Desde que leí 1984 en la adolescencia, he sentido una perpetua fascinación por la presciencia de George Orwell. La saga Edward Snowden/Glenn Greenwald llamó nuestra atención sobre un aspecto de lo que Orwell predijo tan agudamente, pero el “siempre hemos estado en guerra con Estasia” está volviendo a la palestra debido a la… “situación”… con Ucrania, Crimea y Rusia.

El desarrollo más reciente en ese frente mientras escribo esta columna –y que muy posiblemente será sustituido por otra noticia antes de que sea publicada– es la “suspensión” de Rusia del G8. Debido a que existen tantas opiniones contradictorias sobre el tema, permítanme ofrecerles la más simple y plausible explicación de lo que estamos viendo:

Los oligarcas, los estadounidenses tanto como sus homólogos rusos –e incluso hasta más que ellos– anhelan el regreso de la Guerra Fría.

La mayoría de nosotros, la gente normal, no tiene ese tipo de anhelos, por supuesto. Los que tenemos más o menos 40 años, recordamos cómo era vivir bajo la constante amenaza de la aniquilación nuclear, que podía desatarse en cualquier momento si llegaba a romperse el delicado equilibrio entre las dos “superpotencias”.

Sin embargo, para la oligarquía estadounidense –mejor conocida como el “complejo militar industrial”– que se estableció como dominante en la economía y la política de EE.UU. durante e inmediatamente después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, simplemente no puede hacer tanto dinero fácil ni acumular tanto poder incuestionable en el juego de ser “la única superpotencia del mundo”.

Necesitan a alguien que juegue de contraparte para que el chantaje funcione como es debido. Las cosas de poca monta como el terrorismo tienen márgenes de ganancia muy ajustados. El dinero está en las armas nucleares, los aviones caros, ese tipo de cosas; el material que se utiliza para luchar contra enemigos que al menos en teoría tienen tanto poderío militar que uno. Y seamos sinceros, “Irán como una amenaza nuclear” es simplemente risible como justificación para ese tipo de proyectos.

La oligarquía estadounidense necesita un gran enemigo para justificar el millón de millones de dólares al año que le arrebata a los contribuyentes a nivel nacional (además de lo que hace con la venta de armas en el extranjero y cosas por el estilo). Un enemigo con una gran población, una base industrial real, una posición dominante en su región. Un enemigo conocido, al menos en el último siglo o así, por sus ambiciones expansionistas y por ser un hueso duro de roer en la guerra sin cuartel.

En una palabra, la oligarquía estadounidense necesita a Rusia.

Y ¿qué necesita Vladimir Putin? Bueno, necesita una excusa para volver a ser el Gran Oso Malvado. Al igual que los Estados Unidos, Rusia y sus satélites, señoríos y aliados, tienden a solidificarse en un monolito formidable y autoritario ante la amenaza externa, pero ese monolito empieza a deshilacharse por todos lados si de repente emerge la paz. Al igual que con la oligarquía de Estados Unidos, Rusia (en la mayoría de los casos con las mismas caras que en la época soviética, o sus herederos) necesita una amenaza externa para mantener el chorro del dinero fácil bien abierto.

El mejor enemigo que haya tenido jamás, los nazis, desaparecieron inconvenientemente más o menos en 1945 (aunque Russia Today se esfuerza bastante por crear algunos desde cero en Kiev). Así que no queda otra que conformarse con el segundo mejor enemigo: los Estados Unidos.

Es como el cuento del Hermano Oso y el Hermano Conejo, pero con dos Hermanos Osos, cada uno rogándole al otro que no lo eche en el zarzal, mientras secretamente alberga la esperanza de que ambos terminen allí adentro. ¡Todo el mundo gana! Bueno, al menos los dos grupos de oligarcas ganan. El resto de nosotros, no tanto.

Artículo original publicado por Thomas L. Knapp el 24 de marzo de 2014.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

The entrepreneur is given considerable accolades in today’s political discourse. Republicans laud them as role models, paragons of the protestant work ethic. Democrats celebrate the jobs they add to the economy. Libertarians of all stripes love them for their independence and key role in markets. It seems that only advocates of the various forms of state socialism are antagonistic toward entrepreneurs.

These accolades are well-deserved, as Joseph Schumpeter showed. Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who studied entrepreneurship, molded the place entrepreneurs have in the public eye. Schumpeterian entrepreneurs unite economic resources in new and innovative ways, providing means for the production of more value using fewer resources. This allows the resources now regarded as “extra” to be put to use satisfying other preferences. To draw an analogy to biology, entrepreneurs are the source of adaptive mutations in the marketplace.

Still, even non-Schumpeterian entrepreneurs meet needs that are not currently being met. These sorts of entrepreneurs recognize a preference that is not being met and redirect resources from preferences of lower importance to the more pressing preference. Someone who starts a business selling small aquatic pets is doing nothing new or innovative, but if their business succeeds, they are giving others access to goods that they would not have been able to procure. In the process, they are improving the quality of life for others by introducing the means to satisfy a greater number of more important preferences. In biology, these entrepreneurs are akin to the reproductive process.

A less well-received idea in popular discourse is that of direct action, and rightly so. Direct action intentionally sidesteps popular discourse. By simply ignoring popular opinion and working to achieve their ends outside of entrenched systems, activists can bring about their desired societies without needing to appeal to those in power. “Direct action” is a necessarily nebulous term. It includes in its purview agorism, strikes, community organizing, civil disobedience, cop blocks, etc. Anything wherein people act together against an ailment imposed on their society is direct action.

Importantly, direct action is not advocacy. It does not seek to change opinions. Part of the reason for its enormous success in many places is precisely this: It forces others to cease their illegitimate behaviors. When it succeeds, it does not do so because of the approval of those in power. Rather, it is a tool for forcing change in spite of the disapproval of the system as-is.

In one direction, the connection between entrepreneurship and direct action has already been developed. Agorism seeks to build alternatives to oppressive institutions by being entrepreneurial. Once again, it cares not for the opinions of its participants regarding the system they are changing. Only the first Schumpeterian entrepreneur in an agoristic endeavor has to care that the business is eating away at the existing institutions. It is partially because they care that this market actor is able to recognize the profit opportunity and act as an entrepreneur.

What has received less attention is investigation of the nature of direct action as an entrepreneurial activity. Where agorism is an entrepreneurial form of direct action, one can also understand direct action as a form of entrepreneurship. Schumpeterian entrepreneurship acts to improve the lot of society through the creation of more value from lesser value. It does this by replacing old and inefficient technologies with new and improved ones. This is the aim of direct action, as well, albeit not through technology as normally understood. Direct action works because it dismantles existing organizational arrangements. In whatever way it seeks to do so, it engages in what Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction”. Economically and socially inefficient methods end up falling apart as oppressors must succumb to even a small minority that refuses to utilize the system as intended. The new systems stand stronger than their predecessors because fewer people have reason to oppose them. Playing within the new rules maximizes social utility more effectively, giving more people reason to participate.

Consider the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in civil disobedience. By ignoring the legal and social rules as they stood and taking the freedoms they rightly deserved, the participants were able to bring about a social change. They created a system in which more people of color had reason to participate in an economy dominated by “whites-only” access. This incentive to tear down the vestiges of segregation has even proved effective in preventing its re-emergence. Most people, now, see the benefits of having more people actively participating as equals in the economy. The new structure has shown itself to be more efficient, both in allocation of economic goods and satisfaction of social desires than its predecessor with plenty of room for improvement to be gained or discovered. The new model has nearly destroyed the old, and the innovation has improved the lot of everyone living under the newer paradigm.

Israel Kirzner, another Austrian whose research focused on entrepreneurs, pointed out that as part of Schumpeterian creative destruction, entrepreneurs are discovering new information. To start a novel business in the way a Schumpeterian entrepreneur does, they must recognize information that no one else has – yet. This “radical” or “sheer” ignorance is the reason the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is important. They show others a way to improve their lives which they were previously radically unaware.

Direct action reveals information to others that was previously under the cover of radical ignorance. It is a part of being a privileged class that the members are unaware of how they benefit from their privilege. Privilege blinds its holders to its own existence. Due to this, those people who suffer under systems of social oppression must struggle to convince the privileged that their place in society is the product of illegitimate systems of oppression. Unfortunately, this is akin to an entrepreneur attempting to convince everyone that they could benefit from an invention which only the entrepreneur understands. In both cases, it is just easier to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed change. Direct action does this by forcing the change to occur or by building alternative systems for its participants.

It is interesting to note that, globally, humanity has never regressed technologically. Long periods of stagnation in some places and vilification of academia in others, but never a mass, collective step backward. Furthermore, in places where steps backward have occurred, there has almost always been a repressive regime of cultural norms or governmental structures. This is, in part, due to Schumpeterian forces. New ideas and better theories lead to greater efficiency in economic and social arrangements, which in turn select for more of the same. As is usually the case, it’s hard to put a genie back in the bottle. This is why anarchists have the future. The inefficiency of the state will pull it apart, and our ideas will be there to catch society when it happens. Until then, it is our job to spin the state’s dynamo faster and weave our net tighter. Direct action does both.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A ação direta como empreendedorismo.

What would you do if your daughter had an incurable disease? A daughter destined to spend the rest of her life having frequent seizures, uncontrollable by any medicine available in your country? Or, worse: whose only medicine could be acquired abroad, but your country forbids it and labels you a criminal if you do that? What would you do if, to control your daughter’s seizures and give her a modicum of comfort, you had to go against the state and import medical marijuana illegally?

That is a true story. Katiele struggles to treat her daughter’s epilepsy with CBD (Cannabidiol), a substance derived from marijuana and forbidden in Brazil. As part of the Brazilian war on drugs, Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency) bureaucrats have decided that the medical use of marijuana is impermissible inside the country.

As Katiele explains in her video (fittingly titled Illegal), no other medicine available in Brazil can control her daughter’s disease. None. Nevertheless, she found out that CBD is an effective alternative. The obstacle: The Brazilian government forbids the recreational as well as medicinal use of marijuana. What should she do, then? “The despair of having your daughter seizing every day, every time, is so huge that we decided to deal with it no matter what it took, even if we had to bring the medicine in illegally, and that’s what we did,” she said.

According to the state, this mother acted as a criminal. For anyone with a minimal sense of justice, she did the right thing. There are times when the only alternative for decent people is to break the law, including through entrepreneurial civil disobedience. If you, in breaking the law, do not hurt anyone and even benefits people, generating value, that by itself shows that the law in question obstructs society’s well-being generated through free production, exchange and association. That is even more salient when the value generated is the health of a epileptic kid.

On April 5, Katiele and her daughter had a judicial victory. In an historic decision, the federal justice in Brasilia determined that Anvisa should provide the family with CBD for the administration of treatment.

This is not the end, however. The agency can still appeal, the ban on medical marijuana continues in Brazil and the war on drugs, with all its dire consequences, goes on. Apparently, in this country, you have to sue the state to be able to get a permit to prevent such a very avoidable and treatable condition, just because some bureaucrat decided at some point that marijuana is evil.

I can imagine how this mother has suffered. My own sister had a birth condition and suffered from epilepsy. It would have been sad to see her going untreated and having constant seizures because there is someone blocking access to medicine.

Note: The point is not that there is no treatment. It is not that the mother does not have the money and the means to get hold of the medicine. If she did not have money, there would still be hope: Donations or philanthropic institutions, for example. The problem is that the state stands between the mother and legal access to treatment.

In an article for the Center for a Stateless Society, Marja Erwin brought up the question of how a free society, even an anarchist one, would deal with disability, and whether “exchange, on its own, fully includes those of us with disabilities.” Statist societies  have systematically denied the access to medicine or treatments on paternalistic grounds and are at times the largest hindrance to health care, either due to hurdles to medical innovations or due to the increased costs of treatment.

Trying to minimize someone’s agony should not be against the law. What should be against the law, however, is the nanny state’s condemnation of Katiele’s daughter to perpetual suffering. What should be against the law is the existence of such an institution as the state, whose acts within its borders remind us of the inscription on the door of Dante Alighieri’s hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Translated from Portuguese into English by Erick Vasconcelos.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Una madre contra una niñera abusiva.
• Portuguese, A mãe contra a babá abusiva.
• Italian, Una Madre Contro una Balia Oltraggiosa.

Il 25 marzo la Commissione Nazionale per la Verità (Comissão Nacional da Verdade) ha sentito un colonnello in pensione per cercare di capire come “venivano torturati i prigionieri politici” e identificare “chi era vivo al momento dell’arrivo, chi morì, chi scomparve, e chi furono i torturatori” della Casa da Morte (Casa della Morte), un punto segreto di repressione situato a Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, durante il regime militare che governò il paese. La Commissione per la Verità sta investigando le violazioni dei diritti umani durante la dittatura, ma molti l’hanno criticata dicendo che si tratta di uno strumento subdolo che servirà alla sinistra per portare avanti i suoi progetti.

Riportiamo indietro l’orologio. Cinquanta anni fa, un colpo di stato cacciò via la dittatura militare in Brasile. I suoi funzionari, agendo in contrasto netto con la legge, torturarono, inscenarono finti suicidi e fecero “scomparire” centinaia di persone. La colpa del governo civile sta nel fatto di aver favorito una “ri-democratizzazione lenta e graduale” dei diritti dell’individuo. La costituzione brasiliana del 1988, detta “Carta del Cittadino”, fu strumentale a quella ingiustizia.

Che ha un nome: L’amnestia, la legge numero 6.683 del 1970. Il problema non fu tanto la grazia concessa ai prigionieri politici, cosa giusta e nobile, ma il relativo contraccambio: Il governo distribuì grazie anche ai suoi stessi funzionari in una sorta di “auto-amnistia”.

Alle vittime e ai loro familiari fu negata la speranza di vedere un giorno i loro aggressori condannati per queste violazioni del loro diritti; che per loro non erano un semplice termine in gergo tecnico ma dolore e sofferenza causati da uomini che erano agli ordini delle autorità, questo terribile strumento di ratifica e insensibilità; come nel famoso esperimento di Stanley Milgram. La speranza è l’ultima a morire, è vero, ma lo stato che perdona se stesso è la pena capitale applicata alla speranza.

L’attuale diritto internazionale mostra un rispetto esagerato per la “sovranità statale” (non riconosce il diritto alla secessione, ad esempio), ma fortunatamente riconosce il dovere degli stati di rispettare i diritti umani fondamentali. Lo stato brasiliano ha accettato la giurisdizione della Corte Inter-Americana per i Diritti Umani in materia di violazioni dei diritti umani.

Nel caso Gomes Lund e altri (“Afaguaia Guerrilla”) vs. Brasile, l’accusa rivolta allo stato brasiliano fu di non aver condonato i crimini commessi dai suoi funzionari, nonostante il fatto che “le amnistie per gravi violazioni dei diritti umani siano incompatibili con il diritto internazionale”, e per questo fu condannato. Ecco perché turba un po’ vedere sedicenti “libertari” criticare iniziative come la Commissione Nazionale per la Verità o il processo contro funzionari del regime, come se fossero questioni che importano solo alla sinistra.

Accertare i fatti, e dunque punire i crimini, è libertario. Nessuno stato ha il diritto di ritagliarsi una deroga per i suoi stessi crimini. Come si può considerare giusto il fatto che un regime commetta crimini barbari e ne esca pulito solo perché il governo ne ha decretato l’onesta? Solo un sostenitore convinto dello stato, solo chi lo vede come un dio in terra, potrebbe ragionare così.

Le vittime sono vittime, a prescindere dall’affiliazione politica. Il loro sangue deve essere riscattato. Come può uno stato dichiarare che le vittime non hanno il diritto di vedere processati i loro aguzzini? Non si può essere libertari e credere che un’organizzazione criminale professionista possa legittimamente perdonare i crimini dei suoi funzionari semplicemente perché si chiama “stato”.

Fare luce su crimini come assassinî, mutilazioni e occultamenti di cadavere non è una manovra di sinistra; è una norma basilare del vivere civile. Non si può essere libertari senza sostenere queste cose.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

C4SS Media presents Jason Lee Byas‘ “A Thick and Thin PSA” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

So, the right question to discuss is not “thin libertarianism vs. thick libertarianism” (especially since the two depend on each other), but 1. “is it possible to have libertarianism without thickness, and if so, does this mean thickness is not actually relevant to libertarianism-per-se?” and 2. “what is the correct thickness orientation?”

What do you call a “withdrawal” that doesn’t end drone strikes? A faux one. The term withdrawal implies an exit from the area. If U.S. drones will continue to kill people in Afghanistan, the military presence is not truly over. We should be worried about the continued and apparently indefinite use of imperial violence by the U.S. government.

A full exit from the area is the only ethical and practical course of action. There is no moral justification for the further killing of Afghans to prop up a local state. This is especially true of a state as corrupt as the Afghan one, but it would apply to any state. On the practical side of the equation, it isn’t safe to keep making enemies via military occupation. The U.S. government endangers countless people by doing this.

Drone strikes are particularly noxious. They allow for easy remote control killing of suspected enemies of the state anywhere in the world. There are very few obstacles placed in the way of these death machines. Radicals are preferably the ones leading the charge against these killer devices. We left-libertarians can lead the way in opposing the death and destruction created by these monsters.

In the absence of ground troops and drones, the U.S. can still maintain control through a local client regime. This proxy force can wreak plenty of death and destruction too. It is preferable to be resolute in our opposition to both forms of control or occupation; both deserve condemnation for furthering coercive power exercised against Afghans and anyone else who happens to walk into territory claimed by the Afghan state. Power will not stand down without a determined opposition. We left-libertarians can take the lead in furthering that opposition.

What are the implications of continued U.S. drone strikes for the domestic front? At home, we can expect the importation of drones as a method of control. They can be used to surveil people anywhere on Earth. Such invasions of privacy are unacceptable and represent the growth of unaccountable concentrated power. This power will be exercised against all who displease the ruling class in some way or another. The time to fight back is now.

The state’s expansive military power is a threat not only to world peace, but the lives of those in the “homeland” too. The present superpower status of the U.S. does nothing but foment empire. We know that empires wreak death and destruction on a massive scale. Let’s put an end to the U.S. one.

Há uma divisão cada vez maior entre os libertários com relação à conexão entre seu firme comprometimento à luta contra o estado e outros valores sociais e culturais. Contudo, trata-se de uma falsa dicotomia. Os libertários apoiam um único princípio maior: a liberdade. É um princípio que se aplica a situações que envolvem ou não o estado. A preocupação com injustiças não-estatais, além daquelas criadas pelo próprio estado, fortalece nosso comprometimento com a liberdade e deixa claro que o libertarianismo é mais que apenas o anti-estatismo.

Recentemente, o conhecido escritor e editor libertário Lew Rockwell escreveu um artigo em seu blog intitulado “What Libertarianism Is, and Isn’t” (“O que o libertarianismo é e o que ele não é”, em português). Nele, Rockwell afirma: “O libertarianismo se preocupa com o uso da violência na sociedade. Isso é tudo. Ele não é nada além disso”. Ele defende uma visão libertária que se preocupa somente com direitos de propriedade e sua defesa. Rockwell alega que a filosofia libertária se resume ao princípio da não-agressão, aos direitos de propriedade lockeanos e nada mais.

Quaisquer outras preocupações com questões sociais e culturais além desses limites são apenas preferências pessoais desconectadas de sua posição libertária. “Os libertários, é claro, são livres para se preocuparem com questões como o feminismo e o igualitarismo. Porém, seu interesse nessas questões não tem nada a ver com o libertarianismo, não é requerido por ele nem uma característica essencial.” Acredito que isso não seja verdadeiro. Meu alinhamento com as ideias feministas, anti-racistas, com a liberação gay e trans e meu apoio ao fortalecimento dos trabalhadores são frutos do meu libertarianismo. Defendo esses princípios pelos mesmos motivos pelos quais eu estou comprometido ao anti-estatismo.

O motivo por que eu me preocupo com as violações de liberdades que não têm origem no estado é explicada pelo próprio Lew Rockwell: “Nossa posição não é meramente a de que o estado seja moralmente mau, mas de que a liberdade humana seja um enorme bem moral”. Exatamente! Sou contrário ao autoritarismo, à dominação e acredito na igualdade de autoridade. É por isso que me oponho ao estatismo. É também por isso que sou favorável a um mundo livre de opressões institucionais como o patriarcalismo, o racismo, a repressão a gays e trans e ambientes de trabalho hierárquicos e sem autonomia.

Minha crença na igualdade de autoridade se aplica a mais que somente o relacionamento entre um político e o cidadão médio. Se aplica a todos os relacionamentos humanos, estejam eles localizados num prédio estatal, na mesa de jantar ou no balcão da lanchonete; eu desejo maximizar a liberdade humana. Desejar a liberdade humana em todas essas áreas tem relação direta com a filosofia libertária. Não são só complementos, são o prato principal.

Rockwell cita o próprio Mr. Libertarian, Murray Rothbard, em suporte à sua posição libertária enxuta. Rothbard escreve: “O libertarianismo não oferece um modo de viver; oferece a liberdade para que cada pessoa tenha a possibilidade de adotar e agir de acordo com seus próprios valores e princípios morais”. Eu acredito que as implicações verdadeiras do que Rothbard diz aqui dão suporte a um libertarianismo mais amplo, em contraposição à opinião de Rockwell. O libertarianismo, realmente, não favorece um estilo de vida particular, mas tem algo a dizer sobre como devem ser as interações humanas. Portanto, enquanto filosofia social, o libertarianismo deve defender o repúdio a relações autoritárias.

O argumento de Rothbard mostra como a liberdade é necessária para que cada pessoa encontre seu propósito e atinja seus fins. Isso vai muito além das ações do estado. Normas culturais repressivas e costumes sociais dominantes também impedem que as pessoas prosperem. Também limitam suas liberdades. Um negro não pode ter uma vida decente se estiver numa comunidade extremamente racista, onde empresários se negam a empregá-lo ou servi-lo. Eles não estariam violando seus direitos, mas certamente diminuiriam sua capacidade de atingir seus fins. Ele não poderia ser considerado livre numa sociedade tão opressora.

Rothbard continua: “Os libertários concordam com Lord Acton ao dizer que a ‘liberdade é o maior objetivo político’, embora não necessariamente o maior objetivo dentro da escala de valores pessoal de todos os indivíduos”. Embora essa seja uma excelente citação de Lord Acton, ela não vai longe o bastante. Por que a liberdade seria relevante somente à esfera política? Ela é, certamente, afetada por muitos outros fatores. Não há motivos para que nossas preocupações com a liberdade humana sejam deixadas na porta de entrada do Palácio do Planalto. Para sermos coerentes, devemos estender essa preocupação a todas as interações humanas.

Rockwell conclui: “[O libertarianismo] não precisa e não deve ser fundido com qualquer outra ideologia alheia a ele. Isso só levará a confusões e à diluição de seus argumentos morais centrais, além da diminuição do apelo da mensagem central da liberdade”. Contudo, essa fusão não existe. A preocupação com relacionamentos autoritários que estejam fora da alçada do estado é um mero desenvolvimento dos princípios centrais de autonomia e liberdade. Não dilui a mensagem, mas a fortalece. Torna-a mais coerente internamente e faz com que a preocupação com a liberdade seja o foco central, no lugar de um anti-estatismo vazio.

Nós apoiamos a auto-soberania, a autonomia individual e a liberdade pessoal. Esses são os pilares de nossas ideias filosóficas: a massa da pizza. A oposição ao estatismo, à tirania política e à força centralizada e o apoio às liberdades civis, ao livre mercado e ao não-intervencionismo são uma das conclusões que devemos apoiar: o molho de tomate. Mas não são tudo. Nossos fundamentos também justificam a oposição à repressão cultural, à intolerância social e a relacionamentos autoritários, além do apoio ao feminismo, à liberação gay e trans, ao anti-racismo e ao fortalecimento dos trabalhadores, que são o outro lado das conclusões que devemos apoiar: o queijo. Juntos, esses ingredientes formam a grande e deliciosa pizza conhecida como libertarianismo.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

The following article was written by Colin Ward.

The split between life and work is probably the greatest contemporary social problem. You cannot expect men to take a responsible attitude and to display initiative in daily life when their whole working experience deprives them of the chance of initiative and responsibility. The personality cannot be successfully divided into watertight compartments, and even the attempt to do so is dangerous: if a man is taught to rely upon a paternalistic authority within the factory, he will be ready to rely upon one outside. If he is rendered irresponsible at work by lack of opportunity for responsibility, he will be irresponsible when away from work too. The contemporary social trend towards a centralised, paternalistic, authoritarian society only reflects conditions which already exist within the factory.

Gordon Rattray Taylor, Are Workers Human?

The novelist, Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on “incentives” in industry. He remarked that “Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.”

But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging in his garden because there he is free from foremen, managers and bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the same thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to himself and not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and not because he has to. He is doing his own thing. He is his own man.

The desire to “be your own boss” is very common indeed. Think of all the people whose secret dream or cherished ambition is to run a small-holding or a little shop or to set up in trade on their own account, even though it may mean working night and day with little prospect of solvency. Few of them are such optimists as to think they will make a fortune that way. What they want above all is the sense of independence and of controlling their own destinies.

The fact that in the twentieth century the production and distribution of goods and services is far too complicated to be run by millions of one-man businesses doesn’t lessen this urge for self-determination, and the politicians, managers and giant international corporations know it. This is why they present every kind of scheme for “workers’ participation,” “joint management,” “profit sharing,” “industrial co-partnership,” everything in fact from suggestion boxes to works councils, to give the worker the feeling that he is more than a cog in the industrial machine while making sure that effective control of industry is kept out of the hands of the man on the factory floor.

They are in fact like the rich man in Tolstoy’s fable – they will do anything for the worker except get off his back.In every industrial country, and probably in every agricultural country, the idea of workers’ control has manifested itself at one time or another – as a demand, an aspiration, a programme or a dream. To confine ourselves to one century and one country, it was the basis of two parallel movements in Britain around the First World War, Syndicalism and Guild Socialism. These two movements dwindled away in the early 1920s, but ever since then there have been sporadic and periodic attempts to re-create a movement for workers’ control of industry.

From some points of view the advocates of workers’ control had much more reason for optimism in 1920 than today. In that year the Sankey Report (a majority report of a Royal Commission) advocating “joint control” and public ownership of the mining industry in Britain, was turned down by the government for being too radical, and by the shop stewards for not being radical enough. When the mines were actually nationalised after almost thirty years, nothing even as mild as joint control was either proposed or demanded. In 1920, too, the Building Guilds began their brief but successful existence. In our own day it is inconceivable that large local authorities would let big building contracts to guilds of workers, or that the co-operative movement would finance them.

The idea that workers should have some say in the running of their industries was accepted then in a way that it has never been since.And yet the trade union movement today is immeasurably stronger than it was in the days when workers’ control was a widespread demand. What has happened is that the labour movement as a whole has accepted the notion that you gain more by settling for less.

In most Western countries, as Anthony Crossland pointed out, the unions,

greatly aided by propitious changes in the political and economic background, have achieved a more effective control through the independent exercise of their collective bargaining strength than they would ever have achieved by following the path (beset as it is by practical difficulties on which all past experiments have foundered) of direct workers’ management. Indeed ,we may risk the generalisation that the greater the power of the unions the less the interest in workers’ management.

His observation is true, even if it is unpalatable for those who would like to see the unions, or some more militantly syndicalist kind of industrial union, as the vehicle for workers’ control. Many advocates of workers’ control have seen the unions as the organs through which it is to be exercised, assuming presumably that the attainment of workers’ control would bring complete community of interest in industry and that the defensive role of the unions would become obsolete. (This is, of course, the assumption behind trade union organisation in the Soviet empire).

I think this view is a gross oversimplification. Before the First World War, the Webbs pointed out that “the decisions of the most democratically elected executive committees with regard to wages, hours and conditions of employment of particular sections of their fellow workers, do not always satisfy the latter, or even seem to them to be just”. And the Yugoslav scholar, Branko Pribicevic, in his history of the shop-stewards’ movement in Britain, emphasises this point in criticising the reliance on the idea of control by industrial unions:

Control of industry is largely incompatible with a union’s character as a voluntary association of the workers, formed primarily to protect and represent their interests. Even in the most democratic industrial system, i.e. a system in which the workers would have a share in control, there would still be a need for unions . . . Now if we assume that managers would be responsible to the body of workers, we cannot exclude the possibility of individual injustices and mistakes. Such cases must be taken up by the union . . . It seems most improbable that a union could fulfill any of these tasks successfully if it were also the organ of industrial administration or, in other words, if it had ceased to be a voluntary organisation . . . It was unfortunate that the idea of workers’ control was almost completely identified with the concept of union control . . .

It was obvious throughout that the unions would oppose any doctrine aiming at creating a representative structure in industry parallel with their own.In fact, in the only instances we know of in Britain, of either complete or partial workers’ control, the trade union structure is entirely separate from the administration, and there has never been any suggestion that it should be otherwise. What are these examples ? Well, there are the co-operative co-partnerships which make, for instance, some of the footwear sold in retail co-operative societies. These are, so far as they go, genuine examples of workers’ control (needless to say I am not speaking of the factories run by the Co-operative Wholesale Society on orthodox capitalist lines), but they do not seem to have any capacity for expansion, or to exercise any influence on industry in general. There are the fishermen of Brixham in Devon, and the miners of Brora on the coast of Sutherland in Scotland. This pit was to have shut down, but instead the miners took it over from the National Coal Board and formed a company of their own. Then there are those firms where some form of control by the employees has been sought by idealistic employers. (I am thinking of firms like Scott Bader Ltd., and Farmer and Co., not of those heavily paternalistic chocolate manufacturers or of spurious co-partnerships). There are also odd small workshops like the factories in Scotland and Wales of the Rowen Engineering Company.

I mention these examples, not because they have any economic significance, but because the general view is that control of industry by workers is a beautiful idea which is utterly impracticable because of some unspecified deficiency, not in the idea, but in those people labelled as “workers”. The Labour Correspondent of The Times remarked of ventures of this kind that, while they provide “a means of harmonious self-government in a small concern,” there is no evidence that they provide “any solution to the problem of establishing democracy in large-scale industry”. And even more widespread than the opinion that workers have a built-in capacity for managing themselves, is the regretful conclusion that workers’ control is a nice idea, but one which is totally incapable of realisation because of the scale and complexity of modern industry.

Daniel Guerin recommends an interpretation of anarchism which “rests upon large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques, the modern proletariat, and internationalism on a world scale”. But he does not tell us how. On the face of it, we could counter the argument about scope and scale by pointing out how changes in sources of motive power make the geographical concentration of industry obsolete, and how changing methods of production (automation for example) make the concentration of vast numbers of people obsolete too. Decentralisation is perfectly feasible, and probably economically advantageous within the structure of industry as it is today.

But the arguments based on the complexity of modern industry actually mean something quite different.What the sceptics really mean is that while they can imagine the isolated case of a small enterprise in which the shares are held by the employees, but which is run on ordinary business lines – like Scott Bader Ltd. – or while they can accept the odd example of a firm in which a management committee is elected by the workers -like the co-operative co-partnerships – they cannot imagine those who manipulate the commanding heights of the economy being either disturbed by or, least of all, influenced by, these admirable smallscale precedents. And they are right, of course: the minority aspiration for workers’ control which never completely dies, has at the same time never been widespread enough to challenge the controllers of industry, in spite of the ideological implications of the “work-in”.

The tiny minority who would like to see revolutionary changes need not cherish any illusions about this. Neither in the political parties of the Left nor in the trade union movement will they find more than a similar minority in agreement. Nor does the history of syndicalist movements in any country, even Spain, give them any cause for optimism. Geoffrey Ostergaard puts their dilemma in these terms:

“To be effective as defensive organisations, the unions needed to embrace as many workers as possible and this inevitably led to a dilution of their revolutionary objectives. In practice, the syndicalists were faced with the choice of unions which were either reformist and purely defensive or revolutionary and largely ineffective.” Is there a way out of this dilemma? An approach which combines the ordinary day-to-day struggle of workers in industry over wages and conditions with a more radical attempt to shift the balance of power in the factory? I believe that there is, in what the syndicalists and guild socialists used to describe as “encroaching control” by means of the “collective contract”. The syndicalists saw this as “a system by which the workers within a factory or shop would undertake a specific amount of work in return for a lump sum to be allocated by the work-group as it saw fit, on condition that the employers abdicated their control of the productive process itself”.

The late G. D. H. Cole, who returned to the advocacy of the collective contract system towards the end of his life, claimed that,

the effect would be to link the members of the working group together in a common enterprise under their joint auspices and control, and to emancipate them from an externally imposed discipline in respect of their method of getting the work done.

I believe that it has, and my evidence for this belief comes from the example of the gang system worked in some Coventry factories which has some aspects in common with the collective contract idea, and the “Composite work” system worked in some Durham coal mines, which has everything in common with it.The first of these, the gang system, was described by an American professor of industrial and management engineering, Seymour Melman, in his book Decision-Making and Productivity, where he sought “to demonstrate that there are realistic alternatives to managerial rule over production”. I have been publicising this book for years simply because in all the pretentious drivel of industrial management literature (which may not fool the workers, but certainly fools management) it is the only piece of research I have come across which raises the key question: is management necessary? Melman sought out an identical product made under dissimilar conditions, and found it in the Ferguson tractor made under license in both Detroit and Coventry. His account of the operation of the gang system in Coventry was confirmed for me by a Coventry engineering worker, Reg Wright.Of Standard’s tractor factory (he is writing of the period before Standard sold the plant to Massey-Ferguson in 1956, and before Leyland took over Standard), Melman declares, “In this firm we will show that at the same time thousands of workers operated virtually without supervision as conventionally understood, and at high productivity: the highest wage in British industry was paid; high quality products were produced at acceptable prices in extensively mechanised plants; the management conducted its affairs at unusually low costs; also, organised workers had a substantial role in production decision-making.” The production policy of the firm at that time was most unorthodox for the motor industry and was the resultant of two inter-related decision-making systems, that of the workers and that of management:

In production, the management has been prepared to pay a high wage and to organise production via the gang system which requires management to deal with a grouped work force, rather than with single workers, or with small groups . . . the foremen are concerned with the detailed surveillance of things rather than with the detailed control over people . . . The operation of integrated plants employing 10,000 production workers did not require the elaborate and costly hallmark of business management.

In the motor-car factory fifteen gangs ranged in size from fifty to five hundred people and the tractor factory was organised as one huge gang. From the standpoint of the production workers “the gang system leads to keeping track of goods instead of keeping track of people”. For payment purposes the output that was measured was the output of the whole group. In relation to management, Melman points out:

The grouped voice of a work force had greater impact than the pressure of single workers. This effect of the gang system, coupled with trade unionism, is well understood among many British managements. As a result, many managements have opposed the use of the gang system and have argued the value of single worker incentive payments.

In a telling comparison, Melman contrasts the “predatory competition” which characterises the managerial decision-making system with the workers’ decision-making system in which

The most characteristic feature of the decision-formulating process is that of mutuality in decision-making with final authority residing in the hands of the grouped workers themselves.

Emphasising the human significance of this mode of industrial organisation, Reg Wright says:

The gang system sets men’s minds free from many worries and enables them to concentrate completely on the job. It provides a natural frame of security, it gives confidence, shares money equally, uses all degrees of skill without distinction and enables jobs to be allocated to the man or woman best suited to them, the allocation frequently being made by the workers themselves. Change of job to avoid monotony is an easy matter. The “gaffer” is abolished and foremen are now technicians called in to advise, or to act in a breakdown or other emergency. In some firms a ganger will run, not the men, but the job. He will be paid out of gang earnings, and will work himself on a small gang. On a larger gang he will be fully occupied with organisation and supply of parts and materials. A larger gang may have a deputy ganger as a second string and also a gang-steward who, being a keen trade unionist or workers’ man, will act as a corrective should the Ganges try to favour management unduly or interfere with the individual in undesirable ways. Gang meetings are called as necessary, by the latter and all members of the gang are kept informed and may (and do) criticise everything and everybody. All three are subject to recall. Constructive ideas, on the other hand, are usually the result of one or two people thinking out and trying out new things – this is taking place continuously…

He remarks that “The fact of taking responsibility in any of these capacities is educative in every sense.” Certainly the usual methods of work organisation are not only divisive (“They’d cut your throat for a bit more overtime,” a Ford worker told Graham Turner) but are profoundly de-educative, reducing the worker, as Eric Gill used to put it, to a “subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility”. My second example comes from the mining industry in Durham. David Douglass in his book Pit Life in County Durham criticises the attempts of the National Coal Board to introduce more and more supervision into the miner’s work, with the intention of working the mines like factories, remarking that “one of the few redeeming features of pit work, and one that the miners will fight to maintain, is that of independent job control”, for while “most factory workers would regard the mine purely and simply as a black and filthy hole, funnily enough the miner in turn regards the factory as a prison and its operatives as captives”. In the early days of mining in Durham, he explains, “the miner was practically a self-governing agent. The hewers were allowed to manage their own jobs with practically a total lack of supervision. The degree of job control (though necessarily limited by private ownership) was almost complete.” Douglass describes such traditions as the cavilling system (selection of working place by ballot in order to equalise earning opportunities) as:

the fundamental way in which the Durham miner managed to maintain an equitable system of work, and managed to stave off the competitiveness, bullying and injustice of the hated butty system. In essence it was an embryo of workers’ control, as can be seen from its ability to handle disputes between sets of workers without recourse to outsiders. It was a little Soviet which had grown up within the capitalist system. In a sense it was of necessity restricted in its development. It is, however, a feature of the worker intervening in the productive process in a conscious way to say: this is how I run it, you adapt it accordingly.

The same kind of attempt to run the mines as factories that David Douglass complains of, accompanied the introduction in the post-war years of the “long-wall” system of working. A comparative study was made by the Tavistock Institute of conventional long-wall working with its introduction of the division of labour, and of factory type methods, and the composite long-wall method adopted by the miners in some pits. Its importance for my argument can be seen from the opening words of one of the Tavistock reports:

This study concerns a groups of miners who came together to evolve a new way of working together, planning the type of change they wanted to put through, and testing it in practice. The new type of work organisation which has come to be known in the industry as composite working, has in recent years emerged spontaneously in a number of different pits in the north-west Durham coalfield. Its roots go back to an earlier tradition which has been almost completely displaced in the course of the last century by the introduction of work techniques based on task segmentation, differential status and payment, and extrinsic hierarchical control.

A further report notes how the investigation shows the “ability of quite large primary work groups of 40-50 members to act as self-regulating, self-developing social organisms able to maintain themselves in a steady state of high productivity . . .” (P. G. Herbst) describes the system of composite working in a way which shows its relationship to the gang system:

The composite work organisation may be described as one in which the group takes over complete responsibility for the total cycle of operations involved in mining the coal face. No member of the group has a fixed work-role. instead, the men deploy themselves, depending on the requirements of the ongoing group task. Within the limits of technological and safety requirements they are free to evolve their own way of organising and carrying out their task. They are not subject to any external authority in this respect, nor is there within the group itself any member who takes over a formal directive leadership function. Whereas in conventional long-wall working the coal-getting task is split into four or eight separate work roles, carried out by different teams, each paid at a different rate, in the composite group members are no longer paid directly for any of the tasks carried out. The all-in wage agreement is, instead, based on the negotiated price per ton of coal produced by the team. The income obtained is divided equally among team members.

These examples of on-the-job workers’ control are important in evolving an anarchist approach to industrial organisation. They do not entail submission to paternalistic management techniques – in fact they demolish the myths of managerial expertise and indispensability. They are a force for solidarity rather than divisiveness between workers on the basis of pay and status. They illustrate that it is possible to bring decision-making back to the factory floor and the face-to-face group. They even satisfy-though this is not my criterion for recommending them – the capitalist test of productivity. They, like the growing concept of workers’ rights of possession in the job – tacitly recognised in redundancy payment legislation, actively demonstrated by workers taking over physical possession of the workplace as in the “work-in” at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders – have the great tactical merit of combining short-term aims with long-term aspirations.Could the workers run industry? Of course they could. They do already.

Neither of the two examples I have given of successful “on the job” control, exists in the same form today, for reasons which have nothing to do with either their efficiency or their productivity. In the Durham example it has to do with the shift of emphasis in the (publicly-owned) National Coal Board to the coalfields of South Yorkshire and Nottingham, and in the case of Standards with the mergers (sponsored by a Labour government) which led to the formation of British Leyland as a combine large enough to compete for markets with the giant American-owned and European firms.Industry is not dominated by technical expertise, but by the sales manager, the accountant and the financial tycoon who never made anything in their lives except money.For a lucky few work is enjoyable for its own sake, but the proportion of such people in the total working population grows smaller as work becomes either more mechanised or more fragmented Automation, which was expected to reduce the sheer drudgery of manual labour and the sheer mental drudgery of clerical work, is feared because in practice it simply reduces the number of income gaining opportunities. It is a saving of labour, not by the worker, but by the owners or controllers of capital. The lucky few are destined for the jobs which are either created by or are unaffected by automation. The unlucky majority, condemned from childhood to the dreary jobs, find them either diminished or extinguished by the “rationalisation” of work.

Can we imagine that in a situation where the control of an industry, a factory, any kind of workplace, was in the hands of the people who work there, they would just carry on production, distribution and bottle-washing in the ways we are familiar with today? Even within capitalist society (though not within the “public sector” which belongs to “the people”) some employers find that what they call job enlargement or job enrichment, the replacement of conveyor belt tasks by complete assembly jobs, or deliberate rotation from job to job in the production process, can increase production simply by reducing boredom. When everyone in an industry has a voice in it, would they stop at this point?In his brilliant essay Work and Surplus, Keith Paton imagines what would happen in a car factory taken over permanently by its workers. “After the carnival of revolution come the appeals to return to work” but “to get into the habit of responding to orders or exhortations to raise the GNP would be to sell the pass straight away. On the other hand production must eventually be got going on some basis or other. What basis? Return to what sort of work?”

So instead of restarting the assembly track (if the young workers haven’t already smashed it) they spend two months discussing the point of their work, and how to rearrange it. Private cars ? Why do people always want to go somewhere else? Is it because where they are is so intolerable? And what part did the automobile play in making the need to escape? What about day to day convenience? Is being stuck in a traffic jam convenient? What about the cost to the country? Bugger the “cost to the country”, that’s just the same crap as the national interest. Have you seen the faces of old people as they try to cross a busy main road? What about the inconvenience to pedestrians? What’s the reason for buying a car? Is it just wanting to HAVE it? Do we think the value of a car rubs off on us ? But that’s the wrong way round. Does having a car really save time ? What’s the average hours worked in manufacturing industry Let’s look it up in the library: 45-7 hours work a week. What’s the amount of the family’s spending money in a week that goes on cars? 10 3 per cent of all family income. Which means more like 20 per cent if you’ve got a car because half of us don’t have one. What’s 25 per cent of 45 hours ? Christ, 9 hours ! That’s a hell of a long time spent “saving time”! There must be a better way of getting from A to B. By bus? OK, let’s make buses. But what about the pollution and that? What about those electric cars they showed on the telly once? Etc., etc.

He envisages another month of discussion and research in complexly cross-cutting groups, until the workers reach a consensus lor eventual self-redeployment for making products which the workers consider to be socially useful. These include car refurbishing to increase the use-value of models already on the road), buses, overhead monorail cars, electric cars and scooters, white bicycles for communal use (as devised by the Amsterdam provos), housing units, minimal work for drop-outs, and for kids and old people who like to make themselves useful. But he sees other aspects of the workers’ take-over, voluntary extra work for example: “As work becomes more and more pleasurable, as technology and society develop to allow more and more craft aspects to return at high technological level, the idea of voluntary extra over the (reduced) fixed working week becomes feasible. Even the fixing of the working week becomes persuaded.” The purpose of this voluntary extra? “New Delhi needs buses, provide them by voluntary work.” The factory itself is open to the community, including children; -thus every factory worker is a potential “environmental studies” instructor, if a child comes up and asks him how something works.’ The factory in fact becomes a university, an institute of learning rather than of enforced stupidity, “using men to a millionth of their capacities” as Norbert Weiner put it.

The evolution and transformation of the factory envisaged by Keith Paton leads us back to the idea of the Community Workshop envisaged in the previous chapter. We tend to think of the motor industry, for example, as one in which iron ore comes in at one end and a complete car rolls out at the other (though the purchaser of a “Friday car” in today’s society had better watch out, for that car rolled off the assembly line when the workers were waiting for their real life at the weekend to begin). But in fact two thirds of the factory value of a car is represented by components bought by the manufacturers from outside suppliers. The motor industry, like many others, is an assembly industry. The fact that this is so of most consumer goods industries, coupled with the modern facts of widely distributed industrial skill and motive power, means that, as the Goodman brothers said in Communitas:

In large areas of our operation, we could go back to old-fashioned domestic industry with perhaps even a gain in efficiency, for small power is everywhere vailable, small machines are cheap and ingenious, and there are asy means to collect machined parts and centrally assemble them.

But it also means that we could locally assemble them. It already happens on the individual spare-time level. Build-it-yourself radio, record-playing, and television kits are a commonplace, and you can also buy assemble-it-yourself cars and refrigerators.Groups of community workshops could combine for bulk ordering of components, or for sharing according to their capacity the production of components for mutual exchange and for local assembly.The new industrial field of plastics (assuming that in a transformed future society, people find it a genuine economy to use them) offer many unexploited possibilities for the community workshop. There are three main kinds of plastics today: thermosetting resins which are molded under heat with very high pressures and consequently require plant which is at present expensive and complex; thermoplastics, which are shaped by extrusion and by injection molding (there are already do-it-yourself electric thermoplastic injection machines on the market); and polyester resins, used in conjunction with reinforcing materials like glass fibre which can be molded at low pressures by simple contact molding, and are thus eminently suitable for the potentialities of the community workshop.

As we are frequently reminded by our own experience as consumers, industrial products in our society are built for a limited life as well as for an early obsolescence. The products which are available for purchase are not the products which we would prefer to have. In a worker-controlled society it would not be worth the workers’ while to produce articles with a deliberately limited life, nor to make things which were unrepairable. Products would have transparency of operation and repair. When Henry Ford first marketed his Model T he aimed at a product which “any hick up a dirt road” could repair with a hammer and a spanner. He nearly bankrupted his firm in the process, but this is precisely the kind of product which an anarchist society would need: objects whose functioning is transparent and whose repair can be undertaken readily and simply by the user. In his book The Worker in an Affluent Society, Ferdynand Zweig makes the entertaining observation that “quite often the worker comes to work on Monday worn out from his weekend activities, especially from “Do-it-yourself”. Quite a number said that the weekend is the most trying and exacting period of the whole week, and Monday morning in the factory, in comparison, is relaxing.” This leads us to ask – not in the future, but in our present society – what is work and what is leisure if we work harder in our leisure than at our work? The fact that one of these jobs is paid and the other is not seems almost fortuitous. And this in turn leads us to a further question.

The paradoxes of contemporary capitalism mean that there are vast numbers of what one American economist calls no-people: the army of the unemployed who are either unwanted by, or who consciously reject, the meaningless mechanised slavery of contemporary industrial production. Could they make a livelihood for themselves today in the community workshop ? If the workshop is conceived merely as a social service for “creative leisure” the answer is that it would probably be against the rules. Members might complain that so-and-so was abusing the facilities provided by using them “commercially”. But if the workshop were conceived on more imaginative lines than any existing venture of this kind, its potentialities could become a source of livelihood in the truest sense. In several of the New Towns in Britain, for example, it has been found necessary and desirable to build groups of small workshops for individuals and small businesses engaged in such work as repairing electrical equipment or car bodies, woodworking and the manufacture of small components. The Community Workshop would be enhanced by its cluster of separate workplaces for “gainful” work.

Couldn’t the workshop become the community factory, providing work or a place for work for anyone in the locality who wanted to work that way, not as an optional extra to the economy of the affluent society which rejects an increasing proportion of its members, but as one of the prerequisites of the worker-controlled economy of the future? Keith Paton again, in a far-sighted pamphlet addressed to members of the Claimants’ Union, urged them not to compete for meaningless jobs in the economy which has thrown them out as redundant, but to use their skills to serve their own community. (One of the characteristics of the affluent world is that it denies its poor the opportunity to feed, clothe, or house themselves, or to meet their own and their families’ needs, except from grudgingly doled out welfare payments). He explains that:

When we talk of “doing our own thing” we are not advocating going back to doing everything by hand. This would have been the only option in the thirties. But since then electrical power and “affluence” have brought a spread of intermediate machines, some of them very sophisticated, to ordinary working class communities. Even if they do not own them (as many claimants do not) the possibility exists of borrowing them from neighbours, relatives, ex-workmates. Knitting and sewing machines, power tools and other do-it-yourself equipment comes in this category. Garages can be converted into little workshops, home-brew kits are popular, parts and machinery can be taken from old cars and other gadgets. If they saw their opportunity, trained metallurgists and mechanics could get into advanced scrap technology, recycling the metal wastes of the consumer society for things which could be used again regardless of whether they would fetch anything in a shop. Many hobby enthusiasts could begin to see their interests in a new light.

“We do,” he affirms, “need each other and the enormous pool of energy and morale that lies untapped in every ghetto, city district and estate.” The funny thing is that when we discuss the question of work from an anarchist point of view, the first question people ask is: What would you do about the lazy man, the man who will not work? The only possible answer is that we have all been supporting him for centuries. The problem that faces every individual and every society is quite different, it is how to provide people with the opportunity they yearn for: the chance to be useful.

As the radical, insurrectionary affirmation of self, egoism is a direct and hostile challenge to politics, society, civilization, and economics. Unlike the various philosophical identifications and ideologies that it challenges, it is no pretender to the thrones of any mode of thought based upon duty or obligation, no attempt to place itself above or outside of the unique one. We may say, then, that egoism contemplates only an end to self-alienation, yet even then we say too much; egoism is not a volitional unit capable of wanting anything at all. As Apio Ludd writes in “An Egoist Method,” since flesh and blood individuals are “the center of egoism,” “it can’t very well be a philosophy.” Egoist thought is rather a collection of several ways of finding, apprehending, and thinking about conscious autonomy, self-discovery, and self-creation. With Egoism, Ardent Press offers a compendium of such ventures into the questions and possibilities of a creative, fulfilling life unfastened from alienating constraints. Spanning thinkers from James L. Walker to Apio Ludd, Egoism offers a compact but robust primer on the distinctive approach birthed by Max Stirner. Showcasing the diversity of egoist thought, and the changes in emphasis that occurred in the century or so that it spans, the volume begins with entries on its subject from The Anarchist Encyclopedia. In the first such entry, L. Wastiaux quotes the individualist anarchist and Stirner biographer John Henry Mackay, who writes, “To deny egoism is to deny life. There are no altruists; the word ‘altruism’ is a synonym of egoism, and not its antonym.” Egoism thus represents an escape from hypocritical moral posturing and pretensions to something apart from or higher than the arbitrary hungers of the unique — which need no independent justification.

The anonymously authored introduction to the collection presents its objective — to tell “the story of egoism, a mostly neglected tendency in anarchist thought.” That the contemporary anarchist movement has neglected egoism is a regrettable truth. Indeed at times tensions between egoist anarchism and its more traditionally leftist main current have escalated into open hostility. Egoists are repelled by utopian aspirations “to compose a single better world (for everyone),” motivated instead by “stories about winning, defined in individual terms by those who lived life fully.” The writers featured in this compilation had no use for one size fits all definitions of freedom, for moral crusades that demand the surrender of the individual will. It is hardly an accident, then, that several writers in the egoist tradition identify what it is they champion as “anarchist individualism,” where “anarchist” is set as the premodifier of “individualism.” As in Renzo Novatore’s “Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution,” it is individualism that is central, the “creative force, immortal youth, exalting beauty, redemptive and fruitful war on the belief that life [is] a duty, a calling, a mission.” For the egoist, individualism must precede anarchism, for the affirmation of self is the source of the denial of all authority — individualism being the more general thing, anarchism a specific implication. Any anarchism that sets itself up as above individualism becomes its own cause with its own designs and will, subordinating the unique individual, becoming a new “alleged higher interest,” in Apio Ludd’s words. Perhaps this is why many anarchists deny egoists the title, and likewise why many egoists repudiate it themselves, as did Sidney Parker and Dora Marsden.

This emphasis on self-realization in the here and now, together with the concomitant rejection of political movements and their dogmas, is what earned egoist individualism the supposed ignominy of the label “lifestyle anarchism.” Egoists themselves, though, are not necessarily unhappy with the epithet of lifestylism. After all, if anarchism is simply another political doctrine, a mere recapitulation of stock leftist commitments, it represents a rather anodyne challenge to the status quo. As a young anarchist, never did workerist, leftist anarchism seem less attractive, more like an orthodox religious sect, than in the hands of Murray Bookchin, who lamented the paucity of “social action and revolutionary politics in anarchism” in his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Pitting “preoccupations with the ego and its uniqueness” against “the socialistic character of the libertarian tradition,” Bookchin pilloried the “narcissism” which he saw as the influence of “the bourgeois environment” on anarchism. It is precisely these easy, imperious dismissals of individualistic inclinations within anarchist thought which reveal the “principle of worship, mental slavery, [and] superstition” that James L. Walker attacked in The Philosophy of Egoism. Anarchists like Bookchin are positively scandalized that certain of us may want to live for ourselves and our own satisfaction rather than some abstract ideal cast into a totem to be yielded to and praised.

“No gods, no masters” is all well and good right up until some movement leader yanks your anarchist card for notions deemed excessively bourgeois, or insufficiently socialistic. But the vividly impenitent writers found in Egoism were not inclined to be bothered by their lack of inclusion in any group, their solitude being, as Marilisa Fiorina writes in “Freedom and Solitude,” the beloved “realization of their free thought.” It is not that egoists deny the social character of human life, that we desire to be hermits in a dark, atomistic exile from others. From the pages of Egoism stream forth affirmations of love and communication, genuinely aware relationships against the alienations and repressions of power. “The project of participation,” Raoul Vaneigem writes, “is born of the passion for playing, whenever group activity facilitates the self-realization of each individual.” And as John Beverley Robinson’s contribution to this collection observes, “egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism”; it contemplates no necessary abandonment of the love of others, but simply places the individual “above all institutions and all formulas,” products of the human mind that are mistaken for realities, reified and allowed to rule. Walker too admits “that some constructive use for the term altruistic is not of necessity excluded from Egoistic philosophy.” Love for others, he argues, “is one form of Egoistic rejoicing,” or, as Cresencia Desafio and Katherine DiFiore put it just over a century later, relationships are stronger when their component parts — the distinct individuals involved — are independently strong. We continue and cultivate relationships, Desafio and DiFiore argue, as they continue to be relevant to our lives, a conscious, self-motivated way of appreciating social relationships akin to Stirner’s Union of Egoists.

Egoism offers a serviceable introduction to the egoist tradition and a worthy companion to Stirner’s masterwork, The Ego and His Own, showing egoism to be not a static monolith, but a dynamic assault on the various forms of philosophical orthodoxy. Whether contemporary movement anarchism will suffer such an irreverent posture toward its golden calves remains to be seen. In any event, one hopes that collections like Egoism, audacious and absorbing in their assertions of self-love, will excite renewed interest in egoism and in Max Stirner’s work.

Egoism by Various, published by Ardent Press. $8

Nel 2010 Newt Gingrich spiegò che il presidente americano Barack Obama “non si capisce” se non si tiene conto del suo orientamento “anticoloniale keniano” come punto di riferimento interpretativo del suo comportamento bizzarro. Certo che Obama è riuscito a nascondere benissimo il suo odio profondo verso il colonialismo; tanto che ha elogiato l’Europa, in un discorso della settimana scorsa, per aver donato al mondo i diritti umani e la democrazia:

… è stato qui in Europa, attraverso secoli di lotte… che un particolare insieme di idee cominciò ad emergere: La convinzione che, tramite la coscienza e la libera volontà, ognuno di noi ha il diritto di vivere secondo il proprio volere. La convinzione che il potere deriva dal consenso di chi è governato…

David Graeber, antropologo e pensatore anarchico strettamente legato a Occupy Wall Street fin dalla prima ora, ha molto da dire riguardo l’idea secondo cui l’autogoverno è un’astrazione talmente avanzata che, se non fossero arrivati quei tipi geniali di Atene, Parigi o Filadelfia a inventarlo per loro, gli uomini avrebbero continuato a soffrire nell’ignoranza.

L’autogoverno, è il ragionamento di Graeber in “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”, è qualcosa che fanno praticamente ovunque le persone normali, chiunque abbia rapporti a tu per tu con gli altri; perché quando non ci sono poliziotti e eserciti a sottomettere con la violenza, ascoltare quello che hanno da dire gli altri, stabilire con il consenso la strada migliore da prendere, è la cosa più sensata da fare. L’azione basata sul consenso è pratica comune dei consigli tribali in tutto il mondo e in tutta la storia, così come le istituzioni popolari che governano le risorse comuni, alle quali Elinor Ostrom ha dedicato i suoi studi. Queste istituzioni popolari di autogoverno sono rimaste anche quando lo stato si è imposto sulla società. Penso ad istituzioni come la Mir nei villaggi russi, o le società di mutuo aiuto dei lavoratori, ad esempio. Quanto all’idea che tutti debbano avere la stessa voce in capitolo su questioni che li riguardano, è una cosa molto intuitiva per tutti.

Ma gli studiosi occidentali del pensiero politico non sempre pensano che “un consiglio tribale di un villaggio Tallensi o Sulawesi” sia “allo stesso livello di Pericle”. Forse, dice Graeber, decidere a maggioranza e votare “non è poi quell’idea così sofisticata a cui nessuno avrebbe mai pensato se non l’avesse “inventata…” qualche genio antico. Forse il modello democratico a maggioranza non si è mai diffuso tra le società egualitarie perché, senza un apparato che imponga sulla minoranza riottosa le decisioni della maggioranza, è più sensato prendere decisioni sulla base del consenso ed evitare di polarizzare la comunità in fazioni.

Le democrazie maggioritarie sono emerse solo in presenza di due condizioni: 1) La maggior parte delle persone sente di dover dire la sua su decisioni che la riguardano, e 2) esiste un “apparato costrittivo che ha il potere di imporre queste decisioni”. È molto difficile che entrambe le condizioni coesistano, perché nelle società in cui è diffuso il sentire egualitario la costrizione è considerata un errore. E ovunque esista, questa costrizione sistematica ha origine in persone che usano deliberatamente la forza per perseguire i propri interessi a spese di chi subisce l’effetto delle loro decisioni. In origine, lo stato nasce come mezzo per privilegiare le classi che ne hanno il controllo, e per estrarre rendita dalla maggioranza sottoposta al loro governo.

La democrazia come ideologia moderna è nata in società che già erano governate da uno stato oppressivo al servizio degli interessi della classe dirigente. Capita solitamente che il sentimento democratico ed egualitario venga cooptato dalle singole fazioni dissidenti all’interno della classe dirigente, o aspirante tale, che poi si servono dell’aiuto delle classi inferiori per scalzare il regime; dopo di che la nuova classe dirigente annuncia una nuova finta “democrazia”, di cui si dichiara guardiano, e comincia così a governare la maggioranza nel proprio interesse.

Questo è il genere di “democrazia” celebrato da Obama. Noam Chomsky la chiama “democrazia degli spettatori”. Prima si scelgono i candidati tra quelli che rappresentano fazioni contendenti della stessa classe dirigente. Questi sono scelti all’interno della stessa classe dirigente. Dopo le elezioni si smonta la baracca e la nuova élite di governo procede a prendere gli ordini dalla Banca Mondiale e il Fondo Monetario, e firma l’ultimo trattato per il “libero commercio” scritto dalle corporazioni transnazionali, esattamente come aveva fatto l’élite precedentemente eletta. Se per disgrazia capita che un governo possiede un briciolo di democrazia autentica, minacciando così gli interessi economici del capitale transnazionale, Washington lo dichiara “stato terrorista” o “stato fallito” e manda i suoi funzionari della Cia, del National Endowment for Democracy, o della Fondazione Soros per minarlo o per spingere gli ufficiali militari che hanno legami con l’America a rovesciarlo.

La vera democrazia esiste da molto prima dello stato, fin da quando gli esseri umani si riunirono in comunità. E continuerà ad esistere per molto tempo dopo la fine dello stato.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “Magical Thinking and Authority” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Anyone who works within a corporate or government hierarchy, and has to do their job despite constant interference and irrationality from higher-ups, will recognize the truth of this phrase from Dilbert: “Bossworld, where the laws of time, space and mathematics don’t apply.”

There’s a lot of news and information related to prisons, policing, borders, and other facets of the prison state. In previous editions of the Weekly Abolitionist, I have tried to fit multiple stories into one theme or analytic frame. This week, however, I’ve encountered a diverse enough range of articles relating to these issues that I’ll be compiling them into a roundup.

• Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has an excellent reply to the argument that undocumented immigrants have acted immorally by violating the law. As an anarchist I reject the idea that one has a moral obligation to obey the state’s laws. But Somin persuasively argues that even with a presumption in favor of obedience to laws, there are good reasons to believe that other factors make it moral to cross borders without legal permission.
• In other news related to the criminalization of migrants, protests continue across the nation to oppose the ongoing harms of mass deportations. April 5th marked a National Day of Action Against Deportations. Over at PanAm Post, Fergus Hodgson has a good article on the protests.
• Deportations continue to destroy lives and break up families in my home state of Utah. Ana Cañenguez, who I have mentioned previously at this blog, was just told by ICE that her application for humanitarian exemption was denied. This means she will be deported back to El Salvador and her family will be split apart by state coercion. As Ana told reporters,  “I don’t understand why this President can tear families apart.”  We must fight for a world where no presidents or other state actors have that horrible power. As Anthony Gregory puts it, “End deportations now. This is beyond cruel, and such horrors occur hundreds of times a day in the name of immigration control. Obama’s presidency has topped all others on deportations in absolute terms, at least in modern history.”
• Another horror inflicted by the prison state is rape by state actors like police and prison guards. These rapists act with virtual impunity thanks to the state’s institutional power, ideological euphemisms, and the state’s monopoly on law. One of these rapists, Kansas City police officer Jeffrey Holmes, was actually convicted of a crime on Friday. Holmes raped two women, both of whom he accused of prostitution. While prosecutors alleged that he used his position as an officer to coerce the women into sex, prosecutors charged him not with rape or assault but with “corruption.” He was convicted of these charges and sentenced to “15 days in jail and a fine.” This is incredibly lenient compared to typical sentences for rape and sexual assault, and it is yet another example of euphemism being used to shield a state actor from accountability for rape.
• To  understand more about how the prison state enables rape, I highly recommend The Shame of Our Prisons: New Evidence, an article by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow from last October’s New York Review of Books. The article summarizes lots of recent research on prison rape from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and I find it immensely useful for understanding the specifics of the problem.
• As I write this, I’m listening to a talk by Jonathan Nitzan titled No Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power. Nitzan is one of the authors of Capital as Power, and this talk analyzes mass incarceration and punishment through the lens of his analysis of capitalism. This provides an explanation for the seemingly unusual phenomenon of liberal capitalist states incarcerating on a mass scale.
• For another economic perspective on prisons, I also recommend Daniel D’Amico’s talk The American Prison State. D’Amico looks at incarceration and punishment through the lens of free market economics, specifically the Austrian school.

I hope you find these links interesting and informative. I’ll leave you with something you can do to help those imprisoned by the American state. Writing to prisoners can make their life inside the prison slightly less monotonous and more livable. For a good way to start writing letters to prisoners, I recommend writing to prisoners on their birthdays. You can find some information on political prisoner birthdays for April here.

Em 2010, Newt Gingrich explicava que o presidente americano Barack Obama é “impossível de se entender” a não ser que usemos sua orientação ideológica “queniana e anti-colonial” para compreender suas bizarras ações. Porém, Obama tem sido incrivelmente bem sucedido em esconder seu profundo ódio ao colonialismo — ao ponto de elogiar a Europa, em discurso feito no último dia 26, por dar ao mundo direitos humanos e democracia:

[…] foi aqui na Europa, através de séculos de luta […] que alguns ideais começaram a surgir: a crença de que, através da consciência e do livre arbítrio, cada um de nós tem o direito de viver como desejar. A crença de que o poder é derivado do consentimento dos governados […].

David Graeber, antropólogo e pensador anarquista associado ao movimento Occupy Wall Street desde o princípio, tem muito a dizer sobre a ideia de que o auto-governo seja uma abstração tão grande que a raça humana sofria em sua ignorância até que alguns caras bem inteligentes em Atenas, Paris ou Filadélfia pensassem nela.

Em Fragmentos de uma Antropologia Anarquista, David Graeber argumenta que o auto-governo é algo praticado praticamente em todo lugar em grupos pequenos de pessoas comuns, porque, quando não há policiais ou exércitos para oprimir ninguém, ouvir as outras pessoas e estabelecer consensos é coisa mais sensata a se fazer. Esse tipo de tomada de decisões por consenso foi praticada em conselhos de vilarejos em todo o mundo durante toda a história e também por instituições populares que controlam recursos comuns, como estudou Elinor Ostrom. Essas instituições populares resistiram por muito tempo depois de o estado ter sido sobreposto à sociedade — instituições de vilas como o Mir russo e sociedades de trabalhadores e associações mútuas, por exemplo. Quanto à ideia de que as pessoas devem ter igual voz nas decisões que as afetam, isso é intuitivo para quase todos.

Os acadêmicos ocidentais da história do pensamento político normalmente não consideram que coisas como “um conselho de um vilarejo sulawesi ou talensi” estejam “no mesmo nível de Péricles”. Talvez, como afirma Graeber, decisões majoritárias e votações “não sejam ideias tão incrivelmente sofisticadas que não teriam ocorrido a ninguém até que um gênio antigo as ‘inventasse'”. Talvez o modelo ocidental de democracia majoritária não tenha sido amplamente utilizado em sociedades igualitárias porque, sem a estrutura concentrada e coercitiva para forçar as decisões da maioria sobre a minoria, era mais sensato tomar decisões por consenso e evitar a polarização da comunidade em facções.

A democracia majoritária emergiu somente quando duas condições existiam: 1) a maioria das pessoas passou a achar que era uma boa ideia que tivessem voz em decisões que as afetassem; e 2) surgiu de um “aparato coercitivo capaz de executar essas decisões”. É, na realidade, bastante incomum que as duas condições existam ao mesmo tempo, porque em sociedades com valores geralmente igualitários, a própria existência da coerção sistemática é considerada errada. E onde quer que ela tenha existido, a coerção teve origem no fato de que um grupo de pessoas deliberadamente utilizavam a força para perseguir seus interesses às custas daqueles afetados por suas decisões. O estado surgiu como meio para privilegiar as classes que o controlavam e extrair rendimentos da maioria que era subjugada.

A democracia, enquanto ideologia moderna, surgiu em sociedades que já eram dominadas por estados coercitivos que privilegiavam os interesses da classe dominante. Sentimentos democráticos e igualitários geralmente foram cooptados por facções dissidentes dentro das classes dominantes ou por classes desejosas do poder para conseguir o apoio das classes mais baixas para derrubar o regime existente — e para que, depois, as novas classes dominantes instaurem uma democracia de fachada tendo elas próprias como guardiãs para governar a maioria de acordo com seus interesses.

É esse tipo de “democracia” que é defendida por Obama. Noam Chomsky a chama de “democracia de espectadores”: escolher entre candidatos que representam alas de disputa dentro da mesma classe dominante, escolhidos por essa mesma classe dentro de suas fileiras, e sentar e calar a boca depois do fim da eleição, quando as novas lideranças vão obedecer às ordens do Banco Mundial, do FMI e assinar o próximo tratado de “livre comércio” escrito por corporações transnacionais (seguindo os mesmos passos das lideranças anteriores). Se, por algum desastre, o governo de um país de fato passar a refletir algum tipo de democracia genuína que ameace os interesses do capital transnacional, Washington o declara um “estado terrorista” ou “estado falido” e manda seus funcionários da CIA, da National Endowment for Democracy e da Fundação Soros para miná-lo, ou estimula militares com laços com os EUA a derrubá-lo.

A verdadeira democracia existia muito antes do surgimento dos estados, já que os seres humanos viviam inicialmente em comunidades. E ela continuará a existir muito depois de o governo sumir.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

There is a growing division among libertarians regarding the relationship between our fervent commitment to anti-statism and other principles we might hold regarding social and cultural issues. This distinction is a false dichotomy, though. Put simply, libertarians are for one overriding principle: liberty. This principle applies to situations involving the state and situations that don’t. Being concerned about non-state injustices in addition to state created ones strengthens our commitment to liberty. It means libertarianism is about more than anti-statism.

Recently, accomplished libertarian author and editor, Lew Rockwell, wrote an article on his blog titled “What Libertarian Is, and Isn’t.” Mr. Rockwell argues, “Libertarianism is concerned with the use of violence in society. That is all. It is not anything else.” He supports a view of libertarianism that is concerned solely with property rights and the defense thereof. Rockwell envisions the libertarian philosophy as being the non-aggression principle, Lockean property rights, and nothing more.

Any concern for social and cultural issues beyond this is merely a person’s preferences that have nothing to do with their libertarianism. “Libertarians are of course free to concern themselves with issues like feminism and egalitarianism. But their interest in those issues has nothing to do with, and is not required by or a necessary feature of, their libertarianism.” I don’t believe this is the case. My aligning myself with the ideas of feminism, anti-racism, gay and trans liberation, and worker empowerment is an outgrowth of my libertarianism. I am committed to those principles for the same reasons that I am committed to anti-statism.

The reason I concern myself with violations of peoples’ liberty that don’t owe their origin to the state is explained by Rockwell when he writes, “Our position is not merely that the state is a moral evil, but that human liberty is a tremendous moral good.” Exactly! I am against authoritarianism, domination, and believe in equality of authority. That is why I am opposed to statism. But it’s also why I am for a world free of institutional oppression in the form of patriarchy, racism, gay and trans shaming, and autonomy-destroying, hierarchical workplaces.

My belief in equality of authority applies to more than just the relationship between a statesman and the average person. It applies to all human relationships. Whether it be in the capitol building, or in the workplace, or the dinner table, or the lunch counter, I want to maximize human freedom. My desire for human liberation on all these fronts is directly tied to my libertarian philosophy. These commitments are not merely the interchangeable toppings on the pizza of libertarianism, they are the cheese.

Rockwell quotes Mr. Libertarian himself, Murray Rothbard, to support his undecorated libertarian position. Rothbard writes, “Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles.” I believe the true implications of what Rothbard is saying here supports the idea of a broad view of libertarianism, as opposed to Rockwell’s view. Libertarianism is, in fact, not about a certain lifestyle, other than how you interact with fellow human beings. Therefore, as a philosophy about proper social interactions, libertarianism is about the avoidance and disavowal of authoritarian relationships.

Rothbard’s argument shows how liberty is needed for each person to find their own purpose and achieve their own good. This goes beyond the actions of the state. Repressive cultural norms and domineering social customs also prevent people from flourishing. They, too, lessen people’s liberty. A black person can’t flourish if he lives in a staunchly racist community with employers and businesses who refuse him service. They wouldn’t be violating his rights, but they would certainly be diminishing his ability to achieve his own good. He would hardly be considered free in such an oppressive society.

Rothbard continues, “Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that “liberty is the highest political end” – not necessarily the highest end on everyone’s personal scale of values.” While this is an excellent quote by Lord Action, it doesn’t go far enough. Why would liberty only be relevant in the political sphere? It is certainly affected by various other factors. There is no reason to end our concern for human freedom at the doorstep of the capitol building. In order to remain consistent, we ought to extend that concern to all human interactions.

Rockwell concludes, “It need not and should not be fused with any extraneous ideology. This can lead only to confusion, and to watering down the central moral claims, and the overall appeal, of the message of liberty.” But there is no such fusion. Showing concern for authoritarian social relationships outside the purview of the state is merely fully fleshing out our core principles of autonomy and freedom. It doesn’t water down the message. It strengthens it. It makes it more internally coherent and makes concern for liberty the primary focus, rather than just vacuous anti-statism.

We support self-sovereignty, individual autonomy, and personal freedom. These are the bedrocks of our philosophical ideas: the pizza crust. Opposing statism, political tyranny, and centralized force and supporting civil liberties, free markets, and non-interventionism are one set of conclusions we must embrace: the tomato sauce. But this hardly the whole story. Our foundations also mean opposing cultural repression, societal intolerance, and authoritarian relationships and supporting feminism, gay and trans liberation, anti-racism, and worker empowerment, which are the other set of conclusions we must embrace: the cheese. Combined, all these things make up a large, delicious, beautiful pizza known as libertarianism.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, O libertarianismo é mais que o anti-estatismo.

Here we go again: The US Supreme Court has relaxed some political contribution limits. Cue the hype.

Last year, 2013, was the first year of the 2014 campaign cycle.

Question #1: How much did federal elected officials spend on their 2014 campaigns last year?

Answer:  At least $3.45 trillion — a little over $6.4 billion for each US Senator and US Representative and for the two elected executive branch officials, the president and vice-president.

Yes, I’m talking about the federal government’s entire budget.

Every dollar the US government spends serves one or both of two functions: Buying future support or rewarding past support for the politicians who spend it.

That’s not to say that government spending doesn’t ever serve other functions … but it ALWAYS serves those two whether it’s buying farm votes and urban working class votes with food stamps, factory worker votes with “defense” contracts, teachers’ union votes with education spending, “tough on crime” votes with mass incarceration, etc.

Question #2: When was the last time a challenger for federal office raised and spent $6.4 billion in voluntary, individual campaign contributions in a single campaign year? Or two (for a congressional election), four (for a presidential or vice-presidential campaign) or six (for a US Senate campaign)?

Answer: Never. Not even close.

Every elected federal incumbent gets a multi-billion-dollar head start on any potential challenger — before the free media advantage, before internal party support against primary challengers, before even beginning to ask for campaign contributions. Is it any wonder that in the last 20 years the re-election rate in the US House of Representatives has never dipped below 80% and that it has only done so twice in the US Senate?

The last time that re-election rate dipped below 80% in the US Senate, Senators for Life (if they wished it) John McCain and Joe Lieberman threw a temper tantrum for “campaign finance reform” to “get the big money out of elections.” Not THEIR “big money,” but the much smaller “big money” that threatened their sinecures (when Lieberman later lost a Democratic primary and formed his own shell party to get re-elected, it was telling that that party was called “Connecticut for Lieberman” rather than the reverse; Connecticut, in Lieberman’s view, clearly existed for the sole purpose of providing him with a Senate seat).

The only way to “get big money out of elections” is to stop HAVING elections — an idea which, as an anarchist, I strongly support. But that doesn’t seem like something that’s going to happen any time soon, so I’ll settle for an end to the Chicken Little hype-fest that erupts every time a court declines to stop a few more drops of rain from falling in the veritable ocean of “campaign finance.”

If there are going to be “campaign finance” caps, those caps should be on total receipts, not on individual contributions. And the ceiling should be no lower for challengers than for incumbents — including the trillions the incumbents spend off the “campaign” books.

Ho provato a cercare un solo caso di censura o discriminazione dei contenuti da parte dei fornitori di accesso internet in Brasile. Ho cercato casi in cui i fornitori di accesso bloccano l’accesso a specifici siti o offrono un piano più caro per accedere a più contenuti. Sembrerà incredibile ma non ho trovato nulla.

Ho pensato che magari stavo sbagliando, visto che, dopotutto, stavo cercando in internet stesso. Forse il mio fornitore blocca la ricerca, e quando digito “censura da parte dei fornitori di accesso ad internet” su Google è lo stesso fornitore di accesso che filtra i risultati. Forse stavo vivendo in una sorta di Matrix di internet, in cui tutto quello che vedo è quello che il potere vuole farmi vedere e io non me ne accorgo mai.

Però ho trovato diversi utenti che criticavano i servizi offerti dalla loro compagnia, che è quella di cui mi servo io. A quanto pare, il mio fornitore ha fallito miseramente nel suo tentativo di censurare i suoi utenti. Sono riuscito anche ad accedere ai siti della concorrenza e fare una valutazione dei loro prezzi; che, sorprendentemente, in alcuni casi risultavano più bassi di quello che pago io.

Non è possibile. Ho provato con altri siti che avrebbero potuto dare fastidio al mio fornitore. Siti che notoriamente sostengono posizioni politiche radicali e non ortodosse, ad esempio. Con C4SS non ho avuto problemi di accesso. La barra dei segnalibri del mio browser, dove sono diversi siti libertari e anarchici, è uscita incolume.

Posso guardare e scaricare video, così come ascoltare e scaricare musica. I siti torrent sono più vivi che mai per quanto mi riguarda; e non si può dire che siano ben accettati dai fornitori di accesso. Eppure sono a distanza di un click. Non importa quanti siti visito e quanto traffico genero, pago sempre la stessa cifra, ogni mese, per accedere ad internet. Chi l’avrebbe mai detto?

Non potevo crederci. Mi avevano detto che internet per me era quasi completamente chiuso. Senza le norme sulla neutralità della rete, i fornitori di accesso fanno pagare di più per accedere e secondo il piano sottoscritto non mi fanno accedere a certi siti web: una censura.

Questo è quello che ha detto il deputato federale (brasiliano, ndt) Alessandro Molon. Dice che, se non ci fosse la cosiddetta Pietra Miliare Civile di Internet, una nuova legge approvata dalla camera che impone la neutralità della rete, “chi oggi accede gratis a YouTube dovrà pagare di più per vedere i video, e chi scarica musica dovrà pagare di più per farlo.”

Per un attimo ho sperato che il mio fornitore mi facesse pagare di più per accedere a YouTube, così non posso entrarci e sentire le bugie ridicole e nauseanti di Molon.

Lo stato dice che vuole garantire la libertà su internet. È vero?

Lo stato brasiliano è secondo quanto a richieste di eliminazione di contenuti da Google. Fino a qualche tempo fa guidava la classifica. Di recente, la Corte Superiore di Giustizia ha stabilito che qualunque “contenuto offensivo” deve essere rimosso da YouTube.

Dunque l’onere di dimostrare che la neutralità della rete proposta dal governo allargherà la nostra libertà, invece del contrario, spetta tutto ai suoi sostenitori.

Non c’è neanche bisogno di difendere l’internet senza regole dalle dichiarazioni allucinanti di Alessandro Molon e Jean Wyllys, secondo i quali i fornitori di accesso – e non lo stato – stanno per privarci della nostra libertà. Perché è esattamente il contrario.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

C4SS Media presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The New Economy and the Cost Principle” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“As free marketers, decentralists and individualists, we occupy a corner of the libertarian movement. At the same time, as critics of wealth inequality and champions of the poor and working classes, we find ourselves within today’s anti-capitalist movements for economic justice. Given the most commonly repeated terms of debate, the false dichotomies bleated on cable news and opinion pages day after day, these commitments may seem to present a contradiction. Free marketers are regarded as defenders of a plutocratic economic status quo, with the state cast as bulwark against cutthroat competition and protector of the little guy.”

Alternet just can’t stop publishing attacks on libertarianism. The article is titled “10 Reasons Americans Should be Wary of Rand Paul’s Libertarianism, Especially Young People“. It mistakenly labels Rand Paul a libertarian. He has stated he isn’t one:

They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I’m not a libertarian.

He has also displayed a less than libertarian attitude on the War on Drugs:

“He made it very clear that he does not support legalization of drugs like marijuana and that he supports traditional marriage,” [said Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa].

Let us address several of the most important points in this piece. The author writes:

Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian believes that “liberty” is freedom from an oppressive government. But in a democracy the government is us. The real oppressors in today’s economic and political system are the corporations which increasingly dominate all aspects of our public and private lives

One need not choose between opposing government power or corporate power, both deserve our condemnation. They also tend to work together as the author acknowledges in her mention of the corporate state. The author also repeats the tired old fallacy of the government being us. If this were true, when the government kills us it would be suicide rather than murder. It also ignores that there is never total agreement about government policies. Elections always contain a minority that doesn’t get its way. In what meaningful sense are they part of the government? It also supposes a singular social super organism.

The author also contends:

Said Paul, “I would introduce and support legislation to send Roe v. Wade back to the states.”

Why? So that decisions about what a woman does with her body can be made by politicians like that guy in Virginia wanted mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds for any woman who wanted to terminate a pregnancy?

The author is wrong to implicitly ascribe this position to libertarianism. Libertarianism is about individual rights and not states rights, No government has rights; only individuals do. On this issue, I agree with the criticism, but it has nothing to do with libertarian principle.

The final contention we address goes as follows:

Those of us who are fighting for jobs programs and infrastructure investment—two things that would help the millennial generation significantly—have a fierce opponent in Rand Paul. Paul believes government spending is inherently bad, and tax cuts are inherently good. There are jobs proposals that target millennials for assistance. Rand Paul is against them.

The author apparently thinks jobs are something that should be handed down by a governing class. We left-libertarians seek to create our own workplace. As far as infrastructure goes, state funded infrastructure is a way to externalize costs of business onto the general taxpayer. An example is roads used predominantly by corporations engaged in long distance shipping. We bear the costs of their business model. Let us work to put an end to this.

Mais de dez anos atrás, blogueiros neoconservadores cunharam o termo “fisking” para nomear a atividade polêmica (originalmente demonstrada contra o jornalista de esquerda Robert Fisk) de desmontar um comentário, frase a frase, analisando e refutando cada trecho dele. Embora as ideias neoconservadoras sejam tanto incorretas quanto repugnantes, a técnica é válida. E as observações recentes do presidente Barack Obama sobre a crise na Crimeia, em seu discurso no dia 26 de março à juventude europeia, são especialmente adequados a essa descontrução. Portanto, vamos analisar algumas passagens relevantes, ponto por ponto, e compará-las à realidade.

A Rússia se referiu à decisão dos Estados Unidos de ir à guerra no Iraque como exemplo de hipocrisia ocidental. Agora, é verdade que a Guerra do Iraque foi amplamente debatida não só no resto do mundo, mas também dentro dos EUA. Eu participei desse debate e me opus à intervenção militar. Mas, mesmo no Iraque, os Estados Unidos buscaram atuar dentro do sistema internacional.

O tal “sistema internacional” a que Obama se refere de forma idealista foi criado pelos Estados Unidos depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, tendo a Grã-Bretanha e a França como parceiros minoritários, e foi desenvolvido para manter a posição dos EUA como o “poder hegemônico dentro da ordem mundial”. Perceba que a última citação não é de Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn ou qualquer outro acadêmico de esquerda, mas sim de Samuel Huntington — um participante ativo e entusiasta da formulação desse sistema.

O sistema internacional estabelecido em Bretton Woods (o Banco Mundial e o Fundo Monetário Internacional — FMI), que tinha o Conselho de Segurança da ONU e as forças armadas americanas como braços executivos, foi desenhado para garantir que tentativas regionais de secessão econômica, como a Forteleza Europa da Alemanha e a Esfera de Co-prosperidade da Grande Ásia Oriental do Japão jamais ameaçassem novamente tirar grande parte dos recursos naturais ou mercados do controle da ordem corporativa mundial. A função principal das atividades estratégicas americanas nos últimos 70 anos foi garantir que o Sul do planeta se desenvolva dentro da estrutura dessa ordem mundial — chegando ao ponto de usar golpes militares, esquadrões da morte e terrorismo quando necessário como retaliações a contestações locais ao sistema.

Não reivindicamos ou anexamos o território iraquiano. Não tomamos posse de seus recursos para nosso proveito.

É verdade. O governo dos Estados Unidos não anexou formalmente qualquer território iraquiano ou tomou seus recursos em seu nome. Ele apenas ajudou muitas corporações multinacionais a saquear a economia do derrotado Iraque, sob a supervisão das autoridades militares americanas. A Autoridade Provisória da Coalizão, sob o comando de Paul Bremer, leiloou todo o estado iraquiano com a ajuda dos mesmos estrategistas neoliberais do Instituto Heritage e do American Enterprise Institute que haviam supervisionado a pilhagem do Chile e da Rússia sob Pinochet e Yeltsin. Ela invadiu violentamente, roubou e destruiu a sede da federação de sindicatos iraquiana. E também aprovou o acesso do Iraque aos tratados de “direitos de propriedade” mundiais, que deram às empresas de música e filmes, à Microsoft, à Merck, à Pfizer e à Monsanto direitos eternos para extrair dinheiro do suor e do sangue do povo iraquiano.

Ao invés disso, terminamos a guerra e deixamos o Iraque para seu povo com um estado soberano capaz de tomar decisões sobre seu próprio futuro.

De fato. Os Estados Unidos deixaram o Iraque com uma constituição escrita por Paul Bremer e companhia, que transformou em lei permanente toda pilhagem corporativa que ocorreu com a invasão e que requer autorizações da maioria em tantas províncias para a aprovação de emendas que é praticamente impossível acontecer qualquer mudança. Então, é verdade, o governo americano abandonou a anexação direta de territórios (como o Havaí, Porto Rico e outros) muito tempo atrás. Ele foi inteligente o bastante para perceber que é mais barato terceirizar a defesa de seus interesses corporativos para democracias de fachada nominalmente independentes, reservando o uso direto da força para ocasiões em que essas democracias saem do controle.

A social-democracia “idealista” de John Kennedy, assim como o processo de fabricação de salsichas, não é digna de análise tão profunda. Na realidade, por trás de todas alegações de promover os “ideais do Iluminismo”, a “comunidade global” e os “direitos humanos”, o estado exerce só uma função: servir aos interesses da classe econômica que o controla.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

Non-libertarians often find libertarianism baffling. Notice the fundamentally puzzled tone of so many critiques of libertarianism – like, for example, this one by Don Herzog (I choose it more or less at random):

There’s something endearingly toughminded, if that’s not an oxymoron, about libertarianism. At the same time, for the same reason, there’s something unbelievably monotonous about it. Whatever the issue, libertarians can be relied on to complain that people’s rights, especially their property rights, are being violated. Violations of rights, apparently, are everywhere: in laws prohibiting the sale and possession of crack, in zoning regulations, in antitrust statutes, in any and all sorts of economic redistribution, even in the public ownership of roads and taxation itself. [1]

The unspoken subtext is: why on earth would anyone believe this? To the nonlibertarian, libertarianism seems simply weird in its insistence that people have, on the one hand, no welfare rights at all – and on the other hand, property rights so robust that nearly every law on the books stands in violation of them. Libertarianism, in its apparent stark and fanatical focus on negative rights above all else, irresistibly reminds non-libertarians of the contending schools of Presocratic philosophy, intemperately insisting that everything was water, or fire, or motion, or rest. Libertarian policy prescriptions can easily seem to express a kind of fundamentalist mind-set comparable in strangeness and extremism (though of course not in content) to that of the Taliban.

This appearance, I shall argue, is illusory. Regardless of whether libertarians are right or wrong, their viewpoint, I contend, derives not from an alien set of values, but rather from a quite ordinary set of values coupled with a recognition of the logical implications of those values. In Section One I shall explain why libertarians favour negative rights over positive ones; in Section Two I shall turn to the application of this position to property rights.

I. One Right to Rule Them All

Libertarians believe [2] that there is, fundamentally, only one right: the right not to be aggressed against. All further rights are simply applications of, rather than supplements to, this basic right. Hence the vast panoply of other rights – positive rights, welfare rights – recognized by existing political regimes is dismissed as illegitimate.

This view seems mysterious to non-libertarians. More specifically, the libertarian position strikes many critics as puzzlingly one-sided. Freedom from aggression is a good thing, certainly; but so are freedom from hunger, freedom from disease, and freedom from poverty. Why not recognize rights in all these cases? What sort of lopsided view would one have to have of human life, in order to think that aggression is, but hunger, disease, and poverty are not, serious enough evils to take into account in devising a system of rights?

In what follows I offer an explanation of the libertarian position. Although I myself accept that position, I shall not be arguing for its truth; but I do hope to show that the position is not especially puzzling or mysterious, and that it does not depend on an implausible assessment (or indeed any assessment) of the relative badness of aggression compared to other evils.

The libertarian position comprises two distinct claims: first, we have a right not to be aggressed against (call this the Positive Thesis); second, we have no other rights (call this the Negative Thesis). While neither of these theses is uncontroversial, the Negative Thesis is likely to meet with far more dissent than the Positive Thesis. But for the libertarian, any such differential response must express a confusion, because the Positive Thesis turns out to entail the Negative Thesis (at least with the help of some truistic auxiliary premises).

For libertarians, the concept of rights belongs in the first instance to the realm of interpersonal ethics, and applies to the political realm only secondarily. That is because, for libertarians – as for the liberal tradition generally – rights are not the product of a political regime, but are prior to such regimes and constitute a constraint on them. Hence rights cannot without circularity be defined in terms of the purposes of a political regime. If political regimes are constrained by certain pre-existing rights, and indeed have as one of their purposes the protection of these rights, then it must be possible to describe what these rights require without presupposing the existence of a political regime. A crucial feature of libertarian political theorizing is the insistence that not just the precise nature, but the very existence, of political authority requires justification and cannot simply be assumed. If we start from the basic natural rights that human beings would have in any social context, including a state of nature, then the specification of a particular political regime cannot subtract from that array of rights; but then it cannot add to it either, for, as we shall see, the addition of one right always involves the subtraction of another.

How, then, are rights to be defined, if all reference to political institutions is to be omitted? To have a right is to have a moral claim against another person or persons; but not every such moral claim is a right. My having a right to be treated in a certain manner involves, at least, other people having an obligation so to treat me; but it must involve more than this, for not every such obligation has a right as its correlate. I have an obligation to be polite to my associates and grateful to my benefactors, but they have no right (except metaphorically) to my politeness or my gratitude.

It might be suggested that the correlate of a right is not just any obligation, but a legal obligation. Certainly this answer is on the right track, and is in line with the term’s historical associations, but as it stands it is inadequate. For, once again, we cannot without circularity define rights in terms of legal concepts and institutions if we wish to use rights as an independent standard for and constraint on legal institutions. But the reference to legal obligations does point to a crucial fact: the obligations that are correlated with rights differ from other obligations in being legitimately enforceable. If you wish to get me to honour a moral claim against me, you are free to lecture me, cajole me, or pay me, but only if the moral claim is a right may you use force as a means of securing my compliance. Hence X’s having a right against Y comprises both an obligation component and a permissibility component: the obligation on Y’s part to treat X in a certain manner, and the permissibility, on the part of X or of someone acting on X’s behalf, of forcibly compelling Y to treat X in that manner. (Note that the permissibility of enforcing a right does not entail the permissibility of exercising that right. I have the right to publish and distribute Nazi propaganda; it would not be permissible for me to exercise that right, but it would nevertheless be permissible for me, or my agent, to fend off by force anyone who proposed to suppress that right.)

But if rights are defined in terms of force, then there are conceptual constraints on what we can say about the relation between rights and aggression. For aggression and force are conceptually linked; aggression is initiatory force – or conversely, force is that mode of conduct which, if initiated unilaterally, counts as aggression. (To be sure, the precise contours of these two concepts stand in need of specification; but the vagueness of one is the vagueness of the other. Any doubts as to whether a particular course of action counts as force will be mirrored by doubts as to whether the initiation of that sort of conduct counts as aggression.) [3]

Now libertarians, as we have seen, accept the Positive Thesis that we have a right not to be aggressed against. Some libertarians accept this thesis on primarily deontological grounds, pointing, e.g., to the Kantian injunction not to treat persons as mere means to the ends of others, or the Lockean principle that we are not “made for one another’s uses.” Other libertarians accept the thesis on primarily consequentialist grounds, pointing to the beneficial results of voluntary relationships and the harmful results of coercive ones. [4]

But whatever the grounds, even those who reject the Positive Thesis will agree that it is attractive and that there is nothing mysterious about embracing it; it is the Negative Thesis that seems so outrageous. But what the libertarian is claiming is that the possibility of accepting the Positive Thesis while rejecting the Negative Thesis is precluded by the logical structure of the concepts involved. If people have a right not to be aggressed against, then people have a right not to be subjected to any initiatory use of force.

Consider the implications. What would have to be true if there were, in addition, some right other than the right not to be aggressed against? This would have to be a right to be treated in manner X, where failing to act in manner X does not constitute aggression, or initiatory force. (For if failing to act in manner X did constitute initiatory force, then the right to be treated in manner X would be a mere application of, rather than a supplement to, the right not to be aggressed against.) But if failing to act in manner X does not involve initiatory force, then either it involves non-initiatory force, or it does not involve force at all.

Suppose that failing to act in manner X does not involve force at all; in that case, compelling someone to act in manner X would constitute initiatory force, i.e., aggression, since it would be a use of force in response to something other than force. Once we grant the Positive Thesis and recognize a right not to be aggressed against, there can then be no right whose enforcement would involve compelling conduct whose non-performance would not involve the use of force.

Suppose instead that failing to act in manner X does involve force, but not initiatory force. Then what sort of force is it? It must presumably be a forcible restraint of another’s aggression; for otherwise it would be initiatory. But the forcible restraint of another’s aggression is permissible; for once we have granted the existence of a right not to be aggressed against, then we have granted the permissibility of forcibly restraining others’ aggression – since, as we’ve seen, the right not to be aggressed against comprises both the obligation not to aggress and the permissibility of using force to secure such non-aggression. Since forcible restraint of others’ aggression is permissible, there cannot be a right to forbid such forcible restraint.

If an activity involves no use of force, then there can be no right to suppress it by force, since such a use of force would be aggression, and so would violate the obligation component of the right not to be aggressed against. And if an activity involves a non-initiatory use of force, then once again there can be no right to suppress it by force, since such a use of force would violate the permissibility component of the right not to be aggressed against. Hence the only activity whose forcible suppression is consistent with the right not to be aggressed against, is aggression itself. But there can be a right to be treated in manner X, only if forcibly compelling people to act in manner X is permissible, which in turn is possible only if failing to act in manner X is an activity whose forcible suppression is permissible. Thus if aggression is the only activity whose forcible suppression is permissible, then refraining from aggression is the only activity whose performance may legitimately be compelled. It follows that by recognizing a right not to be aggressed against, we have thereby ipso facto ruled out the existence of any other right.

Let me state this argument somewhat more formally:

1. Every person has the right not to be aggressed against by any other person. [The Positive Thesis.] (Premise.)
2. Aggression = initiatory force. (Premise.)
3. X has a right against Y to be treated in manner Z just in case a) Y is obligated to treat X in manner Z, and b) it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (Premise.)
4. Every activity constitutes either initiatory force, non-initiatory force, or non-force. (Premise.)
5. An activity constitutes non-initiatory force just in case it is a use of force to restrain others from initiating force against one. (Premise.)
6. Whatever it is permissible to do, it is impermissible to suppress by force. (Premise.)
7. Doing something is obligatory just in case not doing it is not permissible. (Premise.)
8. If an activity constitutes non-force, then forcibly suppressing it constitutes initiatory force. (Premise.)
9. If X has a right against Y to be treated in manner Z, then it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (3)
10. Every person has the right not to have force initiated against her by any other person. (1, 2)
11. Every person is obligated not to initiate force against any other person, and it is permissible for any person, or the agent of any person, to use force to restrain others from initiating force against that person. (3, 10)
12. Every person is obligated not to initiate force against any other person. (11)
13. It is permissible for any person, or the agent of any person, to use force to restrain others from initiating force against that person. (11)
14. If X has any right against Y other than the right not to be aggressed against by Y, then there is a way of acting, Z, such that Z does not constitute aggression, and yet it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (9)
15. If X has any right against Y other than the right not to be aggressed against by Y, then there is a way of acting, Z, such that failing to act in manner Z does not constitute initiatory force, and yet it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (2, 14)
16. If X has any right against Y other than the right not to be aggressed against by Y, then there is a way of acting, Z, such that failing to act in manner Z constitutes either non-initiatory force or non-force, and yet it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (4, 15)
17. It is permissible for any person to engage in non-initiatory force. (5, 13)
18. It is impermissible for any person forcibly to prevent any other person from engaging in non-initiatory force. (6, 17)
19. It is impermissible for any person to initiate force against any other person. (7, 12)
20. It is impermissible for any person forcibly to prevent any other person from engaging in an activity that constitutes non-force. (8, 19)
21. It is impermissible for any person forcibly to prevent any other person from engaging either in non-initiatory force or in non-force. (18, 20)
22. There is no way of acting, Z, such that failing to act in manner Z constitutes either non-initiatory force or non-force, and yet it is permissible for X, or X’s agent, to use force to compel Y to treat X in manner Z. (21)
23. There are no rights other than the right not to be aggressed against. [The Negative Thesis.] (16, 22)

The frequent charge that libertarians recognize too few rights – that they should recognize positive rights in addition to negative ones – is thus an empty one. Since every right carries with it a permissibility of enforcement, to introduce a new right is always to introduce a new permissible use of force to restrict people’s activities, and thus to close off forcibly certain choices that were previously open to them. If I gain a right to be treated in manner M, you must correspondingly lose the right not to treat me in manner M. Hence every time we add a right here, we ipso facto subtract a right there; the total quantity of rights can thus be rearranged, but not increased. Perhaps libertarians recognize the wrong rights; but it makes no sense to complain that they recognize too few.

Because libertarians acknowledge only negative and not positive rights, critics often assume that libertarians must also, bizarrely, acknowledge only negative and not positive obligations. But of course libertarians acknowledge both kinds of obligations. [5] It’s just that libertarians understand negative obligations to rule out the enforceability of positive obligations; the ban on positive rights derives from conceptual constraints inherent in our negative obligations, not from any privileging of negative obligations over positive ones. (The libertarian is not, for example, committed to regarding freedom from aggression as more important than any other value.)

The Positive Thesis initially seemed more plausible than the Negative Thesis; but once we grant premises 2 through 8, then we can see that the Positive and Negative Theses stand or fall together. Of course premises 2 through 8 are not immune from challenge; but they do have, I submit, a certain luminous obviousness about them. The most likely target for the non-libertarian, then, is premise 1, the Positive Thesis, which for many will lose much of its initial plausibility once it is seen to commit us to the Negative Thesis. But the non-libertarian will then need to face and overcome the deontological and consequentialist arguments for the Positive Thesis. I think those arguments are weighty ones, but defending them is not my present concern; I am simply attempting to delineate the logical structure of libertarianism, to show how its claims hang together.

II. The Logic of Property

A fuller understanding of the libertarian conception of non-aggression requires some attention to the issue of property rights. Libertarians, notoriously, condemn as unrightful any interference with private property. But how is this connected with the libertarian position on aggression? After all, someone could acknowledge a right to be free from initiatory force, but deny that seizing someone’s external possessions counts as initiatory force, or indeed as force at all.

Let us first observe that insofar as a property right is the right to exercise control over some external [6] resource, the defender of welfare programs, economic regulation, and redistributive taxation is as much a proponent of property rights as the libertarian. Someone who claims that the less affluent have a right to the excess wealth of the more affluent (or, for that matter, vice versa) [7] is asserting a right, on the part of one group, to exercise control over certain resources that have heretofore been under the control of another group. Hence the libertarian and the welfare-statist disagree, not about the existence of property rights, but about the transfer conditions of those rights. [8] For the libertarian, a property right can pass from X to Y only if both parties consent to the transfer; [9] for the welfare-statist, such a transfer of property rights can be triggered not only by mutual consent, but also by, e.g., Y’s need, regardless of X’s consent. Hence the libertarian rejection of positive rights does not ipso facto rule out the existence of welfare rights or a welfare state, at least not without further argument; for the welfare state could be seen as securing the negative right of the needy not to be prevented from helping themselves to resources to which they are entitled. [10]

What, then, explains the libertarian’s dissent from the welfare-statist position?

Since libertarians accept the Positive Thesis, they can acknowledge a right to control external resources only insofar as interference with such control would constitute initiatory force. This brings us back to the question of specifying what counts as force. Imagine a world in which people freely expropriate other people’s possessions; nobody initiates force directly against another person’s body, but subject to that constraint, people regularly grab any external resource they can get their hands on, regardless of who has made or been using the resource. Any conception of aggression according to which the world so described is free of aggression is not a plausible one. [11]

Hence it follows that we are committed to recognizing, as instances of initiatory force, some forms of interference with one’s control over external resources, even if no bodily assault on one’s person is involved. But if such forms of interference constitute initiatory force, then it must be permissible to interfere with them; hence it follows that we must also recognize some forms of interference that do not constitute initiatory force. In short, we are committed to a system of property rights – that is, a set of principles determining when one may, and when one may not, interfere with a person’s control over some external resource.

The question, then, is: what system of property rights has the best claim to be an instantiation of the right not to be aggressed against? I shall not argue that the libertarian system is decisively superior to the welfare-statist system on this count; I shall merely attempt to show that there are certain difficulties in regarding the welfare-statist system as an instantiation of the right of non-aggression, and that the libertarian system is not subject to these particular difficulties.

Libertarian property rights are, famously, governed by principles of justice in initial appropriation (mixing one’s labour with previously unowned resources), justice in transfer (mutual consent), and justice in rectification (say, restitution plus damages). [12]

It is easy to see how the right not to be aggressed against will be interpreted here: I count as initiating force against a person if I seize an external resource that she is entitled to by the application of those three principles. If she is not entitled to the resource under these principles, but is in possession of the resource anyway, then my seizing the resource counts as force, but not as initiatory force, so long as I am acting on behalf of whichever person is entitled to the resource; otherwise I am initiating force against that person. [13]

Whether or not this is the most defensible instantiation of the right not to be aggressed against, it is at least a possible and coherently intelligible way of instantiating that right. [14]

It is not clear that the same can be said for the welfare-statist alternative. The welfare-statist may of course claim that it is aggression to cling to one’s resources when there are others who need them more; but what could this mean in practice? Suppose that the disparity of wealth between Scrooge and Cratchit is great enough to trigger an entitlement on Cratchit’s part to some portion of Scrooge’s resources. Several difficulties immediately arise.

First, if Cratchit was initially as wealthy as Scrooge, and through some misfortune has become poor overnight, then Scrooge, through no action of his own, has unwittingly passed from rightful possession to wrongful possession of the resources in question. If seizing resources is to count as force, as it must if property rights are to be based on the right not to be aggressed against, then from Cratchit’s suddenly acquiring title to (and thus a right to seize) these resources in Scrooge’s possession, it follows that Scrooge’s possession of them must suddenly have come to count as aggression (since otherwise Cratchit’s seizure of the resources would be initiatory force). But any conception of aggression according to which one can become an aggressor merely by undergoing a Cambridge change seems inadequate. [15]

Moreover, how great must the disparity of wealth between Scrooge and Cratchit be before the transfer of property rights is triggered? To what percentage of Scrooge’s resources does Cratchit become entitled? If there are many Scrooges and many Cratchits, by what means are we determine how much which Cratchits may take from which Scrooges? The Rawlsian Difference Principle and other such guidelines would be of little help here, for they specify no determinate outcome; one cannot say, e.g., that any given Cratchit has a right to keep seizing resources from any given Scrooge until the disparity in their respective socioeconomic conditions is reduced to a point that is favorable to the worst-off person, for that yields no concrete guidance. The Difference Principle is not meant to be a policy dictating specific transfers; rather, it is a standard against which policies dictating specific transfers may be tested.

More precisely, the Difference Principle and other such guidelines are not principles of interpersonal ethics; rather, they are meant to guide the laws and policies of a political regime. What the welfare-statist is really advocating is not Cratchit’s right to seize some portion of Scrooge’s resources, but Cratchit’s right to have the government allocate resources in accordance with rules that pass the test of the Difference Principle or some analogous principle. But now it is the government’s right to control Scrooge’s resources that stands in need of justification. [16]

Since governments, on any liberal view, are not mystical bodies of social union but are simply collections of individuals, on an equal moral footing with the individuals they govern, a government can have no rights in excess of the sum of the rights of the individuals composing it. [17]

Recall, too, that if rights are to serve as an external standard for the evaluation of political institutions, they cannot without circularity be defined in terms of such institutions; on the contrary, to paraphrase Jefferson, governments are instituted among men to secure rights independently defined. Hence there cannot be a basic right to be treated in a certain way by government; any such right must be reducible to rights holding in ordinary interpersonal relations. The libertarian system of property rights is specifiable in such terms; the welfare-statist one, it seems, is not.

Of course, just as it is open to the welfare-statist to reject the Positive Thesis that people have a right not to be aggressed against, it is also open to the welfare-statist to reject the claim that rights are an external constraint on political institutions. I submit, however, that the result will not only no longer be libertarian; it will also no longer even be liberal. [18]

The truth or falsity of libertarianism, however, is not my present concern. I claim to have shown only the following:

1. Whether or not the Positive Thesis, that we have a right not to be aggressed against, is true, there is certainly nothing mysterious or one-sided about finding such a thesis plausible and attractive.
2. Given the Positive Thesis, together with some highly plausible auxiliary premises, the Negative Thesis, that we have no rights other then the right not to be aggressed against, necessarily follows, and so there is nothing mysterious or one-sided in embracing it.
3. Given the Positive and Negative Theses, the libertarian view of property rights is more defensible than the welfare-statist view, and so there is nothing mysterious or one-sided about preferring the former to the latter.

To the extent that I have succeeded in my purpose, the libertarian’s ethical and political commitments should now be, if not compelling, then at least comprehensible. [19]

Notes:

1. Don Herzog, “Gimme That Old-Time Religion,” Critical Review 4, nos. 1-2 (1990), pp. 74-85.

2. In light of the diversity of the libertarian movement, there is probably no true sentence beginning with “Libertarians believe,” if that is read as “All libertarians believe”; but the view described here is certainly the dominant one. Hence the term “libertarians,” here and throughout, means no more than “the libertarian mainstream.” A typical statement of the kind of position I describe, though differing in presentation from my account, is Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

3. It should be noted that “aggression,” as used here, is a descriptive concept, not a normative one; hence the libertarian prohibition on aggression is not a truism. (Admittedly, the term “aggression” has pejorative connotations – and deservedly so! But so do terms like “torture” and “genocide”; that doesn’t make them normative concepts. In such cases, the pejorative connotation is not part of the stipulated meaning of the term, but derives from the recognition that what the term describes is in fact evil.)

4. My own position is that deontological considerations ground a strong presumption in favour of the Positive Thesis; that this presumption could in principle be overridden by sufficiently weighty consequentialist considerations; and that, nonetheless, consequentialist considerations in fact reinforce the Positive Thesis rather than overriding it.

5. This is true even of that minority of libertarians that bases libertarian rights on an egoistic foundation. Ethical egoism is a theory not of the scope of our obligations, but of their ground.

6. For the libertarian, of course, one’s property includes not just external resources but one’s own person as well; but for present purposes I shall ignore this complication and restrict the use of the term “property” to external resources.

7. It’s worth noting that most libertarians regard the actual operation of the regulatory welfare state as, on balance, upwardly rather than downwardly redistributive – a claim supported by appeal to economic and historical considerations, and often invoked in consequentialist arguments for the Positive Thesis; see, e.g., Roderick T. Long, “Rothbard’s ‘Left and Right’: Forty Years Later,” Mises Daily Article, 8 April 2006, <http://mises.org/story/2099>; “They Saw It Coming: The 19th -Century Libertarian Critique of Fascism,” 2 November 2005, <http://lewrockwell.com/long/long15.html>; and “Who’s the Scrooge? Libertarians and Compassion,” Formulations 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993-94), <http://tinyurl.com/7pqhr>.

8. See Roderick T. Long, “Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights: The Limits of Compulsory Altruism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 1 (1993), pp. 166-91.

9. Or as compensation to the victim of a rights-violation; for an account of this right as an application of, rather than a supplement to, the right not to be aggressed against, see Roderick T. Long, “The Irrelevance of Responsibility,” Social Philosophy and Policy 16, no. 2 (1999), pp. 118-145.

10. cf. James P. Sterba, “From Liberty to Welfare,” Social Theory and Practice 11, no. 3 (1985), pp. 285-305.

11. Recall that aggression is still being treated as a descriptive concept, not a normative one. Hence the question is not whether the grab-what-you-can world is free of injustice, but whether it is free of initiatory force. If I starve to death because someone raids my food stores every time I turn my back, it does not seem implausible to describe the situation as one in which I am forced into starvation.

12. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

13. To say that nobody is entitled to the resource is self-defeating, since that would mean that nobody has a right to decide what happens to it, which in turn would mean that nobody has a right to interfere with anybody else’s use of it – which comes perilously close to conceding title to whichever person is using it at the moment.

14. I am sympathetic to a broadly Lockean account in which a person’s right to exclusive control over her possessions is seen as closely analogous to her right to exclusive control over the molecules currently composing her body. In effect, the physical boundaries of the self are not one’s body but one’s ongoing projects; indeed, a person’s body just is one of her ongoing projects, so the right to bodily integrity is just one more property right. (cf. Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Natural Property Rights As Body Rights,” Noûs 16 (1980), pp. 171-193.) However, I do not take my present argument to depend on the correctness of this account, since at the moment my thesis is not that the libertarian view of property is true, but rather that it is, while the welfare-statist view is not, intelligible as an application of the Positive Thesis.

15. Ann Levey suggests that a welfare-statist could evade my Cambridge-change objection by claiming that no one has a right to any property above a basic minimum; in that case, the surplus property rights of the wealthy, rather than having Cambridge changes as their transfer conditions, would never exist in the first place. This would of course be a rather odd welfare state; once everyone had received the basic minimum, the government could freely grab the surplus of the wealthy, and the wealthy could freely grab it back. But such a system, even if workable, is still vulnerable to a Cambridge-change objection. There cannot be a rights-violation without a rights-violator; so if I have a right to a basic minimum, that means that when I fall below that minimum, someone must be violating my right. But if everyone were to fall below the basic minimum, then no one could count as the rights-violator. Hence the right to a basic minimum makes sense only if the level of the basic minimum is not fixed, but varies with the general affluence of society. But in that case, we still get the Cambridge-change problem: whether I count as an aggressor or not will depend on changes elsewhere in the economy.

16. James Sterba argues that welfare rights are negative property rights, and infers that libertarian considerations therefore mandate a welfare state: “Only a welfare state would be able to effectively solve the large-scale coordination problem necessitated by the provision of welfare. Consequently, once a system of welfare rights can be seen to have a libertarian justification, the argument for a welfare state hardly seems to need stating.” (Sterba, op. cit., p. 305.) But even if we leave aside the consequentialist arguments offered by libertarians against the thesis that the welfare state is the most effective means of securing welfare rights, there is still a problem: if, as Sterba seems to see, it is only in the context of a welfare state that it can be settled which obligations are entailed by welfare rights, then pre-existing welfare rights cannot, contra Sterba, be given any specificity, and so cannot be used to justify the establishment of a welfare state in the first place. (But for a possibly contrary view see Jeremy Shearmur, “The Right to Subsistence in a ‘Lockean’ State of Nature,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 4 (1989), pp. 561-­68.)

17. For the basically egalitarian impulse behind libertarian doctrine, see Roderick T. Long, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal,” <http://www.mises.org/story/804>.

18. cf. Roderick T. Long, “Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 2 (1995), pp. 1-31.

19. This paper has benefited from helpful comments by Ann Levey – though I suspect she will find this version as deranged as the last one.