É intrigante ver a esquerda progressista se posicionando contra a proibição das drogas. São indivíduos que não nos acompanham em espírito, e nem deveriam, mas que formularam suas críticas sobre as poucas bases comuns que possuímos. Muitos alegam que apenas drogas “pesadas” devam ser combatidas com a força e que drogas “seguras” devam ter seu consumo regulamentado. É uma ideia decepcionante, mas nós, da esquerda descentralista, podemos explorar essa oportunidade.

Apesar de os progressistas afirmarem fazer uma crítica substantiva aos poderes sociais e sistêmicos, eles celebram as estruturas plutocráticas do governo. Veem a plutocracia como uma força constituída externamente que pode combater as hierarquias de poder difusas sem se tornar parte delas. Como se fosse uma força “neutra”, uma lacuna em que uma noção racional de justiça pode ser inscrita e comandada efetivamente por essa ideia de racionalidade. Mostrar a ignorância dos progressistas das estruturas de opressão é outra oportunidade.

Todos já nos deparamos com o mantra “Legalizar, regulamentar, taxar!”. Perceba a posição estranha em que se colocam. A diferença entre a regulamentação e a proibição, se é que há alguma, é que a regulamentação abre algumas exceções para privilegiados — o que não é grande alento quando você se encontra em um dos grupos excluídos. Embora a força bruta tenha gerado o caos, os progressistas estão certos de que uma regulamentação moderada pode funcionar. A elaboração de políticas públicas, ao que parece, é equivalente a jogar tiro ao alvo usando uma venda nos olhos.

Mercados negros “desregulamentados”? Onde?

É comum a afirmação de que os perigos dos mercados de drogas resultam de seu caráter “desregulamentado”. Se legalizássemos as drogas e o governo garantisse sua qualidade e consistência, todos estariam mais seguros. Concordo que todos estariam mais seguros com a legalização, mas as regulamentações não têm nada a ver com isso. A verdade é que os problemas atuais ocorrem por causa das falhas do estado regulatório. Não apenas porque a proibição a produção, distribuição e do consumo é a maior forma de regulamentação imaginável, mas porque ela tira o poder dos consumidores, estabelecendo hierarquias e violências estruturais.

Primeiro, a proibição ergue barreiras à entrada que requerem que os agentes tenham acesso privilegiado a recursos especializados — como os meios de produção e distribuição do bem — ou que façam uso de canais pouco confiáveis em diferentes níveis da hierarquia econômica. Não só os recursos proibidos são mais difíceis de adquirir, mas os riscos e custos artificiais que surgem ao atuar fora da lei garantem que a divisão entre vencedores e perdedores seja injusta e que apenas alguns poucos, que agora controlam o mercado, tenham acesso a determinados recursos. O poder do consumidor é limitado porque os distribuidores frequentemente têm diferentes canais de acesso às mesmas cadeias de fornecimento. Não há vantagens em usar canais diferentes.

Segundo, os lucros exorbitantes auferidos pelos participantes privilegiados, graças ao risco de entrada e aos controles de distribuição, levam a relações de poder econômico desiguais. Esse tipo de dominação violenta e perseguição pode ser vista nos cartéis de drogas mexicanos. Num mercado verdadeiramente liberto, em que a participação é aberta ao público, a competição livre age como limitação ao poder e estimula a honestidade dos agentes. Sem a especialização artificial dos recursos necessários, a maioria das ações competitivas tomadas para criar lucros no curto prazo seriam niveladas ao longo do tempo, quando os outros participantes adotassem suas ideias. Na situação atual, em que certos agentes têm recursos e acesso ao poder circunstancialmente melhores, todos os demais agentes não podem fazer nada. Num mercado irrestrito, não haveria nada que impedisse que pessoas diferentes tivessem o mesmo acesso aos mesmos recursos, insumos e dados.

Terceiro, o monopólio estatal do fornecimento de leis e segurança reserva a eles o poder especial de exclusão que, quando usado, tem o efeito de distorcer os mercados negros. É o caso claro dos mercados de drogas ilegais. Não temos a opção de criar nossas próprias instituições de justiça e, ao mesmo tempo, há uma necessidade forçosa de segurança — isto é, proteção contra a própria lei. Então, como agentes do mercado negro, somos privados de várias opções de proteção contra riscos e, assim, se formam cartéis hierarquizados. Não só a proibição define que tipos de instituições são possíveis, mas a necessidade de ocultamento e anonimidade distorce severamente as transações cotidianas. Não é muito seguro fazer transações com um sujeito numa van à noite, mas não há muitas opções — não como são concebidas tradicionalmente.

Respostas de mercado

Vivemos em tempos interessantes. A difusão da internet e a economia da informação deu poder para que as pessoas criassem espaços sociais próprios que seriam proibidos de outras maneiras. Formas tradicionais de organização criam alvos visíveis ou vulneráveis para o estado, mas redes são muito mais resistentes porque podem se recriar facilmente. Através desse modo de organização em rede, estamos vendo uma reversão parcial das várias formas de desempoderamento criadas pela proibição e pela regulamentação estatais.

O Silk Road (SR), por exemplo, teve impacto tremendo nos últimos anos e sua derrubada recente pelo FBI foi uma grande injustiça, mas ao menos estamos vendo, talvez pela primeira vez, um enfraquecimento dos ataques. A resposta do governo dos Estados Unidos partiu o SR em milhões de pedaços, que estão sendo incorporados por outros grupos e indivíduos e transformados em armas próprias. Os consumidores utilizam cada vez mais alternativas de mercado da darknet — inclusive uma nova versão do próprio SR — e têm sido bem sucedidos, com apenas alguns percalços, em retomar sua capacidade de trocar bens e serviços uns com os outros, não importa que sejam “proibidos”.

Para entender melhor os papéis desempenhados por essas alternativas descentralizadas, devemos analisar as inovações e falhas do SR original. O SR era um serviço “oculto”, disponível apenas na rede Tor — ou seja, acessável somente se seu navegador fosse configurado para o uso da rede Tor ou se você utilizasse o Tor Browser Bundle. O site funcionava como uma versão modificada da Amazon ou do eBay e fornecia várias facilidades que ajudavam os compradores e vendedores a estabelecerem laços de confiança, como um sistema de depósitos, feedback para os vendedores e resolução de disputas. De acordo com seu relatório, o FBI comprou amostras de drogas listadas no SR, as testou (página 6) e normalmente viu que a pureza dos produtos era exatamente a que era anunciada. O SR, com seu sistema de reputação combinado com informações precisas nas páginas de perfis e fóruns oficiais, dava poder aos compradores para fazerem escolhas informadas e permanecerem seguros.

O problema crítico do SR era sua centralização. Embora a capacidade de operar “escondido” seja uma característica útil da rede Tor, o serviço pode ser minado se alguns erros forem cometidos por seus fundadores ou se os servidores físicos forem descobertos. Após o primeiro ataque ao SR, o mecanismo de emergência que liberaria os bitcoins armazenados no site para seus donos nunca foi ativado, graças a circunstâncias não previstas. Todas as suas funções úteis foram internalizadas, requerendo a confiança cega na honestidade e na competência dos administradores do site.

É verdade que os retornos de longo prazo sobre as comissões de vendas eram incentivos maiores que os ganhos de curto prazo que poderiam ser extraídos ao enganar toda a base de usuários e fugir com seus bitcoins, mas as falhas de serviços escondidos, como o Sheep Marketplace e o TorMarket, mostram que essa garantia só funciona se as perspectivas futuras do serviço forem boas. O TorMarket foi encerrado sem aviso e nunca mais foi visto após um período de problemas e incertezas em outros mercados e depois de ser alvo de vários ataques DDOS (ataques de negação de serviço distribuídos), que fizeram com que os usuários não pudessem acessar os bitcoins em suas carteiras pessoais e em depósitos no site.

Essas são as lições que devem ser aprendidas. Um serviço “oculto” chamado The Marketplace, localizado na rede I2P, em vez da rede Tor, como explicam seus idealizadores, não é capaz de roubar das carteiras digitais criadas para depósitos. Embora continue a ser um serviço centralizado, há grande interesse da comunidade em dar mais controle ao usuário final, para quem The Marketplace estabeleceu seu modelo. Outros mercados estão fazendo experimentos similares. O potencial para mercados completamente descentralizados já existe — e proteções a compradores e vendedores, onde forem necessárias, estão sendo implementadas por projetos como o Open Transactions.

Esse fenômeno é essencialmente similar ao “molotov invisível” descrito por William Gillis:

Para aqueles interessados em resistir e minar as bases do poder coercitivo, a questão não se trata tanto de como um mercado realmente liberto pode um dia melhorar nossas vidas, mas como os poucos lampejos de liberdade do mercado atual já trabalham contra as hierarquias, o banditismo e a concentração de poder e como eles podem ser fortalecidos. Nosso interesse, portanto, não é na mão invisível do mercado, mas no molotov invisível que ela carrega.

Quanto mais forte as estruturas opressivas nos seguram, mais desliza por entre seus os dedos. Os sistemas sociais em rede que criamos podem sobreviver à própria fragilidade. Na realidade, é nesse ambiente que temos mais sucesso; por formarmos instituições anti-frágeis, nós nos modulamos e nos aperfeiçoamos em resposta às falhas. O estado monolítico requer estabilidade e previsibilidade, mas no novo milênio essa é uma causa perdida. O controle social total é o único meio que ele possui para sua sobrevivência mas elementos de perturbação são impossíveis de eliminar. O sistema atual de conglomerados e estados-nação provoca continuamente essas perturbações e, portanto, participa em sua própria destruição. As correções do mercado negro estão destruindo as instituições de poder “neutro” que os progressistas sonham em comandar e provocando reações que revelam sua natureza não tão inocente, mostrando que, na realidade, são forças de opressão totalizante.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

If I were compelled to summarize the libertarian philosophy’s distinguishing feature while standing on one foot, I’d say the following: Every person owes it to all other persons not to aggress them. This is known as the nonaggression principle, or NAP.

What is the nature of this obligation?

The first thing to notice is that it is unchosen. I never agreed not to aggress against others. Others never agreed not to aggress against me. So if I struck you and you objected, you would not accept as my defense, “I never agreed not to strike you.”

Even an explicit agreement rests on an unchosen obligation. Let’s say you lent me five dollars, I refused to repay the loan, and when you demanded repayment, I said, “Why am I obligated to repay the money?” You would probably reply, “Because you agreed to repay me.” If I replied, “True, but when did I agree to abide by my agreements?,” what would you say? If you said that failure to repay constituted aggression, and I replied that I never agreed not to aggress against you, we’d be back where we started.

Of course this would point the way to absurdity — an infinite regress of agreements to keep my agreements. We would get nowhere. There has to be a starting point.

If I were to ask, “Why do we owe it to others not to aggress against them,” what would you say? I presume some answer rooted in facts would be offered because the alternative would be to say this principle has no basis whatsoever, that it’s just a free-floating principle, like an iceberg. That would amount to saying the principle has no binding force. It’s just a whim, which might not be shared by others. In other words, if a nonlibertarian demands to know why he is bound by the unchosen NAP, libertarians will have answers. Their answers will differ — some will be more robust than others — but they will have answers. At least I hope so.

Now if we have an unchosen obligation not to aggress against others and that obligation is rooted in certain facts, this raises a new question: Might the facts that impose the unchosen obligation not to aggress also impose other obligations? If one unchosen obligation can be shown to exist, why couldn’t the same foundation in which that one is rooted produce others?

To the question “Why do we owe it to others not to aggress against them,” I would respond along these lines: because we individually should treat other persons respectfully, that is, as ends in themselves and not merely as means to our own ends. But some libertarians would reject that as too broad because it seems to obligate us to more than just nonaggression. They might answer the question this way: “Because one may use force against another only in defense or retaliation against someone who initiated the use of force.” But this can’t be sufficient because it amounts to a circular argument: To say that one may use force only in response to aggression is in effect merely to restate the nonaggression principle. One shouldn’t aggress because one shouldn’t aggress. But the NAP can hardly justify itself.

So we need a real justification for the NAP, and the one I’ve offered seems like a good start. The NAP is an implication of the obligation to treat persons respectfully, as ends and not merely as means. Of course this also requires justification. Why should we treat other persons respectfully?

Many libertarians, though certainly not all, approach the question of just conduct — specifically, as it relates to the use of force — from egoistic considerations, such as those provided by Ayn Rand. They say we should never aggress against others because doing so would be contrary to our self-interest: the dishonesty required by a life of injustice would be psychologically damaging, and we’d eventually run out of victims.

Socrates and Plato saw a problem with the first part of this answer. If one could act unjustly toward others while appearing to be just, could unjust conduct serve one’s self-interest? Egoistic libertarians can be asked the same question. What if you could lead an unjust life with a guarantee of the appearance of justice? Must dishonesty be damaging? The same people who would say yes to that question, however, would also say that a person who spins a complicated web of lies to keep the Nazis from learning he is harboring Jews in his attic won’t suffer such damage. If that person can escape harm, why not the unjust liar? Saying that one set of lies is for a good cause doesn’t strike me as an adequate answer. How would a good cause save someone from the harm of “faking reality”?

So it seems that a simple self-interest model doesn’t take us where we want to go: to the unchosen obligation to respect people’s freedom, or more broadly, to treat persons as ends and not merely as means. I would be a little uneasy if a libertarian told me that it is only his self-interest that prevents him from clubbing me on the noggin and making off with my wallet.

And yet, self-interest still might provide an answer. Roderick Long tackles this problem in his extended essay “Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand” (PDF). What Long shows, to my satisfaction at least, is that Rand’s notion of self-interest as expressed in her nonfiction essays is too flimsy to support the libertarian prohibition on aggression and the general injunction to treat people respectfully. To be more precise, Long shows that Rand’s explicit writings on ethics are a tangle of at least three different and inconsistent defenses for the nonaggression principle (one of them Kantian — how’s that for irony?).

Before we get to this, however, we must invoke an important distinction that Long emphasizes: instrumental versus constitutive means to an end. An instrumental means is external to the end. A constitutive means is intrinsic to the end; we can’t imagine the end without it. Long uses the example of a man dressing up for evening out (where “dressing up” includes a necktie). Shopping for a tie is an instrumental means. Wearing the tie is a constitutive means — it is part of what we mean by “dressing up.” One can dress up without shopping for a tie, but one cannot dress up without wearing a tie.

We can look at justice, which includes respect for other persons’ rights, in both ways. Does respect for their rights serve our self-interest merely because we would earn good reputations and others will cooperate with us? (This is Thomas Hobbes’s position.) Or is respecting their rights also a constituent of living a good human life? The answer is crucial. In the first case, one’s self-interest could be served by acting unjustly so long as one could appear to be just. In the second case, one could not flourish by acting unjustly even if one could go undetected. As Socrates suggested, it is preferable to live justly with a reputation for injustice than to live unjustly with a reputation for justice.

Long shows that Rand has both instrumental and constitutive elements in her nonfiction writing on ethics; in some places she says a person’s goal should be survival, while in other places she speaks of survival “qua man.” It isn’t entirely clear whether individuals should aim at the longest possible life regardless of the type of life or at a particular type of life regardless of its length. (Her novels appear to take the latter position — suicide is even contemplated by heroic characters.) If it’s the first, then violating someone’s rights might occasionally be to one’s self-interest. Imagine that at 4 a.m. you pass an alley in a deserted part of town where a man is passed out and a hundred-dollar bill is sticking out of his pocket. The chances of getting caught are zero. Do you take the money? If not, why not? An instrumental model of justice should say to take the money. A constitutive model would not.

It might be said that a rational person acts on rational principles even if in particular cases his or her self-interest is not served. But Long points out that such “rule egoism” ends up being no egoism at all, since the rule is followed regardless of its consequences. This approach is deontological, not teleological, as Rand would want it. So the reply is inadequate.

What are the grounds for accepting the constitutive model of virtue, including justice? Turning to Aristotle, Long writes,

For Aristotle, a human being is essentially a logikon animal and a politikon animal.…

To be a rational animal is to be a language-using animal, a conversing animal, a discursive animal. And to live a human life is thus to live a life centered around discourse.

Our nature as logikon is thus closely allied with our nature as politikon. To be apolitikon animal is not simply to be an animal that lives in groups or sets up governments; it is to cooperate with others on the basis of discourse about shared ends.…

Being politikon is for Aristotle an expression of being logikon; just as logikon animals naturally conduct their private affairs through reason rather than through unreflective passion, so they naturally conduct their common affairs through public discourse and rational persuasion, rather than through violence.…

Thus, Long adds, “To violate the rights of others, then, is to lessen one’s humanity.… To trample on the rights of others is never in our self-interest, because well-being cannot [quoting Aristotle] ‘come about for those who rob and use force.’”

One’s goal is to flourish by achieving excellence in those things that make one human — Aristotle says that “the task of man is a certain life, and this an activity and actions of soul with logos.” One cannot flourish if one lives in a nonhuman way. If this sounds like Rand, it’s because her fictional characters understand it, even if her nonfiction essays do not express it unambiguously.

Long concludes,

A truly human life, then, will be a life characterized by reason and intelligent cooperation. (Bees may cooperate after a fashion, but not on the basis of discourse about shared ends.) To a logikon animal, reason has value not only as an instrumental means to other goals but as an intrinsic and constitutive part of a fully human life; and the same holds true for cooperation. The logikon animal, insofar as it genuinely expresses logos, will not deal on cooperative terms with others merely because doing so makes others more likely to contribute instrumentally to the agent’s good; rather, the agent will see a life of cooperation with others as an essential part of his own good.

Aristotle’s book on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics beautifully elaborates on this point.

If this is right, we owe respect to others’ humanity, via respect for their rights, because the activity manifesting that respect is a constituent of our own flourishing as logikon and politikon animals. We owe it to ourselves to owe it to others. This Aristotelian insight points to an interpersonal moral realm in which the basic interests of others meld in important ways with our own. “To the extent that we are logikon animals,” Long writes, “participation in a human community, together with a shared pursuit of the human good, is a constitutive part of a truly human life.”

But does this show that we owe anything more than nonaggression? It seems so. We abstain from aggressing against others because, as logikon and politikon animals, we flourish by engaging the humanity of other individuals. Clearly, abstaining from aggression is not the only way to engage their humanity, just as aggression is not the only way to deny their humanity. Thus these Aristotelian considerations entail the obligation to treat others respectfully broadly.

One last question remains: Is this obligation broadly to treat other persons as ends and not merely as means a libertarian matter? It is, at least in this way: The obligation broadly to treat other persons as ends and not merely as means is validated by the same set of facts that validate the nonaggression principle. Nonaggression is simply one application of respect. Thus a libertarian society in which people generally thought that nonaggression was all they owed others would be a society that should fear for its future viability qua libertarian society.

Finally, I’m sure libertarians do not have to be reminded that nonaggressive affronts against persons may be responded to only in nonaggressive ways. Neither governmental nor private force may be deployed to counter peaceful offenses. Why not? Because the rule of proportionality dictates that force may be used only to meet force. In other words, some obligations are enforceable and others are not.

(While thinking about this article, I profited mightily by conversations with Gary Chartier.)

Well, give Miss Representation credit. The inescapable “It’s for the children!” is right there in their petition’s name: Join Our Family To Stop Advertising Hurting Our Kids; Support the Truth In Advertising Act. The proposed bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to regulate advertisers’ use of image alteration, as well as create and maintain what would essentially be a Congressional Photoshop report. No doubt the aims are righteous. Evidence exists that the ubiquity of highly retouched imagery can have a pernicious effect on young girls’ self-image. However, it’s precisely this ubiquity which makes a bill like this an untenable attack on free speech.

The bill attempts to specify the kinds of Photoshop it wants to regulate, only applying the regulations to image alterations which “materially change the physical characteristics of the faces and bodies of the individuals depicted.” However, this is obviously an impossible-to-enforce, entirely subjective value judgment.

What we’ve seen with overbroad legislation like this in other industries is selective enforcement. As Laurie Rice pointed out, it’s most likely that “enforcement or non-enforcement will be traded as political favor between members of the FTC and leaders of more powerful advertising companies to crowd out competition from smaller companies – the very companies that might have otherwise offered alternative media with a more positive message for young women.”

Nadine Strossen warned against using censorship to achieve feminist aims in “On Pornography: Lessons From Enforcement:”

The pro-censorship feminists cannot have it both ways. If, as they contend, governmental power is inevitably used to the particular disadvantage of relatively disempowered groups, such as women, it follows that women’s rights advocates should oppose measures that augment that power, including Dworkin/MacKinnon-type laws.

Even if the law were enforced evenly across the board, it puts undue strain on artists who attempt to sell their work. No one wants or needs a struggling photographer to disclose to the federal government exactly how their images were made.

Think that wouldn’t happen? Think again. Carolyn Davis and her son began a moving business after he lost his job in construction. Before long, armed police officers stormed the home of these menaces to society and impounded their vehicle for the crime of advertising and moving people without a license.

Molly Van Roekel put it eloquently: “This is slapping a band aid over the problem and blaming the artists for a cultural problem.”

Miss Representation claims that altered images of perfect models have a negative impact on girls’ satisfaction with their own appearance. This may or may not be true, but there are other, cooperative ways to combat the problem. Parents and educators can challenge the message girls get everywhere from Disney princesses to romantic comedies that their worth lies in their appearance.

Parents and educators should also educate young girls about image alteration. Recognizing that the vast majority of images the public consumes are altered in some way can alleviate girls’ anxiety over not resembling those images.

In addition, the #notbuyingit campaign exists to call out sexism in advertising, and empowers people to stop buying products marketed with sexist messaging.

Luckily, the legislation itself isn’t likely to make any difference. Govtrack gives it a 1% chance of being enacted. The larger problem at play here is that by seeking to ban every kind of speech feminists find distasteful, they discredit a movement with important and worthy goals. Campaigns like this wrongly associate feminists and others concerned about equal opportunity for girls with efforts to curtail speech rights and grow government. Creating a culture which is less hostile to young ladies’ well-being will require proposals which respect the First Amendment and allow a free and open marketplace of ideas.

Kyle Platt catches up with Prof. Roderick Long before his talk at the University of Oklahoma. They discuss why Eudaimonism is compatible with a libertarian philosophy, who libertarians should read, and themes of liberty in science fiction.

The Daily Beast’s Geoffrey Stone has drawn the line in the sand when it comes to the Free Flow of Information Act. He has made it clear which side he’s on. He believes that the only way journalism can continue to be free in the United States of got-dang America is if journalists have the same sort of client privilege afforded doctors and lawyers. If sources don’t feel safe to speak to the media, we are on a railcar headed to hell.

That’s why, he says, Congress should pass the Free Flow of Information Act, warts and all. As is. Right now.

Wait. What?

From Stone’s article (4/15/14):

[T]he law is full of hard choices, and what matters here is not that every tomdickandharry self-professed “journalist” gets to assert the privilege, but that sources can reasonably find journalists who can invoke the privilege when they want anonymity. It is no doubt true that, no matter how one draws the line, some folks will be unhappy. But as long as the statutory definition of “journalist” is reasonable, and is not couched in such a way to exclude journalists because of their particular ideological slant, this is not a serious obstacle. Indeed, if 49 states have managed to make this work, so can the federal government.

Sorry, no. The constitutionalist devil on my left shoulder can’t abide the first amendment-eviscerating clauses added by Dianne Feinstein in the current version of the act; the anarchist on my right shoulder obviously wants to see the act lit on fire, with all digital copies wiped as a precaution. As I wrote in my April 1 op-ed, more than just bloggers would be adversely affected by the shield law’s exclusions:

But what if the reporter in question doesn’t work for a newspaper, television station, radio station or wire service? What if they got a job at Wikileaks?

“The term ‘covered journalist’ does not include any person or entity whose principal function, as demonstrated by the totality of such person or entity’s work, is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization.”

So that means that independent investigative journalists who run their own sites and leak sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome aren’t covered. See also: Targets of state-level “Ag-Gag” laws, which criminalize the filming of factory farm conditions and other agricultural atrocities, and people who film the police.

In fact, the Free Flow of Information Act spends more time detailing what it will not cover than describing who it will protect.

Now, granted, Stone was writing in response to arguments by an ex-Romney staffer, Gabriel Schoenfeld, whose article, “Time for a Shield Law?” was published in the spring 2014 issue of National Affairs. From the quotey bits in Stone’s piece (not to mention an admittedly merely-cursory glance at the source), I don’t know if I could defend the premises of Schoenfeld’s article either. Conservative statism is just as bad as, if not worse than, liberal statism.

But Stone’s piece is still statist apologetics, and needs to be called out as such. So let’s go through the article.

After defining what journalist-source privilege is, and comparing it to the confidentiality agreements afforded doctors or lawyers, he describes a scenario where a congressional aide overhears a bribe taking place. This aide turns to a journalist, who assures them that their identity will not get out: “Without the privilege, the story would never have seen the light of day, but with the privilege the story gets out and the source remains anonymous.”

However, if the congressperson caught taking the bribe is prosecuted in federal court, the journalist is compelled to reveal their source, who is then compelled to testify. “Knowing this, the source in many instances will tell no one about what she overheard, and there will therefore be no investigation or prosecution for the bribe,” Stone writes.

This is definitely not good, but so far, this is simply an argument for a shield law, not the current shield bill being debated. In fact, this scenario presents the main stumbling block: why in the world is Congress going to pass a law that makes it easier for someone to incriminate them and get away scot-free?

Through their definition of who gets to be a journalist, they’re not. They are making sure that the outlets that crave the most access – the major networks, public radio, major newspapers – are the only ones covered; everyone else can suck eggs – especially Wikileaks, or organizations like it.

Stone is fine with this, as the above-quoted section of his article indicates. He’s okay with “compromise.” I’m not.

Quem não realizou o “recadastramento biométrico”, que ocorreu em várias cidades do Brasil, convocando cerca de 14 milhões de eleitores, perderá o título de eleitor e não poderá fazer matrículas em instituições públicas de ensino, se inscrever em benefícios assistenciais estatais, tomar posse de empregos públicos e até mesmo será privado de coisas banais e essenciais, como tirar passaporte e abrir conta corrente. Felizmente, o estado deu uma chance para os retardatários, que poderão “regularizar” sua situação até o dia 7 de maio, “com isenção de multa”. Animador, não?

O estado brasileiro pretende arregimentar os mais de 140 milhões de eleitores e pegar seus dados biométricos para tornar “seguras” as próximas eleições. Para isso, afirma ser necessário coletar as impressões digitais de todos os dedos das mãos das pessoas, além de foto e assinatura. Com esses dados, é emitido um novo título de eleitor. Sem isso, o estado promove, na prática, um embargo econômico contra o indivíduo (sem a possibilidade de tirar um passaporte, o brasileiro não pode nem mesmo fugir do país e dessa obrigação).

A ele se somam todos os outros modos de identificação e vigilância da população de que o governo brasileiro dispõe: carteira de identidade (que deve ser obrigatoriamente carregada a todo tempo), CPF (cadastro dos indivíduos junto à Receita Federal), carteira de motorista, certificado de alistamento militar ou de dispensa de incorporação (para homens), carteira de trabalho, passaporte, certidão de nascimento, certidão de casamento.

É de se pensar que o governo já teria informações suficientes sobre seus súditos, mas aparentemente a necessidade de tornar “segura” a votação para a festa da democracia requer que as pessoas repassem ainda mais dados privados para a autoridade estatal. Se tanta informação é necessária para que nós tenhamos votações seguras, será que as eleições que tivemos até hoje foram potencialmente fraudadas?

É claro que tudo não passa de uma mentira, uma cortina de fumaça para desviar a atenção do fato de que se trata de mais um passo rumo à concentração de poder total no estado. O propósito relativamente inócuo de garantir eleições limpas é apenas um precedente para que o governo tenha cada vez mais poder para arregimentar a população e exigir mais informações privadas.

Nada disso é necessário. Como também não é necessário que o voto continue a ser obrigatório no Brasil. O estado continua a fingir que seu propósito é garantir eleições limpas, quando na verdade simplesmente poderia desobrigar as pessoas de comparecer às urnas e parar de puni-las se elas não o fazem. Sem o voto obrigatório, o argumento de que é necessário que a população se recadastre para votar é nulo.

A maior ironia brasileira é que teremos, em tese, um sistema de identificação extremamente seguro, enquanto, por outro lado, temos um sistema de votação eletrônico completamente à prova de contestação. É virtualmente impossível saber se a urna eletrônica não é passível de fraude, uma vez que não há meios independentes para recontagem de votos e não há recibos físicos de votação. A urna eletrônica brasileira é uma caixa preta, só contestada por aqueles que estão fora do sistema político, como Leonel Brizola, que são prontamente ridicularizados.

O sistema eleitoral brasileiro é perfeito para a classe dominante: máxima identificação pessoal combinada com voto obrigatório e nenhuma possibilidade de verificação independente da votação. Tudo isso garante legitimidade total do estado e nenhum questionamento de seu poder.

É o sonho do totalitarismo suave tropical.

Among libertarians generally, there is a somewhat dependable tendency to hark back to the halcyon days of a supposed free age somewhere in the past, and to spotlight certain related features of Anglo-American legal history in service to that narrative. As those features are romanticized, they become totemic symbols of the classical-liberal tradition and its precursors, and are thus held away from criticism and analysis to a regrettable extent. In his new book, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror,Anthony Gregory attends to this propensity as it applies to the recondite legal doctrine of habeas corpus. And in dismantling facile, oversimplified conceptions of the Great Writ and its tangled history, Gregory reveals what he says “could be called a dark side of the writ,” offering in the process an encyclopedic study like few before it.

Part of the difficulty of chronicling habeas corpus is its inherent insusceptibility to easy definition. The celebrated and widely read English jurist William Blackstone — cited early in the book for his rather sunny view of habeas corpus — acknowledged part of the writ’s complexity in writing that “there are various kinds made use of by the courts.” Avoiding conflating these “many varieties of the article” (quoting Edward Jenks), Gregory solicitously treats linguistic arguments that attempt to pierce the shadows of a distant history to shed light on the origins of habeas corpus as we know it. Throughout his book, Gregory’s review is enriched by his understanding that habeas corpus is, like most creatures of the common law, not a single, “clear-cut doctrine” to be assessed as one monolithic whole. It is a swirling medley of historical, political, and legal currents that have often flowed at cross-purposes, with expediency, not principle, determining the tides. Gregory demonstrates the frailty of the stock appeal to the writ as a categorically libertarian instrument by featuring a host of skirmishes in which one power bloc leveraged habeas corpus to check the power of another. Explanations of struggles between Parliament and the Crown, higher and lower judicial officials, and the states and the federal government whittle away at the mythologies that have encrusted habeas corpus.

Gregory’s thesis about the fickle character of habeas corpus, its dual nature in relation to individual liberty, comes to the fore in the discussion of “judicial activism” that surfaces in the book. If historical habeas corpus has never been quite as formidable a force as its idealized, imaginary version, then upsurges in its power have been the results of activism from the bench almost per se. On the grounds of vertical federalism, conservatives and even many libertarians could take exception to the Supreme Court’s mid-20th-century habeas corpus jurisprudence. But by effectively expanding federal courts’ power to review state courts’ decisions, those cases “marked an expansion of habeas corpus in its scope,” a turn that redounds to the benefit of the individual.

Gregory’s survey of the cases illustrates the broader point that, even taken on its own terms, the kind of “judicial restraint” fervidly counseled by conservatives would produce (and has produced) results both libertarian and not. Libertarian views of deference to precedent should thus be as shaped by expediency and consequence as are those of the state and its agents; it does not profit the liberty movement to play into the hands of tyrants by mechanically accepting their standards and rules — which they themselves readily ignore whenever it serves them. The radicalized form of habeas Gregory hopes for would be a departure from historical precedent, not a continuation of it — and that is exactly the point. Because his interpretations and analyses of the historical record are radical, Gregory’s book will almost certainly bear all of the familiar cries of cynicism from all quarters of power apologists. It is not cynicism, however, that pervades the book, but discernment. One wishes there was more libertarian revisionism of such a high quality, especially in the academy.

A more accurate picture

Certainly there have been earlier attempts to revise the record of habeas corpus to add needed nuance to the picture of the Great Writ, but none so dauntless or so complete. Gregory’s is a scholarly achievement, equipped even with a chart of historical terms (full of legal Latin, the large part of which the author of this review, an attorney, could not define). A number of habeas books over the past decade or so have emerged, essaying to offer a fuller picture of the writ, capable of shedding some of the mystique and romance that has clothed it. Paul D. Halliday’sHabeas Corpus: From England to Empire, published in 2010 by Harvard University and referenced by Gregory, contributed in no small way to the undertaking that Gregory so adeptly continues in his book. Rather than approaching the writ as “something grander” than it actually is or ever was, Halliday made it his goal to balance and remedy a record that too often “has been written less as a history than as an exercise in legal narcissism.”

Legal narcissism is, of course, itself a well-documented piece of the American historical experience. So much of what has prevented Americans (libertarians included) from accepting or at least honestly confronting deeper, more consistent — that is, more radical — accounts of power relationships is the tendency to impute the growth of government and erosion of individual liberty to an insufficient adherence to their own historical legal values. Were we to just go back to X (fill in the blank: the Constitution, the ideas contained in the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, Magna Carta, habeas corpus, or some other favorite), we could have the good government and laws that we were promised.

This longing, retrograde gaze is in fact what has provided the precarious common ground between American libertarians and conservatives. Gregory’s book is important, then, not just for painting a more accurate picture of habeas corpus, but also for, by logical extension, disenchanting those who would see a libertarian Eden somewhere in the past. If there is something approaching a libertarian paradise to be had in the future, it cannot be a result of backward-looking invocations of a varied Anglo-American legal history; rather it will have to issue from a healthy, prudent distrust toward that past, an unflinching readiness to subject it to just the kind of trenchant scrutiny provided in The Power of Habeas Corpus in America. Indeed, few habeas scholars have been willing to face “fully the ironic affirmation of power that it also implies,” even when it is used as a liberatory device. “For every undermining of a custodian’s power [over a prisoner],” Gregory observes, “there is the affirmation of another official’s power — a judge’s power, to say nothing of the state’s general power to decide whom to detain.” This is the glaring trouble with libertarian appeals to legal protections, whether grounded in habeas corpus, the Constitution, or something else. As a matter of course, all such theories and arguments tacitly admit the arbitrary power of the state over the lives of individuals.

To be sure, Gregory’s disquisition into the minutiae of habeas and its legal context is not for the faint of heart, or even necessarily the only moderately interested in the subject matter; exhaustively, expertly researched and teeming with footnotes and legal terms of art, his book does not read like a trendy member of the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers, though it is never wearisome or needlessly donnish in its air. For those unshrinking before arcane Latin terms and legal citations, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America presents a rich reward, as comprehensive a probe into such a massive history as can be advanced in 416 pages. If this is a promise of things to come from Gregory, history lovers and libertarians are in for a treat.

The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror by Anthony Gregory (Independent Institute/Cambridge University Press 2013), 390 pages.

People who did not turn up for the “biometric relisting,” which ocurred in several Brazilian cities, summoning about 14 million voters, will lose their voter registration cards, their ability to enroll in public education institutions, to benefit from welfare programs or to apply for public jobs. They will not even be able to do such trivial and essential things such as opening a bank account or getting a passport. Fortunately, the government was generous enough to offer the laggards a chance to “regularize” their situation by May 7, “with no fines.” Reassuring, is it not?

The Brazilian state intends to acquire the biometric data from more than 140 million voters in order to make our next elections “secure.” For that goal, it is supposedly necessary to collect, from every person, the fingerprints from all fingers, their picture and signature. The new voter registration card is produced reflecting the newly collected information. Without this card, the state directs an economic embargo against the individual — who is no longer able to get a passport to flee from the country.

The voter card is but one of the many tools of identification and surveillance the Brazilian government possesses: ID (which should be carried at all times by every person), CPF (the registration to the federal revenue service), driver’s license, military enlisting or dispensation certificate (mandatory for men), employment record book, passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate …

One would think the government should have sufficient information about its subjects, but, apparently, the need to make voting “secure” for the “celebration of democracy” requires people to turn over even more of their private data to the authorities. If so much information is necessary for us to have secure voting, is it possible that our previous elections have been a fraud? We are left to wonder.

Of course, all of this is but a lie, a smokescreen designed to distract from the fact that this is another step towards total power concentration in the state. The relatively innocuous purpose of guaranteeing clean elections is just a precedent put in place so that the government can amass even more power to control the population and, down the line, demand even more private information.

None of this is necessary. It is also not necessary that voting should continue to be mandatory in Brazil. The state continues to pretend that its purpose is to guarantee elections free of fraud when, in fact, it could easily just end the obligation to vote and stop punishing those who do not. Without mandatory voting, the argument to relist the voting population is irrelevant.

The biggest Brazilian irony is that we will have, theoretically, an extremely safe identification system while, on the other hand, we have an electronic voting system immune to contestation. It is virtually impossible to know if the electronic ballot box is not prone to fraud, since there are no independent means of verification and auditing, and no physical voting receipts. The Brazilian electronic voting is a black box, whose only opponents are those on the fringes of the ruling elite, such as Leonel Brizola, who are promptly laughed at and scorned should they raise any doubts over it.

This is a perfect electoral system for the ruling class: It combines maximum surveillance, mandatory voting which guarantees very large turnout, and no possibility of independent verification and recounting. Therefore, we have total legitimacy for the state and no questioning of its power.

It is the dream of the gentle tropical totalitarianism.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Totalitarismo Identificativo.

Man mano che apprendiamo altri dettagli sullo spionaggio governativo, appare sempre più sconsiderato affidare la nostra sicurezza a terze parti.

Lo stato vuole informazioni sicure sui suoi soggetti. Fin dal primo censimento in Egitto 5.000 anni fa, gli stati hanno sempre cercato di ottenere informazioni personali sui propri cittadini, soprattutto le tirannie, dove informatori e polizia segreta raccolgono informazioni su ogni attività potenzialmente sovversiva. Nell’era di internet e dello spionaggio governativo, le agenzie di spionaggio raccolgono informazioni su di noi – per lo più offerta ingenuamente da noi stessi tramite i social media – a livelli che avrebbero reso verde d’invidia l’NKVD di Stalin. Quando finirà tutto ciò non lo sa nessuno; intanto, meno informazioni utili si possono raccogliere e meno efficace è il controllo dello stato su di noi. Per quanto riguarda gli attivisti nel primo mondo, forme di comunicazione private o anonime potrebbe la soluzione ideale per evitare l’arresto preventivo. In posti come la Siria, poi, diventa una questione di vita o di morte.

All’inizio speravo che compagnie come Google sarebbero venute in soccorso implementando potenti sistemi di criptografia; purtroppo sembra sempre più improbabile che imprese in mano agli azionisti e intrecciate con il governo possano offrire servizi sicuri efficacemente. Se è vero che queste compagnie, che fanno grossi profitti e spendono grosse somme in attività lobbistiche, sono le meglio posizionate nella lotta contro lo spionaggio di stato, è anche vero che sono quelle che hanno più da perdere se non tirano dritto.

Lavabit di Ladar Levison era un servizio di email quasi sicuro. Ad agosto Levison lo ha chiuso citando interferenze e minacce da parte del governo. Secondo speculazioni terze, Levison aveva ricevuto una lettera della Nsa che chiedeva di ottenere dati sui clienti, probabilmente Edward Snowden. Recentemente si è scoperto che un giudice aveva emesso un ordine rivolto ad ottenere la chiave d’accesso SSL dei servizi offerti da Lavabit. Questa chiave permette una connessione criptata sicura tra utente e server. Il suo possesso dà la possibilità al governo di accedere in tempo reale alle informazioni mandate al sito dagli utenti. Questo a sua volta avrebbe reso possibile il rastrellamento delle credenziali e l’accesso alle email criptate dei 400.000 utenti di Lavabit.

Con suo grande merito, Ladar Levison decise di chiudere Lavabit, negando l’accesso all’archivio in cui sono custoditi i messaggi dei suoi clienti. Il suo rifiuto di principio è un’eccezione. Levison non aveva azionisti a cui rendere conto; solo se stesso e i suoi clienti. Non possiamo aspettarci che grosse imprese come Google, che finge di stare dalla nostra parte mentre in realtà cerca di favorire l’intrusione del governo, decidano di sfidare realmente lo stato. Altri, come la Microsoft, sembrano entusiasti di collaborare con l’NSA e altre agenzie a tre lettere.

Cosa significa per noi? Siamo condannati ad abbassare la testa? No! Dobbiamo prendere la cosa nelle nostre mani. Ci sono molti sistemi di criptografia gratis, open source e a standard aperto. Da quel che sappiamo, l’NSA è riuscita a penetrare i sistemi criptografati solo tramite la coercizione e la sovversione, non decodificando il codice. Molto probabilmente, possiamo ancora fidarci della matematica.

Quando un progetto è open source, il suo codice è disponibile allo scrutinio generale. Possiamo esaminarlo, possiamo sapere esattamente come fa quello che fa. La maggior parte di noi non ha le conoscenze tecniche per esaminare il codice di un programma prima di compilarlo, ma ci sono esperti e accademici fidati che possono farlo e lo fanno per noi. Così possiamo conoscere i potenziali punti deboli del software di criptografia e capire i limiti delle sua capacità. Quando comunichiamo usando PGP, ad esempio, usiamo uno standard aperto. Non abbiamo bisogno di affidare i nostri messaggi ad una compagnia che magari è stata costretta dal governo a compromettere la nostra riservatezza. Con PGP la chiave d’accesso è nelle tue mani; nessun altro può essere costretto a rivelarla. Il progetto Tor, più complesso, non è altrettanto ben definito. Per via della sua natura distribuita, le possibilità di abuso aumentano, ma il progetto è open source e questi possibili abusi sono documentati, e dunque possiamo studiarne i limiti.

La conclusione è che siamo tutti dentro. Se decidiamo di servirci dei servizi offerti dalle grosse compagnie, dobbiamo tenere conto del fatto che potrebbero comprometterci da un momento all’altro: non con la forza bruta ma con la coercizione. Con il software proprietario non c’è modo di valutare e prendere per buone le dichiarazioni dello sviluppatore. E quando usiamo un software open source dobbiamo renderci conto delle sue limitazioni e usarlo di conseguenza.

La sicurezza su internet è responsabilità nostra.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Em 1997, o estado de Nova York, nos Estados Unidos, declarou guerra às reservas da Nação Seneca localizadas ao norte, próximas a Tonawanda. O conflito se devia a um pretenso direito que o estado tinha para cobrar impostos sobre bens vendidos nas reservas nativas. Para exercer esse direito, Nova York fechou empresas de nativos e cortou o suprimento de petróleo e cigarros para os senecas.

Em resposta a essa declaração de guerra, os nativos e seus apoiadores bloquearam o tráfego sobre suas terras e armaram um bloqueio na rodovia Interstate 90 e na Rota 17. Policiais foram confrontados, pneus foram queimados e colocados na rua e o tráfego foi prejudicado para que a injustiça das ações do estado ficasse aparente, com a exibição de cartazes e a distribuição de panfletos para os motoristas incomodados.

A resistência valeu a pena e as ações do governo de Nova York foram suspensas, ao menos temporariamente. Os senecas venceram. Não venceram por lobby, protestos pacíficos ou apelo ao direito inerente às terras, mas pelo confronto direto com o governo, que reclamava direitos sobre suas terras e riquezas.

Agora, voltemos nossa atenção para Nevada, nos dias atuais, para uma guerra diferente. Essa guerra foi declarada pelo governo federal, especificamente pelo Bureau of Land Management (Escritório de Gerência de Terras, BLM). Seus adversários, Cliven Bundy e sua família, são pecuaristas na região há mais de um século, mas o governo federal acredita ter o direito de tomar as terras de Bundy. O governo alega que Bundy não pagou multas pelo uso de “terras federais” e por desrespeitar leis que protegiam uma espécie ameaçada de tartaruga.

Esta guerra culminou, na semana passada, no fechamento dos acessos à fazenda de Bundy por agentes federais. A mensagem era clara: pague, abra mão de suas terras ou sofra as consequências violentas. Bundy escolheu a última opção e uma campanha bem sucedida na internet em seu favor levou centenas de apoiadores ao rancho Bundy. Muitos deles eram de “grupos de milícia”. Outros eram simples americanos médios que simpatizavam com a situação de Bundy. Depois de um impasse que durou dias, o BLM foi rechaçado do rancho de Bundy.

Pode parecer obviamente errado comparar os dois eventos. Afinal, como muitos já afirmaram, a terra que Bundy agora defende é, muito provavelmente, resultado de injustiças históricas contra os nativos americanos. Que direito legítimo tem Bundy sobre essas terras além de sua soberania ancestral? Seus ancestrais não se importavam com as reclamações dos nativos sobre as terras. Estou dividido. Se um grupo de nativos americanos invadisse a propriedade de Bundy e a tomasse, imagino que minhas emoções fossem ser de simples apatia. Essa é a natureza dos vários títulos de propriedade nos Estados Unidos, nebulosos por conta do tratamento selvagem dos nativos americanos e de seus direitos às terras deste país. Embora eu não esteja particularmente familiarizado com as reclamações dos nativos americanos às terras de Bundy, presumo que, de alguma forma, a aquisição original das terras dos Bundy não seja nada além de roubo.

Porém, quem permitiu esse roubo? Certamente não o clã dos Bundy. O culpado de tantas injustiças contra os nativos quase sempre foi o governo federal e o estadual, desde que foram estabelecidos. Não tenho qualquer simpatia pela alegação dos Bundy de direitos familiares sobre as terras. Contudo, sou solidário a toda e qualquer oposição a usurpações e ingerências.

Essas guerras contra indivíduos privados ocorrem em prol de um só objetivo: a pilhagem estatal. A ideia de que o governo tem algum interesse nos animais selvagens do deserto de Nevada é absolutamente risível. A ameaça que o gado dos Bundy representava às tartarugas do deserto não era nada em comparação ao reiterado desprezo à natureza do governo americano, que jogou várias bombas atômicas no oeste dos EUA no auge dos testes nucleares. As ações do estado têm como objetivo controle e não a proteção de qualquer espécie animal.

Somente através da radical oposição às reivindicações do estado nós podemos começar a imaginar um mundo em que haja algum tipo de justiça para os nativos americanos. Os senecas entenderam em 1997 que se não resistissem à guerra declarada por Nova York, perderiam qualquer direito às suas terras. Hoje, Bundy se posiciona em favor do mesmo princípio. Eu não apoio Cliven Bundy por conta de seus pretensos direitos de propriedade, mas porque ele procurou realmente defender suas terras da ingerência do governo federal. Nada disso era sobre direitos dos estados, direitos de propriedade ou injustiças históricas. Era uma defesa contra o poder do estado.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

It’s intriguing to see the progressive Left uniting against drug prohibition. They’re not with us in spirit, nor should they be, but they’ve laid the groundwork for its critique, and in a way that is sewn with the same threads of our passing commonalities. Many hold that only “hard” drugs should be combatted with force and other “safe” drugs regulated in their consumption. This is certainly disappointing, but we, the decentralist Left, can exploit this opportunity.

Despite progressives’ claim to command a substantive critique of social and systemic power, they will celebrate governmental structures of plutocracy. They see plutocracy as an externally constituted force that can combat diffused power hierarchies while failing to be a part of them. As if it were a “neutral” force, a blank executive slate upon which a rational justice can be inscribed and effectively commanded by the intended rationality of the prescribed justice itself. Exposing the modern progressive’s ignorance of the structures of oppression is another opportunity.

We’ve all seen this mantra, “Legalize it, regulate it, tax it!” Notice the awkward position they place themselves in. The difference between regulation and prohibition, for there to be a distinction at all, is that regulation makes exceptions for the privileged – that’s little comfort when you’re the one effectively prohibited in either case. While heavy-handedness has resulted in calamity, they’re confident that a moderate application of forceful regulation is workable. Public policy writing, it seems, isn’t equivalent to playing whack-a-mole while wearing a blindfold.

“Unregulated” Black Markets? Where?

It’s often implied that the dangers of criminal drug markets are a result of their “unregulated” character. If we just legalized drugs and let the government regulate their quality and consistency, everyone would be safer. I agree that everyone would be safer under legalization, but regulation has nothing to do with it. Far from it, because the existing harm is spawned from the failures and faults of the regulatory state. Not just because outright banning the production, distribution, and consumption of a good is the highest form of regulation imaginable, but because it disempowers consumers by fostering hierarchy and violence on a structural level.

First, prohibition erects strict barriers to entry, requiring that market actors to either possess privileged access to specialized resources – such as the means of producing and distributing the prohibited good in the first place – or go through unreliable channels at differing levels of the economic hierarchy. Not only are prohibited resources made harder to acquire, but the artificial risks and costs that come with avoiding law enforcement ensure that the divide between winners and losers is not a fair one, and that only a fortunate few, who now control the industry, have access to certain resource inputs. The power of consumer voting is hampered because distributors frequently have different channels of access to the same supply chains. There is little use for a buyer trading one rip-off for another.

Second, the unmatched profits that privileged participants extract from the risk premium and controls on distribution leads to unequal economic power relationships. This kind of violent domination and bullying can be seen in the Mexican drug cartels. In a truly freed market where participation is open to the public, free competition acts as a check on the power and honesty of involved actors. Absent the artificial specialization of necessary resources, most competitive actions delivering short-term profits for smart actors will be leveled over time when others adopt or modulate their ideas. Instead of the current situation where actors having circumstantially better resources and access to power means that everyone else can’t do anything about it. In an unrestricted market, there would be nothing stopping anyone from having access to the same resource inputs.

Third, the State’s forceful monopoly on the provision of law and security reserves for them a special power of exclusion, which, when used, has a distorting effect on black markets. It’s a clear case with illegal drug markets. We are disabled from creating our own institutions of justice while at the same time there’s a forced need for security – that is protection from law enforcement. So, as black market actors, we are heavily constrained in our options to protect against risk, and hierarchical cartels form in response. Not only does prohibition define what kinds of institutions are possible, but the need for hiddenness and anonymity severely distorts everyday market transactions on an individual basis. It doesn’t feel particularly safe exchanging with some shady stranger in his van at night, but there isn’t much in the way of options – not as traditionally conceived.

Market Responses

We live in interesting times. The spread of the internet and the information-based economy is empowering people to create the kinds of social spaces for themselves that would otherwise be prohibited. Whereas traditional modes of organization create visible or vulnerable targets for the State to smash, networks are much more resilient because they can recreate themselves easily. Through this model of networked organization, we are seeing a partial reversal of the forms of economic disempowerment created by state prohibition and regulation.

The Silk Road (SR) has made a tremendous impact over the last few years, and its recent takedown by the FBI was a great injustice, to be sure, but for perhaps the first time, we are seeing a blunting of blows. The U.S. government’s response shattered the SR’s disruptive constituents into a million pieces. Those pieces are being taken up by super-empowered groups and individuals to be forged into weapons of their own. Consumers are making use of a growing array of darknet marketplace alternatives – included among them is a bottom-up remaking of SR itself – and with but a few hiccups along the way we have been relatively unhampered in our ability to peacefully exchange goods and services with each other, regardless if they’re “prohibited” or not.

To better understand the roles these distributed alternatives have to play, we should draw our attention to the innovations and failures of the original SR. SR was a “hidden” service deployed only on the Tor network, i.e., you could only access it if your browser was configured to use the Tor network or if you just used the Tor Browser Bundle. Functioning much like a tweaked Amazon or eBay, it offered a host of useful features that helped facilitate trust between sellers and buyers, such as an Escrow payment system, seller feedback, and dispute resolution. According to their civil forfeiture complaint (PDF), the FBI purchased samples from SR’s drug listings and laboratory-tested them (page 6), and typically found high levels of product purity matching what was advertised. The reputation-based nature of SR, combined with often accurate information on seller profile pages and the official forums, empowered buyers to make informed choices and remain safe.

SR’s critical point of failure was its centralization. Although the ability to operate “hidden” is a useful byproduct of the Tor network, the service can be compromised given a few mistakes by its founders or if the physical servers are discovered. Upon the initial SR seizure, the contingency mechanism that would release members’ on-site Bitcoins to their chosen addresses was never activated due to unforeseen circumstances. All of its useful functions were internalized, requiring blind trust in the honesty and competence of the site’s administration.

It’s true that the long-term returns on sales commissions proved a greater incentive than short-term gains from scamming the entire user base and making off with their Bitcoins, but the failures of hidden services like “Sheep Marketplace” and “TorMarket” illustrate that this only happens so long as the future prospects of the service seem good. TorMarket shut down without warning and was never heard from again, after a period of disruption and uncertainty in other marketplaces and being subjected to several DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that left users unable to access the Bitcoins in their on-site personal and Escrow wallets.

Those are lessons that had to be learned. One “hidden” service called “The Marketplace”, located on I2P, instead of the Tor network, is not, as they explain, actually able to steal from the digital wallets you create for Escrow. Although it remains centralized in other ways, there is a large community interest in giving more control to the end-user, from which “The Marketplace” forged its model in recognition. Other markets are performing similar experiments. The potential for fully decentralized marketplaces is there – where essential buyer/seller protection features exist trust-free and it is being realized by projects like Open Transactions.

This phenomenon is similar in effect to the ‘invisible molotov’ described by William Gillis:

For those of us interested in resisting and undermining coercive power, the issue is less how a truly freed market might one day improve our lives, but rather how the faint sparks of freedom in the market today are already working against hierarchy, banditry and the concentration of power and how those sparks might be stoked. Therefore our interest is not the market’s invisible hand, per se, but the invisible molotov it carries.

The tighter their grip, the more that slips through their fingers. The networked social systems we create for ourselves can stand up to fragility. In fact, it’s an environment where we thrive; as anti-fragile institutions, we self-modulate and improve in response to failure. The monolithic State requires stability and predictability, but in the new millennium, that’s a dying cause. The ends of total social control are the only means of its survival, but these distributed elements of disruption are here to stay. This system of conglomerates and nation-states continually provokes this disruption and thus participates in its own destruction.. A surging black market correction is unraveling the institutions of “neutral” power that progressives dream of commanding, all the while provoking frantic reactions that reveal their nature as not-so-innocent forces of totalizing oppression.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, As correções do mercado negro.

In 1997, New York state declared war on the Seneca Nation reservations located upstate near Tonawanda. The war was over a declared power of the state to impose taxes on goods sold on native reservations. As enforcement, New York saw fit to shut down native businesses, cutting off petroleum and cigarette supplies to the Senecas.

In response to this declaration of war, natives and their supporters blocked traffic onto their land from state troopers and mounted a blockade on Interstate 90 and Route 17. Cops were confronted, tires were burned and thrown into the street, traffic was slowed or halted and the injustice of the actions of New York were highlighted by protesters who waved signs and handed out leaflets to inconvenienced thruway-goers.

This resistance paid off big for the Senecas and the war efforts of New York’s government were at least temporarily halted. The Senecas had won. They had not won through lobbying, through peaceful protest, by appeal to the inherent right of natives to the land, but by facing down the government that made a claim to their land and their wealth and saying no.

Now let us travel to contemporary Nevada and a war of a different sort. This war was declared by the federal government, specifically the Bureau of Land Management. Their adversaries, rancher Cliven Bundy and his family, have been ranchers in this area for over a century, but the federal government believes that it has a right to seize Bundy’s land. The ostensive claims by the feds on Bundy’s land stem from unpaid fines levied against him for using “federal land” and laws protecting an endangered tortoise population

This war came to a head last week as federal agents surrounded the perimeter of Bundy’s ranch. The message was very clear: Pay us, give up your land or face violent conflict. Bundy chose the third option, and a successful internet campaign on his behalf brought hundreds of supporters to the Bundy ranch. Many of these supporters were from “militia groups.” Others were simply average Americans who sympathized with Bundy’s plight. After a days-long standoff, the BLM were fought off the Bundy ranch.

It might seem obviously wrong to compare these two events. After all, as many have rightly pointed out, the land Bundy now defends is in all likelihood the result of historical injustice against Native Americans. What legitimate right does Bundy have to this land beyond a claim to ancestral sovereignty? These ancestors cared nothing at all for the native claim to this ranch. I’m conflicted here. If some band of natives tomorrow were to storm the Bundy property and seize it, I imagine my emotions would be apathetic at best. Such is the nature of many claims to property in America, muddled by the savage treatment of Native Americans and their claim to the lands of this country. While I have not familiarized myself with the particular claims of natives to Bundy’s land, I assume that in some way the original acquisition by the Bundys of this land amounts to little more than theft.

But who enabled this theft? Certainly not the Bundy clan. The culprit in injustices against natives has almost always been the federal and state government itself since its establishment. I do not empathize with the claim of familial rights that Bundy makes here. What I do find myself in solidarity with is any and all opposition to encroachment.

These wars against private individuals are for one reason: Government plunder. Any notion that the federal government cares about the wildlife of the Nevadan desert is preposterous. The menace of Bundy’s cattle to tortoises pales in comparison to the maliciousness towards nature displayed time and again by the US government, which set off multiple atom bombs across the American west in the heyday of nuclear testing. This is about control, not protection of any species.

It is only through blatant opposition to government claims that we can begin to imagine a world in which some manner of justice is restored to Native Americans. The Senecas understood in 1997 that if they did not mount a resistance to the war declared by New York, that they would lose any real sovereign right to their land. Today, Bundy stands for the same principle of opposition. I do not support Bundy because of his property rights claim, but because he sought to truly defend his claim to the land against an ever-expanding federal presence. This wasn’t about states’ rights, property rights or historical injustice. It was about standing up to government power.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Bundy, os senecas e a luta pela soberania.

In Crimea, truppe prive di insegne hanno occupato l’aeroporto e preso il controllo della regione. A Mosca, il parlamento russo ha autorizzato senza obiezioni l’ex colonnello del Kgb Vladimir Putin all’impiego dei militari russi in Ucraina. A Kiev, capitale dell’Ucraina, un’insurrezione che forse è genuinamente spontanea e forse no, e che forse è composta da nazionalisti xenofobi e forse no, ha detronizzato il presidente eletto mandandolo via dalla capitale. In occidente, le solite persone sospette chiedono agli Stati Uniti e ai suoi alleati di “fare qualcosa”. Mentre ci avviciniamo al centenario della Grande Guerra, c’è un’altra crisi, in una località a cui gli abitanti del centro imperiale raramente fanno caso, che minaccia di sconvolgere il castello di carte globale.

La posizione degli anarchici è tanto ovvia quanto prevedibile: ci opponiamo all’esistenza dello stato e, naturalmente, a tutte le guerre. Ma per ragioni legate alla critica dell’azione dello stato basata su un’analisi anarchica e di mercato, un intervento in questa disputa è un’idea particolarmente brutta, ed è molto improbabile che gli interventisti trovino desiderabili le conclusioni a cui porta. Per capire perché, dobbiamo esaminare la storia dell’Ucraina in particolare, e dell’est europeo in generale.

Nella mente di un occidentale, la storia di questa regione è dominata dall’Unione Sovietica e dal suo collasso improvviso ventitré anni fa; ma l’Unione Sovietica non era altro che la continuazione in nuove forme ideologiche del vecchio impero russo, che nel corso dei secoli allargò la sua egemonia alle popolazioni confinanti finché non diventò un’unica distesa dal Baltico al Mare di Bering e dall’Artico ai confini con la Persia, la Mongolia e la Cina, formando il più grande impero coloniale mai visto.

Poiché le colonie russe non erano mai possedimenti oltremare popolati da genti di diverso colore e con culture profondamente diverse, la natura fondamentalmente coloniale dell’intento russo spesso si perde. Questa natura, poi, è ancora più oscurata dalla retorica anticolonialista sovietica, che al di là delle dichiarazioni faceva una politica verso i suoi confinanti che era il proseguimento dell’intento imperiale russo.

Per molti versi, l’Ucraina offre un esempio paradigmatico di come la Russia trattava il suo “vicino estero”, tanto per usare il termine russo che indica le colonie della Russia. Ufficialmente, gli ucraini non erano considerati una nazione separata, la lingua ucraina era bandita, le chiese ucraine erano costrette ad adottare le norme religiose della chiesa russa oppure ad andare in clandestinità, ed erano vietati perfino i vestiti e le festività tradizionali ucraine. La politica ufficiale, in Ucraina come altrove, era la “russificazione”, ovvero il tentativo dello stato di sostituire la cultura indigena con quella russa, e di convertire i colonizzati in russi.

Questo genere di politica è tipica dello stato ovunque sia nel suo processo di formazione. Come ha documentato con grande capacità Graham Robb nel suo The Discovery of France, gli stati accentratori impongono invariabilmente una lingua, una religione e una cultura specifica nel tentativo di “unificare la popolazione”, ovvero per indottrinarli, così che sentano l’asservimento più come patriottismo che come una dominazione straniera. Questo processo rappresenta la continuità tra il processo “domestico” di un indottrinamento imposto dallo stato, come la scuola pubblica e la chiesa di stato, e le forme più familiari di “colonialismo”.

Il modo in cui i russi trattano il vicino estero è una via di mezzo tra il “colonialismo domestico”, che serve alla formazione dello stato, e il più familiare colonialismo d’oltremare. Le culture soggiogate dallo stato russo, in particolare quelle di lingua e identità slava, sono parenti strette della cultura russa, e questa vicinanza ha il potere di oscurare la natura fondamentalmente imperiale dell’espansionismo russo; agli occhi degli occidentali, questo processo ricorda più la ormai accettata nascita dello stato, quando il governo centrale impone il suo potere “unificando la nazione”, abbattendo i movimenti locali e secessionisti, che un certo “imperialismo”, oggi riprovato, in cui i colonizzatori soggiogano i colonizzati eliminando le culture indigene. Le ideologie “pan-slave” presentano gli slavi, un insieme disparato di gruppi linguistici e culturali, come un unico popolo giustamente governato dal centro imperiale russo, che si tratti dell’ortodossia zarista o del “socialismo in un solo paese”.

Nel corso dei secoli, l’interazione delle successive potenze coloniali russe, zarista o sovietica, con le varie rinascite nazionaliste che scoppiavano ad intermittenza nei territori tra la Russia e la Germania, hanno creato una regione incostante, dai confini fortemente arbitrari che non corrispondono a nessun confine linguistico, etnico o culturale. La politica ufficiale russa ha incoraggiato gli insediamenti russi nel vicino estero, così come la politica francese incoraggiò gli insediamenti francesi in Algeria, e il risultato attuale è la presenza di grosse minoranze russe nella maggior parte dei paesi del vicino estero; e ci sono molte regioni all’interno di questi paesi che hanno una decisa maggioranza russa, con un impatto simile a quello che gli insediamenti dei presbiteriani scozzesi ebbero sulle “Piantagioni dell’Ulster” nel diciassettesimo secolo. I tentativi periodici di sterminare culturalmente e fisicamente le popolazioni indigene, poi, hanno creato una divisione netta tra colonizzatori e colonizzati. Per le popolazioni etnicamente ucraine, la Holodomor, la carestia ucraina come strumento del terrore, fu un tentativo deliberato da parte dei sovietici di sterminare il più possibile gli ucraini e distruggerli come popolo. Nei resoconti russi la Holodomor, quando è citata, diventa un’ordinaria carestia, non una politica deliberata dello stato, e le commemorazioni ucraine diventano semplice propaganda anti-russa. (Il parallelo con Gorta Mór, la Grande Carestia Irlandese del 1845, è evidente: gli irlandesi la considerano un prodotto della politica britannica. “Dio mandò la malattia delle piante, gli inglesi la carestia”. Dal canto loro, gli inglesi danno la colpa alla monocoltura degli irlandesi e, in un passato più crudamente razzista, alla natura degli irlandesi ritenuta primitiva).

L’Ucraina è attraversata da varie linee di divisione: fra le altre, tra ucraini e russi, ovviamente, ma anche tra cosacchi e non cosacchi, tra ortodossi e cattolici, e tra gli ucraini e tutte le altre minoranze etniche non russe. Certo non possiamo conoscere tutte le parti in cui è divisa l’Ucraina, perché possiamo accedere solo ad informazioni di seconda mano filtrate attraverso le varie lenti politiche. Ogni proposta di intervento occidentale in Ucraina dipende fortemente da queste linee di divisione. A differenza dei propositi puramente imperialistici di Putin, volti ad assicurare l’egemonia su un territorio più vasto, l’occidente vuole che l’Ucraina abbia un “governo stabile e democratico”. L’occidente è ancora legato all’imperativo della pace di Vestfalia, che considera sacri i confini nazionali, confini che, nel caso dell’ex impero russo-sovietico, furono tracciati in gran parte da burocrati imperiali per ragioni di stato imperiali.

Perciò, mentre noi anarchici considerano la forza militare sempre discutibile, e condanniamo senza dubbi la mossa di Putin per soggiogare l’Ucraina, l’intervento militare delle forze occidentali è particolarmente inadatto alla situazione. Non c’è accordo che possa soddisfare tutte le parti, perché chiunque si ritroverà dalla parte dei perdenti è sicuro che nutrirà sentimenti revanscistici e sarà determinato a vendicarsi non appena cesserà il sostegno occidentale. Se dovesse intervenire con l’obiettivo di ottenere un certo risultato favorevole, l’occidente sarebbe costretto ad intervenire in perpetuo; oppure, come vediamo in Iraq e Afganistan, ad un certo punto dovrebbe rassegnarsi a veder collassare l’ordine che ha stabilito.

La lunga, complessa storia dell’Ucraina, con l’eredità pesante dell’imperialismo (perché i discendenti dei coloni russi in Ucraina e in altre colonie del vicino estero hanno certamente interessi tanto legittimi quanto gli irlandesi e scozzesi, o gli americani bianchi che vivono in territori un tempo indiani) complicano le cose al punto che un insediamento diventa una sorta di pianificazione centrale. Chi pianifica, che si tratti degli autori del Gosplan o di Washington, non può accedere a tutte le informazioni rilevanti necessarie all’applicazione del piano. Non solo, ma queste informazioni non possono esistere finché le popolazioni non le hanno generate dopo aver ricomposto le loro differenze. Capita che una risposta facile non esista, e in questo centenario della Grande Guerra dovremmo tenere bene in mente che l’intervento in una crisi può scivolare rapidamente fuori controllo. Le popolazioni di questa regione possono andare d’accordo pacificamente e a lungo solo se si lascia che siano loro a determinare i termini della convivenza. Il nostro intervento non può che peggiorare le cose.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

C4SS Media presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Missing Comma: Concerning ‘Horizontal Loyalty’” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

I think, for a long time, we’ve been trying to look for new ways to talk about concepts like mutual aid and solidarity; horizontal loyalty, at least as Krulwich describes it (and as Friedman uses it), serves exactly this kind of function. Instead of waiting for power to grant us seats at the table, we create our own tables and work to help each other out. Insofar as journalism is concerned, this is especially crucial – as my latest op-ed shows, the journalism cartel has no intention or desire to embrace independent media. They are offering us no quarter, so we should take the point and set up lodgings elsewhere. Or better, build those lodgings ourselves.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

Welcome to C4SS’s newest regular blog, Wars and Rumors of Wars. Here, we will explore issues of war and peace, ranging from foreign and military affairs through the culture of militarism and the effects of war on soldiers and civilians to the details of anti-war activism. I will be your main writer, although others from within and without C4SS will contribute as well. As my byline says, I’m a veteran of the Iraq War and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, having fought as a medic in Baghdad in 2007 and having been an IVAW member since 2010.

What we want is peace and freedom – no war but class war – but to get there we must understand our enemy. Developing that understanding is going to be a major concern of this blog. If we wish to cut off the state’s supply of soldiers, we must understand soldiers and know why they fight. If we wish to eradicate militarism, we must understand its appeal and recognize its appearance. If we want to help the victims of war heal, we must hear their voices – finding and sharing the stories of the survivors of war will be a major focus for this blog. And if we want to work for peace, we must examine what has worked and what hasn’t, make the best arguments we can and be always willing to back our words with action.

From time to time – as in my recent article on Ukraine – it may appear that I am granting some or even all of the premises of the warmongers. I do this not because I do in fact agree with them – for example, I do not believe that “democracy” in a meaningful sense is any great concern of the planners at Foggy Bottom – but because I think making the strongest argument means meeting the enemy on his own ground. If we can show that war and intervention will not achieve the good things the warmongers claim to want, then we weaken their position and spur interest in what their actual motivations may be.

This year marks the centennial of the outbreak of the Great War, one of the greatest tragedies in European history that had one salutary effect. The Great War made crystal clear the futility and horror of war, and instilled in a generation a healthy and natural skepticism towards power. This skepticism led these men and women to be termed the “Lost Generation,” although no generation since has found a clearer image of the meaning of war. For this first post, I will leave you with one of the most moving iterations of that image, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

Britten was a conscientious objector in the United Kingdom during World War II, refusing service even in a noncombatant capacity due to his firm belief in pacifism. While his pacifism was unpopular, he remained an successful composer. In 1961, he was commissioned to write a piece for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a replacement for the original destroyed in an air raid in 1940. Rather than turn out a triumphalist piece celebrating the Allied victory, Britten turned to perhaps the greatest poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen.

Britten wove Owen’s agonized lyric together with the traditional Latin setting of the Requiem Mass, creating a shattering remembrance of the tragedy of war. He inscribed the score with a quote from Owen himself:

My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity …
All a poet can do today is warn.

While this blog concerns a harsh and terrible subject, our fundamental position is hope. We believe peace can come. “For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” I hope you’ll stay with us.

Na última sexta-feira (11/04), ocorreu a reintegração da posse da Oi de um terreno em um subúrbio do Rio de Janeiro. A área era conhecida como “favela da Telerj” e havia sido ocupada por cerca de 5.000 pessoas, a maior parte vinda das favelas de Mandela, Manguinhos e Jacarezinho, que ergueram casas improvisadas. Houve sérios confrontos com a Polícia Militar durante o cumprimento da decisão judicial de desocupação e, inclusive, um repórter do jornal “O Globo” foi detido quando acompanhava o trabalho da PM.

Esse é o mesmo Rio de Janeiro em que milhares de famílias já foram desapropriadas de suas casas para dar lugar às obras da Copa do Mundo de 2014. Não somente forçadas a sair de onde moravam, como também geralmente receberam baixas indenizações e foram realocadas para regiões distantes daquelas em que habitavam. Segundo o Comitê Popular da Copa e das Olímpiadas, em denúncia realizada ano passado, ocorre inclusive mais desapropriação do que o necessário, para beneficiar empresas do setor imobiliário, ao retirar comunidades carentes e abrir caminho para a construção de empreendimentos residenciais.

Já na Amazônia, desapropriações de terras indígenas foram aprovadas pela Aneel (Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica) para dar lugar ao projeto hidrelétrico de Belo Monte. Denúncia apresentada à Comissão Interamericana de Direitos Humanos levou a que esta solicitasse, em 2011, que o Estado brasileiro “garanta a rápida finalização dos processos de regularização das terras ancestrais dos povos indígenas na bacia do Xingu que estão pendentes e adote medidas efetivas para a proteção dos mencionados territórios ancestrais ante a apropriação ilegítima e a ocupação por não-indígenas e frente à exploração ou o deterioração de seus recursos naturais”. Mas o governo apenas seguiu como se nada tivesse acontecido: em 2012, a última desapropriação de terras foi formalizada, autorizando a remoção de ribeirinhos, índios e pequenos agricultores, de forma amigável ou por via judicial.

Alguém poderia, inocentemente, dizer que o governo brasileiro é um grande guardião da propriedade privada, ao observar a “eficiência” com que fez cumprir, por meio de sua polícia, a reintegração de posse da Oi. Mas é o mesmo governo, comandando a mesma polícia, que desapropria pessoas pobres e indígenas, sem lhes conceder qualquer possibilidade de resistência efetiva para proteção de suas posses e sob o pretexto de um “bem comum” que transcenderia o direito à propriedade e à moradia dessas pessoas.

Em entrevista, o prefeito disse que não admitiria que “pessoas que fazem ocupações como essa sejam privilegiadas”, em detrimento de outras que estão na fila de programas habitacionais, como o Minha Casa Minha Vida. Isso é uma pequena amostra da determinação do Estado brasileiro em controlar o acesso à terra urbana no Brasil.

Mas, como Pedro da Luz Moreira, presidente regional do Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil avalia, “o Minha Casa Minha Vida está sendo viabilizado na periferia, muito distante da cidade, dos centros onde há emprego. Isso representa a sobrevivência de famílias. Não tenho detalhes sobre a ocupação do edifício da Telerj, mas ele está próximo da mancha urbana e próximo, portanto, de oportunidades de emprego”.

Trata-se daquilo que o anarquista individualista Benjamin Tucker denominou de “monopólio da terra”. Escrevendo no século XIX, enfatizou o aspecto rural da questão, descrevendo-o como a “proteção do governo de títulos de terra que não se baseiam na ocupação pessoal e no cultivo”.

Mas, no século XXI, essa análise precisa de atualização, pois é o controle da terra urbana um dos principais mecanismos governamentais de exclusão das pessoas mais pobres, às quais, primeiro, se nega acesso à terra de baixo custo por meio de políticas de regulação urbana impensadas (no Rio, incluindo o banimento dos cortiços e da proibição da ocupação e usucapião de terrenos públicos), para, depois, tornar essas pessoas dependentes do governo para obter alguma terra distante dos centros urbanos, sob controle burocrático do processo por meio da fila de espera de um programa social.

Albert Jay Nock afirmava que o estado foi criado para um propósito criminoso, o de criar uma classe sem acesso à propriedade da terra e dependente, em benefício de elites privilegiadas com pleno acesso à terra. O estado brasileiro, com sua defesa intransigente da propriedade privada de grandes corporações combinada à persistente desproteção da posse das pessoas mais pobres e à ânsia em controlar o acesso destas à terra, é uma prova desse propósito criminoso. A quem os desapropriados da Copa e de Belo Monte solicitarão uma reintegração de posse?

In one of my blog posts; I discussed property rights and the Civil Rights era sit-ins. This post is a further exploration of the subject. I said the following in the previous post:

These bills make an Orwellian use of terms like freedom. The ability to exclude people for irrational and arbitrary reasons is not an instance of liberty. Libertarians will earn the wrath of decent LGBT people everywhere without offering a solution other than state force to the problem of discrimination. We have a chance to show that our individualist principles apply to persecuted minorities as much as non-minorities. It’s not something to botch.

Thomas L. Knapp responded with:

Not sure what you mean by “exclude.”

If I don’t want to bake a cake for you, it doesn’t matter what my reasons are. You don’t own me. I own me. I get to decide whether or not I bake a cake for you — and that decision IS an instance of liberty.

Knapp and I don’t disagree about the importance of personal freedom. I tend not to couch it in terms of ownership, but I understand the gist of it. I do however disagree with him on this one. Power is still being exercised when you deny someone a service for irrational bigoted reasons. It’s not a form of power based on physical violence, but it still counts as such. It represents social ostracism and economic reward/punishment. The latter involves the control of economic resources and selective distribution of them to effect changes in the character or behavior of another. Does this mean we should combat it with physical force? Not at all. There is still the principle of proportionality to consider. Non-violent controlling behavior is ethically met with non-violent means. Of course, if people violently assault peaceful sit in protesters they are entitled to use violence in self-defense.

Another point I made worth revisiting was:

What about the issues of private property rights and trespass? One way to approach that question is through contextual or dialectical libertarian methodology. Private property rights are contextual and relate to occupancy or use. They are one value among others to consider in assessing the morality of an action. In the context of bigots irrationally excluding people from spaces otherwise open to the public, the value of private property rights is trumped by the need for social inclusion.

Why does one have to choose between these two particular values? The sit-iners are not engaged in any aggressively violent actions, so they aren’t violating libertarian principle. As far as private property rights go, there isn’t any violent destruction of property involved. Social inclusion can be fought for through non-violent social activism. The practicality of which was shown by the Civil Rights Movement. In other words: these values are not mutually exclusive. They both serve as supports for genuine freedom.

If someone did destroy property during the course of a sit-down protest, we could still show sympathy and forgive them. This is dictated by the context of their actions. We could even socially pressure the property owner to do the same. A court could refuse to hear a restitution claim. It would be cruel to target the racially oppressed for prosecution in this context.

One final thing is left to address. Does this mean that all uses of coercion to defend property are unjust? Not at all. If a criminal gang tries to take your food, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to use force to defend it. This is due to the rationality of the action. As Ayn Rand could tell you, ethics and rationality run together. Let us work to make ethical rationality a reality.

In this age of the Anthropocene natural resource management is incredibly important. There currently exists a true human dominance over the biosphere. This dominance effects a range of topics from human health to the politics we address. Our dominance raises an important question: How, and perhaps more importantly, by whom, did this dominance arise and how, and by whom, should these ever important issues be addressed?

This ecological challenge requires constant revision of natural resource management/policy. If we are honest about the limitations of our natural ecosystems, however, and implement policies that best fit the needs, health and demands of an informed society and its natural heritage, then we also need to take conversations about the nature of governance very seriously. What is governance, where should its power lie, how can its influence best support a healthy, sustainable, ordered biosphere?

Arun Agrawal, in his book Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects, offers key insight to the nature of governance, landscapes and place while offering a promising direction natural resource management can take. In his book, Agrawal introduces us to Komoan villagers who reside in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. Their natural heritage is enriched by tremendous valleys and expansive rivers – the product of tectonic forces that continue to mold the region. Of incredible importance to the villagers is the bio-regions forests tracts. The ecosystem services the Kumoan forests offer the villagers are immeasurable. These forest tracts were, at one time, very beneficial to the colonial British state as well. Often at odds, the Kumoan people and the British state had very different ideas as to how the forests should be managed. Agrawal opens his books with a discussion of intense conflict in the region. As his book progresses, it becomes a story of decentralization, community empowerment and best management practices. Agrawal provides readers with a historical overview of natural resource management in the Kumoan region and explains the emergence of collaborative management, environmental identity, sense of place and changes in the relationship between the state and the local.

Villagers in the Kumoan region of northern India set ablaze hundreds of acres of forest in the early 1920’s. The fires were set in protest of colonial British rule – particularly the rules and regulations placed on the Kumoan people by the British state that served to “protect” and manage the local environment. The villagers used forests at the time to construct their communities, for fodder and other forms of subsistence. The British state saw extensive military resources – specifically a vast forest that could be utilized for expanding the navy. What followed the forests fires and initial protests was a period of decentralization. This decentralization allowed the Kumoan villagers to conserve their forests very carefully – a total transformation from the age of protest.

Agrawal’s investigation offers support for an ongoing trend in natural resource management: Adaptive Collaboration. Adding to the themes of Elinor Ostrom, Agrawal builds his premise that community based forestry is not only possible, but more sustainable than centralized governance. His book is a story of transition, from centralized policy making to adaptive collaboration – from state to village.  This story holds rather large implications for traditional leadership. The success of decentralised policies can be used as an argument to promote the redistribution of power, to rethink the common perception of authority, and perhaps most importantly, to rethink property – the success of decentralised policy making (not only in the Kumoan) builds the case for public, as opposed to state, ownership of the commons. This idea of collaborative governance ultimately empowers the populace, it takes power from authority and promotes the concept of self governance.

Agrawal personally visited forty villages in the Kumoan region. At each village he assessed the health of surrounding forests, conducted interviews with locals and investigated their historical records. His book is an interpretation of the data he gathered. What he illustrates in this book is how decentralized, adaptive, and collaborative strategies in natural resource management change the relationships between states and the local stakeholders within a community as well as the individuals connection to place. Feeding off of Foucault’s “Governmentality,” Agrawal investigates how decentralization efforts have better protected forests. In this book, Environmentality is the theme – as villagers become more empowered and knowledgable they are able to produce policies that best conserved their natural resources. It is a remarkable success story of decentralized natural resource management.

So what exactly is Environmentality? This concept, put forth by Agrawal, is a new way to understand environmental politics. Agrawal’s concept suggests the differences and changes in knowledge, politics, institutional arrangements and human subjectivity concerning the environment “are of a piece and are best understood when considered together.” Concomitant study of these changes then helps extend contributions from three types of interdisciplinary environmentalists scholarship – the three pieces of environmentality: common property, political ecology and feminist environmentalism. Environmentality, he writes, is a unique way to think about environmental politics:

(1) The formation of new expert knowledges;
(2) the nature of power, which is the root of efforts to regulate social practice;
(3) the type of institutions and regulatory practices that exist in a mutually productive relationship with social and ecological practices and can be seen as the historical expressions of contigent political relationships; and
(4) the behaviors that regulations seek to change, which go hand in hand with the process of self-formation and struggles between expert or authority-based regulation and situated practices.

In short, the idea of environmentality allows Agrawal to examine how environmental governance has changed over time in the Kumoan while providing a framework for analysing the problems with centralized governance and the success of decentralized decision making. Instead of “Governmentality” (molding human beings to the wishes of the state), “Environmentality” (human beings collectively deciding to better manage natural resources based on environmental pressures) produced a conservation ethic among the people of the Kumoan. It is communal natural resource management, as opposed to centralized authority, that is achieving sustainable forestry practices.

Agrawal builds his case by first investigating the relationship between power, knowledge and nature. He then investigates the technologies of government and the results of decentralization. In his book, Agrawal builds the case for decentralization noting how destructive centralized control was to the environment (after all, colonial Britiain wanted strict management of forests so they would have resources to exploit for weapons of war). In the opening passages it is clear the British state used the DAD approach to resource management – Decide, Announce, Defend (or perhaps more appropriate: Enforce). The state initially viewed the forests and land for exploitation. It is this view of forest, and the corresponding regulation of Kumoan villagers that led to massive protests and revolt across the region – cumulating in the large, expansive forest fires.

The state’s vision of the forests evolved over the decades in response to village uprisings. Moving from resources for exploitation, there emerged an idea among officials that foresters should view extensive woodlands as commodities and manage them as such. At this time forestry officials continued to insist that the state was needed for proper control and conservation of forests. The DAD approach, though adjusted, was still in full swing after initial uprisings. Government officials continued to work to expand their authority. Conflict and dissent, coupled with internal struggles, soon become more political fodder, however, for the Kumoan villagers. The continued resistance forced Administrators to increase representation, collaboration and policies of decentralization.

Agrawal’s book is a great example of how the cost of bureaucratic control always falls on locals. This burden forces democratic change. The regulatory mechanisms separated the Kumoan villagers from their natural heritage. The burdens of regulation and revolt lead to a decline in ecological health which manifested itself throughout the population. As a result, the Kumoan villagers began to organize – the principles of democracy and the ideas of self governance lead to the development of forest councils. It is during this stage of transition, from revolt to organization, that the state was forced into ceding its power. The entire relationship between the state and community was transformed – there were more channels for the flow of power. This empowerment caused stakeholder participation to increase and best management practices shifted from the centralized state to communities.

The process of decentralization changed how Kumoan’s viewed the forest. The woodlands were now in their control. This responsibility, the reclaiming of natural heritage, generated a needed concern for conservation. Best sustainability practices flourished simply because the Komoans were empowered – those in an environment, as opposed to a displaced authority, better understand human impacts to said environment and how subsistence is bettered/tied to natural resources. This makes sense – humans are part of nature, but nature continues to exist outside of human civilization. It is reckless and ill-informed human actions that pose a great risk to natural areas. The conclusion of many, that in order to protect our ecology there must be a strong government to over see our natural areas, is refuted in this book. The state saw the forest as a commodity, first and foremost, but the empowered Kumoan’s viewed it as their natural heritage. It was decentralization, not authority, that produced sustainable forest management.  The anarchist, who is usually fighting on the front lines for the environment, knows the idea of state management has disastrous consequences. Anarchists will find an ally (somewhat) in Agrawal. Self-governance and the co-operative nature of human beings is celebrated in this text, though Agrawal, much like his mentor Ostrom, never discusses absolute liberty.

None the less, Agrawal’s book echos a theme prevalent everywhere today. As natural resource management has evolved over the years, traditional views of the environment and human relationships between nature and sense of place have too evolved. Today, resource management is characterized by certain “wicked” problems making it difficult to place responsibility of certain issues within one dimension of government decision-making . The complexity of resource problems today often fall outside the realm of traditional policy making. This has paved the way for more adaptive management styles which utilize alternative stakeholder approaches to environmental issues. These new approaches are formally bringing government institutions and the public together to develop best sustainability practices. This new style of adaptive governance is formally educating stakeholders about the challenges and demands of resource management today. As societies ethical considerations of the environment continually evolve, so to are considerations of government. Today, as more people relate to the great outdoors and come to respect nature, the collaborative management between stakeholders and institutions are naturally moving towards decentralization.

The trend is indeed welcome to libertarians and environmentalists. States tend to view natural resources as a means for maximizing utility – especially when considering military strength (as is the case in Agrawal’s book) and neo-liberal economics. As nation states rise to power they continually wage campaigns to acquire more land and resources. The concept of Environmentality offers an alternative to the states view of natural resources. Furthermore, Environmentality offers the method of achieving sustainability – reclaim the commons, understand the nature of power and the making of subjects and dismantle illegitimate authority. It is this unique intersection of common property, political ecology and feminist environmentalism that makes Agrawals book stand out – it is an incredibly concise argument for decentralized governance.

Perhaps most interesting about the concept of Environmentality is its play on Michel Foucault‘s “Governmentality.” Governmentality describes a system by which governments work to produce a populace best suited to carry out the operation of said government. Agrawal departs from the government narrative and instead investigates how the environment itself will influence human action. His book describes the metamorphosis of revolt to sustainable management, based simply on the transfer of power from a centralized authority to local villages.

Environmentality is a success story. It informs the populace that we the people must continually challenge our institutions to ensure their practices are just and sustainable. No longer can we as a species afford to allow ourselves, nor our institutions, to utilize resources to serve self interests. To ensure this practice, we need to step up and take more responsibility in our everyday lives. The growing importance and successes of collaboration, decentralization and partnerships indicates the need for an informed, engaged and empowered citizenry to develop sustainable resource policies that protect both the land and biosphere.

The current environmental movement is a vast, worldwide movement that holds great implications for the future of human civilization.  Beyond our human species, resource management will decide the fate of all flora and fauna, and all of Earth’s vast and wonderous land and seascapes. What are the human dimensions of resource management then? Should human management of resources be the product of states? The product of a system that utilizes natural resources to secure political boundaries – or is a different order more desirable? Political institutions work for their own self interests. This suggest we make careful consideration of our subjected relationship with the environment and our governance – we should not simply accept preexisting interests. Indeed this shift is happening as we progress decentralist themes throughout our society.

Agruwal’s book is an incredible account of how, by simply increasing liberty, common property management results in best sustainability practices. For the libertarian, it is another body of evidence that rejects the idea that sustainability can only be achieved if there is a strong centralized authority. To the contrary, the structure of governance must fundamentally change if sustainability is to be realized. When we tear down the structures of large, centralized governments we liberate ourselves from manufactured political boundaries of the state and rediscover our natural heritage – under the principles of Environmentality the biosphere will take care of the rest.

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) by Arun Agruwal, published by Duke University Press. $18.40

Last Friday (04/11), a piece of land property in Rio’s suburbia was reinstated to telecom giant Oi. The area was known as “favela da Telerj” and had been occupied by 5,000 people, mostly from Mandela, Manguinhos, and Jacarezinho favelas, who built improvised homes there. There were serious confrontations with the Military Police in the enforcement of the court order of disoccupation and even an O Globo newspaper reporter, who was following the acts of the police, was arrested.

This is the same Rio de Janeiro where thousands of families had their homes expropriated to open up space for the FIFA World Cup 2014 developments. Not only were they forced to leave their homes, they generally received very little compensation and were relocated to very distant regions. According to the Popular World Cup and Olympics Committee, in a complaint from last year, there are even more expropriations than actually necessary, which sweep off poor communities to make way for upper scale housing developments, for the benefit of real estate enterprises.

In the meantime, in the Amazon, expropriations of indigenous land were approved by Aneel (National Agency for Electric Energy) to make way for the Belo Monte Dam. A complaint presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights prompted a request, in 2011, that the Brazilian state should “guarantee the quick completion of the pending processes of regularization of the indigenous people’s ancestral lands in the Xingu River basin and adopt effective measures for the protections of such lands, given the illegitimate appropriation and occupation by non-indigenous peoples and their economic exploitation and dilapidation of natural resources.” The government, however, just kept business going as usual: In 2012, the last land expropriation was formalized, authorizing the removal of riverside dwellers, natives and small farmers, amicably or judicially.

One could think, naively, that the Brazilian government is a great guardian of private property in observing the “efficiency” with which it enforced the property reintegration to Oi. However, it is the same government, in control of the same police, which expropriated poor and indigenous people without giving them any chance of effective protection of their possessions. Under the pretext of upholding the “common good,” the people’s right to property and to a home is worthless.

In an interview, Rio’s mayor stated that he will not have “squatters like those be privileged,” as opposed to people who are waiting in line for government programs such as Minha Casa, Minha Vida (“My House, My Life”). This is a very small example of the determination of the Brazilian government to control access to urban land in the country.

As Pedro da Luz Moreira, regional president of the Architects Institute of Brazil states, “Minha Casa, Minha Vida is being pushed in the periphery, very far from the city centers where jobs are available. The survival of the families depends on that. I have no details on the occupation of the Telerj building, but it is close to the urban spot and, therefore, to job opportunities.”

Hence, it is an instance of what individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker called “land monopoly.” Writing near the end of the 19th century, he focused on the rural aspect of the issue, describing it as “enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation.”

This analysis calls for a 21st century update, since one of the main tools the government has for the exclusion of poorer people is the control of urban land. First, it denies low costs to poor people through urban regulation policies (in Rio, this included a ban on tenements, giving rise to modern favelas, and the prohibition of the homesteading of public land). Then, second, those people become dependent on the government and enter a long line to be able to get any land they can outside urban areas, under close bureaucratic surveillance.

Albert Jay Nock used to say that the state was created for the criminal purpose of creating a dependent class without access to property, for the benefit of the elites with access to land. The Brazilian state, in its uncompromising defense of big corporations’ “private property” combined to its ever dedicated effort to deprive poor of their property and control their access to land, is proof of that criminal intent. After all, from whom are the all the World Cup and Belo Monte property-less going to claim restitution?

Translated from Portuguese to English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, A Chi Chiederanno un Risarcimento i Poveri?

In America il 15 aprile, giorno della dichiarazione dei redditi, è una celebrazione. In questo giorno noi cittadini siamo orgogliosi di stare assieme in una società democratica e di prendere le decisioni cooperando tra noi. I frutti del nostro sudore, sotto l’occhio vigile della IRS (il fisco americano, ndt), sono distribuiti tra la società, edificano il sogno collettivo di una unione più completa… un dollaro fiscale alla volta.

Ok, ok, niente di più lontano dalla verità.

La triste verità sul 15 aprile è che la stragrande maggioranza del gettito va alle spese militari passate, presenti e future. La War Resisters League ha trascorso tanto tempo a studiare il gettito federale, con risultati più che seri.

Il gettito destinato alla spesa militare comprende 584 miliardi dell’enorme bilancio del Dipartimento della Difesa. Altri 202 miliardi circa vanno ad altri settori della difesa. In totale 786 miliardi per operazioni militari correnti. Se si aggiungono i 47 miliardi per le “Operazioni Contingenti Oltremare” di Obama (proseguimento della “Guerra al Terrore” di Bush), si arriva a 833 miliardi per operazioni in corso. Altri 521 miliardi sono usati per le spese militari del passato. Con questo debito di guerra arriviamo a 1.400 miliardi di dollari.

Ma il conteggio non si ferma qui. Il Dipartimento degli Interni, che si è fatto un (triste) nome con la sicurezza aeroportuale, ha militarizzato i dipartimenti di polizia di tutto il paese fin dall’inizio. La guerra alla droga non sembra rallentare (anche se fioriscono sacche di resistenza). Produzione di armi, droni, prigioni, macchine da guerra, mantenimento di arsenali nucleari in grado di mettere fine alla civiltà umana diverse volte (distruggere la terra una volta basta mica)… l’elenco si allunga continuamente.

Il 47% circa del gettito fiscale va alle risorse umane: finalmente prendiamo posto a tavola! Ma non dimenticate che quando i “troppo grandi per fallire” sono nei guai è sicuro che i soldi andranno a loro, non alla popolazione. Mr. Smith chiude bottega, le famiglie perdono la casa, ma l’élite economica è salva. Invece di ridistribuire il gettito tra le persone, i soldi delle tasse vanno a proteggere gli interessi economici dello stato. Il primo salvataggio fatto dall’amministrazione Bush è costato ai contribuenti americani 700 miliardi… e la spesa continua.

Quello che per gli americani è una priorità, come una comunità sicura e pulita, un ambiente pulito, infrastrutture, scuole, ricerca e altro, perde importanza di fronte alla potenza economica e militare dell’impero americano.

Il giorno della dichiarazione dei redditi non è il giorno della cooperazione; è il giorno della beffa. È il giorno in cui ci ricordiamo che lo stato azzoppa il potenziale umano. Serve a ricordare che lo stato è un ostacolo permanente al mercato risorgente. È il giorno in cui ci ricordiamo degli orrori e dei costi della pianificazione centrale.

Il libertarismo offre una soluzione. Immaginate un sistema socio-economico messo su da esseri umani liberati; istituzioni alternative create dall’autogoverno e dalla libera associazione. Le possibilità dell’umanità sono enormi. Neanche possiamo immaginare l’effetto che il talento libero e il lavoro autonomo avrebbero sul progresso e sull’edificazione della società.

Una cosa è certa: Non è negli interessi dell’uomo liberato morire per lo stato; una società senza stato non sprecherebbe risorse immani in guerre.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.