Qualche tempo fa la cantautrice Ani DiFranco ha dovuto cancellare il suo “Righteous Retreat in the Big Easy”, un ritrovo di autori di canzoni ospitato nella Nottoway Plantation and Resort, una ex piantagione di schiavi in Luisiana. La scelta del luogo aveva provocato un meritato scontento, costringendo la DiFranco alla ritirata. La cantante ha poi scritto quella che Callie Beusman, di Jezebel, ha chiamato “una richiesta di scuse senza una richiesta di scuse”. Più che chiedere scusa per il gesto, lo ha difeso.

La Nottoway Plantation and Resort non descrive la storia della schiavitù: le dà una mano di tinta e la glorifica. Dice il suo sito che “Randolph [Nottoway] sapeva che per mantenere i lavoratori ben disposti era necessario provvedere non solo alle necessità di base dei suoi schiavi, come l’alloggio, il cibo e le medicine, ma occorreva anche dare loro una ricompensa e un premio per la produttività.” Invece di mettere in evidenza la violazione dei diritti insita nella schiavitù, il sito definisce gli schiavi “lavoratori ben disposti” e propaganda i presunti benefici ricevuti dagli schiavi.

Il sito vanta anche il fatto che “Una ristrutturazione profonda costata milioni di dollari ha riportato questa piantagione storica ai suoi giorni di gloria”. Io non definirei i giorni della schiavitù, dell’abuso, e dello sfruttamento, “giorni di gloria”.

Il problema qui va oltre una semplice ripulitura della storia della schiavitù. Dovremmo chiederci per quale ragione questa piantagione esiste ancora. Dovremmo chiederci perché è ancora proprietà di persone ricche. Gli schiavi mischiarono il loro lavoro con la terra, facendola fruttare. Furono loro, non gli schiavisti criminali che ritennero il titolo dopo la guerra civile, a lavorare e sudare su quella terra. Come scrive l’economista libertario Murray Rothbard,

“un elementare principio di giustizia libertaria avrebbe richiesto non solo la liberazione immediata degli schiavi, ma anche l’attribuzione a loro, senza compenso alcuno per i padroni, della proprietà della piantagione in cui avevano lavorato e sudato.”

Ma questa giustizia fu negata. I negri liberati non possedevano le loro terre. Al contrario, erano costretti a lavorare per quelli che avevano monopolizzato ingiustamente il territorio. Alla schiavitù seguì la mezzadria, il lavoro a stipendio da sfruttamento, la disoccupazione e altre forme di sfruttamento della povertà strutturale. Le origini dell’attuale povertà strutturale che piaga le comunità di colore possono farsi risalire in gran parte alla schiavitù e al relativo problema del monopolio delle risorse. Questo è un buon esempio di quello che Kevin Carson chiama “il sussidio della storia”, in cui una storia fatta di violenza e razzia gioca un ruolo critico nell’ordine economico moderno.

Le terre delle piantagioni restarono nelle mani dei proprietari di schiavi, per poi passare in quelle dei ricchi capitalisti. Oggi la Nottoway Plantation appartiene alla società di investimenti Paul Ramsay Group. Il suo proprietario, Paul Ramsay, è tra i maggiori contribuenti dei partiti politici australiani. Distribuisce grosse somme ai politici dell’Australia’s Liberal Party, un partito di destra, omofobico e misogino.

L’eredità della schiavitù è evidente non solo nel monopolio delle risorse e nei profitti che la classe dirigente trae dai “centri vacanze” ricavati da queste piantagioni. Il tredicesimo emendamento proibisce la schiavitù “eccetto come punizione conseguente ad un crimine”. Così dopo l’abolizione formale della schiavitù gli stati del sud approvarono una serie di Leggi sui Neri, che in sostanza li criminalizzavano. Questo permise alle popolazioni del sud di continuare a tenere i negri in schiavitù servendosi di un sistema che permetteva di affittare i detenuti. Alcune piantagioni furono convertite in prigioni. Il penitenziario di stato della Luisiana, conosciuto come Angola, è un’ex piantagione di schiavi modificata dove i negri vengono ancora oggi sfruttati come manovalanza agricola. Il razzismo della schiavitù esiste ancora: il 60% dei carcerati è di colore.

Dalla punizione del crimine all’ordine economico, la nostra società è profondamente influenzata dalla schiavitù. Questa è tenuta in piedi dall’ideologia e dalla struttura del razzismo. Kilie Brooks, un’attivista che ha protestato contro il ritrovo dei cantautori nella piantagione, ha espresso chiaramente il concetto:

La debacle di Ani DiFranco fa parte di una serie composta da molti, molti esempi quotidiani di odio per i neri, un fenomeno globale che questi ultimi devono combattere ogni giorno. L’odio per i neri è rappresentato sia dall’esperienza ancestrale della schiavitù che da quella attuale del sistema carcerario: entrambi sono esempi di genocidio.

Opporsi al razzismo contro i neri significa opporsi al monopolio delle risorse, il sistema carcerario e altri metodi di oppressione.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger

Foreword
Introduction
The Failure of Marxism
The Marxist Appeal
Precursors to Marxist Class Theory
Marxist Classes
The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory
Libertarian Class Analysis
Radical Libertarian Class Analysis
Agorist Class Theory
Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems
Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory (1973)

Karl Marx himself asserted that should History fail to bear him out, he would admit he was wrong.

History has passed judgment.

Just as Ludwig von Mises forecast in his landmark book Socialism (1922), in which the impossibility of economic calculation under Marxist statism was demonstrated, Marx’s economics failed horribly. This economic failure led inevitably to the failure of Marx’s political and historical predictions, and Marxist-controlled institutions today coast on intellectual capital and historical inertia.

But Marxism still won the hearts and souls of billions in the past century, and continues to do so among many even now. Why? What is Marxism’s appeal? Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote:

The most appealing part of Marxism may well have been the vision of sociopolitical revolution as a secular apocalypse. While others offered explanations of Revolution, only Marx gave it such meaning. No longer were the oppressed to merely oust the old regime to bring in a new regime brutal in a slightly different way, but the Revolution would make things so great that no further revolution was necessary. Marx’s legerdemain was actually profoundly conservative; once the Revolution was over, there would be no more. Even diehard monarchists flinched from that much stasis.

Yet the combination was unbeatable to motivate political activists: one all-out effort and then home free. More realistic presentations of Revolution tended to excite less dedication and commitment.

But the truth remains: today, Marxism is bankrupt. On the Left, faith is gone, morale is low, and activism is paralyzed. The Left needs a new ideology to supplant its failed and discredited Marxism. Agorism — the purest, most consistent, and revolutionary form of libertarianism — is that supplanting ideology. Agorism can motivate and direct the underclass’s struggle against the overclass — and return the Left to its radical anti-state, anti-war, pro-property, pro-market historical roots. Explained SEK3:

Agorism and Marxism agree on the following premise: human society can be divided into at least two classes; one class is characterized by its control of the State and its extraction of unearned wealth from the other class. Furthermore, agorists and Marxists will often point to the same people as members of the overclass and underclass, especially agreeing on what each considers the most blatant cases. The differences arise as one moves to the middle of the social pyramid.

Agorists and Marxists perceive a class struggle which must continue until a climactic event which will resolve the conflict. Both sides perceive select groups which will lead the victims against their oppressors. The Marxists call these groups of high class consciousness ‘vanguards’ and then extract even more aware elements designated ‘elites of the vanguard.’ Agorists perceive a spectrum of consciousness amongst the victims as well, and also perceive the most aware elements as the first recruits for the revolutionary cadre. With the exception of ‘intellectuals,’ the Marxists and agorists sharply disagree on who these most progressive elements are.

The new HBO documentary Private Violence, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, follows victim advocate Kit Gruelle as she helps various victims of domestic abuse seek justice and freedom from their abusers. Gruelle is a domestic violence survivor herself, and her own story of abuse is told alongside the stories of women who she assists.

One useful function the film serves is dealing with a question domestic abuse victims hear far too often: “Why didn’t you just leave?” Multiple victims in the film talk about how infuriatingly often they hear this question. Kit Gruelle explains that she stayed with her abuser because he had threatened to find and kill her if she left, and he had been trained by the United States Marine Corps to effectively hunt down and kill people.

Deanna Walters, whose story is a centerpiece of the film, did leave her abusive husband. However, on Halloween she decided to take her daughter trick or treating with him in a public place.  He kidnapped her, took her across the country, beat her, tortured her, and nearly killed her in front of her daughter. Leaving situations of violence and predatory aggression is not a simple choice. Abusers use threats, violence, and manipulation to keep their victims with them and under their control.

In Deanna Walters’ case, local prosecutors said her injuries were not sufficiently serious, and were unlikely to prosecute beyond a misdemeanor assault charge. The abuser was only punished because a victim advocate helped Deanna convince federal prosecutors to press charges.

At the beginning of the film, one abuse survivor is reluctant to call the police, but she says she wants to be safe from an abusive ex who is coming after her, and shelter staff tell her that law enforcement are the only ones who can provide her with that security. As I watched, I concluded that these stories show the profound failure of state monopoly justice. Regardless of how uncomfortable victims are with police officers, these officers have a monopoly on providing security and justice. Victims rarely have anywhere else to turn. So they seek help from police and prosecutors who all too often hold misogynistic misconceptions about domestic abuse. Or they do not seek help at all.

Worse still, the criminal justice system sometimes overtly punishes the victim of violence. In one short yet heartbreaking scene in the film, Kit Gruelle travels to help prepare a defense for a black woman who is being charged with first degree murder because she killed her abuser. This man had beaten her so badly over the course of their relationship that her facial structure had radically changed and she had gone blind in one eye. He had threatened her with a gun at least once. Yet she was in jail, facing first degree murder charges.

The Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project has extensively documented cases like this, where women are caged for defending themselves from abuse. While this problem is only covered during a small segment of the film, it’s a tragic and infuriating example of how the state often punishes survivors rather than protecting people from violence.

This is a difficult film to watch. I cried multiple times during the film, and I felt the need to look away from the screen at one point when particularly brutal injuries from a beating and strangulation were being shown and discussed. However, it’s also a film well worth watching. Private Violence tells vitally important stories about how abusers terrorize their victims, how the legal system fails victims, and the steps victims take to survive.

The Jacobin recently published a good piece by Peter Frase titled “The Left and the State.” In it he discusses a recent attack on Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. This attack was published in the well known liberal magazine, The New Republic. He makes use of another good piece by libertarian, Will Wilkinson. Both he and Wilkinson deserve further consideration.

Peter Frase writes:

Wilkinson notes that theoretically, libertarianism is “an argument against the possibility of legitimate government.” This makes it clearly incompatible with most socialist or social democratic attempts to democratize the market or expropriate the means of production. Yet nevertheless, “it’s crazily illogical to reason that the actually existing state is justified on liberal terms just because the libertarian critique of the state is false, and a legitimate liberal state is possible.”

The key word here is “most”. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or state capitalist property. It’s thus clearly possible to accept the libertarian critique of the state as valid and still advocate revolutionary economic transformation. Our ideal is freed markets and not the existing “marketplace”.

Will Wilkinson writes:

Liberals and socialists often accuse libertarians, not without justice, of acting as unwitting apologists for plutocracy. Many free-marketeers do have a bad habit of confusing our unjustifiably rigged political economy with a very different laissez faire ideal, and their defenses of the actually-existing “free enterprise system” really do redound to the benefit of those the system is rigged to enrich. Likewise, liberals do have a bad habit of confusing actual, nominally liberal states with a very different liberal ideal, and their defenses of the actual “liberal state” do tend to redound to the benefit of the insidiously illiberal segments of the state that cannot be justified or accounted for on almost any standard liberal theory of legitimacy. The point being that too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.

An excellent unwittingly left-libertarian sentiment. We libertarians will have an easier time making common cause with the left when we choose to acknowledge these truths. The Jacobin article above is a promising step in that direction. Let’s continue to make left-wing market anarchism visible, so we can see even more like it. I look forward to it.

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger

Foreword
Introduction
The Failure of Marxism
The Marxist Appeal
Precursors to Marxist Class Theory
Marxist Classes
The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory
Libertarian Class Analysis
Radical Libertarian Class Analysis
Agorist Class Theory
Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems
Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory (1973)

Marxism is dead. This is acknowledged almost everywhere, with the exception of university campuses and among stodgy Old Leftists and uninformed media pundits. “The [Marxist] dream is dead,” wrote Samuel Edward Konkin III. “The institutions move on, decadent zombies, requiring dismemberment and burial. The ‘gravediggers of capitalism’ approach their own internment.”

Marxism failed on many fronts, perhaps on all fronts. Most fundamentally, though, its failure was economic. Marx’s “map of reality” — his class theory — was fatally flawed, and economics was the measure by which his philosophy could be checked with reality. The failure of its economics led inevitably to Marxism’s failure to live up to its political and historical predictions. Wrote SEK3:

Remember well that Marx outlined history and brooked no significant wandering from the determined course. Should History not unfold according to the determined pathway ‘scientifically’ obtained, all Marxist theoretical structure crumbles. …

Marxism failed to produce a ‘workable model of reality.’ On the other hand, it has won the hearts and souls of billions in the past century. In order to bury Marx, it is necessary to deal with his apparent success, not his failures. His strong points must be overcome, not his weak, if [radical Rothbardians, agorists] hope to replace his vision as the prime inspiration of the Left.

In his 1815 Principles of Politics, French liberal author Benjamin Constant defended the monarch’s “right to dissolve representative assemblies.”

Constant’s position might seem surprising. Wasn’t securing the independence of parliaments from the royal will one of liberalism’s hard-won victories?

His reasoning ran as follows. The “tendency of assemblies to multiply indefinitely the number of laws” is the inevitable result of “two natural inclinations in the legislators, the need to act, and the pleasure of believing themselves necessary.” Hence it is only to be expected that legislators should “share out amongst themselves human existence, by right of conquest, in the same way as Alexander’s generals shared out the world.” The function of the monarch is to serve as a check against this tendency. This is why the political executive is customarily entrusted with the power of vetoing legislation; but, Constant maintains, the veto is not enough:

The veto is precisely a direct means of repressing the indiscreet activity of representative assemblies but, when employed too often, it irritates without disarming them. Thus dissolution is the only remedy whose effectiveness is assured.

But what ensures that the monarch will use this power beneficently rather than mischievously? Here Constant’s argument becomes less compelling: as a “neutral power” rather than an “active power,” the monarch has, or should have, only the power to restrain the actions of other parts of the government, but no power to initiate action himself; as a “being apart at the summit of the pyramid,” the monarch floats serenely above the fray rather than becoming involved in partisanship, and serves only to mediate among the different branches of government.

Sounds nice, but how is this to be guaranteed? Despite the tendency among some libertarians nowadays to romanticise monarchy, this is scarcely how the institution has actually worked in history: monarchs have frequently become embroiled in faction, siding with one group against another. Thus while Constant has described the problem brilliantly, his solution is unconvincing.

What Constant neglects to take into account is a principle stressed by Isabel Paterson in her 1943 libertarian classic The God of the Machine: a constitutional function must be assigned to an agency capable of fulfilling that function. (As Aristotle put it, a form can be realised only in suitable matter; one cannot make a saw out of wool.) Paterson and Constant would agree that the mechanism of government requires a brake; but has Constant assigned the braking function to an agency well-suited to exercise it?

The monarch is but a forked animal like the rest of us, with no power of his own to compel the other branches of government to do or refrain from anything; what power he has comes from the willingness of others to support him. Hence the monarch must of necessity be involved in factions; if he were to float serenely above them as Constant recommends, he would be like a mere cork bobbing on the waves, with no power to direct events. Monarchs are not Kryptonians; they cannot rule by their own personal might, and so must rule by patronage. In his Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (read it online or buy it), Étienne de la Boétie described the process well:

It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleausres, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence. … And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.

In light of La Boétie’s analysis, Constant’s ideal monarch turns out to resemble the Randian fantasy of government as a reliable, impersonal robot. The braking function cannot be assigned to the monarch, because a monarch must either participate in faction or remain aloof; but if he remains aloof he lacks the power to serve as a brake, while if he participates in faction he cannot brake the activities he is simultaneously abetting.

Paterson argues that the braking function should be assigned to the people at large. Dispersed and disorganised, the masses cannot realistically exercise the power of initiating action; hence Paterson’s rejection of democracy. But the masses do have the power to block governmental action by refusing to cooperate, and so the function of “mass inertia veto” is properly vested in them:

The property of mass is inertia. In politics, inertia is the veto. A function or factor can only be found where it is. No plan or edict can establish it where it is not. … [In the Roman Republic] the tribunes of the people [were] invested with the formal veto power. … At one time, the tribunes of the people ‘stopped the whole machine of government’ for a number of years, refusing to approve and thus permit any act of government whatever … until their grievances were redressed. They were able to do so because the power they exercised did inhere in the body they represented. It was there. If the people will not move the government cannot act. Though laws are passed and orders given, if mass inertia is found opposed, the laws and orders will not be carried out. … [T]he function of mass, which is taken for granted by mechanical engineers, and usually ignored by political theorists, was understood by the Romans. They used it where it belongs for stability, by attaching to it directly that part of the mechanism proper to the factor of inertia, the device to ‘cut’ the motor when necessary.

How is this “mass inertia veto” to be institutionally realised? Paterson maintains that by vesting the “power of the purse” in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Constitution ensures that the ability to cut off the fuel on which the government operates is assigned to the democratic element. The problem with this solution, however, is that congressional representatives are government functionaries, invested with the power of initiating legislative action and not merely of restraining the actions of other parts of government. With regard to the tendency of legislatures “to multiply indefinitely the number of laws,” the House of Representatives is obviously not the solution; it’s part of the problem.

One way to improve the situation would be to assign the representative assembly the sole task of blocking government power. (See my reflections on this here and here.) Then the “pleasure of believing themselves necessary” that leads assemblies nowadays to multiply laws in order to be seen as “doing something” might operate in reverse.

But it’s also worth noting that under Market Anarchism, the “masses” exercise their veto function quite naturally. As Ludwig von Mises points out in Bureaucracy (read it online or buy it), “the capitalist system of production is an economic democracy” in which “consumers are the sovereign people”; capitalists and entrepreneurs are “the people’s mandatories,” who “lose their office” if they “fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for.”

Under Market Anarchism, this economic democracy is simply extended to the production of “governmental” services; there is thus no need to rig up some constitutional mechanism to express the masses’ veto power, as the price system naturally embodies that power: a service provider who fails to satsify its customers will be “dissolved” as surely by the market as by Constant’s monarch. (And the fact that the masses have to pay for the services they desire also puts a check on the masses’ own power; economic democracy thus internalises the externalities associated with political democracy.)

Constant sought to locate the braking function in a monarch; Paterson, in a representative assembly. Both stratagems are unnecessary, since the braking function already exists in the place where the laws of praxeology have put it: in the sovereign consumer.

Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis.

So it ought to be of interest to learn that Marx did not originate class analysis or the idea of class conflict. These things have their roots in radical liberalism, or libertarianism, predating Marx’s writings. Indeed, Marx himself paid homage to the originators, a group of historians in post–Napoleonic France who have been neglected by all but a handful of modern-day libertarians. (In this article I draw on four of those libertarians, the historians Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, and David M. Hart, and economist-historian Walter E. Grinder.)

The names of the key 19th-century French historians are Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry, whose publication, Le Censeur européen, was a hotbed of radical liberal thought. As related by Raico, Grinder, and Hart, Comte and Dunoyer were influenced by the important, but underappreciated, French liberal economist J.B. Say, whom Murray Rothbard lauded as brilliantly innovative, the superior of Adam Smith. (Comte eventually married Say’s daughter.) Indeed, the seeds of a radical liberal class theory were to be found in the second and subsequent editions of Say’s Treatise on Political Economy (first published in 1803), which reflected his response to Napoleon’s military spending and economic manipulation.

As Say wrote in another of his works,

The huge rewards and the advantages which are generally attached to public employment greatly excite ambition and cupidity. They create a violent struggle between those who possess positions and those who want them.

According to Hart, Comte and Dunoyer were struck by Say’s view that services provided in the marketplace are productive — that is, useful — “immaterial goods” and that the entrepreneur, like the laborer, is a producer. Hart writes,

A consequence of Say’s view is that there were many productive contributors to the new industrialism, including factory owners, entrepreneurs, engineers and other technologists as well as those in the knowledge industry such as teachers, scientists and other “savants” or intellectuals.

This is important to the issue of class, the purpose of which is to identify the exploiters and exploited. As everyone knows, Marx, at least in some of his writings, thought only workers were industrious, with owners of capital belonging to the exploiting class (with the state as its “executive committee”). He placed owners of capital among the exploiters because of his labor theory of value (inherited from Adam Smith and David Ricardo): since the value of goods was equivalent to the socially necessary labor required to produce them, the profit and interest collected by “capitalists” must be extracted from workers’ just rewards — hence their exploitation. If the labor theory of value fails and if exchange is fully voluntary, void of state privilege, then no exploitation occurs. (Marx’s exploitation theory was later systematically refuted by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.)

Thus it is crucial to see that the thinkers from whom Marx apparently learned about class analysis put in the productive class all who create utility through voluntary exchange. The “capitalist” (meaning in this context the owner of capital goods who is unconnected to the state) belongs in the industrious class along with workers.

Who were the exploiters? All who lived forcibly off of the industrious classes. “The conclusions drawn from this by Comte and Dunoyer (and Thierry) is that there existed an expanded class of ‘industrials’ (which included manual labourers and the above mentioned entrepreneurs and savants) who struggled against others who wished to hinder their activity or live unproductively off it,” Hart writes.

The theorists of industrialism concluded from their theory of production that it was the state and the privileged classes allied to or making up the state, rather than all non-agricultural activity, which were essentially nonproductive. They also believed that throughout history there had been conflict between these two antagonistic classes which could only be brought to end with the radical separation of peaceful and productive civil society from the inefficiencies and privileges of the state and its favourites.

Thus political and economic history is the record of conflict between producers, no matter their station, and the parasitic political classes, both inside and outside the formal state. Or to use terms of a later subscriber to this view, John Bright, it was a clash between the tax-payers and tax-eaters.

Political economy and liberty

Hart stresses that Comte and Dunoyer’s work took Say’s analysis up a notch. Where Say regarded economics and politics as separate disciplines, with the latter having little effect on the former, the liberal class analysts saw that Say’s own work had more radical implications. “The science of political economy was ‘value laden’ as we might say and implied quite specific policies on property, government intervention in the economy and individual liberty, something Say did not appreciate but which Dunoyer and Comte incorporated into their work,” Hart writes.

As both Hart and Raico point out, Comte and Dunoyer also absorbed much from another great liberal, Benjamin Constant, who had penned important essays showing that an “era of commerce” had replaced the “era of war” and that the modern notion of liberty — the private life — was poles apart from the ancient notion of liberty — participation in politics. As Hart puts it,

Dunoyer was interested in the sentence “[t]he unique end of modern nations is peace (repos), and with peace comes comfort (aisance), and the source of comfort is industry,” which nicely summed up his own thoughts on the true aim of social organisation.

Raico has also pointed out that liberal class analysis is to be found in the writings of the Manchesterite peace and free-trade activists Richard Cobden and John Bright and of Herbert Spencer. He quotes Bright on the fight against the Corn Laws (grain import tariffs):

I doubt that it can have any other character [than that of] … a war of classes. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and the great proprietors of the soil.

Indeed, Raico emphasizes, the Manchester School understood that war and other political intrigue were motivated by the political class’s quest for unearned wealth. Such ideas were also present among other liberal thinkers, including Thomas Paine, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, Albert Jay Nock, and Ludwig von Mises.

Class warfare and statism

What is the upshot of this admittedly truncated overview? The government’s coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.

The state’s officers and the court intellectuals at universities and the news media go to great lengths to have people believe this fantastic story, including the setting up of schools. Alas, most people come to believe it. The role of war is to scare people into paying taxes for their own alleged protection and to keep the wealth flowing to the exploiters with a minimum of grousing.

What can libertarians do about it? First, they must themselves understand liberal class theory. They must not shy away from it because it was hijacked by the Marxists. Second, they should use whatever influence they have to raise the class-consciousness of all honest, productive people. That is, the industrious must be shown that they are daily victims of the ruling political class.

For further reading:

Hart, David M. “The Radicalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer.”

Hart, David M., and Walter E. Grinder. “The Basic Tenets of Real Liberalism. Part IV Continued: Interventionism, Social Conflict and War.” Humane Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1986):1–7.

Liggio, Leonard P. “Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 153–78.

Raico, Ralph. “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio’s Paper.”Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 179–83.

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger

Foreword
Introduction
The Failure of Marxism
The Marxist Appeal
Precursors to Marxist Class Theory
Marxist Classes
The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory
Libertarian Class Analysis
Radical Libertarian Class Analysis
Agorist Class Theory
Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems
Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory (1973)

In the U.S., “only rightist kooks and commies talk about ruling classes and class structures,” the late Samuel Edward Konkin III remarked back in the 1980s.

Konkin was neither a rightist kook nor a commie. But his theory of ruling classes and class structures remains today a brilliant libertarian alternative to tired Marxist theories of class struggle. And that theory may serve as the foundation upon which to build a strong, revitalized libertarian movement.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, on July 8, 1947, Sam Konkin (known also to intimates and others as “SEK3”) was a high-profile leader in the “modern” libertarian movement’s second generation. He was a disciple of Murray N. Rothbard, arguably the most vital member of the movement’s first generation. In fact, Konkin was a consistent, radical Rothbardian, who often outRothbarded the great Murray himself. SEK3 called his extreme Rothbardianism — which advocated a stateless society of peaceful black markets — agorism.

For more than two decades, Konkin promised to produce a book titled Counter-Economics — a mammoth, scholarly work that, he swore, would be to agorism what Das Kapital was to Marxism. But the volume never appeared. Konkin did, however, author a major strategic guide to achieving his agorist dream — New Libertarian Manifesto — which became for his newborn Movement of the Libertarian Left what The Communist Manifesto was to communism, or what The Port Huron Statement had been to the early New Left movement in the 1960s. In addition to this manifesto, SEK3 published, over a 30-year period, such “underground” libertarian publications as New Libertarian, New Libertarian Notes, New Libertarian Weekly, Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance, The Agorist Quarterly, and New Isolationist. It was through these periodicals that Konkin elaborated on his philosophy in disorganized detail.

A primary tenet of agorism was its unique theory of classes. In an article titled “Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory” (see Appendix), published in New Libertarian Notes #28 in 1973, Konkin concluded:

1. The State is the main means by which people live by plunder; the Market, in contradistinction, is the sum of human action of the productive.

2. The State, by its existence, divides society into a plundered class and a plundering class.

3. The State has historically been directed by those who gain most by its existence — the “upper class,” Ruling Class, Higher Circles, or “Conspiracy.”

4. The Higher Circles will fight to keep their privileged status, and have done so, against libertarians seeking their overthrow and the restitution of their plunder to those from whom it was taken.

5. Politicians operate as “gladiators” in the aptly named Political Arena to settle disputes among the Higher Circles (which are not monolithic).

Ten years later, Konkin began work on a book to distinguish Agorist Class Theory from Marxist Class Theory called Agorism Contra Marxism. Only an introduction and first chapter were ever published (in Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance #2), and the book — like most other SEK3 projects — was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2004.

This brief volume represents my attempt to summarize (and somewhat update) that material. — Wally Conger

Goran Hugo Olsson’s new documentary Concerning Violence examines colonialism in Africa, drawing upon a wealth of archival Swedish news footage and tying the film together with text from Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. Excerpts from Fanon are read by Lauryn Hill, whose narration compellingly communicates Fanon’s ideas. I saw the film recently at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film is deliberately structured like a book. As the full title, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, suggests, it’s divided into nine chapters. These chapters cover a diverse range of stories of colonialism and resistance.

One scene shows an interview with a racist in a Rhodesia who fears that black “terrorists” may soon gain power and laments that black people openly express desire for wealth and independence. Another follows guerrilla fighters attacking a Portuguese military base in the territory now called Angola. Swedish interviewers speak to Christian missionaries who are working to impose monogamy upon African populations. Racist colonists and rebellious natives both are filmed in countries across Africa.

To me the most powerful parts of the film are those that expose the brutal violence and exploitation at the heart of colonialism. One particularly illuminating scene shows a miner’s strike at European owned mine in Liberia. The Liberian military was sent in to suppress the strike.  The president argued that the workers should have simply filed their grievances with the government before striking, and that he sent in the troops to prevent violence. One of the soldiers is then interviewed, describing his orders to initiate violence. It’s a revealing portrayal of how economic exploitation and inequity is backed up by state violence.

Another incredibly important scene portrays how NATO forces attempted to stop anti-colonial rebels by dropping napalm bombs on entire villages of civilians. While those who defend themselves from imperialism are to this day labeled “terrorists,” Western powers waged campaigns of terror to maintain colonial domination.

Perhaps the most disturbing image in the film is a woman whose arm has been hacked off, making her appear reminiscent of the Venus de Milo statue. She nurses her similarly injured child in a hospital, their appalling injuries a visceral portrait of colonialist violence.

These and other scenes are tied together by the words of Frantz Fanon, emblazoned as text upon the screen and read aloud passionately by musician and activist Lauryn Hill. Fanon’s text tells of how natives are driven to violent resistance under colonialism, of the economic injustice colonialism fosters, of the dehumanization inherent in colonialism, of the violence enacted by police and military forces on behalf of colonial governments.

This movie is too short to show viewers a full picture of colonialism. Instead, we are given brief vignettes that show us examples of colonization and decolonization. We are shown excerpts from Frantz Fanon’s incisive psychological analysis of colonialism. Hopefully this entices viewers to research more about colonization, resistance movements, and Fanon’s work. If not, it should at least provide an inkling of the world we live in: A world where prisons, warfare, and police violence enable massive economic exploitation, crime, and racism.

Translations for this article:

• Swedish, Goran Hugo Olsson’s “Concerning Violence”.

On January 15, freelance sports blogger Caleb Hannan published a longform article at Grantland documenting his eight-month search for the truth behind Yar Golf’s “physics-defying” putter and its inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt.

Over the course of Hannan’s reporting for this essay, he discovered that Vanderbilt’s claims regarding her academic credentials turned out to be unverifiable. As he dug deeper, he learned from her investors and court documents that she might be a con artist. He also stumbled upon a facet of Vanderbilt’s life that should have been inconsequential, but which he thought was important – nay, “shocking” – enough to focus at least part of his piece on: she was a transgender woman.

According to Hannan’s own accounting of events, Vanderbilt asked him from the beginning to “focus on the science,” and not on her. He agreed to this. As he investigated her claims and found that some of them didn’t pass the smell test, he was well within his rights to do more research. As a journalist he had an obligation to tell the truth given the context of his story. Where that obligation ended – in fact, where that obligation never even approached – was her gender identity.

In his essay, Hannan details at least one scenario where he discussed Vanderbilt’s gender identity with an investor of hers, and it becomes clear as the article progresses that he viewed her transition as another aspect of her con. Indeed, he casts her increasingly agitated email exchanges with him over the course of the reporting period as attempts to obfuscate his ability to tell the entire story. It probably didn’t occur to him that she didn’t want to discuss her gender or have her trans status publicized.

And yet, he did it. And it killed her. Vanderbilt committed suicide on October 18, 2013, almost exactly three months before the piece went to print. Hannan styled the final paragraphs of his essay as a “eulogy,” clicked “save” in his word processor, and sent it to his editors at Grantland, who had no problem publishing the final product.

-~*~-

This final product created a firestorm on the Internet.

Audrey Faye at Autostraddle highlighted Hannan’s flippant misgendering of Vanderbilt:

Hannan details Dr. V’s history of lawsuits, relationships and a suicide attempt. He describes outing her as trans to at least one investor without her consent, and without any acknowledgement of the fact that that’s what he was doing. And then, as the linchpin of the piece, he writes “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into a tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the biggest question remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a great story?”

“A tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.”

A troubled man.

Just like that, Hannan did what so many people do: he called into question the reality of Dr. V’s gender as if her being trans was as suspect as her missing degrees, engaging in the deplorable and time-honored practice of depicting trans* people, and especially trans women, as duplicitous and deceitful.

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville notes his separation from the human element in his story:

Hannan distances himself from this tragedy by including in the story the report of a previous attempt at taking her own life made by Dr. V, as if to suggest that her suicide was inevitable.

Further, he catalogs her deception about her educational and professional background alongside the revelation that she is trans, in a way that suggests her failure to reflexively disclose that she is trans as part of any introduction to a new person is a lie, just like so many others she told.

When she does not agree to become the focus of his story, which was meant to be about the science, he pouts and tasks her with the responsibility for his aggressive invasiveness: “Dr. V’s initial requests for privacy had seemed reasonable. Now, however, they felt like an attempt to stop me from writing about her or the company she’d founded. But why?” He reports disclosing that Dr. V is a trans woman to one of her investors. He publishes her birth name. He describes the scene of her death. And he concludes the piece by calling it a eulogy.

Grantland responded to the multivarious criticisms with an apology letter from editor Bill Simmons and a response piece by ESPN.com baseball reporter Christina Kahrl. These responses were, in turn, criticized for 1. treating Vanderbilt’s death like they would treat a misspelling of a name, and 2. for continuing to treat Vanderbilt’s identity as part of her con game, respectively. Tim Marchman at Deadspin brought up how inappropriate the chronological nature of the article’s structure was; that, by writing the story in linear time, Hannan apparently felt he had to out Vanderbilt in order for everything else to make sense:

By writing the story chronologically, as a mystery where every revelation led to a further revelation, Hannan essentially locked himself into a structure where he had to reveal that Vanderbilt was a transgender woman to make sense of the blanks he’d found in her background. The chronological structure requires that to be the emotional pivot of the story, the moment when the story begins to open up for the author; the death is only a coda.

This is all the more troubling given that Grantland’s editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons, wrote that the story was filed in something approximating its present form before Vanderbilt killed herself in October. That suggests that in the process of writing, Hannan thought it would be acceptable to out Vanderbilt, by way of buttressing his claims about her background and thus casting doubt on the science behind her putter.

The response to Grantland’s attempted mea culpa was just as fierce on Twitter:

And people are really trying to spin this as “Good journalism violates boundaries.” I need a drink…so I can throw it at you!

— Shaadi (@tgirlinterruptd) January 21, 2014

spent the whole time explaining your journalism fails, totally missed how you failed as a human being @BillSimmons — Daniel José Older (@djolder) January 20, 2014

@sophiaphotos it almost reads like “growing pains”. No. A woman is dead. Her death is not “a mistake” that legitimizes your journalism. — Invincible Joy (@aisha1908) January 21, 2014

This woman’s ENTIRE LIFE is less important than this writer’s FIRST PIECE for Grantland. His career can be fixed. She can’t be brought back.

— GenderTerror.com (@Wolferfly) January 21, 2014

.@bodysnatcher226 @scATX It was terrible. Kahrl’s piece basically said Dr. V was at fault for being stealth. Victim blaming, bull.

— GenderTerror.com (@Wolferfly) January 20, 2014

Grandland laying into stealth trans people is a way to discredit trans people and frame stealth trans people as liars and frauds.

— Sophia Banks (@sophiaphotos) January 21, 2014

Of course, Hannan didn’t have to write the article according to the edicts of linear time, and he didn’t have to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt. And ethically, this shouldn’t have even been a question up for debate by either him or his editors.

-~*~-

Just about every newsroom in the world abides by a code of ethics. Sometimes this is a set of loose guidelines, but usually, it’s written out clear as day and in neon. The Society of Professional Journalists, for instance, has incredibly clear rules regarding conduct and harm reduction. Caleb Hannan should know this. He’s been working as a professional journalist since at least 2010, when he won several SPJ awards for his reporting in Seattle Weekly; he has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Deadspin and others on a variety of subjects besides sports, so it’s hard to believe he’s green in this regard.

Here’s what the SPJ has to say about harm reduction:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should: — Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

In the bluntest terms, Hannan objectified Vanderbilt’s transness; he saw her gender identity as a hook to get more eyeballs to his story and his work, and he wasn’t going to let frivolous facts, like transgender people being 25 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, get in his way. He disregarded her desire to keep this aspect of her life private. He, and Grantland, profited from her death.

Hannan’s essay is journalistically unethical. It’s also grossly inhuman.

AGORIST CLASS THEORY: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger

Drawing on the unfinished work of Samuel Edward Konkin III with a foreword by Brad Spangler

DEDICATION: This work is dedicated to Sam, who got the ball rolling.

AGORIST CLASS THEORY [PDF]: A Left Libertarian Approach to Class Conflict Analysis By Wally Conger

Foreword
Introduction
The Failure of Marxism
The Marxist Appeal
Precursors to Marxist Class Theory
Marxist Classes
The Agorist Critique of Marxist Class Theory
Libertarian Class Analysis
Radical Libertarian Class Analysis
Agorist Class Theory
Agorist Solutions for Marxist Problems
Appendix: Cui Bono? Introduction to Libertarian Class Theory (1973)

“From Crossbows To Cryptography: Techno-Thwarting The State” [PDF] was written by Chuck Hammill and presented for Future of Freedom Conference, November 1987.

Public Domain: Duplicate and Distribute Freely

You know, technology—and particularly computer technology—has often gotten a bad rap in Libertarian circles. We tend to think of Orwell’s 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or the proximity detectors keeping East Berlin’s slave/citizens on their own side of the border, or the sophisticated bugging devices Nixon used to harass those on his “enemies list.” Or, we recognize that for the price of a ticket on the Concorde we can fly at twice the speed of sound, but only if we first walk through a magnetometer run by a government policeman, and permit him to paw through our belongings if it beeps.

But I think that mind-set is a mistake. Before there were cattle prods, governments tortured their prisoners with clubs and rubber hoses. Before there were lasers for eavesdropping, governments used binoculars and lip-readers. Though government certainly uses technology to oppress, the evil lies not in the tools but in the wielder of the tools.

In fact, technology represents one of the most promising avenues available for re-capturing our freedoms from those who have stolen them. By its very nature, it favors the bright (who can put it to use) over the dull (who cannot). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the merit of the new) over the sluggish (who cling to time-tested ways). And what two better words are there to describe government bureaucracy than “dull” and “sluggish”?

One of the clearest, classic triumphs of technology over tyranny I see is the invention of the man-portable crossbow. With it, an untrained peasant could now reliably and lethally engage a target out to fifty meters – even if that target were a mounted, chain-mailed knight. Unlike the longbow, which, admittedly was more powerful, and could get off more shots per unit time, the crossbow required no formal training to utilize. Whereas the longbow required elaborate visual, tactile and kinesthetic coordination to achieve any degree of accuracy, the wielder of a crossbow could simply put the weapon to his shoulder, sight along the arrow itself, and be reasonably assured of hitting his target.

Moreover, since just about the only mounted knights likely to visit your average peasant would be government soldiers and tax collectors, the utility of the device was plain: With it, the common rabble could defend themselves not only against one another, but against their governmental masters. It was the medieval equivalent of the armor-piercing bullet, and, consequently, kings and priests (the medieval equivalent of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Crossbows) threatened death and excommunication, respectively, for its unlawful possession.

Looking at later developments, we see how technology like the firearm—particularly the repeating rifle and the handgun, later followed by the Gatling gun and more advanced machine guns – radically altered the balance of interpersonal and inter-group power. Not without reason was the Colt .45 called “the equalizer.” A frail dance-hall hostess with one in her possession was now fully able to protect herself against the brawniest roughneck in any saloon. Advertisements for the period also reflect the merchandising of the repeating cartridge rifle by declaring that “a man on horseback, armed with one of these rifles, simply cannot be captured.” And, as long as his captors were relying upon flintlocks or single-shot rifles, the quote is doubtless a true one.

Updating now to the present, the public-key cipher (with a personal computer to run it) represents an equivalent quantum leap—in a defensive weapon. Not only can such a technique be used to protect sensitive data in one’s own possession, but it can also permit two strangers to exchange information over an insecure communications channel—a wiretapped phone line, for example, or skywriting, for that matter)—without ever having previously met to exchange cipher keys. With a thousand-dollar computer, you can create a cipher that a multi-megabuck CRAY X-MP can’t crack in a year. Within a few years, it should be economically feasible to similarly encrypt voice communications; soon after that, full-color digitized video images. Technology will not only have made wiretapping obsolete, it will have totally demolished government’s control over information transfer.

I’d like to take just a moment to sketch the mathematics which makes this principle possible. This algorithm is called the RSA algorithm, after Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman who jointly created it. Its security derives from the fact that, if a very large number is the product of two very large primes, then it is extremely difficult to obtain the two prime factors from analysis of their product. “Extremely” in the sense that if primes p and q have 100 digits apiece, then their 200-digit product cannot in general be factored in less than 100 years by the most powerful computer now in existence.

The “public” part of the key consists of (1) the product pq of the two large primes p and q, and (2) one factor, call it x, of the product xy where xy = (p − 1)(q − 1) + 1. The “private” part of the key consists of the other factor y.

Each block of the text to be encrypted is first turned into an integer—either by using ASCII, or even a simple A=01, B=02, C=03, …, Z=26 representation. This integer is then raised to the power x mod(pq) and the resulting integer is then sent as the encrypted message. The receiver decrypts by taking this integer to the (secret) power y mod(pq). It can be shown that this process will always yield the original number started with.

What makes this a groundbreaking development, and why it is called “public- key” cryptography, is that I can openly publish the product pq and the number x, while keeping secret the number y—so that anyone can send me an encrypted message, namely a^x mod(pq), but only I can recover the original message a, by taking what they send, raising it to the power y and taking the result mod(pq). The risky step (meeting to exchange cipher keys) has been eliminated. So people who may not even trust each other enough to want to meet, may still reliably exchange encrypted messages—each party having selected and disseminated his own pq and his x, while maintaining the secrecy of his own y.

Another benefit of this scheme is the notion of a “digital signature,” to enable one to authenticate the source of a given message. Normally, if I want to send you a message, I raise my plaintext a to your x and take the result mod(your pq) and send that.

However, if in my message, I take the plaintext a and raise it to my (secret) power y, take the result mod(my pq), then raise that result to your x mod(your pq) and send this, then even after you have normally “decrypted” the message, it will still look like garbage. However, if you then raise it to my public power x, and take the result mod(my pubic pq), so you will not only recover the original plaintext message, but you will know that no one but I could have sent it to you (since no one else knows my secret y).

And these are the very concerns by the way that are today tormenting the Soviet Union about the whole question of personal computers. On the one hand, they recognize that American schoolchildren are right now growing up with computers as commonplace as sliderules used to be—more so, in fact, because there are things computers can do which will interest (and instruct) 3- and 4-year-olds. And it is precisely these students who one generation hence will be going head-to-head against their Soviet counterparts. For the Soviets to hold back might be a suicidal as continuing to teach swordsmanship while your adversaries are learning ballistics. On the other hand, whatever else a personal computer may be, it is also an exquisitely efficient copying machine—a floppy disk will hold upwards of 50,000 words of text, and can be copied in a couple of minutes. If this weren’t threatening enough, the computer that performs the copy can also encrypt the data in a fashion that is all but unbreakable. Remember that in Soviet society publicly accessible Xerox machines are unknown. The relatively few copying machines in existence are controlled more intensively than machine guns are in the United States.

Now the “conservative” position is that we should not sell these computers to the Soviets, because they could use them in weapons systems. The “liberal” position is that we should sell them, in the interests of mutual trade and cooperation—and anyway, if we don’t make the sale, there will certainly be some other nation willing to.

For my part, I’m ready to suggest that the Libertarian position should be to give them to the Soviets for free, and if necessary, make them take them… and if that doesn’t work load up an SR-71 Blackbird and air drop them over Moscow in the middle of the night. Paid for by private subscription, of course, not taxation…

I confess that this is not a position that has gained much support among members of the conventional left-right political spectrum, but, after all, in the words of one of Illuminatus’s characters, we are political non-Euclideans: The shortest distance to a particular goal may not look anything like what most people would consider a “straight line.” Taking a long enough world-view, it is arguable that breaking the Soviet government monopoly on information transfer could better lead to the enfeeblement and, indeed, to the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet empire than would the production of another dozen missiles aimed at Moscow.

But there’s the rub: A “long enough” world view does suggest that the evil, the oppressive, the coercive and the simply stupid will “get what they deserve,” but what’s not immediately clear is how the rest of us can escape being killed, enslaved, or pauperized in the process.

When the liberals and other collectivists began to attack freedom, they possessed a reasonably stable, healthy, functioning economy, and almost unlimited time to proceed to hamstring and dismantle it. A policy of political gradualism was at least conceivable. But now, we have patchwork crazy-quilt economy held together by baling wire and spit. The state not only taxes us to “feed the poor” while also inducing farmers to slaughter milk cows and drive up food prices—it then simultaneously turns around and subsidizes research into agricultural chemicals designed to increase yields of milk from the cows left alive. Or witness the fact that a decline in the price of oil is considered as potentially frightening as a comparable increase a few years ago. When the price went up, we were told, the economy risked collapse for for want of energy. The price increase was called the “moral equivalent of war” and the Feds swung into action. For the first time in American history, the speed at which you drive your car to work in the morning became an issue of Federal concern. Now, when the price of oil drops, again we risk problems, this time because American oil companies and Third World basket-case nations who sell oil may not be able to ever pay their debts to our grossly over-extended banks. The suggested panacea is that government should now re-raise the oil prices that OPEC has lowered, via a new oil tax. Since the government is seeking to raise oil prices to about the same extent as OPEC did, what can we call this except the “moral equivalent of civil war—the government against its own people?”

And, classically, in international trade, can you imagine any entity in the world except a government going to court claiming that a vendor was selling it goods too cheaply and demanding not only that that naughty vendor be compelled by the court to raise its prices, but also that it be punished for the act of lowering them in the first place? So while the statists could afford to take a couple of hundred years to trash our economy and our liberties – we certainly cannot count on having an equivalent period of stability in which to reclaim them. I contend that there exists almost a “black hole” effect in the evolution of nation-states just as in the evolution of stars. Once freedom contracts beyond a certain minimum extent, the state warps the fabric of the political continuum about itself to the degree that subsequent re-emergence of freedom becomes all but impossible. A good illustration of this can be seen in the area of so-called “welfare” payments. When those who sup at the public trough outnumber (and thus outvote) those whose taxes must replenish the trough, then what possible choice has a democracy but to perpetuate and expand the taking from the few for the unearned benefit of the many? Go down to the nearest “welfare” office, find just two people on the dole… and recognize that between them they form a voting bloc that can forever outvote you on the question of who owns your life—and the fruits of your life’s labor.

So essentially those who love liberty need an “edge” of some sort if we’re ultimately going to prevail. We obviously can’t use the altruists’ “other-directedness” of “work, slave, suffer, sacrifice, so that next generation of a billion random strangers can live in a better world.” Recognize that, however immoral such an appeal might be, it is nonetheless an extremely powerful one in today’s culture. If you can convince people to work energetically for a “cause,” caring only enough for their personal welfare so as to remain alive enough and healthy enough to continue working—then you have a truly massive reservoir of energy to draw from. Equally clearly, this is just the sort of appeal which tautologically cannot be utilized for egoistic or libertarian goals. If I were to stand up before you tonight and say something like, “Listen, follow me as I enunciate my noble ‘cause,’ contribute your money to support the ‘cause,’ give up your free time to work for the ‘cause,’ strive selflessly to bring it about, and then (after you and your children are dead) maybe your children’s children will actually live under egoism”—you’d all think I’d gone mad. And of course you’d be right. Because the point I’m trying to make is that libertarianism and/or egoism will be spread if, when, and as, individual libertarians and/or egoists find it profitable and/or enjoyable to do so. And probably only then.

While I certainly do not disparage the concept of political action, I don’t believe that it is the only, nor even necessarily the most cost-effective path toward increasing freedom in our time. Consider that, for a fraction of the investment in time, money and effort I might expend in trying to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all forms of censorship—I can teach every libertarian who’s interested how to use cryptography to abolish them unilaterally.

There is a maxim—a proverb—generally attributed to the Eskimoes, which very likely most Libertarians have already heard. And while you likely would not quarrel with the saying, you might well feel that you’ve heard it often enough already, and that it has nothing further to teach us, and moreover, that maybe you’re even tired of hearing it. I shall therefore repeat it now:

If you give a man a fish, the saying runs, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Your exposure to the quote was probably in some sort of a “work-fare” vs. “welfare” context; namely, that if you genuinely wish to help someone in need, you should teach him how to earn his sustenance, not simply how to beg for it. And of course this is true, if only because the next time he is hungry, there might not be anybody around willing or even able to give him a fish, whereas with the information on how to fish, he is completely self sufficient.

But I submit that this exhausts only the first order content of the quote, and if there were nothing further to glean from it, I would have wasted your time by citing it again. After all, it seems to have almost a crypto-altruist slant, as though to imply that we should structure our activities so as to maximize the benefits to such hungry beggars as we may encounter.

But consider:

Suppose this Eskimo doesn’t know how to fish, but he does know how to hunt walruses. You, on the other hand, have often gone hungry while traveling through walrus country because you had no idea how to catch the damn things, and they ate most of the fish you could catch. And now suppose the two of you decide to exchange information, bartering fishing knowledge for hunting knowledge. Well, the first thing to observe is that a transaction of this type categorically and unambiguously refutes the Marxist premise that every trade must have a “winner” and a “loser”–the idea that if one person gains, it must necessarily be at the “expense” of another person who loses. Clearly, under this scenario, such is not the case. Each party has gained something he did not have before, and neither has been diminished in any way. When it comes to exchange of information (rather than material objects) life is no longer a zero-sum game. This is an extremely powerful notion. The “law of diminishing returns,” the “first and second laws of thermodynamics”—all those “laws” which constrain our possibilities in other contexts—no longer bind us! Now that’s anarchy!

Or consider another possibility:

Suppose this hungry Eskimo never learned to fish because the ruler of his nation-state had decreed fishing illegal. Because fish contain dangerous tiny bones, and sometimes sharp spines, he tells us, the state has decreed that their consumption—and even their possession—are too hazardous to the people’s health to be permitted . . . even by knowledgeable, willing adults. Perhaps it is because citizens’ bodies are thought to be government property, and therefore it is the function of the state to punish those who improperly care for government property. Or perhaps it is because the state generously extends to competent adults the “benefits” it provides to children and to the mentally ill: namely, a full-time, all-pervasive supervisory conservatorship—so that they need not trouble themselves with making choices about behavior thought physically risky or morally “naughty.” But, in any case, you stare stupefied, while your Eskimo informant relates how this law is taken so seriously that a friend of his was recently imprisoned for years for the crime of “possession of nine ounces of trout with intent to distribute.”

Now you may conclude that a society so grotesquely oppressive as to enforce a law of this type is simply an affront to the dignity of all human beings. You may go farther and decide to commit some portion of your discretionary, recreational time specifically to the task of thwarting this tyrant’s goal. (Your rationale may be “altruistic” in the sense of wanting to liberate the oppressed, or “egoistic” in the sense of proving you can outsmart the oppressor—or very likely some combination of these or perhaps even other motives.)

But, since you have zero desire to become a martyr to your “cause,” you’re not about to mount a military campaign, or even try to run a boatload of fish through the blockade. However, it is here that technology—and in particular information technology—can multiply your efficacy literally a hundredfold. I say “literally,” because for a fraction of the effort (and virtually none of the risk) attendant to smuggling in a hundred fish, you can quite readily produce a hundred Xerox copies of fishing instructions. If the targeted government, like present-day America, at least permits open discussion of topics whose implementation is restricted, then that should suffice. But, if the government attempts to suppress the flow of information as well, then you will have to take a little more effort and perhaps write your fishing manual on a floppy disk encrypted according to your mythical Eskimo’s public-key parameters. But as far as increasing real-world access to fish you have made genuine nonzero headway—which may continue to snowball as others redisseminate the information you have provided. And you have not had to waste any of your time trying to convert ideological adversaries, or even trying to win over the undecided. Recall Harry Browne’s dictum from “Freedom in an Unfree World” that the success of any endeavor is in general inversely proportional to the number of people whose persuasion is necessary to its fulfillment.

If you look at history, you cannot deny that it has been dramatically shaped by men with names like Washington, Lincoln, Nixon, Marcos, Duvalier, Khadaffi and their ilk. But it has also been shaped by people with names like Edison, Curie, Marconi, Tesla and Wozniak. And this latter shaping has been at least as pervasive, and not nearly so bloody.

And that’s where I’m trying to take The LiberTech Project. Rather than beseeching the state to please not enslave, plunder or constrain us, I propose a libertarian network spreading the technologies by which we may seize freedom for ourselves.

But here we must be a bit careful. While it is not (at present) illegal to encrypt information when government wants to spy on you, there is no guarantee of what the future may hold. There have been bills introduced, for example, which would have made it a crime to wear body armor when government wants to shoot you. That is, if you were to commit certain crimes while wearing a Kevlar vest, then that fact would constitute a separate federal crime of its own. This law to my knowledge has not passed, yet … but it does indicate how government thinks.

Other technological applications, however, do indeed pose legal risks. We recognize, for example, that anyone who helped a pre-Civil War slave escape on the “underground railroad” was making a clearly illegal use of technology—as the sovereign government of the United States of America at that time found the buying and selling of human beings quite as acceptable as the buying and selling of cattle. Similarly, during Prohibition, anyone who used his bathtub to ferment yeast and sugar into the illegal psychoactive drug, alcohol—the controlled substance, wine—was using technology in a way that could get him shot dead by federal agents for his “crime”–unfortunately not to be restored to life when Congress reversed itself and re-permitted use of this drug.

So, to quote a former President, un-indicted co-conspirator and pardoned felon: “Let me make one thing perfectly clear:” The LiberTech Project does not advocate, participate in, or conspire in the violation of any law—no matter how oppressive, unconstitutional or simply stupid such law may be. It does engage in description (for educational and informational purposes only) of technological processes, and some of these processes (like flying a plane or manufacturing a firearm) may well require appropriate licensing to perform legally. Fortunately, no license is needed for the distribution or receipt of information itself. So, the next time you look at the political scene and despair, thinking, “Well, if 51% of the nation and 51% of this State, and 51% of this city have to turn Libertarian before I’ll be free, then somebody might as well cut my goddamn throat now, and put me out of my misery”— recognize that such is not the case. There exist ways to make yourself free.

If you wish to explore such techniques via the Project, you are welcome to give me your name and address—or a fake name and mail drop, for that matter—and you’ll go on the mailing list for my erratically published newsletter. Any friends or acquaintances whom you think would be interested are welcome as well. I’m not even asking for stamped self-addressed envelopes, since my printer can handle mailing labels and actual postage costs are down in the noise compared with the other efforts in getting an issue out. If you should have an idea to share, or even a useful product to plug, I’ll be glad to have you write it up for publication. Even if you want to be the proverbial “free rider” and just benefit from what others contribute—you’re still welcome: Everything will be public domain; feel free to copy it or give it away (or sell it, for that matter, ’cause if you can get money for it while I’m taking full-page ads trying to give it away, you’re certainly entitled to your capitalist profit…) Anyway, every application of these principles should make the world just a little freer, and I’m certainly willing to underwrite that, at least for the foreseeable future.

I will leave you with one final thought: If you don’t learn how to beat your plowshares into swords before they outlaw swords, then you sure as HELL ought to learn before they outlaw plowshares too. —Chuck Hammill

“This is one of the most horrifying, despicable things that I have seen all day. People who post this kind of adulation for this mass murderer — an immensely privileged millionaire dynastic politician, who imprisoned hundreds of thousands of innocent people in military internment camps solely on the basis of their race, who repeatedly turned away Jews fleeing the Holocaust, who sponsored and administered nativist immigration policies and spoke in openly racist terms against “the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood,” whose policies and whose court appointments resulted in some of the worst adverse civil-rights decisions of the 20th century — the man who authorized the firebombing of Tokyo and the creation of the atomic bombs, who spent the 1930s courting votes from Jim Crow Dixiecrats, who repeatedly used federal forces to imprison striking workers during the Depression, who drove Congress to create the House Un-American Activities Committee and who ordered J. Edgar Hoover to begin the massive covert political espionage program which later became COINTELPRO, . . . — people who post this kind of adulation, I say, thinking that they are doing so in the name of liberalism, are white-washing history and excusing the violation of human rights in defense of immense, unaccountable privilege.

Nobody who professes to have even an ounce of concern about social justice or civil liberty should have anything but disgust for the record of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

A war has been raging in Mexico for almost ten years now. The nexus of American drug laws and Americans’ drug use has spawned outlaw cartels who, like the Prohibition-era Mob, use violence to enforce their control of the drug trade. In 2006, the situation was exacerbated when the government of then-president Felipe Calderon launched Operation Michoacan, intended to reassert state control over areas theretofore largely ceded to the cartels. Pressed by state forces, the cartels began campaigns of terror against the local population, designed to deter cooperation with state authorities — and, according to many reports, state forces have done much the same thing.

Caught in the middle, the people of Michoacan have risen up against their tormentors, not with signs and slogans but with rifles in hand, and have put much of the infamous Knights Templar cartel to flight. But not only the cartel has felt the sting of these armed citizens —  upon entering the town of Nueva Italia in Michoacan, the vigilantes did not stop after expelling the Knights Templar, but disarmed the local police, assuming responsibility for the town’s security themselves. These men clearly understand who their enemies are, knowing from long experience that the rule of the Mexican state, fueled by corruption and consumed with violence, is hardly preferable — perhaps even hardly distinguishable — from rule by the cartels.

The Mexican government clearly understands the threat it faces as well. Rather than trying to co-opt the citizens’ militias as the American occupiers did local Iraqi groups that arose in response to the brutality of Islamist fighters, the Mexican government means to crush them, and rightly so from its strategic perspective. These groups have implicitly, and in some cases vocally, repudiated the state’s fundamental claim on existence — the provision of security. When its legions could no longer protect the provincials from raiding and pillage, the days of the Roman Empire were numbered. The Mexican government clearly realizes that if it cannot secure its citizenry — keep the sheep safe in the folds, as it were — then it will lose its claim on them and its ability to shear and slaughter them.

Clearly, these self-defense groups are a far graver threat to the Mexican state than anything any cartel has attempted or likely even desires. States expect to fight with competitors over populations to exploit, but the exploited are supposed to remain passive victims. The cartel may threaten to defeat the state at its own game, but a rising of the people themselves? That threatens the game itself.

Mutual aid isn’t just about helping one another, although helping one another is of course an important and fundamental aspect. Mutual aid is about showing our masters and each other that we don’t need them anymore, that we can get by just fine without begging for scraps from master’s table. When cities try to hamper efforts to feed the homeless, when the United States government steps in to keep health care costs high, when local governments act against locally grown food, when the American FDA steps in to stop people from buying and drinking raw, local milk, and when the Mexican Army and federal police strive to crush citizens’ self-defense forces, they aren’t merely mindlessly enforcing dumb, often antiquated laws. They are acting to keep us atomized and dependent. Mutual aid doesn’t just help our brothers and sisters. Mutual aid terrifies our masters.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Mutuo Soccorso Contro lo Stato.

Wendy McElroy reviews a historical work on the surveillance state.

Jonathan Cook discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Sheldon Richman discusses how intellectual property creates corporate concentration.

Jim Lobe discusses the fall of Fallujah.

Stephen Kinzer discusses the potential detente with Iran.

Thaddeus Russell discusses The Other America.

Kevin Carson reviews AFFEERCE: A Business Plan to Save the United States and then The World.

Brian Doherty discusses petty law enforcement directed against the poor.

Barry Lando discusses the American legacy in Iraq.

William Blum discusses the NSA spying.

Peter Van Buren discusses 10 NSA myths.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the war in Afghanistan.

Chase Madar discusses the use of police power against kids.

Kevin Carson discusses 5 libertarian reforms to fight for.

Ryan Calhoun discusses state control of the weed market.

Molly Crabapple discusses the 12 anniversary of Gitmo.

Noam Chomsky discusses Ariel Sharon.

Joseph Stromberg discusses Gabriel Kolko.

Clancy Sigal discusses Fallujah.

Sheldon Richman discusses how our leaders don’t mean well.

Sahar Aziz discusses the War on Terror’s authoritarian template.

Naomi Wolf discusses the use of secret assassins by Obama.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Syria peace settlement.

Jonathan Blanks discusses how recognizing power structures is not incompatible with individual liberty.

Sheldon Richman discusses how rights violations aren’t the only bads.

Chris Gilbert discusses U.S. intervention in Colombia.

Uri Avnery discusses Ariel Sharon.

Kathleen Wallace discusses an infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas.

Chris Wainscott reviews Position and Pawn Tension in Chess.

John Watson reviews a whole heap of opening books.

Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique

I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property”
II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality
III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy
IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy
V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design
VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive?

Advocates for “intellectual property” defend it as necessary to encourage innovation, asking what the incentive for innovation or artistic creation would be without it. But in fact patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it, and many producers in the cultural and information fields have demonstrated that value can be captured without “intellectual property.”

Patents are a hindrance to progress because of the “shoulders of giants” effect. Any new invention presupposes a wide variety of existing technologies that are combined and reworked into a new configuration. Patents on existing technologies may or may not marginally increase the incentives to new invention, but they also increase the cost of doing so by levying a tariff on the aggregation of existing knowledge to serve as building blocks of a new invention.78 James Watt’s refusal to license his patent on the steam engine, for example, prevented others from improving the design until the patent expired in 1800. This delayed the introduction of locomotives and steamboats. [79]

Rothbard pointed out that patents eliminate “the competitive spur for further research” because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is hindered, and because the holder can “rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent,” with no fear of a competitor improving his invention. And they hamper technical progress because “mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact.” Patents also distort whatever research and innovation does occur in artificial directions—toward patentable research, at the expense of non-patentable research. [80] Chakravarthi Raghavan argued, likewise, that patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions. [81]

And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is motivated not only by the quasi-rents accruing to the first firm to introduce an innovation, but by the threat of being surpassed in product features or productivity by its competitors. He cites Arnold Plant: “In active competition… no business can afford to lag behind its competitors. The reputation of a firm depends upon its ability to keep ahead, to be the first in the market with new improvements in its products and new reductions in their prices.” [82]

This is borne out by F. M. Scherer’s testimony before the Federal Trade Commission in 1995. [83] Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven “accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.” Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.” Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be “the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales.” In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

The one supposed exception was drugs, according to Scherer, of which 60% would not have been invented. But it’s likely Scherer underestimated the effect of drug patents in discouraging or distorting innovation. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices. We have already seen, in the previous chapter, the extent to which the direction of innovation of skewed by considerations of gaming the patent system and patent trolling the competition. The majority of R & D expenditure is geared toward developing “me, too” drugs: in essence slightly different versions of existing drugs, tweaked just enough to justify repatenting. And of the enormous R & D expenditures which patents are allegedly necessary to allow the drug companies to recoup, a majority goes not to developing the actual drug that goes to market, but to securing patent lockdown on all the possible major variations of that drug.

The injustice is only compounded by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it spent little or nothing to develop. The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money–and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money, and the patent subsequently given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp.84 As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, Congress has more than once extended drug companies’ patents beyond the expiration of their normal term under patent law; as just one example, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law. [85]

Copyrights have also been granted arbitrary extension for certain favored parties (e.g., copyright extension, sponsored by Sonny Bono, for Disney’s “Mickey Mouse” trademark). This is in addition to the draconian copyright protections, described above, already in force under general law. But copyright protection is no more necessary for artistic creation than patents are necessary for invention. There are many businesses, in the open-source world, that manage to make money from auxiliary services even though their content itself is not proprietary. For example, even though Red Hat cannot restrict the copying of the Linux software it distributes, it does quite well customizing the software and offering specialized customer support. Phish has actively encouraged fans to share its music free of charge, while making money off of live performances and concessions. Radiohead offered a recent album for free download, collecting only voluntary contributions via what amounted to a glorified PayPal tip jar.

The Radiohead model is especially interesting in its implications for making a living off open-source production. Since, as we have already seen, the cost of the physical capital necessary for recording and sound editing has imploded, the overhead costs which must be serviced by an open-source music distributor are miniscule. And since the listeners themselves bear the cost of physical reproduction (i.e., they burn their own CDs), whatever revenue stream comes in from voluntary contributions—even it averages only a dollar or two per listener—belongs to the artist free and clear. And even if the content provider charges a price for the download, there is a significant rent entailed in the cost of setting up a rival download service and selling the same content for a lower price. So for all but the biggest blockbuster music groups and publishers, if the content provider charges a low enough price, the transaction costs involved in going through a file-sharing network, or setting up a competing download service just to sell the content for fifty cents instead of a dollar, probably exceed the likely returns. Unless the content providers attempt to price gouge in the way that record companies have done in recent years, or they are forced to service the overhead costs from supporting corporate management and shareholders, they are likely to benefit more than suffer from free culture.

Since IP is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing technology.

In any case, for those whose libertarianism follows from the principles of self-ownership and nonaggression, whether “intellectual property” is necessary for those engaged in certain forms of economic activity to profit is beside the point. The same argument is used by protectionists: certain businesses would be unprofitable if the weren’t protected from competition by tariffs. So what? No one has a right to profit at someone else’s expense, through the use of force. In particular, no one has the right to make a profit by using the state to prevent others from doing as they please with their own pen and paper, hard drives, or CDs. A business model that isn’t profitable without government intervention should fail.

The following example is instructive, as a lesson in double standards. David Noble, in Progress Without People, recounted an incident in the early 1970s when the Washington Post was adopting computerized cold type technology which rendered pressmen obsolete. The pressroom was invaded after hours by pressmen who systematically took apart the machines with the technical expertise of a Jack the Ripper. [86] So why is it bad for “Luddites” to smash machines that put them out of a job, while technology that puts capitalists out of a job (or out of profit, rather) violates their “property” rights? If the same newspaper publishers whose adoption of new technology rendered skilled workers obsolete, now find themselves threatened by cutting and pasting and hyperlinks—well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys. And if the record companies’ management and shareholders now find themselves redundant in the face of home sound editing, filesharing, and other forms of new technology, then let them eat cake. If workers don’t have a property right in their jobs in the face of new technology, then neither do capitalists have a property in the accrual of profits from a business model rendered obsolete by new technology.

“Intellectual property,” finally, hinders innovation in another way we have not yet considered: it increases the cost of putting and keeping one’s own ideas in the public domain, for those who prefer to do so. The content originator or inventor must take defensive measures to prevent his idea, which he leaves in the public domain, from being copyrighted by someone else with the intent of depriving him of its use.

This is not such a problem for copyright. Copyleft, the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons license all presuppose strong copyright laws, and piggyback on standard copyright. Such licenses allow virtually unlimited reproduction and circulation of material under a broad range of circumstances, on the condition that the secondary user make his own use of the material publicly available under the terms of the same license. Copyright protection is simply retained in self-defense, to prevent material in the public domain from being copyrighted by secondary users. Were there no copyright laws in existence in the first place, there would be no need for the GPL or CC license. Patents, however, raise far more difficult issues. Vinay Gupta’s account of his experiences with the hexayurt, an open-source form of cheap emergency housing for refugees living in shantytowns and tent cities, is instructive in this regard.

Look, the problem is this: GPL enforceability rests on strong copyright law.

Hardware, however, is typically not covered by copyright, leaving patent.

Patents are expensive.

So you can patent-with-open-license if you can afford it, or you can publish and it drops into the public domain (i.e. is no longer patentable) and some other bastard can patent things around or enclosing your invention, and then you’re an unhappy camper.

Been through this with the Hexayurt and there’s no good answer right now. I strongly tend towards the public-domain-and-pray approach, personally. [87]

One cannot simply choose not to patent an invention and entrust it safely to the public domain. It is necessary to pay the enormous expense of obtaining a patent in order to enforce the continued public domain status of one’s own invention, and keep it from being stolen by corporate pirates.

In Summary…

“Intellectual property” is theft. Smash the state.

Notes:

78. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, pp. 36-37.

79. Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism, p. 116.

80. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 655, 658-9.

81. Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round & the Third World (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1990), p. 118.

82. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and Mcmeel, Inc., 1970,

83. Scherer testimony, Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Competition. FTC, 29 November 1995 <http://www.ftc.gov/opp/gc112195.pdf>.

84. Chris Lewis, “Public Assets, Private Profits,” Multinational Monitor, in Project Censored Yearbook 1994 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1994).

85. Benjamin Grove, “Gibbons Backs Drug Monopoly Bill,” Las Vegas Sun, 18 February 2000 <http://www.ahc.umn.edu/NewsAlert/Feb00/022100NewsAlert/44500.htm>.

86. David F. Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995), p. 42. 1977), p. 74.

Il verdetto è stato emesso: Tutti i popoli civili devono odiare Dennis Rodman. Politici da John McCain a John Kerry e opinionisti da Bill O’Reilly a Chris Matthews sono offesi dal fatto che un americano visiti il terzo polo dell’Asse del Male. All’inizio di questa settimana Rodman, assieme a sei suoi ex compagni di gioco della NBA (l’associazione di basket professionista, es), è arrivato a Pyongyang e ha giocato una partita dimostrativa di basket contro una squadra di nordcoreani. La partita faceva parte della festa di compleanno di Kim Jong Un. Politici e opinionisti sono atterriti, e la maggior parte degli altri americani non è molto lontana dalla loro isteria. L’atmosfera ricorda i “Due Minuti di Odio” di George Orwell. Ogni minima deviazione dalla politica ferrea di McCain e Clinton che impone di odiare il nemico equivale ad un tradimento. I titoli serali della tivù parlano dell’idiozia di Rodman.

Ma la trasferta di Rodman è davvero un male così grande? Io credo di no. Credo che, se uno è preoccupato per la libertà dei nordcoreani, sia un passo profondamente positivo nella direzione giusta. C’è qualcuno che può citare una sola azione del dipartimento di stato volta a normalizzare le relazioni e far cessare la faida tra i due paesi? I vari Hillary Clinton, John Kerry e altri cosiddetti diplomatici hanno mai dialogato con le loro controparti nordcoreane? E quando mai si sono recati lì per mostrare la loro solidarietà con i cittadini nordcoreani? Che importa se il governo nordcoreano è “irragionevole” o “pazzo”? L’unico compito di un diplomatico consiste nel forgiare relazioni armoniose e pacifiche con altri stati, non importa quanto difficile sia.

Non capisco come faccia un rappresentante del governo a definirsi un diplomatico se il suo primo istinto in fatto di scienza governativa lo spinge a condannare aspramente o a minacciare e mettere in pratica una guerra fredda. I diplomatici dovrebbero essere persone che tessono la tela della pace, non antagonisti. Se non avessi buonsenso, penserei che dipartimento di stato e compagnia, più che alla pace, siano interessati a mantenere le ostilità con una selezione di paesi. Non solo, ma la propensione del dipartimento di stato alle faide è parte di un problema più vasto: l’incapacità totale del governo di concedere la pace alle popolazioni straniere. Lo stato ha una sola freccia sottile nella sua faretra: la forza. Quando c’è un problema, nazionale o internazionale, la forza è l’unica risposta dello stato.

Quali sono gli strumenti che lo stato possiede in materia di politica estera? Le sanzioni. Minacce di guerra. Guerra vera e propria. Aiuti internazionali. Finito. Tutti quanti comportano violenza, reale o minacciata, e, nel caso degli aiuti internazionali, furto e clientelismo grottesco. Certo un segretario di stato potrebbe andare in un paese straniero come ha fatto Rodman, ma a che servirebbe la sua visita? In fin dei conti, l’incontro si ridurrebbe ad un padrone che dice ad un altro padrone come deve trattare i suoi sudditi. I nordcoreani, come tutte le altre persone prive di libertà, hanno bisogno di meno padroni e più esperienza: l’esperienza che viene quando si conoscono altre culture e si impara che c’è tutto un altro mondo fuori dal loro piccolo paese. È possibile che Rodman e sei vecchi giocatori della NBA non rappresentino quella dose culturale forte che libererà i nordcoreani. Ma è un inizio che potrebbe aprire la Corea del Nord al mondo esterno, con le sue differenze esteriori, di stile di vita e di opinioni: tutte cose che qui negli Stati Uniti vengono celebrate.

La trasferta di Rodman e i suoi mi rende ottimista, e applaudo i loro sforzi. Se non l’avessi visto, sarei stato portato a credere che la politica nordcoreana vieta l’ingresso agli americani. Io non pretendo di possedere la risposta a come liberare i nordcoreani dalle catene del loro governo, ma non occorre una grande fantasia per immaginare incontri annuali di basket che fioriscono in qualcosa di più grande. La gente è creativa e le porte si aprono dove uno meno se lo aspetta.

Ovviamente, non mi piace vedere qualcuno della statura di Rodman che canta buon compleanno e va a braccetto con una persona odiosa come Kim Jong Un. Non mi piace vedere la gente che si inchina, elogia o celebra un rappresentante dello stato, che sia nordcoreano o altro. Ma pensateci un po’. Una persona in vista come Rodman, che desidera fare il primo passo per aprire un paese escluso dal mondo, che probabilità di successo avrebbe se andasse ad irritare il suo leader dal pugno di ferro, da cui dipende la sua possibilità di ingresso nel paese? Nessuna. Forse Rodman ammira sinceramente Kim, ma le sue motivazioni non dovrebbero importare. Il suo atteggiamento benevolo verso Kim gli ha dato un’opportunità che nessun rappresentante del governo americano è mai riuscito ad avere. Viene da chiedersi: non è che il governo americano ce l’ha con Rodman perché ha sferrato un colpo al suo monopolio della diplomazia?

Libertà e progresso possono nascere solo da un cambiamento culturale e nei comportamenti. I governi sono reattivi. Più Rodman si apre alla Corea del Nord e più conoscenza i nordcoreani acquisiscono, e più cresce la voglia di conoscere ciò che sta oltre i confini del loro stato. Chissà che un giorno la curiosità culturale dei nordcoreani non si trasformi nella voglia di interagire liberamente con il mondo?

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

A half-century of the “War on Poverty” has not yet come close to making poverty in the United States a thing of the past. Even so staunch a defender as  Paul Krugman admits that “progress against poverty has nonetheless been disappointingly slow.” Supposedly, poverty is simply so intractable that even a gargantuan initiative cannot be expected to end it. So today is an opportune time to look back on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s call in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? for “the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by a distinctly different method.

King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”

The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.” In contrast, King noted that “[w]e are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished” and concluded that he is “now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a … guaranteed income.”

Market anarchists can fully agree with King that “[t]he dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain.” An antipoverty program that empowers ordinary people to run their own lives would be both more respectful and more effective than the top-down approach whose often-lauded, less-often-read bible “The Other America” referred unabashedly to the “Negro who must be patronized and taken care of like a child.” King approvingly quotes laissez-faire populist Henry George’s view that creative activity “is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities” and thus would be “enormously increased” in a post-poverty society.

A society-wide economic floor could, and should, be sustained by means consistent with free markets. Henry George’s single tax was the culmination of a line of classical liberal proposals to provide all members of society with a share of common natural resources. Self-sustaining voluntary organizations that pool members’ resources have an array of models to draw on, such as the Peace Mission Movement that made enough from nonprofit cooperative businesses to hold daily feasts during the Great Depression. And even a simple repeal of the countless legal barriers to subsistence would go a long way towards establishing a de facto floor. With a combination of such approaches, the abolition of poverty need not take another fifty years.

John Stossel recently penned a piece titled Equality vs Liberty. In it, he argues that wealth inequality is not a serious issue. This post is the beginning of a lengthier response to him. It will be expanded into an opinion editorial. Quotations from Stossel will be used in both pieces.

Stossel remarks:

It’s true that today, the richest one percent of Americans own a third of America’s wealth. One percent owns 35 percent!

But I say, so what?

Stossel is oblivious to the fact that control of wealth and property allows a person to dictate the terms of existence to another. A person with little money is more likely to have to work for a boss, because they don’t have the resources to survive otherwise. Inequality is by definition a phenomena involving subordination. When people aren’t relatively equal – command and control ensues. Individual liberty and equality are thus intertwined.

Stossel goes on to say:

Progressives in the media claim that the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.

But that’s a lie.

Hollywood sells the greedy-evil-capitalists-cheat-the-poor message with movies like Martin Scorsese’s new film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which portrays stock sellers as sex-crazed criminals. Years before, Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” created a creepy financier, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who smugly gloated, “It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins; somebody loses.”

This is how the left sees the market: a zero-sum game. If someone makes money, he took it from everyone else. The more the rich have, the less others have. It’s as if the economy is a pie that’s already on the table, waiting to be carved. The bigger the piece the rich take, the less that’s left for everyone else. The economy is just a fight over who gets how much.

But this is absurd. Bill Gates took a huge slice of pie, but he didn’t take it from me. By starting Microsoft, he baked millions of new pies. He made the rest of the world richer, too. Entrepreneurs create things.

Stossel is also unaware of the extent to which state intervention in the “market” props up established wealthy economic players. A genuinely freed market would not involve people getting wealthy at the expense of others, but we don’t live in such a society. A genuinely freed market would likely have a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Not a perfect equality, but a substantially better one. This is what we left-wing market anarchists aim for.

Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique

I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property”
II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality
III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy
IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy
V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design
VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive?

Earlier, we quoted Murray Rothbard’s observation that the enforcement of “intellectual property” rights requires the violation of genuine rights to tangible property. As Cory Doctorow argues, this becomes even more true given the business model required by proprietary digital information:

It’s funny that in the name of protecting “intellectual property,” big media companies are willing to do such violence to the idea of real property ­­ arguing that since everything we own, from our t­-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes. [75]

All-­pervasive DRM prevents the easy transfer of content between platforms, even when it’s simply a matter of the person who purchased a CD or DVD wanting to play it somewhere more convenient. And the DMCA legally prohibits circumventing such DRM, even when — again — the purchaser of the content simply wants to facilitate his own use on a wider and more convenient variety of platforms.

A good recent example of the phenomenon Doctorow commented on is the Amazon Kindle. If Amazon suspends a Kindle account (say, because the user returned too many books), the reader becomes an inert chunk of plastic suitable for use as a doorstop or paperweight. All those e-books already bought and paid for can no longer be read. If the reader falls afoul of Amazon’s good graces, they’ll disable his reader by remote and make the e-books he already “owns” utterly worthless. [76]

But to repeat once again, and for the last time, the laws on which the enforcement of this business model depends are becoming unenforceable, and the business model itself as a result untenable. According to the (probably hyperbolic) claim of Johan Pouwelse, a scholarly analyst of the P2P phenomenon, copyright will become unenforceable by 2010. If his assessment of the timeline is overly optimistic, his analysis of the causes of copyright’s obsolescence are on the mark. As file-sharing platforms become more popular, they are simultaneously becoming more robust and more secure. For a growing percentage of young people, all the industry admonitions that “file-sharing is theft” fall on deaf ears. Among those younger than thirty or so, file-sharing is simply something that people do, and will continue to do. Any attempt to change this cultural atmosphere will be a losing, rear-guard battle comparable to that faced by the Religious Right. At the same time, file-sharing networks are becoming increasingly user-friendly and attractive to mainstream participants.

Most important of all is the prospect of anonymity and security against the punitive efforts of the Copyright Nazis at MPAA and RIAA. According to Pouwelse,

By 2010 darknets should be able to offer the same performance as traditional P2P software by exploiting social networking,” the article reads, referring to networks that allow file trading whithout revealing the identity of its participants to outside entities. ? Just think what would happen if those 72,866 YouTube friends were able to share Hollywood movies within a P2P network that’s as easy to use as YouTube but untraceable by Hollywood. Pouwelse and his colleagues think it’s going to happen within the next two years. [77]

Notes:

75. Cory Doctorow, “In the age of ebooks, you don’t own your library,” Boing Boing, March 23, 2008
<http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/23/in­the­age­of­ebooks.html>.

76. Kevin Carson, “What This Country Needs is a Good Pirated Version of Kindle E-Books,” C4SS, May 1, 2009
<http://c4ss.org/content/448>.

77. Janko Roettgers, “BitTorrent Researcher: Copyright Will Be Obsolete by 2010,” New York Times, January 31, 2009
<http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/01/31/31gigaom-bittorrent-researcher-copyright-will-be-obsolete–
17305.html>.