The following article was written by Stephen Jay Gould and originally appeared in Natural History 106, June 1997.

In late 1909, two great men corresponded across oceans, religions, generations, and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian nonviolence in his later years, wrote to the young Mohandas Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian settlers in South Africa:

God helps our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal. The same struggle of the tender against the harsh, of meekness and love against pride and violence, is every year making itself more and more felt here among us also.

A year later, wearied by domestic strife, and unable to endure the contradiction of life in Christian poverty on a prosperous estate run with unwelcome income from his great novels (written before his religious conversion and published by his wife), Tolstoy fled by train for parts unknown and a simpler end to his waning days. He wrote to his wife:

My departure will distress you. I’m sorry about this, but do understand and believe that I couldn’t do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming, or has become, unbearable. Apart from anything else, I can’t live any longer in these conditions of luxury in which I have been living, and I’m doing what old men of my age commonly do: leaving this worldly life in order to live the last days of my life in peace and solitude.

But Tolstoy’s final journey was both brief and unhappy. Less than a month later, cold and weary from numerous long rides on Russian trains in approaching winter, he contracted pneumonia and died at age eighty-two in the stationmaster’s home at the railroad stop of Astapovo. Too weak to write, he dictated his last letter on November 1, 1910. Addressed to a son and daughter who did not share his views on Christian nonviolence, Tolstoy offered a last word of advice:

The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and the struggle for existence won’t explain to you the meaning of your life and won’t give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it. I say it, probably on the eve of my death, because I love you.

Tolstoy’s complaint has been the most common of all indictments against Darwin, from the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 to now. Darwinism, the charge contends, undermines morality by claiming that success in nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle – the “struggle for existence” or “survival of the fittest” to cite Darwin’s own choice of mottoes. If we wish “meekness and love” to triumph over “pride and violence” (as Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi), then we must repudiate Darwin’s vision of nature’s way – as Tolstoy stated in a final plea to his errant children.

This charge against Darwin is unfair for two reasons. First, nature (no matter how cruel in human terms) provides no basis for our moral values. (Evolution might, at most, help to explain why we have moral feelings, but nature can never decide for us whether any particular action is right or wrong.) Second, Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts. In a famous passage, Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary struggle (Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 62-63):

I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought…. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.

Yet, in another sense, Tolstoy’s complaint is not entirely unfounded. Darwin did present an encompassing, metaphorical definition of struggle, but his actual examples certainly favored bloody battle – “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in a line from Tennyson so overquoted that it soon became a knee-jerk cliche for this view of life. Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the dismal view of Malthus that growth in population must outstrip food supply and lead to overt battle for dwindling resources. Moreover, Darwin maintained a limited but controlling view of ecology as a world stuffed full of competing species – so balanced and so crowded that a new form could only gain entry by literally pushing a former inhabitant out. Darwin expressed this view in a metaphor even more central to his general vision than the concept of struggle – the metaphor of the wedge. Nature, Darwin writes, is like a surface with 10,000 wedges hammered tightly in and filling all available space. A new species (represented as a wedge) can only gain entry into a community by driving itself into a tiny chink and forcing another wedge out. Success, in this vision, can only be achieved by direct takeover in overt competition.

Furthermore, Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, advanced this “gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word) in a series of famous essays about ethics. Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody battle defined nature’s way as nonmoral (not explicitly immoral, but surely unsuited as offering any guide to moral behavior).

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

But Huxley then goes further. Any human society set up along these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and misery – Hobbes’s brutal world of bellum omnium contra omnes (where bellum means “war,” not beauty): the war of all against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in mitigation of the struggle that defines nature’s pathway. Study natural selection and do the opposite in human society:

But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope for human social decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters – nature is nasty and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to avoid in human society. My own preference lies with a different solution based on taking Darwin’s metaphorical view of struggle seriously (admittedly in the face of Darwin’s own preference for gladiatorial examples) – nature is sometimes nasty, sometimes nice (really neither, since the human terms are so inappropriate). By presenting examples of all behaviors (under the metaphorical rubric of struggle), nature favors none and offers no guidelines. The facts of nature cannot provide moral guidance in any case.

But a third solution has been advocated by some thinkers who do wish to find a basis for morality in nature and evolution. Since few can detect much moral comfort in the gladiatorial interpretation, this third position must reformulate the way of nature. Darwin’s words about the metaphorical character of struggle offer a promising starting point. One might argue that the gladiatorial examples have been over-sold and misrepresented as predominant. Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances.

The most famous expression of this third solution may be found in Mutual Aid, published in 1902 by the Russian revolutionary anarchist Petr Kropotkin. (We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. Kropotkin was a genial man, almost saintly according to some, who promoted a vision of small communities setting their own standards by consensus for the benefit of all, thereby eliminating the need for most functions of a central government.) Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, lived in English exile for political reasons. He wrote Mutual Aid (in English) as a direct response to the essay of Huxley quoted above, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” published in The Nineteenth Century, in February 1888. Kropotkin responded to Huxley with a series of articles, also printed in The Nineteenth Century and eventually collected together as the book Mutual Aid.

As the title suggests, Kropotkin argues, in his cardinal premise, that the struggle for existence usually leads to mutual aid rather than combat as the chief criterion of evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build upon our natural inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley held) in formulating a moral order that will bring both peace and prosperity to our species. in a series of chapters, Kropotkin tries to illustrate continuity between natural selection for mutual aid among animals and the basis for success in increasingly progressive human social organization. His five sequential chapters address mutual aid among animals, among savages, among barbarians, in the medieval city, and amongst ourselves.

I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly idiosyncratic, if undeniably well meaning. He is always so presented in standard courses on evolutionary biology – as one of those soft and woolly thinkers who let hope and sentimentality get in the way of analytic toughness and a willingness to accept nature as she is, warts and all. After all, he was a man of strange politics and unworkable ideals, wrenched from the context of his youth, a stranger in a strange land. Moreover, his portrayal of Darwin so matched his social ideals (mutual aid naturally given as a product of evolution without need for central authority) that one could only see personal hope rather than scientific accuracy in his accounts. Kropotkin has long been on my list of potential topics for an essay (if only because I wanted to read his book, and not merely mouth the textbook interpretation), but I never proceeded because I could find no larger context than the man himself. Kooky intellects are interesting as gossip, perhaps as psychology, but true idiosyncrasy provides the worst possible basis for generality.

But this situation changed for me in a flash when I read a very fine article in the latest issue of Isis (our leading professional journal in the history of science) by Daniel P. Todes: “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917.” I learned that the parochiality had been mine in my ignorance of Russian evolutionary thought, not Kropotkin’s in his isolation in England. (I can read Russian, but only painfully, and with a dictionary – which means, for all practical purposes, that I can’t read the language.) I knew that Darwin had become a hero of the Russian intelligentsia and had influenced academic life in Russia perhaps more than in any other country. But virtually none of this Russian work has ever been translated or even discussed in English literature. The ideas of this school are unknown to us; we do not even recognize the names of the major protagonists. I knew Kropotkin because he had published in English and lived in England, but I never understood that he represented a standard, well-developed Russian critique of Darwin, based on interesting reasons and coherent national traditions. Todes’s article does not make Kropotkin more correct, but it does place his writing into a general context that demands our respect and produces substantial enlightenment. Kropotkin was part of a mainstream flowing in an unfamiliar direction, not an isolated little arroyo.

This Russian school of Darwinian critics, Todes argues, based its major premise upon a firm rejection of Malthus’s claim that competition, in the gladiatorial mode, must dominate in an ever more crowded world, where population, growing geometrically, inevitably outstrips a food supply that can only increase arithmetically. Tolstoy, speaking for a consensus of his compatriots, branded Malthus as a “malicious mediocrity.”

Todes finds a diverse set of reasons behind Russian hostility to Malthus. Political objections to the dog-eat-dog character of Western industrial competition arose from both ends of the Russian spectrum. Todes writes:

Radicals, who hoped to build a socialist society, saw Malthusianism as a reactionary current in bourgeois political economy. Conservatives, who hoped to preserve the communal virtues of tsarist Russia, saw it as an expression of the “British national type.”

But Todes identifies a far more interesting reason in the immediate experience of Russia’s land and natural history. We all have a tendency to spin universal theories from a limited domain of surrounding circumstance. Many geneticists read the entire world of evolution in the confines of a laboratory bottle filled with fruit flies. My own increasing dubiousness about universal adaptation arises in large part, no doubt, because I study a peculiar snail that varies so widely and capriciously across an apparently unvarying environment, rather than a bird in flight or some other marvel of natural design.

Russia is an immense country, under-populated by any nineteenth-century measure of its agricultural potential. Russia is also, over most of its area, a harsh land, where competition is more likely to pit organism against environment (as in Darwin’s metaphorical struggle of a plant at the desert’s edge) than organism against organism in direct and bloody battle. How could any Russian, with a strong feel for his own countryside, see Malthus’s principle of overpopulation as a foundation for evolutionary theory? Todes writes:

It was foreign to their experience because, quite simply, Russia’s huge land mass dwarfed its sparse population. For a Russian to see an inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential supplies of food and space required quite a leap of imagination.

If these Russian critics could honestly tie their personal skepticism to the view from their own backyard, they could also recognize that Darwin’s contrary enthusiasms might record the parochiality of his different surroundings, rather than a set of necessarily universal truths. Malthus makes a far better prophet in a crowded, industrial country professing an ideal of open competition in free markets. Moreover, the point has often been made that both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of natural selection after primary experience with natural history in the tropics. Both claimed inspiration from Malthus, again independently; but if fortune favors the prepared mind, then their tropical experience probably predisposed both men to read Malthus with resonance and approval. No other area on earth is so packed with species, and therefore so replete with competition of body against body. An Englishman who had learned the ways of nature in the tropics was almost bound to view evolution differently from a Russian nurtured on tales of the Siberian wasteland.

For example, N. I. Danilevsky, an expert on fisheries and population dynamics, published a large, two-volume critique of Darwinism in 1885. He identified struggle for personal gain as the credo of a distinctly British “national type,” as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism. An English child, he writes, “boxes one on one, not in a group as we Russians like to spar.” Danilevsky viewed Darwinian competition as “a purely English doctrine” founded upon a line of British thought stretching from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Malthus. Natural selection, he wrote, is rooted in “the war of all against all, now termed the struggle for existence – Hobbes’ theory of politics; on competition – the economic theory of Adam Smith. … Malthus applied the very same principle to the problem of population. … Darwin extended both Malthus’ partial theory and the general theory of the political economists to the organic world.” (Quotes are from Todes’s article.)

When we turn to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in the light of Todes’s discoveries about Russian evolutionary thought, we must reverse the traditional view and interpret this work as mainstream Russian criticism, not personal crankiness. The central logic of Kropotkin’s argument is simple, straightforward, and largely cogent.

Kropotkin begins by acknowledging that struggle plays a central role in the lives of organisms and also provides the chief impetus for their evolution. But Kropotkin holds that struggle must not be viewed as a unitary phenomenon. It must be divided into two fundamentally different forms with contrary evolutionary meanings. We must recognize, first of all, the struggle of organism against organism for limited resources – the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as gladiatorial. This form of direct struggle does lead to competition for personal benefit.

But a second form of struggle – the style that Darwin called metaphorical – pits organism against the harshness of surrounding physical environments, not against other members of the same species. Organisms must struggle to keep warm, to survive the sudden and unpredictable dangers of fire and storm, to persevere through harsh periods of drought, snow, or pestilence. These forms of struggle between organism and environment are best waged by cooperation among members of the same species-by mutual aid. If the struggle for existence pits two lions against one zebra, then we shall witness a feline battle and an equine carnage. But if lions are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate environment, then lighting will not remove the common enemy – while cooperation may overcome a peril beyond the power of any single individual to surmount.

Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general notion of struggle – two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation.

No naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life carried on through organic nature is the greatest generalization of our century. Life is struggle; and in that struggle the fittest survive. But the answers to the questions “by which arms is the struggle chiefly carried on!” and “who are the fittest in the struggle!” will widely differ according to the importance given to the two different aspects of the struggle: the direct one, for food and safety among separate individuals, and the struggle which Darwin described as “metaphorical” – the struggle, very often collective, against adverse circumstances.

Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed, but his loyalty to Malthus and his vision of nature chock-full of species led him to emphasize the competitive aspect. Darwin’s less sophisticated votaries then exalted the competitive view to near exclusivity, and heaped a social and moral meaning upon it as well.

They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another’s blood. They made modern literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology. They raised the “pitiless” struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination.

Kropotkin did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but he argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole.

There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense…. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

As Kropotkin cranked through his selected examples, and built up steam for his own preferences, he became more and more convinced that the cooperative style, leading to mutual aid, not only predominated in general but also characterized the most advanced creatures in any group-ants among insects, mammals among vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore becomes a more important principle than competition and slaughter:

If we … ask Nature: “who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.

If we ask why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most nineteenth-century Darwinians advocated competition as the predominant result of struggle in nature, two major reasons stand out. The first seems less interesting, as obvious under the slightly cynical but utterly realistic principle that true believers tend to read their social preferences into nature. Kropotkin, the anarchist who yearned to replace laws of central government with consensus of local communities, certainly hoped to locate a deep preference for mutual aid in the innermost evolutionary marrow of our being. Let mutual aid pervade nature and human cooperation becomes a simple instance of the law of life.

Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.

But the second reason is more enlightening, as a welcome empirical input from Kropotkin’s own experience as a naturalist and an affirmation of Todes’s intriguing thesis that the usual flow from ideology to interpretation of nature may sometimes be reversed, and that landscape can color social preference. As a young man, long before his conversion to political radicalism, Kropotkin spent five years in Siberia (1862-1866) just after Darwin published the Origin of Species. He went as a military officer, but his commission served as a convenient cover for his yearning to study the geology, geography, and zoology of Russia’s vast interior. There, in the polar opposite to Darwin’s tropical experiences, he dwelled in the environment least conducive to Malthus’s vision. He observed a sparsely populated world, swept with frequent catastrophes that threatened the few species able to find a place in such bleakness. As a potential disciple of Darwin, he looked for competition, but rarely found any. Instead, he continually observed the benefits of mutual aid in coping with an exterior harshness that threatened all alike and could not be overcome by the analogues of warfare and boxing.

Kropotkin, in short, had a personal and empirical reason to look with favor upon cooperation as a natural force. He chose this theme as the opening paragraph for Mutual Aid:

Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.

What can we make of Kropotkin’s argument today, and that of the entire Russian school represented by him? Were they just victims of cultural hope and intellectual conservatism? I don’t think so. In fact, I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.

I would fault Kropotkin only in two ways – one technical, the other general. He did commit a common conceptual error in failing to recognize that natural selection is an argument about advantages to individual organisms, however they may struggle. The result of struggle for existence may be cooperation rather than competition, but mutual aid must benefit individual organisms in Darwin’s world of explanation. Kropotkin sometimes speaks of mutual aid as selected for the benefit of entire populations or species – a concept foreign to classic Darwinian logic (where organisms work, albeit unconsciously, for their own benefit in terms of genes passed to future generations). But Kropotkin also (and often) recognized that selection for mutual aid directly benefits each individual in its own struggle for personal success. Thus, if Kropotkin did not grasp the full implication of Darwin’s basic argument, he did include the orthodox solution as his primary justification for mutual aid.

More generally, I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of thumb in judging arguments about nature that also have overt social implications: When such claims imbue nature with just those properties that make us feel good or fuel our prejudices, be doubly suspicious. I am especially wary of arguments that find kindness, mutuality, synergism, harmony – the very elements that we strive mightily, and so often unsuccessfully, to put into our own lives – intrinsically in nature. I see no evidence for Teilhard’s noosphere, for Capra’s California style of holism, for Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Gaia strikes me as a metaphor, not a mechanism. (Metaphors can be liberating and enlightening, but new scientific theories must supply new statements about causality. Gaia, to me, only seems to reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long achieved by classically reductionist arguments of biogeochemical cycling theory.)

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms – if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us – the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.

Well, that didn’t take long. The morning after The New York Times Magazine publishes the Gray Lady’s most charitable and understanding in-depth treatment of libertarianism since the modern movement’s emergence in the 1970s, Paul Krugman had ready his obligatory harrumphing dismissal.

Getting into his economic-wonk comfort zone as quickly as possible, Krugman perfunctorily brushes past the entire actual topic of the magazine article, the appeal of libertarianism to today’s youth, with this: “Polling suggests that young Americans tend, if anything, to be more supportive of the case for a bigger government than their elders.” (Which kind of depends on how you interpret the polls.) But then, keeping up with cultural zeitgeist is not exactly the strong suit of Mr. Twinkie Manifesto who, between his declaration that “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost” (rightly pegged by actual leftist Arun Gupta as “mush-brained“), what Brink Lindsey dubs his nostalgianomics, his lamenting “the breakdown of marriage“, and his reliance on hoary references to Atlas Shrugged (“basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America”) as a proxy for libertarian attitudes, hasn’t gotten past the 1950s. A generation whose view of government is the rot of Game of Thrones rather than the G-Men of The F.B.I., and whose notion of heroic business owes more to the Hunger Games series’s black-market bazaar, The Hob, than to captains of industry, does not compute in that Pleasantville worldview. (The Times‘s Dave Kehr is more perceptive: whereas the H.G. Wells film Things to Come‘s portrayal of a decentralized period before the ascendance of a purportedly-beneficent world government was “a vision of hell to a progressive like Wells”, now “it looks like a land of opportunity, free from corporate oppression and technological tyranny. With her trusty bow and arrow, Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen would feel right at home”.)

Krugman waves a single word at libertarian economics like a vampire hunter’s crucifix: “phosphorous”.  (Not “phlogiston“?) The chemical’s contamination of Lake Erie is treated as a prime example of a problem which self-evidently can be fixed only by the regulatory apparatus of a benevolent government. Did somebody say water pollution? Charles Johnson elucidates that

statist anti-pollution laws are stopping small, local environmental groups from actually taking direct, simple steps toward containing the lethal pollution that is constantly running into their communities’ rivers — and … big national environmental groups are lobbying hard to make sure that the smaller, grassroots environmental groups keep getting blocked by the Feds.

No mention is made of the decades of substantial libertarian literature dealing with pollution, much of it specifically about water pollution. Murray Rothbard treated the pollution problem in a detailed section in his 1973 For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto and a lengthy 1982 article for the Cato Institute [PDF]. How far Rothbard’s take is from the visceral denialist, pro-existing-industry view of conservatives like, well, Paul Ryan (Krugman’s Exhibit A of libertarian “projection”), can be gleaned from his noting that “denial of the very existence of the [pollution] problem is to deny science itself”, that

if governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology will — and has — become a water-polluting technology. If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then that is the sort of production technology we will have.

and, most of all, that

The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton.

Even the most cursory glance over the 1971 New York Times Magazine article “The New Right Credo — Libertarianism”, which is directly mentioned in the new NYTM piece, would reveal its lengthy section on the ill effects of pollution, which is mentioned no less than 17 times. (Not to mention that it’s also harshly critical of car culture.  But then again, what is more exemplary of the postwar Keynesian economy than the auto industry, with its triopoly stability and propped-up consumer demand?)

Krugman’s entire rejoinder to Milton Friedman’s proposal that tort law could effectively replace the regulatory state as a check on corporate power (only one of enough such examples to fill a book) — and his only actual attempt at addressing free-market proposals at all — is: “Really?” Really. Never mind that exactly that approach has been championed by no less of a foe of corporate power than Ralph Nader, much to the chagrin of more statist leftists like Doug Henwood, who chides Nader that tort “[l]itigation is an individualized solution to broad economic and social conflicts whose proper arena is politics, not the courtroom.” And while Krugman feebly notes the correlation that “people who denounce big government also tend to call for tort reform and attack trial lawyers”, Nader has never passed up an opportunity to note how “tort reform” and limitations on legal liability fly in the face of any consistent adherence to free-market principles.

Krugman sees the idea that “welfare programs are wasting vast sums on bureaucracy rather than helping the poor” to be as fictional as Ayn Rand’s novels. (At least he’s giving libertarians the credit of thinking that “helping the poor” is a good thing. And why not replace what little bureaucracy exists with direct payments to the poor?) Never mind the cutting criticism of the welfare state’s supposed beneficence from the real left’s Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as summarized by the New York Times itself:

Historically, they argue, public relief has served to regulate the poor, not assist them; to defuse political turmoil and discipline the labor force. From the Middle Ages, governments have extended relief whenever mass unemployment caused by economic dislocation begins to threaten political order. Once such flashpoints are passed, the relief rolls are constricted; whatever residual assistance remains is administered in such a harsh and degrading fashion as to stand warning for the laboring poor.

As an example of how out of touch libertarians are, Krugman notes that his experiences with the D.M.V. “have generally been fairly good… and I’m sure many libertarians would, if they were honest, admit that their own D.M.V. dealings weren’t too bad”. Few would say the same about the D.E.A.

Wrapping up his purported case that libertarian economics and antigovernment sentiment “is a foolish fantasy”, Krugman concludes that the American left-right spectrum will be undisturbed by libertarianism: “despite America’s growing social liberalism, real power on the right still rests with the traditional alliance between plutocrats and preachers.” But with the memory of the mid-20th-century Cold and culture wars fading, it is increasingly likely that such a Reaganite alliance will not define the future. Let the plutocrats and theocrats huddle together with the bureaucrats. Free-market entrepreneurs and sincere religious believers will no longer be their captive constituency, leaving their increasingly hollow power behind to join with their true worker and free-to-be comrades in a live-and-let-live, pluralistic, post-Twinkie world.

Last night, police in Ferguson, MO were lobbing Super-Sock cartridges into the crowds gathered to protest the fatal shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown. Brown was shot eight times, witnesses say he had his hands in the air. He was shot several times in the back.

A Super-Sock cartridge used in #Ferguson last night – "can result in serious or fatal injury" http://t.co/ATpCtqliIl pic.twitter.com/dnmWWSStPt

— Toby Harnden (@tobyharnden) August 14, 2014

At the same time, police were tear gassing reporters with Al-Jazeera America and taking apart their video equipment so they could not record the police’s actions.

Image of #Ferguson cops gassing @ajam crew &dismantling their gear is bad. The video is worse: http://t.co/zBDSoB89N0 pic.twitter.com/f6BnEzJpm4

— Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) August 14, 2014

They were also arresting Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly. The Federal Aviation Authority declared Ferguson a no-fly zone, preventing news crews from filming aerially.

The Economist:

The shooting comes not long after Eric Garner, another black man, was killed during a choke-hold arrest in New York. Last year an unarmed man called Jonathan Ferrell was shot ten times by a North Carolina police officer. “People are asking: ‘Is it open season on us?’,” says Delores Jones-Brown, director of the John Jay College on Race, Crime and Justice.

Jackie Summers: #Ferguson

The Civil Rights Act is 50 years old. These two pictures were taken 50 years apart. Behold our progress. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/8PNn8eteO2

— Jackie Summers (@jackfrombkln) August 13, 2014

Em um artigo que sem dúvida vai acelerar os corações mais “progressistas” (“The 1% May Be Richer Than You Think, Research Shows“, Bloomberg, 7 de agosto), Jeanna Smialek sugere que a riqueza do 1% mais rico da população é muito maior do que as estatísticas oficiais indicam — e que, como grande parte dessa riqueza é mantida em paraísos fiscais no exterior, os esforços do governo em reduzir a desigualdade através de impostos e de políticas assistenciais são frustrados.

Para ser equilibrada em sua reportagem, Smialek menciona a afirmação de Tyler Cowen de que as “pessoas se preocupam demais com o 1% mais rico” e de que não importa qual a riqueza de Bill Gates se “os pobres acabam em melhor situação nesse processo”.

Isso é uma completa e absoluta idiotice. Se a riqueza de Bill Gates advém do roubo das outras pessoas, então a desigualdade certamente importa. Todos acabam em situação pior do que aquela em que estariam — por definição — na mesma proporção da riqueza que Gates roubou delas.

É foi exatamente assim que Bill Gates conseguiu sua fortuna: pelo roubo dos consumidores. Sem os monopólios de copyrights e patentes sobre o Windows, ele teria que ganhar dinheiro da mesma forma que uma distribuição do Linux ganha, com suporte técnico e serviços de personalização para programas gratuitos. Sejamos generosos aqui e digamos que ele fosse ser capaz de acumular 10 milhões de dólares. É um montante cerca de 1/10.000 do tamanho máximo alcançado por sua fortuna, US$ 100 bilhões. Isso significa que somente um centésimo de um por cento da riqueza de Gates não é roubada.

Você pode achar que isso fortalece o argumento de Smialek em defesa de maior regulamentação e mais impostos progressivos sobre os ricos. Na verdade, ocorre o oposto. A única forma pela qual a justiça poderia ser servida seria com impostos de 99,99% sobre Gates, o que o deixaria com a quantia de dinheiro que ele conseguiu acumular honestamente. E o mesmo pode ser dito de qualquer fortuna que chegue à casa das centenas de milhões ou bilhões. Simplesmente não há nenhum jeito de chegar a esse nível de riqueza sem o roubo. Qual é o maior imposto defendido pelos democratas mais radicais? Quarenta por cento? E isso não leva nem em conta todas as deduções e créditos que eles apoiam. Eu duvido que até mesmo a senadora Elizabeth Warren apoiasse impostos de mais de 50% sobre bilionários.

E para taxas rendas (inclusive retornos sobre riqueza) nessa magnitude seria necessário um enorme, complexo e caro aparato estatal que não teria sucesso na maior parte do tempo.

Os plutocratas mais inteligentes apoiam impostos de renda mais altos porque, da forma como o capitalismo corporativo se estrutura, eles são a única maneira de evitar a piora de depressões econômicas que ocorrem pela tendência crônica dos ricos à sobrepoupança e ao sobreinvestimento, deixando-os com um excedente de capital de investimento que abaixa as taxas de lucro e ocasiona uma ociosidade industrial por conta de crises de demanda. É por isso que os diretores-executivos das grandes corporações, como Gerard Swope da General Electric, apoiaram o New Deal. O estado — seu estado — estava atuando para garantir a sobrevivência de longo prazo do capitalismo e, ao mesmo tempo, para garantir que a plutocracia mantivesse a proporção máxima sustentável de seus proventos roubados. Esse também é o motivo por que existem “bilionários progressistas” como Gates e Warren Buffet.

Lembre-se, porém, de que todas essas riquezas incríveis são alcançadas pela intervenção do estado — o estado dos bilionários e das corporações. Toda a sua riqueza provém de rendas advindas de direitos de propriedade artificiais, da escassez artificial, de monopólios, cartéis regulatórios e barreiras de entrada (e também de subsídios diretos dos pagadores de impostos).

Assim, o estado gastar enormes recursos em coleta de impostos somente para aumentar levemente as receitas provindas de riquezas criminosas obtidas através do próprio estado parece uma maneira muito atrapalhada e indireta de conduzir a questão. E a maior parte dos gastos do estado possibilitados por essa nova arrecadação serão utilizados para promover o modelo econômico patológico pelo qual alguns conseguiram ficar tão ricos: subsídios à cultura dos carros e da expansão urbana, subsídios a fretes e grandes deslocamentos, subsídios à produção em larga escala, os gastos militares que utilizam o excedente de capacidade industrial e absorvem o capital extra, o uso das leis de “propriedade intelectual” para reforçar a obsolescência planejada e o desperdício, etc, retornando aos mais pobres somente uma pequena fração do que foi roubado deles para evitar uma revolução e criar demanda agregada para manter a roda girando.

Então, por que não eliminar todos os monopólios estatais em primeiro lugar, junto com todas as outras perversidades que o estado utiliza para ajudar os ricos e promover o desperdício e a ineficiência. Os ricos não poderão mover suas riquezas roubadas para paraísos fiscais se não tiverem a chance de roubá-la do resto da população através do governo.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Ayn Rand stated:

Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.

True enough in left-wing market anarchy. It’s not true under capitalism though. An employer may use their ability to offer a reward to dependent employees as a tool of control. A lowered wage may be enacted to punish the dissenting worker. Political power also bolsters capitalists, so a strict separation of them under capitalism isn’t present. Not to mention that employer-employee wage labor often involves government on the side of the employer.

If not forcibly suppressed, there may still be employer-employee wage labor in a free society. The liberating effects of a freed market would render the power dynamics involved much more egalitarian though. This would render the destructive form that can be taken by economic power above relatively null and void. It may not be entirely eliminated, but it would be significantly reduced than under capitalism.

Under left-wing market anarchy, power would also be much more dispersed. The decentralizing effects of market forces would render concentrations of power unstable or unworkable. The ability to inflict damage on others through economic means would be tempered by massive market competition. There would be tons of independent producers and cooperatives of producers to deal with. This would make it easy to avoid a producer who is economically abusive.

Such economic abuse in left-wing market anarchy might take the form of demanding far too much for a product or denying someone access to economic resources for bigoted reasons. Freed markets would be one, but not the only, way of dealing with this scenario. One can also imagine a social boycott or protest as a means of ensuring people aren’t exploited. Oppressive power need not always be fought with coercive means. It depends on the form such power takes. There would be no institutional home of aggression in left-wing market anarchy, but there might be instances of power projection like the above. It’s also true that rogue individuals or collectives might try to initiate force, but the power of a left-libertarian culture would render this less likely.

In working for the realization of left-wing market anarchism, one shouldn’t lose sight of the above. The analysis of power dynamics is crucial for understanding what freedom looks like. All are welcome to add their own analysis of said dynamics in the comments section below.

At Slate, Will Oremus raises the question “What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?” (“The New Luddites,” August 6). Rather than being “the cure for economic doldrums,” he writes, automation “may destroy more jobs than it creates”:

Tomorrow’s software will diagnose your diseases, write your news stories, and even drive your car. When even high-skill “knowledge workers” are at risk of being replaced by machines, what human jobs will be left? Politics, perhaps — and, of course, entrepreneurship and management. The rich will get richer, in other words, and the rest of us will be left behind.

It’s a common scenario, and one that’s utterly wrong headed. Although Oremus appeals to Keynes’ prediction of technological unemployment, the irony is that Keynes thought that was a good thing. Keynes predicted an economy of increasing abundance and leisure in his grandchildren’s time, in which the average work week was fifteen hours.

Instead, as Nathan Schneider points out (“Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?” Vice, Aug. 5), US government policy since FDR’s time has been to promote “full employment” at a standard 40-hr week. Both major parties, in their public rhetoric, are all about “jobs, jobs, jobs!”

This fixation on creating more work is what Bastiat, in the 19th century, called “Sisyphism” (after the lucky man in Hell who was fully employed rolling a giant rock up a hill for all eternity). We see the same ideological assumptions, as Mike Masnick argues in the same article where I got the Bastiat reference (“New Report Challenges The Whole ‘IP Intensive Industries Are Doing Well Because Of Strong IP’ Myth,” Techdirt, Aug. 8), displayed in arguments that strong “intellectual property” law is necessary for creating “jobs” and guaranteeing income for creators.

The idea is that we either impose artificial inefficiencies on technologies of abundance in order to increase the amount of labor (“jobs!”) required to produce a given standard of living, or we enclose those technologies to make their output artificially expensive so that everyone has to work longer hours to pay for them, so the increased price can go to paying wages for all those people running on conveyor belts and rat wheels. Make sense?

Either way, it amounts to hobbling the efficiency of new technology so that everyone has to work longer and harder than necessary in order to meet their needs. This approach is both Schumpeterian and Hamiltonian. Schumpeter saw the large corporation as “progressive” even when large size wasn’t technically necessary for efficient production because, with its monopoly power, it could afford to fund expensive R&D and pass the cost on to consumers via cost-plus markup and administered pricing (basically like a regulated monopoly or Pentagon contractor). Mid-20th century liberalism, essentially a managerialist ideology that lionized large, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations, extended this approach: the giant corporation could afford to pay high wages and maintain an employer-based welfare state, and still collect a guaranteed profit, because of its monopoly power.

Modern Hamiltonianism seeks to prevent price implosion from radical technological improvements in efficiency, and instead to guarantee inflated demands for both capital and labor — by imposing artificial inefficiency when necessary — so that returns on venture capital and full-time employment both remain stable.

The most egregious example is Jaron Lanier’s argument that every bit of content anyone produces on the Web should be under strong copyright, so everyone can get paid for everything. But why stop there? Why not monetize the entire economy and force it into the cash nexus? Turn every single thing anybody does into a “job,” so that members of a household get paid wages for mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, or vacuuming the living room. We could increase the nominal work week to 100 hours and per capita income to $100,000. That way, nobody would be able to obtain anything outside the cash nexus. They’d have to have a source of paid income to get the money to pay for anything they consumed — even a beer out of the fridge.

Ironically, that’s the strategy European colonial powers used in Africa and the rest of the Third World to force native populations into the wage labor market and make it impossible to subsist comfortably without wage employment. They imposed a head tax that could only be paid in money, which meant that people who had been previously feeding, clothing and sheltering themselves in the customary economy were forced to go to work for wages (working for European colonial overseers who had appropriated their land, of course) in order to pay the tax.

It’s utterly stupid. The whole point of the economy is not “jobs,” but consumption. The point of human effort itself is consumption. The less effort required to produce a unit of consumption, the better. When a self-employed subsistence farmer figures out a way to produce the food she consumes with half as many hours of labor as before, she doesn’t lament having “less work.” That’s because she internalizes all the benefits of her increased productivity. And when people are free to internalize both all the costs and all the benefits of increased productivity, so that improvements in efficiency are translated directly into lower prices or shorter working hours, they have an incentive to be more productive and work less.

The problem arises, not from the increased efficiency, but from the larger structure of power relations in which the increase in efficiency takes place. When artificial land titles, monopolies, cartels and “intellectual property” are used by corporations to enclose increased productivity as a source of rents, instead of letting them be socialized by free competition and diffusion of technique, we no longer internalize the fruits of technological advance in the form of lower prices and leisure. We get technological unemployment.

But technological unemployment and the rich getting richer are symptoms, not of the progress itself, but of the capitalistic framework of state-enforced artificial property rights and privilege within which it takes place. The economic ruling classes act through their state to intervene in the economy, to erect toll-gates and impede free market competition, so we have to work harder and longer than necessary in order to feed them in addition to ourselves. So let’s not get rid of the technology. Let’s get rid of the capitalists and their state that rob us of its full fruits.

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In an article that will no doubt make “progressive” hearts go pitty-pat (“The 1% May Be Richer Than You Think, Research Shows,” Bloomberg, August 7), Jeanna Smialek suggests that top 1%’s wealth is far greater even than official statistics indicate — and that because so much of that wealth is hidden in offshore tax havens government efforts to reduce inequality through tax and welfare policy are thwarted.

In the interest of fairness, Smialek quotes Tyler Cowen’s statement that “[p]eople worry about the top one percent too much,” that it doesn’t matter how rich Bill Gates is if “the poor are becoming better off in the process.”

That’s a big load of horse manure. If Gates’s wealth comes from robbing everybody else, then the inequality sure as heck does matter. Everyone else is made worse off than they otherwise would have been — by definition — by the exact amount that Gates robbed them of.

And that’s exactly how Gates got his fortune: By robbing his customers. Absent state-enforced copyright and patent monopolies on Windows, he’d have to make money in the same way a Linux distro does, providing tech support and customization services for software that in itself was free. Let’s be generous and say he might accumulate $10 million. That’s about 1/10,000 of his actual peak fortune of $100 billion. That means all but one hundredth of one percent of Gates’s wealth is stolen.

Now, you might think this strengthens Smialek’s case for better tracking and more progressive taxes on wealth. But in fact it does just the opposite. The only way justice could be done would be for Gates’ loot to be taxed at 99.99%, which would leave him roughly the amount he earned honestly. And the same can be said of any fortune in the hundreds of millions or billions. There’s simply no way to get that rich any way but robbery. But the highest any major Democratic player would tax the ultra-rich is, what, 40%? And that’s before all kinds of deductions and credits they support. I doubt even Elizabeth Warren would support a top marginal rate on billionaires as high as 50%.

And to tax income (including returns on wealth) even that high would require an enormously difficult and expensive enforcement apparatus that would be unsuccessful a lot of the time.

And the smartest part of the plutocracy supports higher marginal tax rates because, as corporate capitalism is structured, they’re the only way to stave off worsening depressions from the chronic tendency of the wealthy to over-save and over-invest, the surplus investment capital on their hands with no profitable outlet driving down the rate of profit, and the idle industrial capacity from aggregate demand shortfalls. That’s why corporate CEOs like Gerard Swope of GE supported the New Deal. The state — their state — was acting to ensure the long-term survival of capitalism and at the same time guarantee that the plutocracy would keep the maximum sustainable portion of their stolen loot. That’s also the motive for “progressive billionaires” like Gates and Warren Buffett.

But bear in mind, again, that all that enormous wealth is achieved through the state — the billionaires’ and corporations’ state. All that wealth comes from rents on state-enforced artificial property rights, artificial scarcities, monopolies, regulatory cartels and entry barriers (except the part that comes from direct taxpayer subsidies).

So for the state to expend enormous resources on tax enforcement to modestly increase taxes on ill-gotten wealth obtained entirely through the state in the first place is a pretty clumsy and indirect way of doing things. And most of the state’s spending enabled by that revenue will be aimed at promoting the pathological economic model by which they got that wealth in the first place: subsidies to car culture and sprawl, subsidies to long-distance shipping and inefficient large-scale production, military spending to utilize surplus industrial capacity and soak up excess capital, the use of “intellectual property” law to reinforce planned obsolescence and waste … not to mention giving the poorest of the poor back a small portion of what was stolen from them to prevent revolution and create aggregate demand to keep the wheels turning.

Why not instead eliminate all the state-enforced monopolies in the first place, and all those other perverse things the state does to help the rich and promote waste and inefficiency? The rich can’t move that stolen loot to tax havens if they never never get the chance to steal it in the first place.

Recently the story went viral of the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture threatening a Mechanicsburg seed library on the grounds that it was in violation of regulations intended to thwart the danger of (ahem) “agri-terrorism.” To comply with the regulations, the library would have to confine itself to distributing only store-bought seeds and not distributing any saved in previous years. Who wrote those infernal regulations, Monsanto? The story further highlighted the already blindingly obvious symbiosis between the federal and state departments of agriculture and agribusiness companies that have our food supply under corporate lockdown.

Well, as it turns out, the battle doesn’t always go to the strongest. David still has a few rocks in his arsenal after all. In an article at Shareable (“Setting the Record Straight on the Legality of Seed Libraries,” Aug. 11), Neal Gorenflo, the Sustainable Economies Law Center and Center for a New American Dream report on an impressive job of legal research he did into the language and judicial interpretation of similar statutes and regulations around the country, and finds there are significant potential loopholes to be exploited.

I generally argue, along with C4SS comrade Charles Johnson, that an ounce of circumvention or evasion is worth a pound of working within the system to change the law:

If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform … then … you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.

Far more can be achieved, he says, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Lobbying against draconian copyright laws like the IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and ACTA has done a lot of good, but encryption, proxies and improvements in file-sharing technology have done far more. Before ACTA had even come to a vote, several Firefox extensions became available that can simply bypass domain names seized by the federal government and go straight to their numeric IP address. That’s how people access Wikileaks’ various national sites and mirrors around the world.

In other words, to paraphrase a famous quote, treat the law as damage and route around it.

But sometimes the best way of doing that is by using the law itself as a weapon. The Wobblies and other radical unions have a name for this: “work-to-rule.” Considering the stupidity of the rule-making process in authoritarian hierarchies, there’s no finer way to sabotage an entire company than by obeying workplace rules literally. The same applies to government laws and regulations. A law may have been passed with the obvious intent of protecting proprietary capitalist seed companies from free and open source competition. But regardless of intent, once a policy is put into writing it is limited by its own language. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the destructor is subject to the limitations of the form it’s embodied in.

And as the authors find, the actual language and subsequent judicial interpretation of seed regulations around the country comes in pretty handy as a monkey wrench. Taken literally, virtually all such rules apply at most to the distribution of seed through commercial sale, trade or barter — that is, when a reciprocal exchange of value for value has taken place that involves an explicit or implied contract. Although those who take seed from the Mechanicsburg library are encouraged to return it out of their crops, in order to perpetuate the library, there is no contractual obligation to do so. The only requirement for seed distributors as such in Pennsylvania is to pay a $25 licensing fee. The authors suggest the seed library might do just this, continue to operate as before, and wait for the state (no doubt spurred by the seed companies behind it) to make the next move. And if it does, see what happens when it’s tested in court.

(Shareable has created an open Hackpad for anyone who wants to share the results of their own research into particular state seed regulations).

Of course if this fails and the courts back up the seed companies’ interests, it will be time to take the circumvention a step further (I’m speaking only for myself here, not the authors — they suggest combining the experiment above with lobbying, about which I’m “meh” at best). The file-sharing movement’s response to the shutdown of Napster was to take on a more dispersed, genuinely P2P character, eventually abandoning hosting on fixed servers altogether. With brick-and-mortar seed libraries shut down, organic gardeners might use apps or sharing websites to match up people with matching seed supplies and needs and let them take care of the rest. If the corporate state pushes back hard enough, it might be necessary to relocate the sharing sites to servers in countries outside the DRM Curtain and for seed sharers to deal with one another under cover of encrypted email.

They point to another interesting bit of information. The IRS has acknowledged that time banks are distinct from taxable barter exchanges for much the same reason he argues the time bank is exempt from seed regulations. There is no contractual quid pro quo; although there is an informal “exchange” of favor for favor, there is no legal obligation to return a favor. Now, as the capital goods required to produce a growing share of our consumption needs become smaller and cheaper, and affordable and scalable to individual households or multi-family sharing networks, it follows that a large share of our total production to meet our own subsistence needs will drop out of the cash nexus and off the state’s radar screen, and into self-provisioning through the informal and gift economies. Even on a larger community scale, where some more definite coordination is required through something like Tom Greco’s mutual credit-clearing networks, the system can likely operate under cover of a darknet with transaction costs of enforcement exceeding the benefits.

So technology itself is taking a growing share of our productive lives outside the purview of the corporate-state nexus, and transferring them instead into the realm of voluntary association and mutual aid that Kropotkin, in his Britannica article on Anarchism, set forth as the defining characteristics of anarchy. By seizing on the advantages offered by such technologies, we can evade corporate domination and build the world of our own desires.

Em sua visita ao Brasil, perguntaram ao neurocientista Carl Hart o que ele pensava sobre o termo “Cracolândia”. Hart respondeu: “Com esse nome, nós mostramos para a sociedade como vilanizar certos grupos de pessoas”. É verdade. Ao falarmos da “Cracolândia”, divorciamos a questão de nossa realidade. A Cracolândia passa a ser um mundo separado em que vigoram regras diferentes da nossa vida ordinária.

A característica distintiva do local passa a ser o fato de ser frequentado por usuários de crack. E o perfil dos usuários de crack já é amplamente conhecido: gente pobre, negra e favelada. Mas a narrativa criada pelo rótulo “Cracolândia” não é o de que são pessoas em necessidade, de que são indivíduos inseridos em um sistema com incentivos perversos, de que são peões no meio da troca de tiros entre a PM e o tráfico; a narrativa diz apenas que são “crackudos” que precisam ser eliminados.

O nome “Cracolândia” também exclui do imaginário coletivo o fato de que, como Hart menciona, as pessoas que frequentam esses locais são, essencialmente, comuns. São frequentemente dependentes de drogas (por isso dignas de compaixão e não de desprezo), mas suas ações, aspirações e relações são essencialmente comuns, desviando muito pouco do normal.

A política pode ser descrita por diversos ângulos, mas me parece ser útil pensar nela como um embate de discursos. E discursos não são apenas formalidades propagandísticas de um determinado modo de pensar. Não são a maneira como um pensamento se arranja no meu texto para atingir o seu entendimento. Discursos, como afirma Michel Foucault, são organizações do conhecimento institucionalizado; ou seja, o discurso necessariamente está relacionado a padrões historicamente estabelecidos de pensar o mundo.

Ao falarmos da Cracolândia, recortamos um aspecto da realidade e elegemos o discurso oposto. Nós reproduzimos e estigmatizamos as pessoas que fazem parte, por um motivo ou por outro, desses espaços. Paramos de lidar com indivíduos e passamos a pensar apenas nos termos de poder, nos termos do governo sobre “o que fazer” com as pessoas que estão na Cracolândia, como se houvesse algo particularmente diferente entre as pessoas que estão lá e os miseráveis de outros locais. Ou, como afirma Hart, como se o crack fosse de alguma forma diferente da cocaína, e não simplesmente a mesma droga com o estigma da pobreza.

A Cracolândia, enfim, é só o resultado natural de um combate às drogas cujo discurso pretende rotular todos os usuários de drogas como “drogados” ou “viciados” e justificar sua marginalização. Quando a sociedade nota que sua tentativa de marginalizar pessoas de fato cria bolsões de pessoas marginalizadas, as pessoas levantam a mãos para o céu e se perguntam “o que ocorreu de errado?”, como se o resultado não fosse previsível.

O discurso sobre o crack, como um todo, é desenhado para criar a casta de indesejáveis e de indivíduos fora da discussão racional política. Ou seja, é um discurso para racionalizar a força.

Nesta semana, ganhou força entre grupos liberais e libertários do Brasil o nome do candidato Paulo Batista à Assembleia Legislativa do estado de São Paulo. Propagandeado como alternativa liberal à assembleia estadual, salta aos olhos uma das propostas de Batista que trata do “combate ao crack”. Para ele, o governo deve adotar uma política de “tolerância zero” em relação a traficantes e consumidores do crack.

Muitos liberais e libertários defendem o candidato afirmando que, afora esse pequeno desvio dos princípios libertários, trata-se de uma ótima opção em nosso cenário político.

É uma pena que posições políticas não sejam todas de igual peso e defender a violência extrema, o encarceramento de certas pessoas e a higienização de locais específicos da cidade seja uma ideia absolutamente desprezível, não importa se você defende a redução dos impostos para materiais de construção.

Paulo Batista e os libertários que fazem pouco caso de sua posição sobre o crack pensam estar sendo oposição efetiva e sem utopias no contexto político. Mas estão apenas papagaiando o discurso do poder.

Recently in the Los Angeles Times, Carolina A. Miranda published a list of “8 eye-opening prison books.” Out of the books listed, I’ve only read Angela Davis’s excellent treatise on the prison-industrial complex, Are Prisons Obsolete.  I’ll be adding the rest to my reading list, however. This got me thinking about what I would recommend people read to understand the prison system. So here are a few recommendations:

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, by Victoria Law.  If you’re interested in how women fare in the prison system, this book is a must read. Victoria Law documents a litany of problems including sexual assault, abysmal healthcare, shackling of women during childbirth, separation of mothers from their children, and slave labor conditions. She also explores the ways top down reforms, even hard fought reforms by prisoners’ rights activists, often wind up exacerbating conditions for prisoners. Yet while Law documents a litany of serious problems, she also consistently discusses the ways prisoners organize among themselves to resist and mitigate these problems.

Prisons Will Not Protect You. The Against Equality collective, a radical queer and trans organization, assembled this book to oppose the mainstream LGBT movement’s push for hate crimes laws. The book documents the ways prisons brutalize rather than protect queer and trans individuals, the way some queer and trans people have been criminalized for defending themselves from hate crimes, and the way hate crimes laws exacerbate the problem of mass incarceration. The introduction by Dean Spade is particularly brilliant.

It’s About Time: America’s Imprisonment Binge, by James Austin and John Irwin. This book  provides a detailed discussion of mass incarceration. I particularly appreciate the discussion of how parole policies make it harder for former inmates to find employment, and thus increase risk of recidivism. The authors also compare crime rates among the 50 states. They find little correlation between crime rates and incarceration but do find correlations between crime rates and other indicators of poverty and social problems.

Undoing Border Imperialism, by Harsha Walia. This book connects prison abolition, immigrants’ rights, anti-colonialism, and anti-militarism. Harsha Walia is a founding member of No One Is Illegal – Vancouver, a migrant justice group “that challenges the ideology of immigration controls”  and opposes “racial profiling, detention and deportation, the national security apparatus, law enforcement brutality, and exploitative working conditions of migrants.” Walia begins the book by laying out a theoretical framework for understanding what she calls “border imperialism.” She makes a compelling case that immigration controls, prisons and detention centers, and criminalization are part of a broader system of imperialism, where states have stolen indigenous land and broken up communities along the lines of borders drawn through conquest. She then discusses the concrete actions groups like No One Is Illegal are taking to counter this system of border imperialism and achieve regularization for all immigrants.

The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, by Bruce Benson. One question prison abolitionists are invariably asked is “What’s the alternative?” Economist Bruce Benson provides one of the best answers to that question. He begins by explaining the functioning of historical systems of customary law, stateless legal systems built around restitution. He then explains how the state took over the provision of law and justice, and how this served as a mechanism to transfer resources to political leaders and their cronies. Benson examines the perverse incentives that govern state provided law and examines examples of private sector security provision.

Alternatives to Police, by Rose City Copwatch.  Other answers to the question of “What’s the alternative?” are explored in this online booklet from Rose City Copwatch. This booklet simply explains a variety of organizations and institutions that provide alternative ways to deal with crime without relying on the criminal justice system. It’s short on detail, but provides a useful antidote to the status quo bias that leads too many to see prisons and policing as the only way to deal with crime.

The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo is famous for conducting the Stanford prison experiment, which had to be called off because the students appointed to guard positions became so abusive. Zimbardo uses social psychology to explain how good people can be led toward evil behaviors because of authoritarian social environments. In particular, he applies these insights to explain the causes of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib.

The Social Order of the Underworld, by David Skarbek.  This new book from economist David Skarbek applies economics to understand the rise of prison gangs. Skarbek argues that prison gangs are formed to provide governance, particularly in areas that cannot be governed by guards, such as disputes within black markets in prisons (drug markets, cell phone markets, etc.). As prison populations become larger, inmates cannot rely on knowledge of one another to provide reputation and assurance for transactions, and thus begin to need governance by gangs. The structure of incarceration enables these gangs to even extract taxes from street gangs within the region surrounding the prison. I have not yet read Skarbek’s book, but I’ve seen him present on this topic and I’ve read multiple papers he’s written on the subject. His work is consistently fascinating, and I am quite excited to read it.

One more recommendation. 

Read up on public choice theory. It’s important to understand that criminal justice policies are made and enforced by self-interested individuals, not by benevolent despots. Given the way reforms can often entrench the power of the prison state rather than erode it, those of us who are concerned about carceral power need to understand “politics without romance.” Daniel D’Amico, who has done excellent work applying economics to understand imprisonment, has a great blog post that recommends literature on public choice theory.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Grant Mincy‘s “IP is a Hurdle to Self-Direction” read and edited by Nick Ford.

This is the curse of IP – excessive restrictions upheld by laws used to protect the “economic rights” of authors. Instead of promoting scientific progress we are instead beholden to copyright. Instead of allowing human innovation to flourish, we are told ideas should be owned. IP reserves itself the monopoly of coercion. It does not exist to ease, facilitate and grant social innovation – it prevents such progress. IP is a hurdle to self-direction and thus the inclined labor of human beings. The solution is to question and dismantle this authority, furthering our progress towards a free society.

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:

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In his visit to Brazil, neuroscientist Carl Hart was asked what he thought about the word “Cracolandia,” used to describe the location where crack addicts gather in several cities in the country. Hart replied, “With that name we are … showing to society how to vilify specific groups of people.” Which is obviously true. When we talk about “Cracolandia,” we divorce the issue from our reality. Cracolandia becomes a separate world in which rules are different from our ordinary lives.

The distinctive feature of this place becomes the fact that crack users live there. And their profile is well known: the poor, the black, the favela dwellers. However, the narrative created by the label “Cracolandia” is not that those are people in need, that they’re surrounded by evil incentives, or that they’re pawns in the crossfire between the Military Police and the drug dealers — the narrative says only that they are people who should be eliminated.

The name “Cracolandia” also excludes from the collective thinking the fact that, as Hart says, people who go to these places are, essentially, normal. Sure, they’re often dependent on drugs (and for that we should be compassionate towards them rather than despise them), but their actions, wishes and relationships are essentially common, very little out of the ordinary.

Politics can be described from several angles, but it seems useful to think about it as a clash of discourses. And discourses are not only advertising formalities of a given mode of thought. They aren’t the way my thought arranges itself in this article to get you to understand what I’m saying. Discourses, as Michel Foucault claims, are institutionalized patterns of knowledge; they’re always related to historically established modes of thinking about the world.

When we talk about Cracolandia, we frame one aspect of reality and elect the opposing discourse. We reproduce and stigmatize people who are in these spaces, for one reason or the other. We cease to deal with individuals and start thinking in terms of power, in terms of what the government should do with people who are in Cracolandia, as if there was anything particularly different between people who are there and the extremely poor in other places. Or, as Hart says, as if crack were somehow different from cocaine, but not the same drug branded for the poor.

Cracolandia, then, is just the natural end result of a drug war whose discourse intends to label every drug user as an “addict” or a “junkie” and justify their marginalization. When society notices that its attempt actually works in creating marginalized people, everyone throws their hands in the air horrified and ask themselves, “What went wrong?” as if it wasn’t predictable.

The discourse on crack is specifically designed to create a caste of undesired people, of individuals who shouldn’t be subjected to rational political discussion. Thus, it’s a discourse to rationalize the use of force.

This week, classical liberal and libertarian groups in Brazil started to share the name of candidate Paulo Batista for the Sao Paulo State Assembly. Billed as the liberal alternative for the state, one of Batista’s main proposals is a “zero tolerance” policy against both crack consumers and crack dealers.

Many classical liberals and libertarians defended the candidate, stating that, outside this small deviation of libertarian principles, he’s a very good alternative in our political scenario.

It’s a shame political positions are not all weighed equally, and that to defend the employment of extreme violence and incarceration of certain people as well as the cleansing of specific locations in the city is a despicable idea, it doesn’t matter if you really want taxes on building materials to be lower.

Paulo Batista and the libertarians who dismiss concerns about his ideas on crack cocaine think they’re being effective opposition, without utopia or daydreaming. They’re, however, only parroting the discourse of power.

No dia 7 de agosto, o presidente Barack Obama anunciou sua autorização a ataques direcionados no Iraque para suprimir a ofensiva da milícia ISIS. As ações seguintes do governo de Obama também são importantes. As bombas começaram a ser lançadas na sexta-feira, anunciando sem dizer nada que a política de gerenciar as questões iraquianas de longe está longe de acabar.

O lembrete não surpreende. Ao longo da história do Iraque, as potências ocidentais sempre estiveram presentes, fazendo suas exigências. Desde seu nascimento, o Iraque é exemplifica por que intervenções externas criam sempre mais problemas do que solucionam.

Por exemplo, o caos atual no Iraque resulta diretamente da invasão de 2003 que derrubou Saddam Hussein. Antes disso, os crimes de Saddam foram apoiados pelo governo americano, que vendeu a ele armas químicas, que ele acabou utilizando contra os curdos. Efetivamente, a maior parte das tensões étnicas se deve às fronteiras arbitrárias desenhadas pelos britânicos após a derrota do Império Otomano na Primeira Guerra Mundial.

Obama garante que ele “não permitira que os Estados Unidos sejam empurrados a mais uma guerra no Iraque”, reconhecendo que “não há solução militar americana para a crise iraquiana”. Contudo, suas ações mostram que o que conta como solução será determinado pelos termos estabelecidos por ele e pelo governo que ele representa.

Mesmo se ele mantiver sua palavra e não lançar mais uma invasão ao país, ele ainda assume o direito de ditar o futuro do Iraque. O Iraque é ainda a propriedade dos Estados Unidos.

Uma segunda mensagem oculta é o desprezo pela vida humana que estiver no caminho das operações do exércio dos EUA. Obama está certo em condenar os crimes abomináveis cometidos pela ISIS. Mesmo assim, isso não desculpa sua administração pelo assassinato de inocentes como danos colaterais.

Não importa quão bom foi o “direcionamento” dos ataques, inocentes serão parte da contagem de mortos. É claro, essas mortes são consideradas um efeito infeliz, não-intencional e indesejado dos ataques, que são direcionados à ISIS. Porém, a guerra moderna transcorre de forma que essas mortes não sejam irrelevantes, porque podem ser previstas com quase certeza e não é exagero considerar que ainda se trata de assassinato.

Assim como a contínua hegemonia americana não surpreende, também não deve impressionar o fato de que o governo dos Estados Unidos incinerará inocentes em grandes números com impunidade. Ao firmar seu direito de atacar o que quiser, os EUA já mataram mais de 2.400 pessoas nos últimos 5 anos somente com seu programa de drones.

Há outra coisa que Obama optou por omitir, mas que pode ser ouvida com clareza através de suas ações, que devem ser lembradas pelo povo americano. Não importa quais valores você pense que um político possua, lembre-se de que esses serão necessariamente esquecidos ao chegar ao poder.

A longa campanha de caos nos Estados Unidos é um projeto bipartidário. No governo do presidente democrata John F. Kennedy, a CIA agiu para derrubar líderes hostis. Os republicanos Ronald Reagan e George H.W. Bush venderam a Saddam Hussei as armas que ele usaria contra seu próprio povo antes que Bush invadisse o país na Primeira Guerra do Golfo. O democrata Bill Clinton passou os anos 1990 levantando sanções para fazer crianças iraquianas morrerem de fome, bombardeando o país e mudando oficialmente a política americana para o Iraque para uma de mudança de regime.

Em 2003, o republicano George W. Bush realizou essa política, iniciando a Segunda Guerra do Golfo. Os americanos passaram a odiar cada vez mais essa guerra e dois candidatos a presidente democratas em seguida fizeram campanhas com pedidos de paz.

Agora esses candidatos estão em posições de decidir a política americana no Iraque. John Kerry como secretário de estado e Barack Obama como presidente. Com esse poder, eles decidiram enviar mais soldados e mísseis, mantendo o domínio americano.

Sabendo de tudo isso, o povo americano deve levantar a voz e se recusar a lutar.

Sabendo que o exército americano será usado para agressão e dominação, não importa quem o controle, os americanos devem se recusar a se alistar. Além disso, devem fazer tudo o que puderem para que chegue o dia em que presidentes e secretários de estado deixem de ter a voz para fazer ameaças e lançar seus ataques.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

Perhaps because I live in Chicago, perhaps because I work with other attorneys, in my day-to-day life I’m surrounded almost exclusively by people who identify with the mainstream, American left, centrist Democrats for whom mere mention of the word “libertarian” calls forth nightmarish imaginings of the Tea Party right. Regrettably, identifying myself as a libertarian stops any meaningful dialogue with this set before it starts; for them, libertarianism is associated with the extreme right wing of a one-dimensional American political spectrum that they have been successfully trained never to question. They often know just enough about Ayn Rand to regard libertarianism as an oversimplified and merciless case for corporate greed, for an economic status quo that finds the one percent growing ever richer while the “middle class” contracts and the poor suffer in sheer destitution. Ironically, this kind of centrist Democrat probably understands capitalism and its effects better than many libertarians, seeing economic predation for what it is and looking (however unsystematically) for something to step in and pull back on the reins. What they haven’t taken the time to understand, however, is either libertarianism as a real philosophy or the cavernous gulf that separates the economic system of the present moment from real free markets.

Because of this reflex revulsion at the mere mention of libertarianism, experience has inclined me to describing my politics as “left wing individualism.” This characterization, I have found, invites questions rather than angry diatribes, preparing the ground for a fruitful conversation as opposed to a futile debate. I borrow the phrasing “left wing individualism” from Eunice Minette Schuster, who made “A Study of Left-Wing American Individualism” the subtitle of her dissertation, Native American Anarchism. Schuster’s book follows Native American Anarchism from its nascent, prototypical forms to its blossoming as a distinct and fully realized philosophical system and movement. Her study is important insofar as it illumes a strain of political philosophy that can seem confusing and oxymoronic within the context of today’s mainstream political debates.

The individualist anarchists that Schuster discusses in the section of her book that treats anarchism in its “mature” state were both extreme individualists and socialists, architects of a project which we at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) undertake to continue today. As advocates of unhampered freedom of competition, property rights, and the sovereignty of the individual, individualist anarchists are a part of the history of the contemporary libertarian movement. At the same time, like C4SS today, this group opposed capitalism and regarded socialism as, in the words of radical reformer Ezra Heywood, “the great anti-theft movement” of their day. Unlike today’s free market libertarians, who often demonize the poor as welfare receiving “takers,” thinkers like Benjamin Tucker, Ezra Heywood, and Josiah Warren (just to name a few) saw the rich as the true idle, freeloading class, the beneficiaries of privileges that allowed them to game the system and put a stop to real market competition.

These early libertarians saw that freedom and competition work for all the reasons that are familiar to us today: division and specialization of labor, the massive amounts of information distilled in prices, and accordingly the folly of attempting to plan the economy through the greatest monopoly of them all, the state. They argued that genuine competition in a free market is the best, surest way to ensure that labor is paid with its full product, that is, to solve what was then often called the Labor Question; this made them socialists, even if they fit uncomfortably with much of the socialist movement. Their fit with the liberal advocates of free trade and competition — the political economists — was no less uncomfortable, finding the individualist anarchists constantly compelled to school the economists in their own doctrine, to point out the errors and inconsistencies that characterized so much of what passed as defenses of free trade.

The individualist anarchists were sticklers about consistency; if labor was made to come under the law of competition, of supply and demand, then so too should capital. As Schuster points out, the “scientific anarchism” of people like Benjamin Tucker thus “did not appeal to the Capitalist because it demanded not ‘rugged individualism’ but universal individualism” (emphasis added). Because the individualists regarded them as the proximate results of coercive privilege, rent, interest, and profit — the “trinity of usury” — were treated as akin to taxes, allowing the owners of capital the stolen difference between prices under a regime of privilege and prices as they would be under true, open competition. Market competition, therefore, was not the enemy but the friend of the workingman. The argument of market anarchism is simple: If we are to insist that everyone is entitled to whatever he can obtain in a free market, then at least we ought to try having a free market. And a free market cannot tolerate some of the most common historical features of capitalism: aggressive land theft on a massive scale, arbitrary regulatory and licensure systems that function as high cost barriers to market entry and preclude opportunities for self-employment, various direct and indirect subsidies that redistribute wealth to connected firms, and a government-created system of financial laws and institutions which produces the Wall Street cartel we have today. It turns out, then, that capitalism doesn’t quite square with what libertarians really want when we endorse free markets. We’re not as close to a free market system as even many libertarians like to pretend. It is not a matter of making a few tweaks and free market reforms here and there, of privatizing a few governmental monopolies and deregulating a few industries. Rather to get there from here would mean a thoroughgoing, systematic departure from the capitalistic tyranny we have and have had for a long time, a system which indeed is the direct successor of statist systems before from feudalism to mercantilism.

Anarchists such as Warren and Tucker understood this and spent their lives declaiming against an inequitable, capitalistic status quo that systematically disadvantages working people. And notwithstanding the all too eager efforts to consign them to the political right — even to write them out of the anarchist tradition — they belong (if anywhere) on the left, as Schuster understood. Epitomizing the gross misunderstanding of individualist anarchism among left wing academics, historian David DeLeon, in his book The American as Anarchist, labels Benjamin Tucker a “right libertarian” and amazingly names Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as ideological successors. Elsewhere in the book, DeLeon offhandedly classifies Voltairine de Cleyre, whose escapades in anarchism do not lend themselves to any easy pigeonholing, as simply an “Anarcho-Communist.” No less concerning is his incredible claim that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman were all right libertarians. If one dedicated to the professional study of these figures and their movements can so deeply misinterpret the picture, it is no wonder that individualist anarchism should confuse the mainstream layperson’s political mind.

Calling myself a “left wing individualist” is one of the things I do to help reintroduce the individualist anarchism of the nineteenth century, a tradition that balances the individual and community in a way that is desperately needed in a world dominated by centralized power. The libertarian movement itself, moreover, ought not be so quick to dismiss anarchists such as Tucker as economically illiterate relics of a bygone age. After all, any consideration of how economic relationships would look in a genuine free market is in the nature of pure speculation. Libertarians who believe those relationships would look very much like they do today are seriously lacking in imagination and cannot fathom the depth of the change that real respect for individual sovereignty would bring about.

On August 7th, President Obama announced his authorization of targeted strikes over Iraq in order to quell the ongoing Islamic State offensive. Just as important are the statements his administration has made through the actions that followed. The bombs actually started to fall on Friday, announcing without words that the US government’s policy of actively managing Iraqi affairs from afar is far from over.

This reminder is unsurprising. Throughout Iraq’s history, western powers have always stood over its shoulders, issuing their own demands for their own purposes. Ever since its birth, Iraq has been a prime example of why foreign interventions almost always create more problems than they solve.

For instance, the current chaos in Iraq is a direct result of the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Going further back, Saddam Hussein’s crimes were aided by a US government that sold him chemical weapons, which he then infamously used against the Kurds. In fact, much of the nation’s ethnic tensions can be blamed on the arbitrary borders drawn by the British after defeating the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

Obama assures us that he “will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” acknowledging that “there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” Yet as his actions show, what counts as a solution will be determined by terms laid down by him and the government he represents.

Even if he keeps his word and does not issue another full-scale invasion, he still presumes the right to dictate Iraq’s future. Iraq is still the property of the United States.

A second unspoken message has been the disregard for whatever human life happens to be in the way of operations carried out by the United States military. Obama is right to condemn the truly horrifying crimes committed by ISIL in the harshest terms possible. Even so, this is not an excuse for his administration to begin slaughtering innocents on its own through the inevitable collateral damage.

No matter how precisely “targeted” these strikes really are, completely innocent people will be a part of the body count. Of course, those deaths come as a regretted, unintentional, undesired side-effect of the strikes, which are aimed at ISIL combatants. However, because modern warfare is such that these deaths will not be of an insubstantial number, and because they can be predicted to happen with near certainty, it is not overstating things to say that this is still murder.

Just as the news of continued American hegemony is no shock, no one should be surprised to learn that the United States government will incinerate innocents in large numbers without impunity. While asserting its claim to strike wherever it wants whenever it wants, the United States government has killed over 2,400 people in the past five years alone with its drone program.

There is another thing that Obama opted not to say, but can be heard loud and clear from his actions, of which the American people should take special note. No matter what commendable values you think a politician holds, you can count on power to push them elsewhere.

The United States government’s long campaign of chaos in Iraq has been a thoroughly bi-partisan project. Under Democrat John F. Kennedy, the CIA took actions to overthrow unfriendly leaders. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush sold Saddam Hussein the weapons he would use against his own people, before Bush invaded the country in the First Gulf War. Democrat Bill Clinton spent the 90s starving children with sanctions, dropping bombs, and officially changing United States’s Iraq policy to one of regime change.

In 2003, Republican George Walker Bush actualized that policy, by initiating the Second Gulf War. As Americans grew to hate that war more and more, two Democratic Presidential candidates in a row ran campaigns that heavily capitalized off calls for peace.

Now those candidates are in positions to actually decide U.S. policy in Iraq: John Kerry as Secretary of State, and Barack Obama as President. With that power, they have decided to send in military personnel, drop bombs, and maintain American dominance.

Having heard all this, the American people must start to make a statement of their own. They must refuse to fight.

Knowing that the United States military will be used for aggression and domination, no matter who controls it, they must refuse to join. Moreover, they must do all they can to work toward the day when Presidents and Secretaries of State are deprived of the voice they need to make their threats and stake their claims.

Oggi la mia attenzione è stata attirata da una vicenda di aprile che mi era sfuggita. Sembra che Fatah (la tradizionale organizzazione guerrigliera componente principale dell’Olp) e Hamas abbiano annunciato una riconciliazione e un piano per formare un governo di unità nazionale: “uno sviluppo che potrebbe vedere i territori palestinesi sotto un’unico comando per la prima volta in molti anni” (“Hamas, Fatah announce talks to form Palestinian unity government,” CNN, 23 aprile).

Non ho potuto fare a meno di pensare ad un’altra riconciliazione, avvenuta cinquant’anni prima. Allora Ngo Dinh Diem e Ho Chi Minh, rispettivamente del sud e del nord del Vietnam, avviarono un dialogo per formare un governo ad interim di unità nazionale per l’intero paese, seguito da elezioni nazionali ai termini dell’accordo di Ginevra del 1954. Data l’antipatia dei contadini verso la classe di governo, formata da proprietari terrieri cattolici che vivevano di rendita, e la popolarità del Fronte di Liberazione Nazionale in gran parte del sud, è probabile che il governo degli Stati Uniti non avrebbe gradito il risultato delle elezioni.

Questa riconciliazione storica fu seguita dal rovesciamento militare di Diem, nel 1963, su istigazione della Cia, e dalla sua sostituzione con un generale più obbediente agli ordini americani. In maniera molto simile al colpo di stato, appoggiato dai sovietici, che misero Karmal al potere in Afganistan, l’instaurazione di un capo di stato compiacente aprì la strada all’introduzione massiccia di forze militari americane nel Vietnam meridionale.

Come gli Stati Uniti di cinquant’anni fa, anche Israele ha ragioni per temere la pace tra i due ex avversari. In questo senso, l’attacco massiccio contro Gaza degli ultimi giorni non avrebbe potuto arrivare in un momento più propizio.

Le due cose sono connesse? Non posso dirlo con certezza. In passato, però, le ondate di missili di Hamas erano solitamente la risposta a provocazioni di Israele, come la violazione di una tregua o l’assassinio di un leader di Hamas. Gli attacchi missilistici servivano poi da pretesto per un attacco militare da parte delle forze armate israeliane. Sembra quasi che le forze armate israeliane compilino un elenco di obiettivi da colpire e ogni due o tre anni inventino una scusa per attaccare.

In questo caso, Israele ha accusato Hamas di aver rapito e ucciso tre giovani israeliani, ma non ha fornito le prove. Hamas, che solitamente rivendica queste atrocità, questa volta ha negato. Ciononostante Israele, con la sua Operazione Guardiano del Fratello, ha arrestato centinaia di palestinesi accusati di nulla, e ha bombardato o raso al suolo centinaia di case; in altre parole, ha attuato una rappresaglia collettiva sulla popolazione civile. Hamas ha risposto alla provocazione lanciando missili. E Israele ha preso quest’ultimo fatto come pretesto per un’altra delle sue guerre mostruose e inumane contro quel campo di prigionieri che è Gaza.

E ora incredibilmente i leader di Israele ammettono che non è stata Hamas ad uccidere i ragazzi.

Sui social media ho visto molti sionisti e difensori di Israele che parlavano del desiderio di pace di Israele e della natura bellica dell’Islam. Se non credono che Israele cerchi a tutti i costi una scusa per mettere in pratica il suo elenco di obiettivi da colpire, tutto quello che mi viene in mente è che sono un mucchio di idioti. Io non posso provare che Israele abbia istigato deliberatamente la guerra proprio perché temeva una Palestina unita sotto un unico partito. Ma certo che le apparenze portano esattamente a quella conclusione.

Creare pretesti per una guerra, dicendo che bisogna contrastare un’imminente “minaccia dall’esterno”, è ciò che fanno gli stati. Nel 1939, molti tedeschi credevano sinceramente che Hitler avesse dichiarato guerra alla Polonia per autodifesa, in risposta ad attacchi contro cittadini polacchi di etnia tedesca a Danzica. Se allora ci fosse stata una Cnn tedesca, i suoi mezzibusti, quelle Persone Serissime, avrebbero sicuramente avviato una riflessione profonda sulla maniera appropriata di rispondere alla “minaccia polacca”.

Nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi, l’obiettivo reale di una guerra e le ragioni esposte dallo stato come pretesto sono due cose completamente diverse. Utah Phillips, che disse “In Corea ho capito che mai più, in vita mia, avrei ceduto ad altri la mia capacità di decidere quale è il nemico”, aveva ragione.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

As bombas americanas caem novamente no Iraque em ataques autorizados por Barack Obama contra o grupo militante islamista ISIS, que tomou grande parte do país. Com isso e com o envio de “conselheiros” militares americanos, a lembrança da campanha de Obama, que criticava a guerra no Iraque antes de vencer as eleições, fica cada vez mais turva. Novamente, a fé colocada em líderes e no governo para representar quaisquer interesses que não os seus próprios se choca com o muro da realidade.

Curiosamente, junto com os gritos de “mais forte e mais rápido” de sujeitos como os senadores Lindsey Graham e John McCain, outra corrente pró-guerra surgiu desta vez: uma que alega uma “responsabilidade de proteger”, que existe por causa da dívida que o país contraiu com a invasão do Iraque de 2003 e suas consequências.

O raciocínio é que o envolvimento (contínuo) dos Estados Unidos no Iraque é devido porque a emergência de uma guerrilha sectária é, afinal, culpa dos Estados Unidos pós-Saddam. O arrogante espírito de onipotência militar aqui já está mais do que claro, mas esse episódio também mostra uma compreensão seletiva da história. O histórico de interferência ocidental no Iraque não começa com as mentiras da administração de George W. Bush. Na verdade, o Iraque que conhecemos atualmente foi costurado como protetorado sob domínio britânico com partes do Império Otomano que foram tomadas depois da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Depois da passagem da tocha da hegemonia da Grã-Bretanha para os EUA, uma das primeiras coisas que o governo americano fez no Iraque foi apoiar um golpe pelos baathistas — incluindo um tal de Saddam Hussein — em 1963. Mais tarde, a CIA apoiaria os ataques com armas químicas empreendidos pelo regime de Saddam.

Nos anos 1990 os EUA se viraram contra sua própria criação, trazendo mais guerras e sanções que claramente atingiram mais os civis iraquianos que o regime. Mais tarde, o país foi invadido e mais um governo satélite ocidental foi estabelecido.

Quando avaliamos esse raciocínio de uma “dívida” americana que pede novas interveções e analisamos todo o histórico de interferências no Iraque, sua inocência é impressionante. A dívida literalmente se estende por quase 100 anos. Contudo, a moeda de troca proposta aqui não é uma admissão de culpa e uma restituição aos indivíduos não-estatais, mas mais bombas, mísseis e manipulação. Como isso é o que causou os danos em primeiro lugar, essa suposta “oferta” imperial benevolente não passa de uma piada cretina. O que o governo americano deve ao povo do Iraque, depois de tanto tempo de mentiras e derramamento de sangue, é uma admissão de culpa, seguida por uma saída do palco mundial com a cabeça baixa.

Em reconhecimento à história recente, ao menos, os primeiros ataques desde novo capítulo imperial foram lançados pelo porta-aviões USS George H.W. Bush. Sem o fim da hegemonia dos EUA, que só será alcançada através do próprio fim do estado, os noticiários em 2044 ainda carregarão manchetes sobre a presidente Sasha Obama lançando novos ataques no Iraque a partir do porta-aviões USS John Ellis Bush.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses whether the CIA should be reformed rather than abolished.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why the CIA should be abolished.

Kevin Carson discusses accusations of agri-terrorism.

Ivan Eland discusses how the current situation in Libya shows the folly of U.S. interventionism.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the importance of graphic photos of war.

David Swanson discusses the renewed U.S. intervention in Iraq.

Luciana Bohne discusses American recruitment of Nazis from the past and present.

Brian Cloughley discusses Cold War 2.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the presidential ritual of bombing Iraq.

Justin Raimondo discusses sneaking back into Iraq.

Eric Margolis discusses the Ukraine.

David Stockman discusses Iraq.

John V. Walsh discusses an Obama interview with the Economist.

Benjamin G. Davis discusses torture.

Sheldon Richman discusses the continued subversion of Cuba by the U.S. government.

Laurence M. Vance discusses whether the import-export bank should be reauthorized.

Sheldon Richman discusses the 100th anniversary of World War 1.

Anthony Miles defeats Michael Rhode.

Anthony Miles beats Karpov with ..a6.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Where’s Eric Garner’s Amargosa?” read and edited by Nick Ford.

One might object to a comparison between these situations. The Amargosa police department has four patrolling officers, the NYPD thousands. The weaponry of the Amargosa police department is meager, that of NYPD military-grade. Surely the best way to remember Garner is the slow burn of policy change, of educating a mass movement which is uncooperative with the police, of anything but immediate and direct response.

I might have to forlornly agree with you, that any thought of a battle with the NYPD is doomed from the start. But make no mistake, to be radical on this matter is to encourage a spirit of rebellion like that of Amargosa. Violence and conflict is inevitable on the scale of the individual, the community, city and country. There will not be a true movement against police until we’re ready to assert the value of our loved ones’ lives over those the claims of cops, whose daily plots always involve harassing you and treating you as hostile until proven otherwise.

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

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U.S. bombs fall on Iraq yet again, in strikes authorized by Barack Obama against the militant Islamist group Islamic State, which has taken over a chunk of the country. Between this and the deployment of US military “advisers,” the memory of Obama’s campaign criticizing war in Iraq on his way to office has grown a thick layer of moss. Yet again, faith placed in leaders, in government, to represent any interest but their own is dashed on the rocks of reality.

Curiously, along with the usual “more and faster, please!” screams from the likes of Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, another current of pro-war advocacy has bubbled up: They claim a “Responsibility To Protect,” spun as a debt incurred from the 2003 Iraq invasion and its fallout.

The train of thought is that the U.S.’s (continued) involvement in Iraq is owed because the emergence of sectarian warfare is, after all, the fault of the US post-Saddam. The arrogantly militaristic Can Do spirit at use here is clear enough already, but this also inherently comes with a rather clipped understanding of basic history. The story of western interference in Iraq does not start with the falsehoods of the “W” Bush Administration. In fact, the modern nation of Iraq itself was stitched together originally as a protectorate under the British, from pieces of the Ottoman Empire broken up after World War One. After the passing of the torch of hegemony from Britain to the U.S., one of the first things the U.S. government did in Iraq was back a coup by the Baathists — including one Saddam Hussein — in 1963. Later on, the CIA would aid Saddam’s regime in chemical weapons attacks.

Turning on the US’s own creation in the ’90s brought more war, sanctions that clearly hit Iraqi civilians much harder than anyone in the regime, and then the invasion and subsequent installation of yet another western client government.

Looking back at the “debt” rationale for new intervention in light of the full record of the past, the naive nature of it is blinding. Following it to the letter effectively places a debt going back nearly a hundred years. However, the currency being proposed for exchange is not the profuse apology & restitution that would take place on the level of non-state individuals, but bombs, missiles, and manipulation. That these make up the initial damage reveals the “offer” of supposed benevolent empire to be a sick joke. What is owed to the Iraq people by the U.S. government, after all this time of bloodshed and lies, is admission of guilt, followed by an exit from the world stage, head held low in shame.

In a nod to recent history, the beginning strikes in this ongoing chapter of empire were launched from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. Without the end of U.S. hegemony, attainable only via the end of the state itself, news viewers may be greeted in 2044 by headlines about President Sasha Obama launching airstrikes on Iraq from the USS John Ellis Bush.