In questi ultimi anni gli accaparratori – persone che collezionano mucchi di oggetti fino ad esserne sopraffatti – sono diventati l’argomento forte dei notiziari e della “televisione della realtà”. Secondo un’opinione condivisa da molti gli accaparratori sono persone malate di mente, persone comunque socialmente deviate e bisognose di “aiuto”, o persone che devono essere fermate nella loro mania di ammassare enormi quantità di cose. Io personalmente non sono d’accordo con l’idea di usare la forza per combattere “l’accaparramento”, ma credo che il fenomeno contenga un’utile allegoria.

Tempo fa conoscevo una persona che rispondeva alla descrizione generica di “accaparratore”. Collezionava… bè, di tutto. Quando l’ho conosciuto io, aveva la casa piena di “antichità” (leggi: qualunque mobilia che avesse più di un paio d’anni), “computer classici” (elettronica obsoleta) e pile su pile di vecchi giornali e riviste.

Questo mio amico non soffriva della mancanza di volontà di organizzare la propria vita. Collezionava anche oggetti che servivano ad organizzare qualcosa: box raccoglitutto, schedari, libri su come “tenere in ordine” una casa disordinata. Purtroppo tutto quello ne ricavava era… bè, semplicemente accumulava. Aggiungeva in cima ai giornali vecchi, che stavano in cima all’elettronica obsoleta, che stava in cima ai mobili vecchi. Oh, e collezionava anche gatti. Tanti, tanti gatti. Questo significava che tutte quelle pile di roba erano ricoperte di peli di gatto, grumi di peli di gatto, e altra roba lasciata dai gatti. Aveva un sacco di roba. La maggior parte probabilmente era inutile, rovinata dalla sua mania di collezionare se mai era valsa qualcosa.

Non si preoccupò mai di mettere ordine, e quando morì sono sicuro che i suoi figli adulti (crescendo si erano trasferiti altrove prima che lui sviluppasse questa malattia, se era una malattia) abbiano fatto una sfacchinata per sbarazzare la casa e recuperare qualcosa di valore.

Mi sono ricordato del mio vecchio amico quando ho letto una notizia che diceva che l’Nsa non sa come cavare qualcosa di utile da tutte le informazioni che raccoglie attraverso le sue operazioni anticostituzionali di sorveglianza (“NSA Can’t Make Sense of Masses of Culled Data,” Antiwar.com, 26 dicembre, 2013).

Credo che molti di noi (sì, compreso io) abbiano osservato questa roba di spionaggio, rivelata nei mesi scorsi dall’informatore Edward Snowden, dal punto di vista sbagliato. L’abbiamo vista in termini orwelliani: Uno stato onnisciente che stringe la morsa attorno alla popolazione registrando ogni cosa che fa, ogni acquisto, ogni frase affidata all’elettronica.

Comincio a pensare che quello che vediamo in realtà è l’equivalente dell’ossessione che aveva il mio amico accaparratore.

Se spingiamo l’accaparramento fino a considerarlo un sintomo di problemi mentali, il mio sospetto è che le sue origini stiano nella percezione della perdita di controllo di se stessi. L’acquisizione di tutta quella roba è un tentativo di restaurare quel controllo: di agire, di prendere il comando.

Secondo me, l’accaparramento dell’Nsa rivela le stesse paure. Non è uno stato onnipotente che difende il suo potere e il suo controllo. È piuttosto uno stato fallimentare, tremante e impaurito che cerca disperatamente di riprendersi il potere perduto.

Così come l’accaparratore non capisce che è la sua collezione che controlla lui e non il contrario, l’Nsa non riesce a capacitarsi del fatto che sarà l’ordine anarchico mondiale emergente – una rete volontaria e decentrata di uguali tutti con lo stesso potere – a determinare il futuro degli stati centralizzati e gerarchici, e non il contrario.

Questo non significa che gli stati con le loro spie non sono più pericolosi. Ma stanno diventando sempre più pericolosi per se stessi e sempre meno per noi. Le loro pile di giornali spandono polvere e urina di gatto sui loro apparati elettronici obsoleti, facendo marcire la sottostruttura formata dalla mobilia sottostante. Alla fine tutto precipiterà sulle loro teste.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

On Monday, January 13, two Fullerton, California police officers charged with the beating death of Kelly Thomas were acquitted, and the prosecutor announced his decision not to press charges against a third officer involved. Millions who had been following the story met the verdict with incredulity: How could anyone who watched that horrific video of Thomas pinned down and brutally beaten with fists and batons, begging for his life and calling out for his father, have possibly returned any verdict but guilty?

The answer lies in a famous psychological experiment — the Milgram Experiment — conducted in 1961. This experiment, conducted when the Nuremberg trials were still a recent memory, led subjects to believe they were torturing a fellow subject in the next room (who in fact was a confederate pretending to be a volunteer, and suffered no actual pain) with increasingly powerful electric shocks. Reassured by scientists in white coats that they would assume all responsibility, and urged to continue, subjects continued to (so far as they knew) inflict more and more painful shocks on their fellow subjects, even as the screams became louder and then went silent. In short, these people were willing to inflict pain on strangers who were begging for mercy, to the point of unconsciousness and possible death, based on the assurances of “responsible authority figures,” so long as the victim was framed as an outsider.

Developmental psychologists tell us that children are initially socialized to view political authority as an extension of their parents’ authority. The president is first viewed as a sort of Mommy or Daddy, with all Americans as the family. Gradually actors like Congress, the courts, and so forth enter the picture — at first understood as simply “helpers” to the President, and only later as constitutional checks to presidential authority. But the aura of parental authority persists, on a subliminal level, even then.

This continuing aura of authority stimulates a tendency to give political leaders the benefit of the doubt when they start wars (“they must be privy to information that we’re not”) and to view formal systems of authority as things that exist by popular consent in order to address common problems (“the government is just all of us”). Nowhere is this ingrained tendency more evident than in the view of police officers inculcated in small children. “The policeman is your friend.” “If you’re ever in trouble or need help, call a policeman.” “They must have been doing something wrong, or they wouldn’t have been arrested.”

But this is simply untrue. Perhaps in years past,  police were mostly benign presences in neighborhoods or small towns where local residents had long known both each other and the officer on the beat (although even here things might not seem so benign to vagrants or members of racial minorities). But today a major portion of officers on metropolitan police forces of any size are people who self-selected police work based on authoritarian personalities and a desire to brutalize others; another portion are encultured into brutality after they join the force, and most of those who don’t fall into either of the first two categories learn to honor the blue code of silence when they witness brutality by others in their “band of brothers.”

What happened to Thomas is standard police operating procedure in most jurisdictions: Continue to brutalize someone who’s been rendered physically incapable of resistance — other than involuntary spasms from unbearable agony — while continuing to yell “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” Local police forces are sordid empires of criminality based on planted evidence, entrapment, coerced testimony, “civil forfeiture” racketeering with stolen property and dogs trained to falsely alert on command. Thanks to the gravy train of federal military surplus hardware and military cross-training, police forces are militarized to the point that SWAT teams are used to serve routine search or arrest warrants — battering down doors, shooting pets, ransacking houses and terrorizing families in the dead of night just like Soviet or Nazi-era secret police. Police forces increasingly view civilians as an occupied enemy population to be awed with random shows of force.

Until most people abandon their state-inculcated respect for uniformed authority, and their willingness to treat officially defined outsiders as the “other,” the Rodney King and Kelly Thomas verdicts — and uncounted such verdicts yet unnamed — will continue.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Sobre o culto à autoridade.
• Italian, Il Culto dell’Autorità.

More than a few libertarians appear to hold the view that only rights violations are wrong, bad, and deserving of moral condemnation. If an act does not entail the initiation of force, so goes this attitude, we can have nothing critical to say about it.

On its face, this is strange. If you observe an adult being rude to his elderly mother, it is surely reasonable for you to be appalled, even though the offender did not use force. And, being appalled, you may be justified under the circumstances in responding, such as by cancelling a social engagement or telling others of his obnoxious behavior. One can reasonably say that this person’s mother is owed better treatment, without the word owed implying legal, that is, coercive, enforceability. (Words can have different senses, of course.) Therefore, the rude son may be judged culpable.

This example may be uncontroversial, but observe the attitude in another context. I recently argued that “intellectual property” (IP) can’t really be property (as can land, cars, and socks) and that it is, rather, a government grant of monopoly power over expressions of ideas, which perforce limits other people in the use of their property, while creating scarcities where there would have been none.

The article brought vigorous critical responses, one of which informed me that if I don’t believe that expressions of ideas can be owned, I would have no right to object if someone were to plagiarize or adulterate my written work.

Before diving in, I’d like to draw attention to the strange habit IP proponents have of bringing up plagiarism (or adulteration) as soon as the legitimacy of copyright is challenged. This is strange because so-called copyright infringement per se differs in a crucial respect from plagiarism. The publishing industry doesn’t strenuously lobby the government for fortified copyright laws because it is worried I will publish Atlas Shrugged with my name on the cover. (Who’d buy it?) On the contrary, it worries that I (or someone else) will publish the novel with Ayn Rand’s nameon the cover. Copyright and plagiarism must be considered apart from each other.

Be that as it may, the premise of my critic’s claim — that I cannot logically object to plagiarism or adulteration because I don’t believe expressions of ideas can be owned — must be that theonly legitimate ground for objection would be that these activities are property violations. So if they are not property violations, there is no basis to complain.

With all due respect, this is ridiculous. One who rejects the legitimacy of intellectual property can still have perfectly good moral grounds for objecting to the plagiarist’s or adulterator’s misconduct. Libertarians ought to think long and hard before buying the idea that rights violations are the only species of wrongful conduct.

If someone attaches his name to something I wrote, the plagiarist’s declaration that he is not a thief (because expressions of ideas cannot be owned) is hardly germane. I would not accuse him of being a thief. Rather, I’d accuse him of being a fake — of pretending to have accomplished something he in fact did not accomplish. Likewise, the adulterator is not a thief, but a fraud who misrepresents what he sells. Both are to be held in contempt for they have violated Kant’s maxim to treat each person “never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Their assertions that they are not thieves are as relevant as a burglar’s assertion that he is not a murderer.

Slight digression: Metaphor pervades all language. When one says that a copyright infringer “stole” from an author or publisher, one cannot mean this literally (no pun intended), for what was actually stolen? We can easily imagine an “infringement” that entails no physical violation whatsoever. IP has the impossible premise that an author or publisher owns a Platonic form of a work, which is embodied in, yet transcends, every physical instantiation of that work, even those owned by other people. In other words, you can buy a book, but you cannot buy thebook. The anti-IP response is that abstractions cannot be owned.

The upshot is that a rejecter of IP may justly take offense at the plagiarism or adulteration of his work and expose the fakes and scoundrels. “The same mechanisms that make copying easy make plagiarism very difficult,” Karl Fogel writes in “The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.”

I should add that customers may justly claim they are victims of fraud. On what grounds? On the same grounds that any fraud victim has: The buyers were tricked into entering transactions on terms other than those they would have agreed to. The remedy might come through a class-action suit, the award being a refund plus costs. (Context is crucial. Someone who buys a $10 Rolex on the streets of Manhattan probably cannot credibly claim that he thought he was buying a genuine Rolex.)

What I’m arguing for is a commonsense category of noninvasive moral offenses, wrongful acts that do not involve force. Since force plays no part, the remedies must not entail force (state-backed or otherwise) either. But forced-backed remedies are not the only — or even the best — remedies available. Nonviolent responses, including boycotts, shunning, and gossip (PDF), can be highly effective.

Libertarians ought to beware of embracing such a narrow view of morality that only forceful invasions of persons and property are deserving of moral outrage and response. Think of all the cruel ways people can treat others without lifting a hand. Are we to remain silent in the face of such abuse?

The erroneous belief that only conduct for which a coercive response is appropriate — that is, rights violations — may be condemned leads too easily to the corollary error that if some conduct is deserving of condemnation, it must somehow be a rights violation. The initiation of force is not the only bad thing in the world.

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?

In the contemporary global economy, “intellectual property” plays the same protectionist role for TNCs that tariffs performed in the old national economies. Michael Perelman argues that the upsurge in “intellectual property” protection since the late 1960s has been an integral part of the neoliberal revolution.

Although many old line industries could no longer compete effectively in world markets, exports of intellectual property in the form of royalties and copyright fees soared.

I have not seen hard data regarding the effect of intellectual property rights on the rate of profit, but I am convinced that it is substantial. Just think about Microsoft and the pharmaceutical industry with their low marginal costs relative to their market prices. For example, Microsoft reported that it makes 85 percent margin on its Windows system…. [68]

Elsewhere he cites figures showing that revenues on “intellectual property” rose, between 1947 and the early 1990s, from ten percent to over half of all American exports. In 1999 export revenues from royalties and licensing revenue reached $37 billion, exceeding the revenue from aircraft export ($29 billion). [69]

It’s hardly coincidental that the dominant industrial sectors in the global corporate economy are all heavily dependent on “intellectual property”: software, entertainment, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. And the central focus of the neoliberal regime, which has been falsely identified with “free trade” and “free markets,” is on strengthening corporate control over “intellectual property” in the face of the threats we saw described by Michel Bauwens earlier in this paper.

This is the Nike business model, simultaneously celebrated by Tom Peters and condemned by Naomi Klein: outsource production to networked supply chains, with the corporate headquarters retaining control over trademarks and other “intellectual property,” finance, and marketing.

In addition, patents are used on a global scale to lock transnational manufacturing corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the Uruguay Round is probably its “industrial property” provisions. [70] The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing “generic technologies,” and to restrict diffusion of “dual use” technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement on semi-conductors, for example, is a “cartel-like, ‘managed trade’ agreement.” So much for “free trade.” [71]

The central motivation in the GATT intellectual property regime, however, is to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, “effectively prevent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential development of Third World technology.” [72]

Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World:

Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling… the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income. [73]

But to repeat once again: the good news is that, in both the domestic and global economies, this business model is doomed. As argued by a wide range of authors, it sows the seeds of its own destruction.

The shift from physical to human capital as the primary source of productive capacity in so many industries, along with the imploding price and widespread dispersion of ownership of capital equipment in so many industries, means that corporate employers are increasingly hollowed out and only maintain control over the physical production process through legal fictions. When so much of actual physical production is outsourced to the small sweatshop or the home shop, the corporation becomes a redundant “node” that can be bypassed; the worker can simply switch to independent production, cut out the middleman, and deal directly with suppliers and outlets.

David Pollard, writing from the imaginary perspective of 2015, remarked on the vulnerability of corporations that follow the Nike model of hollowing themselves out and outsourcing everything:

In the early 2000s, large corporations that were once hierarchical end-to-end business enterprises began shedding everything that was not deemed ‘core competency’, in some cases to the point where the only things left were business acumen, market knowledge, experience, decision-making ability, brand name, and aggregation skills. This ‘hollowing out’ allowed multinationals to achieve enormous leverage and margin. It also made them enormously vulnerable and potentially dispensable.

As outsourcing accelerated, some small companies discovered how to exploit this very vulnerability. When, for example, they identified North American manufacturers outsourcing domestic production to third world plants in the interest of ‘increasing productivity’, they went directly to the third world manufacturers, offered them a bit more, and then went directly to the North American retailers, and offered to charge them less. The expensive outsourcers quickly found themselves unnecessary middlemen…. The large corporations, having shed everything they thought was non ‘core competency’, learned to their chagrin that in the connected, information economy, the value of their core competency was much less than the inflated value of their stock, and they have lost much of their market share to new federations of small entrepreneurial businesses. [74]

To take the example of Nike shoes themselves, the larger the percentage that brand-name markup contributes to total retail price, over and above actual costs of production, the greater the incentives will become for the factories producing the actual shoes to defect from the international “intellectual property” regime. By producing identical shoes (perhaps with the Swoosh in a red circle-and-slashbar) and cutting Nike out of the loop, the factories can eliminate the brand-name markup, raise wages by several hundred percent, and lower prices sufficiently to market their shoes domestically instead of for export to Western consumers. Likewise, the small, networked flexible manufacturing firms in industrial districts like Emilia-Romagna, to the extent that they still participate in the supply chains of transnational manufacturing corporations, by simply ignoring “intellectual property” laws can bypass the large manufacturers and offer better, cheaper competing versions of their own products.

One of the greatest services libertarians can render to the cause of freedom is to agitate for mass defection from international “intellectual property” agreements like WIPO and TRIPS, and at the same time to promote the development of technical means of circumventing enforcement of copyright law.

Notes:

68. Michael Perelman, “Intellectual Property Rights and the Commodity Form: New Dimensions in the Legislative Transfer of Surplus Value,” Review of Radical Political Economics 35:3 (Summer 2003), pp. 307-308.

69. Perelman, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 36.

70. Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round & the Third World (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1990), pp. 119-20.

71. Dieter Ernst, Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Industrialization, quoted in Raghavan, Recolonization, pp. 39-40.

72. Martin Khor Kok Peng, The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1990), pp. 29-30.

73. Raghavan, Recolonization, p. 96.

74. David Pollard, “The Future of Business,” How to Save the World, January 14, 2004 <http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/01/14.html>.

Carlton Hobbs recentemente desafiou a tendência da corrente principal dos libertários, defensores do livre-mercado e anarco-capitalistas a favorecer a corporação capitalista como modelo primário de propriedade e atividade econômica e a assumir que qualquer sociedade de livre-mercado futura será organizada no padrão do capitalismo corporativista. Como alternativa a essa forma de organização, Hobbs propôs a “propriedade comum sem estado”, com direito de usufruto possuído pelos habitantes de uma dada área, surgindo “sem acordos prévios formais, incorporando um grupo de donos potencialmente impreciso”. Ele apresentou como exemplos históricos desse tipo de propriedade direitos públicos às vias ou os direitos dos comuns sobre campos, poços ou bosques.1 As questões que ele levantou são aplicáveis numa escala muito maior.

Libertários e anarco-capitalistas, ao defenderem a abolição da propriedade e dos serviços estatais, tipicamente defendem um processo de “privatização” que depende pesadamente do modelo capitalista corporativista de propriedade. A propriedade do estado deveria ser leiloada e seus serviços executados, digamos, pela GiganteGlobalCorp LLC. E a imagem da futura economia de mercado, em relação aos empreendimentos produtivos, é simplesmente a presente economia corporativista menos o estado regulatório e de bem-estar ? Uma versão idealizada do “capitalismo dos barões ladrões” do século XIX. A primeira tendência ignora outras alternativas, igualmente válidas de um ponto de vista anarquista de livre-mercado, tais como colocar os serviços governamentais como escolas e polícia sob o controle cooperativo de sua clientela anterior no nível das cidades ou bairros. E a última tendência ignora a questão do capitalismo de estado, da extensão à qual as gigantescas corporações que receberam uma parte enorme de seus lucros através do estado podem ser consideradas como propriedade privada legítima ou como resultado de roubo.

Ao desafiar essa afinidade estética pela corporação como a forma dominante de organização econômica, Karl Hess denunciou aqueles que simplesmente identificavam o libertarismo “com aqueles que desejam criar uma sociedade na qual os super-capitalistas sejam livres para acumular vastas possessões”. Escrevendo no Libertarian Forum em 1969, Hess argumentou, ao contrário, que

O Libertarismo é um movimento popular e um movimento de liberação. Ele busca o tipo de sociedade aberta, não-coercitiva, na qual pessoas vivas, livres e diferentes podem se associar voluntariamente, se desassociar, e participar, como acharem apropriado, das decisões que afetam suas próprias vidas. Isso significa um mercado verdadeiramente livre em tudo, desde idéias até idiossincrasias. Significa que as pessoas sejam livres para organizar coletivamente os recursos de suas comunidades imediatas ou organizá-los individualisticamente; significa a liberdade de ter um judiciário baseado na comunidade e sustentado por ela quando desejado, nenhum onde não for, ou serviços de arbitragem privados onde isso for visto como mais desejável. O mesmo com a polícia. O mesmo com as escolas, hospitais, fábricas, fazendas, laboratórios, parques e pensões. Liberdade significa o direito de moldar as próprias instituições. Se opõe ao direito dessas instituições te moldarem simplesmente por conta do poder estabelecido ou do status gerontológico.2

Hess desprezava a tendência cultural de muitos libertários de defender os direitos de propriedade privada a despeito de como foram adquiridos, e a assumir que aqueles presentemente no topo da economia capitalista de estado estavam simplesmente coletando a recompensa por um “passado virtuoso”.

Porque muitos de seus componentes [do movimento libertário] (…) vieram da direita permanece pelo menos uma aura ou, talvez, um miasma de defensividade, como se seus interesses centrais fossem, por exemplo, defender a propriedade privada. A verdade, é claro, é que o libertarismo pretende avançar os princípios da propriedade, mas de forma alguma deseja defender, bem ou mal, todas as propriedades que atualmente são chamadas de privadas.Muitas dessas propriedades são roubadas. Muitas têm títulos dúbios. Todas estão profundamente entrelaçadas com um estado imoral e coercitivo que amparou, se desenvolveu e lucrou com a escravidão, explorou e se expandiu por meio de uma política externa agressiva, imperial e colonial, e continua a manter as pessoas basicamente num relacionamento entre servos e senhores através das concentrações de poder político-econômicas.

Dada essa situação, Hess defendeu uma criativa análise libertária, confrontando as questões do “tratamento revolucionário das propriedades ‘privadas’ e ‘públicas’ roubadas em termos libertários, radicais e revolucionários”, incluindo, por exemplo: “A propriedade e/ou uso da terra numa situação de declínio do poder do estado”; “O controle acionário dos trabalhadores das comunidades ou das fábricas produtivas. (…) O que, por exemplo, deveria acontecer com a General Motors numa sociedade liberada?”; e a injustiça de libertar escravos e servos sem estabelecer seus direitos de propriedade das terras de seus prévios donos (i.e., “quarenta acres e uma mula”).

No espírito dos comentários de Hess, eu examinarei modelos libertários alternativos de “privatização” das propriedades e dos serviços do governo, e tentarei aplicar os mesmos princípios por analogia à questão de como lidar com os atuais beneficiários do capitalismo de estado numa sociedade de livre-mercado futura. Ao fazer isso, eu devo antes deixar claro que não sou um anarco-capitalista, como é a maioria dos visitantes regulares do ASC, mas um anarquista individualista influenciado principalmente por Tucker.

Meios Alternativos de “Privatizar” a Propriedade do Estado

A facção anarquista da Young Americans for Freedom [N.T.: Organização estudantil americana fundada nos anos 1960], em seu manifesto de 1969 The “Tranquil” Statement [N.T.: “A ‘Tranqüila’ Declaração”] (um de seus autores era Karl Hess), expressou simpatia pelos estudantes radicais que ocuparam os campi das universidades. Em resposta às denúncias da direita de tais crimes contra a “propriedade privada”, o Statement notou que

a questão da propriedade privada não pertence a uma discussão das universidades americanas. Mesmo aquelas universidades que se passam por instituições privadas são, na verdade, altamente subsidiadas com recursos federais ou, como em muitos casos, sustentadas por fundos de pesquisas federais. A Universidade de Columbia é um excelente exemplo. Quase dois terços da receita de Columbia vem do governo, não de fontes privadas. Como, então, pode alguém razoável ou moralmente considerar a Universidade de Columbia uma instituição privada? (…) E, sendo ela uma propriedade pública (governamental, isto é, propriedade roubada), o libertário radical é justificado em tomá-la e retorná-la ao controle privado ou comunal. Isso, é claro, se aplica a toda instituição de ensino que seja subsidiada pelo governo ou que ajude de qualquer maneira o governo em sua usurpação dos direitos humanos básicos.3

As corporações privadas que recebem “de qualquer maneira” subsídios governamentais, é claro, podem ser escusadas por ver o sinistro potencial desse princípio.

Murray Rothbard, tomando a mesma posição num editorial na The Libertarian, ridicularizou o “grotesco” argumento randiano de que Columbia era uma “propriedade privada” e de que os estudantes portanto estavam violando esses “direitos sagrados”:

Além dos vários laços específicos com o Estado que os rebeldes de Columbia apontaram (…), quase dois terços da receita de Columbia vem de fontes governamentais e não privadas. Como diabos poderíamos continuar a chamá-la de instituição privada?

Defender os direitos de “propriedade privada” de universidades “francamente estatais” era, evidentemente, absurdo. Nesses casos,

A propriedade do governo é sempre e em todo lugar resultado de exploração, para o libertário; o libertário deve regozijar todas as vezes que qualquer parte da propriedade governamental, portanto roubada, for restituída por quaisquer meios necessários ao setor privado. (…)Portanto, o libertário deve aplaudir qualquer tentativa de retornar propriedades roubadas, do governo, ao setor privado, sendo sob o clamor de que “as ruas pertencem ao povo” ou “os parques pertencem ao povo”, ou de que as escolas pertencem àqueles que as usam, i.e., os estudantes e docentes. O libertário acredita que as coisas não corretamente possuídas são revertidas à primeira pessoa que as usa e as possui, e.g., o apropriador [N.T.: “homesteader”] que primeiro limpa e usa uma terra virgem; similarmente, o libertário deve apoiar qualquer tentativa pelos “apropriadores originais” do campus, os estudantes e professores, de tomar o poder nas universidades da burocracia governamental ou quasi-governamental.4

Rothbard argumentou que “o método mais prático de desestatização é simplesmente o de conceder o direito moral de propriedade à pessoa ou ao grupo que toma a propriedade do estado”. Isso implicaria, na maioria dos casos, tratar a propriedade do estado como vaga ou sem dono e reconhecer os direitos de apropriação daqueles que realmente as estão usando. No caso das universidades “públicas”,

os donos adequados dessas universidades são os “apropriadores originais”, aqueles que já a estavam usando e portanto “misturando o próprio trabalho” às instalações. (…) Isso implica a propriedade dos estudantes e/ou dos docentes sobre universidades.5

É possível aplicar esse princípio da apropriação da propriedade estatal por trabalhadores ou clientes de muitas formas. Larry Gambone propôs a “mutualização” dos serviços públicos como uma alternativa à privatização corporativista. Isso significa descentralizar o controle de, digamos, escolas, polícia, hospitais, etc., até menor unidade local viável (bairro ou comunidade) e então colocar esses serviços sob controle democrático de sua clientela. Por exemplo, as pessoas de uma cidade podem abolir o conselho escolar municipal e colocar cada escola sob controle de um conselho selecionado que deveria prestar contas aos pais dos alunos. Em última análise, a taxação compulsória acabaria e as escolas funcionariam com contribuições voluntárias dos usuários. Em termos práticos, a mutualização é mais ou menos equivalente à reorganização de todas as atividades estatais em cooperativas de consumidores.6

Privatização em Sociedades Pós-Comunistas

Murray Rothbard e Hans-Hermann Hoppe tentaram aplicar o mesmo princípio da apropriação original da propriedade estatal em sociedades pós-comunistas.

Embora a abordagem de Rothbard quanto ao potencial libertário da combinação iugoslava do gerenciamento próprio dos trabalhadores e do socialismo de mercado fosse otimista demais e ingênua, sua proposição do princípío para sociedades pós-comunistas foi bastante sólida: “a terra para os camponeses e as fábricas para os trabalhadores, dessa forma tirando a propriedade das mãos do estado e colocando-a em mãos privadas”.7

A queda do império soviético e de seus satélites em 1989-91 transformou essa questão meramente teórica numa questão prática. O curso geralmente seguido no período seguinte envolvia a emissão de ações iguais, vendáveis, das empresas estatais para todos os cidadãos, permitindo então que a propriedade subseqüente se desenvolvesse através da compra e venda das ações. Rothbard propôs, em vez disso, uma solução “sindicalista”:

Seria muito melhor considerar o venerável princípio do homesteading na base do novo sistema de propriedade dessocializado. Ou, para reviver o velho slogan marxista: “todas as terras para os camponeses, todas as fábricas para os trabalhadores!” Isso estabeleceria o princípio básico lockeano de que a posse das propriedades sem donos deve ser adquirida pela “mistura do trabalho com o solo” ou com outros recursos sem dono. A dessocialização é um processo que priva o governo de suas “propriedades” ou controles existentes e que os devolve aos indivíduos privados. Num sentido, abolir a propriedade do governo dos recursos os coloca imediatamente e implicitamente numa condição em que não têm dono na qual uma apropriação anterior pode rapidamente convertê-las em propriedade privada.8

Hoppe fez uma proposta similar em relação à Alemanha Oriental, embora mais hesitante e com mais qualificações.9

É claro, o termo “sindicalista” foi usado principalmente para provocação, já que Rothbard e Hoppe foram ambos claros ao defenderem que essas propriedades “sindicalistas” fossem devolvidas aos trabalhadores e camponeses individuais como ações vendáveis e não aos membros das unidades produtivas coletivamente. O ideal, como Hoppe o expressou, seria o de que a propriedade das ações e o trabalho se separassem o mais rápido possível. Mas não há razão em princípio, como Carlton Hobbs demonstrou em relação aos comuns, por que essas unidades de produção não devessem permanecer propriedade conjunta e indivisível de suas forças de trabalho, com direitos usufrutuários de salários e pensões derivados dela. Esse sistema de forma alguma impediria necessariamente um mercado de fatores de produção. Os coletivos de trabalhadores comprariam novos equipamentos de capital no mercado; mas suas reclamações de propriedade em relação a qualquer unidade industrial de produção seriam coletivas enquanto o empreendimento mantivesse continuidade organizacional e espacial.

Embora Rothbard não tivesse feito tal qualificação em seu texto de 1969 (escrito, afinal, durante sua tentativa de coalizão com a New Left), ele e Hoppe concordaram duas décadas depois que uma tentativa deferia ser feita no sentido de restituir a propriedade estatal aos seus donos legítimos originais antes de um confisco, se registros de propriedade ainda existissem. Hoppe vinculou similares caveats à privatização “sindicalista” das indústrias estatais pós-comunistas em Democracy: The God That Failed.10 Rothbard e Hoppe concordavam que essa restituição seria mais fácil no caso da terra e na Europa Oriental (onde a expropriação da terra ocorreu apenas quarenta anos mais cedo) que na União Soviética. Rothbard enfatizou, contudo, que essa restituição seria virtualmente impossível no caso dos bens de capital e das manufaturas, uma vez que a maior parte da economia industrial foi desenvolvida sob propriedade estatal. Assim, seria melhor colocar a indústria sob controle dos trabalhadores.

Dificuldades Práticas da Privatização Capitalista Corporativista da Propriedade do Estado

A privatização da propriedade do estado, como ela ocorreu é apenas outra forma de subsídio capitalista de estado. Num primeiro momento, o capital transnacional promove projetos de infraestrutura nos países de Terceiro Mundo que são essenciais para retornos sobre o capital ocidental nesses países, como forma de subsidiar o investimento estrangeiro neles às expensas dos pagadores de impostos nativos. Em seguida, o débito resultante é usado para disciplinar o governo do país de forma a fazer com que ele estabeleça políticas favoráveis ao capital ocidental. Finalmente, sob o regime de “ajuste estrutural” imposto pelo FMI e pelo Banco Mundial, o país é forçado a vender seus ativos (anteriormente pagos com o suor das classes produtivas nativas) ao capital ocidental por alguns centavos de dólar. Sean Corrigan perspicazmente descreveu o fenômeno num artigo no LewRockwell.com:

Ele não sabe que toda a estratégia do FMI e do Tesouro dos EUA de dominação total é baseada na promoção de dívidas governamentais improdutivas no exterior, a taxas de juros cada vez mais usurárias, para em seguida ? antes ou, mais freqüentemente hoje em dia, depois do ponto de moratória ? liberar os bancos ocidentais que foram os agentes provocadores dessa Operação Suserano financeira, com novos dólares emitidos, em detrimento dos cidadãos domésticos?Ele não tem consciência de que, subseqüente ao colapso, esses Reconstrucionistas de última hora devem ser deixados arrebatar e comprar o controle proprietário dos recursos e capitais produtivos tornados ridiculamente baratos pela desvalorização ou total colapso financeiro?

Ele não entende que precisa simultaneamente precisa coagir a nação-alvo a explorar seu povo para produzir bens de exportação para pagar a nova dívida refinanciada, em adição à acumulação de um excesso de reservas em dólar como uma suposta garantia contra futuros ataques especulativos (normalmente financiados pelos mesmos bancos ocidentais através de empréstimos a seus colegas das Forças especiais nos fundos de macro-hedge) ? assim assegurando que o mercantilismo reverso da Rubinomics [N.T.: Rubinomics foi o nome dado à política econômica de Bill Clinton por causa de seu Secretário do Tesouro, Robert E. Rubin] seja mantido?11

Privatizações também normalmente envolvem um fenômeno conhecido como “canalização” [N.T.: “tunnelling”], no qual as elites com conexões políticas obtêm vantagens na aquisição de direitos às antigas propriedades estatais. Por exemplo, além do capital ocidental, outro grupo que teve fundos disponíveis para comprar antigas empresas soviéticas foi a nomenklatura do Partido, que acumulou ganhos ilícitos através de décadas de fraudes e corrupção. (Mais ou menos como o bom e velho xerife que usa o trabalho das fazendas do seu condado para colher sua plantação, mas numa escala muito maior.)

Expropriação da Propriedade “Privada” da Classe Dominante Estatista

Mas a linha de argumento até aqui não se aplica somente às propriedades atualmente sob controle formal do estado, mas também a propriedades “privadas” nominais adquiridas através de meios estatistas, ou a empresas construídas com lucros derivados predominantemente da intervenção estatal. Nos comentários acima por Rothbard e Hess sobre as ocupações pelos estudantes, as reclamações de propriedade de universidades privadas financiadas ostensivamente pelo estado foram tratadas como merecedoras de desdém. Elas eram tão suscetíveis quanto as propriedades do estado de serem tratadas como “sem dono” e abertas à “apropriação original” pelos ocupantes, os estudantes e/ou os professores.

Rothbard aplicou o mesmo princípio às corporações privadas que derivavam a maior parte de suas receitas do estado. Universidades nominalmente privadas como Columbia que recebiam a maior parte de seus fundos do pagador de impostos, privadas “somente (…) no sentido mais irônico”, mereciam tanto confisco e apropriação quanto aquelas possuídas pelo estado.

Mas se é assim com a Universidade de Columbia, o que dizer da General Dynamics? O que dizer da miríade de corporações que são partes integrais do complexo militar-industrial, que não apenas conseguem metade ou às vezes virtualmente todas as suas receitas do governo, mas que também participam de assassinatos em massa? Quais são as credenciais delas à propriedade privada? Certamente menos que zero. Como impacientes lobistas por esses contratos e subsídios, como co-fundadores do estado militar, eles merecem confisco e reversão de suas propriedades ao genuíno setor privado o mais rápido possível.12

Tratar a receita bruta como o critério principal, como fez Rothbard, é provavelmente muito simples. A percentagem da margem de lucro de uma firma que adviu do estado nos anos passados é um padrão mais relevante, uma vez que o tamanho presente e a equidade de uma corporação é resultado de sua acumulação passada. No caso dos Estados Unidos, o complexo de rodoviário-automotivo e o sistema de aviação civil foram virtuais criações do estado. Grandes linhas aéreas civis foram viáveis somente por causa do gasto federal em bombardeiros pesados. C. Wright Mills apontou emThe Power Elite que o valor de uma fábrica e dos equipamentos se espandiu em mais ou menos dois terços durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, pela maior parte às custas do pagador de impostos. A maior parte da indústria de eletrônicos foi construída através do dinheiro do Pentágono aplicado em pesquisa e desenvolvimento nos anos 1960; e se os primeiros supercomputadores não tivessem sido comprados pelo governo dos Estados Unidos, é improvável que a indústria fosse capaz de alcançar o ponto de redução de custos para tornar os computadores economicamente viáveis para o setor privado. E não esqueça o papel do Pentágono na criação da infraestrutura da worldwide web…

Mas e quanto aos benefícios não-monetários do estado, como a possibilidade de cobrar preços monopolísticos graças a patentes estatais? Grande parte da cartelização da indústria no fim do século XIX e do começo do século XX ocorreu pela troca de direitos de patente (e.g., entre a GE e a Westinghouse). A indústria química americana alcançou domínio global somente depois que o governo dos Estados Unidos tomou as patentes alemãs durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial e as deu para as firmas químicas de liderança. E o que dizer dos efeitos totais da taxa de acumulação graças à intervenção do estado no mercado de trabalho? (Esta última incluiria as restrições ao direito de organização, como o Railroad Labor Relations Act [N.T.: “Lei de Relações Trabalhistas das Ferrovias”] ou o Taft-Hartley Act [N.T.: Lei americana que restringe o poder dos sindicatos]; restrições à liberdade bancária que mantêm as taxas de juros artificialmente altas, limitam o acesso dos trabalhadores ao crédito e mantêm as dívidas como um instrumento de disciplina.) E também há o benefício coletivo da acumulação primitiva no começo do período moderno (pela qual os camponeses foram destituídos de seus direitos de propriedade tradicionais na terra e se tornaram inquilinos pela vontade do estado), o papel da força mercantilista na criação de um “mercado mundial”, os controles quase totalitários da população durante a Revolução Industrial britânica, os subsídios maciços às melhorias internas, etc.

Juntando todas essas coisas, não é preciso pensar muito para ver que virtualmente todo o grande setor manufatureiro é uma criação do estado corporativista.

A Propriedade das Terras e o Estado

Jerome Tucille certa vez contrastou os legítimos princípios libertários de propriedade da terra com a “anarco-captura de terras” [N.T.: “anarcho-land grabism”]:

Anarquistas de livre-mercado baseiam suas teorias de propriedade privada no princípio da apropriação original: uma pessoa tem o direito a um pedaço privado de terras se misturar seu trabalho a ela e alterá-la de alguma forma. Os anarco-pegadores de terras não reconhecem tais restrições. Simplesmente escale a montanha mais alta e reclame tudo o que você puder ver. Tudo então se torna moral e sagradamente seu e ninguém mais pode colocar os pés nessas terras.13

É claro, esse padrão lockeano de trabalho de apropriação levanta todos os tipos de questões complicadoras. Quanto “trabalho” é necessário para apropriar uma dada porção de terra? Requer direta ocupação e cultivo ou a simples circunscrição (com os pés? num SUV?) e marcação dela é suficiente mistura de trabalho? Se for o último caso, há um tempo limite? Onde paramos antes de reconhecer o direito de um papa de desenhar uma linha através do mapa da América do Sul e dividi-la entre Espanha e Portugal? Por outro lado, se algum ato tangível de trabalho ou alteração da terra é requerido, pareceria que a quantidade de terra que um indivíduo poderia apropriar teria alguma relação definida com a quantidade que ele poderia pessoalmente cultivar. Neste último caso nós nos aproximamos de algo como o padrão de “ocupação e uso” mutualista de apropriação, o qual é meramente um sistema de regras de propriedade privada alternativo, não-lockeano (e o qual este autor defende).

Tibor Machan inadvertidamente apontou ao paralelo próximo entre o roubo do estado pela taxação e o roubo envolvido em muito do que se chama de “aluguel”:

Naqueles dias as classes altas, do rei a sua corte, rotineiramente se envolviam em extorsões. Eles disfarçavam isso com o falso argumento de que tudo pertence ao rei e à sua corte. Sim, monarcas e aqueles que racionalizaram a monarquia propuseram essa fantasia e venderam às pessoas que eles eram os legítimos donos “do reino”, que eles tinham um “direito divino” de nos governar. Dessa forma, quando a maior parte do país ia trabalhar na fazenda ou em qualquer outro lugar, ele tinha que pagar “aluguéis” ao monarca e à sua corte.É claro, se eu vivo em seu apartamento, eu lhe pago aluguel. É seu apartamento, afinal, então você tem direito a isso. Mas e se você conseguiu seu apartamento através da conquista, roubando de um monte de pessoas o que pertencia a elas? Foi na maioria das vezes assim que os monarcas conseguiram governar seus reinos, por conquista. Por direito, eram as pessoas que trabalhavam no reino ? nas terras ou em outros lugares ? que na verdade tinham propriedade sobre o reino, sendo os monarcas os falsos, pretensos donos, nada mais. Mas uma vez que eles conseguiram fazer com que a maioria das pessoas indefesas acreditassem que eles possuíam o reino, o “aluguel” tinha que ser pago.14

Embora haja significativas e fundamentais diferenças entre as teorias mutualistas e lockeanas (e geoístas, por sinal) de propriedade da terra, essa não é a questão aqui. O que é realmente importante notar é o quantoconcordam essas teorias rivais em relação à ilegitimidade de muito do que presentemente é chamado de propriedade “privada”. Vastas áreas de terra reclamadas pelos barões de hoje em dia são ilegítimas por qualquer padrão libertário plausível, inclusive de acordo com a regra lockeana de apropriação. No começo da era moderna na Europa, a classe dos senhores agiu através do estado para transformar sua “propriedade” de mera teoria legal feudal em direito moderno de absoluta propriedade, e no processo roubaram os camponeses, que haviam ocupado e cultivado as terras desde muito tempo, conscientes de seus direitos tradicionais à terra. Esse processo foi seguido por aluguéis extorsivos ou pela remoção em massa e cercamentos. No Novo Mundo, o estado agiu para impedir o acesso às terras vazias ou quase vazias, dizendo que elas eram de domínio “público”. Isso foi seguido por restrições ao acesso de apropriadores individuais juntamente com concessões de vastas terras a especuladores, a ferrovias, a companhias mineiras e serralheiras e a outras classes favorecidas. O resultado foi a limitação do acesso médio independente dos produtores à terra como meio de sobrevivência, para assim restringir sua gama de alternativas independentes na busca de um sustento, assim forçando-o a vender seu trabalho no mercado.

Em virtualmente toda sociedade no mundo onde poucos proprietários gigantes coexistem com um campesinato que paga aluguel pela terra em que trabalha, a situação tem suas raízes em algum ato de roubo passado pelo estado. O fenômeno teve origens na República Romana, como recontado tanto por Lívio quanto por Henry George, no qual os patrícios usavam o acesso que tinham ao estado para se apropriar das terras comuns e reduzir os plebeus ao inquilinato e à escravidão por dívidas. Como escreveu Albert Jay Nock, “a exploração econômica é impraticável até que a exploração pela terra ocorra”.15

Conclusão

Não é preciso que a direita libertária seja se apegue tanto à corporação como forma de organização ideal. Uma economia corporativista como a do padrão atual de forma alguma se segue dos princípios da não-coerção e das trocas de livre mercado. Uma sociedade de livre-mercado que admita a visão de, digamos, Colin Ward e Ivan Illich, em vez de apenas a de Tio Milton e a de John Galt, seria muito mais humanamente tolerável.

Entre não-libertários, o libertarismo é freqüentemente visto somente como uma forma de republicanismo leve em relação às leis de drogas. Em muitos casos, isso é injusto. O movimento libertário possui uma grande facção pequeno burguesa, populista, que tem suas origens em Warren e Tucker e outros individualistas que foi passada adiante pelas mãos de Nock e Mencken. E a maioria dos rothbardianos adere a princípios que significariam a destruição da maioria dos grandes negócios que existem hoje em dia.

Mas em muitos casos, a percepção é infelizmente bastante justa. Um grande segmento do movimento libertário é uma apologia glorificada daqueles presentemente no topo: dos grandes negócios contra os pequenos negócios, consumidores e trabalhadores; do agronegócio corporativista contra os fazendeiros orgânicos; das companhias petroleiras, madeireiras e mineradoras que querem acesso à terra do governo através de concessões politicamente determinadas; e dos colonos nos estados-párias do Terceiro Mundo, ou de estados anteriormente párias como Israel e Zimbábue, às expensas dos nativos miseráveis. Ou, nas palavras de Cool Hand Luke, “É, os pobrezinhos dos chefes precisam de toda ajuda que conseguirem”.

Se o libertarismo continuar a ser percebido dessa forma, como uma elaborada justificação da simpatia pelos ricos contra os pobres, nós não temos chance alguma de vitória. Mas se nós agirmos sobre os princípios da não-agressão e da não-coerção, mesmo quando esses princípios são danosos aos grandes negócios, nós teremos a base de uma coalizão genuinamente libertária de esquerda e direita que seja capaz de destruir a cidadela do estado. Eu espero ter fornecido alguns exemplos concretos de como esses princípios podem ser aplicados em resposta às questões atuais.

Notas

1 ”Common Property in Free Market Anarchism: A Missing Link”http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362

2 ”Letter From Washington: Where Are The Specifics?”, The Libertarian Forum, 15 de junho de 1969, p. 2.

3 In: Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition(Lexington Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co. 1970), p. 268.

4 ”The Student Revolution”, The Libertarian (logo renomeado para The Libertarian Forum), 1 de maio de 1969, p. 2.

5 ”Confiscation and the Homestead Principle”, The Libertarian Forum, 15 de junho de 1969, p. 3.

6 http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/mutualize

7 ”Confiscation”, p. 3.

8 ”How and How Not to Desocialize”, The Review of Austrian Economics 6:1 (1992) 65-77.

9 ”De-Socialization in a United Germany”, The Review of Austrian Economics 5:2 (1991) 77-104.

10 Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002), pp. 124-31.

11 ”You Can’t Say That!”, 6 de agosto de 2002.http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html

12 ”Confiscation”, p. 3.

13 ”Bits and Pieces”, The Libertarian Forum, 1 de novembro de 1970, p. 3.

14 Tibor R. Machan, “What’s Wrong With Taxation?”,http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1103

15 Capítulo 2, Our Enemy, The State.

Tradução de Erick Vasconcelos.

Carlton Hobbs recently challenged the tendency of mainstream libertarians, free marketers and anarcho-capitalists to favor the capitalist corporation as the primary model of ownership and economic activity, and to assume that any future free market society will be organized on the pattern of corporate capitalism. As one alternative to such forms of organization, Hobbs proposed “stateless common property,” with usufructory right possessed by the inhabitants of a given area, coming about “without any prior formal agreements incorporating a potentially imprecise owning group.” He gave, as historical examples of such kinds of ownership, public rights of way, or villagers’ rights of commons in a field, well or wood.  [1] The questions he raised are applicable on a much broader scale.

Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, in calling for the abolition of state property and services, typically call for a process of “privatization” that relies heavily on the corporate capitalist model of ownership. The property of the State should be auctioned off and its services performed by, say, GiantGlobalCorp LLC. And the picture of the future market economy, so far as business enterprise is concerned, is simply the present corporate economy minus the regulatory and welfare state–an idealized version of Nineteenth Century “robber baron capitalism.” The former tendency ignores other alternatives, equally valid from a free market anarchist perspective, such as placing government services like schools and police under the cooperative control of their former clientele at the town or neighborhood level. And the latter tendency ignores the issue of state capitalism, of the extent to which the giant corporations that have received the lion’s share of their profits from the State can be regarded either as legitimate private property or the result of theft.

In challenging this aesthetic affinity for the corporation as the dominant form of economic organization, Karl Hess denounced those who simply identified libertarianism “with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings…” Writing in The Libertarian Forum in 1969, Hess argued instead that

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncracies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status. [2]

Hess decried the cultural tendency of too many libertarians to defend existing rights of private property, regardless of how it was acquired, and to assume that those presently on top in the state capitalist economy were simply collecting the rewards of “past virtue.”

Because so many of its [the libertarian movement’s] people… have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

Given this situation, Hess called for creative libertarian analysis, confronting issues of “the revolutionary treatment of stolen “private” and “public” property in libertarian, radical, and revolutionary terms” (including, for example): “Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power”; “Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities…. What, for example, should happen to General Motors in a liberated society?“; and the injustice of freeing slaves and serf without addressing their property rights in the land of their former owners (i.e. “forty acres and a mule”).

In the spirit of Hess’s comments, I will examine alternative libertarian models for “privatizing” government property and services, and attempt to apply the same principles by analogy to the issue of how to deal with current “private” beneficiaries of state capitalism in a future free market society. In so doing, I should first make clear that I am not an anarcho-capitalist, as are most of the regular visitors to ASC, but an individualist anarchist influenced mainly by Tucker.

Alternative Means of “Privatizing” State Property

The anarchist caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom, in their 1969 manifesto The “Tranquil” Statement (its authors included Karl Hess), expressed sympathy with radical students who had occupied their college campuses. In response to right-wing denunciations of such crimes against “private property,” the Statement remarked that

the issue of private property does not belong in a discussion of American universities. Even those universities that pass as private institutions are, in fact, either heavily subsidized by federal grants, or, as in many cases, supported by federal research funds. Columbia University is an excellent example. Nearly two thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How, then, can anyone reasonably or morally consider Columbia University to be private [?]…. And in so far as it is public (government owned) property (that is, stolen property), the radical libertarian is justifiedin seizing that property and returning it to private or communal control. This, of course, applies to every institution of learning that is either subsidized by the government or in any way aiding the government in its usurpation of man’s basic rights.  [3]

Private corporations “in any way” receiving government subsidies, of course, might be excused for seeing ominous potential in this principle.
Murray Rothbard, taking the same position in an editorial in The Libertarian, ridiculed the “grotesque” Randian argument that Columbia was “private property,” and that the students therefore were in violation of these “sacred rights”:

Apart from the various specific tie-ins with the State which the Columbia rebels were pinpointing…, nearly two-thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How in the world can we continue to call it a private institution?…

To defend the “private-property” rights of “frankly state-owned” universities was, self evidently, absurd. In such cases,

government property is always and everywhere fair game for the libertarian; for the libertarian must rejoice every time any piece of governmental, and therefore stolen, property is returned by any means necessary to the private sector…. Therefore, the libertarian must cheer any attempt to return stolen, governmental property to the private sector: whether it be in the cry, “The streets belong to the people”, or “the parks belong to the people”, or the schools belong to those who use them, i.e. the students and faculty. The libertarian believes that things not properly owned revert to the first person who uses and possesses them, e.g. the homesteader who first clears and uses virgin land; similarly, the libertarian must support any attempt by campus “homesteaders” the students and faculty, to seize power in the universities from the governmental or quasi-governmental bureaucracy. [4]

Rothbard argued that “the most practical method de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State.” This would entail, in most cases, treating the State’s property as vacant or unowned, and recognizing the homestead rights of those actually using it. In the case of “public” universities,

the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities…. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities. [5]

This principle of homesteading State property by workers or clients is amenable to wide application. Larry Gambone has proposed “mutualizing” public services as an alternative to corporate privatization. This means decentralizing control of, say, schools, police, hospitals, etc., to the smallest feasible local unit (the neighborhood or community) and then placing them under the democratic control of their clientele. For example, the people of a town might abolish the city-wide school board, and place each school under a board of selectmen responsible to the pupils’ parents. Ultimately, compulsory taxation would be ended and the schools run on user fees. In practical terms, mutualizing is more or less equivalent to reorganizing all the State’s activities as consumer cooperatives. [6]

Privatization in Post-Communist Societies

Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman Hoppe have attempted to apply the same homestead principle to state property in post-communist societies.

Although Rothbard’s assessment of the libertarian potential of Yugoslavia’s combination of worker self-management and market socialism was over-optimistic and naive, his statement of principle for post-Communist societies was quite sound: “land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, thereby getting the property out of the hands of the State and into private, homesteading hands.” [7]

The fall of the Soviet empire and its satrapies in 1989-91 transformed this from a theoretical to a very practical issue. The course generally followed in the ensuing period involved issuing equal, marketable shares in State enterprises to all citizens, and then allowing subsequent ownership to develop through the buying and selling of such shares. Rothbard proposed, instead, a “syndicalist” solution:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the old Marxist slogan: “all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers!” This would establish the basic Lockean principle that ownership of owned property is to be acquired by “mixing one’s labor with the soil” or with other unowned resources. Desocialization is a process of depriving the government of its existing “ownership” or control, and devolving it upon private individuals. In a sense, abolishing government ownership of assets puts them immediately and implicitly into an unowned status, out of which previous homesteading can quickly convert them into private ownership. [8]

Hoppe made a similar proposal specifically regarding East Germany, albeit more hesitantly and with more qualifications. [9]

Of course, the term “syndicalist” was used mainly for color, since Rothbard and Hoppe were both adamant that such “syndicalist” property be devolved to individual workers and peasants as marketable shares, and not to the members of production units collectively. The ideal, as Hoppe expressed it, would be for share-ownership and labor to become separated as quickly as possible. But there is no reason in principle, as Carlton Hobbs showed in regard to the commons, that such production units should not remain the joint and indivisible property of their labor force, with a usufructory right in the wages and pensions derived from it. Such a system would by no means necessarily prevent a market in factors of production. Workers’ collectives would buy new capital equipment on the market; but their property claims to any industrial production unit would be collective so long as the enterprise maintained organizational and spatial continuity.

Although Rothbard made no such qualification in his 1969 statement (written, after all, at the height of his attempt at a coalition with the New Left), he and Hoppe agreed two decades later that an attempt should be made to restore state property to its original legitimate owner before confiscation, if records of ownership still existed. Hoppe attached similar caveats to “syndicalist” privatization of post-communist state industry inDemocracy: The God that Failed. (10) Rothbard and Hoppe agreed that such restoration would be easier in the case of land, and would be easier in the case of Eastern Europe (where the expropriation had taken place only forty years earlier) than in the Soviet Union. Rothbard stressed, however, that such a restoration would be virtually impossible in the case of manufacturing and capital goods, since most of the industrial economy had been developed under state ownership. So industry was best placed under the control of workers.

Practical Difficulties of Corporate Capitalist Privatization of State Property

Privatization of state property, as it is actually carried out is just another form of state capitalist subsidy. In the first state, transnational capital promotes infrastructure projects in Third World countries that are essential to returns on Western capital in those countries, as a way of subsidizing foreign investment there at the expense of native taxpayers. Next, the resulting debt load is used to discipline the country’s government into carrying out policies favorable to Western capital. And finally, under the “structural adjustment” regime imposed by the IMF and World Bank, the country is forced to sell assets (previously paid for in the sweat of the native producing classes) to Western capital at pennies on the dollar. Sean Corrigan ably described the phenomenon in an article for LewRockwell.com:

Does he not know that the whole IMF-US Treasury carpet-bagging strategy of full-spectrum dominance is based on promoting unproductive government-led indebtedness abroad, at increasingly usurious rates of interest, and then – either before or, more often these days, after, the point of default – bailing out the Western banks who have been the agents provocateurs of this financial Operation Overlord, with newly-minted dollars, to the detriment of the citizenry at home?

Is he not aware that, subsequent to the collapse, these latter-day Reconstructionists must be allowed to swoop and to buy controlling ownership stakes in resources and productive capital made ludicrously cheap by devaluation, or outright monetary collapse?

Does he not understand that he must simultaneously coerce the target nation into sweating its people to churn out export goods in order to service the newly refinanced debt, in addition to piling up excess dollar reserves as a supposed bulwark against future speculative attacks (usually financed by the same Western banks lending to their Special Forces colleagues at the macro hedge funds) – thus ensuring the reverse mercantilism of Rubinomics is maintained?  [11]

Privatization also commonly involves a phenomenon known as “tunnelling,” in which politically connected elites have an advantage in acquiring rights to the former state property. For example, besides Western capital, the other group that had funds available for buying up former Soviet enterprises was the Party nomenklatura, which had accumulated ill gotten gains from decades of graft and corruption. (Sort of like the good ol’ boy sheriff who uses labor from the county work farm to staff his plantation, but on a much larger scale.)

Expropriation of “Private” Property of Statist Ruling Class

But the line of argument so far applies not only to property currently under formal state ownership, but to nominally “private” property acquired through statist means, or to enterprises built with profits derived predominantly through state intervention. In the comments above by Rothbard and Hess on occupations by student demonstrators, the property claims of ostensibly “private” universities funded mainly by the state were treated as deserving of contempt. They were as liable as outright state property to being treated as “unowned” and opened to “homesteading” by the occupiers, the students and/or faculty.

Rothbard applied the same principle to private corporations that derived most of their revenues from the State. Nominally private universities like Columbia that got most of their funds from the taxpayer, private “only… in the most ironic sense,” were as deserving of confiscation and homesteading as those owned by the State.

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to private property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible.  [12]

To treat gross revenue as the main criterion, as Rothbard did, is probably too simple. The percentage of a firm’s profit margin that has come from the state in past years is a more relevant standard, since the present size and equity of a corporation is a result of its past accumulation. In the case of the United States, the highway-automobile complex and the civil aviation system were vitual creations of the State. Large civilian jet airliners were possible only because of federal spending on heavy bombers. C. Wright Mills pointed out inThe Power Elite that the value of plant and equipment expanded by roughly two-thirds during WWII, mostly at taxpayer expense. The electronics industry was built largely from Pentagon R&D money through the 1960s; and had not the first supercomputers been bought by the U.S. government, it is unlikely that the industry would have been able to reach the takeoff point for reducing costs to make mainframe computers economical for the private sector. And don’t forget the role of the Pentagon in creating the infrastructure of the worldwide web….

But what of non-monetary benefits from the state, like the ability to charge monopoly prices thanks to State-enforced patents? Much of the cartelization of industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was achieved by exchange of patent rights (e.g. between GE and Westinghouse). The U.S. chemical industry achieved world prominence only after the U.S. government seized German patents during WWI and gave them away to the leading chemical firms. And what of the total effects on the rate of accumulation owing to the State’s intervention in the labor market? (This latter would include restrictions on the right to organize like the Railroad Labor Relations Act or Taft-Hartley; restrictions on free banking that keep interest rates artificially high, limit working class access to credit, and maintain debt as an instrument of discipline.) And then there’s the collective benefit of primitive accumulation in the early modern period (by which peasants were robbed of their traditional property rights in the land and turned into tenants at will by the state), the role of mercantilist force in creating the “world market,” the near-totalitarian controls on the population during the British Industrial Revolution, the massive subsidies to internal improvements, etc.

Taking these things together, it requires no stretch of the imagination to treat virtually the entire large manufacturing sector as a creation of the corporate state.

Landlordism and the State

Jerome Tucille once contrasted legitimate libertarian principles of land ownership with “anarcho-land grabbism”:

Free market anarchists base their theories of private property rights on the homestead principle: a person has the right to a private piece of real estate provided he mixes his labor with it and alters it in some way. Anarcho-land grabbers recognize no such restrictions. Simply climb to the highest mountain peak and claim all you can see. It then becomes morally and sacredly your own and no one else can so much as step on it. [13]

Of course, this Lockean labor standard of appropriation raises all kinds of complicating issues. Just how much “labor” is necessary to appropriate a given piece of land? Does it require direct occupancy and cultivation, or is simply circumscribing it (on foot? in an SUV?) and marking it off sufficient admixture of labor? If the latter, is there a time limit? Where do we stop short of recognizing the right of a pope to draw a line across the map of South America and apportion it between Spain and Portugal? On the other hand, if some tangible act of working or altering the land is required, it would seem that the amount of land an individual could appropriate would bear some definite relation to the amount he could personally cultivate. In this latter case we are approaching something like the mutualist “occupancy and use” standard for appropriation, which is merely an alternative, non-Lockean system of private property rules (and one to which this author holds).

Tibor Machan inadvertently pointed to the close parallel between the State’s robbery by taxation, and the robbery involved in much of what is called “rent”:

In those days the upper classes, from the king to all his cronies, routinely engaged in extortion. They disguised this, however, with the phony claim that everything belongs to the king and his cronies. Yes, monarchs and those who rationalized monarchy spun this fantasy and managed to sell it to the people that they where the rightful owners “of the realm,” that they had a “divine right” to rule us. This way when the bulk of the country went to work on the farm or wherever, they had to pay “rent” to the monarch and his cronies.

Of course, if I live in your apartment, I pay you rent. It is your apartment, after all, so you have it coming to you. But what if you got your apartment by conquest, by robbing a bunch of people of what belongs to them? That is mostly how the monarchs got to rule the realm, by conquest. By all rights it is the folks who were working in the realm — on the land and elsewhere — who actually owned that realm, the monarchs being the phony, pretend owners, nothing better. But since they managed to bamboozle a great many powerless folks into believing that they did own the realm, the “rent” had to be paid.  [14]

Although there are significant and fundamental differences between mutualist and Lockean (and Geoist, for that matter) theories of land ownership, the issue is beyond our scope here. What is really important to note is the extent of agreement between these rival theories as to the illegitimacy of much of present nominally “private” landlord property. The vast tracts of land claimed by present-day land barons are illegitimate by any plausible libertarian standard, including the Lockean rule of appropriation. In early modern Europe, the landlord class acted through the State to turn its “ownership” in mere feudal legal theory into a modern right of absolute ownership, and in the process robbed the peasants who had occupied and tilled the land from time out of mind of their very real traditional rights in the land. This process was followed by rack-rents or by mass eviction and enclosure. In the New World, the state acted to preempt access to empty or nearly empty land, by claiming it for the “public” domain. This was followed by restrictions on access by individual homesteaders, coupled with massive land grants to land speculators, railroads, mining and logging companies, and other favored classes. The result was to limit the average producer’s independent access to the land as a means of livelihood, to thereby restrict his range of independent alternatives in seeking a livelihood, and thus force him to sell his labor in a buyer’s market.

In virtually every society in the world where a few giant landlords coexist with a peasantry that pay rent on the land they work, the situation has its roots in some act of past robbery by the State. The phenomenon goes all the way back to the Roman Republic, as recounted by both Livy and Henry George, in which the patricians used their access to the State to appropriate the common lands and reduce the plebians to tenancy and debt slavery. As Albert Nock wrote, “economic exploitation is impracticable until expropriation from the land has taken place.” (15)

Conclusion

There is no need for the libertarian right to be so closely wedded to the corporation as an ideal organizational form. A corporate economy on anything like the current pattern does not by any means logically follow from the principles of non-coercion and free market exchange. A free market society that makes room for the vision of, say, Colin Ward and Ivan Illich, instead of just Uncle Milty and John Galt, would be a lot more humanly tolerable.

Among non-libertarians, libertarianism is often perceived as just a form of Republicanism that’s soft on drug laws. In many cases, this is unjust. The libertarian movement includes a very large petty bourgeois, populist strand that goes back to Warren and Tucker and the other individualists, and has been passed down through the hands of Nock and Mencken. And most Rothbardians adhere to principles that would mean the destruction of most big business as it exists today.

But in too many cases, the perception is unfortunately quite just. A large segment of the libertarian movement is a glorified apology for those currently on top: for big business against small business, consumers and labor; corporate agribusiness against organic farmers; for oil, timber and mining companies who want access to government land with politically determined leases; and for the settlers in Third World pariah states or former pariah states like Israel and Zimbabwe at the expense of the native dispossessed. Or in the words of Cool Hand Luke, “Yeah, them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.”

If libertarianism continues to be perceived in this way, as an elaborate justification of sympathy for the haves against the have-nots, we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever achieving victory. But if we act on the principles of non-aggression and non-coercion, even when those principles are harmful to big business, we will have the basis for a genuinely libertarian coalition of left and right that can storm the citadel of the State. I hope I have provided some concrete examples of how these principles can be applied in response to current issues.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Propriedade e privatização libertárias: um paradigma alternativo.

Notes:

1. “Common Property in Free Market Anarchism: A Missing Link” http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362

2. “Letter From Washington: Where Are The Specifics?” The Libertarian Forum June 15, 1969 p. 2

3. In Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1970), p. 268.

4. “The Student Revolution,” The Libertarian (soon renamed The Libertarian Forum) May 1, 1969, p. 2.

5. “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” The Libertarian Forum June 15, 1969 p. 3

6. http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/mutualize

7. “Confiscation” p. 3

8. “How and How Not to Desocialize,” The Review of Austrian Economics 6:1 (1992) 65-77

9. “De-Socialization in a United Germany” The Review of Austrian Economics 5:2 (1991) 77-104

10. Democracy, the God that Failed (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002) pp. 124-31

11. “You Can’t Say That!” August 6, 2002. http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html

12. “Confiscation” p.3

13. “Bits and Pieces,” The Libertarian Forum November 1, 1970, p. 3

14. Tibor R. Machan, “What’s Wrong with Taxation?” http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1103

15. Chapter 2, Our Enemy, the State http://www.barefootsworld.net/nockoets2.html

Konkin offered a scenario [PDF], using agorist class theory, to illustrate the difference between a limited-government libertarian and an agorist:

“Consider the individual standing at the corner of the street. He can see two sides of the building behind him as he prepares to cross the street. He is hailed and turns around to see an acquaintance from the local libertarian club approaching in one direction. The latter advocates ‘working through the system’ and is an armed government agent. Walking along the other side of the building is another acquaintance, same age, gender, degree of closeness and so on, who is a practicing counter-economist. She also may be armed and is undoubtedly carrying the very kind of contraband the State’s agent is empowered to act on. Seeing you, the first individual waves and confirms she indeed has the illegal product — and is about to run into the ‘libertarian statist’ at the corner. Both are slightly distracted, looking at you.

The situation is not likely to happen too often but it’s quite possible. Only the removal of ‘complicating factors’ is contrived. If you fail to act, the counter-economist will be taken by surprise and arrested or killed. If she is warned, she may — at this last-minute — elect to defend herself before flight and thus injure the agent. You are aware of this and must act now — or fail to act.

The agorist may take some pains to cover his warning so that he will not get involved in a crossfire, but he will act. The socialist has a problem if the State agent works for a socialist state. Even the ‘libertarian’ has a problem. Let’s make it really rough: the State agent contributes heavily to the local ‘libertarian’ club or party (for whatever reasons; many such people are known to this author). The counter-economist refuses to participate except socially to the group. For whose benefit would the ‘political libertarian’ act?

Such choices will increase in frequency when the State increases repression or the agorists increase their resistance. Both are likely in the near future.

Agorist class theory is quite practical.”

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?

Patents promoted the stable control of markets by oligopoly firms through the control, exchange and pooling of patents.

According to David Noble, two essentially new science-based industries (those that “grew out of the soil of scientific rather than traditional craft knowledge”) emerged in the late 19th century: the electrical and chemical industries. [35]

In the electric industry, General Electric had its origins first in a merger between Edison Electric (which controlled all of Edison’s electrical patents) and the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company, and then in an 1892 merger between Edison General Electric and Thomas-Houston — both of them motivated primarily by patent considerations. In the latter case, in particular, Edison General Electric and Thomas-Houston each needed patents owned by the others and could not “develop lighting, railway or power equipment without fear of infringement suits and injunctions.” [36] From the 1890s on, the electrical industry was dominated by two large firms: GE and Westinghouse, both of which owed their market shares largely to patent control. In addition to the patents which they originally owned, they acquired control over patents (and hence over much of the electrical manufacturing market) through “acquisition of the patent rights of individual inventors, acquisition of competing firms, mergers with competitors, and the systematic and strategic development of their own patentable inventions. As GE and Westinghouse together secured a deadlock on the electrical industry through patent acquisition, competition between them became increasingly intense and disruptive. By 1896 the litigation cost from some three hundred pending patent suits was enormous, and the two companies agreed to form a joint Board of Patent Control. General Electric and Westinghouse pooled their patents, with GE handling 62.5% of the combined business. [37]

The structure of the telephone industry had similar origins, with the Bell Patent Association forming “the nucleus of the first Bell industrial organization” (and eventually of AT&T) The National Bell Telephone Company, from the 1880s on, fought vigorously to “occupy the field” (in the words of general manager Theodore N. Vail) through patent control. As Vail described the process, the company surrounded itself

with everything that would protect the business, that is the knowledge of the business, all the auxiliary apparatus; a thousand and one little patents and inventions with which to do the business which was necessary, that is what we wanted to control and get possession of.

To achieve this, the company early on established an engineering department

whose business it was to study the patents, study the development and study these devices that either were originated by our own people or came in to us from the outside. Then early in 1879 we started our patent department, whose business was entirely to study the question of patents that came out with a view to acquiring them, because… we recognized that if we did not control these devices, somebody else would. [38]

This approach strengthened the company’s position of control over the market not only during the seventeen year period of the main patents, but (as Frederick Fish put it in an address to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers) during the subsequent seventeen years of

each and every one of the patents taken out on subsidiary methods and devices invented during the progress of commercial development. [Therefore] one of the first steps taken was to organize a corps of inventive engineers to perfect and improve the telephone system in all directions …that by securing accessory inventions, possession of the field might be retained as far as possible and for as long a time as possible. [39]

This method, preemptive occupation of the market through strategic patent acquisition and control, was also used by GE and Westinghouse.

Even with the intensified competition resulting from the expiration of the original Bell patents in 1894, and before government favoritism in the grants of rights-of-way and regulated monopoly status, the legacy effect of AT&T’s control of the secondary patents was sufficient to secure them half the telephone market thirteen years later, in 1907. [40] AT&T, anticipating the expiration of its original patents, had (to quote Vail again) “surrounded the business with all the auxiliary protection that was possible.” For example, the company in 1900 purchased Michael Pupin’s patent on loading coils and in 1907 acquired exclusive domestic rights for Cooper-Hewitt’s patents on the mercury-arc repeater — essential technologies underlying AT&T’s monopoly on long-distance telephony. [41]

By the time the FCC was formed in 1935, the Bell System had acquired patents to “some of the most important inventions in telephony and radio,” and “through various radio-patent pool agreements in the 1920s… had effectively consolidated its position relative to the other giants in the industry.” In so doing, according to an FCC investigation, AT&T had gained control of “the exploitation of potentially competitive and emerging forms of communication” and “pre-empt[ed] for itself new frontiers of technology for exploitation in the future….” [42]

The radio-patent pools included AT&T, GE and Westinghouse, RCA (itself formed as a subsidiary of GE after the latter acquired American Marconi), and American Marconi.43 Alfred Chandler’s history of the origins of the consumer electronics industry is little more than an extended account of which patents were held, and subsequently acquired, by which companies. This should give us some indication, by the way, of what he meant by “organizational capability,” a term of his that will come under more scrutiny in the next chapter. In an age where the required capital outlays for actual physical plant and equipment are rapidly diminishing in many forms of manufacturing, one of the chief functions of “intellectual property” is to create artificial “comparative advantage” by giving a particular firm a monopoly on technologies and techniques, and prevent their diffusion throughout the market.

The American chemical industry, in its modern form, was made possible by the Justice Department’s seizure of German chemical patents in WWI. Until the war, some 98% of patent applications in chemical industry came from German firms, and were never worked in the U.S. As a result the American chemical industry was technically second-rate, largely limited to final processing of intermediate goods imported from Germany. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, as “Alien Property Custodian” during the war, held the patents in trust and licensed 735 of them to American firms; Du Pont alone received three hundred. [44]

More generally, “intellectual property” is an effective tool for cartelizing markets in industry at large. They were used in the automobile and steel industries among others, according to Noble. [45] In a 1906 article, mechanical engineer and patent lawyer Edwin Prindle described patents as “the best and most effective means of controlling competition.”

Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly. In a recent court decision the court said, “within his domain, the patentee is czar…. cries of restraint of trade and impairment of the freedom of sales are unavailing, because for the promotion of the useful arts the constitution and statutes authorize this very monopoly.”

The power which a patentee has to dictate the conditions under which his monopoly may be exercised has been used to form trade agreements throughout practically entire industries, and if the purpose of the combination is primarily to secure benefit from the patent monopoly, the combination is legitimate. Under such combinations there can be effective agreements as to prices to be maintained…; the output for each member of the combination can be specified and enforced… and many other benefits which were sought to be secured by trade combinations made by simple agreements can be added. Such trade combinations under patents are the only valid and enforceable trade combinations that can be made in the United States. [46]

And unlike purely private cartels, which tend toward defection and instability, patent control cartels — being based on a state-granted privilege — carry a credible and effective punishment for defection.

Through their “Napoleonic concept of industrial warfare, with inventions and patents as the soldiers of fortune,” and through “the research arm of the ‘patent offensive,’” manufacturing corporations were able to secure stable control of markets in their respective industries. [47]

Today, “intellectual property” serves as a structural support for corporate boundaries, at a time when the desktop revolution has undermined control of physical capital as their primary justification. The growing importance of human capital, and the implosion of capital outlay costs required to enter the market, have had revolutionary implications for production in the immaterial sphere.

In the old days, the immense value of physical assets was the primary basis for the corporate hierarchy’s power, and in particular for its control over human capital and other intangible assets.

As Luigi Zingales observes, the declining importance of physical assets relative to human capital has changed this. Physical assets, “which used to be the major source of rents, have become less unique and are not commanding large rents anymore.” And “the demand for process innovation and quality improvement… can only be generated by talented employees,” which increases the importance of human capital.48 This is even more true since Zingales wrote, with the rise of what has been variously called the Wikified firm, the hyperlinked organization, Enterprise 2.0, etc.

Tom Peters remarked in quite similar language, some six years earlier in The Tom Peters Seminar, on the changing balance of physical and human capital. Of Inc. magazine’s 500 top-growth companies, which include a good number of information, computer technology and biotech firms, 34% were launched on initial capital of less than $10,000, 59% on less than $50,000, and 75% on less than $100,000. [49]

In many industries, the initial outlay for entering the market was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. The old electronic mass media, for instance, were “typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the end. This led to a limited range of organizational models for production: those that could collect sufficient funds to set up a hub.” [50] The same was true of print periodicals, with the increasing cost of printing equipment from the mid-nineteenth century on serving as the main entry barrier for organizing the hubs. Between 1835 and 1850, the typical startup cost of a newspaper increased from $500 to $100,000 — or from roughly $10,000 to $2.38 million in 2005 dollars. [51]

The networked economy, in contrast, is distinguished by “network architecture and the [low] cost of becoming a speaker.”

The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers. [52]

The central change that makes this possible is that “the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer.”

The core functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned throughout the population of users…. The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment. [53]

The desktop revolution and the Internet mean that the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero. If anything that overstates the cost of entry in many cases, considering how rapidly computer value depreciates and the relatively miniscule cost of buying a five-year-old computer and adding RAM. The networked environment, combined with endless varieties of cheap software for creating and editing content, makes it possible for the amateur to produce output of a quality once associated with giant publishing houses and recording companies. [54] That is true of the software industry, the music industry (thanks to cheap equipment and software for high quality recording and sound editing), desktop publishing, and to a certain extent even to film (as witnessed by affordable editing technology and the success of Sky Captain). Podcasting makes it possible to distribute “radio” and “television” programming, at virtually no cost, to anyone with a broadband connection. A network of amateur contributors have peer-produced an encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which Britannica sees as a rival. As Tom Coates put it, “the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years.” [55]

It’s also true of news, with ever-expanding networks of amateurs in venues like Indymedia, alternative new operations like Robert Parry’s and Greg Palast’s, and natives and American troops blogging news firsthand from Iraq, at the very same time the traditional broadcasting networks are shutting down.

This has profoundly weakened corporate hierarchies in the information and entertainment industries, and created enormous agency problems as well. As the value of human capital increases, and the cost of physical capital investments needed for independent production by human capital decreases, the power of corporate hierarchies becomes less and less relevant. As the value of human relative to physical capital increases, the entry barriers become progressively lower for workers to take their human capital outside the firm and start new firms under their own control. Zingales gives the example of the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency. The largest block of shareholders, U.S. fund managers who controlled 30% of stock, thought that gave them effective control of the firm. They attempted to exercise this perceived control by voting down Maurice Saatchi’s proposed increased option package for himself. In response, the Saatchi brothers took their human capital (in actuality the lion’s share of the firm’s value) elsewhere to start a new firm, and left a hollow shell owned by the shareholders. [56]

Interestingly, in 1994 a firm like Saatchi and Saatchi, with few physical assets and a lot of human capital, could have been considered an exception. Not any more. The wave of initial public offerings of purely human capital firms, such as consultant firms, and even technology firms whose main assets are the key employees, is changing the very nature of the firm. Employees are not merely automata in charge of operating valuable assets but valuable assets themselves, operating with commodity-like physical assets. [57]

In another, similar example, the former head of Salomon Brothers’ bond trading group formed a new group with former Salomon traders responsible for 87% of the firm’s profits.

…if we take the standpoint that the boundary of the firm is the point up to which top management has the ability to exercise power…, the group was not an integral part of Salomon. It merely rented space, Salomon’s name, and capital, and turned over some share of its profits as rent. [58]

Marjorie Kelly gave the breakup of the Chiat/Day ad agency, in 1995, as an example of the same phenomenon.

…What is a corporation worth without its employees?

This question was acted out… in London, with the revolutionary birth of St. Luke’s ad agency, which was formerly the London office of Chiat/Day. In 1995, the owners of Chiat/Day decided to sell the company to Omnicon — which meant layoffs were looming and Andy Law in the London office wanted none of it. He and his fellow employees decided to rebel. They phoned clients and found them happy to join the rebellion. And so at one blow, London employees and clients were leaving.

Thus arose a fascinating question: What exactly did the “owners” of the London office now own? A few desks and files? Without employees and clients, what was the London branch worth? One dollar, it turned out. That was the purchase price — plus a percentage of profits for seven years — when Omnicon sold the London branch to Law and his cohorts after the merger. They renamed it St. Luke’s…. All employees became equal owners… Every year now the company is re-valued, with new shares awarded equally to all. [59]

David Prychitko remarked on the same phenomenon in the tech industry, the so-called “break-away” firms, as far back as 1991:

Old firms act as embryos for new firms. If a worker or group of workers is not satisfied with the existing firm, each has a skill which he or she controls, and can leave the firm with those skills and establish a new one. In the information age it is becoming more evident that a boss cannot control the workers as one did in the days when the assembly line was dominant. People cannot be treated as workhorses any longer, for the value of the production process is becoming increasingly embodied in the intellectual skills of the worker. This poses a new threat to the traditional firm if it denies participatory organization.

The appearance of break-away computer firms leads one to question the extent to which our existing system of property rights in ideas and information actually protects bosses in other industries against the countervailing power of workers. Perhaps our current system of patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights not only impedes competition and fosters monopoly, as some Austrians argue. Intellectual property rights may also reduce the likelihood of break-away firms in general, and discourage the shift to more participatory, cooperative formats. [60]

In this environment, the only thing standing between the old information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their so-called “intellectual property” rights — at least to the extent they’re still enforceable. Ownership of “intellectual property” becomes the new basis for the power of institutional hierarchies, and the primary structural bulwark for corporate boundaries. Even corporate apologists like Bill Gates and Tom Peters celebrate the network revolution and flattening of hierarchies: they just favor domesticating the process within a corporate framework enforced by ownership of “intellectual property.” But the networked designers within Microsoft are doing essentially the same thing that teams of Linux programmers are doing outside the corporate walls. “Intellectual property” is the only thing that prevents the walls from dissolving, and the Microsoft programmers becoming part of a larger environment of loose peer design networks, with the firm replaced by self-organized, project-based teams — with teams constantly gaining members from and losing them to other teams, projects discontinuing or forking, etc., on the Linux model.

Without “intellectual property,” in any industry where the basic production equipment is affordable to all, and bottom-up networking renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative production will replace the old managerial hierarchies. The network revolution, if its full potential is realized,

will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications — like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications giants — to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made.” [61]

Another effect of the shift in importance from tangible to intangible assets is that a growing portion of product prices consists of embedded rents on “intellectual property” and other artificial property rights rather than the material costs of production. Tom Peters cited former 3M strategic planner George Hegg on the increasing portion of product “value” made up of “intellectual property” (i.e., the amount of final price consisting of tribute to the owners of “intellectual property”): “We are trying to sell more and more intellect and less and less materials.” Peters produces a long string of such examples:

…My new Minolta 9xi is a lumpy object, but I suspect I paid about $10 for its plastic casing, another $50 for the fine-ground optical glass, and the rest, about $640, for its intellect… [62]

It is a soft world…. Nike contracts for the production of its spiffy footwear in factories around the globe, but it creates the enormous stock value via superb design and, above all, marketing skills. Tom Silverman, founder of upstart Tommy Boy Records, says Nike was the first company to understand that it was in the lifestyle business…. Shoes? Lumps? Forget it! Lifestyle. Image. Speed. Value via intellect and pizazz. [63]

“Microsoft’s only factory asset is the human imagination,” observed The New York Times Magazine writer Fred Moody. In seminars I’ve used the slide on which those words appear at least a hundred times, yet every time that simple sentence comes into view on the screen I feel the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. [64]

A few years back, Philip Morris purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion, a fair price in view of its subsequent performance. When the accountants finished their work, it turned out that Philip Morris had bought $1.3 billion worth of “stuff” (tangible assets) and $11.6 billion of “Other.” What’s the other, the 116/129?

….Call it intangibles, good-will (the U.S. accountants’ term), brand equity, or the ideas in the heads of thousands of Kraft employees around the world. [65]

Regarding Peters’ Minolta example, as Benkler points out the marginal cost of reproducing “its intellect” is virtually zero. So about 90% of the price of that new Minolta comes from tolls to corporate gatekeepers, who have been granted control of that “intellect.” In an economy where software and product design were the product of peer networks, unrestricted by the “intellectual property” of old corporate dinosaurs, 90% of the product’s price would evaporate overnight. To quote Michael Perelman,

the so-called weightless economy has more to do with the legislated powers of intellectual property that the government granted to powerful corporations. For example, companies such as Nike, Microsoft, and Pfizer sell stuff that has high value relative to its weight only because their intellectual property rights insulate them from competition. [66]

The same goes for Nike’s sneakers. I suspect the amortization cost of the physical capital used to manufacture the shoes in those Asian sweatshops, plus the cost of the sweatshop labor, is less than 10% of the price of the shoes. The wages of the workers could be tripled or quadrupled with negligible impact on the retail price.

How many extra hours does the average person work each week to pay tribute to the owners of the “human imagination”?

The good news is that, as “intellectual property” becomes increasingly unenforceable, we can expect two things: first, for the ownership of proprietary content to become untenable as a basis for corporate institutional power; and second, for the portion of commodity price reflecting embedded rents on artificial property rights to implode.

“Intellectual property” also serves as a bulwark to planned obsolescence and high-overhead production. It’s an example of a general law stated by Thomas Hodgskin: Social regulations and commercial prohibitions “compel us to employ more labour than is necessary to obtain the prohibited commodity,” or “to give a greater quantity of labour to obtain it than nature requires,” and put the difference into the pockets of privileged classes. [67]

A major component of the business model that prevails under existing corporate capitalism is the offer of platforms below-cost, coupled with the sale of patented or copyrighted spare parts, accessories, etc., at an enormous markup. So one buys a cell phone for little or nothing, with the contractual obligation to use only a specified service package for so many years; one buys a fairly cheap printer, which uses enormously expensive ink cartridges; one buys a cheap glucometer, with glucose testing strips that cost $100 a box. And to hack one’s phone to use a different service plan, or to manufacture generic ink cartridges or glucose testing strips in competition with the proprietary version, is illegal. To manufacture generic replacement parts for a car or appliance, in competition with the corporate dealership, is likewise illegal.

As it is now, appliances are generally designed to thwart repair. When the Maytag repairman tells you it would cost more that it’s worth to repair your washing machine, he’s telling the truth. But he fails to add that that state of affairs reflects deliberate design: the washing machine could have been designed on a modular basis, had the company so chosen, so that the defective part might have been cheaply and easily replaced.

Absent legal constraints, it would be profitable to offer competing generic replacements and accessories for other companies’ platforms. And in the face of such market competition, there would be strong pressure toward modular product designs that were amenable to repair, and interoperable with other the modular components and accessories of other companies’ platforms. Absent the legal constraints presented by patents, an appliance which was designed to thwart ease of repair through incompatibility with other companies’ platforms would suffer a competitive disadvantage.

Notes:

35. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 5.

36. Ibid., p. 9.

37. Ibid., pp. 9-10.

38. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

39. Ibid., p. 12.

40. Ibid., p. 12.

41. Ibid., p. 91.

42. Ibid., p. 92.

43. Ibid., pp. 93-94.

44. Ibid., p. 16.

45. Ibid., p. 91.

46. Ibid., p. 89.

47. Ibid., p. 95.

48. Zingales, “In Search of New Foundations,” Journal of Finance, vol. 55 (2000), pp. 1641-1642.

49. Tom Peters. The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 35.

50. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 179.

51. Ibid., p. 188.

52. Ibid., pp. 212-13.

53. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

54. Ibid., p. 54.

55. Tom Coates, “(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything…” Plasticbag.org, September 3, 2003 <http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/weblogs_and_the_mass_ amateurisation_of_nearly_everything>.

56. Zingales, “In Search of New Foundations,” p. 1641.

57. Ibid., p. 1641.

58. Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, “The Governance of the New Enterprise,” in Xavier Vives, ed., Corporate Governance: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 211-212.

59. Marjorie Kelly, “The Corporation as Feudal Estate” (an excerpt from The Divine Right of Capital) Business Ethics, Summer 2001. Quoted in GreenMoney Journal, Fall 2008 <http://greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=60&newsletterid=15>.

60. David L Prychitko, Marxism and Workers’ Self-Management: The Essential Tension ( New York; London; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 121n.

61. James C. Bennett, “The End of Capitalism and the Triumph of the Market Economy,” from Network Commonwealth: The Future of Nations in the Internet Era (1998, 1999) <http://www.pattern.com/bennettj-endcap.html>.

62. Tom Peters, The Tom Peters Seminar, p. 10.

63. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

64. Ibid., p. 11.

65. Ibid. p. 12.

66. Michael Perelman, “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property,” Monthly Review, January 2003 <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0103perelman.htm>.

67. Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Printed for Charles and William Tait, Edinburgh, 1827), pp. 33­34.

On Thursday, January 9 a dangerous toxin, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, leaked from a busted tank and into the Elk River in West Virginia. It is believed that nearly 7,500 gallons of the toxin made its way from the 40,000-gallon tank into the river. It’s unclear how much actually entered the public water supply.

The busted tank is owned by Freedom Industries, which uses the chemical for coal processing. Some 300,000 people have been directly impacted by the disaster, forced to wait in long lines at fire stations to receive potable water. There’s been a constant run on stores for the precious resource as well.

This is a story to often told in Appalachia. The Massey Energy coal slurry spill in Martin County, Kentucky (where 306,000,000 gallons of toxic slurry hit the town) and the TVA coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee, are also part of the history of industrial disaster in the region. This history is wrought with class struggle, environmental degradation and corporatism. From the expulsion of Native Americans to the rise of King Coal, the Hawks Nest incident, the labor struggle, the Battle of Blair Mountain and the wholesale destruction of mountain ecosystems via Mountaintop Removal, Appalachia is on the front lines of the war with the politically connected.

The coalfields of Appalachia have long been home to impoverished people, overlooked by the affluent in the United States. Still, the “War on Poverty” has made its way into the Appalachian hills several times. Most famously, US president Lyndon Johnson singled out the region for his “Great Society” programs, and presidents 42, 43 and 44 have all tried to help the region as well. Instead of offering a new way forward, their programs further damage the area.

Much of the “War On Poverty” has been fought via economic engineering, centralizing the economies of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky (along with parts of Tennessee and Virginia) into the hands of extractive fossil resource industries — notably coal and natural gas. The mechanization of these industries, however, has reduced the labor force. Specialized labor moving to the region has caused short-term booms and long-term busts. Once an extractive resource is exploited and gone,  communities are left to deal with mono economies and irreversible ecological destruction.

The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.

Over the years numerous citizen coalitions have formed. These groups are networking together to ban the exploitation of Appalachia. Groups such as Appalachian Voices, Mountain Justice, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy  (see: ilovemountains.org), Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and many others, have developed true grassroots movements across the region.  The Appalachian movement is building a sense of urgency around the plight of the weeping mountains, and the people who call them home. Movements work, the line has been drawn: The corporate state or its end — it really is that simple.

Which side are you on?

Every day, I’m confronted with articles and opeds that discuss and defend an institution I don’t recognize, an abstraction projected by those who seem to be invested in convincing us that it actually exists. This institution is said to preserve law and order in society through various arms, all accountable to something else called “the people” or “the electorate.” The concept under consideration is identified as the state or government, but there are at least two ways to consider that concept.

The state as we find it in these pieces is the state of fantasy, a phenomenon we might contrast with the state of history. The state of liberal fantasy is a result of social contract, freely developed from the will of autonomous, equal citizens; it provides crucial services, protects individual prerogatives and rights, and furnishes the foundation of society. That this state has never existed is of no import to the proselytizers of statism. Because they want to believe that the state is a well-meaning quasi-charity that the social body has organized and instituted voluntarily, it matters not that the historical state is a very different creature.

Defined by war, conquest and spoliation, the state we find all throughout history has been fundamentally antisocial and antithetical to the principle of contract. Rather than dispensing necessary services and aiding the poor, the historical state has dedicated itself to establishing the preconditions for predation and for the exploitation of the laboring classes. The historical state stole and monopolized in order to make the working poor the tools of the idle rich. Were we ever to find the state of fantasy, it would indeed be inaccurate to call it the state at all. Having shed all of the definitive traits of the state — which is coercive rather than contractual, predatory rather than philanthropic — we mightn’t, as anarchists, find it objectionable at all.

The state of fantasy is in point of fact what we look forward to as proponents of a free society, a condition in which free, sovereign individuals in genuine community provide for one another through consensual trading and giving. The historical state is the foremost enemy and impediment to the emergence of this kind of society. It is interesting, therefore, to see so many apologies for the state from those whose interest in the poor and underprivileged is sincere, those who actually care about wealth inequality and social justice. But these defenses of the state make perfect sense once we understand that the state of fantasy is the one liberals see.

Jacob Huebert has penned a very informative introductory text to libertarian philosophy called Libertarianism Today. It was a pleasure to read, but this left-libertarian market anarchist has some qualms to raise. A detailed review is in the works, so this will be a brief exploration. Quotations from the book will be provided for the reader’s edification. The reader is encouraged to read the whole book.

On pg.39; Huebert states:

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism is not just about property rights and the non-aggression principle, but requires promotion of certain liberal social values.

This left-libertarian market anarchist supports a thick approach to libertarianism. One that emphaizies a broad conception of liberty requiring the promotion of liberal cultural values. The dialectical libertarian model of Chris Matthew Sciabarra serves as an inspiration for this too. The book never mentions thick and dialectical libertarianism. It briefly mentions left-libertarianism, but the coverage is not too extensive. In fairness to the author; the book is intended as an introductory text and broad overview. Not a comprehensive encyclopedia of libertarian thought. 

These thinker’s liberal social views may or may not have merit, but they are not part of libertarianism per se. Again, libertarianism itself is compatible with both liberal and conservative social values.

Is it really? Insofar as conservative social values tend to promote collectivist conformity, deference to traditional or established authority, or self-sacrificial dutifulness, there is a conflict with the individualistic orientation of libertarianism. Implicit in the libertarian conception of individual rights and non-aggression is a liberal sensibility. A society with the conservative social values mentioned above is less likely to sustain it.

On pg.39 to 40; Huebert goes on to say:

To suggest otherwise is an ideological mistake and probably also a strategic mistake. It redefines libertarianism to mean something it has never meant to most modern libertarians, and it narrows the audience for libertarianism to only those people who share this liberal worldview. For many people, the beauty of libertarianism is that it lets everyone pursue their values, as long as they do not feel a need to force their views on the rest of the world.

Redefinition of a paradigm or fundamental change is sometimes necessary to make ideological progress. The subjective comfort of most modern libertarians matters less than pinning down a proper conception of liberty. An abandonment of this liberal worldview could have serious consequences for marginalized populations that run afoul of traditional social norms. It’s also not true that only those with a liberal worldview will then be enticed by libertartarianism. Open minded conservatives who are convinced to challenge their beliefs could still find a reason to jump on board.

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?

Artificial property rights create irrationality by holding productive resources out of use and creating maldistribution of purchasing power.

In the 1830s Thomas Hodgskin, writing in The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, noted the effect of artificial property rights in land in holding productive land out of use and denying opportunities to labor. When land is made artificially scarce to labor by political appropriation of land, so that land owners are able to hold vacant and unimproved land out of use, the landlord will not allow it to come into use unless is is productive enough to support not only the laborer himself but also the rentier. Projects like the draining of marshes and cultivation of waste land, if homesteading were free, would have amply repaid the laborer for his own labor, were not undertaken because labor sufficient to support the laborer and his family in comfort could not “obtain from them a sufficiency to pay profit, tithes, rent, and taxes.” [33]

“Intellectual property,” likewise, enables the owner to hold productive techniques out of use unless the would-be user is able to use them productively enough to provide an acceptable return to the patent or copyright holder, in addition to himself.

And as we shall see below, “intellectual property” is responsible for a phenomenon Tom Peters celebrated: the growing portion of the price of goods comprised of “intellect” and “ephemera.” This is part of a larger phenomenon, by which artificial scarcities, rents on artificial property rights, and the inflated overhead costs imposed those things and by other licensing and regulatory schemes, together erect barriers between effort and subsistence.

By simultaneously increasing the threshold of labor required for comfortable subsistence, and enabling the owners of artificial property rights to derive unearned rentier incomes unrelated to any legitimate effort, “intellectual property” divorces effort from consumption and creates a maldistribution of purchasing power. Regardless of one’s views of the operation of Say’s Law in a free market, it is clear that maldistribution of purchasing power is a very real problem under state capitalism. Hodgskin anticipated this phenomenon almost a century before J.A. Hobson or Keynes.

The wants of individuals which labour is intended to gratify, are the natural guide to their exertions. The instant they are compelled to labour for others, this guide forsakes them, and their exertions are dictated by the greed and avarice, and false hopes of their masters. The wants springing from our organization, and accompanying the power to labour, being created by the same hand which creates and fashions the whole universe, including the course of the seasons, and what the earth brings forth, it is fair to suppose that they would at all times guide the exertions of the labourer, so as fully to ensure a supply of necessaries and conveniences, and nothing more. They have, as it were, a prototype in nature, agreeing with other phenomena, but the avarice and greed of masters have no such prototype…. By this system the hand is dissevered from the mouth, and labour is put in motion to gratify vanity and ambition, not the natural wants of animal existence. When we look at the commercial history of our country, and see the false hopes of our merchants and manufacturers leading to periodical commercial convulsions, we are compelled to conclude, that they have not the same source as the regular and harmonious external world. [34]

Notes:

33. Hodgskin, “Letter the Eighth: Evils of the Artificial Right of Property,” The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832).
<http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html>

34. Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832). Online Library of Liberty
<http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=323&layout=html

Professor David Levy of George Mason University has pointed out that when Thomas Carlyle labeled economics “the dismal science,” he wasn’t referring to the pessimistic conclusions drawn by Thomas Malthus. No, what Carlyle found dismal was that market-based societies entail free labor and rule out slavery, specifically black slavery. That depressed Carlyle. Perhaps slavery was gone in Britain forever, but now how could whites make sure blacks did the hard work they were destined to do?

In this Freeman article from 2000, Levy quoted Carlyle’s 1849 Fraser’s Magazine article, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”:

Truly, my philanthropic friends, [anti-slave] Exeter Hall Philanthropy is wonderful; and the Social Science—not a “gay science,” but a rueful [one]—which finds the secret of this universe in “supply-and-demand,” and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone, is also wonderful. Not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. These two, Exeter Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!

Levy comments:

Too often soft-pedaled by those who admire his attack on economics, Carlyle was the premier theorist of the idealized slave society. In opposition to the economists’ supply-and-demand model of human society, he put forward the doctrine of obedience to one’s betters. While he had been making such arguments through the 1840s, it wasn’t until the “Negro Question” that he realized that all white people are “better” than all black people. This certainly made the idealized slavery more attractive for white Britons than one in which they might be on the cutting end of the “beneficent whip.” . . .Carlyle idealized slavery in the same way economists idealized markets. To match the economists’ claim of mutual gain from exchange, Carlyle put forward the doctrine of the joys of service to one’s betters. And according to the way things were supposed to work, the common religion would give the details of the hierarchy.

Responding anonymously to Carlyle in Fraser’s in 1850 was John Stuart Mill. In “The Negro Question“ Mill objected to Carlyle’s religious-based claim that black people were put on earth to work for white people. He wrote:

“If ‘the gods’ will this, it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods. Omnipotent these ‘gods’ are not, for powers which demand human tyranny and injustice cannot accomplish their purpose unless human beings coöperate. The history of human improvement is the record of a struggle by which inch after inch of ground has been wrung from these maleficent powers, and more and more of human life rescued from the iniquitous dominion of the law of might. Much, very much of this work still remains to do; but the progress made in it is the best and greatest achievement yet performed by mankind, and it was hardly to be expected at this period of the world that we should be enjoined, by way of a great reform in human affair, to begin undoing it.”

Mill went on, passionately, satirically, for 4,600 words, praising the anti-slavery movement as a movement for justice and condemning slavery and the slave trade as criminal. He mocked Carlyle all the way:

“That negroes should exist, and enjoy existence, on so little work, is a scandal, in his eyes, worse than their former slavery. It must be put a stop to at any price. He does not ‘wish to see’ them slaves again ‘if it can be avoided ;’ but ‘decidedly’ they ‘will have to be servants,’’ ‘servants to the whites,’ ‘ compelled to labor,’ and ‘not to go idle another minute.’ “

Carlyle presented himself as the benefactor of black people and invoked the “divine right of being compelled, if permitted will not serve, to do what work they are appointed for.” According to Carlyle, whites had this “right” also. “But,” Mill wrote, “he will begin with the blacks, and will make them work for certain whites, those whites not working at all; that so ‘the eternal purpose and supreme will’ may be fulfilled, and ‘injustice,’ which is ‘forever accursed,’ may cease.”

Mill then turned to “the gospel of work,” praised by Carlyle, “which, to my mind, justly deserves the name of a cant.” He attacked the idea that work is an end in itself, rather than merely a means. “While we talk only of work, and not of its object, we are far from the root of the matter; or, if it may be called the root, it is a root without flower or fruit. . . .In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labor. . . . the exhausting, stiffening, stupefying toil of many kinds of agricultural and manufacturing laborers. To reduce very greatly the quantity of work required to carry on existence is as needful as to distribute it more equally; and the progress of science, and the increasing ascendency [sic] of justice and good sense, tend to this result.”

Levy sums up

If a student knows the Carlyle-Mill debate, it is impossible to think of the classical economists as taking the reactionary side in the Victorian debate over social organization. The alternative to markets was not socialism. There were socialist experiments, but there were no socialist economies. The alternative to market organization was slavery. Teachers have to work rather hard to hide this fact. For instance, when students in classes in British literature encounter Charles Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times, with its savage attack on markets and market economics, teachers wishing to present Dickens as “progressive” have to be careful. When they explain why it is “inscribed to Thomas Carlyle,” it is probably helpful to their cause if they not mention that in 1853 Carlyle republished an expanded version of his part of the exchange with Mill under the title Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. What would modern students think if they knew that the attack on market transactions came from those who idealized slavery for black people?

The Carlyle-Mill debate was a theoretical debate. Ideas do have consequences. The issues stopped being purely theoretical in what historians call the “Governor Eyre controversy” of mid-1860s Britain. What ought we to do about those responsible for an administrative massacre of nonwhite Jamaicans? On the side demanding colorblind justice we find the old coalition Carlyle opposed, antislave Evangelicals and economists now joined by Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. In opposition we find all the major antimarket voices in Victorian literature—Dickens, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Tennyson—joining Carlyle in making the case that it could not be murder to kill Jamaicans of color because one could only murder people. The defeat of the Evangelical-economic coalition was complete. Eyre walked; Mill lost his seat in Parliament; the century of administrative massacre began. And the episode is never mentioned when in English classes the stories of the progressive literary figures and the heartless economists are retold.

More by Levy (and Sandra Peart) here.

Hat tip for the Mill response: Jeff Hummel

A new report from the Swedish Prison and Probation Service claims that 46 percent of Sweden’s inmates are mentally ill, that 70 percent have severe drug problems and that these problems mostly have their origins in early life. As elsewhere, Sweden’s prison population is made up of the most disenfranchised, poorest and most vulnerable elements of society. Sweden’s leading criminologist, Jerzy Sarnecki, notes this and argues that house arrest with an ankle monitor should be used in the case of minor crimes. While anyone who has any knowledge of the scholarship on the effects of imprisonment would agree that this would be an improvement, it would hopefully down the road be a step toward the complete abolition of the prison system. Prison sentences are not only arbitrarily and corruptly passed — they simply do not work.

Contrary to popular belief, being imprisoned in Sweden is no picnic. Although there is a big difference between Sweden and the US, Sweden’s prisoners are also needlessly treated in inhumane ways. Former inmate Torgny Jönsson was one of many inmates placed in the so called “bunker,” a high security facility where inmates are denied any kind of education, rehabilitation, treatment, occupation or visits from family members. He has now started the campaign Reclaim Justice, suing the Prison and Probation Service, on the charge that bunker placement is “legally uncertain like in the USA,” arbitrary and lacks procedural transparency.

The prison system is built on a fundamental paradox of principles. On the one hand, its defenders make pragmatic, consequentialist arguments like “we need to send a clear message to criminals.” But all evidence points to the fact that harsher sentences, longer bids and worse conditions increase recidivism rather than decrease it. It should be obvious, being imprisoned doesn’t make you a better person. It makes you more hostile to the society that put you there and it makes the rest of society more hostile to you — making it more difficult to live a “normal life” once you’ve been released. When faced with these simple arguments, the “tough on crime” crowd sometimes show their true colors — their objective was never to rehabilitate or deter, but to exact vengeance.

The monstrosity of the modern prison system is made possible by the fact that its victims are at the very bottom of the societal ladder. It is based on a logic of vengeance rather than one of scientifically tried methods of actually improving society. It is a cynical exploitation of the blind hatred and fear of “criminals” that many people hold, and lies at the heart of the myth of why we need a state at all. Without the state’s police and prisons, the myth goes, “they” will have free reign. “They” will be able to murder and steal without a care in the world. So the state puts them in prisons and bunkers, in the end making society less safe and more violent for all of us.

So what should be done instead? For one thing poverty and exploitation should be addressed. 32 percent of Sweden’s inmates are citizens of other countries. The total amount of immigrants in Sweden’s prisons is unknown, but higher. Sweden’s labor immigration system is seemingly tailor made to assert the dominance of employer over worker – it is a system in which immigrants’ right to be in Sweden is dependent on having employment, making them extremely dependent on employers and vulnerable for exploitation. Free immigration would end this exploitation, but this is of course just one of countless examples of how the state keeps poor people down. Let’s end this vicious circle of poverty and violence by bringing down the state and its capitalist cronies.

The trial of Fullerton, California police officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli for the killing of Kelly Thomas was unusual from the start. Usually when police officers murder civilians, they are put on “administrative leave” (paid vacation) until an “internal review” determines that they “acted according to policy.” In many cases, the killers’ identities are never even divulged to the public. So when Ramos and Cicinelli were charged, the charges brought with them hope that justice, just this once, might be done.

Let’s be unequivocal on this point: There is no doubt whatsoever, let alone any “reasonable” doubt, that Ramos and Cicinelli brutally murdered an innocent victim. They tased Kelly Thomas five times, then brutally beat him, on camera, as he begged for his life. Thomas arrived at the hospital in a coma and died five days later of his injuries.

An Orange County, California jury’s acquittal of these two clearly and irrefutably guilty murderers, for no better reason than that they were wearing uniforms and carrying badges when they committed their crime, is troubling not only in and of itself, but for its likely future consequences.

Almost by definition, major social changes involve upheaval. But there’s a range within which such upheaval may occur. US president John F. Kennedy alluded to that range when he observed that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Granted, Kennedy’s definition of “revolution” involved relatively minor changes — like, for example, convicting and imprisoning killer cops instead of giving them free passes — within a system he considered too obviously natural to question because he was born into, and fully participated in, it.

That 400-year-old system, the Westphalian nation-state, is disintegrating around us even now. Its 200-year-old progeny, the “police” system as we know it, will almost certainly slide into the dustbin of history with it.

A hip-pocket example of the continuum I’m talking about is the late 20th century dissolution of the Warsaw Pact regimes. In some countries, mass demonstrations segued relatively peacefully into slightly more “liberal” political regimes. In Romania, on the other hand, dictators Nicolai and Elena Ceaucescu were put up against a wall and shot, and regime police attempting to escape the country in an armored vehicle were tracked down and killed by angry Romanians.

When the United States dissolves, as is it inevitably shall, the range of possibilities looks something like this:

At one end of the continuum, former police officers move on. The worst of them may find themselves shunned by right-thinking people, but most of them get real jobs, become productive members of society and spend the rest of their lives trying to live down their sordid pasts … and maybe even succeeding.

At the other end of the continuum, former cops are hunted down like vermin and exterminated without mercy by their victims, their victims’ families and their victims’ friends, with onlookers cheering the executions on, or at least declining to intervene.

The jury’s acquittal of Ramos and Cicinelli was a vote for the latter outcome. It was also a vote for continuing and escalating police lawlessness. The less the specifically guilty individuals pay for their crimes now, the more such crimes we will have, the more the generally guilty class will pay later … and the sooner that later will come.

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?

“Intellectual property” is a contentious issue among libertarians. Among the individualist anarchists alone, Lysander Spooner took an absolutist position in favor of patents and copyrights, defending them as binding in perpetuity, [1] whereas Benjamin Tucker classified them as one of his Four Monopolies.

Fourth, the patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, — in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines. [2]

Although Tucker relegated “intellectual property” to last place among the Four Monopolies, he considered them entirely in terms of their effect on individual exchange, rather than of their effect on industrial structure, or of the structural and institutional relationships between business and the state. This problem of emphasis was a general failing of Tucker’s. After 1900, for example, when he finally began to recognize the trusts as a problem, he assumed they had grown beyond the point at which eliminating the money, landlord, and other monopolies would do any good in reining them in; he ignored entirely the great extent of their dependence, as institutions, on direct subsidies and other structural ties to the state. But in fairness to Tucker, at the time he wrote the passage quoted above the corporate transformation of the economy was just getting well underway, and the effect of “intellectual property” still fell primarily at the level of individual exchange.

Ayn Rand regarded patents and copyrights as “the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence. [3]

Despite her defense of “intellectual property” as a property right rooted in natural law, interestingly, Rand did not pursue the principle consistently to the same logical conclusion as Spooner. Rather than treating it as a right in perpetuity comparable to tangible property rights, to devolve to one’s heirs and assigns without limits, she dismissed perpetual duration as an obvious impossibility. Instead, she considered the positive law’s provisions for copyright and patent duration as “the most rational solution….” [4]

Perhaps the most absurd development of “intellectual property” absolutism was that of Andrew Galambos. As Stephan Kinsella notes, “[i]t is difficult to find published discussions of Galambos’s idea, apparently because his own theories bizarrely restrict the ability of his supporters to disseminate them”; [5] students attending his classes were required to sign non-disclosure agreements promising not to circulate his ideas outside the circle of paying customers [6] (a rule which would seem to doom a movement to extinction about as effectively as the Shakers’ ban on sexual intercourse). Galambos reputedly dropped a nickel in a box for the heirs of Thomas Paine every time he used the word “liberty,” and juxtaposed his first and middle names to avoid infringing on his father’s “intellectual property” rights in his name. [7] If he paid royalties on the alphabet to the Tyre Chamber of Commerce, there is no record of it.

Among the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises, no market anarchist, took a largely agnostic attitude toward the legitimacy of patents. As a purely utilitarian assessment of their effect, he argued that they enabled sellers to charge a monopoly price for goods that might not have been offered at all without the use of patents to recoup the cost of development. [8]

Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, was not shy in his denunciation of patents as a fundamental violation of free market principles:

Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasive of property rights on the market. [9]

Rothbard dismissed utilitarian arguments for patents, based on claims that they are socially necessary to promote innovation, with the contempt they deserved:

The most popular argument for patents among economists is the utilitarian one that a patent for a certain number of years is necessary to encourage a sufficient amount of research expenditure for inventions and innovations in processes and products.

This is a curious argument, because the question immediately arises: By what standard do you judge that research expenditures are “too much,” “too little,” or just about enough? This is a problem faced by every governmental intervention in the market’s production. Resources — the better lands, laborers, capital goods, time — in society are limited, and they may be used for countless alternative ends. By what standard does someone assert that certain uses are “excessive,” that certain uses are “insufficient,” etc.?…

Many advocates of patents believe that the ordinary competitive conditions of the market do not sufficiently encourage the adoption of new processes and that therefore innovations must be coercively promoted by the government. But the market decides on the rate of introduction of new processes just as it decides on the rate of industrialization of a new geographic area. In fact, this argument for patents is very similar to the infant-industry argument for tariffs — that market processes are not sufficient to permit the introduction of worthwhile new processes. And the answer to both these arguments is the same: that people must balance the superior productivity of the new processes against the cost of installing them, i.e., against the advantage possessed by the old process in being already built and in existence. Coercively privileging innovation would needlessly scrap valuable plants already in existence and impose an excessive burden upon consumers. For consumers’ desires would not be satisfied in the most economic manner. [10]

This is, incidentally, the same sort of argument used for eminent domain, when property is seized for the use of a business that will be “more valuable” to the local economy.

If Rothbard rejected patents in principle, he considered copyright to be perfectly tenable and legitimate, on the assumption that it could be achieved through voluntary contract alone.

A man writes a book or composes music. When he publishes the book or sheet of music, he imprints on the first page the word “copyright.” This indicates that any man who agrees to purchase this product also agrees as part of the exchange not to recopy or reproduce this work for sale. In other words, the author does not sell his property outright to the buyer; he sells it on condition that the buyer not reproduce it for sale. Since the buyer does not buy the property outright, but only on this condition, any infringement of the contract by him or a subsequent buyer is implicit theft and would be treated accordingly on the free market. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market. [11]

But the sort of contractual copyright regime Rothbard envisioned would, in fact, be practically untenable.

First, as Kinsella points out, contracts are only binding against the actual parties, so contractual copyright would be unenforceable against third parties who came into possession of copyrighted material. [12]

Second, there are serious practical questions about the legal enforceability of contractual copyright — so-called “shrink wrap” contracts — even against the accepting party. Pseudonymous blogger “quasibill,” of The Bell Tower, writes of the serious problems the common law “meeting of the minds” requirement entails for contract enforcement in general.

As an initial matter, it is important to clarify that a contract is not a written document. For reasons that should become more apparent as you read on, the written document is nothing more than very good evidence regarding the terms of the contract. It is the agreement of the parties, or to use Anglo-American common law terminology, the “meeting of the minds” that is the actual contract. As such, the contract is a subjective creature by nature, as it requires reading the minds of at least two people.

….The words written on a document do not constitute the agreement – they are merely evidence of what the parties intended the agreement to be….

In particular, he mentions that courts generally recur to external evidence like standard market practices (“course of industry”) to ascertain subjective understanding or intent, in determining whether a “meeting of minds” took place and an enforceable contractual obligation therefore exists. [13]

By this line of reasoning, both the seller’s and the buyer’s reasonable expectations in regard to enforceability will play a large role in determining whether the buyer did, indeed, assume contractual copyright obligations by the mere act of purchase. In an environment where verifying compliance is costly and the risks of detection and sanction are low, it is unlikely that either a buyer, or a court after the fact, will take any such contract seriously.

By way of analogy, some employers may demand, as a condition of employment, that their employees not smoke even in their own homes, that they refrain from barroom discussions prejudicial to the employer’s reputation, or that they not park on company premises with a weapon concealed in the trunk. In most such cases, the employee is likely to sign an acknowledgement form and accept the job with his fingers crossed, and with the mental reservation that it’s “none of their damned business.” If a job application asks questions that the prospective employee considers inappropriately nosy or intrusive (i.e. about political sympathies, social affiliations, and the like), he is likely to take the attitude that it’s the prospective employer’s problem to find out such things at his own effort and expense if he wants to know them badly enough; he is under no obligation to incriminate himself.

Kinsella has expressed skepticism, on similar grounds, regarding the enforceability of shrink-wrap and click-wrap contracts:

….[T]here is often no meeting of the minds on the fine print. If the customers routinely just click the “I have read and agree to these terms” box but never do read it, and the vendor knows this, then it’s a sort of fiction to assume both sides have actually agreed on these terms…. [14]

….I believe two consenting parties have the right to enter into whatever terms they want, even if they are stricter and more draconian than those set by modern IP law. …[But] I do not believe that something is part of the agreement merely because it is written down in the fine print of a click-wrap or similar type agreement; there needs to be true meeting of the minds (for example, suppose I sneak into the last clause of a long click-wrap agreement, “And the purchaser hereby agrees to give me half his income for the rest of his life.” Well, I know that you are just gonna click “yes” without reading, so I am aware that you are NOT consenting to this term, so there is no meeting of the minds; that should not be enforceable, and arguably neither should boilerplate, “unreasonable” terms in fine print that the publisher knows the customer is not even really aware of). [15]

Third, the enforcement of contractual copyright, even if enforceable in law, would present enormous problems for verification of compliance. The enormous and draconian body of copyright legislation over the past twenty years should indicate that enforcement of copyright requires an intrusive regulatory and surveillance state, and that copyright is virtually unenforceable without such a mechanism.

The new digital copyright regime has done away with many traditional limitations on copyright from the days when it affected mainly the print medium, like the “first sale” and “fair use” doctrines. We can thank the traditional exceptions to copyright, for example, for the public library and for free access to photocopiers.

Charles Johnson gives, as an example of the fair use exception, the common university practice of making course reserves available for photocopying, rather than expecting every student to buy a scholarly book at the academic publishing houses’ steep rates. (I myself have numerous photocopies of books ordered through Interlibrary Loan, which would otherwise have cost me $70 or more, often for slim volumes of under two hundred pages.) But, he says,

as soon as the University eliminates the paper medium, and facilitates exactly the same thing through an non-commercial, internal University course pack website — which does nothing at all more than what the xerox packets did, except that it delivers the information to pixels on a monitor instead of toner on a page — the publishers’ racket can run to court, throw up its arms, and start hollering Computers! Internet!, send their lawyers to try to shake down have a discussion with the University administration for new tribute to their monopoly business model, and then, failing that, utterly uncontroversial decades-old practices of sharing knowledge among colleagues and students suddenly become a legal case raising core issues like the future of the business model for academic publishers, while even the most absurd protectionist arguments are dutifully repeated by legal flacks on behalf of sustaining the racket…. [16]

In the case of digital content, especially, copyright would be virtually unenforceable without not only DRM, but the criminalization of technical means for circumventing it. Imagine buying a car on the contractual understanding that you wouldn’t drive it to certain places that the dealership disapproved. In the real world, such a contract would be a dead letter because of the high cost of verifying compliance. But if the contract were governed by the legal regime prevailing in the digital content industries, the car would be designed with built-in blocks against driving the car to forbidden places. And not only that, such blocks would be mandated by law, and developing and selling means to circumvent them would be criminal acts. Doesn’t sound very libertarian, does it?

In “The Right to Read,” Richard Stallman depicted the inevitable logic of such principles, as depicted in a late 21st century society under total copyright lockdown.

if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong — something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn’t much chance that the SPA — the Software Protection Authority — would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.)…

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read….

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers’ developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers — you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer’s root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that. [17]

There’s a reason for such draconian controls. As described by Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, the corporate economy faces a growing crisis of realization, in monetizing and capturing profits from use-value created in the immaterial realm. It is becoming increasingly impossible to capture value from the ownership of ideas, designs, and technique — all the “ephemera” and “intellect” that Tom Peters writes about as a component of commodity price — leading to a crisis of sustainability for capitalism.

Recall the following: the thesis of cognitive capitalism says that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based on the accumulation of knowledge assets, rather than physical production tools. [McKenzie Wark’s] vectoralist thesis says that a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information, i.e. the means through which information and creative products have to pass, for them to realize their exchange value. They both describe the processes of the last 40 years, say the post-1968 period, which saw a furious competition through knowledge-based competition and for the acquisition of knowledge assets, which led to the extraordinary weakening of the scientific and technical commons. And they do this rather well.

But in my opinion, both theses fail to account for the newest of the new, i.e. to take into account the emergence of peer to peer as social format. What is happening?

In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism. [18]

In a later blog post for the P2P Foundation, Bauwens elaborated on the nature of cognitive capitalism as a response to the limits on accumulation in the finite physical realm, attempting a new form of accumulation based on ownership of the cognitive realm. But this attempt is doomed to fail because of the increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm. Various resource and input crises like Peak Oil, he wrote, are creating new limits to growth based on extensive expansion in the physical realm. He compares the imperative for capitalism to switch from extensive to intensive development to the parallel crisis of the chattel slave economy.

This is no trivial affair, as the failure of extensive development is what brought down earlier civilizations and modes of production. For example, slavery was not only marked by low productivity, but could not extend this productivity as that would require making the slaves more autonomous, so slave-based empires had to grow in space, but at a certain point in that growth, the cost of expansion exceeded the benefits. This is why feudalism finally emerged, a system which refocused on the local, and allowed productivity growth as serfs had a self-interest in growing and ameliorating the tools of production.

The alternative to extensive development is intensive development, as happened in the transition from slavery to feudalism. But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same. The dream of our current economy is therefore one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means. The hope that it expresses is that business can simply continue to grow in the immaterial field of experience.

However, Bauwens writes, this is not feasible. The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.

1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential.
2) The monetization of such value is linear

In other words, we have a growing discrepancy between the direct creation of use value through social relationships and collective intelligence…, but only a fraction of that value can actually be captured by business and money. Innovation is becoming… an emergent property of the networks rather than an internal R & D affair within corporations; capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence….

What this announces is a crisis of value…, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital. Furthermore, we lack a mechanism for the existing institutional world to re-fund what it receives from the social world. So on top of all of that, we have a crisis of social reproduction…. [19]

Corporations rely on increasingly authoritarian government legislation to capture value from proprietary information. Johann Soderberg compares the way photocopiers were monitored in the old USSR, to protect the power of elites in that country, to the way the means of digital reproduction are monitored in this country to protect corporate power. [20]

The good news in all this is that, even with the upward ratcheting of “intellectual property” law and of the mandated electronic surveillance technologies for enforcing it, it is still becoming unenforceable. In an age of bittorrent, strong encryption, and proxy servers hosted in international anti-copyright havens, the DMCA is a dead letter for anyone who cares enough to take even minimal trouble to circumvent it.

A good example is the so-called “DeCSS uprising,” which followed from an attempt to suppress public discussion of means for circumventing DVD encryption.

Journalist Eric Corley — better known as Emmanuel Goldstein, a nom de plume borrowed from Orwell’s 1984 — posted the code for DeCSS (so called because it decrypts the Content Scrambling System that encrypts DVDs) as a part of a story he wrote in November for the well-known hacker journal 2600. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that Corley defied anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by posting the offending code….

The whole affair began when teenager Jon Johansen wrote DeCSS in order to view DVDs on a Linux machine. The MPAA has since brought suit against him in his native Norway as well. Johansen testified on Thursday that he announced the successful reverse engineering of a DVD on the mailing list of the Linux Video and DVD Project (LiViD), a user resource center for video- and DVD- related work for Linux….

The judge in the case, the honorable Lewis Kaplan of the US District Court in southern New York, issued a preliminary injunction against posting DeCSS. Corley duly took down the code, but did not help his defense by defiantly linking to myriad sites which post DeCSS….

True to their hacker beliefs, Corley supporters came to the trial wearing the DeCSS code on t-shirts. There are also over 300 Websites that still link to the decryption code, many beyond the reach of the MPAA. [21]

This incident, and the humiliating failure of so many other corporate attempts — starting with the “McLibel” case in the UK — to suppress the free circulation of proprietary information or supposedly libelous statements, [22] should demonstrate this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Every such attempt, inevitably, results in the rapid transfer of files of prohibited information around the Worldwide Web, and the proliferation of mirror sites, orders of magnitude faster than content owners can suppress any particular violator. The would-be corporate proprietors of information find themselves playing whack-a-mole.

And in the offensive-defensive arms race between the statist surveillance technologies required to enforce proprietary content, and the circumvention technologies needed to trade such content freely, the defensive side will always be a step ahead. Ultimately, the legal suppression of “piracy” by the surveillance state depends on the same sort of people who are responsible for delivering your mail to the correct address — which means things don’t look very hopeful for the enemies of freedom.

If the DMCA is unenforceable even with state-mandated DRM and criminalization of technical means of circumvention, and even with taxpayer subsidy to the legal cost of enforcement, what would become of such extensive copyright claims in a free market regime? In a free market regime, where enforcement of such claims is a private good provided at cost, the payment of contractual copyright enforcement would be endogenous — i.e., the cost would be borne by the beneficiary of enforcement.

“Intellectual property” is a form of privilege, just one example of a broader category of artificial property rights.

Like all forms of coercion, artificial property rights create a zero-sum situation in which one party benefits at the other’s expense. There is a symmetrical relationship between one party’s benefit and the other’s loss. While natural property rights benefit everyone by securing the individual’s claim to the product of his own effort, artificial property rights enable the holder to collect tribute from the efforts of others. Natural property rights are a way of dealing with scarcity; artificial property rights create scarcity.

The distinction between natural and artificial property rights is analogous to that of Albert Jay Nock between “labor-made” and “law-made” property. [23] Were it not for the legal appropriation of the land, Nock argued — i.e., the engrossment of vacant and unimproved land to a favored class which did not appropriate it by its own labor, but was enabled to collect tribute from those who did — economic exploitation would be impossible. Historically, so long as wage employers have to compete with easy access to self-employment, there is a floor under the wages people are willing to work for and a ceiling on the rate of profit. As Kropotkin asked:

If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour — Who would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after his own….

If all the men and women in the countryside had their daily bread assured, and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at a wage of half a crown a day, while the commodities one produces in a day sell in the market for a crown or more? [24]

Defenders of “intellectual property” argue that the innovator deserves the scarcity rents, as a reward for the net contribution to consumers’ utility. If the consumer does not consider the innovation a benefit even at the patented price, he is free not to buy it. Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, an enthusiastic supporter of the drug and biotech industries, is a good exemplar of this line of argument. Citing a study that compared the overall economic value to consumers from increased life expectancy to the cost paid for drugs, he argued (in the words of his title) that “drug companies don’t get enough money… for the life-saving benefits they give us….” [25]

There’s a word for someone who’s able to price a good according to the consumer’s benefit from it: a monopolist. The normal effect of market competition is for the productivity benefits of new technology to translate directly into lower consumer prices. It is only through artificial property rights that privileged sellers can charge the consumer in proportion to his increased utility, regardless of the cost of supplying the good. Patents impede the normal process of market competition by which technological innovation translates directly into lower consumer cost. They enable the privileged to appropriate productivity gains for themselves, rather than allowing their benefits to be socialized through market competition.

But they do more than that: they make it possible to collect tribute for the “service” of not obstructing production. As John R. Commons observed, the alleged “service” performed by the holder of artificial property rights, in “contributing” some “factor” to production, is defined entirely by his ability to obstruct access to it. As I wrote in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, marginalist economics

treated the existing structure of property rights over “factors” as a given, and proceeded to show how the product would be distributed among these “factors” according to their marginal contribution. By this method, if slavery were still extant, a marginalist might with a straight face write of the marginal contribution of the slave to the product (imputed, of course, to the slave­ owner), and of the “opportunity cost” involved in committing the slave to one or another use. [26]

Such privileges, Maurice Dobb argued, were analogous to a state grant of authority to collect tolls, (much like the medieval robber barons who obstructed commerce between their petty principalities):

Suppose that toll­gates were a general institution, rooted in custom or ancient legal right. Could it reasonably be denied that there would be an important sense in which the income of the toll­owning class represented “an appropriation of goods produced by others” and not payment for an “activity directed to the production or transformation of economic goods?” Yet toll­charges would be fixed in competition with alternative roadways, and hence would, presumably, represent prices fixed “in an open market….” Would not the opening and shutting of toll­gates become an essential factor of production, according to most current definitions of a factor of production, with as much reason at any rate as many of the functions of the capitalist entrepreneur are so classed to­day? This factor, like others, could then be said to have a “marginal productivity” and its price be regarded as the measure and equivalent of the service it rendered. At any rate, where is a logical line to be drawn between toll­gates and property­rights over scarce resources in general? [27]

Thorstein Veblen made a similar distinction between property as capitalized serviceability, versus capitalized disserviceability. The latter consisted of power advantages over rivals and the public which enabled owners to obstruct production. [28]

It is sometimes argued, in response to attacks on patents as monopolies, that “all property is a monopoly.” True, as far as it goes; but tangible property is a monopoly by the nature of the case. A parcel of land can only be occupied and used by one owner at a time, because it is finite. By nature, two people cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time. “Intellectual property,” in contrast, is an artificial monopoly where scarcity would not otherwise exist. And unlike property in tangible goods and land, the defense of which is a necessary outgrowth of the attempt to maintain possession, enforcement of “property rights” in ideas requires the invasion of someone else’s space. “Patents… invade rather than defend property rights.” [29]

Kinsella describes the way that so­called “intellectual property” rights give the holder a right in other people’s real — tangible — property. An “intellectual property” right implies that

“A person who comes up with some useful or creative idea which can guide or direct an actor in the use of his own tangible property thereby instantly gains a right to control all other tangible property in the world, with respect to that property’s similar use.” This new-fangled homesteading technique is so powerful that it gives the creator rights in third parties’ already owned tangible property.

For example, by inventing a new technique for digging a well, the inventor can prevent all others in the world from digging wells in this manner, even on their own property. To take another example, imagine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy — let’s call him Galt­Magnon — decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt­Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams, in a rather feeble attempt to defend copyright, used the analogy of underpants:

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say your neighbor sneaks into your house while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. He tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business — whatever business that is — so this arrangement is good publicity for you. The next time he sees you, he tells you about the underpants because he figures you’ll thank him for saying nice things about his business. He informs you that it’s a win-win scenario.

Given that you have full use of your property (the underpants), is it a victimless crime? I would say the owner of the underpants lost something even though his property is physically the same. [30]

This is a remarkably poor analogy. Underpants are a physical object that can only be in one place at a time. When the neighbor borrows my underpants, I no longer have that particular pair in my possession any more. His use of them logically precludes my being able to use them. Physical property is a zero-sum game, in which one person’s possession necessarily comes at the expense of everyone else’s possession. That is exactly why property rights are a logical conflict avoidance mechanism for physical property: given the fact that a physical object can only be possessed by one person at a time, property rules establish who the rightful owner is and prevent conflict between multiple claimants trying to possess the same thing at the same time. For underpants to be a good analogy, they would have to be reproducible at zero marginal cost so that the same identical pair of underpants could be in ten million dresser drawers at the same time, without the original owner ever losing physical possession of his pair of underpants.

A more accurate analogy would be to suppose that I could cause an exact duplicate of Adams’ underpants, created from atoms in my own house, to appear in my own underwear drawer entirely through publicly available knowledge of the configuration of atoms in the original pair, without ever trespassing in Adams’ home or disturbing his particular pair of underpants in any way.

Adams’ real objection, obviously, is not to the deprivation of the thing itself or its use in any sense, but to loss of the economic value of artistic creations that would result from his sole legal right to sell them. But as Kinsella argues, “one cannot have a right to the value of one’s property, but only in its physical integrity.” [31] One cannot argue otherwise without accepting the premises of local zoning laws and assorted aesthetic ordinances (against outbuildings, compost piles, clotheslines, solar panels, front yard gardens, cars parked on lawns, etc., etc.) designed to protect homeowners from a decline in their “property values.” One’s primary right in a property is to its unfettered use, not to cooperation by others in the maintenance of its resale value. A law that restrains one’s use and enjoyment of one’s own property, in order to maintain the market value of someone else’s property — and all in the name of “property rights,” no less — is fundamentally perverse.

Blogger Mark Poncelet, incidentally, came up with a hilarious parody of Adams’ underpants analogy:

Let’s not forget that you never actually own your underpants (unless you crochet them yourself. Just be very careful that you don’t make a pair that looks like someone else’s. You could be liable for damages). Most underpants makers only give you a license to wear them. When you “buy” these underpants, some of that money goes to the person who designed them. The rest goes to the company that mass­produced them and the company that shipped them. Some of that money finds its way to entities who are preparing to sue you for wearing your underpants improperly.

I pay a subscription fee to a company that sends me underpants on demand. I can wear them, but they get to choose how often I wear them, and I can’t wear similar underpants too many times in a row. When I’m done, I have to send the underpants back. This is a whole lot better than some other methods of getting underpants….

Buy your underpants from iTunes? At least you get to keep them! Yet be prepared to have someone from Apple watch you put them on and take them off….

Regardless of how you get your underpants, there are some brutal realities to consider before you put them on. Like I mentioned above, you don’t own these underpants. Someone else does. They’re just giving you permission to wear them. In return for this permission, they get to decide a lot. [32]

Notes:

1 Lysander Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property; or, An Essay on the Right of Authors and Inventors to a Perpetual Property in Their Ideas (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855) <http://www.lysanderspooner.org/intellect/contents.htm>.

2 “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ,” in Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One. Gordon Press facsimile (New York: 1973 [1897]), p. 13.

3 Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: The New American Library Inc., 1967), p. 130.

4 Ibid., p. 132.

5 N. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), p. 16n. This monograph first appeared as an article the symposium Applications of Libertarian Legal Theory, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001).

6 Ibid., p. 27.

7 Ibid.

8 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago: Regnery, 1949, 1963, 1966), pp. 385-386, 680-681.

9 Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1962, 1970, 1993), p. 655.

10 Ibid., pp. 657-658.

11 Ibid., p. 654.

12 Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, p. 46.

13 Quasibill, “Contract Enforcement Consolidation,” The Bell Tower, December 20, 2007 <http://the-bell-tower.blogspot.com/2007/12/contract-enforcement-consolidation.html>.

14 Stephan Kinsella comment under Aheram, “The Validity of End User Licesnse Agreements Redux,” Copyfascism Watch, December 2, 2008
<http://mises.org/Community/blogs/copyfascism/archive/2008/12/02/the-validity-of-end-user-license-agreements-redux.aspx>.

15 Kinsella comment under David K. Levine, “Can You Contract Away Fair Use?” Against Monopoly, April 13, 2009
<http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=593056000000000868>.

16 Charles Johnson, “How Intellectual Protectionism promotes the progress of science and the useful arts,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, May 28, 2008 <http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/28/how_intellectual/>.

17 Richard Stallman, “The Right to Read” (updated 2007). It originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2) <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>.

18 Michel Bauwens, P2P and Human Evolution. Draft 1.994 (Foundation for P2P Alternatives, June 15, 2005) <http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1>.

19 Michel Bauwens, “Can the experience economy be capitalist?” P2P Foundation Blog, September 27, 2007 <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/can-the-experience-economy-be-capitalist/2007/09/27>.

20 Johan Soderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), , pp. 144-145.

21 Deborah Durham-Vichr, “Focus on the DeCSS trial,” CNN.Com, July 27, 2000 <http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/27/decss.trial.p1.idg/index.html>.

22 Numerous examples—the Diebold corporate emails and Sinclair Media boycott, the Alisher Usmanov libel case, the Wikileaks case, etc.—are provided in the appendices to Chapter Nine (“Special Agency Problems of Labor”) in Kevin Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (Booksurge, 2008). An earlier online draft of the chapter can be found at <http://members.tripod.com/kevin_carson/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Chapter9.pdf>.

23 Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delavan, Wisc.: Hallberg Publishing Corp., 1983), p. 80

24 Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 36-37.

25 Ronald Bailey, “Drug Companies Don’t Get Enough Money …,” Reason Hit&Run blog, February 22, 2006 <http://www.reason.com/blog/show/112727.html#012727>.

26 Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Blitzprint, 2004), p. 79.

27 Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1940, 1960), p. 66.

28 Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and other Essays, p. 352, quoted in John R. Commons, Institutional Economics (New York: MacMillan, 1934), p. 664.

29 Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy. (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and Mcmeel, Inc., 1970, 1977) , p. 71.

30 Scott Adams, “Is Copyright Violation Stealing?” The Dilbert Blog, April 7, 2007 <http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/04/is_copyright_vi.html>.

31 Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, p. 47.

32 Mark A. Poncelet, “Leave my underpants alone,” poncelet, April 9, 2007 <http://poncelet.livejournal.com/62034.html>.

Over the weekend, Bill and Emma Keller declared which side they were on in the ongoing blogger vs. journalist debate, and they did it in the worst way I could conceive of: They tag-team attacked a woman with stage four breast cancer for daring to tweet about her experiences, and daring to be optimistic about her chances of survival.

Bill Keller is the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, so his arrival at this position, from up at the peak of the ivory tower, is at least understandable (though no less abhorrent). His wife, Emma? A cancer survivor.

Emma Keller’s post at the Guardian, titled “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” has already been deleted “with the agreement of the subject because it is inconsistent with the Guardian editorial code.” Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we’re able to knock back the clock and see exactly what she said.

“Lisa Bonchek Adams is dying,” Emma Keller writes. “She has Stage IV breast cancer and now it’s metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver and lungs. She’s in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud. On her blog and, especially, on Twitter.”

Is this mockery? I can’t tell. If I wasn’t aware of the title or theme of the article, I would probably say that this was just a very succinct, radio-friendly lede. But it becomes clear very quickly that this is no mere profile of a dying woman. Keller’s distaste of Adams’s practices is apparent by the second paragraph. It is apparently notable that Adams tweets “dozens of times an hour,” and that some of the people who follow her do so like they would a reality television show.

Keller doesn’t mention until further down that she herself is one of those people:

“The clinical drug trial she was on wasn’t working. Her disease seemed to be rampaging through her body. She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?”

If this article were directed at the doubtless innumerable tourists of the internet, then I would most likely have no need to devote blog space to it. But it isn’t. Keller criticizes Adams for using social media as a way to keep herself going.

“It’s clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience,” Keller writes.

“She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She’s living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life,” she said. “In some ways she has invited us all in.”

Emma Keller ends her piece by saying,

“Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a “no visitors sign” on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?”

Emma seems to oscillate between being frustrated with herself that she has allowed a compelling story to hold her attention, and angry at Lisa Adams for creating that compelling content.

Bill’s article is still standing strong over at the New York Times, and while the snarkiness of his concern-trolling is more subdued, it’s still emblematic of a larger issue the Kellers seem to take with the medium.

He begins his less-virulent hit-job with a more-or-less stone-faced appraisal of Adams’s activity as a blogger over the last seven years. He writes,

“Since a mammogram detected the first toxic seeds of cancer in her left breast when she was 37, she has blogged and tweeted copiously about her contest with the advancing disease.”

The way he describes Adams’s fight with cancer from this point on is reminiscent of a war zone, and that’s not an accident: later in the piece, he reminisces about the time his father-in-law died from cancer in a British hospital, where,

“more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.“

Yet Adams, despite the advanced nature of her cancer, does not seem to be miserable; as Keller notes, she is currently receiving care from the New York Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the oldest private cancer research center in the world. Her tweets have lost some of their optimism, but she’s continuing to fight.

That she’s doing it in the public eye apparently deserves the ire of old media. If Adams had taken the time between painful and debilitating chemotherapy treatments to pen a memoir, or, as other writers have quipped, hundreds of thousands of sentences for the New Yorker, Keller (Emma and Bill both) would be weeping over her beautiful eloquence and inspiring prolificness. But because Adams decided to blog, this is not worthy of attention and we should question her motives.

It’s clear that, at least in the minds of some of the old media guard, blogging isn’t just “not-journalism.” It’s not fit for existence. That others are proving them wrong is inspiring in itself.

Adams’s story is not that of attention-seeking. It is emblematic of the struggle for human flourishing, despite astronomical odds against them. That she’s blogging it makes it no less powerful.

The media and talking heads have moved on from last week’s obsession — beating up on Dennis Rodman’s North Korea trip —  to the new scandal du jour: Chris Christie and Bridge-Gate. Without rehashing the entire story and timeline, Christie, or at the very least his administration, allegedly sought to cause major traffic obstacles and disruptive delays for residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey, as retribution for the Democratic Mayor of Fort Lee’s refusal to endorse Christie’s reelection bid. The Christie Gang apparently succeeded, as traffic over the George Washington Bridge and into and out of Fort Lee was a nightmare over the course of several days in September. The story broke when Fort Lee’s mayor went public with his suspicions.

As the details surrounding Bridge-Gate continue to unfold, MSNBC and Fox duke it out each night on the prime time news programs. Objective news critics know how the story plays out without having to turn on the television. MSNBC attempts to tie  it to Christie in an effort to derail his 2016 Whitehouse bid, while Fox tries to minimize its importance and refocus its viewers on the Obama administration’s various scandals. Stuck in the middle of the opinion molding are CBS, ABC and CNN, who try to land somewhere in between their competitors. The nightly stories focus solely on the political fallout: Was Christie involved and how will the scandal affect his prospects for national office? Few in the media deviate from this standard theme.

One thing that neither side of this story is interested in examining is the underlying problem of government’s all-powerful ability to completely disrupt, and in some cases ruin, average people’s lives. The massive state bureaucracy has assumed so much responsibility that the evil whims of a select few individuals can completely change the face of entire communities for the worse. Bridge-Gate also highlights in stark fashion how government officials view their constituents; to these officials, they tend to be nothing more than pawns to be used in the ongoing chess match that is politics.

The New Jersey scandal is not a new or unusual phenomenon in politics. In fact, it’s the norm for governments near and far. When an institution like government is given such complete power so as to control every important aspect of people’s lives, systematic abuses of innocent people becomes pervasive. In this case, it happened to be local New Jerseyans caught in the political crossfire of Chris Christie and some New Jersey Democrats. In other instances of government’s muscle-flexing, the innocent victims are charitable organizations attempting to do good in the world, but whose views don’t comport with bureaucrats at the IRS.

Nowhere is the “people as government pawns” problem more evident than in the foreign policy arena. Take for example the ongoing US/Iran feud. While the governments of both countries battle over the issue of nuclear weaponry, citizens of both countries suffer because of the intergovernmental power struggle. Iranian people are starved and deprived of life-sustaining medicine as the United States regime’s approach to defeating the Iranian government is to inflict pain upon its subjects to the extent that they feel compelled to affect government overthrow. Americans, most of whom have never been to Iran and who would be unable to point to Iran on a map, suffer (albeit to a lesser extent than the Iranians), as they are systematically robbed in the form of taxation to pay for their government’s wartime atrocities. All of this to further the ongoing fight that is solely between governments, not their people.

Alternative scandals and other smaller-scale wars on innocent people take place daily in every city, every state, and every country, because government at all levels have assumed monopoly powers over functions as diverse as defense, infrastructure, food and water, the environment and health care provision. Advocates of freed markets seek to strip governments of their monopoly powers and unwind government granted privilege, turning over control of vital command posts to individuals and communities. The likelihood of violence on a such a massive scale, as in the Iranian example, or politicians’ unleashing of chaos on unassuming constituents, as in the Christie example, becomes far less possible absent the institution that enables it. Bad actors will never cease to exist, even when localized control prevails, but eliminating the legalized means to affect these actions is certainly a good start.

Until the Rachel Maddows and Megan Kellys of the world start questioning the underlying nature of government as an institution, instead of trying to pick and choose the right people to compose it, we can expect many more instances of abuse of little people attempting to go about their daily lives.

I – What Is Anarchy.

The statesman, intent on schemes to compromise principles and tide over clamorous demands for justice, says it is disorder and spoliation. New taxes are then levied to defend the state, to repress incendiary talk, and protect privileged prerogatives. Or false and surface issues are prepared to distract attention, to embroil citizens in partisan quarrels, and furnish new offices for the spoils-hunter. The people pay the bills and the statesman remains.

The priest, intent on saving souls, and setting less value on temporal things – for others – says it is abolition of marriage, atheism, and draws a frightful picture of a state wherein his voice would be derided, yet ever careful to bring no testimony to corroborate his dismal forebodings of social chaos.

The financier, intent on new schemes for manipulating public credit to personal ends, says it means “a dividing up”; that the lazy and worthless want to share with the industrious and honest the fruits of industry; and thousands believe it and never think to ask whether any one ever saw an anarchist who believed in this fancied “divvy.”

The landlord, comfortably collecting toll for the use of land from those who have been placed upon this earth, says it is the destruction of the foundation and framework of society and removal of all incentive to progress and then proceeds to invest tolls received in fresh acres.

The merchant seeking by every means to obtain a monopoly of the market, says it Is the negation of freedom, a gigantic despotism in which life would be burdened with prison rules and social intercourse regulated with clock-like regularity.

One and all incessantly dinning this into the public ear, their cry re-echoed by that social prostitute, the “able editor,” in whose sheet their respective callings are advertised, the timid shrink from the word, women grow pale, and children learn to believe an anarchist is a first cousin to Old Nick, And, laughing in their sleeves over their success, the statesman lays pipe for a re-election, the priest pictures another world where corner lots have no speculative value, the financier busies himself in cutting coupons and computing interest, the landlord in figuring how soon he may safely raise rents, the merchant in converting “surplus values” into profits.

In the tenement house human being are huddled like sheen in a pen; in the factories women and children crowd out husbands and fathers; in potter’s field trenches are continually opened and filled; in the cities vice and crime are spreading gaudy attractions for idle feet; in the country able bodied men vainly seek employment; men grow disheartened and sullen, women overworked and cross, girls and boys dejected and lost. Yet while rent and interest are collected and profits amassed society is safe and law order secure,  though

Our fathers are praying for pauper pay,
Our mothers with Death’s kiss are white;
Our sons are the rich man’s serfs by day,
And our daughters his slaves by night.

Yet anarchy will not down, but continues to gain adherents, and says to the statesman: Your surface issues are dead and party questions misguiding. We ask justice, and would stop the spoliation from which we have so long suffered. Producing all, we too often lack food and warmth and clothing. Where all are prosperous the state must be so too, and until we are state interests are of secondary importance to us.

It says to the priest: There can be no healthful organization of the moral forces while poverty sets at our hearths and vice beckons our youth to gayer scenes than home can afford. Give us freedom from unrequited toil and enforced destitution and our emotional natures will warm into unity from higher aspirations.

It says to the financier: Your function in society should not be determined by monopoly, but under equal opportunities. Your privileges are our restrictions; your charters our disfranchisement. We demand freedom to co-operate in financial as in other matters; to co-operate for mutual banking as well as for mutual insurance; and when you are shorn of privileges we may co-operate to base credit upon all wealth as well as on that you would dictate, for equal opportunities would destroy your prerogative to fashion and control a medium of exchange. Justice would reign and interest cease, because it could not be exacted.

It says to the landlord: Equal opportunities give you no monopoly of the soil. Again, monopoly has conferred a chartered right and men are disinherited. Destroy this chartered privilege and strong arms will labor with joy and find in mutual credit new avenues to invade the province of nature. Co-operation would enlarge production, extend consumption, and equalize distribution. Overproduction and underconsumption would become myths, and demand would seek supply with unfailing regularity without other guarantee than absence of restriction.

It says to the merchant: Exchange is a social function, and, in the absence of the monopolies of money and land, labor, free from artificial restriction, free to co-operate in mutual banking to organize credit based on all products, thus free to connect use with possession of soil, free from the enforced payment of interest for monopoly money, free from enforced payment of rent for production, would through co-operation organize exchanges and leave you free to whistle for profits.

To them all it says: Gentlemen, we ask no privilege, we propose no restriction nor, on the other hand, will we permit it. We have no new shackles to propose, we seek emancipation from shackles. We ask no legislative sanction, for co-operation asks only for a free field and no favors; neither will we permit their interference.

It asserts that in freedom of the social unit lies the freedom of the social state.

It asserts that in freedom to the capitalization of the acquired wealth lies social advancement and the death of interest.

It asserts that in freedom to possess and utilize soil lies social happiness and progress and the death of rent.

It asserts that in freedom to co-operate the labor exchange will displace the penny-pinching tradesmen and prove the death of profits.

It asserts that in freedom from restriction co-operation will result, and in free co-operation capital will seek labor as well as provide guarantees for security.

It asserts that order can only exist where liberty prevails, and that progress leads and never follows order.

It asserts, finally, that this emancipation will inaugurate liberty, equality, fraternity.

II – What Anarchy Offers.

The world of activity is one of inducements. Why should I do thus or so? Because my highest interests are concerned. To follow a given course, to advocate certain measures, there must be sufficient inducement therein to satisfy my mind that such is for my interest to do so. We propose no change in human nature, we take it as we find it. And ask, “Does anarchism offer any inducements superior to those of the present system? Can self-interest see any advantage in the change?” It is a question of comparison, of weighing of advantages and disadvantages. Self-interest shall be umpire.

Let us see what are the inducements now offered, what are the prizes in the lottery of life, and the chances of winning them. We find men placed upon earth dependent upon labor for enjoyment of life. In our zone nature withholds her gifts and makes them the reward of exertion. Every faculty of individuality is thus aroused to exertion and self-reliance developed. We do not pluck and eat, but labor and develop natural resources, and hence provide. Herein lies the cause of progress, of civilization. Natural conditions must be accepted and our activity governed in accordance therewith.

But at the first glance we see that our efforts are limited by artificial regulations. Nature has placed us upon the earth, but we are denied its use for productive purposes. We find the source of all production resting in land, and on every lot we find the placard: “Taken.” Nature’s gift has been monopolized, and artificial conditions are first to be surmounted before access can be had to the use of soil. Held, not for use, but for sale, it assumes a speculative value. Have you a lot, a homestead left to you? This speculative value extends over to it increases your taxes, places a fine upon all improvements, and where such are made requires increased exertions to meet new exactions. Society says that you have no natural right to the soil. The right to produce must be bought. You must first accumulate through production before you can have access to the source of production, hence you must crave employment. You must realize sufficient profits from the sale of time or products before you can purchase the right to produce for yourself. Therefore, you work for others, and from the values you create there is diverted one part to the owner of land, from whom you purchase the right to remain on earth, under the form of rent, and another portion to the employer as inducement for giving you employment, instead of starving, under the form of profits. After these requirements are met you receive wages. And were we studying political economy instead of glancing at some of its salient points, it would be seen that this applies as well to the farmer as to the laborer.

The laborer’s wages are paid in the form of money, the current medium of exchange. Advancement lies in saving, in economy, in postponement of marriage, in accumulating money by which privilege may be purchased or capital secured. Possession of land is not enough; there must be joined to it ability to use. But labor saved is only wealth till turned to reproductive use, when it becomes capital. But here, again, artificial conditions are introduced. Society in its wisdom having privileged the landlord, now grants prerogatives to the capitalist. It limits the medium of exchange to a particular form of wealth. All credit must flow through a specified sluice. A, B, and C seek through co-operation to escape from the necessity of working for others. A has wealth saved in a house; B has wealth saved in machinery; C has wealth saved in products; all having equal exchangeable value. But their wealth had cannot be capitalized into wealth used, save by purchasing monopoly money. As a basis for mutual credit it is valueless; as a basis for sale or mortgage it can command money, be capitalized. Thus by this privilege conferred upon one form of wealth to constitute the sole medium of exchange and basis for credit another toll is laid upon industry in the form of interest.

All these artificial complications by which the surplus value of production is diverted from the producer into the coffers of the, so to speak, complicators of normal social relations require the support of the source of interference hence taxation claims its share before the residual sum is dealt out as wages. Therefore it is that, as under slavery and serfdom, the producer works for as little as may be necessary to support him. The competition of labor for privilege to live keeps the minimum of wages at the line of cost of subsistence, while taxation, profits, and rent have no determinable limit. Labor, lying under all these superimposed burdens, paving all these exactions, is necessarily remunerated by this iron law of wages. Anarchism must offer emancipation from this enforced subjection of labor to land and capital, and, logically, in proclaiming emancipation it must proclaim freedom to the oppressed – liberty!

Emancipation from the thralldom of man to land; the individual right to possession and use, carrying with it the right to co-operate for guaranteeing security and protection. Emancipation from the thralldom of man to capital, the individual right to utilize all wealth, and the right through co-operation to organize mutual credit with the same facility we are now graciously permitted in mutual insurance.

Emancipation from bondage to rent would base all titles upon occupancy and use; would open avenues of escape to the toiler, and in nowise limit the farmer’s capacity to produce, nor his ability to enjoy the reward thereof. In increased production, application to labor would be lightened, the necessity for struggle lessened, an inflation of wealth would ensue, distribution be more equitably adjusted, and natural right to a footing on earth receive social sanction and, through co-operation, social guarantee.

Emancipation from bondage to interest would join means to possession of the source of production. Co-operative effort would offer sanction to co-operative credit, and in freedom to capitalize all products interest would be abolished in the same sense as petroleum “abolished” candles.

Labor, free from the exactions of speculative rent, and released from necessity to buy a monopolized medium of exchange, would offer as inducements to exertion:

Opportunity to freely enjoy the fruits of industry without paying toll.

Opportunity to the endless increase of wants and means to wrest from nature their supply.

Opportunity to the use of all wealth had in the extension of productive activity.

Opportunity to freely co-operate to secure:

1. Protection and security from invasion of these natural rights. 2. Insurance against depredation and risks. 3. A medium of exchange based upon wealth saved, having social sanction, discharging social functions, and serving social ends. 4. The organization of labor exchanges from which profits would have fled to join rent and interest. 5. The organization of all forms of activity, and thus release from enforced taxation.

In short, where capital seeks labor, where supply waits upon demand, where order follows progress, where authority dissolves under the genial glow of liberty, and necessity for wage-labor disappears.

The present system offers government to defend privilege. Anarchist-socialism offers co-operation to extend opportunities. The one, in making co-operation compulsory and fostering privilege, sets a premium upon greed and culminates in tyranny. The other, in removing privilege, places a premium upon voluntary co-operation, and tends to eliminate greed.

III – Who Should Be Anarchists?

First, we might ask: Why should there be any? Are not our cities filled with evidences of ceaseless traffic? Is not capital ever on the alert for investment in profitable enterprises? Are not our western towns rivaling each other in “booms” in real estate, thus testifying to increasing revival of business? Is not the army of the unemployed steadily diminishing, and demand for labor increasing? Are not our public documents teeming with statistical columns showing national prosperity? The building trades find employment in building new and grander palaces; in their decoration and furnishing an army of skilled employees find remunerative labor; in the clothing and adornment of their inmates thousands are fed and clothed. On every hand new church spires arise, as if to serve as exclamation points to the astonishment which the voice of anarchy arouses.

Festive revelries were never more frequent; people marry and are given in marriage, and display to reporters the bridal gifts; luxury is creating new demands upon industry; salaries of officials and popular preachers are raised, and pews sell at a higher premium; in fact, everything goes as merry as a marriage bell were it not for the discordant note of frequent strikes.

Ah! Here is a depth which statistical compilations of productions and exports does not reach, it seems. Let us peer beneath the veneering of “national prosperity,” and see if the structure be sound or worm-eaten. Let us see if the gilded rays of boulevard prosperity radiates into tenement-denizened streets and “nigger alley”; whether the magic wand of the speculative genie of the business boom has transformed these humble homes.

Alas! To ask is to answer; the toiler still delves on in his weary tread-mill round, and finds advancing age but brings added cares and disquietudes. To him the business boom and national prosperity are only visible when seen recapitulated in the eloquent words which flow front the “able editor’s” prostitute pen.

In his thinking moments the artisan dreams of a co-operative society in which freemen will combine to wrest from nature her hidden wealth, in which liberty to labor will no longer be restricted as a boon to crave, in which with manly independence, he may look forward to the calmer enjoyment of the fruits of industry in old age. Nor stands he alone. The farmer wonders if his mortgage will ever be paid. The tradesman asks whether life has no other aim than the constant necessity of counting pennies. The clerk thinks that there cannot be room at the top for all, and what if he should miss his hold on the ladder?

Through all grades of society unrest prevails, because in all success depends upon ability or craft to climb over the fallen forms of your associates; to rise out of the slough by using them as stepping stones, though every upward step plunges them deeper into the abyss.

Modern society, monarchical, parliamentary, and republican alike, cries with one voice: Law and order first and foremost, liberty and progress secondary and resultant. Anarchy says: Not so; law must not deny liberty, order must not precede progress; they are causes, not results. It proclaims progress first, to which order must adapt itself; liberty at all times, over which law has no control.

It whispers to the artisan, the laborer, the miner, the factory hand, the farmer, the tradesman, the clerk, to all whose hearts have not been seared by the blighting hand of successful greed: Your happiness lies in freedom front artificial restrictions, not in strife for privilege.

Look over the broad fields teeming with golden grain and then at the numberless acres held by speculators to extort from human necessity an onerous toll as prerequisite condition to their use to further increase production. Look over the crowded human bee-hives where the toilers jostle each other and then at the vacant lots surrounding them, serving but as receptacles for broken crockery. Ask yourselves by what title deed has the landlord disinherited you from nature’s estate? Has God set his seal to it? Is nature’s sign-manual there? Have you surrendered your natural claim to a footing on earth? Whence, then, the privilege to him and the restriction upon you? There is but one answer: The law so ordains!

You dream of co-operation, but when you essay it you find rent and interest as firmly seated astride your shoulders as was the Old Man of the Sea upon Sinbad. Not only are you denied possession of the source of production – land – but monopoly also steps in to dictate upon what conditions you may have the means of production by conferring the privilege of capital on a certain form of wealth only. Your buildings, your machinery, your products, your possessions, the reward of honest industry, may be used, but not capitalized: they cannot be made the basis of credit except in the terms of the monopoly money furnished for the purpose of selling to you permission to utilize your own credit. To the question: Why is this so? again there is but one answer: The law so ordains!

Instead of praying: From rent and interest, good Lord, deliver us! strike down that which breathes vitality into their grasping tentacles, crush it, throttle it, damn it like freemen, and assert our right to co-operate in producing wealth without making terms with the land-robber, and to co-operate to furnish mutual credit without paying toll to the credit robber.

Anarchy is freedom from artificial regulation and restriction; and, in freedom, the farmer, as well as the artisan and all the classes into which society is now divided, will find that wider scope to activity will bring increased comfort; and in freedom to use of land and to organize credit, rent, interest, and profits will disappear together like bats before the dawning light; and in co-operation find full security for wealth attained and opportunity for its application.

In anarchy labor and capital would be merged into one, for capital would be without prerogatives and dependent upon labor, and owned by it. The laborer would find that to produce was to enjoy and the nightmare of destitution banished. The artisan would find in co-operation that nature alone remained to be exploited. The tradesman would find that production offered greater inducement than exchange, unless he accepted a position of competence and ease in the labor exchange which would supplant isolated stores. The clerk, no longer with his horizon bounded by a ribbon counter, would have full scope to display his talents in any direction. The farmer, above all, free from irksome care to meet interest, to dread foreclosure from enforced taxation, with his family growing up around him, and rendered secure by a common title and mutual inter-dependence, or seeking in insurance indemnity for depredation, would find in anarchy release from useless drudgery and his labor crowned with plentiness and peace.

The only question then likely to arise would be: Who would not be an anarchist?

IV – Co-operation.

Now that questions of forms of faith in theology and government have ceased to divide men into hostile factions, that political as well as religious toleration has become firmly rooted as a social virtue, economic questions rise into greater importance. Here again we find the old struggle of past centuries under new standards; again liberty is arrayed against authority on other fields. Co-operation in religion has passed out of the field of strife and been declared victorious; our creed is no longer dealt to us. Co-operation in government has won its place in the world’s history; our rulers no longer claim divine right to govern. The scaffolding of past centuries has brought mankind to the completion of the social structure. Reason and intelligence on the one hand and necessity and discord on the other are instructing them in its aims and preparing them for the application of the requisite means. It is the dream of the toiler, the hope of the thoughtful, and the goal of the progressive humanitarian.

How shall we substitute co-operation? Efforts have been many, satisfactory results few. Unforeseen obstacles are met to be overcome; artificial environments limit freedom of action; chartered privileges impede progress; restrictions hamper and clog activity.

Co-operation in the distribution of products sacrifices the producer to the consumer. Buying at the lowest competition price, and following current trade principles, it would swell profits for the benefit of customers. If it tends to lesson [sic]prices the consumer, so far as he is a producer, but gives from one band what the other hand gains. An English writer indulges in the following criticism on the system:

The co-operative wholesale society is a gigantic middleman. In its workshops it pays the lowest of competition wages. In the language of one of the workers in one of the shoe factories: “The workmen have to work for what they can get; they know there is no true co-operation.” In its transactions with other producers it pays the lowest of competition prices. The profits made out of the retail prices are distributed among the members; labor is depressed. In short, it is as far from displaying a single feature of real co-operation as any private trader is who uses the weapons of competition and capitalism for his personal ends, regardless of the interests of others.

Even where success attends the enterprise it can hardly rank as even ameliorative. The few, the stockholders, the customers alone are its beneficiaries; the great mass are left, and further, so far as co-operation lifts a few out of the social slough it is at the expense of less fortunate fellow-creatures, who find their own fate more irrevocably fixed in becoming stepping-stones upon which the few mount to privileged enjoyment. Co-operation to eliminate the middleman and retaining rent and interest is but a sorry makeshift for the bright ideal our dreams had presaged.
Anarchy presents a wider and grander view of co-operation than that involved in joint stock or profit-sharing concerns – a view which requires no elaborate scaffolding to erect nor exercise of legislative authority to preserve. It seeks no charter, for it asks no privileges; it seeks no aid, for it contains within itself capacity to provide for all needs. All it asks is a free field – the removal of restrictions which limit its scope and deny it full exercise. And as it finds these restrictions in legislative sanction given to privileges, in chartered rights bestowed upon some, it demands their abrogation.

It claims for co-operation of freemen ability to discharge any social function, and as production and exchange are the principal directions in which modern activity manifests itself it imperatively demands as means of industrial emancipation that neither shall be endowed with privilege, that the source of production and the means of exchange cannot be subject to letters patent.

With freedom of access to land, to hold for occupancy and use, resting upon this common title, common needs will draw occupants and users to co-operate to secure what is beyond the power of the individual to obtain. The common title would produce independence, mutual reliance and organization, and precisely as privilege was eliminated fraternity of spirit and common aims would naturally arise. Co-operation would not have to be invented, it would be evolved; common needs would require common efforts, and whenever union would present benefits unattainable to divided efforts that moment steps toward co-operative unity would be taken.

But freedom of land is not enough. Capital, clad in the legalized armor of monopoly, holding in its power the medium of exchange and thus imposing a tax upon its use as a means to further production, can well afford to laugh at the puny effort to co-operate and make it also tributary to its gains. Again anarchism says to secure perfect co-operation there must be freedom in financial as well as in other matters. The privilege bestowed upon gold, by bestowing upon it as if by divine right a royal crown over other products of labor, has made it the despot of exchange. Anarchy declares that it has no natural right to the exclusive discharge of this social function over any or all other products; that so far from facilitating exchange it fastens upon industry the clog of interest, causing all other wealth to pay tribute to it and at the same time regulating values by a speculative standard. Anarchy asserts that in the overthrow of this old superstition, exploded everywhere else save in financial matters, men will be thrown upon their own resources to organize mutual credit; that in co-operation a medium of exchange can be issued based upon any and all forms of wealth as security, and that in this ability to capitalize products for purposes of production of increased wealth there will be no monopoly to command interest for use. Anarchy, therefore, sees in emancipation from the monopoly of land and credit the opportunity for complete and perfect co-operation. Not a governmental scheme by which our functions are prescribed but a free alliance to achieve common ends; not necessarily a unity in one national association, but co-operation for local or national ends, just as the need arises, confident that under equal opportunities that which best discharges its social function will best commend itself for support.

The great trouble is that we have so long been nursed that we are not yet fully aware of our own capacities. So much have we been dominated by the state that we have not encouraged self-reliance. If, however, freedom is preferable to restrictions co-operation can only be secured by the joint efforts of free individuals, and just so far as the social units are emancipated from restriction so far will society reflect that liberty; just so far as the individuals are happy, prosperous, and moral, so far only will society be happy, prosperous, and moral. Social virtues are results, not causes.

Liberty, therefore, is the basis upon which true co-operation rests. To remove the shackles from individual activity in order that co-operative activity may have natural genesis is the mission of anarchy. It looks to the state only to abolish privilege; it looks to the freeman for the co-operative unit. It lays its foundation at the bottom, rather than beginning at the top to build downward.

In co-operation it sees that which will supplant the state, which will open avenues to every faculty, provide supply for every demand, and furnish to all the fullest and freest scope for the development of individuality, without the necessity of pleading a “baby act” to invoke guidance or desire to compel others to follow our co-operative lead and example.

O editor do The Freeman, Sheldon Richman, discursando na George Mason University, levantou a questão sobre o que os libertários convencionais querem dizer quando chamam um país de “capitalista”. O que qualifica um país como “capitalista”?

Muitos países com índices relativamente baixos de liberdade econômica (incluindo aqueles classificados como “majoritariamente não-livre”) são normalmente considerados “capitalistas”, e referenciados como tais nas propagandas políticas neoliberais comparando-os, de forma favorável, a países não-capitalistas como Cuba. E os âncoras da CNBC e escritores da imprensa corporativa geralmente se referem a “nosso sistema capitalista”, mesmo que isso nem sequer se aproxime, nem remotamente, a um livre mercado.

Assim, no uso comum, entre libertários do establishment e aqueles que se passam por especialistas em relação ao “livre mercado,” qualquer país que não tenha adotado o socialismo marxista como sua ideologia oficial é “capitalista”.

Baseado nessas observações, Richman conclui que “capitalismo”, na prática, “designa um sistema em que os meios de produção são, de fato, de propriedade privada.”

Curiosamente, Murray Rothbard conta uma anedota em que Ludwig von Mises tornou essa distinção, ou algo muito parecido com isso, explícita. Ele perguntou para Mises: dado que existe certa variação de possíveis graus de estatismo, do estatismo total ao mercado totalmente livre, e dado que nenhum país aproxima-se de nenhum dos extremos, o que você considera como a característica principal que divide essencialmente sociedades capitalistas de essencialmente não-capitalistas? A resposta de Mises: a existência de um mercado de ações. Uma sociedade com um mercado em favor de bens de capital é, essencialmente, capitalista.

Como já apontei no passado – um ponto onde Richman se refere no seu discurso – é um tanto curioso que o “capitalismo” fosse adotado como o termo convencional para uma sociedade baseada na propriedade privada e na livre troca. Não há nenhum motivo óbvio, na procura de um nome para uma economia em que todos os fatores de produção são ostensivamente iguais e se estabelecem em livre contrato como iguais, do qual o capital deveria ser distinguido, em especial, para ênfase específica. A escolha do termo “capitalismo” sugere alguma agenda ideológica específica, como se o sistema funcionasse pelo e para o capital como distinguido de outros fatores de produção.

A suposição não declarada incorporada quando se chama um país “economicamente não-livre” e também capitalista, é esta: um país não-livre do ponto de vista econômico só deixa de ser capitalista quando a falta de liberdade econômica interfere na capacidade das pessoas ricas tornarem-se mais ricas a partir dos rendimentos sobre a terra e o capital. Enquanto que a falta de liberdade econômica primariamente limita a liberdade de o pobre sair da pobreza, embora o rico permaneça apto a enriquecer a si mesmo no modelo do United Fruit Company, da Guatemala, ou dos clientes do Jack Abramoff, nas Ilhas Marianas, ele recebe o selo de aprovação capitalista Good Housekeeping.

A resposta de Mises a Rothbard, anteriormente – além de confundir um “mercado para bens de capital” com um mercado acionário de empresas– sugere que, sem importar o quão não-livre economicamente, um país em que a maioria das empresas comerciais é possuída de forma absenteísta por proprietários de riqueza concentrada, e que a maior parte do trabalho é contratada por salários por esses proprietários absenteístas, passa a ser chamado de “capitalista.” Presumivelmente, um país no qual a riqueza é, de forma tão amplamente distribuída e o emprego autônomo e a propriedade cooperativa são, assim, formas básicas de organização, de modo que o comércio de ações seja de importância marginal, seria colocado no lado “socialista” da linha de Mises – mesmo que não houvesse restrições regulamentárias das transações no mercado de câmbio e no livre movimento de preços.

Esse é um conjunto bem notável de prioridades: o “capitalismo,” em oposição ao “socialismo,” não é definido pelo grau de liberdade econômica como tal. É definido por uma estrutura institucional particular, no qual ele está, de modo desproporcional, em benefício de uma classe particular de agentes do mercado.

Tradução Rodrigo Viana. Revisão de Matheus Pacini.