà anche i cittadini a comportarsi entro i limiti del comportamento così come permesso dalle leggi. Questa tecnologia può essere usata, e sarà sicuramente usata, per condannare persone colpevoli di crimini senza vittime. Sarà usata per controllare il nostro comportamento. La videocamera vede le cose in una sola direzione, sospetta preventivamente di noi, ci invita a vedere i fatti attraverso gli occhi dell’agente. Gli occhi dell’agente sono quelli della legge. Purtroppo per il cittadino, ciò che limita la sua libertà è la massiccia, smisurata opera della legge. Ciò che limita la libertà dell’agente, invece, è l’indagine interna, il pubblico ministero amico, i giurati, e la convinzione che, come è stato spesso dimostrato, la vita di tutti i giorni è diventata un’attività in gran parte criminale. Tutti corriamo il rischio di infrangere la legge perché la legge riguarda una grossa parte del nostro comportamento e perché è codificata in una montagna di libri che non abbiamo né il tempo né la pazienza di leggere. Alla fine, tutto ciò ci porterà ad interiorizzare il punto di vista del poliziotto. Saremo coscienti non solo di essere osservati, ma anche di essere osservati da un sistema che ha dichiarato illegale gran parte della nostra vita.

Io credo che il dipartimento della giustizia abbia visto correttamente. Le videocamere porteranno i cittadini all’obbedienza. Quei cittadini terrorizzati all’idea di infrangere la legge. Cosa accadrà ai video in cui sono ripresi gli atti violenti della polizia quando questi saranno resi pubblici? Accadrà che diventeranno parte del sistema, e da quest’ultimo saranno controllati e mediati. Diventeranno una nuova forma di spettacolo. Mostreranno cosa può accaderci in qualunque momento se non facciamo il nostro dovere. Man mano che la polizia sarà sempre più esonerata dalla necessità di fornire prove filmate, la gente capirà qual è il proprio ruolo: quello del sospettato, della minaccia, della prova.

Il mio non è un discorso contro la sorveglianza. È un discorso a favore della distruzione delle istituzioni che ci sorvegliano, e a favore di istituzioni nostre, di un nostro punto di vista. È la polizia che dev’essere sorvegliata: per chi fa parte del nostro movimento, niente potrebbe essere più chiaro. L’assassinio di Eric Garner, documentato da un cittadino giornalista, sollevò questioni diffuse su un inaccettabile abuso di potere. Non ci fu un filtro. Non come negli altri casi, almeno. Non fu affidato ai pubblici ministeri, ai giudici e altri sociopatici istituzionali, ma alla discussione pubblica. Il risultato fu la messa in discussione non solo del comportamento dell’agente, ma anche delle leggi meschine usate per giustificare l’aggressione. Certo i giurati sono protetti dall’influenza del pubblico perché il sistema vuole imporre solo il suo punto di vista. In teoria ci sarebbero due punti di vista, e qualcuno dovrebbe difendere i cittadini dagli agenti spietati. In pratica non è quasi mai così. Il sistema non ammette il sospetto che ci siano leggi considerate ingiuste nella vita reale. In un tribunale, la legge ha valore assoluto, almeno quando usata contro i cittadini.

Dobbiamo abbattere questa mediazione avvelenata. Le videocamere non lo fanno. Appartengono al dipartimento di polizia, e ciò che ritraggono è passato al setaccio di una versione dei fatti accuratamente di parte. Dobbiamo togliere potere alla polizia. Le videocamere non lo fanno. Queste servono solo a togliere il potere a chi disobbedisce, o si sospetta che possa disobbedire, alla legge. Dobbiamo sempre fare in modo che sia presentata la nostra versione dei fatti. Le videocamere non lo fanno. La nostra voce è ignorata, considerata ostile da un sistema giudiziario criminale, per il quale questa è l’unica cosa logica da fare.

Dobbiamo armare i cittadini di videocamere, di piattaforme proprie per la diffusione dei video, di argomenti critici che sfidino il potere dello stato. Queste risorse le abbiamo già. Sarebbe un errore dare milioni alla polizia per queste videocamere, che poi loro useranno per assolvere se stessi mentre ci controllano e ci impongono la loro disciplina. Che lo stato compri pure le videocamere, ma non pensate che siano uno strumento neutro. La legge non conosce neutralità. Puntate le vostre videocamere contro di loro. Puntate i vostri punti di vista contro di loro. Ora avete il potere di combattere lo stato di polizia, di sfidarlo secondo i vostri termini.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

No dia 18, a PEC (Proposta de Emenda Constitucional) 215, que pretendia mudar o regime de demarcação de terras indígenas que as tornaria dependentes de aprovação dos políticos no Congresso Nacional, foi arquivado na Câmara dos Deputados.

Infelizmente, isso não significa que a posse indígena esteja protegida do governo no Brasil. Basta ver como o governo federal tem tratado a resistência do povo indígena mundurucu, no estado do Pará, à construção da hidrelétrica São Luiz do Tapajós, no rio Tapajós, que provocará um alagamento de mais 700 mil km² nas terras onde vivem e que é a primeira usina de um total de cinco.

Apesar da previsão constitucional de que o governo brasileiro deve reconhecer a posse dos povos indígenas de suas terras e recursos naturais, essa comunidade nunca teve suas terras demarcadas e, agora, corre o risco de perdê-las em nome do “interesse nacional”. Assim, os índios mundurucu da comunidade indígena afetada Sawré Muybu foram forçados à ação direta e autodemarcaram suas terras.

Paralelamente, já foi determinado na justiça que a não-demarcação das terras dessa comunidade é ilegal e que a Fundação Nacional do Índio deve completá-lo. Um documentário produzido por Nayana Fernandez conta a história de resistência dos mundurucus.

A crônica desses indígenas é uma história constante de inúmeras etnias minoritárias ao redor do globo: projetos de desenvolvimento dos governos centrais repetidamente expulsam comunidades das terras que habitavam tradicionalmente, sem consulta nem compensação satisfatórias.

Como se pode aceitar que comunidades inteiras sejam deslocadas das terras de seus ancestrais, muitas delas tidas como sagradas, e de todo um modo de vida, por uma decisão de uma suposta autoridade que afirma que isso vai ser bom para o “desenvolvimento nacional”? Como pode ser justo um sistema onde direitos são permanentemente negados (ou lentamente reconhecidos) às minorias enquanto há muita eficiência para planejar empreendimentos do interesse de políticos e grandes corporações?

Não é de hoje que o desenvolvimentismo brasileiro pretende alcançar o progresso e o desenvolvimento, conforme definidos pelos políticos e burocratas em Brasília às custas dos direitos de minorias à posse de suas terras e recursos naturais. Uma região brasileira convenientemente suscetível para os desmandos desenvolvimentistas é a Amazônia, dado o potencial energético de seus rios, para a construção de hidrelétricas para fornecer energia subsidiada para o complexo industrial do Sul e do Sudeste.

Por trás do discurso do desenvolvimento nacional, temos o favorecimento de algumas regiões do país em detrimento das outras e de algumas partes da sociedade em detrimento de outras, conforme a estratégia formulada centralmente pelo governo federal.

A abstração da nação é uma retórica que camufla o tratamento desigual às diferentes regiões, o que é mais fácil de ocultar no caso amazônico, com sua baixa densidade demográfica e menor população comparativamente às outras regiões, o que significa menor peso político em uma democracia majoritária. A Amazônia está para o Brasil como a Sibéria está para a Rússia, eternamente subordinada e distante do desenvolvimento “brasileiro”.

A liberdade das minorias — e de toda população amazônica — jamais estará segura enquanto esse tipo de ideologia desenvolvimentista continuar a dar as cartas em Brasília.

The recent trajectory of events leading up to the shooting of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the nationwide police backlash afterward, have made it clearer than ever how police feel about the public they supposedly protect and serve: they’re terrified of us. For more than twenty years, the Drug War and associated police militarization encouraged an increasing tendency of urban police to see local populations as a dangerous occupied enemy. In Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop they admit to stopping and exiting patrol cars randomly in non-white neighborhoods solely to make a show of force, reminding cowed residents who’s boss. And thanks to the mushroom proliferation of SWAT teams (originally designed for use in rare situations like hostage crises) even in small towns, and the enormous flow of surplus military equipment to local police forces like Ferguson, that hostile and fearful attitude towards the local population has spread downward into suburbs and towns.

Meanwhile internal police culture has taken on the same paranoid coloring that caused Lt. Calley and his men to snap and massacre the population of My Lai. Since Hill Street Blues days, cops have commonly described their jobs patrolling the community using “Band of Brothers” rhetoric reminiscent of extended recon missions in Vietnam. But these self-perceptions are utterly detached from reality. Soldiers in Vietnam actually had a high risk of getting killed. But police on-duty casualty rates have fallen steadily for decades. Policing is the ninth-most dangerous job (the top two are logging and fishing); sanitation work is twice as deadly.

That embattled self-image has been the police norm, to an increasing extent, for the past twenty years or more. In recent years police resentment ratcheted further upward over the “chilling effect” of widespread citizen recording of brutality with smart phones, and social media criticism after the Occupy camp shutdowns. But internal police culture went into full-blown panic mode in response to protests over the shooting of Michael Brown, and to the nationwide #WeCantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations after the verdicts in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner shootings.

On police-only message boards, off-duty cops feel free to admit how they really see us: a bunch of sniveling ingrates too spoiled to appreciate the “thin blue line” protecting them from chaos. Virtually any unarmed non-white person killed by a cop is referred to in such venues as a “criminal” or “thug.” Police apologists go frantically to work digging up dirt on the victims. They depict the victims in language appealing to the most bestial, menacing stereotypes of black men (like the fixation on 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s height and the description of Michael Brown as a hulking linebacker grunting like an animal).

Poul Anderson once wrote that government is the only institution that’s entitled to kill you for disobeying it. That comes through loud and clear with the police — especially the “entitled” part. A police union spokesman flat-out said, if you don’t want to get killed, obey police orders without question. (As if even that were a sufficient guarantee, considering the people having epileptic seizures or in diabetic comas who were killed for “resisting arrest.”) Among the general public “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” is a punchline, but police even joke among themselves about literally getting away with murder (for example those “We Show Up Early to Beat the Crowds” t-shirts).

To police any criticism at all, even a suggestion that police may sometimes engage in racial profiling or excessive force, is seen as an existential threat. Those same police message boards mentioned above were rife with complaints that protests over the Brown and Garner verdicts were creating an “open season” on cops. The NYPD union gave Mayor Bill de Blasio notice, after he mentioned warning his biracial son to be especially careful around cops, that he would not be welcome at police funerals.

Police paranoia increased its simmer to a boil in response to the protests over Brown’s death and the verdicts; the shooting of Liu and Ramos made it an exploding pressure cooker. Internal NYPD emails accused de Blasio of having “blood on his hands” for his remarks, and implicated protestors as accomplices. Police nationwide have echoed the sentiments.

In short, the cops blame everyone for the hostility that led to Liu’s and Ramos’s death except themselves. Police are professionals at playing the victim card.

The NYPD now considers itself at war. Cops only patrol in pairs, serving warrants and summonses only when absolutely necessary to make an arrest. After decades of asserting how inconceivably dangerous their jobs are, the NYPD responds to two line-of-duty deaths in a force of thousands — the first in THREE YEARS — like it was Pearl Harbor. That speaks volumes about how privileged and entitled they really are.

We can safely assume that, NYPD officers minimize interactions with the public to when an arrest is absolutely necessary, rates of crime by both the public and the cops themselves can only decrease. While they’re at it, maybe they can go on strike — another phenomenon that’s historically associated with drastic drops in the crime rate. That’s one good way of taking criminals off the street.

Peace on Earth and goodwill toward all — in a world of conflict, ’tis the season of peace.

Sadly, this holiday season the United Nations released a study indicating that 2014 is among the worst years on record for the world’s children. Chronicled in the report is another disturbing history of war and state violence.

An estimated 230 million children currently live in political territories subjected to violent conflict. The executive director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, as reported by the New York Times, states: “Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds … They have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves.”

As we reflect on this year of violence, imagine alternatives and act for social change perhaps we may revisit an age-old political ideology as liberating, co-operative and peaceful as it is misunderstood. The rich political tradition to which I refer is anarchism.

In popular circles the word anarchism has come to mean complete disorder or chaos — a state of perpetual violence. This is unfortunate as liberty rejects violent coercion. Anarchic practitioners advocate highly ordered societies rooted in the principles of free association, mutual aid and cooperative labor.

This libertarian idea is deeply ingrained in the human spirit. Labor organizer Rudolph Rocker describes anarchism as “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind” which, “strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.”

This is my favorite description of anarchism. Liberty is not a doctrine, but rather a praxis innate to human thought and action — the underlying principle being that one should always challenge authority and dismantle unjustifiable concentrations of power. The result is a more libertarian relationship between people and their institutions. Anarchism is thus a human phenomenon.

When feminist movements organize for women’s agency over their own bodies and life without fear of violence, we see anarchism.

We see anarchism in Mexico as the population seeks liberation from violent drug cartels, complacent government and oppressive state policies.

We see anarchism in prisons as inmates band together in these dehumanizing institutions to demand living conditions free of violence and sexual battery.

We see anarchism in war-torn regions of the world where individuals risk their lives to save innocent victims of the drone strikes and barrel bombs of oppressive regimes.

We see anarchism in towns and neighborhoods challenging the monopoly of violence held by the police.

We see anarchism in movements that seek the protection of wilderness areas and native lands from the clutches of extractive industries and the iron fist of capital.

We find anarchism in the new technology and falling communications costs that allow all of us to craft markets and labor together free of regulatory restriction.

We see anarchism in our everyday social interactions — telling our family and friends we love them and being kind to strangers.

These are but a few examples. Anarchism is everywhere.

Human action counters systems of power and domination. We have witnessed movements rise against all the bad that has happened this year at the whims of the powerful. This is our age-old tale: History is a race between state power and social power.

So, in the spirit of the season, let us decide to embrace liberty. Let us no longer follow the whims of those who wish to command and control society. Instead, let us labor to coordinate and cultivate the free societies and communities we wish to live.

It is in anarchic order that we see everything humanity can be. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward all are not mutually exclusive — peace IS goodwill. It is our inclined labor that reminds us we can and will build a peace that makes life on Earth worth living — a peace for every child of humanity. When that’s accomplished we will know freedom; such grandeur is only attainable in liberty.

Che direste se la vostra proprietà sulla vostra casa fosse riconosciuta solo se approvata dal Congresso? Vi sentireste più sicuri o meno? Questa è la realtà che vivono milioni di brasiliani che vivono nelle favelas, le cui proprietà sono soggette a questo genere di scherzo politico. Uno scherzo che, secondo l’opinione di alcuni parlamentari, dovrebbe essere esteso alle popolazioni indigene del Brasile.

La proposta di emendamento costituzionale numero 215 intende cambiare il modo in cui si decidono i confini dei territori appartenenti agli indigeni, assoggettando la decisione all’approvazione politica. La legge avrebbe dovuto essere votata il sedici dicembre, ma il voto è stato cancellato a causa delle proteste degli indiani. Attualmente, l’articolo 231 della costituzione brasiliana stabilisce che “le organizzazioni sociali indiane, gli usi, gli idiomi, il credo, le tradizioni e i diritti originali sulle terre da loro occupate sono riconosciuti, ed è competenza del governo federale la demarcazione, la protezione e il rispetto di dette proprietà.” Il primo paragrafo dell’articolo definisce i territori in questione:

[Q]uelli abitati in permanenza dalle popolazioni indiane, quelli utilizzati da loro per le loro attività produttive, quelli che sono indispensabili per la conservazione delle risorse ambientali necessarie al loro benessere e quelli necessari alla loro riproduzione fisica e culturale, secondo i loro usi, i costumi e le tradizioni.

Dunque il governo federale avrebbe il compito di decidere i confini dei territori delle popolazioni indigene. Quando parliamo di governo federale, ovviamente, intendiamo l’esecutivo tramite organismi come il Funai (la Fondazione per la Nazione Indiana). Nel suo sito si possono trovare elencati i passi necessari alla demarcazione dei territori.

Nessuno di questi passi è essenzialmente politico. Sono usati criteri tecnici e antropologici per riconoscere un preesistente diritto al possesso permanente. Lo stesso processo usato per regolarizzare la proprietà di qualunque cittadino, nelle aree urbane o rurali, quando il possesso esiste ma non è documentato. Per quanto riguarda le popolazioni indigene, il processo è diverso per ragioni etnografiche: la proprietà è regolata da usi e costumi specifici. Ma per lo più si applicano le stesse regole in entrambi i casi.

La procedura è amministrativa e dovrebbe verificare il reale possesso della terra e la sua legittimità. Se il possesso non è legittimo, entrano in gioco i tribunali. La questione, comunque, è legale, non politica.

La proposta di emendamento numero 215, se approvata, cambierebbe lo scenario, dando al Congresso brasiliano il diritto esclusivo di approvare le demarcazioni territoriali e di ratificare quelle esistenti. Basterebbe una semplice maggioranza, soggetta ad intrighi e coalizioni ad hoc, per rallentare il processo di demarcazione delle terre, rendendo la situazione degli indiani ancora più insopportabile.

Cosa potrebbe accadere alle comunità Munduruku che vivono lungo il fiume Tapajos, dove il governo vuole costruire delle dighe e inondare l’intera regione? Non occorre aspettare per saperlo: Vedendo che il governo non riconosceva i loro diritti tradizionali, ma allo stesso tempo procedeva con efficienza impressionante a portare avanti il progetto delle dighe, i Munduruku della comunità Sawre Muybu hanno demarcato i confini dei territori da sé e ora si trovano a combattere una battaglia legale contro il governo brasiliano (potete donare per la causa su Indiegogo).

I diritti comuni alla terra sono molto fragili nell’attuale regime e, se lasciate ai politici, le cose peggioreranno ancora.

Si tratta di una violazione dei diritti delle comunità indiane, un regresso. Il cambiamento dovrebbe rafforzare i loro diritti, non indebolirli. I loro territori non dovrebbero essere proprietà del governo brasiliano. Le terre dovrebbero diventare proprietà comune degli indiani per “usucapione”, come già avviene nelle comunità Quilombola (discendenti dagli schiavi fuggitivi).

Cambiamento significa espellere lo stato dai territori indiani. L’emendamento numero 215 è stato scritto con l’intenzione di distruggere i diritti degli indigeni sui loro territori. L’intenzione è di infilare lo stato ancora di più nella vita degli indiani. Per questo dev’essere rigettato.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

No sábado, o campo de detenção da Baía de Guantánamo liberou quatro de seus 136 detentos que não haviam sido acusados de qualquer crime. Com seis anos de atraso, Barack Obama está próximo de manter sua promessa: “Eu já afirmei repetidas vezes que pretendo fechar Guantánamo e vou concluir esse objetivo”. Quanto à promessa de restaurar o habeas corpus que acompanhava seu discurso anti-Guantánamo durante a campanha, ele não está tão inclinado a “concluir esse objetivo”.

Obama disse à CNN que “haverá um certo número irreducível de casos muito difíceis, de indivíduos que fizeram algo errado e são muito perigosos, mas para quem é difícil coletar provas para um processo tradicional nas cortes americanas, então teremos que lidar com esse fato”. Esse é o mesmo Obama que emitiu uma ordem executiva dois dias depois de se tornar presidente para “fechar prontamente os centros de detenção em Guantánamo”, afirmando claramente que “os indíviduos presos em Guantánamos possuem o direito constitucional ao habeas corpus”.

Isso é democracia.

O presidente demorou até a segunda metade de seu segundo mandato para dar esse minúsculo passo em direção ao fechamento de uma instalação que, mesmo em termos puramente de realpolitik, é um problema da mesma dimensão da Bastilha da França pré-revolucionária (onde o Antigo Regime poderia ter resistido por mais algum tempo se tivessem libertado um ou outro prisioneiro ocasionalmente). Seus custos são tão altos que Guantánamo faz com as prisões americanas convencionais pareçam modelos de responsabilidade fiscal e faz com que até seus defensores hesitem, como Nile Gardiner, diretor do Centro pela Liberdade Margaret Thatcher da instituto conservador Heritage Foundation.

Enquanto isso, a Voice of America, o órgão de propaganda oficial do governo dos Estados Unidos, coloca a culpa do atraso nos “obstáculos impostos pelo Congresso dos EUA”, um argumento parecido com o adotado por ideológos que pediram que o congresso “deixasse Reagan ser Reagan” e implementasse o regime de laissez faire com que ele sempre sonhou.

Emma Goldman escreveu em “Prisões: falência e crime social” que o “impulso natural do homem primitivo de revidar um golpe, de vingar-se de uma ofensa, é anacrônico. Ao invés disso, o homem civilizado, despido de coragem e audácia, tem delegado a um organizado maquinário a responsabilidade de vingar-se por ele de suas ofensas, baseado na tola crença que o estado se justifica ao fazer aquilo para o qual ele não tem mais a virilidade ou consistência. A ‘majestade da lei’ é algo racional; ela não desce aos instintos primitivos. Sua missão é de natureza ‘superior'”. Um século mais tarde, o crescimento hipertrofiado da burocracia prisional dá suporte a essa observação e também à insistência de Goldman de que “a esperança
de liberdade e de oportunidade é o único incentivo para a vida, especialmente para a vida de um presidiário. A sociedade tem pecado há muito contra eles e isto é o mínimo que ela deve deixar-lhes. Eu não estou muito esperançosa que isto ocorrerá, ou que qualquer mudança real nesta direção possa acontecer até que as condições que originam a ambos, o prisioneiro e o carcereiro, sejam abolidas para sempre”.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos, com citações diretas do texto de Emma Goldman, “Prisões: falência e crime social“, traduzido por Anamaria Salles.

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010).

Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s.

Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner in their club by selling the future productive value of what they create in exchange for the present wealth they need to get started. The stolen, dead value of the past captures the unborn value of the future.

* * *

Whatever portion of our productivity we allow to be taken from us will return in the form of our own oppression.

This is possible only because of a monopoly on the function of marketing future value, combined with an artificial floor under the cost of getting started. The productivity of horizontal, networked peer groups is expropriated by the holders of artificial property rights.

Those who are able to control the circulation of the product of the labor of others can impose laws and social institutions according to their interests. Those who are not able to retain control of the product of their own labor are not able to resist.

Thomas Hodgskin fairly well demolished the “labor fund” doctrine. The financing of subsistence of workers engaged in production can just as accurately be conceived in horizontal terms, as the continual mutual advance of credit by workers to each other against their future production. The capitalist is not someone who advances pay from a labor fund derived from their own “past abstention,” but someone who relies on the preemption and monopoly of this mutual advance of credit function by a privileged class, with the help of the state.

The idea of capitalist abstention as the source of the mythical labor fund, and of profit as the reward for abstention or long time-preference on the capitalist’s part, is especially laughable given the fact that the original accumulation of capital — the concentration of enormous investment funds in the hands of a small plutocracy — was actually accomplished through robbery rather than abstention or savings. And it’s rendered even more so by the fact that banks lend money into existence out of thin air, without even the pretense that it’s backed by anyone’s savings.

The radical erosion of the latter barrier through ephemeral technology (as described by Douglas Rushkoff) is making an increasing share of venture capital superfluous.

For a capitalist class to exist, the market must be rigged…. Capitalism must increase the price of capital by withholding it from labor. In reality the “free market” is an imposition by property owners on to workers…. Capital needs to make the price of labor low enough to prevent workers, as a class, from being able to retain enough of their own earnings to acquire their own property. If workers could acquire their own property, they could also stop selling their labor to the capitalists. Capitalism, then, could not exist in a free market.

This is especially true of the networked, p2p economy.

Capitalism depends on the state to impose control within the network economy, particularly to control relations through authorized channels, and thereby capture value that would otherwise be retained by its producers. Points of control are introduced into the natural mesh of social relations….

The state’s ability to grant title and privilege is based on its ability to enforce such advantages through its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

That is not to say that Kleiner is anti-exchange as such. Like David Graeber, he’s open to the possibility that exchange and markets of some sort would exist as one component of a post-state/capitalist economy. But like Graeber, he’s extremely skeptical that such a post-state, post-capitalist market would bear any resemblance to our present economy, dominated by commodity production and mediation by the cash nexus.

If “freed” from the coercion of profit-seeking capitalists, producers would produce for social value, not for profits, as they do in their private and family lives…. This is not to say that a free society would not have competition, or that its members would not seek to benefit from their own labor. Indeed, the division of labor required in a complex society makes exchange and reciprocity necessary. However, the metaphor of “the market” as it is currently used would no longer hold.

Kleiner seems to suggest, if I read him correctly, that most discrete acts of production and distribution, on the micro-level, would be governed by the ethos of social production for use, and exchange would take place on a higher level.

The “market economy” is, by definition, a surveillance economy, where contributions to production and consumption must be measured in minute detail. It is an economy of accountants and security guards. The accounting of value exchange in tiny and reductive lists of individually priced transactions must be superseded by more fluid and generalized forms of exchange.

This suggests that most production for everyday consumption would take place within primary social units with production as a part of daily living, and exchange will consist mainly — as Bakunin envisioned — of the distribution of primary resource inputs over large areas, or the exchange of surpluses between primary social units.

Kleiner sees networked communication technologies and peer production as the means to “resist and evade the violence” entailed by existing hierarchies and coercively enforced privilege. “Social relations among transnational, trans-local communities operate within an extra-territorial space, one where the operations of title and privilege could give way to relations of mutual interest and negotiation.”

Even the accumulated wealth from centuries of exploitation cannot ultimately save the economic elite if they are unable to continue to capture current wealth. The value of the future is far greater than the value of the past…. [I]t is our new ways of working together and sharing across national boundaries that have the potential to threaten the capitalist order and bring about a new society.

He also sees such liberatory technologies as the basis of an economic vision of peer-production as a modern, high-tech version of the precapitalist model of production on the commons.

Modes of production employing structures similar to peer-to-peer networks have relations reminiscent of the historic pastoral commons, long gone commonly held lands used for the maintenance of livestock and regulated by ancient rights predating modern laws and governments. The modern commons, however, is not located in a single space, but rather spans the planet, offering our society hope for a way out from the class stratification of capitalism by undermining its logic of control and extraction….

Peer networks, such as the internet, and all the material and immaterial inputs that keep them running, serve as a common stock that is used independently by many people. Free software, whose production and distribution frequently depends on peer networks, is a common stock available to all…. Mass transportation and international integration have created distributed communities who maintain ongoing interpersonal and often informal economic relationships across national borders.

All of these are examples of new productive relationships that transcend current property-based relations and point to a potential way forward. Developments in telecommunications, notably the emergence of peer networks such as the internet, along with international transportation and migration, create broad revolutionary possibilities as dispersed communities become able to interact instantly on a global scale.

But Kleiner warns that the peer production and free sharing of informational goods — even including the designs of physical products — will be insufficient to liberate producers from rent extraction if the physical means of production and subsistence remain concentrated in the hands of a small class of rentiers. The increased productivity and cost savings from free and open software and open industrial design will simply be appropriated as rent by the owners of the physical means of production, in the same way that Ricardo’s landlords appropriated the increased productivity from industrial production.

He proposes venture communism as a way to organize the material basis of life, along with the material, for a community of peer producers

a structure for independent producers to share a common stock of productive assets, allowing forms of production formerly associated exclusively with the creation of immaterial value… to be extended to the material sphere.

Just as copyleft and other free information licenses turned copyright against itself, the venture commune uses the corporate form as a vehicle for asserting control over productive assets. The commune is legally a firm, but with distinct properties that transform it into an effective vehicle for revolutionary workers’ struggle.

The venture commune holds ownership of all productive assets that make up the common stock employed by a diverse and geographically distributed networked of collective and independent peer producers. The venture commune does not coordinate production; a community of peer producers produce according to their own needs and desires. The role of the commune is only to manage the common stock, making property, such as the housing and tools they require, available to the peer producers.

The venture commune is the federation of workers’ collectives and individual workers, and is itself owned by each of them, with each member having only one share. In the case that workers are working in a collective or co-operative, ownership is held individually, by the separate people that make up the collective or co-operative…. Property is always held in common by all the members of the commune, with the venture commune equally owned by all its members….

As a platform for supporting self-managed collectives, the venture commune is one example of a larger category of economic models organized on a modular architecture.

A venture commune is not bound to one physical location where it can be isolated and confined. Similar in topology to a peer-to-peer network, Telekommunisten intends to be decentralized, with only minimal coordination required amongst its international community of producer-owners.

Although there are many networked economic models organized on a module-platform basis, one of the most prominent is the phyle. The phyle was originally created in the fictional setting of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and David de Ugarte and his comrades in the Las Indias Cooperative Group adopted the term for the model de Ugarte discusses in his book Phyles: From Nations to Networks (exemplified in practice by the Las Indias phyle and its member enterprises). Draft Chapter Five of my online Desktop Regulatory State manuscript is an extended survey of modular networked economic platforms. The phyle model is especially relevant to Kleiner’s discussion of transnational cultural communities as the base for networked economic organizations. Both Stephenson’s fictional phyles and de Ugarte’s real-life model are based on international linguistic diasporas.

Kleiner proposes a finance model similar to the kind of bootstrapping envisioned in Ebenezer Howard’s original Garden City proposals: colonists would pool their resources to buy land at a far enough distance from existing population centers to be mostly vacant and cheap, and then finance municipal services with a tax on the rapidly appreciating value of the land.

The function of the venture commune is to acquire material assets that members need for living and working, such as equipment and tools, and allocate them to its members…. The members interested in having this property offer a rental agreement to the commune, giving the terms they wish to have for possession of this property. The commune issues a series of bonds to raise the funds required to acquire the property, when then becomes collateral for the bondholders. The rental agreement is offered as a guarantee that the funds will be available to redeem the bonds.

Rents over and above the amount required to service the bonds are issued as a dividend to all members equally — reminiscent of geolibertarian models influenced by Georgism and social credit that finance public services with taxes on economic rent and issue a basic income or citizen’s dividend to everyone.

The basic model is a good illustration of the broader anarchist principle summed up by the Wobbly slogan, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” It starts out within the interstices of the present system and, leveraging the superior productivity of free people voluntarily cooperating and using their full capabilities without interference from a managerial class that fears their initiative, growing until it supplants the preexisting system.

On Saturday, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp released four of its 136 uncharged detainees from custody. Six years late, Barack Obama is inching closer towards keeping his promise: “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that.” But as for the pledge to restore habeas corpus that accompanied his making an anti-Guantanamo stance central on the campaign trail, he’s not so inclined to “follow through on that.”

Obama told CNN that “there’s gonna be a certain irreducible number that are gonna be really hard cases, because we know they’ve done something wrong and they are still dangerous, but it’s difficult to mount the evidence in a traditional Article III court, so we’re gonna have to wrestle with that.” And yes, this is the same Obama who issued an executive order two days after becoming president aimed “promptly to close detention facilities at Guantanamo” stating clearly that “the individuals currently detained at Guantanamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.”

This is what democracy looks like.

It has taken the president until the lame-duck section of his second term to take such a baby step towards closing a facility which, even in purely realpolitik terms, is a liability on par with the Bastille of pre-revolutionary France (whose Ancien Regime could likely have hung on longer by making a show of releasing a couple of inmates now and then). Not that its cost making regular US prisons look like models of fiscal restraint gives pause to its unblinking defense by Nile Gardiner, the Heritage Foundation’s director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

Meanwhile, Voice of America shifts the blame to “obstacles imposed by the U.S. Congress,” a move reminiscent of bygone calls to “let Reagan be Reagan” and implement the laissez-faire he really wanted to all along.

Emma Goldman wrote in “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure” that “the natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to avenge a wrong, is out of date. Instead, the civilized man, stripped of courage and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the duty of avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is justified in doing what he no longer has the manhood or consistency to do. The majesty-of-the-law is a reasoning thing; it would not stoop to primitive instincts. Its mission is of a ‘higher’ nature.” A century later, the hypertrophied growth of the prison bureaucracy bears this out, as well as her insistence that “The hope of liberty and of opportunity is the only incentive to life, especially the prisoner’s life. Society has sinned so long against him — it ought at least to leave him that. I am not very sanguine that it will, or that any real change in that direction can take place until the conditions that breed both the prisoner and the jailer will be forever abolished.”

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, “Escape de la bahía de Guantánamo”

George H. Smith begins discussing the ideas of Bishop Butler.

Matt Peppe discusses the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the torture report.

Kevin Carson discusses the question that Michael Lind has yet to answer.

David Roediger discusses the defenders of police violence.

David Stockman discusses Wall Street crony capitalist plunder.

Sheldon Richman discusses getting away with torture.

David S. D’Amato discusses Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

Gary Leupp discusses Paul Wolfowitz and the torture report.

Jacob Sullum discusses why torture is always wrong.

Randall Holcombe discusses normalizing relations with Cuba.

Pat Kennelly discusses the year in Afghanistan.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the obscenity of respectable politics.

Laurence M. Vance discusses detainees in U.S. prisons.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses sexual autonomy.

Henry A. Giroux discusses America’s addiction to torture.

Stephen Kinzer discusses quitting Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jo-Marie Burt discusses the lesson of Latin America for the U.S.

Leon Hadar discusses a new neocon book.

Justin Raimondo discusses why the U.S. government tortured.

Uri Avnery discusses whether the U.S. will decline to veto a U.N. resolution unfavorable to the Israeli government.

Rob Urie discusses torture and state power.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the normalization of relations with Cuba.

Philip Peters discusses the chance for a new policy towards Cuba.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the difference between libertarians and conservatives on torture.

Andrew Levine discusses a Hilary victory.

Zoltan Grossman discusses how the war at home and war abroad are similar.

Lawrence Davidson discusses the futility of torture.

Mark Taimanov defeats Anatoly Karpov

Mark Taimanov defeats Alexsander A Shashin.

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roy A. Childs, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford.

The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important period of human history. I have attempted to give a straightforward summary of New Left revisionist findings in one area of domestic history: the antitrust movement and Progressive Era. But I have done so not as a New Leftist, not as a historian proper, but as a libertarian, that is, a social philosopher of a specific school.

In doing this summary, I have two interrelated purposes: first, to show Objectivists and libertarians that certain of their beliefs in history are wrong and need to be revised under the impact of new evidence, and simultaneously to illustrate to them a specific means of approaching historical problems, to identify one cause of the growth of American statism and to indicate a new way of looking at history.

Secondly, my purpose is to show New Left radicals that far from undermining the position of laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to what they call state capitalism, a system of government controls which is not yet socialism in the classic sense), their historical discoveries actually support the case for a totally free market. Then, too, I wish to illustrate how a libertarian would respond to the problems raised by New Left historians.

Finally, I wish implicitly to apply Occam’s razor by showing that there is a simpler explanation of events than that so often colored with Marxist theory. Without exception, Marxist postulates are not necessary to explain the facts of reality.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

In 1950, the US went to (undeclared, and under pro forma UN auspices) war with North Korea.

In 1953, the parties (the US, the UN, South Korea on one side, North Korea on the other) negotiated a cease-fire, which has now been in effect for 61 years.

Over the years, various incidents have occurred which strained the cease-fire. From the point of view of an American media consumer, most of those incidents (the taking of the USS Pueblo, sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, the artillery duel on and around Yeonpyeong, etc.) have been blamed on the north, but …

Earlier this year, Kim Jong-Un’s regime declared that the impending release of a film, The Interview, constituted an act of war. And we all laughed. Well, most of us laughed. I know I did.

Then, earlier this month, the studio releasing the film — an American subsidiary of a Japanese company — came under cyber attack by hackers unknown. Part of the fallout from that hack was disclosure that, well, the production and planned release of The Interview WAS pretty much an act of war. That is, the US government encouraged and facilitated its production for the clearly stated purpose of encouraging the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the overthrow of his regime.

Oops.

Now, most of us are probably still laughing.

I still was, until the Obama regime announced its certainty — unbacked by any disclosure of real evidence, that’s “classified,” see? — that the Kim regime was behind the hack and that the Obama regime plans some regime-to-regime retaliation.

Well, now. This shit is starting to get real all of a sudden, isn’t it?

Could the US go to back to open war with the DPRK over the matter? I’d like to laugh at that notion, too, but then I remember what the Obama regime has done or tried to do to individuals who have initiated embarrassing disclosures about it (the four who come immediately to mind are Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown).

When the US accuses a foreign government of doing things that it has jailed (or tried to jail) and exiled people for, war doesn’t really seem beyond the realm of likelihood. And the US government’s bellicosity abroad seems to run on the same cycle as its descents into banana republicanism and police statism at home. We’re at a pretty high tempo on the latter front right now, for reasons including but not limited to the Ferguson intifada. New attempts at Internet control and censorship here at home, with the Sony hack as an excuse, will almost certainly top the next session of Congress’s to-do list.

Kinda scary.

[cross-posted from KN@PPSTER]

Our pale blue dot has circled its star eighteen times since it lost the astronomer who gave us the perspective to see it that way — and that phrase.

Carl Sagan is not usually remembered as a political prophet, aside from pioneering recognition of the dangers of nuclear war and remaining an inspiration to opponents of drug criminalization. But his inquiry probed any political order’s taboo “set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about” (like the USSR’s “capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty” or the USA’s “socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty”). Otherwise, it would wither, as with antiquity’s Alexandrians who never “seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not.”

While not a radical leftist like his feminist wife and coauthor Ann Druyan or his New Leftist friend Saul Landau (who, in a sign of the up-in-the-air alliances of the times, contributed to the Cato Institute’s Inquiry Magazine), his liberalism was influenced by the ferment of SDS’s participatory democracy Whole Earth Catalog-style emancipatory technology. It was thus steadfastly in favor of civil liberties, people power, and sexual liberation, and highly wary of moral panics and calls to trade freedoms for security. Despite being vilified by a right dominated by National Review hawkishness, he sought common ground with pro-lifers. As he said of Albert Einstein, he “was always to detest rigid disciplinarians, in education, in science, and in politics,” and his distrust of politics was evident in proposing “[a] series in which we relive the media and the public falling hook, line and sinker for a coordinated government lie.”

He took note that the flowering of inquisitive, tolerant values in ancient Greece and Renaissance Holland grew from their trading economies; as his muse Bertrand Russell put it,

The relation of buyer and seller is one of negotiation between two parties who are both free; it is most profitable when the buyer or seller is able to understand the point of view of the other party. There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength.

His antidote for the existential crises of nuclear war and environmental damage was not consensus reasonable-centrism — he was apprehensive of the triumphalist The End of History prediction “that political life on Earth is about to settle into some rock-stable liberal democratic world government” — but the widest possible experimentation. He recommended two of the great science fiction depictions of functional stateless societies: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with its “useful suggestions… for making a revolution in a computerized technological society,” and Eric Frank Russell’s “conceivable alternative economic systems or the great efficiency of a unified passive resistance to an occupying power.” He hoped the inspiration of such ideas would make a reality “the beginning, much more than the end, of history.”

Recentemente, em um comentário a meu artigo “O caminho libertário para o igualitarismo“, o filósofo libertário Tibor R. Machan citou o livro de George Orwell A Revolução dos Bichos como exemplo do que acontece quando tentamos combater a desigualdade. Para Machan, a desigualdade é um “problema fabricado” e a história de Orwell é um alerta para os perigos da tentativa de corrigi-la. Ao ler seu comentário, fiquei um tanto perplexo, porque eu jamais havia interpretado A Revolução dos Bichos dessa maneira. Desde que li o livro pela primeira vez, minha leitura indicava um alerta quase oposto ao indicado por Machan.

Parecia-me então, como agora, que A Revolução dos Bichos faz uma advertência a respeito dos problemas da desigualdade, o resultado da concessão de direitos e privilégios a uma classe política dominante. Orwell habilidosamente ilustra o problema fundamental da autoridade política, seus conflitos inerentes e seus incentivos que favorecem o abuso do poder e que rapidamente enterram grandes ideais filosóficos. O ponto principal de Orwell era que os porcos nunca levam a sério sua retórica de igualdade e de restabelecimento da fazenda em termos mais igualitários — que quase imediatamente passam a tomar vantagem de sua posição desigual na fazenda para explorar o resto dos animais e concentrar os luxos para seu usufruto particular. A Revolução dos Bichos, assim, sucintamente demonstra a conexão entre o poder político e o poder econômico. Quando a desigualdade naquele é instituída como fato legal, a desigualdade neste se segue inexoravelmente. Os libertários de livre mercado normalmente ficam desconfortáveis com as condenações de esquerda à desigualdade econômica, alegando que, em princípio, o libertarianismo não tem qualquer problema com a desigualdade.

Afinal, se favorecemos os direitos individuais, a competição aberta e a propriedade privada, devemos aceitar quaisquer resultados que se seguirem dessas premissas. Estritamente, tudo isso é verdade. Parece-me, porém, que uma crítica social libertária precisa incluir uma crítica à desigualdade econômica como sintoma da falta de liberdade econômica e das persistentes interferências do poder político em favor das elites ricas. Em seu estudo biográfico de Thomas Hodgskin, o historiador David Stack descreve a crença de Hodgskin de que “o trabalhador poderia ser liberado através da aplicação consistente da moralidade burguesa”. Para Hodgskin, Stack afirma, “a desigualdade e a miséria, a ordem social e a antipaz” eram todas funções da legislação, impostas artificialmente e não resultantes de “quaisquer desigualdades inerentes no sistema de produção”. Se as injustiças econômicas existentes resultam da lei positiva, então “restrições socialistas ao laissez faire estavam enganadas”. Hodgskin viveu e escreveu seus trabalhos numa época em que era mais fácil articular uma visão que fosse tanto liberal quanto socialista. O legado pouco apreciado de pensadores como Hodgskin avança o argumento (frequente aqui no Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado) de que os libertários devem desconfiar do termo “capitalismo” em vez de trombeteá-lo como algo que favorecemos.

Como Hodgskin, os anarquistas de mercado atuais não se opõem ao fato de que o capital é compensado como parte do processo de produção. A preocupação — que só pode ser aplacada pela adoção de um ora hipotético livre mercado — é que o capital seja supercompensado devido à posição de privilégio que o estado confere a ele. Escreveu Hodgskin: “Ficamos tentados a pensar que capital é como uma palavra cabalística, tal qual Igreja ou Estado, ou quaisquer outros termos gerais que são inventados por aqueles que tosam a humanidade para esconder as mãos com a tesoura. É um tipo de ídolo perante os quais os homens devem se prostrar (…).” Entre os insights principais de Hodgskin, normalmente ignorados pela maioria dos defensores do livre mercado, está a ideia de que o comércio em si não prova a ausência de exploração. As trocas desiguais são exploratórias no momento em que uma das partes têm vantagens injustas ganhas através de intervenções coercitivas ou restrições à competição. No nível micro, as trocas desiguais se manifestam, por exemplo, em relações de emprego ou em acordos de bens ou serviços de consumo. Em uma escala maior, análises sobre trocas desiguais podem auxiliar nosso entendimento sobre a forma pela qual os países pobres e em desenvolvimento interagem economicamente com o Ocidente desenvolvido.

No mundo de A Revolução dos Bichos, os porcos empregavam a violência como maneira de preservar sua posição de poder; os outros animais trabalhavam cada vez mais em troca de menores pagamentos, enquanto os porcos eram os senhores da Granja dos Bichos — nome que foi eventualmente revertido ao original Granja do Solar. O mantra original “Todos os animais são iguais” foi gradualmente, quase imperceptivelmente, suplantado pela ideia de que “alguns animais são mais iguais que outros”. A interpretação de Machan de A Revolução dos Bichos esquece que Orwell era um socialista e, como o estudioso de Orwell Craig L. Carr observa, o livro é um alerta bastante direto a respeito da “traição do ideal igualitário”. Após a revolução dos porcos, com a queda do sr. Jones, permaneceu “[um] sistema econômico que legitimava a desigualdade material”. Orwell tinha bastante interesse no uso da língua. Em toda a sua obra, inclusive em A Revolução dos Bichos, gestos políticos são os mecanismos através dos quais os objetivos nobres da revolução se tornam “coerentes com o privilégio e a posição de superioridade da classe dominante”. Os termos usados pelo libertarianismo e pelo livre mercado similarmente são importantes aos beneficiários dos privilégios econômicos. Sem eles, as pessoas reconheceriam o que de fato é o poder corporativo: algo criado pela violência e coerção políticas, um sistema de classes tão real, observável e quantificável quanto qualquer outro anterior. Criticar a desigualdade deve ser importante para o libertarianismo porque devemos levar a sério nossas ideias em favor do livre mercado e devemos considerar a economia política atual como muito distante de nosso modelo. Os libertários, da mesma maneira, devem estar abertos ao socialismo e à análise de classes presente no trabalho de esquerdistas como Hodgskin e Orwell. É hora de começarmos a enfatizar tanto a liberdade quanto a igualdade, não somente uma ou outra.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second.

Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray Rothbard, Austrian economists generally, and others have long pointed out. It overlooks, for example, the factor of potential competition. If a lone seller knows that someone could challenge his “monopoly” by entering the market, that will tend to influence the seller’s pricing and service policies. Is he then really a monopolist even if, for the time being, he’s alone in the market?

In deciding who is a monopolist, we also face the problem of defining the relevant market. The Federal Trade Commission once charged the top few ready-to-eat breakfast cereal companies with monopolizing “the market.” But what market? The FTC meant the market for ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. But that’s not all that people eat or can eat for breakfast. If you define the relevant market to include bacon and eggs; oatmeal; yogurt; English muffins and butter; bagels, lox, and cream cheese; breakfast burritos; and anything else people may find appealing in the morning, a “monopoly” in ready-to-eat cereals looks rather different. Even a single cereal seller (assuming no government privilege) could not price his product without taking into account what his rivals in other foods, and consumers, were doing. He could not even be sure who his rivals were until they arose in response to his consumer-alienating actions.

The conventional notion of monopoly has also been subjected to the reductio ad absurdum. In deciding who is a monopolist, where do we stop? Only one shop can occupy the northeast corner of Elm and Main in Anytown. A particular consumer could decide it’s too costly in time or effort to cross the street and buy at the rival shop on the northwest corner. Does that make the first shop a monopoly?

I have exclusive domain over my own labor services and tools (laptop, etc.). The same is true for each reader. Does that make us all monopolists? If so, how useful is the concept? (Much of what I’ve learned over many years about monopoly and antitrust I learned from Dominick T. Armentano. See Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure.)

Ludwig von Mises, I should acknowledge, believed that in theory there could be “instances of monopoly prices [harmful to consumers] which would appear also on a market not hampered and sabotaged by the interference of the various national governments and by conspiracies between groups of governments.” However, he added, these “are of minor importance. They concern some raw materials the deposits of which are few and geographically concentrated, and local limited-space monopolies.”

In chapter 10 of Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard critiqued the concept monopoly price as useless in a free-market context because identifying it would require knowledge of a product’scompetitive price, which itself cannott be identified. All we can observe is the price that emerges from buying and selling on the market. Other Austrian economists, such as Israel Kirzner, think Mises was right.

Adam Smith’s approach to monopoly makes more sense than the mainstream neoclassical view. To Smith, monopoly denoted a privilege, a legal barrier to competition, such as a license or a franchise — in other words, a grant from the state. Anyone who attempted to compete with the monopolist would run afoul of the law and be suppressed by force, because that’s how the state assures its decrees are faithfully carried out. When someone whose actions are consonant with natural rights is suppressed by force, that is aggression.

Hence my claim that the concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Monopoly-building interventions take forms other than outright franchises and licenses. Tariffs and other restrictions on foreign-made consumer goods impose monopolistic, or at least oligopolistic, burdens on consumers by preventing or hampering competition from producers outside the country and thereby raising prices. If the restricted goods are producers’ goods, they burden domestic manufacturers as well as consumers.

Intellectual-property laws — patents, copyrights, and the like — have a similar effect by hampering competition through prohibitions on the use of knowledge and forms that people possess mentally. The creation of an artificial property right through patents is practically indistinguishable from a franchise or license. Its harm to consumers is the same.

Frédéric Bastiat appears to have understood this, though he was not always clear. (Yes, this whole thing has been an excuse to write about one of my favorite thinkers.) In his unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, Bastiat said some interesting things that bear on this issue.

Bastiat praised the competitive market process — where the state abstains from plunder on behalf of any special interests — precisely because it transfers “real wealth constantly … from the domain of private property into the communal domain.” (I detail his argument in “Bastiat on the Socialization of Wealth.”) What he meant was that, when economizing, profit-seeking producers substitute the free services of nature (water, gravity, electricity, wind, etc.) for onerous human labor, competition drives down prices to reflect the lower production costs. When consumers obtain the same or greater utility at a lower price, they enjoy free of charge some of the utility they previously had to pay for with their labor. Innovation-with-competition delivers the fruits of the services of nature gratis, and the whole community benefits.

This is why Bastiat said that the market transfers wealth from the realm of private property to the “communal realm.” Producers who formerly reaped returns on human services that provided utility to consumers now instead employ nature’s services from which they can reap no return at all. As a result, we all get increasing amounts of free stuff.

But free competition is crucial. Bastiat used the example of a producer, John, who invents a new process “whereby he can complete his task with half the labor it previously took, everything included, even the cost of making the implement used to harness the forces of Nature.” In that case, Bastiat writes, “as long as he keeps his secret, there will be no change” in his product’s price, that is, its exchange ratio with other goods.

(For Bastiat, prices are formed, not according to the amount of labor that goes into goods, but by the toil and trouble, subjectively conceived, that consumers are saved by engaging in exchanges of services rather than by producing goods for themselves. He calls the English economists’ axiom Value comes from labor “treacherous.”)

Why will there be no change in price, or what Bastiat calls “value”? “Because,” he replies, “the service is the same. The person furnishing [the good] performs the same service before as after the invention.” So long as John can keep his secret, other things equal, the terms of exchange will remain unchanged.

The important question is: how long can John keep his secret? Bastiat went on to say that the old price will fall “when Peter, [a consumer and producer of another good to be offered in exchange],can say to John: ‘You ask me for two hours of my labor in exchange for one of yours; but I am familiar with your process, and if you place such a high price on your service, I shall do it for myself’” (emphasis added).

Bastiat is clearly happy about this. I interpret this to mean that he did not approve of patents, which would prevent Peter from exploiting his knowledge of John’s invention in order to save himself (and other people) money.

In fact, Bastiat follows up that passage with this:

Now this day comes inevitably. When a new process is invented, it does not remain a secret for long. [Emphasis added.]

The resulting fall in price “represents value [not to be confused with utility] eliminated, relative wealth that has disappeared, private property made public [emphasis added], utility previously onerous, now gratuitous.” (As my earlier article notes, Bastiat expected this kind of talk to get him accused of being a communist. Can you imagine?)

What I want to emphasize is this: in Economic Harmonies, which Bastiat wrote late in life and despite what he may have said elsewhere (and in distinguishing between patents and copyright, he was by no means unambiguous), he appeared not to regret that an inventor was unable reap returns by forcibly thwarting imitators. (In a letter, he wrote, “I must admit that I attach immense and extremely beneficial importance to imitation.” Hat tip: David Hart of Liberty Fund.) He expressed no concern that imitation would discourage innovation.

So-called intellectual property is the dominant engine of monopoly in modern economies. Fortunately, cheap technology makes enforcement increasingly difficult, and we may look forward to the day when it disappears entirely. Which underscores my point: to rid society of monopoly we must rid society of aggression.