C4SS Feed 44 republishes Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “Anarchism and American Traditions” read and edited by Rhonda Federman.
Feed 44:
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My first call to Direct Action was sparked by the scores of undocumented immigrants from Central America that ICE has been shipping to Phoenix. An AZ Central article reports that “The Border Patrol says about 400 migrants were flown from Texas to Arizona because of [a] surge in migrants being apprehended in Texas.” This mass relocation has been going on for over a month now. The process itself breaks up families and is intensely disorienting for the apprehended. By the time they’re dropped at the Greyhound station, they’ve been kept in a cell for up to twelve days without showers or a change of clothes. When they do eat, they are periodically kicked (literally kicked) awake for small meals.
Hearing that all this was going down just blocks away from where I live, I joined up with some of my local activist friends at a union hall to help out the victims any way I could. When we arrived at the station, we were met with a long line of exclusively adult female immigrants, some holding the hands of small children. Clothes, water, and the use of a cell phone to call family members were the three big items in demand. ICE drops them off at the station without a change of clothes or a bus ticket, so they’ve got to find a way to get clean, hydrated, and procure a ride all in the space of a few hours. The amazing volunteers who helped out that day managed to provide them with all of the above and more, and even though most of the immigrants were limited to washing off in the Greyhound bathroom and forgoing a meal on the bus ride back, they couldn’t have been more appreciative and kind.
This was my first time volunteering with a radical community, and if I wasn’t already convinced of the potential of Direct Action, this experience did it for me.
The very phrase “direct action”- being a deliberate term associated with anti-authoritarian movements – conjures up scenes of aggression and violence against state institutions: Black rows of masked protesters wielding molotovs, improvised raids on animal testing facilities, even communist attempts to “disrupt the flow of capital” are all valid instances of direct action. But to limit the phrase to only its most dramatic manifestations is a mistake. Voltairine de Cleyre said of Direct Action circa 1912:
Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action.
This all-encompassing conception of Direct Action is the most meaningful, because it acknowledges how peaceful, voluntary cooperation toward a given goal can best achieve desired outcomes.
To examine the efficacy of this direct approach, consider the steps one must take to achieve something within the confines of the political system. For instance, you could always vote for the most promising presidential candidate. Going this route, if you’re very lucky, your vote has a “1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome.” Even if you’re one of the lucky few, your candidate will most likely break his more appealing promises, whether he vowed to free political prisoners or you’re reading his lips about “no new taxes.” Aside from the purely theatrical ritual of voting, the very systems underlying politics cause blockage. Bloated bureaucracy and red tape backs up the process and absorbs any genuine attempt at meaningful change. Party members, even at the local level, must “play the game” and play up to special interests if they want to survive the cutthroat world of corruption and nepotism. If there ever was any genuine intent to begin with, it is quickly swept under the rug to make way for “moving the needle forward” and other such nihilistic rallying cries of Whiggish progress for progress’s sake.
The spirit of Direct Action is inherently anti-authoritarian as it bypasses the arbitrary thresholds of negotiation and concession that come packaged with politics. There’s no need to beg politicians for a drink when you can, as David Graeber puts it, “dig the well yourself”.
But behind the tactical and ethical consistency of Direct Action in community volunteering, there’s the invaluable bonus of personally connecting with those in need. The sheer sincerity of helping others is a humbling experience, and for me, the Greyhound station was a sharp moment of clarity when my anarchist principles were more than words bound to the page by logic and rhetoric: They took shape in a way that brought vastly different individuals together for a crucial cause. I went hoping that I could be a part of that cause – I never knew it would become such a big part of me.
Da quando Katiele e sua figlia sono state catapultate nella cronaca, in Brasile scarseggia il dibattito sulla necessità di legalizzare la marijuana. Katiele lotta per curare l’epilessia di sua figlia con il cannabidiolo (CBD), una sostanza estratta dalla marijuana.
La domanda è: qual è la posizione dell’Anvisa, l’equivalente brasiliano dell’istituto superiore di sanità, in materia? Come giustifica il divieto di servirsi della cannabis per usi terapeutici?
Il ricercatore André Kiepper ha esposto alcuni dubbi all’Anvisa, e ha ottenuto risposte che, provenendo dal vice coordinatore dell’ufficio che si occupa di sostanze soggette a controllo, sono a dir poco peculiari.
“Perché non posso coltivare la cannabis esclusivamente per le necessità di mia figlia e di altri famigliari?” ha chiesto. La risposta è stata che “la cannabis sativa L. è classificata nell’elenco E (elenco di piante proibite che possono generare effetti inebrianti e/o sostanze psicoattive così come descritto nell’annesso I dell’Ordine Ministeriale del Ministero della Salute nº 344 del 1998). Dunque la coltivazione è vietata in tutto il territorio nazionale.”
Questo significa che, se coltivi la marijuana per uso medico, la tua terra può essere espropriata senza indennità, visto che la pena prevista dalla costituzione per la coltivazione di piante contenenti sostanze psicoattive è proprio quella. La risposta fornita da Anvisa fa capire i seri rischi in cui incorre nel proprio paese chi fa disobbedienza civile piantando erbe che aiutano un bambino malato. Alleviare la sofferenza di un bambino è proibito.
Il ricercatore ha poi chiesto di sapere se l’Anvisa ha il potere di autorizzare la coltivazione e la raccolta delle specie vegetali elencate nel cosiddetto Elenco E. L’ente ha risposto dicendo: “Ogni obiettivo curativo deve essere provato all’Anvisa con studi sulla sicurezza e l’efficacia sia pre-clinici che clinici, e i risultati devono essere illustrati in un dossier da allegare alla richiesta di registrazione, richiesta che le aziende farmaceutiche interessate devono inviare all’Anvisa.”
Notate i salti mortali che la gente deve fare per poter accedere alla marijuana per uso curativo. Katiele, andando contro lo stato, ha acquistato il cannabidiolo dall’estero, con risultati promettenti per la salute di sua figlia.
Da notare anche il fatto che l’autorizzazione a coltivare l’erba dipende dal fatto che un’azienda farmaceutica presenti una richiesta. L’Anvisa ha poi aggiunto che “l’uso di queste sostanze deve essere limitato a strutture mediche o scientifiche,” cosa che “impedisce la coltivazione individuale”. Solo le aziende possono chiedere l’autorizzazione a coltivare l’erba! I pazienti dipendono dalla loro volontà!
Di fronte a queste restrizioni, Kiepper ha chiesto l’autorizzazione all’importazione. La risposta disumana dell’Anvisa fa cadere le braccia: “La informiamo che non abbiamo una norma per quel genere di procedura.”
Kiepper ha insistito e ha chiesto perché una norma non esiste. L’Anvisa: “Finora, nessuna compagnia ha fatto richiesta formale per registrare alcun medicinale a base di sostanze derivate dalla cannabis.” Chi vuole curarsi con la marijuana deve aspettare che una compagnia faccia richiesta così che si faccia una norma al riguardo.
C’è la possibilità di richiedere un’esenzione per l’uso personale, ma non è di grande aiuto per i pazienti: “Un’autorizzazione eccezionale all’importazione di medicinali controllati a base di sostanze proibite, non registrati nel paese, può essere concessa dietro richiesta caso per caso, in quanto si tratta di un’esenzione dovuta alla mancanza di alternative terapeutiche nel territorio nazionale. … [È] obbligatorio ripetere gli accertamenti periodicamente così da adeguarsi a possibili cambiamenti nella prescrizione o nella forma dei trattamenti che influiscono sulle quantità precedentemente autorizzate.” Questa risposta serve a negare la possibilità di un rinnovo annuale, o di un registro che autorizzi l’acquisto dei medicinali all’estero.
E non esiste una norma che autorizzi un’organizzazione non-profit ad importare cannabidiolo: “Ogni autorizzazione concessa è specifica per ogni singolo prodotto (nome commerciale, se esiste, presentazione, formula, eccetera) e per ogni singolo produttore, paziente ed esportatore, e non autorizza l’importazione di altri prodotti.”
Alla domanda se “Anvisa intendesse facilitare il processo per evitare la morte inutile di altri bambini,” l’ente ha risposto dicendo di non avere notizie riguardo eventuali cambi di procedura per l’importazione, ma ha assicurato che “Anvisa sta facendo ogni sforzo per promuovere un dibattito, a livello nazionale e internazionale, relativo all’importazione di cannabidiolo, così da garantire la corretta assistenza medica; senza dimenticare, però, la necessità di evitare un uso improprio, ricreativo di qualunque sostanza o pianta.”
Mentre i burocrati dibattevano sulla questione, Gustavo Guedes, un anno e quattro mesi, sofferente della sindrome di Dravet, in attesa che Anvisa concedesse l’uso del cannabidiolo, è morto.
Leftist academic, Corey Robin, recently commented on what he sees as the radicalism of the young CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). He quotes David Montgomery to the effect that at its annual convention: the CIO called for:
continuation of government controls over prices and the allocation of production materials, “development of atomic energy for civilian purposes under United Nations auspices,” government sponsorship of housing to offset the failures of the market to provide for workers’ urgent needs, and expansion of social security to encompass all agricultural, domestic, and maritime workers and to include health protection.
There is nothing particularly radical about the above. Government is a very old institution and so is the hierarchy that is inherent to it. Its use of aggressive force, violence, coercion, and compulsion to gets its way is nothing new in human history either. The non-anarchist or non-libertarian left often seems to want to replace corporate capitalist hierarchy with government hierarchy. That is the meaning of central planning of prices and allocation of productive resources. A monopolistic government controlling the allocation of production or prices would certainly qualify as a violent hierarchical central planner.
In contrast, left-libertarian market anarchism seeks a world of horizontalism where hierarchies have been maximally flattened – if they exist at all. The kind of things mentioned above would require a high degree of hierarchy to effectuate through government. That ancient institution enmeshed in power and violence. One can only struggle to identify at least the radicalism of means in certain parts of the above and in toto on others.
Radical leftism is preferably about rejecting hierarchical aggressively coercive power structures wherever they are found. Not in merely lessening the aggressively coercive character of said institutions. Many non-anarchist or non-libertarian leftists have admirably contributed to restraining the aggressive power of government, but the radical solution is to abolish it. Its use of any and all aggressive coercion is one the major root problems with it.
It’s not surprising that another hierarchical aggressively coercive structure of power like capitalism is so tied up with government. The history of extensive corporate welfare is indicative of this, but the main point to be made here is that seeking the abolition of government doesn’t have to mean giving a free pass to capitalism. It can in fact be an integral part of doing away with both aggressively coercive oppressive structures of power. Let’s get started on it!
C4SS Feed 44 presents Cory Massimino‘s “Private Property, A Pretty Good Option” read by Stephen Leger and edited by Nick Ford.
It’s vital not to forget Joseph’s wonderfully put and absolutely correct argument that private property is the only method by which people can peacefully interact and allocate scarce resources. It would be odd indeed if we ignored the volumes of work, such as Human Action or Man, Economy, and State, showing how and why property rights are important, indeed necessary, for a functioning and prosperous society. Still, it would be similarly odd if we ignored the volumes of work explaining why people have an inherent moral right to private property, such as The Ethics of Liberty or Two Treatises of Government.
Before answering if there is good reason to respect private property beyond just consequential considerations, we have to ask, is there good reason to respect individual sovereignty beyond just consequential considerations? It seems evident that there is. Arguably the entire libertarian and anarchist project is predicated on the idea of a certain moral worth that each individual is entitled to, by their very nature, which makes states and oppressive hierarchies unjust.
Feed 44:
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If libertarians want to change how nonlibertarians’ think about government, they will need to understand how nonlibertarians think about government. By “nonlibertarians,” I mean the majority of people who spend little if any time pondering political theory, or what Murray Rothbard called political ethics. They may focus at times on particular government programs and actions, or on proposals for new programs, but rarely about government as an institution.
This is not hard to understand. We all come into a world full of national governments that present themselves as providers of a social safety net, guarantors of products and services, protectors of workers, defenders of the national borders, and dispensers of benefits to an assortment of deserving groups (farmers, exporters, too-big-to-fail banks, low-income people, and so on). This is all represented as indispensable to the general welfare.
So for most people, the welfare, or social-service, state is a natural, ever-present part of the landscape. This is reinforced through their “education” in government schools. Few ever question its necessity, much less wonder what life would be like without it. Some people may think the government goes too far (or not far enough) in this matter or that, but the social-service state itself never comes under examination. Its morality is implicitly assumed on the basis of how commonplace it is.
So how can libertarians speak to these people in a way they will understand? How do we get them to question deeply held beliefs that may never have been articulated? My basic advice is to start by trying to see government as they see it. This may be distasteful, but if you want to persuade people, what else are you going to do? Without this, you might as well be speaking in a foreign language.
It is self-defeating to seem to be condemning people for their reliance on or support of the various welfare-state programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Exhorting them to self-reliance will have little effect, especially since it exposes the libertarian to an apparent contradiction. After all, no libertarian would criticize people who buy insurance policies on their homes, cars, health or lives. Nor would we disparage members of the old mutual-aid societies, who drew cash benefits when sick, injured, or unemployed. Why not? Doesn’t this show a lack of self-reliance, a rejection of “rugged individualism”?
“That’s different,” some will say. “Unlike insurance and mutual aid, government assistance is coercive.”
Exactly! What I’m getting at is that people’s attraction to government-provided social services is not the problem (they believe they pay for them through taxes), because similar services offered in the voluntary sector (for-profit or mutual) would be not only unobjectionable but salutary.
Since that’s the case, the libertarian approach should focus on the flawed political method by which the services are provided, not the purported objects of the services themselves — security. We must demonstrate that people cooperating in freed markets (not to be confused with today’s corporatist economy) would be better providers than the state.
This principle is applicable in a variety of other areas. The government regulates or inspects products and services, and licenses an increasing number of occupations, in the name of consumer protection. Since people’s preference for consumer protection in itself is unassailable, the libertarian critique of government in this area shouldn’t imply that those who want help in looking out for shoddy products and dishonest, incompetent providers are irrational. They are just unaware of a better, more moral alternative.
The same goes for workers who worry about their vulnerability to arbitrary dismissal or onerous demands. Again, libertarians do not look askance at individuals who sign contracts specifying the conditions, including the term, of employment. The quest for some certainty about such things seems reasonable in that context. Other things equal, most people would prefer not to be in a position in which they could lose their jobs without notice because the boss had a bad day. This is especially so when the government’s central bank is in the habit of generating bubbles and consequent busts, which can bring long-term layoffs and permanent unemployment — something that could not happen in a freed market.
In all these cases, the problem, again, is with the means — provision through the state — not the ends. The world is inherently uncertain. No one can be sure what tomorrow will bring. So the wish to create islands of relative security in an insecure world — a safety net, if you will — is only rational. The libertarian job is to convince people that, on two counts, government provision is a bad way to secure a good end. First, it is morally wrong because it requires compulsion — the threat of physical violence — starting with taxation. And second, as a consequence of the first feature, state provision is inferior to private provision because it is outside the free and competitive market, a process that, unlike the political realm, ties rewards to customer service and stimulates entrepreneurial discovery, which makes products and services better and cheaper.
For example, market-based consumer protection would be superior to the government’s ersatz version precisely because it would be market-based — that is, offered by competitors trying to prosper by demonstrating competence, establishing reputations, and winning the favor of customers. We see such organizations today — Underwriters Laboratories, Consumer Reports, and, thanks to the Internet, Angie’s List and many others — but they would become even more widespread and more important with the removal of the government’s illusion of protection. (That people use these services demonstrates that they have little faith in government protection.)
Consumers would also be better protected if producers had no shelter whatever from free competition (which all licensing, permits, and costly regulation provide to some extent) and no prospect of government subsidies, bailouts, or other privileges, such as limited liability for damages or immunity from lawsuits because minimum government standards were complied with.
Bureaucrats face perverse incentives compared with those faced by participants in freed markets. The officials who run government agencies have no money at risk, and the people (as taxpayers) have no choice but to put up with them. (What do you do if you think the head of the FDA, FCC, FTC is incompetent?) Moreover, government agencies are easily subject to regulatory capture, by which the well-connected among the regulated influence or control the regulators — leaving consumers out in the cold with only a false sense of security, which is worse than none at all. (Historically, big firms have favored government regulation over the unpredictable competition of the marketplace, which can make market share a fleeting thing.)
In other words, consumers would be safer without government protection. But that counterintuitive claim must be patiently demonstrated, not merely insisted on. (One disadvantage for libertarians is that most people are ignorant of economics.)
Similarly, workers who look to government for protection from capricious bosses unwittingly leave themselves vulnerable to insidious co-optation by “labor leaders” whose higher priority is sitting at the corporate state’s conference table with the big boys. Real protection would be found in truly worker-based organizations whose rules were not written by a Washington bureaucracy to accommodate the insiders.
Even more important, abolition of the myriad ways by which government rigs the market would maximize workers’ bargaining power. These ways include the many impediments to starting small-scale home-based businesses and cooperative neighborhood enterprises, impediments that harm low-income people most of all, who are already hampered by the rotten product delivered by government schools. Killing occupational licensing, permit regimes, zoning, intellectual property, and eminent domain would only begin to free us from this virtually guild-ridden economic system.
Libertarians understand that government — because it operates through force and faces no market test from customers free to say no — offers inferior services even when they would be perfectly legitimate if offered privately. (However, not everything the government does would have a legitimate counterpart in the private sector. Some “services” are intrinsically aggressive.) Libertarians also understand that trusting government to provide those services is a tragic mistake, because bureaucracies inexorably come under the control of those with the most political sway, no matter what the progressives say. On net and contrary to the politicians’ propaganda, wealth tends to be transferred up, not down. That’s how things work.
Libertarians understand these things, or ought to, but most other people don’t. Instead, they see government as a vast mutual-aid society (even if they are unfamiliar with that term): You pay your dues (taxes) and you draw benefits when you qualify under the various programs. If you don’t pay your dues, you are penalized because you agreed to pay them. (Agreed? Presumably by not leaving the country — a highly dubious assumption.) If you don’t like the rules, vote for people who will change them.
Advocates of individual freedom are unlikely to make progress if they don’t educate other people on what’s wrong with this picture.
Bloomberg ha pubblicato una notizia secondo cui “il più grosso gruppo d’affari di Wall Street ha avanzato la proposta di un consiglio stato-industria che si occupi di guerra cibernetica,” consiglio che sarebbe guidato da “un grosso rappresentante della Casa Bianca” e composto da rappresentanti dell’alta finanza e di almeno otto agenzie federali.
Il suddetto “gruppo d’affari”, la Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, ha già coinvolto l’ex direttore della Nsa Keith Alexander e una società guidata dall’ex capo della Sicurezza Nazionale Michael Chertoff per “facilitare” la realizzazione del progetto.
La banda c’è tutta! Lo stato, ex lacchè di stato, banchieri… ma manca qualcuno. Chi sarà? Ah, è vero, siete voi! Ma non preoccupatevi. C’è un ruolo anche per voi. Tanto per iniziare, vi tocca il conto.
Quando Alexander scoprì che il suo servizio di sicurezza, offerto tramite la sua società di “consulenza” IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc. al prezzo di un milione al mese, non era un gran successo, decise di spolverare la vecchia fregatura della “società pubblico-privato”: chiudi in un serraglio i “clienti” che non hanno voglia di pagare e fai entrare lo stato, che poi passa il conto ai cittadini sotto forma di tasse.
Una “società pubblico-privato”, anche banale, è sempre una pessima idea. La parte “pubblica” si occupa del pagamento (vostro) dei costi. La parte “privata” si occupa dei benefici (i loro). In caso di fallimento, stato e socio “privato” dividono le colpe. Non nel senso che se le dividono tra loro, ma nel senso che se le rimpallano a vicenda fino allo sfinimento, finché tutti si dimenticano cosa è successo e loro possono tornare a frugare nel vostro portafogli.
Ovviamente né “pubblico” né “privato” significano quel che sembrano. La parte “privata” è formata da persone come Alexander, Chertoff e i loro amici banchieri senza volto: non più, o non ancora, tecnicamente alle dipendenze del governo, ma saldamente attaccati alla mammella. La parte “pubblica” è formata da burocrati governativi ansiosi di intraprendere una simile carriera in futuro. Le due parti sono collegate tramite una porta girevole. Se è difficile da vedere è perché gira molto rapidamente (sentite il sibilo?). Voi sborsate i soldi e per il resto non sono affari vostri.
Questa particolare “società”, però, è ben lungi dall’essere banale. Come faccio a dirlo? Semplice: c’è la parola “guerra”.
Le guerre hanno parti. Le guerre hanno nemici.
Non mi credete? Chiedetelo a Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, che è appena tornato dall’ospedale dopo che arditi (“pubblici”) guerrieri antidroga hanno lanciato una granata stordente nel suo box durante un raid. Forse avete sentito la storia nei notiziari della sera, infilata tra uno spot e l’altro della “pubblicità progresso” che pubblicizza la (“privata”) Associazione per una America Senza Droga. Questo è ciò che vi è dato sapere della lotta alla droga.
L’obiettivo di questo sforzo bellico “pubblico-privato” è la riparazione del muro eretto tanto tempo fa (dagli stessi attori “pubblici” e “privati” di oggi) attorno ai servizi bancari, finanziari e di pagamento.
Il suo nemico è il far west dei mercati e i loro clienti (compresi voi). Pensate a Bitcoin. Pensate a Uber e Lyft.
Questi mercati operano (a volte di fatto, altre potenzialmente) fuori dalla rete di normative di stato messa su per offrire fette di mercato, come i monopoli, a quelli che hanno amicizie politiche. Sono sempre esistiti (pensate al baratto, alla moneta spontanea, ai minibus e i taxi abusivi), ma oggi stanno spuntando come funghi. Alimentati dall’accesso diffuso ad internet e dalla disponibilità di forti tecnologie crittografiche, rappresentano un pericolo crescente non solo per alcuni particolarimonopolisti, ma per l’intero sistema statale di controllo che garantisce loro il monopolio.
È già in corso il dispiegamento della propaganda giustificativa che alla fine culminerà in qualche “standard di sicurezza” accompagnato da “azioni energiche o preventive”. Forse non è un caso se la notizia di questa proposta da parte dei media segue immediatamente la notizia di un articolo di un blog, presumibilmente legato al gruppo Isis, in cui si parla dell’uso di Bitcoin per “diffondere la jihad”. Non mi sorprenderei se dovessi sapere che gli autori di quell’articolo e gli addetti stampa del “consiglio di guerra cibernetica” condividono lo stesso ufficio al Pentagono… o perlomeno sono in contatto telefonico.
La cattiva notizia è che probabilmente non potete fare nulla per evitare questo “consiglio di guerra” o i suoi piani bellici.
La buona notizia è che potete vincere questa guerra. Tutto quello che dovete fare è capire che avete bisogno di mercati nuovi, migliori e non controllati più che di mercati controllati dallo stato (o dello stato, se è per questo) e agire di conseguenza.
Periodicamente, a queda persistente da confiança dos americanos no governo que ocorre desde a década de 1950 causa consternação dentro da centro esquerda. A apresentadora de talk show de rádio Leslie Marshall recentemente publicou um tweet, muito preocupada, sobre uma pesquisa que apontava que a porcentagem do público que confia no governo para “fazer a coisa certa” na maior parte do tempo ou “quase sempre” estava em 19% em 2013 (para dar um contexto, o pico porcentual ocorreu em 1965, com 77%). Ela apontava para um artigo de Julian Zelizer na CNN que lamentava a pouca fé no governo (“que é necessária para uma sociedade saudável”), afirmando que se trata de uma herança cultural da Guerra do Vietnã e do escândalo de Watergate e defendendo reformas políticas para combater a corrupção, restaurar a confiança do público e tornar o sistema político, mais uma vez, funcional.
Mas o que significa “funcional”? Sob que tipo de governo os americanos viviam em 1958 (quando a confiança do público estava em 73%) ou em 1965 (77%) antes que o Vietnã destruísse sua fé? Samuel Huntington, que compartilhava a preocupação de Zelizer com o declínio da confiança no governo, o descreveu bem em 1973, em um artigo para a Comissão Trilateral sobre a “crise de governabilidade” e o “excesso de democracia”. Para Huntington, o papel dos Estados Unidos no pós-guerra como “poder hegemônico na ordem mundial” dependia de um sistema doméstico de poder. Nesse sistema, os Estados Unidos “eram governados pelo presidente com o apoio e a cooperação de indivíduos-chave e grupos dentro do executivo, da burocracia federal, do congresso e nas empresas, bancos, firmas legais, fundações e veículos de mídia, que constituem o establishment privado”.
Os altos níveis de confiança pública, como naqueles bons e velhos tempos antes do Vietnã e de Watergate, eram necessários para manter esse sistema de poder estável. O papel adequado dessa hegemonia global, afirmava Huntington, requeria a capacidade de o estado “mobilizar, disciplinar e sacrificar seus cidadãos” em busca de objetivos sociais e políticos — o que requeria que os americanos confiassem no governo e não tentassem ver de muito perto o que de fato ele estava fazendo.
E o que ele fazia quando a confiança era tão alta? Logo que saiu da Segunda Guerra Mundial como potência global, os Estados Unidos começaram a recorrer a invasões diretas, golpes militares e esquadrões da morte quando os países se recusavam a cooperar com a ordem corporativa pós-guerra.
O tão exaltado “New Deal”, além de promover suficiente demanda agregada para estimular uma produção econômica massificada baseada no desperdício, também era uma maneira de alcançar o tipo de aprovação pública de que Huntington tanto sentia falta. “Finja que não está vendo quando nós derrubarmos Arbenz, Mossadeq, Sukarno e Diem e você poderá ter um tripex e um carro novinho!”
Eu me recordo muito bem do momento desde Watergate em que a confiança do público de que o governo “faria a coisa certa” passou dos 50%: 11 de setembro. O congresso deu a George W. Bush uma carta branca para lutar em qualquer lugar do muno para sempre e amém, em conjunto com poderes de estado policial que rivalizavam os de Hitler após o incêndio do Reichstag. O conhecido observador Dan Rather dizia na época: “Só me diga onde eu tenho que me apresentar, Sr. Presidente.”
Então, por que qualquer pessoa confiaria no governo dos Estados Unidos? Ele é a ferramenta da classe econômica dominante desde que os grandes mercadores, donos de títulos, barões de terras e senhores de escravos da Filadélfia o criaram. No pico da confiança do governo, ele promovia torturas, assassinatos, terrorismo e tirania para defender sua ordem mundial neocolonial — e ele nunca deixou de fazer isso. O estado tira vantagem sempre de qualquer aumento na confiança pública para aumentar suas atividades criminosas.
Portanto, talvez a desconfiança do governo não seja uma coisa tão ruim.
Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.
Since Nathan Goodman has asked me to fill in for him this week on The Weekly Abolitionist, I’d like to focus on something important to radical political struggles that isn’t talked about much: fiction.
As prison abolitionists, we can talk at length about the ways that prisons as such encourage abuse, add to recidivism, interlock with other oppressive systems like white supremacy, and are inherently unjust. Yet, for some people to really “get it,” something more is required.
At the time I’m writing this, I’ve finished about a season and a half of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which is set in a women’s prison and loosely based around the real-life Piper Kerman’s prison memoir of the same title. Though it does not take an abolitionist outlook toward the prison system, it is a perfect example of the kinds of stories that need to be told. (It’s not for nothing that the show has even received praise from Angela Davis.)
Most significantly, Orange Is the New Black humanizes prisoners. Rich character development is one of the show’s strong-suits, and that helps to remind viewers that those suffering behind bars are real, flesh and blood people.
By showing flashbacks to their lives on the outside, we see that prison inmates are usually nothing like the caged monsters that are typically imagined in popular discourse surrounding them. They are often much like us, and it becomes difficult to sanction their sentences in good conscience.
Both on the outside and in prison, we seem them capable of compassion, meaningful human bonds, and all sorts of impressive achievements. For most of them, we see otherwise normal women who made one big mistake, not ongoing threats who need to be physically removed from the outside society.
Furthermore, we see that the condition of prison does not rehabilitate these women, but instead hardens them. Women who would normally never even think of hitting another person come close to murder, because of the situation created for them by the prison.
The show’s strong character development is present not only in the inmates, but also the staff, which further helps the show’s utility for abolitionists. This is because when we look at the staff of the show’s prison, we (mostly) don’t see sociopaths. We see ordinary people whose positions of power either require them or bring them to do extraordinarily awful things.
It’s not enough to just change out the people running the prison, because it would still end up looking roughly the same. The problems are structural, not personal.
It is difficult to imagine any situation (at least in the contemporary United States) where one person has as much near total control over another person and their life as a prison guard has over a prisoner. As we should expect, this brings out the worst in those given free rein to do whatever they want with or to others.
For example, in everyday life, one man’s homophobia may be unlikely to ever actually materialize as actual violence. But that same man, when given the power to do so, thinks nothing of sending a prisoner to solitary as part of his temper tantrum against her attraction to women. He feels entitled to do so precisely because of how sharply subordinate prisoners are to the staff.
That incident brings us to another important feature of the show. While its portrayal of prison in general is clearly not pleasant, it reveals solitary confinement for what it is: Hell. Solitary confinement is nothing short of torture, and it is difficult to say otherwise when watching the scenes that take place there.
A character cries out to herself in pain, and a soft voice answers back on the other side of the wall. Even this small amount of human interaction is a godsend, and she nervously asks “are you real?” The reply is chilling: “I don’t know.”
That is where the cramped isolation and dehumanization of solitary confinement leads, and the viewer can see it more clearly than they’d ever want to.
Viewers often assume that the show’s introduction – a sequence of eyes and mouths set to Regina Spektor’s “You’ve Got Time” – is made up of extreme close-ups of the show’s cast. The reality is that all of those faces are the faces of actual formerly incarcerated women.
This serves as a reminder that even for those events in the show that are entirely fictional, something like that has happened to someone, and something like that will happen to someone in the future (at least as long as we have prisons). It is just that sort of reminder that reveals the show’s real value.
By capturing our empathy, Orange Is the New Black forces us to acknowledge that when we accept the prison system, these are the women we are condemning to that life. It refuses to let us lazily fall back into the impersonal justifications we’ve rehearsed for as long as we’ve known about prisons.
We cannot just look away from the people we cage as we talk about why we cage them. We must look them in the eyes as we say it.
Art stirs people’s basic human sympathies toward action, and action is desperately needed to rid ourselves of the prison state. It is for this reason that we need more shows like Orange Is the New Black.
“For the last century, or more, we have been experimenting with the rule of democracy–the bludgeoning by governors whom majorities, drunk with power, impose on vanquished minorities. This last is probably the worst of all, for we stand to-day steeped to the lips in a universal corruption that is rotting every nation to the core. Is it not a fact that, whether it be a French Deputy or an English Member of Parliament, a Republican, a Democratic, or a Socialist candidate for office, each and every one of them sings exactly the same siren song: “Clothe me with power, and I will use it for your good “? It has been the song of every tyrant and despoiler since history began.” — W.C. Owen, “Anarchism versus Socialism”
W(illiam) C(harles) Owen (2/16/1854-7/9/1929), individualist-anarchist, author of The Economics of Herbert Spencer, “Anarchism versus Socialism” (and here), “Elisée Reclus”, “England Monopolised or England Free?”, “Full steam astern! Is this progress or the road to ruin?”, “The Mexican revolution, its progress, causes purpose and probable results” and numerous other essays was born in Dinapore, India, raised in England, and emigrated to the United States in 1882.
His socialist leanings led him to become a member of the International Workingmen’s Association in California. He discovered Kropotkin’s writings and translated of several of his works, beginning his travel fromsocialism to anarchism. He was a contributor to Burnette G. Haskell’s (1857-1907) San Francisco Truth (1882-97); editor of Nationalist of Los Angeles (1890) and San Francisco (1891-4); and contributed to Commonweal, organ of the Socialist League (which had been taken over by anarchists in 1890) of William Morris in England. In 1890, in New York, with Italian Saverio Merlino he joined the league and became a founder of the New York Socialist League in 1890. He was expelled from the League in 1892. Owen, now influenced by Benjamin Tucker, became an anarchist-individualist. He contributed to Freedom from 1893 on and returned to California to work as a journalist, where he would become involved in the land question, a subject which he would turn to again and again. Owen also contributed to the libertarian weekly “Free Society” in San Francisco (1897-1904) and Emma Goldman’s “Mother Earth“.
In 1911, he began his work withRicardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) and his brother, Enrique Flores Magón and becomes editor of the English section of Regeneración (1910-1916) and corresponds throughout the international libertarian press. Many anarchists, both individualist and collectivist, throughout the western United States would actively support the Magón brothers and their revolutionary activities in Baja California. Emma Goldman, in her biographical essay, “Voltairine de Cleyre,” said, Voltairine
“fervently took up the fight of the Mexican people who threw off their yoke; she wrote, she lectured, she collected funds for the Mexican cause”
before dying in 1912 (in Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell’s Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre–Anarchist, Feminist, Genius (Albany, SUNY Press, 2005. p. 38). Their offices and activities were centered in Los Angeles and Tijuana where most of their publications were produced. In the 1970’s, I tracked down their address in the center of Los Angeles and kept some pieces of the old brick building which had been torn down. Only the foundation was left.
He published his own periodical,”Land & Liberty” (1914-15) and then in 1916 returned to England (1916). At that time, anarchist immigrants, especially activists, in the United States were under severe pressure from the federal government to be deported and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles was seeking
“a federal indictment against [any anarchists involved]…for conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States and to invade Mexico.” (William Preston, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933 (NY: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 53).
Congressmen were applauded in Congress for saying such things as
“Now I would execute these anarchists if I could, and then I would deport them, so that the soil of our country might not be polluted by their presence even after the breath had gone out of their bodies. I do not care what the time limit is. I want to get rid of them by some route… or by execution by the hangman. It makes no difference to me so that we get rid of them.” (ibid., p. 83).
On February 18, 1916, Enrique & Ricardo Flores Magón were arrested at their Community Farm near Los Angeles, California. Enrique was beaten by the police and hospitalized. The Magón brothers were charged with mailing articles inciting “murder, arson and treason,” and go on trial May 21. Both were convicted, given prison sentences and fines.
As Owen’s friends and fellow-travelers in the I.W.W. poetically said at the time that WWI was beginning,
I love my flag, I do, I do.
Which floats upon the breeze,
I also love my arms and legs,
And neck, and nose and knees.
One little shell might spoil them all
Or give them such a twist,
They would be of no use to me;
I guess I won’t enlist.<br
I love my country, yes, I do
I hope her folks do well.
Without our arms, and legs and things,
I think we’d look like hell.
Young men with faces half shot off
Are unfit to be kissed,
I’ve read in books it spoils their looks,
I guess I won’t enlist.
(ibid., p. 89)
When back in London, he took part in the newspaper “Freedom” (1886-?) and the Freedom Press, joined the Commonwealth League, and wrote for its organ Commonweal. In 1926, he became part of a small co-operative colony close to Storrington (Sussex). W.C. Owen died in Worthing, Great Britain in 1929.
Along with Auberon Herbert, Victor Yarros, Henry Bool, Charles T. Sprading and a few other writers, he would be regarded as among the best of the Spencerian Anarchists, integrating the insights of Herbert Spencer with individualist-anarchism. Marcus Graham (aka Shmuel Marcus, 1893-197?, Romanian-born editor of the anarchist journal Man! (1933-40) would say of Owen that
“He proved to be one of the most interesting men I ever had the good fortune to know. We met often and he was a fountain of knowledge in every respect…Owen’s spirit was that of a revolutionary…Owen carried on a long correspondence with me until his death, and his reading and correcting the proofs of the Anthology [of Revolutionary Poetry (New York: The Active Press, 1929)] was of immense value.” Marcus Graham, MAN! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974. p. 10)
Anarchy versus Socialism
Introduction
“Anarchy versus Socialism”, W.C. Owen’s best-known work, was written originally around 1902 at the request of Owen’s friend, Emma Goldman, who wanted a work detailing the difference between Anarchism and Socialism, most likely, as a response to Daniel DeLeon‘s “Socialism versus Anarchism” (Girard, Kansas: People’s Pocket Series No. 5; Appeal to Reason. Lecture Delivered at Boston, October 13, 1901. The individualist-anarchist, A.H. Simpson, was in the audience and provided questions for DeLeon which are valuable to read, just as E. Belfort Bax’s “‘Voluntaryism’ versus ‘Socialism'”, a response to Auberon Herbert, is useful). It was Owen’s belief that no honest alliance was possible between the two. As he said,
“either you believe in the right of the Individual to govern himself, which is the basis of Anarchism, or you believe that he must be governed by others, which is the cornerstone of all those creeds which should be grouped generically as Socialism. One or the other must be the road to human progress. Both cannot be.”
The following is a condensed version of his essay:
Man is manifestly destined to be master of himself and his surroundings, individually free. His capacity for achievement has shown itself practically boundless, whenever and wherever it has been permitted the opportunity of expansion; and no less an ideal than equal and unfettered opportunity–that is to say, individual freedom–should satisfy him…[A]ll forms of slavery [are] a refusal to recognize Man’s dignity or native worth.
Anarchism
[S]o long as the ordinary individual remains unconscious of his proper dignity as the great thinking animal, slavery, in my judgment, will continue. The first essential business, therefore, is to awaken thought; to get men to look at things as they are; to induce them to hunt for truth.
To us the problem is not merely economic…[T]he promotion of individuality, and the encouragement of the spirit of revolt against whatever institutions may be unworthy of humanity, are everything. We are rebels against slavery, and we understand that men will win their way to freedom only when they yearn to be free.
Back of all this infamy stands always the Government machine; dead to all human sympathy, as are all machines; bent only on increasing its efficiency as a machine, and enlarging its power; organized expressly to keep things, in all essentials, precisely as they are. It is the arch-type of immobility, and, therefore, the foe of growth. It is the quintessence of compulsion, and, therefore, the enemy of freedom. To it the individual is a subject, of whom it demands unquestioning obedience. Necessarily we Anarchists are opposed to it. We do not dream, as do the Socialists, of making it the one great Monopolist, and therefore the sole arbiter of life. On the contrary, we seek to whittle away its powers, that it may be reduced to nothingness and be succeeded by a society of free individuals, equipped with equal opportunities and arranging their own affairs by mutual agreement.
[Echoing Herbert Spencer, [t]he Anarchist type of social structure is the industrial type, and for it the true industrialist, the working man, should stand. On the other hand, he who cries for more Government is declaring himself an advocate of the military type, wherein society is graded into classes and all life’s business conducted by inferiors obeying orders issued by the superior command. That offers the worker only permanent inferiority and enslavement, and against that he should revolt.
[T]he State…deprives men of personal responsibility, robs them of their natural virility, takes out of their hands the conduct of their own lives, thereby reduces them to helplessness, and thus insures the final collapse of the whole social structure.
[Anarchism i]s based on the conception that the Individual is the natural fount of all activity, and that his claim to free and full development of all his powers is paramount. The Socialist interpretation, on the other hand, is presented as resting on the conception that the claim of the Collectivity is paramount, and that to its welfare, real or imagined, the Individual must and should subordinate himself.
On the correct interpretation of Life everything depends, and the question is as to which of these two conflicting interpretations is correct. Always and everywhere the entire social struggle hinges on that very point, and every one of us has his feet set, however unconsciously, in one or other of these camps. Some would sacrifice the Individual, and all minorities, to the supposed interests of the collective whole. Others are equally convinced that a wrong inflicted on one member poisons the whole body, and that only when it renders full justice to the Individual will society be once more on the road to health.
[T]he existing system is a miserable compromise between Anarchism and Socialism with which neither can be content. On the one hand, the Individual is instructed to play for his own hand, however fatally the cards are stacked against him. On the other hand, he is adjured incessantly to sacrifice himself to the common weal. Special Privilege, when undisturbed, preaches always individual struggle, although it is Special Privilege that robs the ordinary individual of all his chances of success. Let Special Privilege be attacked, however, and it appeals forthwith to the Socialistic principle declaring vehemently that the general interests of society must be protected at any cost.
When a man says he is an Anarchist he puts on himself the most definite of labels. He announces that he is a “no rule” man. “Anarchy”–compounded of the Greek words “ana,” without, and “arche,” rule–gives in a nutshell the whole of his philosophy. His one conviction is that men must be free; that they must own themselves.
Anarchists do not propose to invade the individual rights of others, but they propose to resist, and do resist, to the best of their ability all invasion by others. To order your own life, as a responsible individual, without invading the lives of others, is freedom; to invade and attempt to rule the lives of others is to constitute yourself an enslaver; to submit to invasion and rule imposed on you against your own will and judgment is to write yourself down a slave.
Anarchism stands for the free, unrestricted development of each individual; for the giving to each equal opportunity of controlling and developing his own particular life. It insists on equal opportunity of development for all, regardless of colour, race, or class; on equal rights to whatever shall be found necessary to the proper maintenance and development of individual life; on a “square deal” for every human being, in the most literal sense of the term.
Moreover, it matters not to the Anarchist whether the rule imposed on him is benevolent or malicious. In either case it is an equal trespass on his right to govern his own life. In either case the imposed rule tends to weaken him, and he recognizes that to be weak is to court oppression.
So, from the exact Greek language the precise and unmistakable word “Anarchy” was coined, as expressing beyond question the basic conviction that all rule of man by man is slavery.
The entire Anarchist movement is based on an unshakeable conviction that the time has come for men–not merely in the mass, but individually–to assert themselves and insist on the right to manage their own affairs without external interference; to insist on equal opportunities for self-development; to insist on a “square deal,” unhampered by the intervention of self-asserted superiors.
[U]nder the artificial conditions imposed on them by rulers, who portion out among themselves the means of life, millions of the powerful species known as “Man” are reduced to conditions of abject helplessness of which a starving timber-wolf would be ashamed. It is unspeakably disgusting to us, this helplessness of countless millions of our fellow creatures; we trace it directly to stupid, unnatural laws, by which the few plunder and rule over the many, and we propose to do our part in restoring to the race its natural strength, by abolishing the conditions that render it at present so pitiably weak.
For the last century, or more, we have been experimenting with the rule of democracy–the bludgeoning by governors whom majorities, drunk with power, impose on vanquished minorities. This last is probably the worst of all, for we stand to-day steeped to the lips in a universal corruption that is rotting every nation to the core. Is it not a fact that, whether it be a French Deputy or an English Member of Parliament, a Republican, a Democratic, or a Socialist candidate for office, each and every one of them sings exactly the same siren song: “Clothe me with power, and I will use it for your good “? It has been the song of every tyrant and despoiler since history began.
It is you yourselves, governed by the misrepresentations of superstition, and not daring to lift your heads and look life in the face, who substitute for that magnificent justice the hideously unjust inequalities with which society is sick well-nigh to death. Does not the experience of your daily life teach you that when, in any community, any one man is loaded with power it is always at the expense of many others, who are thereby rendered helpless?
Let us not flatter ourselves that we can shirk this imperative call to self-assertion by appointing deputies to perform the task that properly belongs to us alone. Already it is clear to all who look facts in the face that the entire representative system, to which the workers so fatuously looked for deliverance, has resulted in a concentration of political power such as is almost without parallel in history.
Our representative system is farce incarnate. We take a number of men who have been making their living by some one pursuit–in most cases that of the law–and know nothing outside that pursuit, and we require them to legislate on the ten thousand and one problems to which a highly diversified and intricate industrial development has given rise. The net result is work for lawyers and places for office-holders, together with special privileges for shrewd financiers, who know well how to get clauses inserted in measures that seem innocence itself but are always fatal to the people’s rights.
Anarchism concentrates its attention on the individual, considering that only when absolute justice is done to him or her will it be possible to have a healthy and happy society. For society is merely the ordinary citizen multiplied indefinitely, and as long as the individuals of which it is composed are treated unjustly, it is impossible for the body at large to be healthy and happy. Anarchism, therefore, cannot tolerate the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed interests of the majority, or to any of those high-sounding catchwords (patriotism, the public welfare, and so forth) for the sake of which the individual–and always the weakest individual, the poor, helpless working man and woman–is murdered and mutilated to-day, as he has been for untold ages past.
Only by a direct attack on monopoly and special privilege; only by a courageous and unswerving insistence on the rights of the individual, whoever he may be; on his individual right to equality of opportunity, to an absolutely square deal, to a full and equal seat at the table of life, can this great social problem, with which the whole world now groans in agony, be solved.
In a word, the freedom of the individual, won by the abolition of special privileges and the securing to all of equal opportunities, is the gateway through which we must pass to the higher civilisation that is already calling loudly to us.
It is urged that we Anarchists have no plans; that we do not set out in detail how the society of the future is to be run. This is true. We are not inclined to waste our breath in guesses about things we cannot know. We are not in the business of putting humanity in irons. We are trying to get humanity to shake off its irons. We have no co-operative commonwealth, cut and dried, to impose on the generations yet unborn. We are living men and women, concerned with the living present, and we recognize that the future will be as the men and women of the future make it, which in its turn will depend on themselves and the conditions in which they find themselves. If we bequeath to them freedom they will be able to conduct their lives freely.
To overthrow human slavery, which is always the enslavement of individuals, is Anarchism’s one and only task. It is not interested in making men better under slavery, because it considers that impossible–a statement before which the ordinary reader probably will stand aghast. It seems, therefore, necessary to remind him once again that Anarchists are realists who try to see Life as it is, here on this earth, the only place where we can study it, indeed the only place whereon, so far as hitherto discovered, human life exists. Our view is that of the biologist. We take Man as we find him, individually and as a member of a species. We see him subject to certain natural laws, obedience to which brings healthy growth while disobedience entails decay and untimely death. This to us is fundamental, and much of Anarchism’s finest literature is devoted to it.
Now, from the biological standpoint, Freedom is the all-essential thing. Without it individual health and growth are impossible… Biologically we are all parts of one organic whole–the human species–and, from the purely scientific standpoint, an injury to one is the concern of all. You cannot have slavery at one end of the chain and freedom at the other. In our view, therefore, Special Privilege in every shape and form, must go. It is a denial of the organic unity of mankind; of that oneness of the human family which is, to us, a scientific truth. …Internationalism is, to us, a biological fact a natural law which cannot be violated with impunity or explained away. The most criminal violators of that natural law are modern Governments, which devote all the force at their command to the maintenance of Special Privilege, and, in their lust for supremacy, keep nations perpetually at war. Back of all this brutal murdering is the thought: “Our governing machine will become more powerful. Eventually we shall emerge from the struggle as rulers of the earth.”
This earth is not to be ruled by the few. It is or the free and equal enjoyment of every member of the human race. It is not to be held in fee by old and decaying aristocracies, or bought up as a private preserve by the newly rich–that hard-faced and harder-conscienced mob which hangs like a vulture over every battlefield and gorges on the slain…For, just as the human species is one organic whole, so the earth, this solid globe beneath our feet, is one economic organism, one single store-house of natural wealth, one single workroom in which all men and women have an equal right to labour.
To every Anarchist the right to free and equal use of natural opportunities is an individual right, conferred by Nature and imposed by Life. It is a fundamental law of human existence.
It is a question of intelligence, and to Anarchists the methods generally proposed for restoring the land to the use of the living do not appear intelligent. Clearly Nationalization will not do; for Nationalization ignores the organic unity of the human species, and merely substitutes for monopoly by the individual monopoly by that artificial creation, the State, as representing that equally artificial creation, the Nation. Such a philosophy lands us at once in absurdities so obvious that their bare statement suffices to explode them.
Even Capitalism knows better than that. In theory, as in practice, Capitalism is international, for it recognizes that what is needed by the world at large must pass into the channels of international trade and be distributed.
To all Anarchists, therefore, the abolition of Land Monopoly is fundamental. Land Monopoly is the denial of Life’s basic law, whether regarded from the standpoint of the individual or of the species.
In some way or another the Individual must assert and maintain his free and equal right to life, which means his free and equal right to the use of that without which life is impossible, our common Mother, Earth. And it is to the incalculable advantage of society, the whole, to secure to each of its units that inalienable right; to release the vast accumulations of constructive energy now lying idle and enslaved; to say to every willing worker–“Wherever there is an unused opportunity which you can turn to account you are free to use it. We do not bound you. We do not limit you. This earth is yours individually as it is ours racially, and the essential meaning of our conquest of the seas, of air and space, is that you are free to come and go whither you will upon this planet, which is at once our individual and racial home.”
The Land Question, viewed biologically, reveals wide horizons and opens doors already half ajar. Placed on the basis of equal human rights, it is nobly destructive, for it spells death to wrongs now hurling civilisation to its ruin. Were free and equal use of natural opportunities accepted as a fundamental law–just as most of us accept, in theory, the Golden Rule–there would be no more territory-grabbing wars. …Free exchange, so essential to international prosperity, would follow automatically, and with it we should shake off those monstrous bureaucracies now crushing us.
These doors already are standing more than half ajar… Science, annihilating distance, has made, potentially at least, the human family one. What sense is there in fencing off countries by protective tariffs when the very purpose of the railway and the steamship, the cable and the wireless station, is to break through those fences?
All intelligent and courageous action along one line of the great struggle for human rights helps thought and action along other lines, and the contest that is certain to come over the land question cannot but clear the field in other directions. It will be seen, for example, that freedom of production will not suffice without freedom of distribution.
If mankind is ever to be master of itself, scientific thought–which deals with realities and bases its conclusions on ascertained facts–must take the place of guess and superstition. To bring the conduct of human life into accord with the ascertained facts of life is, at bottom, the great struggle that is going on in society.
War
[War] has thrown us back into barbarism. For the moment it has afflicted us with Militarism and scourged us with all the tyrannies that military philosophy and tactics approve of and enforce. Necessarily Militarism believes in itself and in that physical violence which is its speciality. Necessarily it sympathies with all those barbarisms of which it is the still-surviving representative, and distrusts those larger views that come with riper growth. How could it be otherwise? By the essence of its being Militarism does not argue; it commands. Its business is not to yield but to conquer, and to keep, at any cost, its conquests. Always, by the fundamental tenets of its creed it will invade; drive the weaker to the wall, enforce submission. He who talks to it of human rights, on the full recognition of which social peace depends, speaks a language it does not and cannot understand. To Militarism he is a dreamer, and, in the words of the great German soldier, Von Moltke, it does not even regard his dream as beautiful.
Every Government is a vast military machine, armed with all the resources of modern science. Every Government is invading ruthlessly the liberties of its own “subjects” and stripping them of elemental rights. Resolved on keeping, at any cost, its existing conquests, every Government treats as an outcast and criminal him who questions its autocracy. Obsessed perpetually by fear, which is the real root of military philosophy, every Government is guarding itself against popular attack; and with Governments, as with all living creatures, there is nothing so unscrupulous as fear. When Government punishes the man who dares to express honestly his honest thought, does it pause to consider that it is killing that spirit of enquiry which is the life of progress, and crushing out of existence the courageous few who are the backbone of the nation? Not at all. Like an arrant coward, it thinks only of its own safety. When, by an elaborate system of registration, passports, inspection of private correspondence, and incessant police espionage, it checks all the comings and goings of individual life, does it give a thought to personal liberty or suffer a single pang at the reflection that it is sinking its country…? Not a bit of it. The machine thinks only of itself; of how it may I increase and fortify its power.
Just as the Court sets the fashions that rule “Society,” so the influence of the governmental machine permeates all our economic life. The political helplessness of the individual citizen finds its exact counterpart in the economic helplessness of the masses, reduced to helplessness by the privileges Government confers upon the ruling class, and exploited by that ruling class in exact proportion to their helplessness. Throughout the economic domain “Woe to the Conquered” is the order of the day; and to this barbaric military maxim, which poisons our entire industrial system and brutalizes our whole philosophy of life, we owe it that Plutocracy is gathering into its clutches all the resources of this planet and imposing on the workers everywhere what I myself believe to be the heaviest yoke they have, as yet, been forced to bear.
Anarchists … regard Militarism as a straitjacket in which modern Industrialism, now struggling violently for expansion, cannot fetch its breath. And everything that smacks of Governmentalism smacks also of Militarism, they being Siamese twins, vultures out of the same egg. The type now advancing to the centre of the stage, and destined to occupy it exclusively, is, as they see it, the industrial type; a type that will give all men equal opportunities, as of human right, and not tolerate the invasion of that right, a type, therefore, that will enable men to regulate their own affairs by mutual agreement and free them from their present slavery to the militant employing class; a type that will release incalculably enormous reservoirs of energy now lying stagnant … That such is the natural trend of the evolution now in process they do not doubt; but its pace will be determined by the vigour with which we shake off the servile spirit now para lysing us, and by the intelligence with which we get down to the facts that really count. At bottom it is a question of freedom or slavery; of self-mastery or being mastered.
Our faith is in Science, in knowledge, in the infinite possibilities of the human brain, in that indomitable vital force we have hitherto abused so greatly because only now are we beginning to glimpse the splendour of the uses to which it may be brought.
[H]ow can Science discover except through free experiment? How can the mind of Man expand when it is laced in the straitjacket of authority and is forbidden independence? This question answers itself, and the verdict passed by history leaves no room for doubt. Only with the winning from Militarism and Ecclesiasticism of some measure of freedom did Science come to life; and if the world were to pass again into a similar thraldom, that life would fall once more into a stupor from which it could be shaken only by some social upheaval far greater and more bloody than the French Revolution ever began to be. It is not the champions of Freedom who are responsible for violent Revolutions, but those who, in their ignorant insanity, believe they can serve Humanity by putting it in irons and further happiness by fettering Mankind. We may be passing even now into such a thraldom, for Democracy, trained from time immemorial to servility, has not yet learned the worth of Freedom and Plutocracy would only too gladly render all thought and knowledge subservient to its own profit-making schemes.
[T]he seven great Anarchist writers…–Tolstoy, Bakunin, Kropotkin Proudhon, Stirner, Godwin, and Tucker–calls special attention to the fact that, although on innumerable points they differ widely, as against the crippling authoritarianism of all governing machines they stand a solid phalanx. The whole body of Herbert Spencer’s teaching, once so influential in this country, moves firmly toward that goal. His test of Civilisation was the extent to which voluntary co-operation has occupied the position previously monopolized by the compelling State, which he regarded as essentially a military institution. Habitually we circulate, as one of our most convincing documents, his treatise on “Man versus the State,” and in his “Data of Ethics” he has given us a picture of the future which is Anarchism of the purest type.
Every organism struggles with all the vitality at its command against extinction; and every Government, whatever it may call itself, is an organism composed of human beings. It exists, and can exist, only by compelling other human beings to remain a part of it; by exacting service from them, that is to say, by making them its serfs and slaves. The organism’s real basis is human slavery, and it cannot be anything else.
Socialism
[T]he position of Socialism…is to free mankind. The first difficulty, however, lies in the fact that while the word “Anarchy,” signifying “without rule,” is exceedingly precise, the word “Socialism” is not. Socialism merely means association, and a Socialist is one who believes in associated life and effort. Immediately a thousand questions of the greatest difficulty arise. Obviously there are different ways in which people can associate; some of them delightful, venue quite the reverse. It is delightful to associate yourself, freely and voluntarily, with those to whom you feel attracted by similarity of tastes and pursuits. It is torture to be herded compulsorily among those with whom you have nothing in common. Association with free and equal partners, working for a common end in which all are alike interested, is among the things that make life worth living. On the other hand, the association of men who are compelled by the whip of authority to live together in a prison is about as near hell as it is possible to get.
To be associated in governmentally conducted industries, whether it be as soldier or sailor, as railroad, telegraph, or postal employee, is to become a mere cog in a vast political machine… Under such conditions there would be less freedom than there is even now under the régime of private monopoly; the workers would abdicate all control of their own lives and become a flock of party sheep, rounded up at the will of their political bosses taking what those bosses chose to give them, and, in the end being thankful to be allowed to hold a job on any terms.
Let no one delude himself with the fallacy that governmental institutions under Socialist administration would be shorn of their present objectionable features. They would be precisely what they are to-day. If the workers were to come into possession of the means of production to-morrow, their administration under the most perfect form of universal suffrage–which the United States, for example, has been vainly trying to doctor into decent shape for generations past–would simply result in the creation of a special class of political managers, professing to act for the welfare of the majority. Were they as honest as the day–which it is folly to expect–they could only carry out the dictates of the majority, and those who did not agree slavishly with those dictates would find themselves outcasts. In reality, we should have put a special class of men in absolute control of the most powerful official machine that the world has ever seen, and should have installed a new form of wage-slavery, with the State as master. And the workingman who was ill-used by the State would find it a master a thousand times more difficult to overthrow than the most powerful of private employers.
Socialists declare loudly that the entire capitalistic system is slavery of the most unendurable type, and that landowning, production, and distribution for private profit must be abolished. They preach a class war as the only method by which this can be accomplished, and they proclaim, as fervently as ever did a Mohammedan calling for a holy crusade against the accursed infidel, that he who is not with them is against them. For this truly gigantic undertaking they have adopted a philosophy and pursue means that seem to us childishly inadequate.
To us it is inconceivable that institutions so deeply rooted in the savagery and superstitions of the past can be overthrown except by people who have become saturated to the very marrow of their bones with loathing for such superstition and such savagery. To us the first indispensable step is the creation of profoundly rebellious spirits who will make no truce, no compromise. We recognize that it is worse than useless to waste our breath on effects; that the causes are what we must go for, and that every form of monopoly, every phase of slavery and oppression, has its root in the ambition of the few to rule and fleece, and the sheepish willingness of the many to be ruled and fleeced.
What is the course that the Socialists are pursuing…? In private they will tell you that they are rebels against the existing unnatural disorder as truly as are we Anarchists, but in the actual conduct of their movement they are autocrats, bent on the suppression of all individuality, whipping, drilling, and disciplining their recruits into absolute conformity with the ironclad requirements of the party. They declare themselves occupied with a campaign of education. They are not. In such a contest as this, wherein the lines are drawn so sharply; where on the one side are ranged the natural laws of life, and on the other an insanely artificial system that ignores all the fundamental laws of life, there can be no such thing as compromise; and he who for the sake of getting votes attempts to make black appear white is not an educator but a confidence man. We are aware that there are many confidence men who grow into the belief that theirs is a highly honourable profession, but they are confidence men all the same.
The truth is that the Socialists have become the helpless victims of their own political tactics. We speak correctly of political “campaigns,” for politics is warfare. Its object is to get power, by gathering to its side the majority, and reduce the minority to submission. In politics, as in every other branch of war, the entire armoury of spies, treachery, stratagem and deceit of every kind is utilized to gain the one important end–victory in the fight. And it is precisely because our modern democracy is engaged, year in and year out, in this most unscrupulous warfare that the basic and all-essential virtues of truth, honesty, and the spirit of fair play have almost disappeared.
We raise further that if politics could, by any miracle, be purified, it would mean, if possible, a still more detestable consummation, for there would not remain a single individual right that was not helplessly at the mercy of the triumphant majority. It is imperative, and especially for the weaker–those who are now poor and uneducated–that the “inalienable” rights of man be recognized; and that, while he is now “supposed” to be guaranteed absolute right of free speech and assemblage, and the right to think on religious matters as he pleases, in the future he shall be really guaranteed full opportunities of supporting and developing his life–a right that cannot be taken away from him by a dominant party that may have chanced to secure, for the time being, the majority of votes.
This is the rock on which Socialism everlastingly goes to pieces. It mocks at the basic laws of life. It denies, both openly and tacitly, that there are such things as individual rights; and while it asserts that assuredly, as civilized beings the majorities of the future will grant the minority far greater freedom and opportunity than it has at present, it has to admit that all this will be a “grant,” a “concession” from those in power. There probably never has been a despot that waded through slaughter to a throne who has not made similar promises.
The way in which a man looks at a subject determines his treatment of it. If he thinks, with the Socialists, that the collectivity is everything and the individual an insignificant cipher, he will fall in willingly with all those movements that profess to be working for the good of the majority, and sacrifice the individual remorselessly for this supposed good. For example: Although he may admit, in theory, as the Socialists generally do, that men should be permitted to govern their own lives, his belief in legislating for the majority, and the scant value he puts on the individual life, will lead him to support such movements as Prohibition, which, in the name of the good of the majority, takes away from the individual, absolutely and in a most important matter–as in the question of what he shall and shall not drink–the command of his own life.
Apparently Socialists cannot conceive of a society run on other than the most strictly centralized principles. This seems to us a profound error.
Locomotion is the industry of all others that seemed, by its very nature, doomed to centralization, yet even in this department the tide of decentralization has set in with extraordinary rapidity. With the advent of the bicycle came the first break the individual machine becoming at once a formidable competitor of the street car companies. The tendency received a further and enormous impetus with the introduction of the motor, which throws every highway open to the individual owner of the machine and does away with the immense advantage previously enjoyed by those who had acquired the monopoly of the comparatively few routes along which it is possible to lay down rails and operate trains. It is obvious that the motor, both as a passenger and freight carrier, is as yet only in its infancy; and when the flying machine comes, as eventually it will come, into general use the individualization of locomotion will be complete.
In short, the philosophy that bases its conclusions on the conditions that happen to prevail at any given moment in the machine industry is necessarily building on quicksand, since the machine itself is undergoing a veritable revolution along the individualistic lines we have indicated.
This delusion respecting machinery has led the Socialists into ridiculous assumptions on the subject of centralization in general, committing them for a couple of generations past to the pipe-dream that under the régime of Capitalism the middle class is doomed, by the natural development of the economic system, to speedy extinction. On the other hand, in proportion as the capitalistic system develops the numbers and influence of the middle class increase, until in America–the country in which Capitalism has attained its greatest growth–it is well nigh omnipotent.
[T]hose who have studied the works of such profound writers as Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Sir Henry Maine, and others too numerous to mention are well aware that the history taught the Socialists through Marx and Engels is partisan history, and that the real movement of humanity has been to get away from the military régime of authority to the domain of individual freedom. It is this movement with which we have allied ourselves, convinced that there is nothing too fine for man, and that it is only under conditions of freedom that man has the opportunity of being fine. The tendency must be toward a finer, which means a freer, more self-governing life.
My own hatred of State Socialism, in all its forms, springs from my conviction that it fosters in the Individual this terrible psychology of invasion; that it denies the existence of Rights which should be secure from assault; that it teaches the Individual that in himself he is of no account and that only as a member of the State has he any valid title to existence. That, as it seems to me, reduces him to helplessness, and it is the helplessness of the exploited that makes exploitation possible. From that flow, with inexorable logic, all wars, all tyrannies, all those despotic regulations and restrictions which to-day are robbing Life of all its elasticity, its virility, its proper sweetness. State Socialism is a military creed, forged centuries ago by conquerors who put the world in chains. It is as old as the hills, and, like the hills, is destined to crumble into dust. Throughout the crisis of the past eight years its failure as even a palliative policy has been colossal.
Conclusion
[O]ur suffering and danger do not come from Free Industrialism but from an Industrialism that is not free because it is enslaved by Monopoly and caught fast in the clutches of that invasive military machine–the State. Monopoly is the enemy, the most dangerous enemy the world has known; and never was it so dangerous as now, when the State has made itself well-nigh omnipotent, Monopoly is State-created, State-upheld, and could not exist were it not for the organized violence with which everywhere the State supports it. At the behest of State-protected Monopoly the ordinary man can be deprived at any moment of the opportunity of earning a livelihood, and thrown into the gutter. At the command of the State, acting always in the interests of Monopoly, he can be converted at any moment into food for powder. Show me, if you can, a tyranny more terrible than that!
I call myself an Anarchist because, as it appears to me, Anarchism is the only philosophy that grips firmly and voices unambiguously this central, vital truth. It is either a fallacy or a truth and Anarchism is either right or wrong. If Anarchism is right, it cannot compromise in any shape or form with the existing State régime without convicting itself thereby of dishonesty and infidelity to Truth. Tyranny is not a thing to be shored up or made endurable, but a disease to be recognized frankly as unendurable and purged out of the social system. Personally I am a foe to all schemes for bolstering up the present reign of violence, and I cannot regard the compulsions of Trade Unionism, Syndicalism, and similar States-within- States, as bridges from the old order to the new, and wombs in which the society of the future is being moulded. Such analogies seem to me ridiculous and fatally misleading. Freedom is not an embryo. Freedom is not a helpless infant struggling into birth. Freedom is the greatest force at our command; the one incomparable constructor capable of beating swords into ploughshares and converting this war-stricken desert of a world into a decent dwelling-place.
Anarchism rests on the conviction that human beings, if granted full and equal opportunity to satisfy their wants, could and would do it far more satisfactorily than can or will a master class. It is inconceivable to us that they could make such a failure of it as the master class has done. We do not believe that the peoples, having once become self-owning, would exhaust all the resources of science in murdering one another.
We are for abolishing Capitalism by giving all men free and equal access to capital in its strictest and most proper sense, viz., the chief thing, the means of producing wealth–that is, the well-being of themselves and the community… The work of their brains–these few who “scorned delights and lived laborious days”–has put into our hands a capacity to produce which is practically illimitable, and a power to distribute which laughs at physical obstacles and could, by the exercise of ordinary humanity and common sense, knit the entire world into one harmonious commonwealth and free it forever from the mean and sordid struggle that keeps it in the sewer. These few, knowing no God but Truth and no religion but loyalty to Truth, have made Nature, which was for ages Man’s ruthless master, to-day his docile slave. In all history there is nothing to compare with the Industrial Revolution wrought by Science, but the harvest of that mighty sowing we have not as yet even begun to reap.
This is the dream; but it is not a dream. The abolition of human slavery is essentially the most practical of things. The adjustment of individual and social life to conditions that have been completely revolutionized by the advance of human knowledge is an adjustment that must be made.
FINIS
Just a thought.
Market anarchism is grounded in the sovereignty of each individual and the simple idea that all relationships between adults ought to be voluntary and consensual, permitting everyone the freedom to do anything she wishes, as long as she respects the identical right of all others. The “market” in market anarchism refers to the fact that under such a system of equal freedom, individuals could cooperate and exchange in any and all ways nonviolent and non-fraudulent.
The “anarchism” comes from the insight that a society of strict nonaggression is ipso facto incompatible with the existence of the state. Since the state, both in theory and practice, is defined in terms of aggression against innocents, a truly free society cannot endure such an institution. Where, though, does immigration fit into all this theoretical ideation?
Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that open borders actually amount to “forced integration,” that a free society is in fact one of exclusion and static populations disallowed from free movement simply by facts of “private property.”
And of course these facts and the relationships they implicate are never to be called into question. Never are we to ask what kinds of results and patterns legitimate property rights, properly based on some notion of homesteading, would create if actually developed and held to. Given the limits on the circumstances under which such forms of private property would be regarded as legitimate in a hypothetical freed market, it strains credulity to think that the fear-mongering of anti-immigration “libertarians” is well-founded.
Furthermore, arguments that see open borders as “forced integration” are especially spurious and unconvincing within the context we’re presented today, where governments themselves own and administer most of the land and the rest has been doled out to political favorites under a process in which proper homesteading has never been a real or important consideration. In their essence, anti-immigration arguments come to the laughable contention that merely due to accidents of birth which place some lucky group in one favored locale and others somewhere else, the fortunate group ought to be able to control and impede the movement of others.
We must therefore ask how and on what basis? Stripped of intricate apologies for the status quo, the answers presented are simply, “using force, deadly if necessary” and “because sovereign states have the right to protect their borders.” But even if we grant the premise that the United States ought to be able to protect its borders — itself an enormously controversial one which, as anarchist, I challenge — we must then wonder: Protect them from what? As economist Bryan Caplan observes, leaving out the moral questions implicated by the immigration debate, “even a random illiterate peasant” represents an economic benefit to his new country.
“Immigration laws,” Caplan shows, “trap people in countries where workers produce far below their potential.” When allowed the opportunity to work and produce to their potential, immigrants fill important economic needs and increase the overall wealth in society.
In terms of both basic economic and humanitarian considerations, completely free immigration and open borders are the soundest way forward for the United States and the whole world. Arbitrary, aggressive restrictions on people’s movement trample individual rights, divide families, and hurt the economy. It’s time to end the global apartheid of invented national boundaries and embrace the market anarchist solution of free movement, free exchange and free people.
Patrick Cockburn discusses the growing lack of support for the Iraqi prime minister, Maliki.
Kevin Carson discusses whether government is just things we do together.
Lawrence Wright discusses the savage strategy of ISIS in Iraq.
Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why we need an enlightened citizenry invested in liberty.
Ajamu Baraka discusses Western policy on Iraq.
Rannie Amiri discusses ISIS and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Patrick Cockburn discusses the great unraveling of Iraq.
Michael Schwartz discusses the new oil wars in Iraq.
Ed Krayewski discusses why interventionism is a bigger threat than the Iraqi civil war.
Patrick Cockburn discusses the cracking of Iraq.
Gilbert Mercier discusses ISIS.
Jonathan Cook discusses the occupation.
Doug Bandow discusses why the U.S. should stay out of Iraq.
James Bovard discusses freedom vs medals of freedom.
Conor Friedersdorf discusses the recent release of a memo on extrajudicial killings.
Jameel Jaffer discusses the newly released drone memo.
Gene Healy discusses how both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for Iraq.
Stephen Kinzer discusses blowback in Iraq.
David Swanson discusses the drone memo.
Clancy Sigal discusses the role of armed resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.
Peter Van Buren discusses 10 reasons not to launch airstrikes in Iraq.
Steve Clemons discusses Saudi Arabia’s policy in Syria.
Dan Sanchez discusses the total state.
Robert Fantina discusses how racism is alive and well in Israel.
Laurence M. Vance discusses why libertarians are right about drugs.
Sheldon Richman discusses U.S. aid to the Egyptian government.
Pal Benko plays a fantastic game against Israel Albert Horowitz.
In recent weeks both Thoughts on Liberty and Reason have published articles on the Millennial generation’s social and political attitudes, as they relate to libertarianism. One is a good example of how libertarians should approach Millennials. The other most decidedly is not.
Let’s start with how to. Rachel Burger, at Thoughts on Liberty (“Millennials And Left-Libertarianism Part 1: They Need Community,” May 29), does a great job of understanding the Millennials on their own terms. She starts out from the communitarian, cooperative values of the Millennial generation, and asks libertarians to tailor our vision of a free society to that value system. And that entails incorporating left-wing sensibilities into libertarianism.
Millennials, she says, form online communities and social networks at far higher rates than the previous generation, and see cooperation with their peers as a normal way of getting things done. They are not only more cooperative and community-oriented, but more tolerant and concerned about social justice issues like “race, gender, sexual identity and class.” So libertarians need to emphasize the values of community, cooperation, and social justice. That probably means a public face of libertarianism that’s not a white guy in Silicon Valley reflexively dismissing the “statism” of feminists and people of color.
I would add that the Millennial generation is far more open than its predecessors to the sharing of information, cooperative/peer production, horizontal or networked forms of organization, and prefigurative politics.
Unlike us older folks who adhere to the slogan “information wants to be free” as an ideological proposition that we at some point consciously adopted, most Millennials grew up accepting it as a fact of nature. For them Web filters and firewalls are something installed by clueless education bureaucrats, that they can circumvent in a matter of minutes. They’ve been sharing music files as long as they can remember, and laugh at RIAA “anti-songlifting” classes the way stoners of my generation laugh at Reefer Madness. Chelsea Manning, Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden were Millennials, and members of that generation just assume that full transparency should be the norm and anything short of it serves corrupt power interests of some sort.
Millennials are used to networked collaboration. In the workplace they view such collaboration with their peers as the way to get things done, and see traditional corporate managerial hierarchies as a form of damage to be routed around. The same ethos is reflected in the political models that have emerged in recent years — the Arab Spring, M15, Syntagma, Occupy — all reflect this.
Millennials favor horizontal, prefigurative politics over older models of working within the system for good reason. In the economic realm, they took out student loans and got good grades — followed all the rules for advancement under the old “meritocratic” system — and wound up working part-time for temp agencies (if at all) after moving back in with their parents. In the political realm, enthusiastic 20-somethings turned out in record numbers to vote for Obama. And Obama, elected with the most left-sounding rhetoric, and the largest electoral and Congressional majorities in a generation, turned out to be every bit as much of a tool of the banks and the warfare and surveillance state as Bush had been.
As a result, Millennials have low levels of faith in old-style vertical hierarchies like the corporation or the state to mediate their vision of the good life. Instead, they see direct collaboration with each other to create the kind of life and counter-institutions they want, here and now, as the way to realize their ideals.
Because 20-somethings came of age during the Great Recession, they are unemployed or underemployed to a degree comparable to the Lost Generation in Japan, and consequently live in very large numbers in multi-generational households and meet a major share of subsistence needs through cooperation, bartering skills and self-provisioning outside the wage system and cash economy. James O’Connor, in Accumulation Crisis, argued thirty years ago, that in severe cyclical downturns it’s common for unemployed and underemployed workers to meet as many of their needs as possible outside the wage system, through self-provisioning and production for use within the household and informal sectors. As Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation observed, Web 2.0 was largely the creation of tech workers unemployed by the Dotcom bust.
What we’re in now is not a cyclical downturn. It’s a secular downturn resulting from cheap, ephemeral production technologies that make increasing portions of labor and investment capital superfluous, but in which corporate dinosaurs — with the help of the state — are attempting to survive by enclosing technologies of abundance as a source of rent. So this generation is shifting the meeting of its subsistence needs from the cash nexus and wage labor to the social economy — not on a cyclical basis, but as the characteristic form of the new epoch.
So based on all this, it stands to reason this generation would be heavily involved in building all the major components of the successor society that’s emerging from the decaying ruins of the corporate-state nexus. There are 20-somethings in the hackerspace, open hardware and micromanufacturing movements, in Permaculture and community gardens, organizing squats into coherent, cooperative communities, developing encrypted counter-currencies and mutual credit systems, creating scholarly communities around open courseware and academic journals liberated from behind paywalls, and developing open meshworks the state can’t shut down and anonymizing darknets the state can’t penetrate.
The main shortcoming of Burger’s article is not her understanding of the Millennials, but her understanding of left-libertarianism. Left-libertarianism is not synonymous with “liberaltarianism.” As Jeff Ricketson has argued (“A Left-Libertarianism I Don’t Recognize,” Center for a Stateless Society, July 12), liberaltarians or bleeding heart libertarians start out with the center-left’s managerialist assumptions about the naturalness and inevitability of hierarchical institutions. We don’t. My comrade Roderick Long at Center for a Stateless Society (“Left-Libertarianism: Its Past, Its Present, Its Prospects,” C4SS, June 17) contrasts the bleeding heart libertarian approach with our version of left-libertarianism:
left-libertarians tend to be more radical, in both their leftism and their libertarianism, than the majority of those self-identifying as BHL proponents…. Most BHL proponents appear to see their libertarian commitments and their left-wing commitments as at least to some extent moderating each other; left-libertarians, by contrast, tend to see their libertarian and leftist commitments as mainly reinforcing each other.
We at C4SS don’t split the difference between liberty and economic or social justice, or look for some “moderate” midpoint between them. We are extremists in both our libertarian absolutism and our commitment to economic and social justice. We see the state as the keystone of economic exploitation, as well as a heavily interlocking component of other forms of domination like racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. And we see a society without relationships of hierarchy and subordination in the social and economic arena, without hierarchical workplace authority within the wage economy, as a major component of real individual liberty. The maximization of individual freedom and pursuit of happiness in every aspect of life is our goal, and we see the destruction of authority and coercion in one aspect of life as furthering their destruction in every other aspect.
Now for how not to appeal to Millennials. In two articles at Reason (“Millennials Opt for Meritocracy Over Egalitarian Society” and “64 Percent of Millennials Favor a Free Market Over a Government-Managed Economy,” July 10) on a Reason-Rupe poll of Millennials, Emily Ekins — rather than approaching the Millennials’ ideology on its own terms — tries to shoehorn their views, in about the most tone-deaf manner possible, into the conceptual categories of mainstream American libertarianism as it’s prevailed in recent decades. The very framing of the questions — I became much more irritated when I realized Ekins wasn’t just reporting on a poll someone else had done, but was actually involved in its design — includes unstated assumptions big enough to drive a truck through.
Take the alternatives one question presents, of a society where “wealth is distributed according to achievement” versus one “where the gap between rich and poor is small regardless of achievement.” The term “meritocracy” itself is meaningless. Every society in human history has been a meritocracy, with “merit” and “achievement” defined in terms of how well one serves the interests of the structure of power.
Under American corporate capitalism, arguably, most “merit” and “achievement” are defined according to how well people perform functions that serve the extractive interests of corporate capitalists. We, and most of the rest of the world, live under a form of capitalism in which the state for the several centuries has actively promoted — through subsidies, monopolies, and outright robbery like the land enclosures in early modern England, under Hastings in Bengal and the rest of the colonial world in the 19th century — the concentration of enormous amounts of property in a few hands, and monopoly returns on such concentrations of property. The highest “achievers” in the United States and most of the world — hundred millionaires and billionaires like Bill Gates — are parasites living off the rent from enclosure. Holders of patents, copyrights and trademarks, landlords whose titles trace back to the enclosure of vacant and unimproved land, incumbents protected by regulatory cartels and extracting super-profits through oligopoly markup, and untold other beneficiaries of entry barriers and monopolies, all get rich through the moral equivalent of a protection racket.
Further down the pyramid, the most lucrative salaried positions, and a major portion of all wage labor, amount to what anarchist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” (“On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine, August 2013). Some of them are simply waste production for the basically Hamiltonian purposes of utilizing surplus production capacity and employing surplus investment capital, in order to prevent the collapse of capital asset value: the Military-Industrial complex, replacement of goods designed for planned obsolescence, producing for the automobile-highway-suburban real estate complex, etc. But the majority probably involve “guard labor” (a term coined by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis) — jobs that exist only because of the concentration of wealth in a small ownership class, and because of the basic conflicts of interest that result from absentee ownership, managerialism and hierarchy.
Compared to these things, the “merit” entailed in actually producing things people want to eat, wear or live in, or cutting their hair and emptying their bedpans, is small potatoes indeed.
And the Reason-Rupe poll’s framing of the questions implicitly assume that wide disparities of income and wealth are the normal result of “competitive markets,” and can only be reduced by state intervention to “redistribute wealth.”
Other questions apparently presuppose a pot-smoking Republican understanding of what “the free market system” is, using language that suggests “the free market system” and “government programs” are just the two major components of our present economy, and the “free market system” itself is basically just contemporary American corporate capitalism, but with the parts officially labelled “government” removed. Of course there may be a bit of hat-tipping toward “crony capitalism” or even “corporatism” (depending on what kind of mood Stossel’s in today), but then again he’s just as likely to defend Halliburton and Blackwater as “free market defense.” At one point she suggests the Millennials’ views on capitalism and socialism reflect the fact that they came of age in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and have never yet had an opportunity to observe “market-driven success” — implying that something in fairly recent memory is a reasonable proxy for the kind of “market economy” that creates opportunity.
Worse yet, Ekins tries to read Millennial political attitudes through a right-leaning libertarian framework in which capitalism equals “free enterprise” and “markets,” and “socialism” equals “government ownership. Consider this howler:
Millennials are free marketeers. When asked to choose which is the better system, 64 percent of millennials say a free market system and 32 percent favor an economy managed by the government. By a narrower margin, 52 percent favor capitalism and 42 percent choose socialism.
Millennials appear to be more favorable toward socialism than a government-managed economy, even though the latter is arguably less interventionist. This raises the question: Do millennials know what socialism means?
Perhaps not. A 2010 CBS/New York Times survey found that when Americans were asked to use their own words to define the word “socialism” millennials were the least able to do so. Accord to the survey, only 16 percent of millennials could define socialism as government ownership, or some variation thereof, compared to 30 percent of Americans over 30 (and 57% of tea partiers, incidentally).
This may explain why socialism garners greater support than a government-managed economy.
I’d like to raise a question of my own: Does Ekins know what socialism means? The equation of “socialism” to state-owned, centrally planned command economies in popular consciousness, and the equation of corporate capitalism to “free enterprise” and “free markets,” was certainly a propaganda coup for corporate capitalism in its ideological war to shape the perception of alternatives.
But in fact the definition of socialism as “government ownership” didn’t achieve predominance until after WWI. Even Friedrich Engels, who saw nationalization of the trusts by the workers’ state as the proper path to socialism, didn’t regard state ownership alone as a sufficient criterion of socialism. According to Engels in Anti-Duhring, if the state was controlled by capitalists then the nationalization of major transportation and communications infrastructure, heavy industry, etc., would simply be a higher form of monopoly capitalism in which the capitalists acted through their state to manage their economy. Even Engels, who favored a socialist model based on state control of the economy, believed it would only be socialism if the state was politically controlled by the working class.
For the socialist movement as a whole, including state socialists like Engels, the one essential characteristic of socialism was not state ownership or control of the economy, but the political and economic power of the working class, and an end to economic exploitation. If one thing has defined socialism, then and now, it is a desire for the “euthanasia of the rentiers.” And if one thing has defined American capitalism — and the entire capitalist epoch — from its beginning, it is the control of the state by rentiers. In fact one wing of the socialist movement — anarchism — explicitly calls for abolition of the state. Individualists and other market anarchists like Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker and Franz Oppenheimer — and me — see state enforcement of artificial property rights and artificial scarcities as the main source of the rentier classes’ income, and want to “euthanize” the rentiers by abolishing all state-enforced monopolies and privileges so competition can destroy their rents.
If “socialism” is defined by the level of state involvement in the economy, regardless of whose interests are served, then American corporate capitalism is the world’s bastion of socialism. Virtually every penny of the profits of the Fortune 500, and of the billionaires’ fortunes, results from state intervention.
My intent here is not to counterpoise alternative dogmatic definitions of “socialism” and “capitalism” to Ekins’, but to point out that definitions don’t come from Mount Sinai. The definitions that currently appear in the dictionary are historically conditioned, and reflect older ideological victories by power structures that are far from disinterested. There are generational differences in usage, and usage has changed significantly over time — and these are nuances that can’t be captured by a dictionary definition.
As David Graeber suggests, it is the fact that the Millennials didn’t grow up during the Cold War, and weren’t exposed to the US corporate state’s propaganda machine, that accounts for their failure to absorb a definition of “socialism” that serves the interests of the monopolists and rentiers who control the US government. They favor “socialism” while distrusting the bureaucracy and regulations of a corrupt state, and favor “free markets” while distrusting a corporate capitalism that has been statist to the core since its very origins. When Millennials say they favor “socialism” over “capitalism,” they don’t mean they want an economy controlled by the government. And when they say they favor “free markets” over government programs, they don’t mean they want a world organized through the cash nexus and owned by McDonalds and Walmart. The form of socialism they want is based on horizontalism, face-to-face democracy, and the organization of a large part of economic life through the commons and peer-production. This is the form of socialism advocated by the most interesting and innovative currents today — the Italian autonomists, Graeber and the horizontalists, and the producing classes’ exodus to commons-based peer production advocated by Hardt and Negri. It’s also a form of socialism fully compatible with freed market exchange, and desired by many of us left-wing market anarchists at Center for a Stateless Society.
This kind of “socialism,” and this kind of “free enterprise,” doesn’t fit in well to a traditional right-libertarian intellectual framework where everything is either a capitalist corporation or a government agency. And unfortunately the questions in the Reason-Rupe poll, and Ekins’ narrative about the significance of the Millennials’ response, all presuppose this outdated industrial age framework. The Millennials’ understanding of “markets” and “socialism” are arguably more relevant to the age we live in than are conceptual categories like Ekins’, which date back to an ideological struggle between the Soviet bureaucratic oligarchy (posing as “socialism”) and the American corporate state (posing as “free enterprise”).
We left-libertarians favor a society, as Kropotkin phrased it in his Britannica article on “Anarchism,” in which harmony is achieved, “not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption,” a society arrived at by a process in which “voluntary associations” grow to “cover all the fields of human activity” and eventually “substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.” This is fully compatible with everything from money exchange to peer-production, to commons governance of natural resources, to mutuals, friendly societies, and other solidaristic institutions for pooling risk and income, to moneyless communism and production for use in favelas, squats and cohousing associations. This is our free market. This is our socialism. Everything voluntary is compatible with this vision. Institutions based on robbery, force and authority — like the state and the large corporation — are not.
My purpose here has not been to argue that the political attitudes of Millennials coincide perfectly with what we on the libertarian left believe. But I do think there are some fundamentally different ideas prevalent among Millennials that set them off from previous generations. The acceptance of horizontal forms of collaboration and sharing as a fact of life, their instinct to bypass irrational constraints from authority figures, the approach to politics reflected by large-scale disillusionment with Obama and the rise of Occupy, etc., don’t necessarily overlap a whole lot with conventionally libertarian positions on specific policy issues, but I think they reflect an existentially libertarian reaction to authority in their everyday lives. They also prefigure basic organizational paradigms of a successor society structured on fundamentally different lines from the Weberian/Fordist assumptions of the 20th century. Millennials may not be ideologically hostile to the state as an entity, but they are naturally suspicious of authority and direction from the top, and are much more accustomed to problem-solving approaches that involve direct collaboration with their peers to get things done rather than trying to persuade institutions to change their policies.
So Ekins and the people at Reason need to stop worrying about teaching Millennials the “correct” definitions, or pigeonholing their beliefs into industrial age conceptual categories — and start listening to them instead.
Talk of extended principle is the present issue in libertarian circles. When the modern libertarian crowd was introduced to the thick/thin debate via the writings of Charles W. Johnson, others at C4SS and elsewhere, the issue proved itself divisive and thought provoking. From this grew the related distinction between libertarian “Brutalists” and “Humanitarians” as described in Jeffrey Tucker’s now infamous essay Against Libertarian Brutalism. Tucker argues that
[Brutalism] strips down the theory to its rawest and most fundamental parts and pushes the application of those parts to the foreground. It tests the limits of the idea by tossing out the finesse, the refinements, the grace, the decency, the accoutrements. It cares nothing for the larger cause of civility and the beauty of results. It is only interested in the pure functionality of the parts. It dares anyone to question the overall look and feel of the ideological apparatus, and shouts down people who do so as being insufficiently devoted to the core of the theory, which itself is asserted without context or regard for aesthetics.
Tucker’s concern for “finesse”, “refinements” and “grace” have to do with his predisposition for a certain “civilized” aesthetic that has always been an implicit component to Anarcho-Capitalism itself. Tucker’s verbose monologue on shaving cream and undetachable tuxedo may act as some elaboration. Between him and Murray Rothbard, the bow tie has become synonymous with Anarcho-Capitalism: the “Ancap bowtie” now appears on shirts, posters, and even the masthead of the Anarcho-Capitalism subreddit. At last year’s Students For Liberty Southern California Regional Conference, I learned that wearing a bow tie to a libertarian event was considered an unspoken “AnCap signifier” from a friend who was surprised to meet a bow tie-adorned newcomer who regrettably turned out to be a “Conservatarian” who didn’t get the memo. Tucker’s penchant for the “civilized” stems from his optimistic outlook on the future of 3D printing, BitCoin and the robust power of markets in general. Markets are, after all, the optimal means to allocate scarce resources that end up producing marvelous wonders of civilization, so it only stands to reason that it’s proponents would adopt an aesthetic that mirrors that truth. On the flip side of this pride in the productivity and driving social force of markets is a distaste for the “uncivilized”. Historically, in the 20th century liberty movement, this has included, but was not limited to daydreamers, free spirits, hippies and other counter-cultural types. The now defunct Paleo-Libertarian strategy called for a renouncement of left-leaning cultural and aesthetic preferences. Lewellyn Rockwell, who fervently argues against thick conceptions of liberty, once pushed his own batch of thickist commitments:
In his essay “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism”, Rockwell accused mainstream libertarians of “hatred of western culture”. He argued that “pornographic photography, ‘free’-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda – no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them.” Of paleo-libertarians, he wrote “we obey, and we ought to obey, traditions of manners and taste.
In the same vein, Rothbard didn’t hold back his distaste for those who daydream of a locus amoenus in his essay Conservation in the Free Market [PDF]:
One of the most disquieting features of the environmentalist movement is its evident abhorrence of modern technology and its Romanticist back-to-nature philosophy. Technology and civilization are responsible, they say, for crowding, pollution, despoliation of resources, so let us therefore return to unspoiled nature, to Walden Pond, to contemplation in a far-off glade.
For both Rockwell and Rothbard, it’s about more than morality and strategy. They had already established a clear view on cultural and aesthetic commitments before the 21st century thick/thin debate began. While the 20th century classical liberals championed the 19th century Individualists as fellow free-marketeers, at times they couldn’t have been further apart culturally, strategically and aesthetically. Consider Rothbard’s above dismissal of “Romanticist back-to-nature” types with Voltairine de Cleyre’s wistful prose:
I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,—a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its sweetness, and time to rest after tasting; sleep when it came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it would, not sooner—Air, room, light rest, nakedness when I would not be clothed, and when I would be clothed, garments that did not fetter; freedom to touch my mother earth, to be with her in storm and shine, as the wild things are,—this is what I wanted,—this, and free contact with my fellows;—not to love, and lie and be ashamed, but to love and say I love, and be glad of it; to feel the currents of ten thousand years of passion flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I have asked no more.
With the recent growth of groups like C4SS and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the inclusion of Left Libertarians into mainstream libertarian groups like SFL and YAL, these historical distinctions are becoming bolder and more relevant. Ryan Calhoun has written elsewhere about this very development:
I see a similar divide growing among Libertarians today. There are the young professionals at Students For Liberty and the lifestyle Libertarians who moved to New Hampshire to smoke weed naked in public parks. I think it’s uncontroversial to say that both are needed and will stick around, but I think the benefit of a radical Libertarian counterculture is underestimated. More than a political movement, Libertarians need a cultural movement. One that emphasizes the difference between current social values and alternative social values.
The thing is, libertarianism has hardly ever had a uniform “cultural movement.” While the likes of Jeffrey Tucker, Lewellyn Rockwell and Ron Paul praise productivity and a traditional work ethic in their own right, Nick Ford’s blog, abolishwork.com, challenges the state-corporate nexus and “the Protestant/Puritan work ethic which enables the modern day work ethic to persist and destroy people’s lives.” So how are we to pin down the precise trajectory of culture in an ideology with an historically nebulous commitment to culture and aesthetics? Or, as Leonard Bernstein asked “Whither music” in the 20th century, “Whither Libertarianism” in the 21st? While appropriate thickness orientations have been argued for, appropriate libertarian aesthetic commitments are an entirely different animal. The libertarian ideology, being inherently individualistic, attracts and embraces vastly different — usually idiosyncratic — types from all over. Even strictly defined subsets of libertarianism, like C4SS’s own Free-Market Anti-Capitalism have sub-sub-cultures with their own identifiable aesthetic: the Roderick Long virtue ethics posse being a good example. While we are seeing some strong divisions arise from the thickness debate, as we should, I don’t think we should expect to see — or should want to see — that same thing happen to the proverbial “libertarian aesthetic”, god forbid one take root. A particularly attractive and defining feature of the liberty movement is its regard for the individual, so what better libertarian aesthetic than the one that the individual happens to bring with them?
Guest Blog by Irfan Khawaja
In a recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, “Hang Tough, Israel,” Fernando Tesón takes issue with those of his “libertarian friends” who are “relentless” in their criticisms of Israel, and responds to them by translating a longish passage from Spanish by the Argentinian writer Marcos Aguinis. What follows are four remarkably ignorant and offensive paragraphs on the Israel/Palestine dispute which I’m assuming that Tesón endorses. The post is too short to deserve a very long response, but I think it deserves more criticism than (with some notable exceptions) it’s so far gotten. Since I assume that Tesón endorses Aguinis’s claims, I’ll refer mostly to “Tesón” rather than “Aguinis”; if Tesón doesn’t endorse Aguinis’s claims, I have no objection to his publicly disowning as many of them as he now decides to reject.
Much of Tesón’s post involves generalizations about the moral character of Palestinians, and Palestinian youth in particular. Here’s a particularly offensive one:
In our postmodern times it is increasingly irrelevant where the good and the bad reside. Does it matter that the Israeli youth dream with being inventors and scientists, while the youth of Hezbollah and Hamas dream with being martytrs? Apparently not. Does it matter that in Israel children are not taught to hate the Arabs, while among the Arabs, the Protocols of Zion and Mein Kampf are best sellers, and that the Egyptian TV broadcast a repulsive series where the Jews would extract children’s blood for their rituals? Apparently this doesn’t matter either.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Tesón that if you’re going to describe “Israeli youth” in one clause of a sentence, the contrasting clause should make reference to “Palestinian youth,” not “the youth of Hamas or Hezbollah,” as though Palestinian youth were, as a whole, reducible to a faceless mass of terrorist fanatics, among whom the very essence of “badness” resides.
More fundamentally, I’d ask Tesón pointblank how much face time he’s ever had with Palestinian youth (or Palestinians generally), and if he hasn’t had very much (as I’d surmise), what conceivable basis he could have for a generalization of the sort he endorses in that post. How fluent, for example, is his Arabic? Evidently not fluent enough to list on his CV. But then, how can a person who speaks no Arabic know what Palestinian youth are like? Imagine generalizing about American youth but being unable to string together a sentence in English. That’s the caliber of the discussion he’s initiated, and which he regards as a serious contribution to the debate. (For the record: my Arabic is very rudimentary, and I have no facility at all with Hebrew, but then, I’m not inclined to make wild generalizations about either Palestinians or Israelis, as Tesón is.)
Last summer, I spent some time in the West Bank, and in particular in the city of Hebron and the village of Beit Umar. One contrast that I observed between Israeli and Palestinian youth was instructive: In Beit Umar, I watched youthful Israeli soldiers (in their 20’s) taking physical control of the village by force of arms – machine guns, tear gas, armed vehicles – blocking its roads so that settlers could help themselves to its resources. Meanwhile, unarmed Palestinian youth confronted them and remonstrated with them by discourse.1 This is an everyday occurrence in Beit Umar and the West Bank generally, though not one typically reported in our media or current in our discourse. It doesn’t exactly square with Tesón’s picture of terroristic Palestinian youth.
Meanwhile, just a few miles away, in the town of Abu Dis, my friend Munir Nusseibeh runs the Human Rights Clinic at Al Quds University, specializing in property rights claims – a kind of Palestinian version of the Institute for Justice. Munir leads a group of non-violent activists in property rights litigation against a military occupation whose bureaucrats literally enforce their whims and those of the settlers they protect, at gunpoint. After a few intense hours of conversations with him, it occurred to me that he had a better grasp of the nature and value of property rights than most political philosophers I know – and certainly better than Tesón himself who, despite his official rejection of collectivist conceptions of property ownership has nothing to say about the explicitly collectivist and expropriative character of Israeli land use policy. (For more details on Israeli land use policy, see Oren Yiftachel’s excellent book, Ethnocracy.) None of this squares with Tesón’s picture, either.
And then there is Lucy Nusseibeh, a one-woman powerhouse who runs MEND, an institute for non-violent protest and democracy.2 Her message? She wants to “demilitarize our minds” – not exactly the stuff of Hamas or Hezbullah. The non-violent nature of her activities has not, of course, prevented her from being raided and shut down by the Israeli authorities – the same authorities whom Tesón advises to “hang tough” as they hunt down such threatening Islamist figures as Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Bert.
Excuse me, but who is operating by the pen here and who is operating by the sword? And my anecdotes merely scratch the surface of the work that Palestinians are doing to create the basis of a non-violent civil society in the West Bank. In mentioning these anecdotes, I don’t intend them as data for generalizations about the depravity of “Israeli youth” or the heroism of “Palestinian youth,” but as data against facile generalizations of the kind Tesón takes for granted.
There’s no doubt that Palestinian political culture has its deformities, some of them deeply grotesque, unjust, and irrational. I have no qualms about saying that to anyone anywhere, as I have for decades – whether in The New York Times in 1987, or in front of an irritable West Bank audience in 2013.3 (Feel free to do a search on “Irfan Khawaja” in this book for some more documentation.) But Tesón writes as though the cultural deformities were all or uniquely Palestinian. As it happens, the falsity of this claim is becoming increasingly obvious, and has been obvious for decades. This past Friday’s New York Times has a story that makes explicit what most informed Israelis probably take for granted:
Tamir Lion, an anthropologist who studies youth, said he was troubled by the changing attitudes among Israel’s young people. For many years, Mr. Lion interviewed soldiers about why they chose to enter combat units. “The answers,” he said on Israel Radio, “were always about the challenge, to show I could make it, the prestige involved.”
That began to change in 2000, he said. “I started to get answers – not a lot, but some – like: ‘To kill Arabs.’ The first time I heard it, it was at the time of the large terror attacks, and since then it has not stopped.”
A generation has grown up in a period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with suicide bombs and military incursions, rocket fire and airstrikes. Young people on both sides may think about the other more as an enemy than as a neighbor.
Mr. Lion, head of research at the Ethos Institute, said he was troubled. “Today I can say, and everyone who works with youth will say it, Jewish youth in Israel hate Arabs without connection to their parents or their own party affiliation and their own political opinions.” (“Killing of Palestinian Youth Puts an Israeli Focus on Extremism”).
Those tempted to excuse these attitudes as a justified or understandable response to Palestinian suicide bombings may want to remember that such inferences run both ways: if it’s understandable that terrorism-traumatized Israelis should want to kill Arabs, it ought to be equally understandable that occupation-traumatized Palestinians should want to kill Israelis. It also ought to be rather obvious that a forty-seven-year long military occupation offers more than its share of opportunities for Israeli depredations. The inferences can only run asymmetrically if we assume either that Israelis have intrinsically greater moral weight than Palestinians, or that Palestinians are always the aggressors and Israelis always the defenders against their aggression. Neither assumption is true, and neither issue is adequately addressed by Tesón’s post. (Israeli rights violations are systematically documented by such organizations as B’Tselem, Al Haq, and the Human Rights Clinic at Al Quds University. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that they say or do, but their work is generally admirable and indispensable for understanding the realities of life under Israeli rule.)
I can’t literally replicate the reality of Palestinian life under military occupation in a short essay like this one, but You Tube offers a useful supplement to the written word. In offering the videos in this essay as evidence for my claims, let me stress that I am not making global generalizations about Israelis or Jews as such, much less making claims about their heritable traits. I’m pointing to well-established socio-political trends within Israel, trends that are the predictable result of its occupation and settlement of the West Bank, and of Zionist ideological assumptions generally.
This seven minute video provides a disheartening account of Anti-Arab sentiment in Israel (though I think Uri Davis understates the degree of anti-Semitism on the Arab side). This ten minute video candidly discusses “Israel’s New Generation of Racists.” This eight minute video offers a rather unflattering picture of attitudes among Israeli youth and of specifically American complicity in those attitudes. While you watch it, imagine a comparable scene involving thousands of white American youth with anti-black attitudes marching triumphantly and gleefully through a historically black neighborhood (in drunken throngs, at 3 am) – be it Harlem, Watts, Newark, or Detroit – while expressing themselves as these Israelis do. For a glimpse at life in Beit Umar, watch this video. For an ordinary day in Hebron, try this one. While watching these videos – and you can find hundreds more like them online – you might ask yourself how long Palestinians are supposed to endure behavior of the kind depicted in them without taking it upon themselves to engage in retaliatory self-help. You might try to put yourself in the place of the Palestinian victims in these video, a heuristic familiar to most grade school children but notably absent from Tesón’s post.
I’ve saved the best and most topical video for last. It doesn’t need much in the way of comment, at least if you’ve been following recent events in Israel. As you watch the video, try repeating the following Tesónite mantras to yourself and observing how they affect your ability to process what you’re watching:
Does it matter that the Israeli youth dream with being inventors and scientists, while the youth of Hezbollah and Hamas dream with being martytrs?
Already several generations of stoic Israeli citizens have defended the country with one hand while working with the other.
Does it matter to Tesón that the Israeli youth depicted in this video are not dreaming of being inventors or scientists, but of revenge fantasies which they’re enacting in real life? Does it matter to him that what we see here are not “Stoic Israeli citizens” defending the country with one hand while working with the other, but overwrought Israeli soldiers beating a child with their hands and feet in broad daylight?
I said I would focus here on Tesón, but I should perhaps say a word about Marcos Aguinis. I don’t know a great deal about his work, but if what I’ve read is any indication of his knowledge of the region and its issues, he’s little more than a crude propagandist at the level of Joan Peters, from whom he seems to have gotten a good part of his rhetorical playbook. To quote from an article of Aguinis’s:
No me gusta ser apologista, pero hay hechos demasiado evidentes que se tratan de negar falazmente.
[Rough translation: I don’t like having to function as an apologist, but there are facts that are sufficiently evident yet are gratuitously denied [and require a response].]
Delete the “No” and the whole second clause of this sentence, and you have a good summary of the agenda involved here. Twenty-two years after Rodney King and the LA riots, American readers ought to know better than to accept rhetoric of this nature about a whole ethnicity – and frankly, deserve better in the way of reading material on Israel/Palestine from supposedly eminent experts on the ethics of international relations. That Tesón should offer this post in all seriousness to a supposedly serious audience suggests that as far as attitudes about Palestinians and Arabs are concerned, we have a long way to go before we achieve even minimal decency in discussing the subject.
The bottom line is that Israel is a country that has operated a nearly fifty-year long military occupation and militarized settlement campaign at the expense of the millions of Palestinians who live under its rule. It claims to fear Palestinian terrorists, and has built a “security wall” to keep them “out,” but then insists on placing its own population on both sides of the wall, nullifying the point of having a wall, and erasing the “inside/outside” distinction which gives the wall whatever point it was supposed to have. Unfortunately, this desire to have things all ways at once is the classic hallmark of pro-Israeli discourse today, especially in its militant right-wing variety, which, regardless of his intentions, is the variety that Tesón’s post exemplifies. Israel may in many respects be a liberal democracy as Tesón and Co. claim, but unfortunately, the occupation proves that you can’t have your liberalism and eat it, too. That, I’m afraid, is the unintended but actual message of Fernando Tesón’s post.
Irfan Khawaja
Dept. of Philosophy
Felician College
Notes
[1] This is what force looks like when it confronts discourse, by the way. So where is the closed area, exactly? Is it just wherever the soldier’s tear gas happens to float? It turns out that one can’t ask IDF soldiers simple questions like this when they’re mad and on patrol – qualities that seem to go together a lot. Their rather non-responsive answers to simple questions often seem to take the form of dirty looks, lots of yelling in Hebrew, angry spitting on the ground, and the gratuitous firing of tear gas rounds. But I don’t regard any of that as an answer. Actually, I have a feeling they don’t, either.
[2] Lucy Nusseibeh and Munir Nusseibeh are not related, but Lucy Nusseibeh is married to Sari Nusseibeh, the well-known Palestinian intellectual. Coincidentally, she’s also the daughter of the philosopher J.L. Austin.
[3] I signed the 1987 letter with my middle name rather than my last name after my father took exception to it. I was a minor at the time, and living under his roof.
This series at Thoughts on Liberty shows just how poorly understood left-libertarianism is, even among those who would claim to know enough about it to laud it as ”the future of libertarianism.” Rachel Burger begins her “defense” of left-libertarianism by conflating it with liberaltarianism. Left-libertarianism is a body of outlooks within libertarianism which see leftist concerns about problematic social arrangements as legitimate but also recognize that existing institutions of power are not likely to be helpful in solving these social woes. We see corporate power and the boss-worker relationship as stifling, and we don’t want the most hierarchical institution of all, government, trying to do anything about it. Liberaltarians have the opposite view about power, and, as Roderick T. Long points out, they tend to see their left-leaning concerns as being moderating influences where left-libertarians see the two as reinforcing each other or even radicalizing one another.
The article goes on to delve into a topic that seems as abused as it is popular: millennial libertarianism. News sources as disparate in ideology as the Huffington Post and Town Hall (which, unfortunately, are not disparate enough) have published articles in praise of it. With some questionable sociological claims about the way Millennials have grown up, Burger comes to the conclusion that “Millennials are all about community, not individualism.” This claim is entirely unclear, even from the data Burger cites. The Pew Research Center study to which the article links says, “Millennials have emerged into adulthood with low levels of social trust.” But also, “They are about as likely as their elders to have a favorable view of business, and they are more likely than older generations to say they support an activist government.” Burger further claims that Millennials “are the least narcissistic generation in decades.” This is a controversial assertion that may not even be using the proper definition of narcissism. Burger goes so far as to claim that Millennials tend to live with their parents because of this supposed community-oriented thinking, completely ignoring the fact that anyone born after 1986 would have graduated high school or college into one of the worst job markets in American history.
Moving on to the recommendations for spreading libertarianism to her communitarian, family-dependent Millennials, Burger’s first point is to play down individualism. Instead, she says, libertarianism needs to address identity politics. This dichotomy is very strange. Identity politics seeks to understand the ways in which socially contrived groups of individuals live among each other. Most often, it seeks to understand implicit social dynamics that put some groups in positions of social inferiority with respect to some other group. In other words, those of us who are interested in identity politics want to free individuals from the groupings they are assigned by others. We seek to free people in a radically more individualistic way than do adherents to thinner libertarian ideologies which see the government as the only social ill opposable on libertarian grounds.
In fact, what left-libertarianism has as its central tenet is that every individual should have complete control over their life and no one else’s. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and the myriad other bigotries that can haunt the lives of underprivileged individuals are social power structures. Burger deserves applause for pointing out that left-libertarians and liberaltarians seem to be the only libertarians grappling with these collectivistic problems, but she is completely backwards in saying that this means collectivistic rhetoric will win Millennials (or, more meaningfully, anyone with concerns about the socially oppressed) to libertarianism. This is the mistaken liberaltarian interpretation of identity politics’ success. Instead of presenting bad ideas (like communitarianism) as a front for libertarianism, left-libertarians want to show how identity politics is intensely focused on the identity of individuals.
The rest of Burger’s first article suggests some good techniques for bringing the community-minded into libertarianism, but they’re not terribly specific to left-libertarianism and really just continue her mistaken idea that left-libertarianism is somehow more collectivistic or moderate than other forms of libertarianism. Most libertarians recognize that communities and government are the antithesis of each other. Cooperation can’t happen under the influence of power dynamics, but even the most capitalistic anarcho-“capitalist” understands that. It’s part of why every libertarian is concerned about government influence in the market. Here, Burger has lost an opportunity to delve further into the critical framework left-libertarianism offers, and instead relegates a two hundred year-old body of thought to mere rhetorical strategy.
In her article, Burger fails to even explain what kind of left-libertarianism she thinks libertarians need to work with more. She treats her subject matter as though it were nothing more than a way of choosing conversation topics to interest the left. I highly doubt Rothbard was being rhetorical when he wrote:
[T]here were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand… which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.
Maybe next time Burger will consider reading about what she wants to recommend for others.
The old “53% vs. 47%” meme that got so much attention in the 2012 election resurfaced this week when it came out that Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez apparently first coined it at a 2010 Rotary Club speech. The 47% who pay no income tax, he said back then, are “dependent on the largesse of government” and “perfectly happy that someone else is paying the bill.” The talking point got traction with the Tea Party and was soon picked up by politicians like Paul Ryan (who warned we were approaching “a net majority of takers vs. makers”) and Mitt Romney.
Of course this is pure buncombe. It presupposes that high taxable incomes result primarily from being “makers,” when the truth is just the opposite. The higher your income, in fact, the more likely you’re a taker who’s — all together now! — dependent on government.
It’s possible to get moderately wealthy — say, an income that qualifies you for the “top 1%,” which is somewhere under $400,000, or assets in the low millions — through genuine entrepreneurship. Even at this level, of course, it’s more likely you have an income heavily inflated by membership in a licensing cartel, or help manage a highly authoritarian, statist corporation where your “productivity” — and bonuses — are defined by how effectively you shaft the people whose skills, relationships and other human capital are actually responsible for the organization’s productivity. But it’s at least possible to get this rich by being a maker of sorts, by being more adept than others at anticipating and meeting real human needs.
But you don’t get to be super-rich — to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars — by making stuff. You get that filthy rich only through crime of one sort or another (even if it’s technically perfectly legal in this society). You get the really big-time money not by making stuff or doing stuff, but by controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to make stuff and do stuff. You get super-rich by getting into a position where you can fence off opportunities to produce, enclosing those natural opportunities as a source of rent. You do it by collecting tolls and tribute from those who actually make stuff, as a condition of not preventing them from doing so. In other words you get super-rich by being a parasite and extorting protection money from productive members of society, with the help of government.
So don’t be fooled by the fact that some of us aren’t paying any income taxes. We pay lots of taxes — to rich takers who live off our largesse. The portion of your rent or mortgage that results from the enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use through artificial property rights is a tax to the landlord. The 95% of the price of drugs under patent, or Bill Gates’s software, is a tax you pay to the owners of “intellectual property” monopolies. So is the portion of the price you pay for manufactured goods, over and above actual materials and labor, that results from embedded rents on patents and enormous brand-name markups on (for example) Nike sneakers over and above the few bucks a pair the sweatshops contract to make them for. So is the estimated 20% oligopoly price markup for industries where a few corporations control half or more of output. If by chance you do pay federal income tax, half of it goes to support the current military establishment or pay off debt from past wars — wars fought for the sake of giant corporations.
The “takers,” in short, are the people Romney spoke to at $1000/plate fundraisers, who pay Hillary Clinton several hundred grand for a speech reassuring them Wall Street’s not to blame. The entire Fortune 500, the entire billionaire plutocracy, depends on largesse from us makers — and they can only do it with government help.
Thomas Knapp, C4SS Senior Media Analyst and Media Coordinator, discusses with Outright Arizona the possibility and strategy of the Libertarian Party running the most consistent and qualified presidential candidate in its history: None of the Above 2016!
C4SS Feed 44 presents Joseph S. Diedrich‘s “Property The Least Bad Option” read by Stephen Leger and edited by Nick Ford.
We would be much better off if we weren’t tormented by scarcity. There would be no conflict or potential for conflict over physical goods. This hypothetical world — one of superabundance or post-scarcity or infinite supply or infinite reproducibility or whatever you want to call it — is preferable to both options presented in the libertarian dichotomy. Superabundance would also obviate and overcome other undesirable corollaries of scarcity, including opportunity cost, supply and demand, and ultimately economy itself. Unfortunately, this world doesn’t exist.
Feed 44:
Bitcoin tips welcome:
O Bloomberg relata que “o maior grupo comercial de Wall Street propõe a criação de um conselho de guerra cibernética formado pelo governo e pela indústria”, liderados por um “representante da Casa Branca”e composto por nomes da indústria financeira e nada menos que oito agências federais americanas.
O “grupo comercial” supracitado, a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Associação da Indústria de Títulos e de Mercados Financeiros), já contratou o ex-diretor da National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander e uma firma capitaneada pelo ex-chefe do Departamento de Segurança Interna dos EUA Michael Chertoff para “facilitar” o projeto.
A turma está toda aqui! O governo, ex-funcionários do governo, banqueiros… espere, falta alguém. Quem poderia ser? Ah, sim! Você! Mas não se preocupe, vocë tem um papel a desempenhar aqui. Para começar, você pode pagar a conta.
Quando Alexander descobriu que seus serviços de sergurança (vendidos por sua firma de “consultoria” IronNet Cybersecurity) não vendiam muito a US$ 1 milhão por mês, ele tirou da cartola a velha fraude das “parcerias público-privadas”: arranjar clientes que não estão dispostos a pagar e colocar o estado na jogada para enfiar a conta goela abaixo nos pagadores de impostos.
Mesmo as “parcerias público-privadas” melhorzinhas são péssimas ideias. Suas partes “públicas” são relacionadas ao pagamento de custos (você). A parte privada” tem a ver com a alocação dos benefícios (eles). O estado e seus parceiros “privados” dividem a culpa pelo fracasso — sem comparilhá-la, mas passando de um para outro até que todo mundo esqueça o que aconteceu e possa voltar a bater sua carteira.
É claro, “público” e “privado” não significam aquilo que parecem. O lado “privado” são pessoas como Alexander, Chertoff e seus colegas banqueiros sem rosto — que não estão mais (ou ainda não foram colocados) na folha de pagamentos do governo, mas que estão com seus dentes firmes no erário. O lado “público” são burocratas governamentais salivando por futuros profissionais parecidos. Uma porta giratória conecta os dois lados. Se é difícil percebê-la, é porque ela gira muito rápido. Você paga o frete, mas não tem mais nenhum utro envolvimento.
Esta parceria, porém, não é das melhores. Como é que eu sei? Fácil: ela tem “guerra” no título.
Guerras têm lados. Guerras têm inimigos.
Não acredita em mim? Pergunte a Bounkham Phonesavanh, o bebê que está de volta em casa após internação no hospital depois de ser atingido dentro de seu berçário por uma granada de flash jogada por policiais guerra (“pública”) às drogas. Você pode já ter visto esta história no noticiário no meio de anúncios que dão apoio a um país “sem drogas”. Esse é o seu cérebro na guerra contra as drogas.
O objetivo dessa guerra “público-privada” é consertar a cerca que foi levantada há muito tempo (pelos mesmos indivíduos que agora a defendem) em volta dos bancos e serviços de pagamento e financiamento.
O inimigo é o mercado desregulado e seus clientes (inclusive você). Pense no Bitcoin. Pense nos serviços de carona compartilhada como o Uber e o Lyft.
Esses mercados operam — às vezes na prática, às vezes potencialmente — fora da teia de regulamentações do estado, que são estabelecidas para monopolizá-los e entregar seu controle aos bem conectados. São mercados que sempre existiram (na forma de escambo, moedas locais, vans e caronas compartilhadas), mas hoje em dia crescem em ritmo frenético. Com a ajuda da internet e de fortes tecnologias criptográficas, representam os maiores riscos não só aos monopolistas mas ao sistema de controle estatal que garante seus monopólios.
A campanha de propaganda que eventualmente culminará em “padrões de segurança” e “ações prévias e posteriores” já está em andamento. Provavelmente não se trata de coincidência o fato de que a cobertura da mídia dessa proposta se segue à cobertura de um texto de um blog com supostas conexões à ISIS sobre o uso de Bitcoin para “permitir uma jihad em larga escala”. De fato, eu não me surpreenderia se soubesse que os autores do tal texto e do release do “conselho de guerra cibernetica” tivessem dividido um cubículo no Pentágono — ou pelo menos que tivessem os contatos uns dos outros na discagem rápida.
A má notícia é que provavelmente não há nada que você possa fazer para parar esse “conselho de guerra” e seu planejamento de combate.
A boa notícia é que você pode ganhar essa guerra. Tudo o que você tem que fazer é perceber que precisa de mercados novos, melhores e desregulados mais do que precisa de mercados controlados pelo estado — ou mais do que precisa do próprio estado.
Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.
