How to write an Alternet criticism of libertarianism: 1) Cite an unpleasant aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy; 2) use the news topic of the day as an exemplar of that unpleasantness; and 3) treat it as somehow symbolic of the fundamental nature of the entire libertarian movement. In this case, I’m not so much interested in Richard Eskow’s lazy, by-the-numbers attack on libertarianism (“The Sharing Economy is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand, and the Truth About Tech and Libertarians,” Alternet, February 1) as I am in his treatment of his chosen news hook, Uber.

Don’t get me wrong. His attack on libertarianism is as historically illiterate as most other examples of the genre at Alternet. Making dogmatic, blanket generalizations about a movement with as many varied sub-currents as libertarianism (many of them quite left-wing or even socialistic), and discovering the “truth” about their “real nature” in the thought of Ayn Rand, is as stupid as a Bircher denouncing “socialism” based on his heavily underlined copy of “The Communist Manifesto.”

But I want to focus instead on the internal inconsistency of Eskow’s statements on the sharing economy, and his incredibly naive understanding of how regulations work. Eskow’s argument about the sharing economy is:

1) A sharing economy “is lateral in structure” and “a peer-to-peer economy” (correct);

2) Uber is neither. It’s “hierarchical in structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining their level of earnings” (correct again); therefore …

3) The sharing economy is a lie!

Well, no. Genuine sharing — lateral and peer-to-peer — is no lie. We just need to replace the counterfeit, Uber, with the real thing: Open-source ridesharing services instead of proprietary corporate apps, cooperatively controlled by drivers and customers rather than by Uber’s glorified temp agency model. And that would be, incidentally, a genuine free market institution — the kind of thing any genuine libertarian, as opposed to a mere corporate shill, should want.

Even more ridiculous is Eskow’s googoo defense of regulations, straight out of a tenth grade civics book. Uber’s defenders, he says, “don’t seem to understand that regulations exist for a reason.” Even when they’re onerous and bureaucratic, “it’s a flaw in execution rather than principle.” Regulations “serve a social purpose, ensuring the free and fair exchange of services and resources among all segments of society. Some services, such as transportation, are of such importance that the public has a vested interest in ensuring they will be readily available at reasonably affordable prices.”

Actually, no. Regulations usually serve the business interests that control the state. Eskow seems to labor under the illusion that the state is (to borrow a phrase) just “all of us working together.” It is not. It is, as Marx characterized it, “the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class.” The state has always been the mechanism by which economic ruling classes enforce the privileges, artificial property rights, artificial scarcities and monopolies through which they extract rents from the rest of society.

Although sold to the public as measures to restrain corporate malefactors for the general welfare, regulations generally serve the interests of the regulated businesses. The Progressive Era regulatory agenda, as described by New Left historian Gabriel Kolko in The Triumph of Conservatism, was passed at the behest of the regulated industries after their attempts at establishing stable voluntary cartels had failed, in order to restrict price competition between them. The centerpiece of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration, established industry-run cartels, enabling big business to restrict output and set prices.

But explaining the taxicab medallion system as a measure to guarantee the availability of adequate service at reasonable prices, when its actual purpose is to restrict entry and limit competition so the regulated firms can charge monopoly prices, approaches Orwellian levels of naivete.

Roy Childs described liberal intellectuals as the running dogs of big business. And he was right. Monopoly capital doesn’t need right-wingers consciously propagandizing for it, when it has liberal useful idiots like Eskow to unwittingly do so.

Raúl Zibechi. The New Brazil: Regional Integration and the New Democracy. Oakland: AK Press, 2014. Raúl Zibechi. Brasil potência: Entre a integração regional e o novo imperialismo. Rio de Janeiro: Consequência Editora, 2013. Todas as citações no decorrer do texto foram retiradas da versão em inglês e traduzidas para o português.

Brasil potência: Entre a integração regional e um novo imperialismo trata essencialmente da construção de uma nova elite no país. Em linhas gerais, é bem sucedido mostrar a relativamente nova aliança intersetorial que tomou o controle do estado, das indústrias e de centros de influência social no Brasil. A representação social desses setores forneceu a justificação ideológica para a afirmação dos novos traços do capitalismo de estado no Brasil. Mas cabe um preâmbulo antes de falar sobre o conteúdo do livro em si.

O passado colonial de violência e exploração econômica da América Latina é amplamente conhecido. O fim dos impérios português e espanhol não significou que os países remanescentes nas Américas tenham dado grandes passos institucionais. De fato, as elites portuguesas e espanholas estabeleceram sistemas econômicos estratificados que dependiam fortemente da exploração do trabalho escravo ou em condição semi-servil. Na América espanhola, o sistema das mitas e encomiendas era extensivamente baseado na exploração do trabalho indígena. Na América portuguesa, o Brasil, os vários ciclos econômicos coloniais se basearam em diversas formas de trabalho escravo (em sua maior parte, negro) e na imposição imediata do latifúndio através da doação de terras pela coroa portuguesa. O resultado dentro do Brasil foi o encastelamento de uma elite econômica com laços estreitos com elite imperial portuguesa. Além disso, com as particularidades da independência brasileira, que manteve no trono um rei português, há uma linha de continuidade direta entre a elite político-econômica colonial e a pós-colonial no Brasil. Esses fatos moldaram a constituição do estado nacional brasileiro.

Nada disso é desconhecido. Raymundo Faoro, em Os donos do poder, aponta que o arcabouço institucional brasileiro foi criado essencialmente pelo colonialismo português: a burocracia estabelecida servia para fazer valer a vontade da coroa portuguesa e o país não passava de uma “propriedade privada” do rei. Desde cedo em Portugal a coroa irradiava sua vontade pelas castas da elite, que se expandiam até serem capazes de servir adequadamente ao soberano. E, como em todas as sociedades “civilizadas” da história, o poder político e o poder econômico eram um só pólo inseparável e indistinto.

As veias abertas da América Latina, de Eduardo Galeano, texto essencial para boa parte da esquerda há décadas, reconta essa história de domínio e exploração econômica no Brasil e na América espanhola. A expansão de Portugal e Espanha naturalmente levou à criação de elites locais, que passaram a deter o poder econômico e o político com a independência. Para Galeano, havia continuidade entre a exploração econômica de ontem e a exploração econômica de hoje; são fenômenos também indissociáveis. Se a elite político-econômica na América Latina hoje em dia tem nomes diferentes, ela continua a se beneficiar do sistema de poder que foi construído por séculos.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Plínio Apuleyo Mendoza e Carlos Alberto Montaner aparentemente discordam. Em seu Manual do Perfeito Idiota Latino-Americano, os três autores caracterizam o livro de Galeano como “a bíblia dos idiotas”. Para eles, a tese do livro poderia ser resumida em uma só frase “Somos pobres; a culpa é deles”. Llosa, Montaner e Mendoza então acham que o sistema político-econômico implantado e moldado desde o período colonial na América Latina não teve grande impacto sobre o desenvolvimento econômico da região? Ou talvez achem que não haja elites econômicas e políticas que se beneficiam do sistema vigente nos países latino-americanos? Se a América Latina é pobre, a culpa seria de quem? Da própria América Latina? De quem dentro da América Latina? Os três autores parecem pensar que os sistemas existentes são apenas autômatos neutros e não instituições organizadas em benefício de pessoas e classes específicas.

Para Llosa, Mendoza e Montaner, atentar para o desenvolvimento das instituições de um país desloca uma culpa transcendental pelo seu subdesenvolvimento. Nesse cenário, o país está simplesmente sujeito ao jugo de forças externas a si e não pode decidir o próprio destino. A falta de definição metodológica do trio causa problemas aqui: é óbvio que as populações negras e indígenas foram exploradas na evolução política e econômica da América Latina. E é óbvio também que a exploração do trabalho dessas populações serviu aos interesses de uma elite. Se esses povos foram explorados, é correto dizer que “a culpa é deles” (de outras pessoas). E quem era essa elite? Inicialmente, composta pela burocracia e pela aristocracia ligadas às coroas espanhola e portuguesa, cujo poder político foi mais tarde deslocado para as elites locais.

Roberto Campos escreveu na introdução à edição brasileira do Manual:

Boa parte de nosso subdesenvolvimento se explica em termos culturais; ao contrário dos anglo-saxões, que prezam a racionalidade e a competição, nossos componentes culturais são a cultura ibérica do privilégio, a cultura indígena da indolência e a cultura negra da magia.

Ignorando por ora o racismo explícito de Campos (indígenas certamente não gostavam muito de trabalhar para quem os tentava escravizar) e a idealização dos países ricos, ele parece imaginar que os “termos culturais” que explicam o subdesenvolvimento latino-americano existem num vácuo. Como se a “cultura ibérica do privilégio” não privilegiasse justamente uma elite econômica; como se o “privilégio” fosse um fenômeno difuso que faz com que os países simplesmente acabem de forma geral subdesenvolvidos, mas que não serve a interesses particulares de ninguém.

Logo, qualquer teoria sobre o desenvolvimento de quaisquer países (em particular os da América Latina) que exclua uma teoria de classes será absurda. Qualquer teoria que pretenda explicar o funcionamento dos sistemas econômicos latino-americanos deve tomar como dado a existência de uma classe político-econômica que explora o trabalho das classes inferiores, uma vez que as instituições políticas criadas na América Latina foram estabelecidas justamente para extrair o valor do trabalho da maioria em prol da minoria.

Daron Acemoglu e James A. Robinson, em Por que as nações fracassam, chegam exatamente a essa conclusão. Para eles as “instituições” (ou seja, o estado) de um país pode ser um empecilho maior ou menor ao desenvolvimento econômico. Os países cujas instituições são mais “extrativas” (em contraposição às “inclusivas”, na terminologia dos autores) tendem a ser subdesenvolvidos. Acemoglu e Robinson tratam extensivamente sobre o caso da América Latina e sobre essa continuidade entre as elites coloniais e os sistemas de extração de valor do trabalho de então com os sistemas de exploração atuais.

Ao mesmo tempo, as mudanças socioeconômicas na América Latina foram acompanhadas de realinhamentos no plano internacional. Se anteriormente as elites latino-americanas existiam em função dos poderes coloniais, mais tarde elas passaram a existir em função dos poderes neocoloniais. Com sistemas estabelecidos de exploração econômica, as elites da América Latina passaram a estar sujeitas ao domínio econômico das elites dos Estados Unidos, em vez de burocracias europeias. E o sistema de dependência que se firmou a partir da segunda metade do século 19 e durante todo o século 20 não dependia mais da união política; agora, o poder político das elites locais estava sujeito ao poder político e econômico das elites internacionais. Isso não significa que as elites locais na América Latina não possuíssem poder por si só, mas que seu poder viria a ser sempre limitado por um poder maior estrangeiro.

Esse relacionamento entre elites locais e as elites estrangeiras (geralmente ligadas às corporações transnacionais) não é pacífico. Existem interesses conflitantes em jogo, mas que são solucionados com o apelo à supremacia militar e política americana. Às elites locais, sobra um quinhão do espólio econômico — uma vez que, igualmente, seria inconveniente para as elites estrangeiras estabelecerem um novo sistema político local para facilitar sua exploração. Assim como os britânicos faziam alianças pontuais para ganharem terreno político dentro da sociedade indiana, as corporações estrangeiras fazem alianças pontuais com elites políticas locais que sejam frágeis demais para manter seu sistema de exploração independente dos sistemas do exterior. No caso da América espanhola especialmente, a elite geralmente tem estado vulnerável às elites estrangeiras.

Contudo, não há determinismo histórico em jogo e é possível que um país escape dessa lógica, ao menos parcialmente. É disso que Raúl Zibechi fala em Brasil potência. Zibechi esboça no livro a reorientação e independência parcial da elite política e econômica brasileira dos Estados Unidos, que, para ele, passam por um enfraquecimento em sua hegemonia. Para explicar esse realinhamento, Zibechi resgata a teoria do subimperialismo de Ruy Mauro Marini, que estipulava a existência de centros de poder de médio porte em adição ao poder hegemônico.

Marini era marxista, mas desviando do marxismo ortodoxo, que enfatizava que as sociedades latino-americanas se encontravam em meados do século 20 em um estágio “pré-capitalista”, afirmava que o que vigia então era um “capitalismo sui generis”. Para Marini, a existência de um poder hegemônico é indisputável (os Estados Unidos), mas as elites locais são fortes o suficiente para manterem um relacionamento de “cooperação antagônica” (termo cunhado pelo marxista alemão August Talheimer) com a elite externa. Além disso, o subimperialismo depende também da existência de certas ambições imperialistas que provejam seu combustível ideológico. Nesse ponto, as ditaduras militares que chegaram ao poder na América do Sul a partir dos anos 1960 representavam esse projeto. Zibechi sublinha extensivamente a existência desse projeto no Brasil durante o regime militar: os generais que controlavam o país planejaram abertamente a construção de uma esfera de influência que colocasse os sistemas exploratórios vizinhos a serviço da elite político-econômica local. (Cabe o parêntese aqui de que Zibechi é abertamente ambivalente em relação ao termo “subimperialismo”, uma vez que talvez o termo “imperialismo” talvez seja igualmente aplicável. Mas, dadas as características cooperativas com o poder hegemônico, Zibechi ainda mantém a relevância do termo para explicar a construção de uma esfera regional pelo Brasil.)

Zibechi enfatiza duas facetas da consolidação do Brasil como pólo regional de poder: a reorganização do capitalismo nacional e a construção de uma estratégia de alianças políticas no Sul-Sul, substituindo em pontos focais a influência política e econômica dos Estados Unidos. Este último ponto é o elo mais fraco do trabalho de Zibechi: a existência de planos e alianças internacionais formais nunca indicou a existência de influência política efetiva. As estratégias, os objetivos declarados pela Secretaria de Assuntos Estratégicos, pouco têm de relevante, principalmente quando percebemos o pouco de avanço em suas implementações. Boa parte dos prognósticos a respeito da situação do Brasil também parece se basear em expectativas francamente megalomaníacas sobre o crescimento do país e de sua influência política internacional. É interessante notar que, para a consolidação de uma elite extrativa dentro do país, não são necessárias altas taxas de crescimento econômico. É necessário que haja uma realocação do capital, mas não exatamente que esse capital tenha uma grande expansão. E, para que o país se apresente como pólo regional, sua economia precisa ser grande em relação aos países que pretende estabelecer como periferia, mesmo que suas taxas de crescimento sejam baixas.

Além disso a ênfase no planejamento estratégico do posicionamento político nacional também tende a subestimar o papel dos incentivos estruturais ao expansionismo. Se, com o estabelecimento do regime militar brasileiro, ganhou espaço na alta cúpula do governo brasileiro a ideia de que o país deveria ser um pólo de poder regional, já existiam incentivos estruturais para a expansão do poder estatal — que é o que já vinha acontecendo. Pedro Campos comenta a respeito em Estranhas Catedrais – as empreiteiras brasileiras e a ditadura civil-militar, quando afirma que as empresas de construção civil do Brasil já vinham ganhando espaço dentro do governo pelo menos desde o governo de Juscelino Kubitschek. As obras de infraestrutura em que os militares estavam interessados em fazer nos anos 1970 aproximou as empreiteiras ainda mais do governo, consolidando seu cartel — em pleno funcionamento até hoje.

Claro que há uma lógica na resistência ideológica ao sistema de domínio internacional exercido pelos EUA do ponto de vista dos militares. Dados os incentivos estruturais à centralização interna e externa, apenas um esforço consciente de separação pode evitar a anexação por inércia. Era essa a lógica dos militares da Escola Superior de Guerra. Golbery do Couto e Silva, citado por Zibechi, um dos principais ideólogos do regime militar, explica isso claramente, em seus típicos termos floreados:

Os países fortes tornam-se cada vez mais fortes e os fracos, dia a dia, mais fracos; as pequenas nações se vêem, da noite para o dia, reduzidas à condição de Estados pigmeus e já se lhes profetiza abertamente um fim obscuro, sob a capa de iniludíveis integrações regionais; a equação de poder do mundo simplifica-se a um reduzido número de termos, e nela se chegam a perceber desde já apenas raras constelações feudais de estados-barões rodeados de satélites e vassalos. (p. 26)

De qualquer maneira, a consolidação do caráter imperialista do Brasil se deu com a ampliação da elite. A aproximação das empreiteiras do estado brasileiro durante o regime militar paulatinamente criou um dos centros de influência dentro do estado brasileiro, mas Zibechi dá atenção para a formação de outro: os sindicalistas.

A partir do final da década de 1980, os maiores sindicatos do Brasil, formados principalmente por trabalhadores industriais urbanos, passaram a ganhar maior espaço dentro do processo decisório das empresas e aproximaram os trabalhadores da classe gerencial. O sindicalismo brasileiro sempre esteve sob a tutela estatal, através da unicidade e do imposto sindical e a Constituição de 1988 não promoveu qualquer mudança nesse sistema. Durante os anos 1990, com o início do processo de privatizações e com a abertura da gestão dos fundos de pensão para os trabalhadores, houve uma aproximação definitiva entre as classes gerenciais e os sindicatos. Em centrais sindicais como a CUT foi se formando gradativamente uma nova classe burocrática, representando os trabalhadores, com controle financeiro sobre a economia (através dos fundos de pensão) e com a colaboração da classe patronal (que passou a ser vista como aliada contra os “recessionistas” do capital financeiro, que favorecem medidas restritivas como o aumento dos juros).

A ascensão do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) ao governo, com fortes laços ao sindicalismo, foi a etapa final da integração de uma elite sindical ao estado brasileiro. Dezenas de milhares de sindicalistas foram alçados à burocracia estatal em cargos comissionados. Com o acesso dos sindicatos a fundos de pensão, o PT os passou a utilizar como braços de atuação na integração tanto dos sindicalistas quanto do capital nominalmente privado ao estado. Zibechi afirma:

A plataforma do PT durante a campanha eleitoral de 2002 afirmava que os fundos de pensão são “uma ferramenta poderosa para fortalecer o mercado interno e uma forma de poupança de longo prazo para o crescimento do país”. Além desse clássico e razoável argumento em favor dos fundos de pensão, havia outra linha de pensamento dentro do PT que via os fundos de pensão como uma nova estratégia para controlar o capitalismo e moralizá-lo. É uma mudança de perspectiva que é adotada pela liderança do PT e os leva a traçar estratégias, junto com os sindicalistas dos fundos de pensão, sobre o futuro do país nos termos do mercado e do sistema financeiro. (p. 56)

O poder dos fundos de pensão que o PT era capaz de controlar, porém, só foi estabelecido a partir da presidência de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, quando ocorreram as “privatizações” brasileiras.

Falidas, as empresas estatais nos anos 1990 eram um peso para o estado brasileiro. Para reorganizá-las sem perder controle efetivo, o estado brasileiro organizou uma série de “privatizações” com dinheiro público. Grupos de controle acionário das empresas foram formados por fundos de pensão públicos (para aliviar a oposição sindical) e o governo ainda financiava a compra das estatais através do BNDES. O banco de investimentos do estado teve papel fundamental nas privatizações da Vale, da Telebrás e dos bancos estaduais (que, subsequentemente, foram absorvidos por conglomerados bancários maiores). O estado brasileiro manteve o controle parcial ou total das empresas “privatizadas” — o BNDES era um dos braços do estado, enquanto os grandes fundos de pensão eram o outro.

Se as novas empresas estatais se tornaram efetivamente mistas, o oposto também ocorreu: houve uma aproximação ainda maior do capital privado do estado. A conhecida política do governo Lula dos “campeões nacionais” foi responsável pela criação de uma constelação de empresas nominalmente privadas que passaram a girar integralmente em torno do estado. Pedro Campos afirma que, sempre através do BNDES e dos fundos de pensão, o estado brasileiro passou a estar presente em 119 grupos corporativos, em comparação a 30 em 1996. (Em outro artigo sobre as privatizações, eu exploro um pouco mais a fundo esse relacionamento do governo com as empresas no Brasil.)

Zibechi observa também que a reorganização do capitalismo brasileiro tinha como um dos pontos centrais a Petrobras, que mostra a “vantagem para o estado do emprego de planos estratégicos com objetivos de longo prazo” (p. 135). É um tanto irônico ler a respeito do emprego de objetivos de longo prazo da Petrobras, dados os escândalos recentes repetidos que envolvem a empresa, que levaram à queda de sua presidente e à perda de valor aguda da estatal. No entanto, a corrupção na estatal é instrutiva para mostrar a relação do capital nacional com o estado e como a Petrobras se tornou um dos núcleos econômicos do estado brasileiro. As empreiteiras Odebrecht, Camargo Corrêa e OAS — todas figuras perenes em financiamentos de campanha — são investigadas no esquema de propinas para obras públicas.

A política de “campeões nacionais” tinha como objetivo moldar as empresas brasileiras, através de subsídios a fusões e a custos de operação, para o mercado externo. Com isso, o estado brasileiro ganhou influência nas economias dos vizinhos sul-americanos. Zibechi aponta que os maiores efeitos dessa agressividade externa do Brasil foram sentidos no Paraguai e na Bolívia, os vizinhos mais fracos. Ele enfatiza que a relação do Brasil com o Paraguai mudou mais drasticamente após a construção da hidrelétrica de Itaipu, que foi construída no Paraguai e não no Brasil por um movimento geopolítico calculado pela ditadura militar: o país não precisava da hidrelétrica nem da energia que seria gerada por ela, que passou a ser vendida a preços subsidiados para o Brasil. Ao tentar revisar o Tratado de Itaipu, o Paraguai foi ameaçado por treinamentos militares na fronteira em 2008. Além disso, durante a ditadura militar paraguaia dos anos 1970, foram tomados cerca de 12 milhões de hectares de terras, grande parte dos quais que acabaram em mãos estrangeiras. Segundo a pesquisa de Mark Glauser, apontada por Zibechi, 32,7% das terras roubadas acabaram em mãos brasileiras.

Já o caso da Bolívia é tão precário que a “nacionalização” dos hidrocarbonetos em 2006 praticamente não mudou de mãos sua produção. Oitenta por cento da exploração dos hidrocarbonetos bolivianos ainda está em mãos estrangeiras. A Petrobras explora mais de 60% do gás natural e cerca de 55% do petróleo boliviano. A posição privilegiada da Petrobras na Bolívia foi conseguida pelas ótimas concessões que passou a explorar dos anos 1990. Apesar da retórica nacionalista do governo, os monopólios brasileiros estão preservados dentro da Bolívia. O Equador, que vinha passando por um processo de anexação econômica parecido, acabou por entrar em rota de colisão com o Brasil, expulsando tanto a Odebrecht em 2008 quanto forçando a saída da Petrobras dois anos mais tarde.

Através das “alianças estratégicas” tanto com a Argentina quanto com a Venezuela, a sensação é a de que o Brasil vem construindo seu quintal na América Latina. Brasil potência não afirma este ponto com todas as letras, mas deve ficar claro que a expansão brasileira, como a de todos os outros impérios ao longo da história, se deu através da ocupação e da centralização da exploração econômica no exterior. Na América do Sul, isso ocorreu através através da monopolização de setores estratégicos das economias vizinhas através de concessões e acordos bilaterais que garantiam um cenário de privilégios e subsídios para as empresas brasileiras. Assim, a expansão brasileira foi possibilitada e facilitada a cada etapa pela centralização política dos estados vizinhos combinada à fraqueza econômica da elite.

As discussões comentadas por Zibechi a respeito do caráter do (sub)imperialismo brasileiro, embora interessantes, são um tanto problemáticas — como tendem a ser os debates econômicos marxistas. Ao comentar os trabalhos de Mathias Luce Seibel, Virgínia Fontes e João Bernardo, pouco tempo é gasto para tratar das consequências internas do crescimento do capitalismo monopolista no Brasil; enquanto Brasil potência parece impressionado pelas perspectivas otimistas do governo e de vários grupos corporativos sobre o crescimento brasileiro, o próprio Brasil começava a pisar no freio do crescimento. O extrativismo interno do modelo implementado no país já começa a apresentar sinais de exaustão: a inflação de preços sobe, há sinais de sobreinvestimento massivo na construção civil, o desemprego aumenta e é mascarado pelas estatísticas governamentais.

Nenhum desses fatores é surpreendente. A acumulação de capital, por si só, não é sinal de crescimento. Os subsídios a fusões e a dispersão de custos promovida pelo estado brasileiro mascaram a ineficiência das instituições centralizadas. A expansão acelerada dos tentáculos estatais no Brasil indica que os subsídios já não são capazes de compensar os rendimentos decrescentes do capital e fomentar o “crescimento econômico” dentro da economia corporativa. E com uma maior concentração de capital e retornos de escala cada vez menores, os pontos de caos calculacional tendem a aumentar e o crescimento tende a ser cada vez menor.

Com o fim dos dias de calmaria do capitalismo corporativo brasileiro, o estado foi obrigado a fazer o que todas as elites dominantes fazem em tempos de declínio de seu poder: aumentaram a violência e a opressão sobre o resto da população para tentar manter a capacidade de extração de rendas para subsidiar o capital. Isso se manifestou especialmente com os diversos protestos contra os aumentos das passagens do transporte público nas metrópoles brasileiras (que culminaram nas manifestações de junho de 2013) — reprimidos energicamente — e nas milhares de expropriações nos preparativos para a Copa do Mundo de 2014 e para as Olimpíadas de 2016.

Zibechi dispensa algumas páginas para comentar a nova cultura política que tem surgido, encapsulada, segundo ele, principalmente pela mudança de caráter do Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) — que adotou uma estrutura horizontalizada e deixou de ser um movimento essencialmente de classe média e se expandiu pela periferia. O MPL de fato incorporou ideologicamente a luta pelo direito à cidade e contra cristalização das estruturas de poder no traçado urbano, que reserva o centro aos ricos e isola os pobres na periferia. Tudo isso é correto e deve ser levado em conta em qualquer análise sobre o cenário recente do Brasil. Suas observações, porém, parecem incompletas.

A cultura política brasileira vem se modificando paulatinamente a partir da administração petista em grande parte como reação ao partidarismo pelego das organizações historicamente ligadas às causas sociais.

O movimento estudantil brasileiro, por exemplo, enfrenta já há anos uma “crise de representação”. As organizações que representam o movimento, com ligações ostensivas com partidos políticos e estruturas eminentemente verticalizadas, já não têm o poder o mesmo poder de mobilização de antes. Até mesmo organizações com bases fortes como o Movimento dos Sem-Terra sofre com a verticalização, a burocratização e à submissão das pautas de interesse do movimento aos interesses partidários.

A aliança ideológica que dá sustentação à expansão capitalista do estado brasileiro, afinal, é uma tripartição entre os sindicalistas, os burocratas e os grandes empresários. Com o contraste — cada vez mais óbvio — entre os interesses da base e das cúpulas de classe, a hegemonia ideológica começa a perder sua legitimidade e as decisões das estruturas verticalizadas enfrentam cada vez mais resistência.

A inadequação das organizações sociais tradicionais para lidar com as novas preocupações da população ficou patente durante as manifestações de junho de 2013: quando as multidões tomaram as ruas sem organização, estrutura ou mesmo exigências unificadas para além de uma insatisfação generalizada, grande parte da esquerda institucionalizada passou a vilificar o movimento, chamado “fascista”.

Assim, se há uma cultura política característica dos movimentos sociais atuais, ela se baseia numa reação à burocratização histórica e ao encastelamento das elites.

Brasil potência não é o único, mas certamente é um dos mais importantes livros recentes a traçar o panorama do capitalismo de estado brasileiro. E ao falar da história do poder no país, Zibechi está acima da média porque vê continuidade em vez de rupturas. Zibechi, porém, apesar de ter os instintos corretos, sabendo identificar os pontos chaves da política contemporânea no Brasil e na América Latina, não apresenta um aparato teórico capaz de desafiar a hegemonia ideológica do capitalismo corporativo.

As fraquezas estruturais desse modelo só podem ser combatidas pela ideia de um livre mercado radical e descentralizado. E, assim, a consequência lógica da horizontalização de nossa cultura política é a anarquia.

Thaddeus Russell
A Renegade History of the United States
Free Press, 2010

For Thaddeus Russell freedom doesn’t come from a political system, a social order, a station in life or any other such institutionalized relationship. It is the practical ability I have to do what I want in my daily life. To the extent that such freedom exists, it is not because of “our free democratic system,” nor because of political protests against those who rule that system, but because selfish, non-conforming, flagrantly hedonistic and egoistic renegades* insisted on living as they wanted against all the odds.

The book is a good contrast not only to mainstream history, but also to the various leftist histories that tend to make activists into martyred heroes, and the oppressed into blameless victims. It is not at all a politically correct history. This is appropriate since political correctitude is a puritanical moral attitude, and that is precisely what the renegades Russell writes about refuse to accept.

I appreciate the premise of the book. The argument that freedom in any meaningful sense, my freedom to live, enjoy and create my life as I see fit, is never granted, but is rather taken in spite of whatever authority may be in power, is a basic part of my egoist and my anarchist perspective. And it is a pleasure to read this history of the fierce and playful battles of so-called degenerates to maintain their pleasure against the attempts of authorities, reformers, radicals, etc., to suppress them.

At the same time. I am convinced Russell tweaks his history leaving out parts that don’t fit his view. This view definitely challenges status quo history. (He lost one teaching job because of his ideas.) Some portions of the book would have been helped by foot-notes (or endnotes) for quotations, so readers could more easily track them down in the sources to give them context. This would be particularly useful in chapters 2 and 3 where he quotes extensively from interviews with former slaves.

In addition, he almost makes heroes out of syndicate and mafia mobsters, who may indeed have played a significant role in providing space (at a price) for various outsider pleasures and ways of life, but who also ran extremely authoritarian organizations that often worked hand-in-glove with the authorities, including cops. For their profit, they’d work both sides of the fence, and Russell doesn’t bring this out.

In addition, though many of the scandalous enjoyments Russell’s renegades fought for were not products on the market, Russell seems to use this history to promote a kind of pro-market stance. I don’t think that the market has any inherent connection to either the enjoyment of life or the refusal of constraints on one’s enjoyment. In fact, the market as I’ve known it in my lifetime has been one of the institutions limiting my freedom to enjoy my life, not only by putting price-tags on more and more pleasures, but by turning them into fixed products – identities that can be marketed, as free relations cannot. I’m not going to get into the relation of the market to the work ethic, one of the most oppressive products of puritanism, here.

So the book is flawed. Despite this, it is a fun to read. It exposes how authorities, reformers and radicals use democracy, reform and even the idea of revolution to suppress the actual experience of freedom and enjoyment. And it provides abundant evidence that no one can grant you “freedom” (or better, ownness) in any practical sense; instead you have to take it, and you don’t take it by sacrificing yourself to it, but by doing what you want regardless of laws or morals.

*Russell uses this word in the sense of intentional “outsiders,” non-conformists.

My Own is a publication of anarchist, egoist, individualist ideas, literature and analysis coming from an explicitly anti-capitalist, non-market egoist perspective aimed at encouraging the interweaving of individual insurrections against all forms of authority, domination and enforcement of conformity.

My own is available on a basis of mutuality. If you want to receive it, show that you are aware of the effort and expense (postage and printing) I put into it by sending me something that compensates for that: My_Own@riseup.net

“The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” writes US president Barack Obama in his letter to Congress of February 11, “poses a threat to the people and stability of Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, and to U.S. national security.” Therefore, Obama requests that Congress pass an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” supporting his prior military measures in Syria and Iraq and giving him carte blanche to continue and escalate those measures for three more years.

Obama’s AUMF proposal raises several questions within the context of state action. For example, why does he only now request Congress’s permission to do what he’s already doing while claiming he doesn’t need that permission? Why doesn’t he go whole hog and request a declaration of war — the only instrument of congressional approval which passes constitutional muster — instead of an unconstitutional “authorization?”

But unlike some previous “AUMF” situations, this one brings a more important question to the forefront. Why won’t Obama admit that the Islamic state is, in fact, a state? That question looms implicitly in previous AUMF requests versus “rogue” or “failed” states (like Saddam’s regime in Iraq and the Taliban government in Afghanistan) and “non-state actors” like al Qaeda. With respect to the Islamic State, Obama has put the question front and center.

In a previous presidential message, Obama claimed that the Islamic State is neither Islamic nor a state. Both claims are risible, and for the same reasons.

The Islamic State is clearly Islamic. It bases its claims to religious authority on Muslim doctrines drawn from the Quran and from particular hadiths (Islamic prophetic traditions). Disputes concerning the validity of its interpretations are sectarian, of a piece with arguments between Christian denominations over the appropriate method of baptism and so forth.

The Islamic State is also clearly a state. From among many definitions of the word, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s should suffice here: “[A] compulsory territorial monopolist of protection and jurisdiction equipped with the power to tax without unanimous consent.” The Islamic State stakes that monopolistic claim over large portions of Iraq and Syria. The people living there are taxed to support it and forced, violently as necessary, to accept its laws and its authority.

Why doesn’t Obama want to admit that the Islamic State is a state? Because it openly rejects the Westphalian system, the model derived from 1648’s “Peace of Westphalia.” In the Westphalian system, a state claims sovereignty over defined territory, respects the similar sovereignty of other states, and is held equal to all other states in international law. Because the Islamic state claims the whole world as its territory, denies the sovereignty of other states and holds its claims superior to any prior international law, Obama asserts that it is not a state.

But the United States fails that definition on the same grounds. For 70 years now, the US has done what it wants where it wants around the world, denying at will the sovereignty of other states and rejecting any adverse applications of international law to its own actions. Other states — notably the late Soviet Union — have done likewise as they were able.

World War II was the Westphalian system’s death knell; the time since has been an extended wake. Obama refuses to recognize this because he doesn’t want to go down in history as the eulogist at its funeral by admitting the moral equivalency of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s regime with his own.

The Westphalian system lies dead in history’s dustbin. Humanity’s next task is to sweep its successor states in after it.

Translations of this article:

• Spanish, Obama se queja demasiado del Estado Islámico

For policy elites in most nations, there are only two alternatives for the provision of public services: State ownership and management (the preferred model of Social Democrats and liberals/progressives) or corporate “privatization” (pushed by neoliberal heirs of Reagan and Thatcher). Commons governance (about which more later) isn’t even on the radar.

There’s little practical difference between state- and corporate-owned services, despite the theoretical difference in ownership. Both are governed by the same top-heavy managerial culture, the same bureaucratic “best practices” and the same high-overhead business model. Both serve the same interests, regardless of whether a particular service is nationalized or “privatized.” Nationalization amounts to “lemon socialism,” in which some input is of vital importance to the interests of capital as a whole but corporation interests either find it insufficiently profitable or have difficulty overcoming the prisoner’s dilemma problems of funding and coordinating it themselves. And “privatization” is just the opposite — lemon capitalism — in which the state’s performance of a function has outlived its usefulness for capital and corporate interests see the opportunity to extract a profit from it (but still with the state’s help, of course).

The two are frequently parts of the same life-cycle. Initially the state creates an infrastructure that’s necessary for capital’s realization of profit. For example, the majority of foreign aid and World Bank loans since WWII have gone to building the transportation and public utilities infrastructure needed to make Western capital’s overseas investments profitable. Quite often public debt is undertaken to fund such infrastructure as the result of collusion between multilateral institutions or corporations and unaccountable elements within the debtor government, without any taxpayer feedback.

Once undertaken the public debt, in turn, serves (much like company store debt in American mining towns) as a lever for enforcing desired behavior on the recipient. Ultimately, if servicing debt becomes too big a burden, it may be used to blackmail governments into adopting neoliberal austerity policies (e.g. the “structural adjustment” programs imposed on much of the developing world, the European Central Bank’s squeeze on Greece, or the corporate coup which put an “Emergency Manager” in charge of Detroit).

The cycle is complete when neoliberal elites use debt from creating the publicly funded infrastructure to blackmail governments into virtually giving away that same infrastructure to the corporate interests it was created to serve in the first place. Such “privatization” typically involves insider deals by which it is priced at a tiny fraction of the cost of creating it, or of what it would cost for those corporations to build it from scratch themselves. In fact governments often spend as much money upgrading the infrastructure to make it saleable as they realize from the sale. And the first order of business for the corporations that acquire these infrastructures at fire sale prices is usually asset-stripping and hollowing out. Finally, far from functioning in a “free market,” newly “privatized” services continue to exist in a web of state protections and de facto monopoly status.

It’s an overall process in which the state socializes operating costs and subsidizes inputs to make capital artificially profitable, and disaster capitalists seize on the resulting fiscal disaster to loot taxpayer-funded assets and subsequently gouge the public.

The principles are basically the same, with minor changes in details, in the kinds of “public-private partnerships” where a service or infrastructure remains state-owned and -funded, but some aspect of service delivery is outsourced to a for-profit corporation (the corporate model of “educational reform” the disaster capitalists imposed on New Orleans is an example). As Cory Doctorow (“Go digital by all means, but don’t bring the venture capitalists in to do it,” The Guardian, Feb. 6) points out in the case of museums, libraries and schools as “market-driven public institutions,”

it’s we, the public, who are the angel investors. We paid to keep the archives growing, to put a roof over the museum, to amass and catalogue all of our nation’s cultural treasures (and the treasures of many other nations). The internet now makes it possible for those institutions to reach wider audiences than ever before, at lower costs than ever before – once their collections are digitised. When Siemens or another big company comes along to digitise our investments, they are the VCs putting in late-stage capital after we’ve borne all the risks, sometimes for centuries.

Both variants of “privatization” are everywhere to be found. In countries like Iraq that are militarily defeated by the United States, or countries like Chile and Russia where US-backed dictators come to power, entire economies are auctioned off to global corporations. The same is true of debtor nations like Greece that international vulture capital has over a barrel, and cities like New Orleans and Detroit that experience one kind of disaster or another that renders them vulnerable.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was born without a sense of ethics, filled a vacancy on the school board with Deborah Quazzo, co-founder of GSV Advisors, a firm that raises venture capital for outsourcing public school functions (“teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards”) to for-profit businesses. (The seat was previously held by billionaire Penny Pritzker when she was appointed to Obama’s commerce department — I’m not sure whether that says more about Emamuel’s Chicago or the Obama administration.)

GSV Advisors’ sister firm, GSV Capital, owns educational technology companies that sell teaching software and extracurricular materials to public schools. Since accepting her school board seat Quazzo has continued to invest in such firms. “In other words, a key decision-maker for Chicago’s public schools makes money when school boards decide to sell off the functions of public schools” (Rick Perlstein, “How to Sell Off a City,” In These Times, January 21).

Fortunately, we have alternatives beyond ownership of public services and resources by governments or corporations. Commons governance of common pool resources (like the lakes and aquifers that city water systems depend on) and social (not state) ownership of public services is one of them. Social or common ownership can be reflected in public utilities organized as stakeholder cooperatives, with the ratepayers themselves directly governing the use of resources and distribution of services.

Fortunately, too, the communities being stripped of their rightful ownership rights by states in collusion with capital aren’t taking it lying down. In Detroit, for instance, the Detroit Water Brigade (an organization former “Emergency Manager” Kevyn Orr denounced as a “tool of Occupy Wall Street,” and accused of putting manufactured victims on display as a gimmick to villify him and the corporate looters) is resisting the corporate parasites who’ve taken over the city water system and put the screws to the public. Detroit Water Brigade, among other things, stockpiles and distributes drinkable water to Detroit residents in danger of dehydration, and likewise distributes portable rainwater collection systems as an alternative for those whose water has been cut off. And it’s conducting a public awareness campaign to shine the light on the scavengers picking Detroit’s carcass clean.

More generally, there’s a movement to reclaim the commons as a public inheritance against both state and capital (“Ciudad furor: The public, the commons and the democratisation of the city,” Provisional University, Dec. 4, 2014):

1. People are fighting privatization by refusing to recognise the state as the owner of public services and resources, instead claiming that they belong to the people.
2. Where public services are gone, people are organising themselves, locally and democratically, to provide the services they need. This included the provision of healthcare in the Greek example and the provision of housing in the Spanish example, but there are millions of others.
3. But there are also forms which kind of bring together both elements of the first two. These are struggles which both defend or demand the public provision of services while at the same time vesting ownership of services in the people and getting people involved in the democratic control of services.

The manufactured struggle between “government” and “business” conceals a real alliance. The claims of business interests to favor “free enterprise” are as fake as government claims to represent the “public interest.” It’s time for us to reject this false choice and instead turn to the real alternative of cooperating with each other in our common interest.

The future of energy in the United States is a testy topic these days. Politicians, industry officials and special interests are fighting over partisan policy proposals. All actors are fully engaged in the art of hyperbolic mouth breathing — depraved political theater at its finest.

The Obama administration wants to build a legacy of environmental stewardship and energy independence. Not so easy in the current market, as these two tasks seem ever at odds. Regarding stewardship, the administration has put its political clout behind designating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness. This would liberate the landscape from oil and gas production, road construction, clear cuts and other industrial follies. However, the administration also proposes opening up sections of the Atlantic coast for oil exploration for the first time in US history. This would expose previously protected territories to industrialization and the risk of disaster.

Regarding ANWR, the US Department of the Interior (DOI) says this may be one of the largest conservation measures “since Congress passed the visionary Wilderness Act over 50 years ago.” Opponents, such as Marita Noon (executive director of Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy), liken the move to Obama siding with the Russians in America’s new Cold War: “The anti-American accusation may be a bit of hyperbole — but, then again, maybe not. When you connect the dots, it seems clear that President Obama is doing Russia’s bidding …” Apparently, Noon missed the Atlantic coast memo.

Regarding Atlantic exploration, DOI’s latest five-year plan calls for the government to lease southern coastal waters, and new areas of the Gulf of Mexico, to industry. In a flip-flop, industry officials celebrate the move while conservationists remain stunned, dismayed and angered.

The media narrative around these proposals is business as usual, focused mainly on what these proposals mean for Obama’s environmental legacy, the jeers and cheers from congressional Republicans and Democrats on their respective sides of the issues, and the wishes and concerns of industry giants and deep pocketed green groups are thoroughly detailed. Once again, the country’s energy future lies in the hands of those with access to the halls of power.

What’s missing from this narrative? The most important of social forces: You.

The market left has little regard for the vertical nature of the narrative. We envision vibrant social co-operation in the absence of centralized authority. We believe in competition between polycentric institutions and federations under democratic control. In short, we believe in the horizontal. Let’s look to one another as we craft the decisions that will cultivate the future of our communities — energy policy included.

In this libertarian order environmental stewardship and energy independence will not be at odds. Market actors will conduct cost/benefit analyses before harvesting resources. With the new burden of true environmental costs (such as the destruction of an ecosystem in the event of a disaster) a market mechanism for conservation will develop. It is in our best interest to have resilient, healthy ecological communities because the ecosystem services they award are far too important for the cash nexus.

The free society will be built by spontaneous order — by individuals with agency over their labor. Energy will be democratic, with decisions made based on community needs and natural limitations. The energy demands and environmental concerns of today are indeed great, but if we work together we can meet the challenges of the 21st century. So let’s begin our labor, leave behind the hyperbole and build democratic energy.

No dia 20 de janeiro, a Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) anunciou o lançamento do projeto Apollo 1201, dedicado à erradicação do DRM (Digital Rights Management, literalmente “gestão de direitos digitais”, em português) no mundo. Capitaneado pelo ativista Cory Doctorow, o projeto pretende “acelerar o movimento para revogar legislações que protegem o DRM”, além de estimular um “mercado de alternativas viáveis a essas trancas digitais”. Para a EFF, as tecnologias de DRM “ameaçam a segurança e a privacidade dos usuários, distorcem o mercado”, suprimem a inovação e são ineficazes na proteção da “propriedade intelectual”.

A EFF tem razão em se preocupar com os efeitos do DRM, que tem estendido o escopo da propriedade intelectual no mundo inteiro. Como a EFF observa, o DRM já se tornou tão embrenhado em nossa sociedade que um mundo sem essas tecnologias é difícil de imaginar. Contudo, o debate se torna ainda mais relevante com a disseminação das impressoras 3D, capazes de produzir bens protegidos por “PI”, e com os avanços pelas corporações, que tentam controlar mais e mais os produtos já comprados pelos consumidores.

A Keurig, por exemplo, tentou lançar recentemente uma cafeteira protegida por DRM, que só processa o café “oficial” da empresa, cujos recipientes têm uma marca especial. Os consumidores não ficaram tão felizes por terem que hackear sua máquina de espresso para poderem fazer um café, uma vez que os grãos “2.0” não estavam disponíveis em quantidade suficiente para atender à demanda.

A Apple, por outro lado, está envolvida numa longa corrida de gato e rato contra os usuários que fazem “jailbreak” em seus produtos — apesar de há muito tempo já ter perdido a batalha no mercado da música e ter sido obrigada a adotar padrões abertos em seus produtos. A Amazon, que agora está interessada em adquirir apenas séries “exclusivas” para seu serviço de streaming, já tem longa experiência com o uso de padrões proprietários para restringir as opções dos consumidores na compra de ebooks para seus Kindles. Já a Netflix, em concorrência com a Amazon e com apoio entusiasmado da Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), tem barrado usuários de outras regiões que desejam acessar o acervo muito mais completo do serviço disponível dentro dos EUA através de serviços de VPN.

Os aparelhos de videogame são dos itens mais atingidos, com trancas digitais que impossibilitam seu uso em caso de modificação. Além disso, os últimos anos viram a popularização de esquemas de “passes online”, notoriamente pela Electronic Arts e pela Ubisoft, desenhados para suprimir o mercado de jogos usados, fazendo uma nova cobrança de “autenticação” além do preço que já foi pago à empresa pela cópia do jogo originalmente. A duas empresas também ganharam notoriedade por seus jogos que requerem conexão permanente à internet (mesmo jogos de um só jogador) ou, no mínimo, autenticação periódica junto aos servidores oficiais.

Elas não são as únicas. A ampliação dos direitos de “propriedade intelectual” nos últimos anos tem sido tão extensa e intrusiva que agora, os detentores dos “direitos autorais” se sentem livres para interferir na produção de conteúdo que anteriormente seria considerado fair use. A Nintendo, por exemplo, acaba de criar o chamado “Creator’s Program” no Youtube. Nele, os usuários que utilizam gravações de jogos da empresa para a criação dos próprios vídeos (especialmente os populares “Let’s Plays”) têm que se registrar junto à Nintendo para que seus vídeos sejam “aprovados” e para que revertam para ela 70% da receita de publicidade que gerarem. Não deveria ser de se surpreender para uma empresa que fez lobby bem sucedido pela proibição do aluguel de videogames no Japão nos anos 80 (que permanecem proibidos até hoje) e tentou passar a mesma legislação nos EUA.

Na internet, a Mozilla recentemente foi pressionada pelos “detentores de conteúdo” a implementar os padrões fechados adotados pela indústria em seu navegador Firefox. A Mozilla os implementou, embora relutantemente, para não perder os usuários de serviços de streaming. A Mozilla, inclusive, destaca um dos maiores problemas com qualquer esquema de gestão de direitos digitais: eles são um problema de segurança, uma vez que dependem de o código não estar disponível ao usuário. E é um problema antigo: o escândalo do rootkit implementado pela Sony BMG em 2005 já mostrava o potencial destrutivo desses sistemas.

Porém, enquanto as corporações tentam montar um campo de força em volta do conteúdo que controlam, os usuários encontram formas de consumi-lo sem vigilância, quebrando travas e driblando suas restrições. Enquanto as corporações tratam seus consumidores como potenciais criminosos e tentam controlar cada passo que dão com “seu” conteúdo, os piratas fornecem facilidade e conforto.

O mundo do DRM é um mundo de ineficiência e má prestação de serviços. Não é de admirar que as grandes corporações gostem tanto do DRM. Elas são a faceta mais ineficiente de nossa economia e seriam destruídas numa economia genuinamente livre — sem “propriedade intelectual” e “gestão de direitos digitais”.

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Warning of Animal Farm: Inequality Matters” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Like Hodgskin, today’s market anarchists do not object to the mere fact that capital is compensated for its part in the process of production. The worry — which can only finally be allayed by observing a now hypothetical free market and finding out — is that capital is overcompensated due to a position of privilege which the State confers on it. “One is almost tempted to believe,” wrote Hodgskin, “that capital is a sort of cabalistic word, like Church or State, or any other of those general terms which are invented by those who fleece the rest of mankind to conceal the hand that shears them. It is a sort of idol before which men are called upon to prostrate themselves . . . .”

Among Hodgskin’s central insights, habitually overlooked by most free marketers, is the idea that the fact of exchange in and of itself does not prove the absence of exploitation. Unequal exchange is exploitative insofar as one party to the exchange has an unfair advantage, one gained from the coercive prevention or restriction of competition. Considered on the micro level, unequal exchange might manifest in, for example, the employment relationship or an agreement for consumer goods or services. On a larger scale, unequal exchange analyses may aid our understanding of the way that the poor, developing world interacts economically with the rich and developed West.

Feed 44:

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Left-libertarianism detours only slightly from the traditional understanding of what it means to be a libertarian, but with some very important nuances. It is necessary to stress some basic moral principles that libertarians share to begin with:

1. No one should be allowed to aggress against peaceful people.

2. Producers should own the immediate fruits of their labor unless other agreements are made.

What substantially differentiates left-libertarianism from what we’re all used to are two major emphases:

1. The existing arrangement of property rights and wealth accumulation are not purely the product of the free market and productivity, and thus their legitimacy, as well as the bargaining power they command in the marketplace, must be called into question.

Left-libertarians recognize that historical feudalism, mercantilism, and existing crony capitalism have established a perverted economic order in which working people are exploited through systematic state subversion of market principles.

2. Egalitarian values are not seen as overtly threatening, as the state’s intrusion into the economy upset the natural trend of markets toward equality. Left-libertarians see socialist and progressive backlash against corporatism and its resulting inequality less as a threat and more as a well-intentioned but incorrect means of correcting the unjust distribution of wealth and power in today’s society.

Nothing has essentially changed from the ethical purview of libertarianism, but with this mindset, libertarians need not unnecessarily isolate themselves from those who have been most victimized by the statist economy and those on the Left who champion their interests.

In fact, many American proto-libertarians and radical market thinkers of the 19th century considered themselves anti-capitalists, such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, who are now revered icons of the libertarian right.

There was a time before socialism referred almost exclusively to a system of collective or state ownership of the means of production like it does today. There were many socialists who stringently disagreed with Marx and Engel’s diagnosis of the origins of capitalism as inevitable, with or without the state there to aid the concentration of capital into the hands of an elite few.

Not only did pro-market socialists claim that the state was absolutely necessary for the exploitative economic order they were experiencing to historically emerge and continue to exist in their time, but they also argued that markets indeed served the interests of the working classes. Most famous in this tradition was the founder of mutualism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the proto-libertarians named above, the Ricardian socialists such as Thomas Hodgskin, and Eugen Dühring, the anti-Marxian socialist who earned himself an entire book’s worth of rebuttal from Engels for his dissent.

To them, socialism also encompassed systems where individual workers owned the means of production through natural market processes, and were thus not forced to accept dismal working conditions and wage labor due to state-granted rents to the wealthy.

It is undeniable that countless state intrusions into the economy throughout the four hundred year transition from feudalism to whatever you call what we have now has substantially shifted the economic bargaining power away from laborers and into the hands of the major holders of capital. A free market would restore whatever the legitimate balance is by removing the products of state fiat such as entry barriers and restrictive labor laws which prevent effective labor agitation, horizontally-oriented firms, and true common law negotiation.

Libertarians have a tendency of defending existing hierarchies and wealth distributions under the auspice of “rule of law.” Challenging the validity of existing property rights is acknowledged as a big no-no due to that primal conservative desire to not commit the perceived sin of “class warfare.” When libertarians behave in this manner they fail to realize how radical their philosophy actually is and how much liberty is in surprising harmony with the ends of their assumed antagonists in the progressive and socialist movements.

Confronting the problems of the modern world from a left-libertarian paradigm opens new dimensions of alliance to be explored between all people who yearn for a more just and sensible world. From its vantage point, the ethical landscape of our world is significantly more complex. Liberty is no longer as cut and dry as the standard right-libertarian defense of the absolute freedom of contract for employers who currently have the economy artificially stacked in their favor to monstrous advantage over labor.

Liberty’s main mission today is to allow the poorest and most dominated in society the chance to crawl out from under the boot of continuous state capitalist oppression to forge a better world for themselves, and not to help businesses pay less in taxes. While left-libertarians also want taxes lowered if not abolished entirely, it shouldn’t define the sum total of what it means to be a libertarian. There is a better, more complete world waiting which will independently please both those who seek free markets and those who yearn for egalitarian values in our society. Left-libertarianism is the bridge between all who seek either individual freedom or social justice.

The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) holds a prominent annual interdisciplinary academic conference featuring free-market-oriented research.

C4SS has had a panel at every APEE program since 2010. This year’s meeting will be in Cancún, April 12-14, and C4SS is sending Nathan Goodman (C4SS’s Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies), Jason Lee Byas (C4SS Fellow), and Roderick T. Long (C4SS Senior Fellow) to speak at a C4SS-organised panel on the topic “Prisons: Reform or Abolition?”

If you’d like to help us bring the radical libertarian message of prison abolition to the APEE, any contribution would be appreciated; check out our GoFundMe page “Send C4SS to the 2015 APEE.”

The first thing I saw on Twitter this morning, when I sat down with my coffee, was Allison Kilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) linking to a David Edwards piece at RawStory with the remarkably asinine comment “‘Spontaneous order’ is not a thing, libertarians.” The article (“Fox host: FEMA is unnecessary because Walmart will ‘spontaneously’ save us all in a disaster,” Feb. 8) contained some equally asinine comments by John Stossel holding up corporations like Walmart as an example of spontaneous order outperforming government disaster response efforts. This, Edwards implied, is what spontaneous order is: a right-wing ideology with the transparent purpose of transferring state functions to corporations like Walmart.

But Stossel’s ideas on spontaneous order are just as distorted and dumbed-down as Edwards’s. There are much better examples of spontaneous order in disaster relief than Walmart. And the best examples of all are usually those of the ordinary people on the ground.

Willow Brugh, in a draft paper based on her experiences in Occupy Sandy (“Knowledge Transfer in Networks“), argues that the most important direction is that from below — telling outside organizations where supported is needed and “keeping [them] out of the way when not wanted.” And the most effective logistical coordination, by far, is that done at the neighborhood level in distribution centers organized by the residents themselves and aid workers on the ground working in direct contact with residents. It’s such self-organized efforts that do the overwhelming bulk of heavy lifting in disasters, regardless of what party’s in power. And sadly, most of the material that’s distributed at the neighborhood level in this way comes from the neighborhood itself, as people scour the area for underutilized resources and donate goods they have a surplus of to the distribution centers.

In New Orleans, as recounted by anarchist aid worker Scott Crow in Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, state and local “authorities” for the most part treated such self-organized neighborhood institutions as the enemy — as potential terrorists, in fact. A neighborhood relief center on the second and third floors of a school, which provided a clinic, food pantry, emergency housing, and school and activities for children, got the full SWAT treatment (complete with “Down on the floor, motherfucker!”) from cops and National Guard troops storming it. “Authorities” treated the local population, heroically keeping itself alive almost entirely by its own efforts, as an occupied enemy.

If government efforts in Sandy were more effective and less adversarial, it wasn’t because of superior large-scale planning. It was because they listened. They listened, and followed the lead of those below, who informed them — as Brugh said above — of which distribution centers needed what materials, and when the “authorities” needed to get out of the way.

Edwards’s article also quoted an earlier liberal attack on spontaneous order by Damon Linker (“Libertarianism’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea,” The Week, Sept. 26, 2014 — I raked Linker over the coals here), arguing that the aftermath of US intervention in Iraq and Libya proved spontaneous order to be a bunch of hokum. The point was reiterated by Eric Whitney (@EricExtempore) in the same Twitter thread with Kilkenny I referred to at the beginning: “Iraq and Libya were military adventures entered upon with no plan for afterwards. Both were disasters.”

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. A centralized authoritarian state launches a war of aggression. Its national security bureaucracy, after the fashion of all centralized authoritarian hierarchies, plans based on an overly simplified model of a complex reality, assumes that everything will turn out as planned, and systematically filters out any feedback from naysayers trying to tell it what it doesn’t want to hear. The result is a complete clusterfuck. And the fact that an authoritarian hierarchy did a horrible job anticipating the future and systematically suppressed all information contrary to its rosy assumptions… is evidence (wait for it) that more planning and hierarchy is needed.

The Soviets got their butts kicked in Afghanistan because they were wild-eyed anarchists who believed in spontaneous order and self-organization, I suppose. And Dilbert should listen to the Pointy-Haired Boss and spend more time reading the Mission Statement.

Utter garbage, of course. Guerrilla forces and networked resistance movements like Al Qaeda Iraq kick the crap out of centralized, capital-intensive superpower military machines for the same reason the file-sharing movement kicked the crap out of the record industry: Hierarchy makes people stupid.

That’s why the smart people in the military colleges came up with Fourth Generation Warfare military doctrine, attempting to duplicate the agility of networked groups like Al Qaeda. Unfortunately for the world’s Sole Remaining Superpower, the military bureaucracy utterly sabotaged this doctrine in the process of adopting it. The Army’s 4GW doctrine envisioned taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by network communications technology to empower tactical commanders on the ground to act on their own initiative, based on their independent access to intelligence, without waiting for approval from higher-ups. But bureaucrats need to be needed; the Army bureaucracy wound up instead taking advantage of the potential of network communications by increasing the number of sign-offs and dotted-line approval tactical commanders were required to get from field-grade commanders before acting. And this approval required the submission of plans ahead of time — plans (I kid you not) that had to be submitted in PowerPoint with very detailed formatting guidelines. So long as managerial hierarchies can interfere with the judgement of those in direct contact with a situation, they will.

More broadly, I’m stunned by the absolute ignorance of their own historical tradition on the part of people who call themselves “Leftists.”

Although these people consider themselves “leftists” (Whitney’s Twitter profile, hilariously, describes him as a “Typical Far Lefty”), they’re basically center-left managerialists and liberal googoos. They’re too ignorant of the history of the actual Left, outside their own little #UniteBlue/Coffee Party echo chamber, to mount a competent ideological assault on the Right. They don’t even know enough about their own tradition to recognize the distinguishing features that set the Right apart from the Left.

Spontaneous order, regardless of what David Edwards may think, is a lot older than Hayek (apparently neither Edwards, nor Kilkenny and Whitney, ever heard of Pyotr Kropotkin). Although Hayek’s discussion of distributed knowledge in “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” contributed useful insights to the theory of spontaneous order, he didn’t invent the theory. And Hayek’s insights are just as applicable to the information problems of the corporation’s internal planned economy as they are to the bureaucratic state. James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, criticized Taylorist scientific management and corporate managerial hierarchy starting from ideas quite similar to Hayek’s (let’s face it — a clueless suit behind a desk giving orders to people is a clueless suit behind a desk giving orders to people, whether it’s in a government agency or a C-suite). And there’s a major segment of the Left whose model of the future society is based on self-managed workplaces and commons-based peer production as an alternative to the hierarchies of capital and state.

If you want examples of spontaneous order, don’t look to Walmart and other Fox News bullhocky. Look to the self-organized working class institutions described by Kropotkin in Mutual Aid, by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, and in Colin Ward‘s whole body of work on self-built housing and the squatters movement. Look to the spontaneous activity of the Argentinian people in 2002, like recuperated factories, alternative currencies and neighborhood assemblies. Look to Syntagma in Greece, M15 in Spain and Occupy in the United States, all built on the horizontalist model celebrated in so much of David Graeber‘s work.

One reason for this abysmal ignorance of history may be that so much of what passes for the “Left” is actually just liberal. And their historical roots go back to something very anti-Leftist: the so-called “Progressive” movement, centering around Herbert Croly, the Civic League and The New Republic, at the turn of the 20th century. As I wrote a while back:

The Progressives came largely from the white collar managerial-professional classes that controlled the large bureaucratic organizations — giant corporations, government agencies, universities, foundations and think tanks — that dominated American society after the Civil War. Many Progressives in the corporate world came from industrial engineering backgrounds. The kinds of people who made up the demographic base of Progressivism saw American society as an extension of the large, hierarchical institutions they managed, and thought society could be managed the same way an engineer managed industrial processes.

I have a great fondness for the Left, and consider myself part of it. For liberalism I have nothing but contempt. To illustrate the distinction, Woodrow Wilson — a good liberal — virtually liquidated the genuine American Left during and after WWI.

In recent years some 20th century-style liberals have renamed themselves “Progressive” and tried to mix some greenwashing, hippie aesthetic sensibilities and other New Left trappings into the old managerial-centrist recipe. But it’s like mixing oil and water. You can’t take the ideology of Schumpeter, Galbraith and Chandler and change its essence by slapping a coat of Carl Oglesby on it.

Given their origins, these people are innately suspicious of anything self-organized or decentralist. And given their historical ignorance of the actual socialist and anarchist movements, and the unfortunate likelihood that they hear about ideas like spontaneous order, decentralism and self-organization these days only from right-wingers who have coopted them, they just assume they’re right-wing ideas. They live in an ideological universe where the alternatives are limited to vanilla-flavored mainstream liberalism and Fox News conservatism. To quote myself again, these are the kinds of people who

would dismiss Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman as “right-wingers” for hatin’ on “public education.” They’d put Huey Newton and Robert Williams in the same category as Wayne LaPierre for viewing private firearms as a weapon against oppression.

That’s why someone like Stossel can so easily pull a number on them. He can take an idea that reflects two hundred years of libertarian-leftist theory and praxis and put a right-wing corporate spin on it, and these pseudo-“Leftists” take his right-wing claim on the idea at face value. In the process, they wind up giving away the most useful and innovative conceptual tools of the Left to the enemy without ever realizing they’ve done so.

On January 20, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced the Apollo 1201 project, an effort to eradicate digital rights management (DRM) schemes from the world of Internet commerce. Led by well-known activist Cory Doctorow, the project aims to “accelerate the movement to repeal laws protecting DRM” and “kick-start a vibrant market in viable, legal alternatives to digital locks.” According to EFF, DRM technologies “threaten users’ security and privacy, distort markets, undermine innovation,” and don’t effectively protect so-called “intellectual property.”

EFF’s aim is true. DRM plays a huge role in extending the life of intellectual property monopolies and their evil effects on creation and innovation. Indeed, as EFF notes, DRM has become so intertwined with our society that a world with no DRM technologies seems hard to fathom. The debate becomes even more relevant given the widespread adoption of 3D printing, which is capable of making many “IP”-protected goods, and given moves by corporations to extend post-purchase control over those who buy their products.

Keurig, for example, recently tried to market a DRM-protected coffee machine that only recognizes its own “official” pods. Consumers weren’t too happy to find out they would have to hack their own spresso machines to brew coffee, since the so-called “2.0” pods weren’t available in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand.

From Apple’s cat-and-mouse race with jailbreaking phone buyers, to Amazon’s move into “exclusive” programming for its streaming service, to Netflix’s region-blocking (enthusiastically supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, a powerful US IP lobby), to rampant user control schemes by console video game makers, DRM has a long record of enabling predatory behavior by politically privileged players in captive “markets.”  The enforcement of “intellectual property”  claims has become so extensive and intrusive that “rights holders” feel increasingly free to interfere in production of content formerly considered fair use.

While corporations try to set up force fields around the content they control, users find ways to consume it without monitoring, breaking locks and sidestepping restrictions. While corporations treat their customers as potential criminals and try to control them at every turn, “pirates” supply ease and comfort.

The DRM world and the larger universe of state-granted and state-enforced “intellectual property” monopolies are black holes of inefficiency and bad customer service. It’s no accident that large corporations and their political cronies love DRM. They fear a genuinely free economy — one with no “intellectual property” and no “digital rights.”

Translations for this article:

• Italian, È Ora di Distruggere il DRM.

Novos cercamentos, saques e monopólios corporativos surgem em todos os lugares atualmente. Assistir os noticiários é como assistir RoboCop ou Blade Runner quando vemos coisas como o leilão de bens do município feito pelo “gerente de emergências” de Detroit para rentistas corporativos, idêntico ao que Paul Bremer fez no Iraque com a Autoridade Provisória. Por tudo isso, é muito difícil que eu me surpreenda. Eu só não esperava que os capitalistas corporativistas conseguissem um monopólio sobre o desgosto em relação ao governo. E, no entanto, é isso que o acadêmico Andrew Hoberek sugere (Noah Berlatsky, “Watchmen and Neoliberalism: An Interview with Andrew Hoberek“, The Hooded Utilitarian, 15 de janeiro).

Hoberek argumenta que o quadrinista Alan Moore, em Watchmen, foi motivado por uma desconfiança em relação às instituições em geral que remontava, mais do que tudo, ao espírito anti-establishment dos anos 1960. Esse espírito era forte em boa parte da esquerda de então, mas, de acordo com Hoberek, “se tornou parte integral do discurso da direita neoliberal”. Seu entrevistador, Noah Belatsky, observa que a desconfiança das instituições “deixou de ser uma característica compartilhada da esquerda e da direita no período da Guerra Fria para se tornar uma marca do neoliberalismo”.

Uau! Eu sou de esquerda e anarquista e desconfio muito do governo e de instituições hierárquicas em geral. Eu não fazia ideia de que tinha aberto mão de meus direitos a essa posição! Talvez Hoberek e Berlatsky pensem que a direita adquiriu propriedade sobre essas ideias “antigoverno” por usucapião. Mas eu tenho expressado essas ideias bem ativamente por muito tempo, então não acho que minhas ações possam configurar abandono.

Hoberek também considera o “desgosto por organizações” de Obama (em que universo?) “problemático” porque, embora ele tenha origem em suas raízes na organização comunitária, desde então “o sentimento antigoverno se tornou uma das maiores ferramentas dos que estão no poder”.

A questão mais importante que Hoberek ignora é que neoliberais como Reagan e Thatcher desgostam tanto do governo quanto oligarcas burocráticos como Stalin avançavam o socialismo (no sentido de poder genuíno da classe trabalhadora e controle dos meios de produção). De fato, ativismo estatal é central ao modelo de neoliberalismo que Thatcher e Reagan promoviam. O capitalismo corporativo depende fortemente do estado para garantir às indústrias extrativas o acesso ao petróleo e aos recursos minerais no exterior, para proteger o controle do agronegócio sobre terras roubadas e para proteger a “propriedade intelectual” — o monopólio protecionista mais central aos lucros corporativos nesta época. Ele depende do estado para subsidiar seus custos de distribuição e o processamento de “recursos humanos” na casa de centenas de bilhões de dólares ao ano e para gastar centenas de bilhões a mais no emprego da capacidade industrial ociosa ou para absorver os custos extras do investimento de capital na forma de dívida pública. O capitalismo de Reagan provavelmente necessita de um estado maior do que o modelo do New Deal.

O “sentimento antigoverno” pode até ser uma grande ferramenta de propaganda do neoliberalismo, dado que parte do público o aceita e apoia a agenda neoliberal por pensar que realmente está defendendo a “livre iniciativa” e “tirar o governo das nossas costas”. Mas a efetividade dessa cortina de fumaça ideológica depende em grande parte dos críticos do capitalismo corporativo, que também aceitam essa pose “antigoverno” dos neoliberais.

Aceitar o rótulo “antigoverno” sem exame é uma tolice estratégica. O estado não é apenas central para a sobrevivência do poder corporativo, mas servir aos interesses das elites capitalistas tem sido a função principal do estado americano — como a de todos os estados — desde o começo. Remover as estruturas de apoio ao capitalismo corporativo é a única coisa capaz de destruí-lo. Então, ao nos privarmos unilateralmente da oposição ao estado somente porque os capitalistas neoliberais falsamente se apropriaram do rótulo “antigoverno” é o mesmo que deixar de explorar uma das maiores vulnerabilidades do seu inimigo.

Permitir que o inimigo defina as suas categorias conceituais é o mesmo que perder a batalha antes de lutar.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The State Needs Crime” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Police provocateurs as instigators of crime is an old narrative. As Earth First! organizer Judi Bari famously said, “the person that offers to get the dynamite is always the FBI agent.” From the December 1999 Seattle protests on, the anti-globalization movement was rife with rumors of undercover cops always being the first to suggest smashing store windows. Nearly every “terror cell” busted by the FBI since 9/11 turned out to have been organized every step of the way by federal agents. Indeed the “terrorists” were usually so incompetent they could barely function even with FBI guidance.

Just as Charles Foster Kane manufactured news where there was none, the state manufactures crime where none would otherwise exist.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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1971, the story of the whistleblowing Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI which raided files from a regional FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, made its theatrical debut at New York City’s Cinema Village on January 6. The documentary should spark a rediscovery of the seminal but unrecognized group dedicated to exposing the FBI’s disruption of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements. They uncovered FBI misdeeds ranging from intimidation of Martin Luther King, Jr. (showing, contra LBJ loyalists, that that was not just Selma‘s dramatic license) to the existence of COINTELPRO. The ensuing Church Committee investigation imposed substantial restraints on domestic surveillance powers.

The move, in their words, “from nonviolent protest to nonviolent disruption” exemplifies what Howard Zinn called non-violent direct action, “more energetic than parliamentary reform and yet not subject to the dangers which war and revolution pose in the atomic age.”

Zinn adds that “for us in the United States, it is hard to accept the idea that the ordinary workings of the parliamentary system will not suffice in the world today.” Indeed, the doublethink of party politics is a boon to the domestic security apparatus. Republicans who damned the FBI for Waco during the Clinton years ignored it under Bush. In turn, Democrats who condemned Bush’s post-9/11 surveillance state abruptly made peace with it under Obama. And the film notes the FBI used identical tactics against groups on the right as well as the left.

But such polarization has failed to contain snowballing distrust in the system. 1971’s clips of the TV hit The F.B.I. look quaint when even The X-Files’ FBI agents with “cool” jobs suspect their employer’s motives.

In 2006, the Los Angeles Times scolded the still-unknown members of the Commission that “it is tragic when people lose faith in their government to the extent that they feel they must break laws to expose corruption.” But even those who accept Zinn’s observation that “no form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away” can be strikingly equivocal about that power itself. As Variety notes, even one of the participants laments that their attention to abuses aided “the destruction of public belief in government.”

But network age organization requires the dispersed local nodes that were the FBI’s Achilles heel. Just as the Commission’s 8 outmatched the FBI’s 200 investigators who failed to track them down, the human scale has an advantage in getting things done. Including the investigations into genuine, non-victimless interstate crime that are a bureau always primarily about combating domestic dissent’s purported rationale.

Justin Raimondo discusses Hilary’s war in Libya.

William Astore discusses seven reasons why American war persists.

David Swanson discusses the exporting of Sherman’s march.

W. James Antle III discusses the last chance for peace with Iran.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses aggression and the American Sniper movie.

B.K. Marcus discusses the history of African-American self-defense.

Laurence M. Vance discusses drug warriors.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why troops in Iraq and Vietnam were not defending our freedom.

Joshua Keating discusses whether Obama’s drone war helped cause Yemen’s collapse.

Chris Hedges discusses the American Sniper movie.

Paul Edwards discusses the sociopath as hero.

Sheldon Richman discusses the U.S. as James Bond.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses how Yalta still haunts us.

Mateo Pimentel discusses Washingtion’s war on Cuba.

Ramzy Baroud discusses how to lose a ‘War on Terror’.

Gerald Celente discusses Chris Kyle as model American.

Omar Kassem discusses the nightmare that is Egypt.

Ronald Bailey discusses abolishing the intelligence-industrial complex.

Sarah Lazare discuses how to end the ISIS war.

Arthur Silber discusses embalmed dissent.

Sheldon Richman discusses nationalism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses how the American military burns people alive.

William Norman Grigg discusses Chris Kyle.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses whether ISIS atrocity videos teach us anything.

Andy Piascik discusses Henry Kissinger and war crimes.

Kelly Vlahos discusses a Blackwater world order.

Brian Cloughley discusses uprooting peace in Palestine.

Justin Raimondo discusses the lies of Brian Williams.

Paul Von Blum discusses violent self-defense in the Civil Rights movement.

Noah Beriatsky discusses the root of the problem that sex workers face.

Two weeks ago we all learned that Brad Spangler, a professed libertarian and anarchist once of some prominence, is a child molester. There have always been hidden monsters and no movement, community or culture is entirely immune. But while we’ve spent the last two weeks recoiling in horror and crushed under the sadness of these revelations, one of the most striking dynamics to come out of this has been how many women in the liberty movement are only now being listened to.

To be sure, it’s easy to see creepy behavior in a far more sinister light with hindsight, but many of Spangler’s semi-public actions were still clearly objectionable in their own respect, of the kind that alienates community members and poisons movements. Many of us in the movement totally failed to see this side of him. But some of us did, to varying degrees, and it’s worth asking why the behavior that was visible remained in large part unnoted and unchallenged.

Spangler frequently escalated sexual content on his Facebook and in exchanges with people in ways generally felt inappropriate, often appealing to a thin veneer of “sex-positivity” to justify things that seemed wildly out of place in the context most people thought they were engaging with him. He was, in a word, creepy. He made misogynistic statements, crossed people’s boundaries without any sign that he cared to avoid them, and actively leveraged his status and influence to act predatorily towards younger women. The details of accounts go all over the place. I myself happened to defriend him over a bit of his transmisogynistic ranting a friend pointed out to me. But others who tuned in more to his feeds had concerns. Several times I got variations of “oh yeah I like what the Center publishes but I never considered writing for you because I thought you had a bigger connection to Brad and he’s a creep.”

As it turns out these asides in private were reflective of a large number of women who felt disinclined to speak up given the culture and dynamics of our movement. And when someone did–we now all know–they were immediately aggressively discredited and silenced. It should in no way be contentious to state that we should have done more as a community to listen to people with concerns about Spangler’s behavior.

Make no mistake, child molestation is its own unique evil, but it lies on a spectrum of predatory and dehumanizing perspectives and behaviors deeply connected to misogyny. Spangler did not act in a vacuum. And it is baldly disingenuous to assert that recognizing the complex but deep dynamics tying him and the branches of patriarchy equates dismissing his moral culpability. A soldier can be not one whit less to blame for murder if his superiors — and indeed the institutions and toxic cultural dynamics of statism and warfare — are to blame as well. Spangler made his choice, but patriarchal narratives of sexual entitlement to the bodies of others and the timidity many of us have shown in confronting & organizing against predatory & alienating patriarchal behavior were to some degree co-conspirators.

We’re always going on about how non-state approaches to fucked up dynamics can be so much more effective — and ultimately they can be — yet this is precisely the kind of situation where we should easily be able to demonstrate that, and instead we’ve come up empty.

Socialist movements are famous for cloaking foulness under organizational bureaucracy and losing real horrors in opportunistic firing circles. But many libertarians seem content to worship a noxious kind of callousness in which nothing can be admitted matters until a breaking point is reached. Today there is — ironically — no better portrait of a seized up and unnatural, undynamic system, incapable of organic adaptation, capable of responses only in desperate fits, than portions of the libertarian movement.

Overcrediting gossip without a clear evaluation of probabilities given sources and myriad other considerations can obviously be quite problematic, but locking our mouths closed until there’s something approaching 100% proof or consensus is an insane overreaction.

Markets work through the brilliantly self-organizing decentralized conveyance and evaluation of information. Insofar as we suppress that among ourselves — insofar as we declare that we know better than our compatriots what information is pertinent to their decisions and what they can be trusted to evaluate rationally — we suppress signals and leech dynamism from the market. We in effect reproduce some of the irrationality of state capitalism.

People are intelligent, they have agency, they can update their probability/risk assessments from new info without turning into lynch mob. Publicly pointing out someone’s problematic behavior shouldn’t be a big deal. People certainly shouldn’t have to fear being widely dismissed and harassed for doing so. And if our instincts and social organisms that might successfully navigate the myriad tensions involved without turning to team sports and vengeful gossip have withered away, well let this be a wake up call to get started rebuilding them.

On December 3, 2014 the New York Daily News reported that a “… hulking brute grabbed a 28-year-old MTA employee up in a bear hug at a Bronx train station, shoved her onto the platform and began choking her in an unprovoked attack — then ran away smiling …” (emphasis added).

Curiously, only a day later they reported that, “Police Officer Mirjan Lolja, 37 was suspended after he allegedly attacked the 28-year-old transit employee on a Bronx subway platform by putting her in a bear hug, throwing her to the ground and choking her” (emphasis added).

Two different perpetrators? No, Mirjan Lolja is the same “hulking brute” the Daily News described in the first place.What changed?

Naturally, the alteration was due to Lolja’s occupation as a police officer. As Reason‘s Robby Soave points out, “Many in the media possess an overriding presumption that everything the police do must be justified — even when police actions would be considered horrifying if carried out by anyone not wearing a badge.”

To make matters worse, “Photography Is Not A Crime” founder Carlos Miller recently revealed that instead of being charged with a felony as the law dictates, Lolja will face three misdemeanor charges instead.

Terry Raskin, spokesperson for Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, “defended” the charges. “There is an adequate scope of punishment (one year) covered by a misdemeanor charge,” Raskyn said. “Charging is always at the discretion of the District Attorney.”

In other words, unlike the vast majority of New York residents, who presumably would face the fullest extent of the “criminal justice” system’s wrath in a similar situation, Lolja will get special treatment — in the form of a reduced sentence — because of his status as a member of the New York Police Department.

Make no mistake, prisons aren’t the answer to the cop problem. Making the police obsolete as a function of the state is. But the inherent flaw of the criminal justice system is also important to note here. This flaw can be described as letting the state dictate, through its own mechanisms and personnel, how justice should be handled. This, as opposed to prioritizing the victim’s  agency in matters of law.

Given this structuring of justice it shouldn’t be any surprise that Lolja isn’t facing the felony counts like he should. Police officers seem bent on acting as like Judge Dredd, repeating to themselves that they are the law. Saying it so many times that they themselves believe it. Of course, it’s a frivolous formality, because even the rare cop who doesn’t believe she’s above the law will ultimately receive support from the same corrupt justice system.

What we should take away from an event like this isn’t that we need more tweaking to what “equality under the law” means. Instead, we need to look toward the more radical demand of equality with the law. We need to radically alter the system so we all have equality of authority with each other, instead of being equal under the law which helps perpetuate subservience and illegitimate hierarchies.

The longer we delude ourselves into thinking that the justice system is working, that the cops will eventually get what’s coming to them and that the state is on our side, the more dangerous it becomes.

It’s time to reclaim justice by smashing prisons, abolishing the police and creating a more anarchic world where equality with the law is more important than the law itself.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The reason for the venom directed at those of us who question American sniper Chris Kyle’s status as a hero can be put into one word: nationalism.

Nationalism is a poison. It attacks the mind, short-circuits thinking, and makes self-destruction look appealing. Nationalism sows the seeds of hate and war. It makes the title warrior an honorific instead of the pejorative it ought to be.

We see naked ugly nationalism in many defenses of Kyle. Defenders appear to have but one operating principle: If Kyle was an American military man and the people he killed were not, then he was a hero. Full stop. No other facts are relevant. It matters not that Kyle was a cog in an imperial military machine that waged a war of aggression on behalf of the ruling elite’s geopolitical and economic interests, that he did his killing on foreign soil, and that no Iraqi had come to the United States seeking to harm him or other Americans. (Contrary to what Kyle defenders seem to believe, not one Iraqi was among the 19 hijackers on 9/11, although had that been otherwise, the murder of millions of other Iraqis and the displacement of millions more would not have been justified.) All that apparently matters to many Kyle fans is that this man was born in America, joined the American military, and faithfully obeyed orders to kill people he called he called savages.

That is what nationalism does to a human being.

The ugliness of nationalism is often perceptible even by those who harbor it and commit terrible acts as a result. So they rationalize. They don’t openly cheer the killing of Iraqis because they are Iraqis (or Arabs or Muslims); rather they plead self-defense: if we don’t kill them, they will kill us. Kyle and his comrades were defending America and Americans’ freedom, his defenders say.

But if you’ve seen American Sniper, the movie based on Kyle’s book, you heard Kyle’s wife, Taya, reject that claim. I’m surprised that this bit of dialogue has been ignored (to my knowledge) in the voluminous writing about the movie. As Kyle gets ready for yet another tour in Iraq, his unhappy wife asks why he is going back. “For you,” he says, and by extension, America.

“No you’re not,” she fires back.

He also invokes the welfare of the Iraqis, telling his wife that being away from home for another long stretch would not be a problem because their family could spare the time and the Iraqis could not. She didn’t buy that line either. She is deeply disturbed that her husband would rather try to fix Iraq (as though he and his comrades could do that through military force) than look after his family.

It’s curious that Taya Kyle (if this scene actually took place) had a clearer picture of the world than Kyle’s vitriolic nationalist defenders, who praise the sniper for following orders without question. (One even approvingly alluded to Tennyson’s poem.)

If not for nationalism, such contortions — the conjuring of imaginary threats, the conceit in aspiring to save a society one knows absolutely nothing about, the twisting of the warrior’s ways into virtues — would be unnecessary. Things could be called what they are. Someone who swears an oath that in practical terms obliges him to kill whomever the current White House occupant tells him to kill, “asking nothing about the justice of [the] cause,” would be called a cold-blooded contract killer rather than a hero.

Nationalism, to judge by how nationalists conduct themselves, is an unswerving religious-like devotion to the nation, construed as a quasi-mystical entity — “America” — that cannot be wrong and so has the authority to command reverence and obedience. The nation transcends particular political officeholders, but the government, or state, is integral to the entity. The nation (country) cannot be imagined without the state. It would not be the same thing. When an American nationalist thinks of his country, he thinks not merely of a land mass with distinctive features, the people (a diverse group indeed), and its history (a mixed bag) because that list does not fully capture what they mean by America.

Government represents and expresses the will and sentiment of the nation. (To be sure, a nationalist can think that the people have erred in picking their “leaders,” in which case the nation is misrepresented and has to be “taken back.”) The power of compartmentalization allows some people who think of themselves as individualists while  seeing the nation in these corporate terms.

Let’s remember that this quasi-mystical entity is what it is only because of countless contingent events effected by flawed human beings. The United States did not begin with 50 states, of course. Had events gone differently, it might have included some or all of Canada and none of what was once part of Mexico. It might have been without the Florida territory and the 828,000 square miles that constituted the Louisiana Purchase. The current boundaries were the result of (often bloody) human action but not entirely of human design. So it was with other nations. At one time, there were no nations as we think of them today.

“Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation,” Ernest Renan said in his famous 1882 lecture, “What Is a Nation?,” “which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations…. Unity is always effected by means of brutality.” (Ludwig von Mises praised Renan and his lecture in Omnipotent Government.)

This integral relationship between nation and state is why nationalists reject claims that one can love one’s country while despising the government. That’s impossible by their definition of country. To oppose the government is to oppose the country. You may oppose a particular president, but don’t dare oppose the military. Now, you can try to redefine country to make it something properly lovable, but you won’t persuade a nationalist.

It’s no accident that governments never fail to call on their flocks to “love their country,” by which they mean: be willing to make any sacrifice on its behalf, with “sacrifice” defined by politicians. Instilling nationalism is always the primary mission of government and its schools because, as Ernst Gellner wrote in Nations and Nationalism, “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”

That mission is behind the near-compulsory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance (written by an avowed collectivist), salutes to “the troops” for “their service” on any and every occasion, and the playing of the national anthem and other nationalist songs at sporting events. It’s what’s behind the repeated, compulsive assurances that “America is the greatest country on earth.” The ruling elite understands that love of country will inevitably find its application in fealty to the government, no matter what dissenters may say.

Some of us wish to distinguish nationalism from patriotism, but I don’t think this works. Patriot has a lineage that includes the Greek words for “fatherland,” patris; “of one’s fathers,” patrios; and “father,” pater. This indicates the country’s parental relationship to the citizen. It can’t simply mean “land of one’s fathers” because people believe they should feel patriotic about lands their fathers never set foot in. We’re back to that quasi-mystical entity, America. Hence my definition ofpatriot: one who, no matter the difficulties, places power above party.

I understand the love of the place one knew as a child. I understand the love of home, of family, of community, of neighbors, and of people with whom one has shared experiences and beliefs. I understand the love of virtuous principles as expressed in historical documents (such as the Declaration of Independence). That kind of love does not ignite hate for the Other or create admiration for the warrior who enjoys killing the Other on order. That takes the poison of nationalism and an obsession with the nation it creates.

The prospect of compulsory vaccination (“Should Obama make vaccines mandatory for all children,” Dr. Manny Alvarez, Fox News, January 30) should trouble even those who think the practice can be defended in principle as a kind of self-defense.

The burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the 1960s emphasized a theme with a prominent American pedigree, powerfully expressed by John Locke, who helped to inspire the Declaration of Independence: The right to own your own body is the most basic of all rights. Proponents of voluntary vaccination stress this right.

Critics argue that, if we can use force to stop a knife-wielding thug, we can use force to stop someone from infecting others, even unintentionally. But at least one cluster of difficulties ought to concern even those who think this argument works (there isn’t space here to talk about why it might not): The negative consequences of a forcible vaccination program would be serious and far-reaching.

Proponents of compulsory vaccination want the government to vaccinate their neighbors. Implementing a large-scale state program of mandatory vaccination would dramatically increase the level of government intrusion in people’s lives.

Like the “war on drugs,” such a program would feature incentives for extensive government monitoring. Pediatricians would confront new reporting requirements. Home-schooling parents would be assessed for compliance. New levels of intrusion would spawn new secondary crimes, as people were punished not only for failing to comply with vaccination mandates but also for failing to provide information needed to implement these mandates. Government agencies would demand new surveillance powers and technologies. Those with state power would find it hard to resist the temptation to seek more power and more budget dollars.

At the same time, mandatory vaccination would create new incentives for what economists call “rent-seeking.” Well-connected businesses would welcome opportunities to boost their profits at the public’s expense. Those that manufacture vaccines, often worried by anticipated profit declines as drug patents expire, would doubtless find reason to lobby — in the public interest, of course — for mandates that would dramatically increase their captive markets. (The Affordable Care Act already requires insurers to provide vaccines at low costs.) More and more illnesses could be expected to be added to the list of those met with compulsory vaccination — enabling these markets to expand without reference to consumer demand. Makers of monitoring technology would surely find multiple opportunities to encourage legislators to boost government contracting opportunities.

Any appeal to “save our children” is likely to be met with hysterical enthusiasm. So the vaccine manufacturers will continue to be protected against liability, as they are now, by federal law. (Taxpayers are on the hook for some injuries in virtue of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Not only does this unfairly burden people who aren’t responsible for making or marketing unsafe products, but it reduces the incentive for manufacturers to concern themselves with safety.)

While federal regulation of mandatory vaccines might reduce some dangers, manufacturers’ incentives to keep risks at appropriate levels would be dampened by “regulatory capture.” Those who regulate key industries are usually drawn from those industries’ top executives. And even when regulators come from outside, regulatory agencies typically depend on the regulated industries for information about products, standards of care, and so forth. The kind of regulation we could expect doesn’t inspire confidence, especially where population-wide mandates are concerned.

We could be confident, for instance, that pre-release safety review of vaccines, like those of drugs, would continue to be designed to satisfy regulators rather than to survive exposure during litigation. And where there are billions of dollars to be made, out-and-out fraud is hardly unlikely.

Government bureaucracies predictably seek to expand their own power. Business-government partnerships work to enrich well-connected businesses and their politician allies at the public expense. A mandatory vaccination program could be expected to increase government power and force ordinary people to pay more to influential corporations.

Let’s stick with freedom.