For the last twelve years, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has publicly recounted the story of a harrowing 2003 helicopter flight in Iraq. Covering the war on the first day of the American invasion, Williams traveled with the US Army’s 159th Aviation Regiment. According to Williams, an Iraqi RPG struck his helicopter, forcing it to make a dangerous emergency landing. Williams has told his story of what it feels like to come under enemy assault and to fear possible death in multiple venues. Unfortunately, that story is factually incorrect.

It’s true Williams was aboard an Army helicopter on that first day of the American invasion, just not the one that took RPG fire. After apologizing for “misremembering” the incident, Williams admitted that while he was part of a four-part helicopter unit, one of which took Iraqi fire, his wasn’t the one that took a direct hit. His was behind the one hit. As the story evolves, other Army personnel have said that Williams was in an entirely separate helicopter unit traveling in the other direction. The pilot of Williams’s helicopter has said it did take fire, but only from Iraqi AK-47s. With the details still being sorted out, one thing is clear — Brian Williams is undeserving of the public valor heaped upon him for his supposed war heroics.

The problem with labeling Brian Williams, or any other journalist or soldier who comes under attack during war a hero, is that it glamorizes war’s senseless violence. War between feuding governments is insidious and deserving only of scorn. Invading forces attacked during a war as mad as George W. Bush’s Iraqi excursion are no more deserving of the gallantry attributed to them than the loser of a drunken barroom brawl.  Here in America, unfortunately, we live in a perverted reality tunnel within which this senseless violence must be celebrated at all costs, regardless of your views of the war itself. Bravery, courage, and honor still manage to apply to those who willingly involve themselves in even the dumbest and bloodiest of wars. Injured soldiers and war correspondents receive parades, medals, and endless public praise, no matter the circumstances that led to their injuries.

American war culture is a sickness. By making heroes of those who come under return fire during war, we ignore the incredible destruction they bring about in their mission. Ron Paul got into hot water in the wake of Chris Kyle’s death when he tweeted about Kyle that “those who live by the sword die by the sword.” It’s a saying all the more applicable to active duty troops. For one should hardly expect anything less than serious injury or death when he or she ventures out to deliver the same fate to a foreign people.

By celebrating the violent acts of individuals who carry out war, even where the war itself is almost wholly lacking in public support, the American public reveal themselves as pawns of the warmongers. Backlash against warmongers becomes difficult where the warmonger can deflect all criticism as “hurting the troops.” Let’s face it: There’s nothing inherently good about traveling abroad to kill people for your government. Remove this trump card from the politicians’ pockets and they’ll have a much tougher sell the next time they decide to engage in global terror.

Aproximadamente a las 17:00 Hora Estándar del Centro de Estados Unidos del 22 de enero de 2015, Brad Spangler confesó en un post de Facebook haber abusado sexualmente de un niño en el año 2004 y expresó su intención de entregarse a la policía. Spangler no ha publicado, ni hasta donde sabemos, comunicado nada más respecto al hecho en el tiempo transcurrido desde entonces. Tampoco ha surgido ninguna evidencia o circunstancia que sugiera que su confesión sea falsa, fingida o forzada.

El Centro para una Sociedad sin Estado (C4SS) considera que los actos monstruosos de Spangler y la forma en que los admitió son absolutamente abominables y totalmente contrarios a los valores pomovidos por C4SS.

No hay absolutamente ninguna manera de eludir un hecho evidente: Spangler es cofundador de C4SS. Jugó un papel clave en la construcción de su infraestructura. Pero no ha sido parte de C4SS desde hace mucho tiempo, ni públicamente ni tras bastidores. Su biografía en nuestro sitio web le atribuía erróneamente el título de Asociado Senior hasta ayer; esa descripción debería haber sido modificada hace mucho tiempo en honor de la exactitud. Debido a este descuido, C4SS está trabajando en la aprobación de una propuesta para identificar y remover a los asociados que han “abandonado” a C4SS por su falta de comunicación o participación.

C4SS ha cambiado sustancialmente en los últimos años a medida que hemos crecido y Spangler no nos representa. En lugar de continuar albergando los escritos de un abusador de menores, y para dejar clara nuestra tajante desvinculación, hemos eliminado de nuestro sitio el historial de sus publicaciones. Pero tampoco es nuestra intención tirar por el “agujero del olvido” el desafortunado legado de Spangler, por lo que archivaremos el historial de su contenido en otro sitio, el Spangler Pensieve.

La admisión de Spangler fue un duro golpe para nosotros, pero cualquier malestar que pueda sufrir nuestra organización en los próximos meses no es nada en comparación con el dolor que ha sufrido durante una década la víctima de las acciones de Spangler, ni con el dolor que la víctima seguramente se vea forzada a revivir como resultado del egoísmo de este último. La víctima merece la oportunidad de sanar. Respetaremos el espacio de la víctima y ofrecemos nuestra ayuda en caso de que alguna vez se necesite o desee. Para favorecer este fin, C4SS donará US$200 de nuestro Fondo Empresarial Anticapitalista a generationFive. [G]enerationFive “trabaja para interrumpir y reparar el impacto intergeneracional del abuso sexual infantil en los individuos, familias y comunidades. Somos de la convicción de que el que la comunidad se involucre significativamente en estos temas es la clave para una prevención eficaz”.

Nos gustaría cerrar con algunas citas de Por qué los misóginos son tan buenos informantes: Cómo la violencia de género en la izquierda facilita la violencia estatal en los movimientos radicales:

Una y otra vez, los hombres heterosexuales en los movimientos radicales han sido autorizados a hacer valer su privilegio y subordinar a otros. A pesar de todo lo que decimos en sentido contrario, el hecho es que los movimientos sociales y organizaciones radicales en los Estados Unidos se han negado a abordar seriamente la violencia de género [1] como amenaza para la supervivencia de nuestras luchas. Hemos tratado a la misoginia, la homofobia y el heterosexismo como males menores, como temas secundarios que finalmente se harán cargo de sí mismos o se desvanecerán en el trasfondo una vez se resuelvan los problemas “reales” del racismo, la policía, la desigualdad de clases y las guerras de agresión lanzadas por Estados Unidos. Elegir la ignorancia conlleva graves consecuencias. La misoginia y la homofobia son fundamentales para la reproducción de la violencia en las comunidades de activistas radicales. Escarba en la superficie de un misógino y encontrarás un homófobo. Escarba un poco más profundo y puede que encuentres los ingredientes de un futuro informante (o alguien que se dedica a desestabilizar movimientos tal como lo hacen los informantes). …

Aunque la violencia de género por parte de la izquierda me causa mucha rabia, mantengo la esperanza. Creo que tenemos la capacidad de cambiar e implementar la justicia en nuestros movimientos. No tenemos que lanzar cacerías de brujas para delatar a misóginos e informantes. Ellos se delatan por sí mismos cada vez que se niegan a pedir disculpas, a responsabilizarse por sus acciones, cada vez que comienzan conflictos y se niegan a resolverlos a través del consenso y cada vez que maltratan a su compañer@s. No tenemos que buscarlos, pero cuando nos encontramos con sus comportamientos destructivos tenemos que hacerlos responsables. Nuestras estrategias no tienen que ser punitivas; las personas tienen derecho a sus errores. Pero debemos esperar que la gente se haga cargo de esas acciones y no permitir que se conviertan en un patrón.

Tenemos derecho a enfadarnos cuando las comunidades que construimos y que se supone son el modelo para un mundo mejor y más justo albergan los mismos tipos de violencia que predominan en la sociedad como el racismo y la discriminación contra aquellos que tienen estilos de vida alternativos y las mujeres. Como organizadores radicales, debemos exigirnos mutuamente una rendición de cuentas y no facilitar que los misóginos ejerzan tanto poder en estos espacios. No permitamos que sean los rostros, voces y líderes de estos movimientos. No permitiamos que violen a una compañera y luego aparezcan en el jodido noticiero de las cinco. […] Al no permitir que la misoginia eche raíces en nuestras comunidades y movimientos no solo nos protegemos de los esfuerzos del Estado para destruir nuestro trabajo, sino que también creamos movimientos más fuertes que no pueden ser destruidos desde dentro.

[1] Uso el término violencia de género para referirme a las formas en que la homofobia y la misoginia están enraizadas en comprensiones heteronormativas de la identidad de género y de los roles de género. El heterosexismo no sólo ejerce un rol de policía sobre las sexualidades no normativas, sino que también reproduce los roles de género y las identidades normativas que refuerzan la lógica del patriarcado y el privilegio masculino.

Entrada de blog original publicada por C4SS el 24 de enero de 2015.

Traducido del inglés por Carlos Clemente.

On February 6, an exceptional documentary about the unacknowledged whistleblowing group The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, 1971, previously only screened at festivals, is beginning a limited theatrical run at New York City’s Cinema Village. As of this writing, there are limited engagements planned in Santa Fe, Portland (Oregon), Los Angeles, Bellingham, Columbus, and internationally in Toronto, Canada.

Structured and paced like a heist film (which in a sense it is), the documentary is as laser-focused and as unencumbered by unnecessary clutter as the action it chronicles.

The Commission, despite its imposing sesquipedalian title, was in fact a tiny group of a mere eight people. Yet they were able to pull off a carefully targeted plan that produced a significant dent in the national security state.

Determined to uncover the FBI’s own documentation of its abuses of power, they found out that many perfunctorily guarded local branch offices kept full copies of many of their secret files — including in nearby Media, Pennsylvania. They planned to break in to the office after hours, obtain the documents, and get copies of material self-incriminating of FBI crimes and dirty tricks to the press.

And they did.

This exposure preceded that of the Pentagon Papers (and the filming itself antedated Snowden’s NSA revelations), blew the cover of COINTELPRO, and led directly to limits on the scope of domestic surveillance unequaled before or since.

So determined and trustworthy were the Commissioners that not only did they avoid capture, but their identities remained completely secret until survivors came forward in 2013. But apart from maturity and self-control, it’s striking how ordinary they were.

In moving, in their words, “from nonviolent protest to nonviolent disruption,” the Commissioners exemplify the strategy Howard Zinn called non-violent direct action — a “technique which is more energetic than parliamentary reform and yet not subject to the dangers which war and revolution pose in the atomic age.”

And while the operation paralleled the FBI’s need for secrecy, it benefited from being suited to the small-scale local operation that was the FBI’s Achilles heel. Indeed, since decentralization multiplies points of vulnerability, it being a weakness for an organization is itself a weakness many times over. And this becomes ever more so in a network age. Eric Frank Russell pointed out that the ideal spy would be as much an ignoramus as possibly consistent with doing the job; this is an ever-harder balance to maintain in a knowledge society.

Creating an engaging story about a long-gone event lacking direct documentation is always a formidable challenge for a documentarian. It’s even more so for a historical period that, conversely, is so media-saturated that its images are as cliché as they come. But the blend of new interviews with decades-old historical footage may be the best since the 1970s documentary The Wobblies tracked down elderly veterans from the One Big Union’s heyday almost three-quarters of a century before. And the re-enactments channel the spirit of the young conspirators, with an attention to detail that satisfies on a heist-movie level while showing the effectiveness of micro-organization.

With a common focus on FBI abuses, 1971 serves well as a companion piece to Selma. Indeed, the FBI’s intimidation of Martin Luther King, Jr. — down to attempts to induce him to commit suicide — are covered.  LBJ’s cronies have made desperate efforts to leverage the dramatic licenses of Selma to discredit its devastating portrait (while not seeing any shame in taking the side that lost the battle for history). 1971 shows that no dramatic license is necessary. (And that’s not even getting into the Bureau’s origins in the original post-Russian Revolution Red Scare of the 1920s. It was always primarily about cracking down on domestic radicalism, not the interstate crime that was the purported rationale.)

If it’s hard to watch without wondering why the FBI hasn’t been shut down, it’s even harder to realize that almost all of the restrictions the aftermath of the Commission placed on the FBI have been subsequently rolled back since 9/11.

Significantly, the film mentions how the surveillance also covered far-right groups as well as far-left ones, so that it was a brown scare as well as a red scare.  The United States’s polarized politics has been a boon to the domestic security apparatus, with partisans only complaining when their opponents are in office.  Republicans who complained about Waco and Ruby Ridge during Bill Clinton’s administration fell silent when George W. Bush replaced Clinton; Democrats did the same for the post-9/11 surveillance state when Bush yielded to Obama. (The cycle will invariably turn again when a Republican reclaims the Oval Office.)  Many of the same baby boomers who lionized Daniel Ellsberg learned to stop worrying when it came time to call for locking up Assange, Manning and Snowden (and seeing no irony in calling them — and sentencing them as — worse criminals than the alphabet-soup-agency criminals they exposed).  Frank Rich called Charles and David Koch’s opposition to the FBI “to the right of Reagan.”

But the culture outside that blinkered realm is a different story. 1971 points out that the straightforwardly law-and-order television series The F.B.I. was a mainstream hit for a decade (with most of that span being in “the Sixties” — it was the Seventies that really put an end to the Fifties). By the Nineties, even shows about FBI agents with cool government jobs were suffused with suspicion of the government’s motives, and it’s only snowballed since then. (Even one of the participants laments “the destruction of public belief in government” the Commission played a role in instigating.)

The title “1971” is itself a reminder to not dismiss a decade usually considered, in the words of The New Yorker’s George Packer, “a long and often embarrassing anticlimax — a shapeless, burned-out interregnum between the high dramas of the sixties and the bright, hard edges of the Reagan era.” While not fitting into a narrative of political partisanship and mass movements, the tactics of the 1970s were superior to the overrated Sixties (whose most detrimental aspects are the most imitated — the immaturity, the preaching to the choir, the concern with sheer size of mass movements). And as an operation that hinged on lockpicking before locks went virtual indicates, the techniques of the decade that foresaw computer liberation and space colonies are more relevant to a post-industrial age. The very titles of books of the 1970s — Neighborhood Power, Free Schools, Community Technology — reads like a list of roads not taken that are worth a second look.

There’s no better place to begin such a second look than this film.

It’s frustrating to hear US president Barack Obama receive kudos from the beer community simply because of his fondness for the beverage. Between his 2009 Beer Summit, his occasional beer in public, and his recent quip that he’s the first president to brew beer at the White House since George Washington, Obama has successfully cultivated a faux-cool image using beer as a prop.

A bit of advice to Obama: If you really want to be a hero to the beer community, use your platform to remedy the government-caused shortage of beer variety. Use your office to shine a light on how government regulation of alcohol restricts consumer choice and drives up the price of beer. And for God’s sake, stop drinking Bud Light!

After the 21st Amendment ended Prohibition, regulation of alcohol was left to the states. Currently, every state except Washington uses the “three-tier system.” Like all other government regulation, it is convoluted, harmful to consumers, and propped up by large corporate interests, all in the name of public safety and order. The three-tier system mandates that manufacture and sale of alcohol flow through a specific chain of production. Producers sell to distributors who in turn sell to retailers. You, the consumer, may only purchase alcohol from retailers.

Though minor deviations from the strict system (such as permitting breweries to create and sell beer on-site) are occasionally allowed, it remains largely intact today nationwide. Try to brew your own beer and sell it at a local farmer’s market and you’ll learn firsthand about the three-tier system, and a host of other government licensing and permitting laws you’ve also broken.

Proponents of the system claim that these controls over manufacture and sale of alcohol prevent substance abuse and promote accountability among producers and consumers alike. Perhaps the most ridiculous argument of all: Three-tier’s supporters warn that large manufacturers might obtain monopolies in less-regulated marketplaces. Like other paternalistic government rubbish, this assumption sees consumers as dupes, incapable of developing their own tastes for small, local craft products. The Anheuser-Busch store that would inevitably appear on every street corner would be too overwhelming for beer drinkers to resist.

To the contrary, the three-tier system has itself created virtual monopolies whereby small manufacturers are denied entry into marketplaces by large manufacturers who can afford to buy exclusive deals with distributors and retailers. Because small producers are forbidden to retail their own products, they are de facto barred unless they can “pay to play.”

This sad and infuriating story is detailed in the 2009 documentary Beer Wars, which points out that voters are hard pressed to find a single state, local or federal political officeholder who does not receive contributions from the Big Beer lobby. While Beer Wars doesn’t provide much hope for legislative change, it does encourage beer enthusiasts to avoid supporting the beer industry’s Big Three (Busch, MillerCoors, and InBev — now, due to mergers and acquisitions, the Big Two, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller) in favor of small local brewers. And there is some indication that the Big Two’s profits are declining.

The Big Two’s support for an inefficient and costly three-tier regime is reminiscent of another rotten government-business partnership: Philip Morris’s and R.J. Reynolds’s support for a mandatory, industry-wide excise tax on cigarettes as a means to squelch their smaller competitors. As detailed by Timothy Carney in The Big Ripoff, large tobacco companies ended up partnering with state attorneys general after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. Each realized that its own financial well-being depended on the others’. The excise tax became so beneficial to states that anything harmful to the big tobacco companies jeopardized the state’s coffers. An expansion of the excise tax to ensnare smaller tobacco companies not involved in previous litigation logically followed, at the behest of the larger companies. Yet another example of government and big business feeding off one another at the expense of consumers.

The way government alcohol regulation has played out over time, one wonders how heavily bureaucratized marijuana will become once pot prohibition has finally seen its end. Maybe black market pot, with all its risks, is actually preferable.

Planos para uma nova sociedade parecem ser bastante populares entre anarquistas de todos os matizes. Na direita, temos o modelo de Murray Rothbard, que enxergava uma sociedade inteira baseada em seu “código legal libertário” deduzido de princípios como a autopropriedade e a não-agressão. Dentro do movimento anarquista histórico de esquerda, temos modelos uniformes como o sindicalismo ou o comunismo kropotkiniano. A mesma tendência pode ser observada entre modelos socialistas libertários semianarquistas como o deleonismo e o Movimento Socialista Mundial; este último pretende criar uma sociedade comunista persuadindo todos os países do mundo a votarem em seu modelo preciso de organização social através do processo político em um período muito curto de tempo. Como se tudo isso não fosse o bastante, temos a Parecon.

A posição “anarquista sem adjetivos” foi uma reação a essa construção doutrinária de modelos e aos conflitos resultantes entre os proponentes de várias receitas totalizantes para a sociedade — notoriamente, tratou-se de uma reação ao conflito no final do século 19 entre individualistas, representados por Benjamin Tucker, e comunistas, encabeçados por Johann Most. O termo, porém, havia sido usado pela primeira vez por dois anarquistas espanhóis, Ricard Mella e Fernando Terrida del Marmol (que Voltairine de Cleyre conheceu em Londres em 1897). Errico Malatesta e Max Nettlau adotaram a posição e de Cleyre e Dyer Lum se tornaram seus mais importantes defensores nos Estados Unidos. A ideia básica era que os anarquistas deveriam parar de criar rixas sobre modelos específicos da sociedade anarquista futura e deixar para as pessoas desenvolverem esses sistemas como acharem melhor. Ideias econômicas como o mutualismo de Proudhon, a livre iniciativa de Tucker e o comunismo de Kropotkin eram complementares e, numa sociedade pós-estatal, cem flores desabrochariam de um local, de um agrupamento social, para outro.

David Graeber já defendeu algo parecido. Ele expressa ceticismo de que algo como o anarcocapitalismo pudesse existir por muito tempo em uma escala significativa, num ambiente em que um grande número de pessoas estaria disposto a se submeter ao trabalho assalariado a serviço de uma minoria, dado que o acesso aos meios de produção seja relativamente fa´cil e não haja policiais para excluir as pessoas das terras vagas. Afinal, o relacionamento de “mestre” de Robinson Crusoé sobre Sexta-Feira dependia do fato de que ele já tinha “se apropriado” de toda a ilha e de que possuía uma arma. Mas contanto que os arranjos econômicos sejam negociados entre iguais, e ninguém esteja em posição de submeter os outros a sua vontade através das armas, Graeber está contente em esperar para ver.

Então, o que poderíamos dizer sobre uma sociedade sem estado em linhas gerais? Primeiro, ela emergirá a partir da paulatina exaustão, do abandono e do recuo de grandes instituições hierárquicas como o estado, as corporações, as universidades burocráticas, etc. A sociedade se baseará geralmente em certo tipo de horizontalismo (prefigurado por movimentos como a Primavera Árabe, o M15 e o Occupy) em conjunção com instituições locais autogeridas. Segundo, seus elementos básicos serão as contrainstituições a surgir em todos os lugares para assumir as responsabilidades deixadas pelo estado e pelas corporações. Jardins comunitários, permacultura, ocupações, hackerspaces, sistemas monetários alternativos, produção comunitária nos commons, a economia do compartilhamento e todas as outras formas de organização social baseadas na cooperação voluntária e em novas tecnologias ultraeficientes para a produção em pequena escala. E terceiro, se a sociedade passar a refletir qualquer ideologia comum, ela refletirá valores como autonomia pessoal, liberdade, cooperação e solidariedade social. Mas os pontos específicos serão resolvidos de milhares de maneiras diferentes, diversas demais para serem englobadas por modelos verbais como “comunismo” ou “mercados” (entendido como o nexo monetário).

Eu espero que exista uma grande variação entre instituições de pequena escala, tanto dentro quanto entre comunidades: coletivos de trabalhadores, empresas, cooperativas, redes p2p, etc. Unidades sociais multifamiliares como ocupações, projetos de coabitação e complexos de famílias estendidas podem implementar um comunismo autárquico internamente e desfrutar de máquinas para produção em pequena escala para atender à maioria de suas necessidades através da produção direta, obtendo o resto através de trocas no mercado. Regras de posse e apropriação de terras e empresas variarão de uma comunidade para a outra.

Mesmo que partamos de algumas premissas básicas — como um entendimento mais amplo do princípio de autopropriedade e não-agressão (não que a maioria do movimento anarquista venha de uma tradição filosófica que dê muito peso a essas palavras) –, isso significa muito pouco em termos de regras práticas a serem deduzidas. Não há nenhuma maneira, a partir de axiomas básicos como a autopropriedade e a não-agressão, para deduzir quaisquer regras particulares que sejam óbvias e necessárias para questões como (por exemplo) meu direito de intervir para impedir que um animal seja torturado por seu “dono” ou quais regras específicas devem valer no caso de ocupantes e no abandono de propriedades.

Até a definição do que caracteriza agressão contra um indivíduo é, em grande medida, definida culturalmente. O ambiente afeta o corpo físico de milhões de maneiras diferentes e a fronteira entre o que é considerado agressivo e o que não é (como fótons e ondas sonoras que afetam fisicamente os órgãos sensoriais e, subsequentemente, o sistema nervoso e o estado mental interno) é um tanto arbitrária. O mesmo varia no caso das definições cambiantes do que caracteriza uma pessoa e o que é o seu ambiente, e o quanto desse ambiente pode ser considerado parte da pessoa, uma extensão do eu ou uma envelope do “espaço pessoal”. Lembre-se de que as definições dentro do direito comum do que é agressão presumem esse envelope espacial e englobam ações que nem mesmo incluem tocar o corpo de outra pessoa.

Qualquer sociedade pós-estado incluirá indivíduos e comunidades que assumam várias ideias conflitantes sobre o que são “liberdade”, “autonomia” e “direitos”. Os “códigos legais” que venham a surgir não serão deduções lógicas óbvias de axiomas, mas interações constantes entre indivíduos e grupos que afirmam seus entendimentos diferentes do que direitos e liberdade significam. E esses entendimentos surgirão após a ocorrência de conflitos, através da negociação prática dentro dos órgãos de mediação e adjudicação dentro das comunidades.

Em outras palavras, precisamos passar menos tempo como Thomas More, fazendo planos sobre todos os detalhes da utopia, ao ponto de prescrever qual será sua comida e arquitetura, e passar mais tempo conversando com nossos vizinhos e criando maneiras de cooperar e nos relacionar sem que o estado nos diga o que fazer.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Today, American politicians of both major parties — conservatives, “moderates,” and so-called liberals alike — insist that the United States is an “exceptional,” even “indispensable” nation. In practice, this means that for the United States alone the rules are different. Particularly in international affairs, it — the government and its personnel — can do whatever deemed necessary to carry out its objectives, including things that would get any other government or person branded a criminal.

This is nothing new. “American exceptionalism” goes back to the founding. When American politicians set their sights on Spain’s North American possessions, they were driven by the same attitude. In their view the new “Empire of Liberty,” as Jefferson called it, was destined to replace the old, worn-out empires of Europe in its hemisphere. They had no doubt that the Old World’s colonial possessions would eventually fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, either formally or informally.

Acquisition through negotiation was preferred over war by a good number of presidents, secretaries of state, and members of Congress, but if war was necessary, they intended to be prepared and to let Spain and her fellow colonial powers know it. Thus the push for a global navy under James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before 1820. Manifest destiny! (Congress’s constitutional war power was a burr under the saddle for Adams and others, who thought war-making was properly an executive power.)

Today we see signs of the doctrine of American exceptionalism all around. U.S. foreign policy is not bound in the ways in which U.S. officials expect other countries’ foreign policies to be bound. America is special, chosen. So the rules are different.

We might say America has a James Bond complex. In the eyes of many Americans, the United States has a “Double O.” Bond said the Double O indicated “you’ve had to kill a chap in cold blood in the course of some assignment.” As Ian Fleming’s series went on, the Double O became a license to kill. Judging by how the U.S. government gets away with murder, terrorism and other horrible offenses, it apparently has a de facto license to kill. Although by the U.S. definition, nothing it does can ever qualify as murder and terrorism.

The signs can be perceived in Americans’ pronounced lack of interest in seeing the country’s governing elite held accountable for its aggressive wars, abuse of prisoners, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, sponsored genocide and occupation, and so on.

U.S. rulers have waged aggressive genocidal wars (against the Indians and Vietnamese, for example), have brutally put down colonial rebellions (against the Filipinos, for example), facilitated genocidal policies carried out by client dictators (in Indonesia, for example), underwritten repressive dictatorships and brutal occupations (in Egypt and Palestine, for example), and instigated in antidemocratic coups (in Iran and Chile, for example).

When has an American official been placed in the dock to answer for these crimes?

Instead, officials from whose hands the blood of countless innocents drips are treated like dignitaries, even royalty. When 91-year-old Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state who presided over the deaths of countless Vietnamese and others, appears anywhere, such as a Senate hearing, he’s accorded the reverence that parishioners pay to their priests — while peace activists, who want him held responsible, are called “low-life scum” by a fawning senator. When Madeleine Albright, a former UN ambassador and secretary of state, writes a new book, talk-show hosts climb over one another to interview her — never asking how she could have thought that killing half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s was an acceptable price for the Clinton administration’s attempt to drive Saddam Hussein from office.

Will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld face charges for their wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan? For their drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia? For their torture programs? Will Barack Obama ever have to defend himself against murder counts for his drone kills? Will former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bear consequences for the havoc she unleashed in Libya?

Of course not. The United States is the Double-O nation. Its rulers need not fear judgment. They have a license to kill.

On February 4, American media trumpeted the expected, “dog bites man” headline: “Ross Ulbricht Convicted” of being Dread Pirate Roberts, operator of the online Silk Road marketplace. Few expected an acquittal. From the moment US Attorney Preet Bharara announced Ulbricht’s indictment on seven charges, ranging from “money laundering” to “drug trafficking,” the prosecution ran on rails.

A compliant judge rejected  defense motions to exclude illegally obtained evidence, as well as denying bail for Ulbricht based on “murder for hire” charges publicized just long enough to poison the jury pool before being quietly withdrawn. Then came  a show trial typical of the current US “justice” system, its verdict known beyond reasonable doubt well in advance of opening arguments. Ulbricht faces 30 years to life in prison on charges that amount to “doing business without Preet Bharara’s permission.”

The pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts” is drawn from the popular 1987 film The Princess Bride. Wikipedia summarizes the character as “not one man, but a series of individuals who periodically pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor. … the method works because Roberts'[s] notorious reputation inspires overwhelming fear in sailors. Ships immediately capitulate and surrender their wealth rather than be captured, a fate they imagine to be certain death.”

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Ulbricht was, indeed, the operator of Silk Road as of his arrest. Who sounds more like Dread Pirate Roberts: The operator of a business connecting willing sellers with willing buyers, or the US Attorney who caged him and whose co-conspirators in the US Marshals Service auctioned off Bitcoin — tens of millions of dollars worth — stolen from Silk Road’s accounts?

“This case is about a dark and secret part of the Internet,” said Bharara crewman (sorry, “Assistant US Attorney”) Timothy T. Howard in opening arguments. Well, no. It’s about money, power and control. Striking fear into the hearts of vulnerable merchantmen. Preserving reputation as the biggest, baddest band of buccaneers on the Spanish — Spanish Harlem, anyway — Main.

The Silk Road abduction/heist scheme is no one-off thing. It’s part of what prosecutors would call, if they had Preet Bharara in the dock, a “pattern of serious criminal misconduct.” As one example of his racketeering record, let us remember the 2011  caper in which Bharara’s corsairs took down several internationally based online poker sites, indicting their operators for offering online gambling to willing US customers. The extortion payoff … excuse me, “settlement” … from one site and operator alone (Gibraltar-based Party Poker and co-owner Anurag Dikshit) came to more than $400 million. As such things go, the mafia’s “Five Families” pale next to Bharara’s operation.

Unfortunately, the mafia analogy isn’t trite and frankly supersedes the Dread Pirate Roberts comparison. The fictional Roberts and his crew ran as a self-contained operation. Bharara ranks, at best, as capofamiglia or sotto capo (family boss or sub-boss) in the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organized crime ring in human history: The US government, which rakes in trillions of dollars every year on its various rackets.

If there’s a weakness in the analogy, it’s that capo di tutti capi Salvatore Maranzano didn’t, for the most part, try to tell his victims how to run their lives or convince them that he was shaking them down for their own good.

Dos 14 textos que publicamos em janeiro em português, 4 deles foram originais — dois escritos por mim e dois por Valdenor Júnior. Minha coluna falando da hipocrisia política após o ataque contra o jornal Charlie Hebdo foi a mais republicada durante o mês (10). Republicamos também a resenha de um livro muito interessante feita por Anthony Ling de Um país chamado favela, traduzindo-a também para o inglês.

Os números de janeiro foram os seguintes:

• 14 textos publicados em português
• 9114 envios para sites e jornais
• 43 republicações
• 3999 curtidas no Facebook (+381)
• 106 seguidores no Twitter (+4)
• 14 seguidores no Tumblr (+14)

Neste momento, precisamos muito de sua ajuda para continuar atuando no Brasil e em outros países de língua portuguesa. Sua doação é o que mantém o C4SS em funcionamento. Portanto, se puder, doe R$ 10 mensalmente e dê suporte ao nosso trabalho!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: January 2015

Out of the 14 articles we published in January in Portuguese, 4 of them were originals — two mine, two written by Valdenor Júnior. The article that was picked up the most (10) was my own column on the political reactions to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. We also republished a very fine review by Anthony Ling of the book Um país chamado favela (“A Country Called Favela”), which I translated into English.

January numbers our Portuguese embassy were as follows:

• 14 articles published
• 9114 submissions
• 43 pick-ups
• 3999 likes on Facebook (+381)
• 106 followers on Twitter (+4)
• 14 followers on Tumblr (+14)

At this moment, we really need your help to continue our actions in Brazil and in other Portuguese-speaking countries. Your donation is what makes C4SS possible. So, please do make a recurring $5 donation and support our work!

Erick Vasconcelos
Portuguese Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

My radio alarm woke me with a perky voice announcing “Northwest Arkansas! We’re all growing together as a region — and so is our newspaper!” I hear that tone of breathless enthusiasm a lot from local elites trying to secure public buy-in on actions they were never consulted on to begin with.

By way of background, there was never any “we” involved in the way Northwest Arkansas grew over the past twenty years. The internal policies of local governments are determined almost entirely by the chambers of commerce — by Jim Lindsey’s billion-dollar real estate empire, in particular. Virtually all decisions are rubber-stamped by local goverments and presented to the public afterwards. Take, for example, the decision to raise the sewer rates of existing residents to cover the increased costs for hooking up Jim Lindsey’s new housing additions, or to close old neighborhood schools and build new ones near said new subdivisions.

On a regional level, most policy initiatives originate in a nominally private body called the Northwest Arkansas Council, made up of civic minded folks like representatives from Walmart, Tyson, the Lindsey real estate empire, and ex officio representatives of city governments, the University and the main newspaper. The Northwest Arkansas Council’s policy proposals, purely by coincidence, tend to be major infrastructure projects like a regional airport and highway bypasses that mainly benefit the Council’s civic-minded members. The Council quietly lobbied for the airport, after which seven local governments quietly voted to create a Regional Airport Authority as an emergency measure without any public discussion.

As for “our newspaper,” the story goes back to the Arkansas Democrat (a second-rate paper run by cranky right-winger John Robert Starr) winning the Little Rock newspaper war and buying out the Arkansas Gazette (the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi). The newly christened “Arkansas Democrat-Gazette” started a special Northwest Arkansas edition. And after two decades of local newspaper wars and the disappearance/consolidation of local newspapers in seven Northwest Arkansas communities into one regional newspaper (the Morning News), the Demozette bought out the Morning News and brought the entire region under one big newspaper.

Note that all this was done without the slightest peep of actual input from the public — but the radio commercial described the process in language suggesting we’d all just raised a barn together or something.

This commercial, trivial as it may seem, is just one example of a much larger phenomenon: the manufacture of artificial loyalties to secure not only compliance with, but actual support for and identification with, institutions that are utterly unaccountable to us. Erich Fromm, in his Afterword to 1984, referred to such identification as “mobile truth.” Our culture inculcates identification with, and endorsement of the policies of, any organization to which we find ourselves subordinated at any particular time. Starting with “school spirit” in the elementary grades, we’re expected to support the local team, be “community spirited,” identify with the interests of the corporation that employs us — all the way up to supporting “our” government in whatever war “we” get into.

For its entire history until 2005, my town of Springdale had one high school. A week before classes started in the newly opened second school, I saw a car with a sticker celebrating its sports team. Think about it. This school hadn’t even held classes yet. It was just a newly constructed building. A bunch of middle-aged men in suits sat around a conference table deciding what to name it, what to call the sports team, what its mascot would be, what the slogans and cheers would be — and here was a family, presumably with a teenager already thinking of it as “our” school and “our” team.

I’ve hated the local university teams wherever I live — particularly the Arkansas Razorbacks, for whom I have a special hatred — precisely because their biggest boosters are the local Rotary Club yahoos who make all these decisions affecting my life. To me, the Razorbacks represent every institution for which I am expected to feel loyalty, despite its leadership being unaccountable to me and not giving a damn about my interests.

I experienced the same thing in every large institutional workplace where I ever punched a clock. I used to work at a VA hospital in Fayetteville. One spring the VA system was conducting an employee satisfaction survey. The management of the local hospital decided that “we” were in a friendly rivalry with Shreveport, along with us one of the two leading hospitals in the federal region with the highest completion rate. The director exhorted us on the intercom to take the survey ASAP so that “we” could beat Shreveport. I asked a coworker why the director thought I would remotely give a crap about the outcome of a rivalry between “our” management and that of another hospital, both of which were equally unaccountable to me. Her response: “Well, if you work for them you should care.” I think I can intellectually grasp her identification, but emotionally it was beyond my comprehension then and still is now.

As a species we spend most of our history until the Agricultural Revolution living in hunter-gatherer groups of a few dozen at most, and most of the time since then in villages ranging from that size up to a few hundred. That means, arguably, that we’re biologically wired to form loyalties to primary social groupings of that size, made up of people we regularly encounter in person, and governed by face-to-face decision-making on a comparatively egalitarian basis. We survived by cooperating with our neighbors in such social groupings on a day-to-day basis. Our loyalties to family, friends, neighbors, clan and village, and our affection for the land in which our dead are buried, are accordingly natural and healthy for the most part.

The rise of the first hierarchical state apparatuses, basically extractive machineries for enabling a superimposed ruling class to skim off the surplus from the villages, dates back maybe five thousand years. Large bureaucratic nation-states engaged in perpetual war are more recent still. The rise of a few hundred global corporations controlling an entire planetary economy dates back little more than a century.

In most of the developed world today, we’re born into class societies dominated by hierarchical institutions that exist for their own ends and use us as means to those ends. And one of the central functions in societies so organized is the cultural reproduction apparatus, which processes a population into human resources that view such institutions as natural, normal and inevitable, and the only viable way of doing things. This cultural reproduction apparatus takes our wired-in tendency to form loyalties to extended kindship groups and villages, and redirects them to identifying with institutions that are unaccountable to us and view us only as raw material.

In the most extreme form, this includes identifying with “our” nation-state and the claimed “national security” purposes of its military establishment, overseas empire and wars. But as Howard Zinn said, one of the most pernicious lies taught by the American establishment is the existence of some common “national interest” that unites everyone from the billionaire down to the homeless vagrant. The reproduction apparatus resorts to “enveloping phrases like ‘the national interest,’ ‘national security,’ ‘national defense,’ as if we’re all in the same boat.” “No, the soldier who is sent to Iraq does not have the same interests as the president who sends him to Iraq. The person who works on the assembly line at General Motors does not have the same interest as the CEO of General Motors.”

We’re sold lies about “our country” fighting wars to “defend our freedoms” or “defend the country,” when they’re really fought for things like keeping Guatemala safe for United Fruit Company, or auctioning off the Iraqi economy to global corporations. We’re given feelgood rhetoric by our employers about how we’re all just “one big team” — until the boys in the C-suite decide it’s time to downsize some of us and make the rest work harder, in order to give themselves a bonus.

It’s time to take back our loyalties from states, corporations, and all other unaccountable institutions that use us as raw material and cannon fodder, and take back control over our own lives as well. And it’s time to form real loyalties with our friends and neighbors, the people we voluntarily cooperate with as equals in building the kinds of lives and society we want for ourselves.

New corporate enclosures, looting and monopolies are springing up all over the place these days. Watching the news is a lot like watching Robocop or Blade Runner, what with stuff like Detroit’s “Emergency Manager” auctioning off local assets to corporate cronies the same way Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority did in Iraq. Given all that, it takes a lot to surprise me. I wasn’t expecting corporate capitalists to acquire a monopoly on dislike for the government though. Nevertheless that’s what scholar Andrew Hoberek suggests (Noah Berlatsky, “Watchmen and Neoliberalism: An Interview with Andrew Hoberek,” The Hooded Utilitarian, January 15).

Hoberek argues that comic artist Alan Moore, in Watchmen, was motivated by a distrust of institutions in general that was, more than anything else, in the ’60s anti-establishment spirit. That spirit was strong on much of the left back then, dating at least to the Port Huron Statement. But, Hoberek maintains, it has since “become totally the property of the neoliberal right.” His interviewer, Noah Berlatsky, remarks that general distrust of institutions “has gone from being a shared feature of both the left and the right in the cold war period to a hallmark of neoliberalism.”

Wow! I’m a left-winger and an anarchist, and I really distrust government as well as hierarchical institutions in general. I had no idea I’d signed over the rights to it. Maybe Hoberek and Berlatsky think the right acquired property in the “anti-government” label by adverse possession. But I’ve expressed such ideas pretty actively, on a continuous basis, for a long time, so I don’t think I could have relinquished them through constructive abandonment.

Further, Hoberek considers Obama’s alleged “dislike of organization” (huh? in what universe?) “problematic” because, although it has roots in his community organizing background, in the days since then “anti-government sentiment has become a major tool of those in power.”

The most important point Hoberek ignores is that neoliberals like Reagan and Thatcher don’t really dislike government, any more than bureaucratic oligarchs like Stalin really favored socialism (in the sense of genuine working class power and control of the means of production). In fact the activist state is central to the model of neoliberalism that Thatcher and Reagan promoted. Corporate capitalism depends heavily on the state to guarantee extractive industries’ access to oil and mineral resources overseas, to protect agribusiness interests’ control over stolen land, and to enforce “intellectual property” — the protectionist monopoly most central to corporate profits in this era. It depends on the state to subsidize its distribution costs and the processing of “human resources” to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and spend hundreds of billions more to employ idle industrial capacity or soak up surplus investment capital in the form of government debt. Reaganite capitalism arguably requires bigger government than even the New Deal model.

“Anti-government sentiment” may be a major propaganda tool of neoliberalism, to the extent that a major segment of the public takes it at face value and supports the neoliberal agenda under the misconception that they’re genuinely fighting to defend “free enterprise” and “get the government off our backs.” But the effectiveness of this ideological smokescreen depends heavily on critics of corporate capitalism buying in to the neoliberals’ professed “anti-government” pose.

Taking the “anti-government” label at face value is incredibly foolish from a strategic point of view. To repeat, the state is not only central to the survival of corporate power, but serving the interest of capitalist elites has been the main function of the American state — like all other states — since its beginning. Removing the state’s structural supports to corporate capitalism is the one thing capable of destroying it. So unilaterally depriving ourselves of opposition to the state, just because neoliberal capitalists have falsely appropriated the “anti-government” label for themselves, amounts to taking our enemy’s single greatest vulnerability off the table.

Letting your enemy define your conceptual categories for you is the same as losing the war before it’s ever been fought.

The Center for a Stateless Society would like to formally thank all of our supporters for their generous donations and staunch vocal backing over the last month or so. The Center has had a rough last few weeks but the future looks brighter than ever thanks to you.

The International Students For Liberty Conference is the world’s largest gathering of liberty minded people and for the first time in history the Center for a Stateless Society will be represented at the annual get together. Thanks to dozens of charitable and passionate donators, we were able to reach our Go Fund Me goal of $500 and afford a sponsorship at the ISFLC. This means there will be a C4SS table with all sorts of pamphlets, books, pins, and other goodies in the exhibit hall all weekend!

In addition, a C4SS social is being held on Saturday, to be determined, at Medaterra where over a 100 students are joining together for fun, friends, and free stuff! Every attendee will get a free pamphlet and free pin just for showing up. Furthermore, there will be a raffle to give away a copy of “Markets Not Capitalism” signed by one of its editors, Charles Johnson. Join the Facebook event for the social here! If you have any questions about the event, don’t hesitate to email cmassimino@studentsforliberty.org.

The left market anarchist presence at this year’s ISFLC will be bigger than ever and I can’t thank C4SS supporters enough. Y’all are truly the epitome of a community rooted in common understanding and mutual aid. The Center is unbelievably grateful for all your support, monetary or otherwise, and wants to give back! So join us at the International Students For Liberty Conference and make left libertarianism a force to be reckoned with! We already know the support is there – our existence and increased success is proof of it. Let’s show everyone else!

Sincerely and For Left Liberty,

Cory

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “Shutdown Theater (Off-Off Broadway Follies)” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

When even “progressive” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren threaten “shutdown” to get their way, it’s just too obvious that there’s no real shutdown in play. Per Chekhov, “[i]f you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” If Warren is willing to pull the trigger, we know that the gun isn’t really loaded.

Inside the Beltway, the big question — passed back and forth between cast, directors, producers, etc. — is never “should we stop doing what we’re doing?” That’s just not on the playbill, folks. The only question of importance to politicians is “how do we keep doing what we’re doing without losing the audience?”

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

Bitcoin tips welcome:

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On January 30, two-time Republican Party presidential hopeful Mitt Romney nixed a third go-around, telling supporters via teleconference that he can better serve America by supporting whomever the party chooses as its 2016 presidential nominee. Hallelujah. A third Romney candidacy would have been difficult to stomach. Romney had floated a trial balloon of making “helping the poor” a major campaign platform plank. Perhaps Republicans see the absurdity of a man with a car elevator in one of his many homes preaching to America that we need to help the poor. More likely Republicans aren’t interested in making this position a priority.

The old and tired Romney show handily symbolizes not just the Republican Party, but politics and government in general. They’re all characterized by the old, stale ideas that have failed us time and again. And yet, many strongly considered trying them once more. That seems to be the best we can do with government: Watch failed policies rebranded with new faces every few years, rinse and repeat. This is not to say that other Republican (or Democrat) candidates will offer something more fresh or innovative. They won’t. The lesson to be learned here is that politicians don’t offer real answers to social ills.

But let’s not dismiss all of the issues bandied about by politicians, least of all their calls to help the poor. Just because we cannot take politicians seriously in such matters does not mean that these matters are never real or pressing. Let us instead recognize that neither Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, nor any other government figurehead or committee, can serve as a savior who will eliminate the conditions that lead to poverty.

For those of us who seriously doubt the ability of government to help those in need, the answer is not to simply strip people of every last vestige of support the government currently provides, thereby teaching everybody to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Yet neither is the answer to provide more and more tax funding to such disastrous programs. To encourage people to continue counting on these bankrupt, unsustainable programs for their very survival is cruel. Further compounding that cruelty, such tax-funded failures create division and animosity between the “helper” and the “helped.”

The answer lies in the kind of social support network that many libertarians have been actively engaged in all the while as government continues its failed experiment. The libertarian’s method seeks to chip away at reliance on faceless bureaucrats for support, replacing them with localized, voluntary, and cooperative ventures and community organizing (not Barack Obama’s kind). Mutual understanding and respect between neighbors, being there for each other during tough times, makes for a more effective and genuine welfare system.

Forking over large portions of your paychecks to distant government agencies and expecting them to do the difficult work of shaping a vibrant community has not been and will never be successful. For those who believe this is mushy, pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, ask yourself: In a world of plentiful resources, do you truly desire to eliminate poverty? If so, will you continue counting on an ineffectual government to do the job, or will you help your neighbors the next time you see them in need? If you’re too busy to try, consider yourself part of the government catastrophe.

Schematic designs for a new society seem to be really popular among self-described anarchists of all stripes. On the Right, we have Rothbard’s model for an entire society modelled whole-cloth on a “libertarian law code” deduced from axioms like self-ownership and the non-aggression principle. Within the historic anarchist movement of the Left, we have uniform templates like syndicalism or Kropotkinist communism. And the same tendency can be found among quasi-anarchistic libertarian socialist models like De Leonism and the World Socialist Movement; the latter assumes the creation of a communist society by persuading all the countries in the world to vote in their precise model of social organization through the political process, within a short time frame. And if all this isn’t bad enough there’s Parecon, for god’s sake.

The “anarchism without adjectives” position was a reaction to this kind of doctrinaire model-building, and the resulting conflicts between the proponents of various totalizing blueprints for society — most notably the late-19th century conflict between individualists, represented by Benjamin Tucker, and communists, represented by Johann Most. Although the term was first used by a couple of Spanish anarchists, Ricardo Mella and Fernando Terrida del Marmol (whom Voltairine de Cleyre met in London in 1897). Errico Malatesta and Max Nettlau adopted the position, and de Cleyre and Dyer Lum became its most visible American proponents. The basic idea was that anarchists should stop feuding over the specific economic model of a future anarchist society, and leave that for people to work out for themselves as they saw fit. Economic ideas like Proudhon’s mutualism, Tucker’s individualist free enterprise and Kropotkin’s communism were complementary, and in a post-state society a hundred flowers would bloom from one locality, one social grouping, to the next.

David Graeber has argued for something like this. He expresses skepticism that anything like anarcho-capitalism could exist for very long on a significant scale, with a large number of people willingly working as wage laborers for a minority, so long as access to the means of production is relatively easy and there are no cops to exclude people from vacant land. After all, Robinson Crusoe’s “master” relationship over Friday depended on him having already “appropriated” the entire island and having a gun. But so long as economic arrangements are a matter of negotiation between equals, and nobody’s in a position to call in men with guns to enforce their will on others, he’s happy to just wait and see what happens.

So what can we say about the general outlines of a stateless society? First, it will emerge as a result of the ongoing exhaustion, hollowing out and retreat of large hierarchical institutions like state, corporation, large bureaucratic university, etc. It will generally be based on some kind of horizontalism (prefigured by movements like the Arab Spring, M15 and Occupy) combined with self-managed local institutions. Second, its building blocks will be the counter-institutions cropping up everywhere even now to fill the void left as state and corporation erode: Community gardens, permaculture, squats, hackerspaces, alternative currency systems, commons-based peer production, the sharing economy, and in general all forms of social organization based on voluntary cooperation and new ultra-efficient technologies of small-scale production. And third, to the extent that it reflects any common ideology at all, it will be an attachment to values like personal autonomy, freedom, cooperation and social solidarity. But the specifics will be worked out in a thousand particular ways, far too diverse to be encompassed by any verbal model like “communism” or “markets” (in the sense of the cash nexus).

I expect a wide variation in small-scale institutions, both within and between communities: workers’ collectives, business firms, cooperatives, p2p networks, etc. Multi-family social units like squats, cohousing projects and extended family compounds may take practice autarkic communism internally and take advantage of small-scale machinery to meet most of their needs through direct production, while obtaining the rest through exchange on the market. Property rules in land and enterprise ownership will vary from one community to the next.

Even if we stipulate starting from basic assumptions like the broadest understanding of self-ownership and the nonaggression principle (not that even a majority of the anarchist movement actually comes from the philosophical tradition which regards these as words to conjure with), that means very little in terms of the practical rules that can be deduced from them. There is simply no way, starting from basic axioms like self-ownership and nonaggression, to deduce any particular rules that are both obvious and necessary on issues like (for example) whether I have the right to intervene to stop an animal being tortured by its “owner,” or what the specific rules should be for squatters’ rights and constructive abandonment of a property long left idle.

Even the definition of physical aggression against an individual is, to a large extent, culturally defined. The surrounding environment impinges on the physical body in a million different ways, and the boundary between those that are considered aggressive and those not (like photons or sound waves that physically affect the sensory organs and subsequently the nervous system and internal mental state) is somewhat arbitrary. The same is true for varying cultural definitions of the boundary between person and environment, and how much of the surrounding physical environment not actually part of the human body can be regarded as an extension of the self or an envelope of “personal space.” Bear in mind that common law definitions of assault assume such a spatial envelope, and include actions short of physically touching another person’s body with one’s own.

Any post-state society will include both individuals and communities adhering to many conflicting ideas of just what “freedom,” “autonomy” and “rights” entail. Whatever “law code” communities operate by will be worked out, not as obvious logical deductions from axioms, but through constant interaction between individuals and groups asserting their different understandings of what rights and freedom entail. And it will be worked out after the fact of such conflicts, through the practical negotiations of the mediating and adjudicating bodies within communities.

In other words, we need to spend less time like Thomas More drafting out all the details of a future libertarian utopia, right down to the food and architecture, and spend more time talking to our neighbors and figuring out ways of cooperating and getting along without the state telling us what to do.

<< Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page

After years of subsidizing power consumption, something that curiously benefits capital-intensive manufacturing, Brazil’s government has decided to raise electrical bills by 30% in 2015. Indeed, 30% is Mines and Energy minister Eduardo Braga’s most optimistic projection. Hikes will more likely average 40%. Braga, however, as has become standard procedure for the Dilma administration, prefers to navigate through meaningless promises until reality catches up and the government narrative crumbles permanently.

The increases are already in the bills, signaled by so-called “flags” indicating extra costs for power generation in each region in Brazil. Large chunks of Brazilian territory are now “red flag” areas, which informs us that the power supply is being supplemented by thermal plants, whose higher costs require us to cough up more money.

Besides the price increases, Brazil now lives with frequent nationwide blackouts. It is as if we have gone back in time to 2001, when for an hour every day for several months power supply was cut. In 2005, then president Lula stated — in another of his megalomaniac speeches ridden with sentences claiming “never before in this country” — that Brazil would never suffer another blackout. His foresight did not extend even to the end of his own administration. In 2009, almost the whole country shut down and Lula stated that new power outages depended only on “God’s will.” Since then, God has apparently ordered several blackouts each year.

In 2015, the party in power, the Workers’ Party (PT), still thinks the divine will provide for everything, making it rain so that hydroelectric plants can generate power for the people. This is not surprising for a government whose minister of Science, Technology and Innovation believes that global warming is a tool used by imperialism to control the poor countries. For the current government, any intervention by man in nature seems mysterious and unpredictable in its consequences.

Brazil’s power crisis is compounded by a water supply crisis. The drought in Sao Paulo has already led to government rationing of water. What is curious, though, is that 70% of the water from the ever-drying reservoirs goes directly to heavily subsidized agriculture. And 22% of it goes straight to Sao Paulo’s heavily subsidized manufacturing sector. The remaining 8% goes to private homes, which are always the ones compelled to cut consumption.

Agriculture subsidies also have indirect effects on the water supply. Cultivation of cerrado (tropical savanna) lands that require intensive use of water, and the appropriation of Amazonian lands, limiting tree transpiration, also influence the Sao Paulo drought. Evidently, PT, which solidified its alliance with the agribusiness by appointing ruralist Katia Abreu to the Ministry of Agriculture, means to do nothing about it.

What impresses most in government pronouncements is their view of nature as indomitable and wholly unpredictable. Any measure involving future projections is absolutely absurd and unfeasible for the government, which works in cycles of four years (up to the next election). If hydroelectric plants run out of water, we can only pray for rain to restore the dams to their usual levels. If potable water runs out, only nature can replenish the reservoirs. Like tribesmen for whom any human interference in climate is anathema, every solution proposed by the government is an appeal to fortune and divine grace.

Brazilian politicians should be wary, however. Divine grace periodically answers the call for rain. And with the gift of rain, periodically Brazilian cities are flooded, hundreds die and thousands are displaced. Even though that happens anually, without fail, for the government floods are absolutely unpredictable, too. Well, what can we do? Let’s pray for rain. But not a lot.

Transaltions of this article,

• Spanish, Según el gobierno, Dios es el único capaz de resolver una crisis

On November 20, 2014, president Barack Obama announced a series of executive orders reforming the US immigration system. His plan of action consists not so much of improvements as of acceptance of the system’s failures and a doubling down on those failures. The plan’s key elements include increasing border security, deporting felons (“instead of families,” notes whitehouse.gov), criminal background checks, and tax liability for all undocumented immigrants.

Instead of trying to enforce these  failed policies, Obama could consider two simple arguments for open borders: The rights argument and the economic argument. Though either alone is sufficiently strong to make the case for border abolition, together they should be strong enough to destabilize enforcement of one of the greatest human rights abuses and human welfare handicaps in human history.

The rights argument is the simpler of the two. If every person has the right to do as he or she pleases without infringing on others’ right to the same, then borders are a baseless infringement on every person’s rights. If someone in Spain and someone in Saudi Arabia want to meet in Bangladesh, preventing them by force from doing so simply because of their starting locations cannot be justified. The same two people, if living across the street from one another and meeting in a local restaurant, would do no harm and face no border controls. The inconsistency is morally intolerable. Furthermore, the argument that immigrants might be criminals, who might harm others’ persons or property, flagrantly violates the principle of presumption of innocence. If one has the right to cross the street, as even convicted felons do, one has the right to cross borders.

The economic argument is a very simple one. Imagine a hypothetical planet, Widgetworld. On Widgetworld, two things are needed to make widgets: Usable land and labor. All anyone needs to live on is a few widgets. Once laborers have enough widgets to live for a while, they prefers to spend their time on leisure, i.e. not making widgets. Workers laboring together produce more widgets per hour than they could alone. On Widgetworld, laborers are distributed randomly and unevenly, as is usable land. Naturally, laborers may move from place to place, but land is fixed in location. If laborers want to spend as little time as possible working , their natural course of action is to move to where they will be most productive. Laborers may congregate on centers of usable land to build widgets and by cooperating maximize the amount of time they spend on leisure.

Now, imagine that on Widgetworld there are random lines drawn across the planet delineating borders. It doesn’t particularly matter what the enforcement rules are, so long as they make movement harder. It could be that it costs a few widgets to cross one, that it takes a long waiting time, that they are completely impassible, or some combination thereof. What matters is that there is a cost, insurmountable or not, to crossing a border. This does not bring prosperity to those in regions with more land than labor to work it, as they cannot easily get laborers to work that and increase its productivity. Nor does it help labor-rich regions, as laborers there have nothing on which to work. Everyone has to work more to stay alive, meaning less leisure. Borders just make life harder for everyone.

Widgetworld is not that different from Earth. Both have only two independent productive factors: Land and labor. Capital, the goods used to produce other things, must ultimately be built from land and labor. The largest difference between Widgetworld and Earth is that on Widgetworld all labor, all useful land, and all products are the same. On Earth, the varied types of labor and land make it even more important for the right kinds of each factor to come together in the right places to make the right kind of products. The differences in kind within each category only compound the need for freedom of movement.

Borders are rights violations and economic burdens. They disrespect human dignity and hold down quality of life. They represent arbitrary violence and limit human potential. The White House’s reformism is unacceptable. Borders must be abolished.

Sheldon Richman discusses why Chris Kyle is not a hero.

Michael Brendan Dougherty discusses Hilary and Libya.

Michael Dickinson discusses Winston Churchill.

Arthur Silber discusses the American Sniper movie and Chris Kyle.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown discusses libertarian feminism as an alternative to carceral feminism.

Medea Benjamin discusses why Cuba should be taken off the terrorist list.

Lew Rockwell discusses the libertarian principle of secession.

Sheldon Richman discusses the consequences of liberty.

David Rosen discusses the changing role of the U.S. military.

George H. Smith discusses the relation between religious skepticism and libertarianism.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses the possibility of U.S.escalation in the Ukraine.

Jeff Deist discusses how secession begins at home.

Tom H. Hastings discusses the military’s honoring of the late Saudi king.

Hunter Hastings discusses how free markets increase freedom of choice.

Janet Weil discusses American Sniper

Katherine Hawkins discusses the torture report and memos.

Andrew J. Bacevich discusses Obama’s foreign policy.

Robert Parry discusses the propaganda surrounding Ukraine.

Graham Peebles discusses the danger of being a girl in India.

Mark Davis discusses libertarians, selfishness, and progressives.

Glen Allport discusses the coercive state.

Paul Bonneau discusses xenophobes.

Veselin Topalov defeats Francisco Vallejo Pons.

Veselin Topalov draws with Vishy Anand.

Dear C4SS supporters,

Well, it’s time for the monthly update on what we’re doing at the Center’s “op-ed shop.” But before I hit the numbers, a word or two about January.

About two thirds of the way into the month, the Center went through a pretty wrenching series of events. If you know what I’m talking about, well, you know. If you don’t know what I’m talking about I won’t try to tell you whether to just count yourself lucky that it blew right past you without notice or to read the Center’s statement on the matter. Decide that for yourselves.

Anyway, after all that, our immediate attitude was “get back on the horse.” That felt good. So good, in fact, that it wasn’t until I started toting up the numbers yesterday that I realized we hadn’t fallen off the horse and that in fact we have been wearing the horse out.

In January, I made 42,759 submissions of English-language Center op-eds to 2,588 publications worldwide.  I haven’t combed through previous monthly reports for the exact date, but I’m pretty sure the last time we broke the 40k submissions mark was early last fall.

As far as seeing our content re-published by newspapers, magazines and other (loosely defined) “mainstream media,” we’ve been hovering around the 50-pickup mark for months. In January, we racked up 60 pickups, and I suspect our surge in frequency of op-ed publications/submissions toward the end of the month will boost the early February pickup numbers as well.

Our single most re-printed piece for January was Daniel Pryor’s “Free Speech Supporters Should Still Criticize Charlie Hebdo,” which reached newspaper audiences in Jamaica, India, Mexico and the US states of Vermont and Arizona (as well as the global Internet audience, of course).

So: In good times and bad, through internal and external events that are hard on everyone involved, we keep on putting the market anarchist message into popular print. Thanks as always to you for the support which makes our work possible. And could someone please bring that horse a bag of oats and some water?

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
English-Language Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

Consistent free-market advocates — and not just professional economists — are not only enthusiastic about their preferred system of political economy; they are very enthusiastic. At least part of that enthusiasm is fueled by a well-grounded conviction that thegeneral level of prosperity would be unprecedentedly high if people were free to engage in peaceful production and exchange without forcible interference by the state or freelance aggressors.

This enthusiasm is found in two broad categories of radical free-market advocates, or libertarians: those who regard themselves as consequentialists (or utilitarians), that is, those who think moral acts are acts that maximize some good like pleasure or happiness or well-being, and those who regard themselves as deontologists, or advocates of doing one’s moral duty (say, respecting other people’s rights) as good in itself, without reference to consequences.

In chapter 1 of Gary Chartier’s Anarchy and Legal Order, he explains certain fundamental problems with consequentialism.

There is no underlying thing that well-being is. “Well being” or “welfare” or “flourishing” or “fulfillment” should simply be seen as a summary label for all the different aspects of a life that goes well. There is no quantity, no substance, that underlies all dimensions of well-being qua dimensions of well-being. And the absence of such a substratum, a definable common element, means that the various aspects of well-being are incommensurable — that there is no way of measuring them in relation to each other.… Similarly, particular instances of the various aspects of well-being are non-fungible: there is no objective basis for trading one off against another.

If this is true, utilitarianism, which implores us to maximize social well-being, must be a nonstarter.

I ignore for now a third category of libertarian, the eudaimonists, or virtue ethicists, with whom I identify. Eudaimonist libertarians are also enthusiastic about free markets in part because of the prospect for a high level of general prosperity. (See my “The Moral Case for Freedom Is the Practical Case for Freedom” and this video lecture by Roderick Long.)

It’s no surprise that consequentialists would embrace free markets on grounds that they will produce general prosperity. In their view, they would be touting the (supposed) maximization of a good, which is what interests them. And we can understand a deontologist’s joy at the prospect of high general prosperity. Why not rejoice that one’s moral duties yield good consequences even if yielding good consequences is not their objective?

But this raises a question: what if we suspended disbelief and supposed that free markets could reasonably be expected to impoverish most people while benefiting only the few? What then?

I would still favor freedom, but I don’t mind confessing I’d have decidedly less enthusiasm for it. Why wouldn’t I be less than thrilled by the prospect of human suffering? On the other hand, prosperity is not the only important thing in life. The ability to be self-directed counts for a lot in my book. Money, to be sure, can enhance self-directedness by expanding options, but it’s better to be poor and free than poor and unfree. Those who would suggest a third alternative — unfree and wealthy — have entirely too much faith in the state.

Some deontologist free-marketeers may insist that their enthusiasm for markets would go on even if most people faced poverty. I have trouble believing that. I would suspect secret disappointment. For one thing, I doubt that this type of libertarian is as pure a deontologist as claimed. Roderick Long has something to say on this matter:

In real life, one rarely finds members of either camp [deontologist and consequentialist] relying solely on a single set of considerations. It is a rare moral or political polemic indeed that does not include both consequentialist and deontological arguments.…

Whatever they may say officially, most consequentialists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies slighted human dignity, and most deontologists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies had disastrous consequences.

Fortunately, this discussion is purely hypothetical. We know that a radically freed market would create a high level of prosperity even for the “poorest.” But before getting into the reasons for that, there is a point worth putting on the table. Sometimes the question posed to deontologists is different: What if free markets increased income inequality (not poverty)? The switch from poverty to income inequality is sometimes unnoticed, but it is significant. I noted recently that increasing “market inequality” (as opposed to what I call “political-economic inequality,” which results from government privilege) is consistent with dramatically rising prosperity for all:

Let’s remember that it is entirely possible for the poorest in a society to become richer even as the gap between the richest and poorest grows. Imagine an accordion-like elevator that is rising as a whole while being stretched out, putting the floor further from the ceiling.

I don’t think a growing income gap is likely in an increasingly prosperous freed market, but the scenario is not logically absurd. At any rate, I am not concerned about the prospect of growing market inequality the way I would be about mass poverty if I thought a freed market would produce it. My view accords with that of Benjamin Tucker: “Equality if we can get it, but Liberty at any rate!” (Hat tip: Roderick Long.)

As I say, this discussion is hypothetical. Freedom (or justice) can be counted on to produce good outcomes, in a eudaimonistic way, for everyone. But is this just a lucky break? Or is there a more solid explanation? It’s long seemed obvious to me that good should be expected to come from abiding by natural law (including respect for natural rights). I recall that somewhere Murray Rothbard said the same thing. This is a fairly general statement, however, and it would be better to have a detailed explanation of why this is the case.

Fortunately, we have one — from Roderick Long in his paper “Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?” I recommend reading this paper in its entirety. Here I will only hit the highlights. Long first shows “the concurrence of deontological and consequentialist criteria” by arguing that, as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics taught, the contents of the individual virtues reciprocally determine one another. This is part of what is meant by the “unity of virtue.” For example,

What courage requires of me [in a given instance] cannot be determined independently of what prudence [which is concerned with consequences] requires of me, and vice versa.… This does not make justice a consequentialist notion, since the direction of determination runs both ways; what counts as a beneficial consequence will be partly determined by the requirements of justice.… Aristotle defines virtue and human flourishing in terms of one another. ” [Emphasis added.]

Because “justice and benefit are conceptually entangled,” it’s no mere “happy coincidence” that justice has good consequences.

This is Long’s “unity-of-virtue solution” to the puzzle of why justice is beneficial. But he can’t leave it at that because his “solution gives us no reason … to expect any concurrence between the prima facie contents of justice and benefit, before they have been mutually adjusted.” After all, if the pre-adjusted prima facie contents can be mutually adjusted to each other, that cannot be explained via the unity of virtue.

Here I can only summarize Long’s answer. He finds that the prima facie content of justice, “considered apart from consequentialist considerations,” is represented by libertarianism, that is, the principle that each person is an end in himself and therefore is equal in authority to everyone else. On the other hand, “the prima facie subjectivist content of benefit, considered apart from justice,” would entail the long-run satisfaction of people’s preferences.

The social theorists of the Austrian School have shown, on praxeological grounds, how a libertarian social order constitutes an economic democracy, in which consumer preferences direct the productive resources of society through the imputation of value from consumer goods to goods of higher order. Hence justice, as it would be conceived prior to adjustment, does a reasonably good job of producing beneficial consequences, as those would be conceived prior to adjustment. Whether one thinks that the alterations to be produced in these two concepts after adjustment would be great or small, the fact remains that there is a rough concurrence prior to adjustment, and this rough concurrence seems to require explanation.

That explanation, Long says, is to be found in the work of the Austrian economists.

If the Austrians are right, and I think they are, then a solution to our problem may be in sight. The fact that a libertarian social order tends to satisfy consumer preferences is not a contingent empirical fact; the Austrians argue at length … that this concurrence can be established by conceptual analysis.

But if this is so, then the concurrence requires no explanation. It makes sense to ask why there are four shrimp on my plate instead of five, because the alternative is all too conceivable. But it doesn’t make sense to ask why two plus two equals four instead of five, because the alternative is incoherent. Nothing could count as two plus two equaling five, so “Why don’t two and two make five?” is no more coherent a question than “Why isn’t MOO?” If the praxeological approach is sound, then demanding to know why the laws of social science are as they are is equally incoherent. That whose alternative is inconceivable requires no explanation.

It may be an interesting exercise to imagine how we’d feel about freed markets if the consequences were generally bad, but we need lose no sleep over the question. And now we know why.

Journalist Barrett Brown, a woman who wanted to become a member of ISIS and a rapper named Tiny Doo. Not a list of people that seem to fit together in many ways ordinarily but here’s the rub: Each will be spending portions of his or her life in prison.

Brown is guilty of, as he puts it, “… copying and pasting a link to a publicly available file that other journalists were also linking to without being prosecuted.” He is poised to spend five years in prison.

Shannon Conley is a 19 year old who became transfixed with Islam and planned to go to Turkey to aid ISIS as a nurse. She was arrested in the Denver International Airport and may spend as many as four years in prison.

Lastly, Brandon Duncan, also known by the gangster rapper stage name Tiny Doo, arrested and jailed eight months ago. He faces 25 years to life for violating a little-known California statute making it illegal to “benefit from gang activities.” How did Duncan benefit from gang activity? Prosecutors allege he benefited financially from gang activity in 2013, but they admit they have no knowledge that he actually participated in gang activity himself.

These three individuals have had their lives ripped away from them by the state for expressing themselves. Brown is guilty of sharing something that was already publicly available. Conley is guilty of (at worst) of being naive and foolish about her beliefs. And Duncan is guilty of rapping about how tough (as he puts it) “urban street life” can be.

The state’s answer to all of these things is the one size fits all hammer of trial, sentencing and prison time. In each case the prosecutors want to “send a message” and ensure that no one ever commits these “crimes again.” But if this was actually a viable tactic we’d see murders very infrequently and see recidivism in prisons even less. But neither is the case.

In addition, it’s clear that in none of the cases does the state has just cause to throw these people in prison and have them lose years of their lives. The government continues to criminalize whistle-blowing and those who help spread its message. The government continues to penalize those who make mistakes without letting them learn on their own. And the government continues to penalize and target African Americans who try to come to grip with the realities of race and poverty in America and make something valuable out of their experiences.

Free speech? Only as free as the state wants it to be.