When looking at history for examples of the establishment of anarchist societies we often think of the Spanish anarchists in Catalonia or the efforts of the Zapatista army in Mexico. These are both examples of groups using tactics of revolutionary armed conflict against the state and capitalism in an attempt to establish an autonomous stateless society in the here and now. And while anarchist Catalonia was eventually quashed by outside forces, the Zapatistas are still fighting on, albeit using different methods than before.

And then there’s the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê‎ (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK). Formally a Marxist-Leninist political party which fought to establish an independent Kurdish state called Kurdistan. However, under the guidance of their leader Abdullah Öcalan, the party changed its platform and strategy. After Öcalan‘s imprisonment during which he corresponded with American anarchist Murray Bookchin and was deeply influenced by his philosophy of libertarian communalism, he called for the PKK to adopt a platform of democratic confederalism and dropped its demand for the establishment of a Kurdish state, instead advocating complete statelessness.

Democratic confederalism is a political structure consisting of many independent and autonomous communities working together as a confederacy based on the ideas of participatory direct democracy at the local level, social ecology, and anarcha-feminism. According to Öcalan himself, democratic confederalism, “is open towards other political groups and factions. It is flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented.” These autonomous communities are built upon communalist values and resources are shared amongst all thus making taxation and forced redistribution of resources and wealth unnecessary and irrelevant.

They focus on building their own systems, ignoring the state altogether in their decision making processes. They do not see the revolutionary necessity or sustainability in an armed overthrow of the state but instead advocate a peaceful evacuation from and gradual dissolution of the state as local communities build their own political systems to replace it. However, they do recognize that the state and other groups will retaliate with violence and that self-defense is much needed. That is why communities maintain a series of decentralized armed militias such as Yekîneyên Parastina Gel‎ (People’s Protection Units or YPG) and Yekîneyên Parastina Jin‎ (Women’s Protection Units or YPJ). Their efforts are funded directly by the community through fundraisers, concerts, parties, and independent businesses, making it a true example of community agorism at work.

The YPJ/G model has proven successful thus far, breaking ISIS lines to rescue thousands of Yazidis — a people often hated and condemned as “devil worshippers” by much of the local Islamic community — when they were surrounded on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Also, despite suffering heavy losses, they successfully defended Kobani when ISIS launched an all-out assault on the city with tanks, missiles and even drones.

Already this philosophy and the group’s actions have inspired others across the globe to help in the fight with many socialist, communists, communalists, libertarians, and anarchists alike currently immigrating to the area and helping to fight hand-in-hand with the PKK. The YPG and YPJ are currently fighting to secure and maintain a free and autonomous Kurdish democratic confederacy against the Turkish government and ISIS, and hope to spread the philosophy far beyond an independent stateless Kurdistan. The PKK has hopes of democratic confederate workers’ revolutions spreading across the world much in the same fashion as the Marxist-Leninist revolutions did in the past. But this time they hope to achieve it by more libertarian means. This is an anarchist revolution unfolding before our very eyes.

For Rhode Islanders who value the lives and well-being of animals, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus should never be welcome in Providence. Don’t let Ringling fool you with its newfound compassion for elephants — it remains an enemy of animals.

Although it may be ending the elephant performances, plenty of other confined and tortured animals will remain as unwilling participants in its shows. Don’t think for a second that the elephants’ retirement has to do with anything other than Ringling’s bottom line. Elephants have been dismissed because they happen to be among the most high-profile circus victims.

This is a convenient public relations move, as disingenuous as SeaWorld’s end to captive whale breeding. There are still so many more Ringling victims in need of liberation.

In a move that should surprise no one, Reuters reports that the Obama administration announced that they’re going to deploy 200 more troops to Iraq. This doesn’t include the additional advisors, Apache helicopters and other gadgets that the US government has authorized to send to Iraq, nor the additional troops to Syria.

At a recent press conference in Saudi Arabia, Obama said that “[i]t was very important … for us to describe our assessment that Prime Minister Abadi is .. effectively fighting against ISIL … while acknowledging that there are significant problems in terms of government stability inside of Baghdad. And that’s a reason for us not to withdraw, but rather to get more involved in helping to stabilize areas.”

This fight for stability in Iraq and the Middle East is a fight that the US government has been attempting without success for over a decade. Perhaps the conclusion from this is that the common tactics of propping up US-backed governments, destabilizing others or assassinating leaders mysteriously doesn’t lead to more inner-state cogency.

But as Obama notes, none of that is a reason to back off the US’s attempt to control things they’ve shown time and time again they cannot control. Instead, we should rely on the time-tested tactics of more violence, more outside control, more innocent civilians being caught in the crossfire. None of which could cause any further militarization of the general populace against the US, naturally.

Unfortunately, because of the way government operates, the only word that matters is Obama’s. None of us have any say over whether Obama deploys 200 more troops to Iraq. Furthering this  control, the taxes we are forced to pay are funds that go to the US war machine to help continue the imperialism many do not support to begin with.

A war machine led by someone oblivious to the notion that ordering troops to go into other people’s countries, destroying their homelands, threatening their populations and spreading violence may not solve political instability in the long-run.

Obama couches it in positive terms suggesting in the same quote that “[i]f we want Sunni communities to be able to rebuild themselves and to get back into the lives they were leading before ISIL took over, then we’re going to have to help the Iraqi government respond.”

But how can a government that is trillions of dollars in debt, fails to protect the most marginalized communities within its own borders, and which treats its neighbors south of the border with utter disdain, do that?

The strides Obama has made to exit Iraq are notable and I’ve commented on them before, but instead of using that as a leaping off point to get all of the troops out of danger Obama has used his authority to inject more and more troops, bits at a time.

These quieter acts of war make it less visible and make Obama seem more praiseworthy.

However, no meaningful change is going to come within Iraq or elsewhere on a sustainable basis, by the US’s creation, because of inherent problems like a lack of local knowledge, legibility and information. Iraqis are best able to make the decisions for themselves, not Obama and his military. The best chance Iraq has at rebuilding is getting American troops out of Iraq and anywhere else they are stationed in the region. But Obama won’t do any of that.

His previous Iraq withdrawal has been replaced with the same sort of political backtracking that dominates actions by government agents. “People can’t be left to make their own decisions about their own communities! We need to have government force cultural cogency!” This paternalistic and imperialistic drive is at the heart of the US government’s foreign affairs.

Obama’s foreign policy is a sword that he should consider bequeathing, lest he die by it.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner. 2007. Doubleday.

For those interested in learning about the blunders, deceptions, crimes and disasters of the Central Intelligence Agency, Tim Weiner’s 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is an excellent place to start. The book presents a highly critical history of the agency dating from the its inception to the end of the George W. Bush era.

Tim Weiner is a former New York Times reporter who has also written books about the FBI, the Pentagon and the presidency of Richard Nixon. Recurring themes of Legacy of Ashes include dishonesty, incompetence and over-willingness to falsify intelligence to please superiors. Weiner argues that these same tendencies led not only to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, but numerous other crimes and mishaps throughout the post-war era.

While this book won a National Book Award for Non-fiction, the CIA itself was more critical, stating that “anyone who wants a balanced perspective of CIA and its history should steer well clear of Legacy of Ashes.” Ironically, Weiner’s acknowledgements thank numerous high ranking CIA officials including former directors Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, and George Tenet whose conversations with him contributed to this book. Additionally, Weiner writes from the point of view of one who thinks the US should have a top quality intelligence service, but makes it clear that the CIA has dismally failed in this role.

Despite this, Legacy of Ashes has much to offer libertarians and other explicit opponents of secret governance, as nearly all of its narrative is presented in a matter of fact manner, reporting what happened while avoiding value judgments. Weiner used some 50,000 documents, mostly archived by the CIA, as source material. By sticking to “on the record” sources, he avoids the speculation and conspiracy-theorizing that otherwise pervades criticism of secret governance. Nevertheless, his report is extremely damning.

Weiner’s story starts at the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War, when the US had essentially no intelligence on the Soviet Union. While originally founded as a kind of global news-gathering agency for the executive branch, the CIA couldn’t resist cloak-and-dagger activity (which it often did poorly). The agency’s precursor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), was led by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, now seen as the “Father of American Intelligence” who believed US intelligence “must be global and totalitarian.”

The agency was able to skim money from the Marshall Plan, funding its early attempts to recruit Russian spies. Early operations tended to be quickly infiltrated by Soviet sympathizers and hundreds of CIA-trained recruits were found and executed by the Soviet state. On a similar note, a Russian spy broke into the CIA’s code-breaking center and destroyed what little information the agency had about the far east. This left the US government blindsided by the Chinese invasion of North Korea, which nearly drove US forces from the peninsula.

Under Allan Dulles, the CIA fought public distrust by exerting influence on news outlets such as The New York Times, Newsweek, the CBS Evening News and the Washington Post, as well as popular publications such as Time, Reader’s Digest, Look, and Parade. These media outlets did what they could to portray the agency and Dulles in a positive light, despite its many failed ventures, which were largely unknown to the American public and most members of government.

When the CIA did find success, it was more often than not done through bribery and brute force, rather than stealth, secrecy or good strategy. Weiner uses the installation of the Shah of Iran as an example. In a humorous anecdote he notes that an early attempt at a coup failed, leading the Shah to flee to Rome, where he inadvertently checked into the same hotel as the same moment as the vacationing Allan Dulles. Dulles was presumably quite surprised to see the Monarch walking the streets of Rome, but he still greeted the Shah by saying “after you, your majesty”.

On a more serious note, when the coup ultimately did succeed, it planted the seeds of anti-Americanism and religious extremism that would continue to haunt US/Iran relations throughout the book and to this day. Similarly another CIA celebrated success was the 1954 coup in Guatemala, which led to “forty years of military rulers, death squads, and armed repression.” Another such “success” was the Ba’athist coup in Iraq whose future leadership would include Saddam Hussein.

Weiner also discusses the agency’s failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro (who is still alive as of this writing). These failed attempts were intentionally kept from the Warren Commission after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, because the CIA initially feared that the assassin’s motive was retaliation for the failed attempts on Castro’s life. This omission is widely believed to have compromised the commission’s findings, leaving open the possibility of a link between the assassination and Cuba. It is also revealed that the nearly all Cubans working for the CIA, at the time, were in fact double agents, reporting to the Cuban government.

In another dark chapter, Weiner reviews the CIA’s funding of the rise of Suharto in Indonesia, and the resulting killings of hundreds of thousands as well as the holding of over a million political prisoners. Additionally, the agency created secret police in Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. As well as an international police academy in Panama, whose graduates would lead death squads in El Salvador and Honduras.

During the Johnson era, and continuing under Nixon, the CIA embarked on an operation code-named Chaos, in which agents grew their hair long and infiltrated anti-war and black power groups. Much of this coincided with the rise of Henry Kissinger as the de facto head of covert operations and an increased surveillance of US citizens. Unsurprisingly, a strong emphasis is placed on the CIA-backed coup in Chile which initiated the brutal Pinochet dictatorship.

As the seventies wound down the Agency failed to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as well as the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. A great deal of focus is given on the CIA’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and its gun running mission to Jihadist in Afghanistan. Weiner notes that the CIA funded both sides in the war between Iran and Iraq. He also notes that after the CIA failed to predict Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, it attempted to compensate by predicting he would invade Saudi Arabia.

The final chapters focus on failed attempts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden during the 1990’s and 2000’s as well as the intelligence failures and outright dishonesty that led to the US invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. He notes that CIA director George Tenet staked much of his own reputation and that of the agency on the gamble that WMD would be found in Iraq, despite evidence that was at best insufficient and at worst deceptively manipulated. His successor Porter Goss largely continued the CIA and Bush era traditions of purging the ranks of any sign of ideological dissent.

Weiner recounts all of this largely from the agency’s point of view, including its (often dysfunctional) relationships with various US presidents, the pentagon and its own leadership. Recurring themes include heavy alcohol abuse among the leadership, an inability of the agency to successfully recruit foreign agents or American agents who do not stick out like sore thumbs in foreign settings, and an over-willingness to doctor findings to coincide with the expectations of Presidents. That latter was often the case with the Soviet Union, with whom the agency was often so busy exaggerating its military might that it failed to notice the hugely dysfunctional Soviet economy. Ultimately, the book details too many additional instances of CIA support for dictators, involvement in the drug trade, overthrowing democratic governments and causing civilian deaths, as well as instances of failed predictions, lies and reckless endangerment of personnel to discuss all of them in this review.

Weiner squeezes a great deal of history into roughly 500 pages of narrative, but in doing so cannot go into the level of detail other books have on specific operations and activities. For example, while the book does discuss the CIA’s experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, especially LSD, on unwitting subjects, as well as its mind control research under Project MK-ULTRA, this is given much more thorough treatment elsewhere. At the end of the book one has little choice but conclude that an institution as secretive, murderous, dishonest, and as psychopathic as the CIA has no place in a free society, even if this is not the author’s stated position. Legacy of Ashes functions quite well as an introductory, long-view, critical history of American intelligence and secret government activity, and is an enjoyable read too.

People who want to live in a society organized on the basis of peaceful, voluntary cooperation don’t want to be ruled by monopolists — by states. State authority is illegitimate, unnecessary, and dangerous.

But that obviously leaves open the question: what do we do now, while we’re still under the state’s rule, to make our own lives and the lives of the state’s other victims more bearable — and to help dismantle the state?

One answer, for a lot of people, is: vote. That’s an answer about which I’m increasingly skeptical.

In my 2011 book The Conscience of an Anarchist, I suggest that electoral politics might offer one avenue for positive social change. And I’m not saying it can’t play that role. But there are good reasons to pursue alternatives.

Let’s get a red herring out of the way first. Some people oppose voting because they think it’s immoral, as if the sheer act of voting placed an imprimatur on the political process or as if the voter were responsible for everything someone for whom she voted did in office. I think that’s silly. Voting can be a defensive act; one’s purpose in voting can be to reduce the risk that the state will cause harm. Casting a vote doesn’t have to mean endorsing the state, the electoral system, or the specific politicians or initiatives for which one votes; it doesn’t have to mean anything more than regarding these as less awful in at least some respects than alternatives. The harmful results of decisions made by politicians can reasonably be treated as unaccepted, unwelcome side-effects of voters’ choices. And politicians have to be seen as responsible for their own actions.

The problem with voting isn’t that it’s inherently wrong; no doubt, in principle, voting or even campaigning for office could be a reasonable defensive act. But even if that’s true in principle, the reality is that there are lots of good reasons not to vote.

Start out with the ineffectiveness of voting.

As we’ve seen in previous elections, governments can determine the outcomes of elections by eliminating some people from the voter rolls. And this means, in practical terms, that the victims of the drug war and other campaigns against victimless actions will be poorly positioned to influence electoral outcomes. The deck starts out stacked against anyone who wants to roll back state policies responsible for unjust imprisonment. The effect is similar to the one exerted when death penalty opponents are prevented from serving on juries; the full range of conscientious positions isn’t represented.

Campaign advertising is often deceptive and manipulative. Like other lies that don’t involve the fraudulent transfer of title, advertising ads shouldn’t be actionable at law, but that doesn’t mean they’re not harmful. Many voters depend on them, often to the exclusion of other sources of information, with the result that lies are persistently disseminated and electoral outcomes distorted.

Politicians themselves often frame their positions in ways likely to mislead the unwary. Compare candidate Barack Obama’s appeals to the peace vote, and his seeming opposition to the growth of the national security state with President Barack Obama’s actions after occupying the White House. Politicians say what they think voters want to hear; once in office, they can be counted on to do whatever they think will boost their chances of reelection and benefit their cronies.

And of course there’s the fact that votes often don’t count because elections can easily be stolen; just ask Coke Stevenson. That’s especially true now that hackable electronic voting devices are increasingly common. And counting errors can occur even when people act in good faith, too (thanks to Sam Hays for this point).

Gerrymandering decreases the likelihood that the outcome of a given election will be dependent on individual votes, and it’s been common as long as there have been electoral contests. But, even in its absence, the likelihood that your vote will determine the outcome of a race is very small indeed when the number of relevant votes is large.

Suppose that, in a given case, you really can influence the result of an election: what then? It’s clear that the outcome of a given race may make little difference at all. Most politicians operate within fairly narrow ideological confines, and are most unlikely to do particularly radical things. The sorts of people who are likely to become successful politicians are unlikely to rock the boat. Indeed, successful politicians are very likely to be the sorts of people who want power and are good at acquiring and retaining it: they are likely, that is, to be unprincipled and ambitious. But even if a genuinely radical politician is elected, that doesn’t mean that radical changes will be enacted. After all, once in office, a politician becomes the target of enthusiastically privilege-seeking elites and their cronies, who will be adept at influencing her or his actions to their benefit.

And even if a politician doesn’t bend to the will of any of these various interest groups, there’s the obvious fact that individual politicians have considerable difficulty accomplishing things. A legislator is only one member of a sizeable group, many of whose members will be largely uninterested in basing decisions on principles, especially defensible ones, so the odds that a continuingly principled radical legislator will be able to make substantive change happen are very low. The odds that an elected executive will be a principled radical are even lower, given that more people have to be satisfied to ensure that a successful campaign for governor or president is managed and funded, and more principles will often have to be sacrificed to win a campaign for executive office. But, again, once in office, a radical executive would have no choice but to work with a legislature that was unlikely to be radical at all.

A further problem: a genuine radical, someone who really cared about making the world a better place, might find the temptation to use power, not to liberate people, but to control and manage them, almost irresistible. Even in the absence of effective manipulation by special interests, the desire to change the world by force could corrupt an initially principled politician.

In short, therefore, there is little reason to believe that voting will effectively lead to the actual enactment of policies that enhance freedom and justice. We may sometimes, rarely, see, ex post, that it did; but as a general ex ante policy, it’s safe to assume it won’t. Emma Goldman was surely right: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

Not voting can make sense for other reasons, too.

It can be a useful means of protest — an expression of one’s disgust at the limited options, the deceit, the hypocrisy of campaigns and the aggression and manipulation, the theft and murder, of governing. It can also offer a great opportunity to highlight the awfulness of the state. Imagine people’s reactions when they see you wearing a sticker that says, “I’ve avoided voting. Have you?”

It’s especially useful to avoid voting because of the rush of team spirit that accompanies every election campaign. If you’re going to vote for a politician, you should at least hold your nose. But otherwise sane and sensible people fall victim to charisma and breathe in the seductive pheromones of murderers and thugs. They announce, without a second thought, that their candidate is wise and good and heroic. They cheer for their team’s inanities, and dramatically exaggerate the good any rational person could expect an election might accomplish. If you want to avoid being caught up in mass hysteria, stay away from the ballot box.

Electoral democracy also helps to convince ordinary people that they are the state’s masters rather than its subjects. It conceals factional disputes within the power elite and frames them as popular contests in which the people’s will is done. It deceives people into supposing that they really have consented to the state’s dictates, and prompts them to dismiss critics of the status quo with shibboleths like, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Refusing to vote helps to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes.

So just say “no.” This year, vote for nobody.

You may be familiar with the role of proprietary automobile diagnostic software in enforcing a repair cartel of the Big Auto manufacturers, dealership mechanics, and auto repair chains and big garages that can afford to license the software. By using closed software that makes it impossible for an independent party to access it, or open it up and modify it, the effect is to lock low-cost, independent mechanics (“shade tree mechanics”) out of a major share of repair work. Similarly, closed, proprietary software in electronic voting machines makes the process of counting votes completely non-transparent so that voters and independent investigators have no way to verify whether the machines have been hacked — a repeated concern in election years ever since the internal emails of the Diebold company were leaked in 2004. But at least you don’t depend on such software to keep your heart beating. Well, actually you do — as Cory Doctorow points out, pacemakers also run on proprietary software (“Pacemakers and Piracy: The Unintended Consequences of the DMCA for Medical Implants,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 19).

The whole point of proprietary software and other forms of proprietary information, coupled with the DMCA’s restrictions on circumvention technology, is that you never actually own anything you buy. In fact directly accessing the source code is a crime. That’s bad enough — an injustice and an inconvenience — when it comes to your computer operating system or a song you paid for. But when it involves the software running a device inside your own body, that you depend on to keep your heart beating, it’s a lot more serious. As Doctorow says:

“However you feel about copyright law, everyone should be able to agree that copyright shouldn’t get in the way of testing the software in your hearing aid, pacemaker, insulin pump, or prosthetic limb to look for safety risks (or privacy risks, for that matter).”

Of course this is nothing new. So-called “intellectual property” has been a threat to human safety and survival ever since neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” started imposing draconian increases in copyright and patent protections about 25 years ago. Big Pharma has been one of the most strident lobbyists — and biggest beneficiaries — for imposing U.S. patent law on a global scale. So countries that previously allowed the production of generic forms of patented life-saving drugs, or had compulsory licensing requirements, now fall afoul of the “intellectual property” provisions of those “Free Trade Agreements.” That translates into the deaths of potentially millions of real-life human beings.

In the United States, the chemical cocktail injected into the ground in the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process is also proprietary. That means the public, whose ground water is potentially threatened by these chemicals, has no legal right to know what’s being pumped into the ground by fossil fuels companies.

So the nature of “intellectual property” isn’t just a theoretical debate. “Property” claims on the right to use or duplicate information, or to copy techniques, are not only spurious in principle. They’re a threat to human life in the real world. It’s time to abolish them.

From C4SS Sr. Fellow Thomas Knapp’s blog, Kn@ppster,

In an essay on “the bathroom wars” published yesterday at Epic Times, Dr. Richard Ebeling writes:

In government accommodations in such places as, say, courthouses, and in spite of the additional taxpayers’ expense, matching toilet facilities for men and women, there also should be “transgender” facilities of some sort. There must be accommodations for taxpaying citizens who would feel uncomfortable in satisfying biological functions in the same limited space with those they define as members of the opposite sex, and at the same time for there to be facilities for those who are indifferent or who consider it “right” for transgender individuals to share such facilities with them.

Interesting perspective. Let me see if I’m understanding him correctly.

I take it Dr. Ebeling supported the “public” (i.e. government-run, although through a contractor) bus line in New York City that made “accommodations” for taxpaying male Orthodox Jews who “would feel uncomfortable” having women ride in the front of the bus with them, by requiring women to board through the back door and remain in the back of the bus, right?

Breathing and drinking water are “biological functions.” Am I entitled to have, just for example, the public courthouse segregated by race if I “would feel uncomfortable” breathing the same air or drinking from the same fountain as African-Americans, Dr. Ebeling?

Just wondering.

[hat tip: Nick Manley]
Read more at http://knappster.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-couple-of-questions-for-dr-richard.html#IREFhlk6MyI51DJb.99

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson’s “The Desktop Regulatory State” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Desktop Regulatory State“.

$15.00 for the first copy. $13.00 for every additional copy.

Defenders of the modern state often claim that it’s needed to protect us — from terrorists, invaders, bullies, and rapacious corporations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, famously argued that the state was a source of “countervailing power” that kept other social institutions in check. But what if those “countervailing” institution — corporations, government agencies and domesticated labor unions — in practice collude more than they “countervail” each other? And what if network communications technology and digital platforms now enable us to take on all those dinosaur hierarchies as equals — and more than equals. In The Desktop Regulatory State, Kevin Carson shows how the power of self-regulation, which people engaged in social cooperation have always possessed, has been amplified and intensifed by changes in consciousness — as people have become aware of their own power and of their ability to care for themselves without the state — and in technology — especially information technology. Drawing as usual on a wide array of insights from diverse disciplines, Carson paints an inspiring, challenging, and optimistic portrait of a humane future without the state, and points provocatively toward the steps we need to take in order to achieve it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE–THE STIGMERGIC REVOLUTION

• Reduced Capital Outlays
• Distributed Infrastructure
• Network Culture
• Stigmergy

CHAPTER TWO–NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES

• The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies
• Hierarchies vs. Networks
• Networks vs. Hierarchies
• Systems Disruption

CHAPTER THREE–NETWORKS VS. HIERARCHIES: END GAME

• Transition from Hierarchies to Networks
• The Question of Repression
• The Question of Collapse
• Conclusion

CHAPTER FOUR–THE DESKTOP REVOLUTION IN REGULATION

• The Regulatory State: Myth and Reality
• Individual Super-empowerment
• The “Long Tail” in Regulation
• Networked Resistance as an Example of Distributed Infrastructure
• Informational Warfare (or Open-Mouth Sabotage)
• A Narrowcast Model of Open Mouth Sabotage
• Attempts to Suppress or Counter Open Mouth Sabotage
• Who Regulates the Regulators?
• Networked, Distributed Successors to the State: Saint-Simon, Proudhon and “the Administration of Things”
• Monitory Democracy
• “Open Everything”
• Panarchy
• Collective Contracts
• Heather Marsh’s “Proposal for Governance
• Michel Bauwens’ Partner State

CHAPTER FIVE–FUNDAMENTAL INFRASTRUCTURES: NETWORKED SUPPORT PLATFORMS

• Bruce Sterling: Islands in the Net
• Phyles: Neal Stephenson
• Phyles: Las Indias and David de Ugarte
• Bruce Sterling: The Caryatids
• Daniel Suarez
• John Robb: Economies as a Social Software Service
• File Aesir
• Venture Communism
• Medieval Guilds as Predecessors of the Phyle
• Transition Towns and Global Villages
• Modern Networked Labor Unions and Guilds as Examples of Phyles
• Virtual States as Phyles: Hamas, Etc.
• Eugene Holland: Nomad Citizenship
• Producism/Producia
• Emergent Cities
• The Incubator Function
• Mix & Match

CHAPTER SIX–FUNDAMENTAL INFRASTRUCTURES: MONEY

• What Money’s For and What it Isn’t
• The Adoption of Networked Money Systems
• Examples of Networked Money Systems

CHAPTER SEVEN–FUNDAMENTAL INFRASTRUCTURES: EDUCATION AND CREDENTIALING

• Introduction: Whom Do Present-Day Schools Really Serve
• Alternative Models
• Potential Building Blocks for an Open Alternative
• Open Course Materials
• Open Textbooks
• Open Learning Platforms
• Credentialing

CHAPTER EIGHT–THE ASSURANCE COMMONS

• Introduction
• Legibility: Vertical and Horizontal. Graeber, Scott, etc.
• Networked Certification, Reputational and Verification Mechanisms
• Ostrom, Commons Governance and Vernacular Law

CHAPTER NINE–THE OPEN SOURCE LABOR BOARD

• Historic Models
• Networked Labor Struggle
• Open-Mouth Sabotage

CHAPTER TEN–OPEN SOURCE CIVIL LIBERTIES ENFORCEMENT

• Protection Against Non-State Civil Rights Violations
• When the State is the Civil Liberties Violator
• Circumventing the Law
• Circumvention: Privacy vs. Surveillance
• Seeing Like a State, and the Art of Not Being Governed
• Exposure and Embarrassment
• Networked Activism and the Growth of Civil Society

CHAPTER ELEVEN–THE OPEN SOURCE FOURTH ESTATE

• The Industrial Model
• Open Source Journalism

CHAPTER TWELVE–OPEN SOURCE NATIONAL SECURITY

• The State as Cause of the Problem: Blowback
• Meta-Organization
• Active Defense, Counter-Terrorism, and Other Security Measures
• Passive Defense
• The Stateless Society as the Ultimate in Passive Defense
• Disaster Relief

Kevin A. Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and a prolific writer on subjects including free-market anti-cap­it­al­ism, the in­div­idualist anarchist tradition, grassroots technology and radical unionism. He is the author of ”The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand”, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and The Desktop Regulatory State. He keeps a blog at mutualist.blogspot.com and frequently publishes short columns and longer research reports for the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

To attribute to money a concept of bestowing freedom upon an individual owner may well exist as a theoretical possibility. Yet ownership is itself a contested concept. As is freedom. By bestowing freedom on the owner, it effectively prompts the dominance of certain types of power to come to the fore of monetary and economic relations. We can see this in Weber’s concept of a struggle for economic existence [1], whereby the formation of prices is a struggle for dominance, with money as the main weapon for such a struggle. Thus the use of money and with it the creation of prices for commodities is brought out of a struggle for who determines this, and who can win the best deal from such a battle. In this sense, capitalistic markets are the battleground for the domination of certain winners and losers, with the codification of power and dominance written into those who enter either of these two classifications.

However, the market did not simply evolve into this reality. The creation out of spontaneous order is simply a myth in the murky realities of the creation of capitalism and its monetary relations. The very history of primitive accumulation is that of the creation of wage labour and the domination of certain economic forms and expressions by the powers of capital. This furthers accumulation of capital and puts money as the central driver of the capability to maintain power and with it accumulation. The history of enclosures, both medieval and modern, and the destruction of any semblance of independence for the peasant classes and its spiritual successor, the proletariat, meant that for money to attribute freedom to an individual, that individual must already hold a position of distinct power. Certainly, history is not unitary, and there are examples of money actually absolving populaces of extreme authoritarianism found within certain social structures, it cannot excuse the historical reality of the destruction of community ownership of land and the independence of classes of people [2] from the dominance of capitalism.

The allotting of wage labour relations allows for the attribution of freedom to certain people who control money. Other relations of monetary significance, such as mutual credit systems and community ownership, are pushed into the background or outright destroyed. Wage labour, and the primitive accumulation that created its fundamentals, acts as a barrier to the attainment of freedom. Equally, the monetary relations of creditor-debtor limits the potential of freedom that comes from money. Rather than freeing individuals from a system of skewed power, as suggested by Felix Martin and Mary Douglas, we simply go from the former into a new system of power, that of the dominance of capitalist organisation and the monetary relations that come from it.

With this, we see the fundamental issue of money, that of control. There are limits to power and freedom. They play around each other, reproducing certain techniques useful to those in power. All knowledge and its production constitutes a form of power, with it being a characteristic relation of people. Thus, placing this in the context of money, money will always exist and it will have corresponding power relations. But who controls it changes that correspondence. Spontaneously ordered control mechanisms [3] can develop that limit the ability of domination over others. A politics of resistance can be created, with control being vested in a more distributed manner. The Weberian struggle of existence in the market can be changed by its actors. The fundamentals of money are not solid truths, but rather characteristics of power that can be resisted.

The idea that money absolves the worst crimes embedded social relations does have a convincing history. “Money in its nature is essentially an instrument of freedom” [4], with the capacity to end authoritarian control by opening up the possibilities of trade and new socio-economic relations. Felix Martin paints a similar picture, showing that “traditional social obligations were transformed into financial relationships” [5]. A new ability to break free of traditional hierarchies, which enforced upon individuals and classes a certain position with which they would most likely never leave behind, meant that the value of man was no longer his societal role, but rather his capability to accumulate money [6]. With this came the early market “as the organising principle of trade, of prices as the instructions guiding human activity” [7]. Other values were subordinated to the totality of price and trade. What mattered was what a commodity was worth. Rather than the Polanyian matrix of commodification affecting social relations, ripping up the core of some peoples existence, there are “patterns of social domination, exclusion and hierarchy that markets sometimes act to break down” [8].

Its a rosy picture, but it doesn’t represent the realities of money. Certainly, marketised money economies have allowed for the breaking of caste and class systems which entrench inequality, but it doesn’t mean money itself doesn’t act as a control mechanism which can close doors for individual exigencies [9]. Simply looking at Martin’s analysis of the transformation of Athenian sharecroppers from feudal relations to monetary relations, there is a turn towards contractual tenancy via rents [10]. Federici noted a similar trend in feudal relations in much of Europe with the commutation of labour services, which led to the development of some peasants having more freedom, but for the poorer peasants it meant a radical change in their lives, leading to new class relations as lords and richer peasants could use poor peasants as a class of wage labourers, leading to a landless proletariat due to the need for poor peasants to go into debt to afford rents and harvests [11]. Thus money has a capacity to change social relations in the way of creating newer classes for exploitation.

The general history of the expansion of this cash nexus shows a further trend toward commodification and social dislocation. “Improvements…are, as a rule, bought at the price of social dislocation” [12], as seen in the enclosures. These are examples of primitive accumulation, the “expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the ‘New World'” [13]. Such things were codified by the creation of monetary relations through forces out of the control of those most affected. By separating the labourer from the means of production, making them reliant on wages, a monetary relation is developed that benefits the owners of the means of production. “The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production” [14] i.e. the historical enclosures in Western Europe and the colonies. Carson notes that fertile land in Kenya was stolen by the colonial authorities for cash-crops and the landless farmers were pushed into wage labour by a “stiff poll tax that had to be paid in cash” [15]. This type of monetary relation, the enforcement of a tax debt, was seen as the best way of creating wage labour, as it removed the Bukusu right to land that was a fundamental part of Kenyan society [16] and developed the type of landless labourers characteristic of post-enclosure Europe. The primitive communism that existed, with its mutualities and solidarity among labourers and peasants, as imperfect as it was, presented a reality of some control over life. The feudal village represented the seeds of an alternative to the hierarchies and control of feudalism [17]. Yet its destruction pushed forth new monetary relations and the removal of communal land, and with it the removal of real control of one’s socio-economic surroundings.

This an act of disembeddedness. The separation of an economy from its social structures, and with it the creation of a “market society” [18]. Cultural aspects of early mercantile capitalism suggest that while skewed power relations were part of non-market societies, capital’s domination was hardly a panacea relative to European alternatives developing in the Feudal era and the early capitalist era. Capitalist monetary relations engender separation, of worker from production, and of money from social relations. This entails modern wage labour, but also the creditor-debtor relation that allows for the wielding of economic power, such as with the introduction of the poll tax in Kenya. When one is in debt to you, you have control. Fundamentally, the issue of money comes down to control and who wields power. Money under capitalism does not entail freedom, but rather control which may create freedom, but also create despotism.

Money then becomes a system of control through which systems of power and domination are pushed. The relation of creditor and debtor is of central importance in maintaining this relation, allowing for the development of wage labour and dependence on a class of owners as seen in Europe during the enclosures and in the colonisation of Kenya. The ability for independence is curtailed. Such can be seen in the Price Revolution of 16th century Europe, where the large scale importation of gold and silver by colonial empires led to “a massive redistribution of wealth and a new proletarianization process” [19], with the destruction of real wages and entrenchment of poverty, leading to mass starvation and destroying the independence of the working classes. So when money and freedom are equated, the question is who has the freedom.

The eventualities of this transformation have now become commonplace. The development of an “entrepreneur of the self” [20], managing one’s own employability and indebtedness, allows for the relation of creditor and debtor to be maintained. Such an existence comes with shadows of economic certainties, such as liberty and wealth [21]. With value being measured relative to money, an idea of liberty is crafted by money spent on consumables rather than by a sense of economic control or action. Equally, wealth is seen as capital accumulated, usually from forms of speculation and rent, rather than through value creation in the real economy. Such ideas may encompass some concept of freedom, but only insofar as it is limited by those who create and control money. Money acts as a panopticon, inducing in “the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” [22], with freedom only a consequence of decisions and mechanisms one has no part in. With money, most is created by banks, the agents of capitalism, and the state, whose actions during the Price Revolution and the move from feudalism to capitalism show an authoritarian application of monetary relations.

Ingham has noted that capitalist money is a debt relative to the state’s ability to tax. Capitalist credit money specifically found its widespread adoption through the state using it as a tool of economic organisation in relation to tax debts. “As the largest makers and receivers of payments, and in declaring what was acceptable as payment of taxes, states were the ultimate arbiters” [23] of credit-money, using the means developed in trading networks for larger, colonial economies. This led to, in the case of England, a “coalescence of the interests of commerce and statecraft” [24], with which comes certain power relations being encoded. Thus both vested interests and tax debts are developed. With the latter, the violence developed is evident in the use of enclosures. These events were met with widespread opposition, particularly against new taxes on religious ceremonies [25]. Taxes codified new monetary relations which engendered the creditor-debtor relation, with the state as the overarching arbiter. This meant violence via primitive accumulation, expropriation of land and the destruction of traditional socio-economic institutions.

The banking system also has power relations that lead to centralisation. Banks have the capacity to create money with interest, meaning the “money supply must continually expand and the economy must grow” [26], pushing the limit of the Earth’s biocapacity. In the Polanyian matrix, this represents a disembeddedness as institutions that limit or socialise the needs for constant growth are marketised and put into monetary frameworks, reaching that shadow of wealth that Goodchild described. This leads to a disconnect of real world wealth creation and stocks and exchanges[27], and an inflationary environment that reduces the value of money, inflates land prices and negatively effects wages [28]. Power relations that benefit shareholders and bankers, the modern owners of the means of production, are developed, with workers wages being depressed in favour of the shadows of economic certainty.

Continual growth itself leads to consumption, which then leads to the indebtedness of modern economies as seen in credit cards, which are a microcosm of “permanent debt” [29]. Through interest, wealth is redistributed from “the population, business, and the Welfare State to creditors” [30]. Such a mechanism acts a system of exploitation, removing wealth from the real economy and into the realm of speculation and debt. These represent a new form of rent, extracting money from settled wealth rather than value creation, “a machine for capturing and preying on surplus value in conditions created by modern-day capitalist accumulation” [31]. It is no longer about capital production but about ownership and control.

What this shows is that the fundamental issue is one of control of money and its creation. Finance is a central part of an economy, “impossible to…separate from production” [32], much in the same way that power is a central social relation. “One is always ‘inside power, there is no ‘escaping’ it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned” [33]. Going back to the two circumstances of money, that of debt and remuneration, we see an “asymmetry of forces” [34] where power is held by those who are creditors, the modern owners of the means of production, separated from the realities of its existence as Marx described. Money itself has no necessary material value, but is rather a representation of socio-economic relations, and within those relations there exists power, particularly the power of subjectivation [35].

We can see this in the eye of the panopticon, where money “automatizes and disindividualizes power” [36] by creating the illusion of freedom in its midst. Freedom is not measured by economic participation or by value found in the real economy of production and labour, but by the capacity to earn wealth from speculation and rent. Large tracts of wealth are earned not from technological innovation but from financial speculation, intellectual property and other forms of rent [37]. The forces of labour, on the other hand, have seen stagnant wages relative to increased productivity [38] and have been subject to increased indebtedness through regimes of privatised Keynesianism. Within neoliberalism, there was the growth of derivative markets and stock options for the rich (forms of rentierism as Lazzarato describes) and credit markets for the poor and middle classes, as seen in increasing usage of mortgages and credit cards [39]. Increasingly debt-based economies allowed for further rentierism at the top and a restructuring of the welfare state at the bottom, leading to responsibilisation and the entrepreneur of the self, a kind of petty imitation of the rent of the rich.

By seeing this panopticism we see that money is a function of control. Its supply and its power relations are relative to the struggle of market forces as Weber described, as well as the struggle of political power. While the politico-economic elite can rely on tax revenues, interest and their positions as creditors and rentiers, the poor rely on continual indebtedness, whether it be in student loans, credit cards or mortgages. Such a dichotomy can most clearly be seen in the bank bailouts and subsequent QE programs, which served to leverage banks for more speculation rather than an injection of money into value-creating activities [40], while workers and the lumpenproletariat suffer with stagnant wages and increasingly unsustainable levels of personal and household debt.

To say freedom is the epitome of money is making a mistake in understanding the totality of what freedom encompasses. Dispossession of actual political or economic control is not made up by the capability to access a multitude of consumer goods, or to own one’s home through a mortgage. These are shadows of liberty, masking that lack of control, and showing a capitalocentric discourse, one of “a heady mix of freedom, individual wealth, unfettered consumption, and well-being trickled down to all” [41], which doesn’t reveal the totality of what money is. It goes back to Douglas’s argument of money as freedom. She also noted it as a form of control, and contrasted it to coupons, nominally control systems but that have an equally spontaneous development like money [42]. What coupons show is that money under different systems of control can allow for freedom. Money need not be a totalising concept conscripted to centralised power in the form of capitalism or the state, with compound interest or the necessitation of primitive accumulation to engender relations of wage labour. Rather, money can be relative to socio-economic relations, expressed in debt forgiveness, mutual credit clearing systems, time banks or local currencies. Here power is vested in those who use the money and create value within it. Rather than a tool for speculation and rent, and a power relation that codifies both the wage labour and creditor-debtor relation, money can be representative of distributed power relations, as in participatory citizenship or local market structures. Finance and power are an ever-present part of life. They are inescapable socio-economic realities, but that does not mean they cannot be used for freedom. However, money, as seen and defined today by capitalist class relations, is not an act of freedom. The latter is not an attribute of the former. The dichotomy of commodified money on the one hand and non-commodified on the other is frankly a false one. Money is imbued with social relations and issues of governance, but equally with a need for a medium of exchange. Thus a matter of freedom is not a matter of whether money is commodified or non-commodified, but about who has control, and whether that be in the area of pure spontaneous order or of spontaneously ordered control mechanisms.

Notes: 

1. Ingham, G. 2004, 67
2. Federici, S. 2004, 9
3. Douglas, M. 1967, 120
4. Douglas, M. 1967, 120
5. Martin, F. 2013, Chapter 3
6. Martin, F. 2013, Chapter 3
7. Martin, F. 2013, Chapter 3
8. Holmes, C. 2014, 528
9. Douglas, M. 1967, 121
10. Martin, F. 2013, Chapter 3
11. Federici, S. 2004, 28-29
12. Polanyi, K. 2001, 79
13. Federici, S. 2004, 63
14. Marx, K. 1887, 507-508
15. Carson, K. 2008
16. Ndalilah, J. 2012, 282
17. Federici, S. 2004, 72
18. Polanyi, K. 2001, 74
19. Federici, S. 2004, 76
20. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 94
21. Goodchild, P. 2013, 53
22. Foucault, M. 1991, 201
23. Ingham, G. 2004, 122
24. Ingham, G. 2004, 122
25. Wood, A. 2002, 50
26. Flomenhoft, G. 2016, 74
27. Flomenhoft, G. 2016, 75
28. Flomenhoft, G. 2016, 76
29. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 20
30. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 20
31. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 21
32. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 22
33. Foucault, M. 1978, 95
34. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 34
35. Lazzarato, M. 2012, 35
36. Foucault, M. 1991, 202
37. Jacobs, D. 2015, 18-21
38. Solow, R. 2015
39. Crouch, C. 2009, 390
40. Goodchild, P. 2013, 49
41. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006, 55
42. Douglas, M. 1967, 121

Bibliography

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Crouch, C. (2009). Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 11 (1), 382-399.

Douglas, M. (1967). Primitive Rationing. In: Firth, R. Themes in Economic Anthropology. United Kingdom: Tavistock Publications. 119-147.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.

Flomenhoft, G. (2016). Escaping the Polanyi Matrix. Real-World Economics Review. 74 (1), 98-123.

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Jacobs, D. (2015). Extreme Wealth is Not Inherited. Available: https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/dp-extreme-wealth-is-not-merited-241115-en.pdf. Last accessed 20 Apr 2016.

Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext.

Martin, F (2013). Money: The Unauthorised Biography. London: Bodley Head.

Marx, K. (1887). Capital: Volume I. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Ndalilah, J. (2012). Colonial Capitalism and the Making of Wage Labour in Kimilili, Kenya: 1900-1963. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. 2 (23), 282-290.

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Solow, R. (2015). The Future of Work. Available: http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-why-wages-arent-keeping-up. Last accessed 20th Apr 2015.

Wood, A. (2002). Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Last week, Governor Gary R. Herbert signed a resolution which declared porn a public health crisis in the state of Utah. This latest authoritarian move by anti-porn moralists has been defended by Utah state Senator Todd Weiler who said, “This isn’t just a religious moral issue. Some people want to make this about sex education; no boy or girl needs to see those images to learn how families are created.” And while we may agree that porn is not meant as a form of sex education, Sen. Weiler makes it clear by his statement that his views are indeed clouded by his religious views which see sex only as a way to create families.

The problem isn’t Sen. Weiler’s, Gov. Herbert’s, or any of the other anti-porn moralist crowd’s personally held convictions; it’s their right to believe in whatever religious or personal moral code they wish to. The problem lies in their attempts at the use of authoritarian power to enforce their personal morals on the rest of society. Now don’t be confused, this resolution is in no way legally binding nor does it create any new laws or restrictions. In effect, at the current stage, it changes nothing. In the past when such porn prohibition laws have actually been enacted, the courts have struck them down as violative of free speech. No, this resolution is part of a move by the anti-porn crowd to reframe their strategy entirely. Instead of focusing the legality of porn they are instead trying to label porn as an epidemic and declaring a state of emergency in which they can use pseudoscience and propaganda to convince people that restricting pornography is in our best interests heath-wise. Much like with alcohol and drug use, prohibitionists are only concerned citizens worried about your health, no matter the costs of prohibition.

This resolution, while being little more than a public statement in action, has the potential to open the doors for state repression of currently legal sex work, an industry that is populated by many marginalized women including transwomen and women of color. In fact, one of the authors of the resolution, Dani Bianculli, the director of the law center at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, has said that anti-porn activists from 10 different states have already contacted her to help draft legislation for their states as well. If this movement gains momentum, it could pave the way for larger prohibitions against the sex industry thus making it even more unsafe for some of the most marginalized workers in the market today.

This issue is about more than just free speech. It’s about the right of privacy and free trade. In an already extremely restricted market, porn is one of the few industries rapidly decentralizing. With easier access to cameras and millions of webcam, streaming, and other porn sites everywhere online, many people find it is an easy industry to break into with very little start up cost, thus offering them a chance to find employment and even self-employment. This is especially helpful to those who are kept from other industries due to systematic oppression. Make no mistake about it, this is about worker’s rights. Luckily at the current stage, Lee Rowland, a free speech attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union says it’s only, “an empty gesture.” But that’s no reason to let this go unnoticed and unchecked. Let’s quash this prohibition before it starts so it’s nothing more than just that.

Last week, I attended a local Fight for $15 rally with some fellow Wobblies and other union organizers and supporters. Echoes of rally cries demanding, “$15 and a union,” filled the streets outside of a local McDonald’s as fast food and child services workers from the Tampa and Orlando, Florida area, mostly workers of color, took to the streets and blocked traffic in an unpermitted display of solidarity for the struggles of working peoples everywhere. Tying their movement together with the movements for Black Lives and immigrant justice, they made sure to remind protesters and onlookers alike that this is a fight for all workers, including black and immigrant workers.

Their goal was, as most of us are familiar with by now, a push for a state and/or federal increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which they feel would allow them something closer to a living wage. Their reasoning is simple: these corporations are getting rich by systematic theft of resources, government subsidies, corporate-friendly legislation, and wage theft while the workers they employ have to work multiple jobs and rely on state welfare programs and private charity to survive. The corporate bosses make their fortunes on the backs of poverty stricken employees who produce the company’s products and the employees want to be fairly compensated for such labor, which they do not feel is happening.

When workers are limited severely in terms of self-employment and cooperative employment by means of occupational licensing regimes, zoning laws, anti-homesteading laws, artificial increases in the costs of resources, corporate-friendly business regulations meant to stifle competition, and the numerous other barriers of entry into the market, they are sometimes all but forced to work for these types of corporations which systematically steal from them, overwork them, underpay them, and subject to them to physical, verbal, and sexual harassment, and unsafe working conditions. It is because of this that laborers found the need to organize a movement in the first place. Collective bargaining is a means of survival in the marketplace against corruption and collective bargaining for higher pay is just one way of fighting back against systematic corporate theft from workers.

Critics of minimum wage will point out however that a blanket wage floor prices increase unemployment and hurt small businesses. And while the first claim is still being widely debated by all sides with studies supporting multiple conclusions, it is hard to ignore the cost to small businesses. While it maybe minor in some cases, in others the difference in pay rate could mean the difference between staying in business at a comfortable functioning level or struggling to afford enough labor to survive. Higher minimum wage laws make it harder for individuals and groups of workers to start new businesses, cooperatives, worker’s collectives, and other alternative models to compete with the current dominant market players. The goal of the labor movement shouldn’t be so much to make working for corrupt corporations slightly more manageable but to create better workplaces entirely, to drive the corporations from the market, and to create an environment where workers are treated with respect and are given control over their own lives and work. To quote Cory Massimino from his paper Why I Fight Against $15, “What’s needed is more competition… Competition is what destroys artificial rents. And that’s exactly what a new, worker-owned and -managed firm would introduce.”

So how are workers to fight for both survival in the here-and-now and long term victory against the capitalist-dominated market? Is this a win or a loss for libertarian workers? When our reformist band-aid that offers relief, aid, and hope to so many poor and marginalized workers possibly also threatens their future prosperity and escape from such oppressions, what are our options? Massimino, in the same essay quoted above, makes the somewhat bold claim that, “An across the board, one-size-fits-all, imposed wage floor is not “compatible with anarchist principles” like [Kevin] Carson argues,” and that may indeed be the case but does that mean that a fight to raise wages in general is against anarchist principles?

Taking a historical lens on the issue, Carson reminds us in his essay Why I Fight for $15 that, “Back in the late 19th century, the American movement for an eight-hour day included people from a wide range of political ideologies. Some favored federal legislation to achieve their goal. But the movement also included numerous anarchist tendencies, including individualist anarchists affiliated with the New England Reform League. The nationwide general strike for an eight-hour day was seen by some as a call for a government-mandated limit to the working day, but it was also a pressure campaign on employers.”

If we are to stand in solidarity with the current workers’ movement, we must show that we understand their issues and demands for dealing with them and will fight alongside them and when we do find areas of disagreement, we should strive to find common ground or alternative solutions. Well for that we can look to alt labor organizations for guidance such as OUR Walmart, the Restaurant Opportunities Center, Domestic Workers United, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

Charles Johnson explains the significance and achievements of the C.I.W.’s approach:

Founded in 1993, C.I.W. organized local strikes and protests in Immokalee, helping workers recover stolen wages and demanding increased piece rates. After some successes and a lot of stonewalling, they outlined a daring new strategy… In 2001, C.I.W. introduced a contractual pass-through program for companies to voluntarily and directly pay the cost of wage increases. They chose Taco Bell for their first target, and launched a bold, eye-catching campaign using sympathy protests, hunger strikes, pickets, and street theater, amplified by online activist networks and social media. Finally they worked with student groups in a hardball campaign to boot Taco Bell franchises from lucrative dining-service contracts on college campuses. Taco Bell finally conceded after four years of boycotts and 25 schools cancelling contracts. C.I.W. then quickly mounted and won new campaigns targeting McDonald’s, Burger King, Whole Foods, Subway, and seven other restaurants, supermarkets, and dining-service companies.

The Fair Food Program has paid off with $11,000,000 in increased income for Florida tomato-pickers, after three decades of stagnant wages, and new policies to curb assault, sexual abuse and unsafe conditions in the fields… Groups like C.I.W., the Restaurant Opportunities Center, OUR Walmart, and the Domestic Workers United dispense with formal unionization, sidestepping both the privileges and constraints of NLRB labor law, and employ deliberately non-state mechanisms — workplace activism, outreach to consumers, shaming protests, and pressure campaigns — to mobilize workers, provide social support and pressure companies for better pay and conditions. Alt-labor approaches have proven especially successful for workers excluded from NLRB recognition, or in sectors (like low-wage service or restaurant work) where AFL-style collective bargaining has proven difficult or impossible.

Fast food is one such industry often ignored by most business unions and the workers are thus left to find other means. And while the Fight for $15 movement is already part of the alt labor movement, itself foregoing the NLRB or traditional business unions in favor of more non-statist tactics, they haven’t divorced themselves from fighting for statist solutions. However C.I.W.’s strategy has done nothing if not prove that a broad coalition movement can indeed fight for higher pay against multiple of our market’s most dominant corporations and win, they themselves having already won contracts from Ahold USA (Stop&Shop/Giant Food), Walmart, The Fresh Market, Aramark, Compass Group, Sodexo, Chipotle, Burger King, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Subway, Yum! Brands (Taco Bell), McDonald’s, and Bon Appétit.

If the Fight for $15 movement took the same approach and demanded a $15 per hour wage from these corporations themselves, instead of pandering to the state, they could pressure McDonald’s, Walmart, and our other biggest minimum wage employers into their demands through similar tactics to what they’re using now such as solidarity pickets and informational campaigns with the help of social justice and civil rights allies, strikes, direct action on the job, etc., with other businesses following suit and doing the same to both save their public image and to appease their workers. This would allow workers to make strides company-wide through direct action against the ones responsible for exploiting their labor, affecting all employees who work for them nationally and potentially internationally, instead of state-by-state with limited success and the help of reformist politicians. It would also allow workers to get what they demand from the corporations that are exploiting them without making it more difficult for workers to form their own ventures to outcompete hierarchical and exploitative workplaces, thus making them obsolete and ushering in a new era of libertarian worker control.

As Johnson reminds us, “Alt-labor successes should remind us that freed-market processes don’t just mean free rein for employers to do whatever they please; they also include unregulated, worker-driven competitive pressures, voluntary labor associations, social entrepreneurship, and freewheeling social activism, as part of hard-driving competitive bargaining.”

For almost five years now, Reason has been shilling for a corporate-owned charter cities project (Zones for Economic Development and Employment, or ZEDE) in Honduras. A whole body of articles by Senior Editor Brian Doherty takes a consistently boosterish approach to the project, repeatedly using such language as “a freer economy or better legal institutions,” “clean slate for innovations in political and economic growth,” “laboratory for creating wealth-producing institutions that can then be replicated worldwide,” “freedom-friendly,” “libertarian space,” “unrestricted free markets.” Just site search “site:reason.com Doherty Honduras” and you’ll get a long — very long — evening’s reading material.

Doherty mocks critics of the project like Danielle Marie Mackey at The New Republic (“Honduras Charter Cities Spearheaded by U.S. Conservatives, Libertarians,” Dec. 14, 2014) for their apprehension that it might simply promote corporate extraction of wealth at the expense of the people of Honduras. In fact he describes a female journalist in Mackey’s story as “driven to vapors.” But Mackey’s apprehensions, based on the interests that brought the present government to power and the political context in which the ZEDE project has been promoted, strike me as quite justifiable:

Oscar Cruz is a silver-haired 64-year-old lawyer in Tegucigalpa. “The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything,” Cruz says. “They started to reform the Constitution and many laws — the ZEDE comes in this context — and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich.”

Doherty, in stating his hopes for the project, points out that Honduras is “a mess,” and repeatedly cites descriptions of the country as ridden by violence, corruption and organized crime; “free cities” owned by transnational corporations, he argues, might institute “good governance” and “rule of law,” enabling prosperity to take hold in place of the present chaos. The elephant in the room is that Honduras is corrupt and violent in large part because of the U.S.-backed coup that took place there — a coup brought about to promote the interests of the same white-knighting transnational corporations that want these charter cities.

You might think — as suggested by Doherty’s choice of a title for one of his pieces (“The Blank Slate State,” Reason, June 2013) — the charter cities movement is happening in a historical vacuum. You’d get the idea that Honduras and the rest of Latin America are corrupt and violent “just because,” perhaps owing to the unaccountable cultural vagaries or primitive character of the people living there, and that Western capital is finally coming to the rescue with its job-creating investments and experiments in cutting-edge good governance.

The fact is, though, that Latin America — like the rest of the global South — has had relations with global capital going back centuries. The countries of Latin America have been impoverished by the hacienda system (in which neo-feudal landed oligarchs mercilessly squeezed surplus labor from the landless and land-poor peasants), and by foreign corporate ownership of natural resources like the mineral wealth of the Andes. Local governments have violently repressed peasant activists and labor organizers, in the interests of the land-owning and employing classes. And for decades Latin America has been swept by wave after wave of military coups, backed by transnational corporations (and by the U.S. military and CIA), whose main purposes were to protect the existing ownership of land and natural resources from challenge and to keep labor in line.

Given such a history, perhaps Mackey’s suspicions that the charter cities might fit into this previous narrative should not be so quickly dismissed as vapors and megrims. And given the track record of the Disaster Capitalism model of “economic liberalization” in countries like Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia and Bremer’s Iraq, it’s not entirely unreasonable to wonder why this marvelous new project just happened to find fertile ground in a country whose right-wing government had just seized power by overthrowing the previous leftist government in a U.S.-backed coup.

Even if it did occur in a historical vacuum, and all the robbery, rape and plunder of Latin America by global capital had never happened, there are good reasons to view corporate-owned charter cities with some skepticism. Capital is one factor of production among several. Despite being unrepresented as an internal stakeholder in corporate governance, “human capital” — the tacit, job-related knowledge of workers, and the fabric of cooperative social relationships and horizontal transfer of knowledge they bring to the job — is the source of more productivity and equity value than the absentee-owned physical capital in many industries, and a major source of it in all of them. Although corporate management uses the myth of ‘shareholder ownership’ to justify denying worker
representation based on the value they contribute, in fact most large corporations are self-perpetuating managerial oligarchies that run the firm in their own interests and deliberately strip assets and gut long-term productivity to boost short-term earnings and game their own compensation. So there’s no literal conflict of interest in an alleged “free market” utopia in which all the laws and rules are written by one party, corporate management.

So these are the questions. They all boil down to “Will the charter cities reflect the exploitative historical context they’re situated in?”

And now an answer comes in: Yes.

The charter cities project is all about rhetoric cribbed from De Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital” about “rule of law” and “strong property titles” as a solution to corruption. But it turns out that the corporate promoters of this “free market” project are relying on the corruption and unclear land titles in that country… to steal land from peasants to build their charter cities on! According to Laura Carasik at Foreign Policy (“There Are No Peasants Here,” Oct. 23, 2015), the vast majority of land in Honduras has no clear title. Most peasant land is held under customary title not recognized by the state, which makes it easy prey for the landed oligarchy to seize — exactly the kind of thing de Soto wrote about.

Former president Zelaya was working on a major land reform that would formalize and register peasant communities’ title to their land. Yeah, that Zelaya — the one whose overthrow the U.S. backed in 2009. And the same government that’s promoting “free market reforms” like this charter cities project is also creating a friendly climate for the local patron to take over peasant land and build enclosing walls around it. The old landed oligarchy has been seizing peasant land right and left since the coup. And to top everything off, under the ZEDE law the government has the right to seize land by eminent domain (eminent domain, Doherty? really?) for creating these “free market” enclaves — seizures which Honduran peasants won’t even be able to contest or claim compensation for because they have no title recognized by the state.

In short, the ZEDE project, which purportedly aims to cure corruption by instituting the “rule of law” which is missing on account of “weak state institutions,” actually takes advantage of that corruption and those undeveloped institutions to get what it wants — by robbing people! Despite all the pious talk, the corruption is a feature — not a bug.

As Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” It turns out that, yes indeed, Honduras isn’t just some blank slate for experiments in neoliberal theory. Honduras — and the charter cities project — are still very much a part of the ongoing history of colonial and neo-colonial plunder.

Who could have guessed that a partnership between capital and the state, in a region where the state has a long history of violence to serve the needs of capital by murdering or robbing ordinary people, might turn out… to benefit capitalist interests by robbing ordinary people? Almost makes you suspect that “free market” projects carried out by the state in league with capital will inevitably amount to robbery.

Brian Doherty is the right-wing mirror image of the naive Leftists who take the Castro regime’s rhetoric about “socialism” at face value, seriously believing that genuine socialism and workers’ power can be implemented by an authoritarian dictatorship. There’s a libertarian sucker born every minute, and two right-wing dictators talking about “free markets” to take ’em. Perhaps Doherty should reread Jesse Walker’s classic “The Mad Dream of a Libertarian Dictatorship.”

Despite occasional articles denouncing “crony capitalism” in principle, Reason has a long history of endorsing things like charter schools, Michigan emergency managers “privatizing” common resources, and this ZEDE project — all of which are the epitome of crony capitalism if the term means anything at all.

It’s time to admit that “free market reforms” carried out by the capitalist state, at the behest of corporate capital, cannot result in anything but crony capitalism.

Joseph R. Stromberg discusses war and just defense.

Yves Engler discusses Canada’s version of Blackwater.

Uri Avnery discusses soldier A.

Carlos Latuff and Max Blumenthal discusses Bernie Sander’s recent comment on the last Israeli war in Gaza.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses why libertarians can win.

Jack Hunter discusses why Black Lives Matter doesn’t like Bill Clinton.

Paul R. Pillar discusses a book on humantarian intervention.

Ivan Eland discusses U.S. alliances.

Trevor Timm discusses why Bernie should bring up the Iraq War when discussing Hilary Clinton.

David S. D’Amato discusses a book on the Lochner court decison.

Matt Welch discusses why Trump is not a peacenik.

Jacob Sullum discusses sexual assault done in the name of the War on Drugs.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses John Kerry’s recent comments on Hiroshima.

George H. Smith discusses Kant and the natural law tradition.

Dan Sanchez discusses how to oppose the empire.

William J. Astore discusses words about war.

Uri Avnery discusses a possible way of resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Bonnie Kristian discusses why more troops to fight ISIS is a bad idea.

William Norman Grigg discusses police statism.

David S. D’Amato discusses the birth of the state.

Dan Sanchez discusses the knowledge problem faced by imperialists.

Ivan Eland discusses Ted Cruz on foreign policy.

Michael Brendan Doughtery discusses a new book about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Sheldon Richman discusses the fallacy of buy American.

Richard M. Ebeling discusses ending government run schooling.

Celeste Ward Gventer discusses a book on the war for the Greater Middle East.

Peter Van Buren discusses Afghanistan.

Sheldon Richman discusses a book on the rationalist and pluralist liberal traditions.

Franklin Spinney discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Marjorie Cohn discusses Hilary vs Bernie on Israel-Palestine.

For many years, I have encountered repeated references to Wendell Berry, the venerable farmer-sage of Kentucky: novelist, poet, essayist, philosopher and environmental activist. And I lazily assumed his writings to be in the category of things that are Good For You, but probably dull, like stodgy health food. But then I came across The Art of the Commonplace, a collection of Berry’s essays on what he calls “agrarianism”, and I found his writing electrifying. Berry has a well-thought-out, far-reaching, passionately articulated analysis of what is wrong with the prevailing political/economic/social system in America, which extends with minimal adjustments to much of the rest of the world. It’s different from the sort of political analysis typically seen at C4SS.org – not incompatible with it, but, I would say, complementary to it. I think it’s therefore fruitful to examine Berry’s political/economic/social philosophy from a freed-market anarchist (FMA) perspective, noting the substantial points of agreement, but also the areas where Berry’s agrarianism perhaps contributes something missing from FMA discourse, and vice-versa.

The Art of the Commonplace consists of essays dating from 1969 to 2002, on a range of topics including racial justice, sexual politics, the arts, religion, as well as Berry’s more central concerns: farming, land use, environmentalism, and economics. But despite the fact that many of the writings date from thirty-some years ago, all of them remain surprisingly timely. Running through them all is a single unifying premise: no society can remain healthy if it fails to care for the soil and water from which its food comes. And Berry presents compelling arguments that many superficially unrelated social ills can be traced to this central sin (yes, that’s Berry’s term for it). The problem lies in a constellation of attitudes, practices and technologies that Berry labels “industrialism”.

1. A little soil science. The starkest example of this industrialism is the practice of heavily mechanized, synthetic fertilizer- pesticide- and herbicide-based agriculture, which began in post-World War II America, and then spread to the rest of the world as “the Green Revolution”. We now know, as traditional farmers have long intuited, that healthy soil is a living thing: a complex ecosystem of growing and decaying vegetation, arthropods, nematodes, bacteria, fungi, as well as sand, silt, clay, water and air. The soil fauna and microbes constantly break down dead vegetation, making the nutrients within it available to the living plants, and storing extra nutrients in the form of humus, extremely complex carbon compounds.¹ But early twentieth century agricultural science made the facile assumption that soil fertility was a matter of supplying a few chemicals, basically nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, while the soil fauna and microbes were seen only as potential pests. The agrochemical industry was born, and with heavy government support, it quickly achieved a dominant role in what is now known as conventional agriculture. Monsanto and their genetically engineered crops are merely the latest installment of this grand industrial program. Synthetic fertilizers (derived mainly from petroleum) burn through the soil fauna and humus, giving a shot of growth to the crop, but eliminating the microbes and fauna that might help plants fight off parasites and diseases, and depleting longer-term soil fertility. Next season, the farmer needs even more fertilizer and pesticide, and s/he’s locked into a vicious cycle. The soil becomes little more than a medium for delivering petro-chemical inputs to crops. But without humus to hold it together, topsoil turns to dust and is lost to wind and rain. Carbon, previously sequestered in the humus, becomes CO₂, significantly contributing to climate change. Without enough vegetation to hold rainwater in place and evaporate it back into the atmosphere, desertification begins. Meanwhile, the farmer has been replaced by an agribusiness corporation. And if this corporation can no longer grow enough wheat in Kansas, it can grow some other cash crop in the not-yet-depleted soils of South America, or Africa. Farming becomes an extractive industry, like mining, using up resources that cannot easily be replaced. This is what Berry means by failing to care for the soil. We may not all grow food, but we all eat food; soil depletion therefore poses an existential threat to every one of us. We are now seeing the consequences of this depletion in steadily rising food prices.

2. Rootless in America. But the attitudes underlying industrialism have much deeper antecedents in American culture, originating in its colonialist inception. In ‘A Native Hill’, Berry relates an account from 1797, by one Rev. Jacob Young, of a party of frontiersmen constructing a road, near the site of Berry’s present-day farm in Kentucky, perhaps including some of Berry’s own ancestors:

They knew but little. They could clear ground, raise corn, and kill turkeys, deer, bears, and buffalo; and, when it became necessary, they understood the art of fighting the Indians as well as any men in the United States… That country then was unbroken forest; there was nothing but an Indian trail passing the wilderness… The company worked hard all day; in quiet, and every man obeyed the captain’s orders punctually. About sundown, the captain, after a short address, told us the night was going to be very cold, and we must make very large fires. We felled the hickory trees in great abundance; made great log heaps … so we warmed our cold victuals, ate our suppers, and spent the evening in hearing the hunters’ stories relative to the bloody scenes of the Indian war… Thus far, well; but a change began to take place. They became very rude, and raised the war-whoop. Their shrill shrieks made me tremble. They chose two captains, divided the men into two companies, and commenced fighting with the firebrands… They fought, for two or three hours, in perfect good nature; till brands became scarce… Some were severely wounded, blood began to flow freely, and they were in a fair way of commencing to fight in earnest. At this moment, the loud voice of the captain rang out above the din, ordering every man to retire to rest… We finished our road according to directions, and returned home in health and peace.

Berry observes:

The significance of this bit of history is in its utter violence. The work of clearing the road was itself violent. And from the orderly violence of that labor, these men turned for amusement to disorderly violence. They were men whose element was violence… And let us acknowledge these were the truly influential men in the history of Kentucky, as well as in the history of most of the rest of America… ‘They knew but little’, the observant Reverend says of them, and this is the most suggestive thing he says. It is surely understandable … that these men were ignorant by the standards of formal schooling. But one immediately reflects that the American Indian, who was ignorant by the same standards, nevertheless knew how to live in the country without making violence the invariable mode of his relation to it; in fact, from the ecologist’s or the conservationist’s point of view, he did it no violence. This is because he had, in place of what we would call education, a fully integrated culture, the content of which was a highly complex sense of his dependence on the earth. The same, I believe, was generally true of the peasants of certain old agricultural societies, particularly in the Orient.

Whereas the native people had transported themselves through and about this region for thousands of years using small trails, the settlers chose to make a broad road, presumably to facilitate the export of that first agribusiness crop, tobacco, or its successor, cotton. Whereas native people, on a cold night in the woods, would have built small fires, with temporary shelters around them to contain the heat, these settlers laid waste to the hickory trees and heated the whole outdoors around them.

The road builders, on the contrary, were placeless people. That is why they ‘knew but little’. Having left Europe far behind, they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it in a way that would produce the intricate knowledge of it necessary to live in it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to.

Berry’s verdict: “We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America.” And though the American populace has always included those who have attempted to settle down, to care for the land, to establish local economies and communities that the land could support – in short, to indigenate themselves – the prevailing culture of America (and certainly the elite culture) has always been essentially rootless, seeing the land only as a resource from which to extract wealth, and then pull up stakes and migrate west, or (a few generations later) migrate to the city, or (even more recently) migrate into the new managerial class, in obedience to the demands of ‘progress’ and economic self-betterment. The rootlessness of industrialism has perhaps reached its pinnacle in modern transnational corporations, which exhibit no loyalty even to the nation-states that have subsidized and protected them. It is mirrored by the doctrine of neo-classical economists, who insist that land must be viewed as simply a form of capital.

Meanwhile, the self-indigenated subcultures, such as the Amish, are scorned and marginalized as ‘backwards’. For along with rootlessness, industrialism as Berry sees it is characterized by a contempt for manual labour and small-scale projects – particularly the sort of patient, careful farming that is necessary if we are to farm in ways that enrich the soil rather than deplete it. Berry recounts a personal anecdote illustrative of the general attitude: having established himself as a respected writer and obtaining teaching jobs at several prestigious universities, Berry decided to return to Kentucky. A senior colleague took him aside:

‘Young man’, he said ‘don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ He went on to speak of the advantages, for a young writer, of living in New York among the writers and the editors and the publishers… His argument was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out. There simply could be nothing worth going back to… Finally, there was the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well because unknown or unconsidered by the people who really matter – that is, the urban intellectuals.

3. Industrialism and capitalism. What I now want to show is that Berry’s critique of industrialism overlaps highly with the FMA critique of capitalism. Berry’s vignette about the Kentucky roadbuilders, and their dispossession of indigenous peoples, is of a piece with, for example, Kevin Carson’s discussion of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, ch. 4.² As Carson argues, you do not get a capitalist system – i.e. division of society into a capitalist class, who own the means of production, and the remainder, who must work for them – unless the would-be capitalists first forceably seize a vastly disproportionate share of the society’s wealth, principally through state action. The extractive nature of capitalist enterprise, and its accompanying rootlessness, so eloquently lamented by Berry, is due to the capitalists’ ability, with state collusion, to forceably enclose the property of others, externalizing their costs of doing business, including inputs such as land and energy, or outputs such as toxic wastes. Berry points out that – unlike the self-regulating consumption of resources within a balanced ecosystem, or a sustainable human society within that ecosystem – for industrialists the question ‘How much is enough?’ can only be answered ‘As much as possible’. From the FMA perspective, this reckless, greedy behaviour is due to the same cause: capitalists, having externalized their costs of doing business (in the short term, at least), have every incentive to grab as much profit as they can, and call it an ‘economy of scale’. The dismissive attitude of Berry’s colleague towards rural folk is simply a manifestation of the hierarchical view of society that one must adopt in order to be ‘successful’ in capitalist terms, either outright success as a member in the capitalist class, or its poor step-cousin, success in the professional-managerial class, including academia, as an intellectual handmaiden of capitalism.

Berry’s critique here could, however, have been improved by combining it with Carson’s FMA analysis. How did Berry’s Kentucky frontiersmen, for example, come to be ‘placeless’ people, ready to do the bidding of the early US land speculators and their mercantile and slaveholding elite allies? These Scotch-Irish settlers were themselves forceably dispossessed of their land, their livelihoods, and their culture by the enclosures and highland clearances wrought by the proto-capitalist elite of Great Britain. In ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community’, Berry describes precisely this sort of economic dispossession, focussing on a community of northern English farmer/weavers in the late eighteenth century, in the parish of Hawkshead:

Before this time, idleness at a fellside farm was unknown, for clothes and even linen were home-made, and all spare time was occupied by the youths in carding wool, while the girls spun the ‘garn’ with distaff and wheel… The sale of the yarn to the local weavers, and at the local market, brought important profits to the dalesman, so that it not only kept all hands busy, but put money into his pocket. But the introduction of machinery for looms and for spinning, and consequent outside demand for fleeces instead of yarn and woven material, threw idle not only half of the family, but the local hand-weavers, who were no doubt younger sons of the same stock.

The result was that these ‘dalesmen’ had to mortgage their lands, and then lost them to the emerging capitalists. Not only their individual livelihoods, but their rich local culture was destroyed. But Berry here seems to accept that technological innovation, operating through market forces, was itself sufficient to ruin the Hawkshead weavers. He therefore adopts a neo-Luddite posture, hinting that some mechanism is needed for prohibiting the development or adoption of technologies which may prove socially harmful. But he never specifies in whose hands this prohibitory decision-making power would be lodged – to his credit, he has a clear distaste for authoritarian solutions – and so his critique ends up muddled and incomplete. Berry’s analysis could have been strengthened, and moved in a less technophobic and agoraphobic direction, by consideration of the range of violent and coercive measures that early English capitalists employed to force small farmer/weavers such as these Hawkshead dalesmen, or rather their children, into the textile mills, as chronicled by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, and as summarized by Carson in his discussion of primitive accumulation. It thus appears that technological innovation and market forces were not the primary culprits in the destruction of communities like Hawskhead: rather, it was old-fashioned state violence. Without this violent dispossession, these farmer/weavers might have adopted power-loom and spinning jenny technologies themselves within the framework of worker cooperatives. Or they might have developed alternative sorts of textile technology, perhaps better suited to the structure of their households and communities. We therefore don’t need top-down prohibitions on particular sorts of technology, we merely need to oppose and undermine the violence that threatens genuine free markets.

4. Mourning what has been lost. But if Berry’s critique of industrialism lacks a certain rigour supplied by the FMA perspective, I submit that FMA critiques of capitalism are often comparatively superficial, particularly in recognizing the cultural component of liberty, and its flip side, the cultural destructiveness of capitalism. In the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, we typically speak of liberty as something enjoyed and exercised purely by individuals. As the Hawkshead example above illustrates, there is something about industrialism/capitalism that leads it inexorably and systematically to commit cultural genocide. It takes as input economically autonomous communities, chews them up, extracting as much wealth as it can, and spits out atomized individuals, stripped of the rich cultural ties that gave their lives meaning, and of their ties to the land. It then forces these individuals to subsist in a new, bleak economic landscape, wherein their only possible roles are as employee and consumer, wherein their well-being or impoverishment is subject to the whims of distant, powerful economic decision-makers whom they do not know, and who do not know them. By way of comparison, observe the jovial sense of self-sufficiency and neighbourly generosity expressed in ‘The Farmer’s Toast’, a pre-industrial English drinking song:³

I have lawns, I have bowers, I have fields, I have flowers / And the lark is my daily alarmer. / So jolly boys now, here’s God speed the plough / Long life and success to the farmer.

Come sit at my table, all those who are able / Let me hear not one word of complaining. / For the tinkling of glasses all music surpasses / And I love to see bottles a-draining.

For here I am king, I can laugh, drink and sing. / Let no man approach as a stranger. /Just show me the ass who refuses a glass / And I’ll treat him to hay in a manger.

Let the wealthy and great roll in splendour and state, / I envy them not, I declare it. / For I eat my own ham, my own chickens and lamb, / And I shear my own fleece and I wear it.

Admittedly, there is something backward-looking in much of Berry’s writing, particularly his articles from the 1970’s and 80’s – a grieving for what has been lost. For Berry grew up in a rural community that pre-dated agricultural industrialization, and he experienced this loss first-hand. But such grief need not be a mere exercise in idle sentimentality. Today, nearly all of us are refugees of this cultural devastation, most without any memory of the pre-industrial community that is our birth-right as humans. Berry’s moving accounts of cultural loss can fire our imagination and desire for the cultural elements that we might work to restore.

5. Looking forward. Though Berry never describes himself as an anarchist, I find it significant that his most concrete prescriptions for remediating the harm of industrialization are not statist policy measures but agorist ventures. Indeed, Berry is acutely aware of the collusion between big business and big government. In ‘The Idea of a Local Economy’, Berry writes:

What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the ‘developed’ world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing and shelter. Moreover they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of ‘service’ that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals or households or communities… The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the ‘environmental crisis’ can be merely political – that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we have given our proxies to police the economic proxies we have already given… Communism and ‘free market’ capitalism are both modern versions of oligarchy.

Instead, he advocates the re-establishment of local economies, through Community Supported Agriculture ventures, farmers’ markets, and similar proposals. He suggests that the industrial capitalist elite are so preoccupied with globalizing the scale of their operations that they will not grasp the significance of this small-scale alternative economic movement developing under their noses. This is all strongly reminiscent of the anarchist IWW strategy of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old.’ A relocalization movement has since sprung up, under various names (de-growth, slow food, the hundred-mile diet, Transition Towns, permaculture), or under no name at all, all over North America. In my city of Edmonton – in the shadow of that vast industrial obscenity, the Alberta tar-sands – farmers’ markets and community gardens have proliferated within the past decade. Wendell Berry is, directly or indirectly, the intellectual father of this movement. There is no reason though that this relocalized economy should be limited to the agricultural sector, nor is there any reason for it to eschew sophisticated production technologies, such as 3-D printers, as Kevin Carson argues at length in Homebrew Industrial Revolution. With these supplementary provisions, Berry’s programme for social transformation becomes indistinguishable from that of Freed Market Anarchism.

I have a remaining quibble, though, with Berry’s notion of agrarianism, which he defines as the set of values, attitudes and practices that lead to proper care for soil, in contrast to industrialism. Fair enough. But at times he seems to conflate this agrarianism with the culture of rural Kentucky in which he grew up. He acknowledges that not everybody is meant to be a farmer or to live in rural areas. But he seems to hold up rural living as the agrarian ideal. It is worth noting, however, that the rural lifestyle in North America, with its isolated farmsteads, is quite aberrant in comparison to farming in the rest of the world; it is a consequence of colonialist settlement patterns.⁴ The more typical agrarian pattern, among indigenous peoples and old-world peasants, was/is one of farmers living together in villages and going out to work their fields and orchards, individually or in teams. There is something, I believe, salutary and essentially human, in living together. In any case, isolated rural living does not appeal to me personally at all. Cities and towns have the advantage, as Richard Register has noted,⁵ of maximizing opportunities for personal interaction while minimizing transportation costs. Whereas Berry, despite his general neo-Luddite stance, admits that he can’t enjoy any sort of social life in rural Kentucky without the regular use of a car. Moreover, there are sound reasons to grow food within cities as much as possible. Firstly, because that’s where the biggest market of consumers is. But secondly, because conventional agriculture has so depleted the soil of rural areas that urban soils are often healthy by comparison. The environmental problem with cities is not population density per se, but urban design which prioritizes cars over people. With a shift away from car use, large areas within cities could be de-paved and given over to food raising. Paris, for example, still has many urban market gardens, and until recently the city was largely self-sufficient in food production. In sum, Berry’s agrarianism need not be anti-urban. Rather, agrarianism must be brought into the city.

A final point concerns Berry’s observations on land tenure. C4SS.org recently had a mutual exchange symposium on this topic,⁶ but none of the contributions, including my own, addressed Berry’s concern. In brief, he argues that proper care for soil requires a long-term relationship between a particular farmer (or set of farmers) and the soil, flora and fauna of a particular place. The farmers must have intimate knowledge of the particularities of that place; they cannot practice one-size-fits-all farming methods; rather they must skillfully adapt their methods to the constraints and advantages of that place. This practice is not something that farmers could pay employees to do for them. Nor can their farm be so large as to preclude this kind of specific local knowledge. And the farmers cannot regard their stake in the land as something temporary, something readily alienable. Ideally, for Berry, a multigenerational commitment is required between a particular farming family (perhaps an extended family) and the piece of land. Berry does not go beyond identifying these sorts of desiderata, but if we take them seriously, they suggest a return to something like the mediaeval fee tail for agricultural lands.

The next few hours are going to define how Dilma Rousseff will leave office (the later vote in the Senate, if called upon, will be pro forma), but the rule of the Workers’ Party in Brazil undoubtedly has come to an end. The result of impeachment vote is of little importance: we already know that Dilma doesn’t have any legitimacy to stay President and that the nationalist project of the Workers’ Party (PT) is over.

There’s the temptation to ascribe the administration’s meltdown to contingencies such as Rousseff’s political inability — a carreer bureaucrat, lacking connection with grassroots social movements, unable to articulate the simplest negotiations. But PT’s failure was built over more than a decade, going back to the period before 2001’s electoral victory by Lula.

Despite being popularly seen as a primarily socialist party, PT was a patchwork of so-called “tendencies” and social movements stitched together. By the early 1990s, these tendencies and movements (led by the Articulation caucus) had come to the consensus that they should attempt to establish a “disciplined” capitalism. In 1993, large construction company Odebrecht began supporting the Workers’ Party, opening the floodgates for alliances with Brazilian businesses. By the end of the 1990s, the labor unions that made up PT’s grassroots had already occupied management spots in large pension funds, which were used to “privatize” state companies during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s tenure. By 2001, these had become very important players in Brazil’s economy, controlling large state companies and private monopolies that were created in the late 1990s.

When Lula was elected, PT’s project was essentially a fascist alliance between the Brazilian business elite, the labor union bureaucrats, and old political chieftains. It was a corporate Leninism, where the state controlled the largest chunk of available resources, distributed it among the elites, and kept any dissent on a tight leash. China was the model petistas dreamed of.

Until the end of Lula’s second term, the arrangement seemed to work. Brazil reversed the 1990s policies, closed off the economy to imports and placed heavy subsidies on national companies (especially through the state development bank BNDES). Low interest loans were granted to finance large scale mergers, creating monopolies in the country (so-called “national champions,” such as BRF, Fibria, Oi, JBS Friboi, among others). Agribusiness also became a loyal friend of the government, which protected the latifundistas from outside competition while propping them up inside the country via subsidized loans and price floors. Land reform had also become an afterthought for the left party. The high commodity prices in the 2000s sustained a large part of the Brazilian growth during Lula’s administration. Movements that had some voice within PT (such as the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Unified Workers’ Central) worked diligently to appease discontent.

Much like John Kenneth Galbraith, the Workers’ Party concluded that only an economy of large conglomerates controlled partially by each social stratum (workers, businesspeople, politicians) would be able to bring about growth and benefits to all.

That’s fascism in operation: it attempts to unite the national fabric under one umbrella, but it can only do so by smashing dissent. The idea of a nation justifies the coming together of all classes, which are, by their turn, represented by their elite only. In the Brazilian case, the workers were heard through labor union bureaucrats — who, under PT’s rule, were free to deal with large businesspeople and old politicians.

When the state’s bloatedness began to weigh on the country’s shoulders, public debt exploded, and growth faded away, PT’s authoritarian streak showed itself nakedly. We saw the violent removal of favelas for World Cup and Olympics public works; the military was sent to repress with protesters; the army occupied poor communities; the Brazilian police state started growing uncontrollably — the country’s prison population increased 7% each year from 2002 on, incarcerating primarily poor, black people.

Policies employed during the 14 years of PT in Brazil weren’t accident: they weren’t deviations, they weren’t a right turn after gaining power. The project was that. Lula worked diligently to solidify Brazil’s corporate state. Dilma Rousseff followed in his steps. Today, it’s a failed program — it’s unable to generate growth and allowed the gargantuan corruption schemes investigated by Operation Car Wash, which threaten to throw Lula in jail.

The greatest symbol of the PT years in Brazil is the Belo Monte Dam. Its construction, by a consortium composed of Odebrecht, Camargo Corrêa, and Andrade Gutierrez, placed workers in precarious as well as unhealthy work conditions for a long time. Workers were not represented in the labor union, which was controlled by the government. When they went on strike for better work conditions, the union promptly cut a deal to resume activities. It’s a perfect picture: actual workers against the unions, businesses, and government tag team.

Before Belo Monte, when Dilma was one of Lula’s ministers, popular leaders of the Xingu River Basin communities were welcomed in Brasilia to lay out their concerns about the dam construction. Annoyed by the objections she heard, Dilma Rousseff ended the argument punching the table and shouting, “Belo Monte is going to happen!”

Today, when deputies vote for the impeachment, remember that Workers’ Party didn’t come to this by accident. Their dream amounted to Dilma Rousseff punching a table and repeating “Belo Monte is going to happen!” forever.

In a recent op-ed (Karma tastes delicious in America’s new, humane economy, Washington Post, April 15, 2016), Kathleen Parker lauds what she sees as “a revolution…in the ever-more-dignified animal kingdom.” For Parker, evidence of the revolution is clear: From SeaWorld’s ban on orca breeding, to Armani’s discontinuation of fur-use in products, to Walmart’s promise of “cage-free” egg production by 2025, a “sweeping evolution” is taking place throughout America’s economy. This r/evolution is happening in corporate boardrooms across the country, Parker says, because executives understand that “humane treatment of animals and good business practices are not mutually exclusive.”

The only problem with Parker’s claim is that big business doesn’t give a damn about the plight of animals except where there is money to be made or preserved. The so-called Humane Economy is anything but. Like the criminal who abstains from violence based solely on the fear of being caught and punished, business executives implement “humane” practices in food production and entertainment industries only after having their hands forced, once their corporate balance sheets or forecasts are impacted by gruesome exposés on their practices.

See, even if a CEO finds within himself a newfound respect for animals, his compassion is only as good as its effect on the company’s bottom line. As soon as consumer tastes change, activism quiets, or competition eliminates the already razor-thin corporate margin, animal torture and exploitation will once again continue unabated. In fact, it would have to under any of these circumstances. CEOs and other corporate officers have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder value. If necessary, on the backs of animals. What these tweaks to the production process represent is corporate America’s realization that there are unrealized profits (or more likely, losses to be stemmed) in the bourgeois, upper-middle class, feel-good Humane Economy. To get a sense of how disingenuous the reforms are, consider that we still must give many of the companies vast amounts of time to “phase out” their exploitative practices.

Unlike racism, sexism, and many other historical forms of discrimination which have now become more structural than overt — speciesism endures as a bold and proud American tradition. Americans shamelessly consume animal flesh and byproduct three meals a day, watch animals in “performances” which require tortuous training, and gun down (often incapacitated) animals for sport, all without a second thought. Not one iota of consideration goes into the deplorable conditions in which animals suffer so that consumer tastes may be satisfied. So it should come as no surprise that there are companies willing to satisfy the grotesqueness.

Capitalism enables this depravity. The consumer’s product is conveniently divorced from its complex production process, essentially giving the finished commodity a fictitious life of its own. This commodity fetishism, to borrow one of Karl Marx’s terms, is part and parcel of today’s global economy. The final consumer good on one’s plate or draped on one’s back must be completely disconnected from the production process that’s brought it there, especially in the case of animal goods. The alienation process is a necessary smokescreen for barbaric animal agriculturalists. But consumers play a willing role as well. “I don’t want to know” has become an all-too-common refrain at dinner tables everywhere.

As usual, the state lags even further behind on animal issues. While corporate reformists can at least feign concern for animals with their soft reforms, the state continues to provide them with a lucrative safety net built into the law. Although animal cruelty statutes are now commonplace, they will remain largely meaningless so long as animals are classified as chattel property. Prosecution for animal cruelty requires violence so wanton and gratuitous that the assailant can come up with no legitimate reason why he “used his property” in the fashion alleged. Otherwise, a balancing test between the human and animal interests at play is generally applied. And it doesn’t take much to tip the scales in favor of the human. The result under our current animal-as-property regime is a foregone conclusion where the animal’s life and death interest interferes with a company’s stock price. How could it be any other way when one of the parties involved is mere property?

While we should never diminish actual improvements in the lives of earth’s most exploited beings, we should label these slow-drip Humane Economy reforms appropriately. They are too slow and not radical enough. Real progress will strike at the root of the problem — animals’ legal classification as property.

The rise of Donald Trump has led to a growing interest in what is generally called the “alternative right” in the United States — a group that could be more simply labeled “literate racists.” The “alt-right” resembles the French New Right and the German conservative revolutionaries in that they are not obsessed with corporate welfare, Zionism, and killing Communists and/or “Islamic-Fascists” the way Anglosphere conservatives are. Instead, the alt-right focuses on things like justifying monarchy, “scientifically” proving how stupid non-whites are, and dreaming about how to create a society defined by the kind of ferociously traditionalist social bonds that made up the antebellum American south, instead of the consumerist, postmodern wasteland we all inhabit.

These folks have been around for a while, it is just that nobody cared until Donald Trump started winning Republican primary after primary. But profiling them is not my intent in the here and now though — if you are really curious check out Radix Journal or The Right Stuff. What I would rather focus on is the unbearable and disgusting irony of anti-Trump Republican writers attacking the alt-right. Donald Trump has revealed the longstanding racist core of the Republican Party, and in their search for someone to blame Trump on so they needn’t look in the mirror, the country’s capitalist columnists have found the alt-right.

An excellent example is Ian Tuttle’s recent essay, “The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the Alt-Right” in National Review. Ian writes:

Most on the Alt-Right do not only reject the “conservative Establishment” or some other contemporary bogeyman; they also reject the ideals of classical liberalism as such. That rejection grounds the thinking of Jared Taylor, and Richard Spencer, for instance — representative “intellectuals” of the Alt-Right…. These men — the founders of the publications American Renaissance and Radix Journal, respectively — have not simply been “accused of racism.” They are racist, by definition. Taylor’s “race realism,” for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally — that is, biologically — different. Spencer, who promotes “White identity” and “White racial consciousness,” is beholden to similar “scientific” findings.

Republicans like Ian and the whole crowd at National Review obsess over their status as the “reasonable rightists,” the high-minded ones, the ones RealClearPolitics.com link to, the ones you could have a polite conversation with at a classy bar, the nice ones who know a lot about good literature like Tom Wolfe and Flannery O’Connor. A big part of this charade is that they are constantly attacking the people on their right who actually keep the Republican Party chugging along.

The trouble, of course, is that Ian and company don’t have any ground to stand on, whatsoever — and no amount of politeness, smart suits, or well-endowed think tanks and magazines can change that. Let’s take a look at the history of National Review, the publisher of Ian’s essay and a longstanding bedrock of America’s “intellectual right” that even good liberals like E.J. Dionne can’t help but like.

• Its founder and longtime editor was the late conservative icon William F. Buckley. Buckley was a huge fan of Joseph McCarthy, wrote a book defending him, and a few years later wrote a book defending the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
• In 1957 Buckley wrote in National Review, “The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Note the capitalization of the “w” in “white”.
• The same year, National Review gave a sympathetic interview with the notorious segregationist senator Richard Russell, where he said, “I know of nothing in human history that would lead us to conclude that miscegenation is desirable.”
• In 1964, on the anniversary of the Brown Supreme Court decision, an editorial in National Review stated, “But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named ‘civil rights movement’ – that is, the Negro revolt … But the Court carries its share of the blame.”

Naturally, the Republican argument here is that those were “the bad old days, when everyone thought like that!” This is of course a terrible, dishonest argument, but let’s pretend it has validity for just a moment and speed up to more recent times.

• In the 1980s and 1990s National Review regularly published Sam Francis, largely considered the intellectual godfather of America’s alt-right
• Throughout the 1990s, National Review’s senior editor was Peter Brimelow, the white nationalist. While at National Review, he spewed all kinds of hate at immigrants (inspiring Ann Coulter), so much so that they eventually let him go, allowing him to launch his own spectacularly hateful website, vdare.com.
• During Brimelow’s tenure National Review published “crime reports” by white nationalists like Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and positively reviewed his books.
• Not only did National Review help promote the notoriously racist Bell Curve, they also publish Charles Murray essays. In 2000 he wrote in National Review, “[W]hen we know the complete genetic story, it will turn out that the population below the poverty line in the United States has a configuration of the relevant genetic makeup that is significantly different from the configuration of the population above the poverty line. This is not unimaginable. It is almost certainly true.”
• Only in 2012 did National Review fire John Derbyshire, a big promoter of IQ differences, “underreported” black-on-white crime, and contributor to vdare.com.
• Right after Derbyshire was fired, National Review “realized” another one of their contributors was also writing for white nationalist publications, and fired him too.
• Despite that wave of firings, National Review still publishes columns “calmly and reasonably” explaining why it is okay to avoid black people when you’re out and about.
• National Review still publishes Mark Krikorian — head of the anti-immigrant think tank Center for Immigration Studies — who will cite white nationalists like Sam Francis in their pages, this happened in 2014.
• National Review also still publishes Jason Richwine, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation a few years ago for palling around with white nationalists and writing for a website literally called alternativeright.com.

Ian Tuttle and his posse might dislike Donald Trump because of his low-brow vulgarity, his dislike of the loathsome wars America launches, and his unwillingness to worship low taxes and corporate “free” trade — but Trump’s hateful racism is perfectly compatible with the Republican Party at large. The “reasonable Republican” that people like Ian desperately want to project is a myth, one that is propped up by a media invested in promoting never ending debates between “reasonable people who disagree” — a kind of infinite Brooks and Shields discussion.

The sooner people unmask the “center right” for what it really is, the sooner we can all move on from shadowboxing over John Locke and begin imagining a radically better world. Ian is no better than Trump supporters, and Democrats who enable this “reasonable Republican” myth are no better than Ian — only we are.

Mike Lindell, president of My Pillow Inc., seems like a nice guy, and I like his product. But he says something in his commercial that bothers me:

“Every part of my product is made in the USA.”

What could be wrong with that? Lots of things.

First, is it true? Lindell may really believe what he says, but I suspect that if he thoroughly inventoried his Chaska, Minnesota, factory, he’d find many things made (at least in part) by people in other countries. Since he says, “every part of my product,” he may be thinking in narrow terms. But what about every aspect of his production process? If he uses vehicles made outside the United States to transport his goods to a shipping center, his statement is inaccurate. If the grass on his business property is cut with a Japanese lawnmower or the coffee he provides his employees is grown in Colombia, his statement is inaccurate. In a global economy few things are the product of only one place.

But let’s assume Lindell is right. Would it really be such a great thing? No, not really.

His statement implies that buying only American-made parts is good not just for the particular Americans who make and sell those parts, but for all Americans — indeed for America as a whole. But that can’t be true. Sure, it is good for those who make the parts, but it’s bad for unidentifiable other Americans, and that means it can’t be good for the whole country.

Observe: if Lindell bought foreign-made parts, he would pay for them with dollars. But his foreign vendors can’t spend dollars in their home countries, just as Americans can’t buy groceries with Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, or euros. Foreign vendors, however, can use dollars to buy American products or invest in the U.S. part of the world economy. The only other thing they can do with their dollars is sell them for their home currency, but then the buyer of those dollars would face the same choice to buy American products or invest in the United States. (The so-called trade deficit equals the dollar amount of the investment in America that foreign exporters undertake. That deficit is no problem, Messrs. Trump and Sanders.)

So if Lindell really buys all his parts from Americans, other Americans lose out because some sales and investments don’t happen. When doing economic analysis, the French economist Frederic Bastiat taught, look for the unseen as well as the seen consequences.

I don’t mean to criticize Lindell. My point is that his implicit message — that Buy American is good for all of America — is untrue.

Lindell’s Buy-American policy raises other questions. Are American parts more expensive than foreign parts? If so, does he try to pass the higher costs to his customers? If so, he makes it harder for poorer Americans to buy his pillows. A higher price also puts his product — and therefore his company and employees — at a disadvantage in the marketplace. Does he think American consumers care where products are made? Whatever they may tell pollsters, what Americans really care about — judging by their actions — is the combination of price and quality. Let Lindell advertise: “Every part of my product is made in the USA — so we charge you more than our competitors do.” The response would be informative.

However, maybe he doesn’t pass along the extra cost. Maybe he accepts lower profits. If so, how does he improve his factory, increase employee productivity, and pay competitive wages? If his profit is lower, he also has less money to spend on other American and foreign products and less to invest.

Again, my point is not to criticize Lindell. It’s to show that he’s not helping America as a whole.

But now I must end on a critical note. When Lindell touts his Buy-American policy, he seems to be suggesting that Americans are more worthy than non-Americans. Is human worth really determined by which side of an arbitrary national boundary one was born on?

Trade among perfect strangers from all over the world is cooperation, trust, mutual benefit, and peace in action. Don’t we need more of it? Injecting divisive nationalism into commerce, however innocently, violates the true liberal spirit, which has bestowed incalculable blessings on the human race.

At Reason, Brian Doherty tears into Bernie Sanders for opposing what the latter calls “unfettered free trade” (“Bernie Sanders Hates The World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them,” April 5). “This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the long term: supporting their jobs and economies.”

Sanders is wrong — big time — about one thing: his characterization of the corporate globalization created by “Free Trade Agreements,” from NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT to the present, as “unfettered free trade.” But that’s a misconception that Doherty seems to share, framing Sanders’s stance as opposition to “allowing things to happen that will overwhelmingly benefit the less well off,” and wanting to “make sure no freely chosen action of any American could possibly benefit” the Third World poor “via trade.”

And in fact these so-called Free Trade Agreements” are all about protectionist barriers to “allowing things to happen that will overwhelmingly benefit the less well off.” Their central feature is not the reduction of tariffs, but imposing maximalist “intellectual property” standards — the main form of protectionism that global corporations depend on for extracting profits from ordinary people in both the Third World and here at home.

The whole point of these fake “free trade” agreements is not to “allow” trade to take place, but to put it under a global corporate lockdown. Even the language of “trade” between America and other countries, as if Chinese-owned industry exported goods to America and vice versa, has an archaic ring to it. In reality, the majority of world “trade” is not trade at all, but an administrative action:  the shuffling of raw materials and goods within transnational corporations between their subsidiaries in different countries. And free trade — the genuinely free exchange of goods between actual producers — is precisely what they’re designed to prevent.

Their strong patent and trademark provisions serve exactly the same protectionist functions for transnational corporations today that tariffs did for the old national industries a hundred years ago: They give the corporation a legal monopoly on disposal of a given product in a given market. Because of these protectionist restrictions, a global corporation is able to make money, not from actually producing things, but by controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to produce and exchange with each other. It is able to contract out all actual production to Third World sweatshops, pay next to nothing for the goods, and then use its legal monopoly on disposing of the product to gouge Western consumers with a thousand percent price markup over actual cost of production.

These so-called “Free Trade Agreements” also protect global corporations in their ownership of the land, oil and mineral resources that were looted from the Third World under centuries of colonialism.

Transnational corporations play the same role that free market radical Thomas Hodgskin ascribed to capitalists in his 1825 tract “Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital”:

“Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share…. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence. ”

And it’s the monopolies on the free movement of information and artificial titles to stolen resources, enforced by these “Free Trade Agreements,” that enables the corporation to occupy this usurped position. (The fact that free market libertarians have gone from Hodgskin’s jeremiads against the plutocracy in 1825 to Doherty’s apologetics for them in 2016 tells you, by the way, everything you need to know about who owns the mainstream libertarian movement today.)

Here are some of the actions that aren’t “freely allowed,” thanks to so-called “Free Trade Agreements”:  A factory in China isn’t able to produce identical copies of the iPhone or Nike sneakers and sell them directly to the local market, without an enormous trademark or patent markup. People in Africa can’t produce cheap generic forms of life-saving AIDS drugs because they’re under patent. People in Shanghai, Nairobi and Mexico City can’t legally copy a CD or DVD and sell it cheaply — in fact the proprietary content and software industries even harass governments, under “intellectual property” accords, for using open-source software like Linux in preference to Windows. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the Third World are unable to feed themselves on the land that they or their parents or grandparents were evicted from, by neo-feudal landlords acting in league with global agribusiness corporations, because that would violate the “private property” of the thieves (and it’s largely these landless robbed people, by the way, who are forced to accept sweatshop jobs on whatever terms they’re offered).

Bernie Sanders is right that “Free Trade Agreements” exploit working people — in both the United States and overseas. He’s wrong — very wrong — to call it “unfettered free trade.” The global corporate economy is the very definition of “fetters.” What we need to do is abolish all the fetters — the legal monopolies, subsidies and fictitious titles to stolen loot — that enable global corporations to control trade. And if Brian Doherty, wicked man that he is, truly wants to allow all freely chosen actions that help the world’s poor, he should demand repeal of the protectionist “Free Trade Agreements” that allow global corporations to impede production and exchange outside their own control.

Capitalism’s relation to spiritual attitudes and ideologies has historically been hostile. The use of magic and the holding of pagan beliefs in peasant communities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was mercilessly crushed, as they were seen as a belief systems that removed control from the mercantile elites and prevented the mechanistic control needed to create a class of wage labourers[1]. Along with the enclosure of the commons, and the warping of gender relations to fit new roles created for the purpose of capital accumulation, this is an attempt to engender new relations into the socio-economic sphere.

While seen as an historical process, enclosures and the processes of accumulation have continued in the developing world, particularly in South America, where during the neoliberal turn in economic governance in the 80s, the repression and economic failure that followed it became known as the “lost decade”[2]. We’ve seen the creation of a landless proletariat and massive inequalities in land and wealth ownership. However, even with the dislocations and destruction that has followed these privatisations, they’re regularly presented as a small cost that’s outweighed by larger benefits. Thatcher’s statement of there being no alternative is invoked.

This is far from the truth. In the realms of tribal knowledge and spirituality, and a connection to the land through different socio-economic conceptions, we see the roots of an alternative economic system that can challenge the dominance and discourse of capitalism. Buen Vivir represents such an alternative. It encompasses a realm of socio-economic knowledge that is ignored or even colonised by the processes and discourses of capital. Rather than relying on ideas of modern economic development that requires centralisation and rigid control, Buen Vivir advocates a different understanding of economy centred around communities and a revitalised commons. Smaller economies with less consumption and a better understanding of social and environmental costs. This represents a turn away from neoliberal capitalism, with a wider understanding of human subjectivities rather than the typical homo economicus, placing it in a larger area of social relations that understands nature as imbued with spiritual knowledge, a commons of shared information, a confederation of ecologically aware beings and environments.

The emphasis on different concepts of an economy links with ideas of alternative knowledge and ontology. These ideas redefine economy and political authority, distributing it and making it participatory. The praxis of Buen Vivir shows the capacity for variable forms of knowledge and power. Further, by understanding the religiosity of capitalist discourse, we see how religion-based alternatives can themselves combat the objectivities of capitalism.

Finally, by looking at Federici’s contention that capitalism was a regression for the peasant classes (particularly lower class women) that removed their agency and control, we see parallels with Buen Vivir as an alternative similar to the alternatives Federici presents as combating feudal relations. Processes of enclosure and debates over the realm of communal property are happening in Latin America as they were in Europe from the 14th century. The religiosity and mutuality present in peasant communities at that time are seen in the landless communities of South America. Buen Vivir is fighting against the totality of capitalism and its transition toward its neoliberal form, presenting a picture of an alternative economy. But Buen Vivir is not a totality, but a representation. “It describes a way of life and a form of development that sees social, cultural, environmental and economic issues working together and in balance”[3].

Buen Vivir places a different perspective on what constitutes an economy. In particular, it places the realms of spiritual knowledge on the same level as economic knowledge and capitalistic value. It is “structured by a specific vision of what is to live well, of what a good society is about, and they seek to embody that vision in a specific set of practices”[4] rather than simply a utilitarian look at modern capitalist practices in relation to the environment and indigenous communities. In this sense Buen Vivir is opposed to viewing nature and the economy as individualistic systems that need to be owned and appropriated. Rather than a belief in natural capital, a popular expression found in corporate social responsibility and forms of ‘environmentalist’ capitalism, there is a desire for “collaborative consumption and the sharing economy”[5]. Instead of seeing a society of individuals, collectives are perceived as the major economic variable. What is important are the communities and unique environments individuals find themselves placed within[6]. This is best summed up in the idea of suma qamana, the “harmonious balance between material and spiritual components”[7]. Such knowledge can only exist within a broad community of sociality and ecology. This community is placed within ayllu, the idea that wellbeing encompasses not just humanity but also animals and crops[8].

This bears relation to Bennett’s idea of nature and society conforming into confederations of beings[9]. It breaks the dualism of nature and society which assumes control by the latter over the former, fitting the capitalist role of controlling resources rather than owning them in common. The cultivation of openness put forward in the idea of confederation of nature acts as a form of modern commons in relation to the spiritual-environmental sphere. From this we can see an ecological-spiritual-political commons, whereby the working together of different groups through shared meanings allows for non-recalcitrant behaviours to come to the fore. Within this broad polity, shared meanings can constitute shared understandings of the spiritual realm, that of religious experience and with it shared politico-economic experiences. Thus an alternative to the modes of capitalism can come about from these experiences. Further, this doesn’t constitute a totality of experience but rather a heterogeneous field of perception and resistance. Similar ideas exist in the realm of interpreting the Holy Spirit as a “mystical communalism”[10], a commons of shared spiritual knowledge. Religious experience is emphasised within “humans’ relational ethos of agapic love”[11], in a similar way to how nature and its confederation is experienced through the communal and spiritual in Buen Vivir.

In its praxis, Buen Vivir shows how a lack of a totalising narrative is a strength, as it doesn’t rely on a colonisation of certain ideologies or knowledge but rather depends on linking up different conceptions of modernity and economy into an alternative. It combines modern elements of sociological thought with traditional, tribal knowledge in Andean communities. This is expressed in concepts of post-development and deep ecology[12]. Within this, the foundation of modernity and its rationality are questioned and “critical perspectives on development, originated from different ontologies, meet and interact”[13]. Assumed objectivities of society, such as the market economy and the direction of economic growth, are challenged from multiple perspectives. From this, the fundamental notions of power and what constitutes the realm of accepted knowledge become debated. The objectivities and subjectivities of capitalism, represented by its locational variables and widespread discourses respectively[14], are pushed into the dominion of questionability not through a totalising alternative but through a multitude of discourses, ranging from “indigenous belief systems” to “western critiques [of capitalism]”[15].

Milbank has made the point that because of the religiosity of capitalism’s existence[16], only an alternative that expresses religious and spiritual knowledge can combat the totality of capitalism. Going from Milbank’s analysis, we see the possibility for different alternatives in different areas of space-time. Capitalism is “theoretically rational and indefinitely feasible”[17], meaning that universal truths cannot simply combat the discourses of capitalism. Rather multiple options, “a ceaseless imagining of…possibilities”[18], are found to oppose capitalism. Buen Vivir shows this in its treatment of different forms of knowledge. Not looking for universal truths, but rather for subjectivities from which can be constructed a multiplicitous alternative, whether that be in traditional knowledge, modern critiques of capitalism or a combination thereof. Milbank makes an analogous point, stating that “processes of ‘tradition’, the gradual development of a common cultural outlook, and collective purpose develops through seeing what is possible at specific historic junctures”[19]. A universal authority or form of knowledge is more an illusion of ideology that a constructive reality. Buen Vivir’s ontology shows this, relying on the cultural background of South America and its historic relation to neoliberalism.

This process of cultivating such a truth within capitalism is a significant part of its history, both in its subjectivities and objectivities. In terms of an ideological trend, early capitalism took from Cartesian mechanics an understanding of the body and nature as conquerable by forms of rationalism. They have fundamental laws that can be understood and used. Forms of magical understanding of the body and nature are removed, capturing them in a “system of subjection”[20]. What comes from this is the theory of an individualised, self-managed body[21]. Humanity is disconnected from the wider community and mutualities of life. It’s difficult to classify the human as purely individual when “we are made up of its”[22], such as communities of cells and biological components. Thus to make the human mind and body mouldable to the “exercising of an unlimited sovereignty”[23], we see a history of extreme violence. The enclosures and the witch hunt represent the epicentre of this accumulated violence. Due to the historic independence cultivated by the peasant classes (themselves an early proletariat) through high wages and significant control of crafts and other industries in the early Middle Ages, a threat was presented to the established order of the elites of the time. Capitalism’s objectivity then took the form of presenting wage labour and the elimination of traditional forms of work and living as natural consequences of Enlightenment thinking and the train of progress. Yet the reality was the holding of power from feudalism to capitalism. This historical epoch was a regression away from bottom-up authority and power toward maintained control from the top. In a similar manner, the modern period of “intense techno-scientific transformations” shows ecological confederations and spiritual knowledge systems being destroyed “by the gangrene of mass-media consumption” and a “standardization of behavior”[24]. Capitalism’s ontology requires the destruction of such mediums as otherwise they present choice in a sea of uniformity.

However, because of the violence imbued in such objectivities, they are open to contestation. Due to the religiosity that surrounds capitalist thought, with its requirement of a “dogmatic cult” of utilitarianism and its concretisation via an understanding of its existence as immortal and unbending[25] (as seen in Cartesian mechanics and Lockean theories of property which proffer an understanding broken from history and reliant purely on theory), the objectivities that make it up are held as “outside of known fact and subjective grasp, a mystery, a matter of interpretation”[26]. Rather than the origin of private property being seen in the subjective realities of everyday experience during the Enclosures, Lockean ideas provide a mysticism of origin, with property being voluntarily removed and held out of the commons of land. Similarly, Hobbesian governance relies on the mystery of a time of all against all, with no basis for trust and law. The religiosity of capitalism comes from its capability to mould social relations out of its economics. These relations are formed in terms of their monetary significance via credit and debt. Within this, the capacity for a social relation is that of power and guilt. Power over one who owes you a debt and guilt for the feeling that this debt may not be repaid. A form of psychological peonage is cultivated, with the “reform of being” no longer important, but rather its “obliteration”[27] at the altar of Mammon. The importance of accumulating money to maintain semblance of authority becomes the centrality of life. Now these ideas are not known truths, but theories. And like all theories they can be challenged. Thus as Blencowe shows, the basis of authority relies on their interpretation[28] of what constitutes the fields of biology or economy. The ideas of objectivity anchor “specific commonalities, solidarities, of experience”[29] in a realm of contested knowledge. Capitalism does not the hold the field of hegemonic reality. While capitalocentric discourse has attempted to colonise the field of economic objectivity[30], the reality is that neoliberal forms of governance rely on control mechanisms to hold the sway of reality and authority, engendering inequalities of power. Buen Vivir opens up this capitalocentric discourse to scrutiny, and cultivates new forms of knowledge and praxis that remove its objectivities as forms of absolute truth.

The realities of capitalism means an unequal implementation, leaving some “at an impassable distance from reality”[31], but with the capability of an alternative fulfilling the role of mediating objectivities like economy and biology for those excluded. These exclusions allow for new forms of knowledge to grow, as well as the rediscovery of ancient knowledge. A multitudinous version of knowledge and value comes through this, with Buen Vivir’s collation of different knowledge-forms. These conceptions of traditional knowledge cultivated in localities that house economic alternatives present a fundamental issue for capitalism. They cannot be infected by capitalocentric discourse. “These ‘primordial images’ or ‘archetypes,’ as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious”[32] coming from tradition and spiritual excitation, much in the same way Buen Vivir develops its knowledge from traditional and modern sources, ignoring neither economic nor spiritual conceptions. If we understand capitalism as encompassing the social factory, simply reproducing the act of mass consumerism, it doesn’t allow for the collective transcendent and denigrates the idea of community. Knowledge is transformed as an individualised process of exploration and control. But what Buen Vivir does is re-embed these products of sociality back into their constituent social relations. What is present in this is the construction of authority, “the reality of a community”[33]. By this construction of authority, new power relations become codified which challenge the predominance of capitalist ones, creating new socio-economic relations through a cultivation of different knowledge structures. The way Buen Vivir does this now, through a combination of modern and indigenous, is similar to the facets of resistance Federici shows as prevalent in the development of capitalism in the Middle Ages, acting as a form of resistance against its regressive forces.

Historically, peasant communities had a deep connection to spiritual forms of knowledge. At this time in the Middle Ages, “the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism”[34]. All elements of life, all organisms, represented a community of nature, each component with special powers within it. Buen Vivir, with its idea of a commons of life and knowledge from all beings is a modern reiteration of such traditions. Things like land and the body were seen as spiritual embodiments. Religious life itself was something of a pastoral mutuality between the church and the community. The church acted as a community center. But rather than that of a statist pastoralism (of recording, collecting and coercing) the connection was in some ways reciprocal, reflecting ingrained mutualities. Similarly, in the realm of ontology Buen Vivir attempts to hold the same mutualities between collective tradition and the conditions of modernity, which one holding the other in non-capitalist structures. Rather than celebrating this as some ahistorical panacea however, what I do see is the capability of religion to provide a decentralised pastoral power through the means of a political structure that shared the commons of life and politics with those in that society. Such conceptions can be thought of again as an alternative to modern neoliberal capitalism. Further elements like this are seen in the way nature was viewed by peasant communities. Their views constituted “a qualitative conception of space and time”[35] which didn’t fit in with capitalist concepts of wage labour.

Thus the need for capitalist forms of organisation to end these alternative perceptions became important, as seen in the land enclosures, social enclosures (which meant criminalising peasant community forums and protests, such as the sabbat) and the witch-hunt. However, the social resistance that came against these forces shows the capacity for religious alternatives to develop and sustain themselves. The heretical movement gave way to new ideas of worker control of industry and craft[36], as well as new sexual relations more in the way of egalitarianism than dominance. Many of these were hedged in ideas of church reforms which wanted to eliminate Catholic hierarchies and make a church that worked with the people, something that already in the idea of the church as a community center. Even into the late Tudorian era the protests continued, waging against the dissolving of the monasteries and opposition toward taxes on christenings and marriages[37]. What can be seen is the capability of religion to help construct new narratives of economy and society. They were only defeated through extreme forms of violence encapsulated in the legalisation of rape against peasant women[38] and the witch-hunts which remade sexual politics and relations from the Middle Ages on.

Like the alternatives that developed that allowed for early of forms of non and anti-capitalist political and economical practices, Buen Vivir holds a position of crafting alternatives in a multiplicitous, multifaceted manner. It takes positions against modern mass consumerism, which engender mass production and the mercantilisation of the worker[39]. It looks toward the distribution of power and knowledge to participatory bodies and institutions of governance and community, much like some of the Christian socialist ideas of “a clerisy of all citizens”[40] with constitutive social hierarchies and mutualities. Knowledge and power is informed by active citizenship in the ecological confederation.

Fundamentally, Buen Vivir encapsulates not a totalising narrative of utopian socialism like that of Fourier, but rather a reconceptualisation of society along different economic and moral lines. It moves away from the individualisation and responsibilisation of society. Rather than a marketised view of what inhabits the economy, it looks at things like social and economic costs, and the happiness and cohesiveness of communities rather than the productivity level of a worker.

By understanding the religiosity of capitalism, funnelled through debt-based guilt and a servitude to Mammon, to money and the consumables it can purchase, we see that the objectivities that embody capitalism are not simply rational and guided by pure laws. While containing some of Cartesian mechanics, their actual implementation is much messier and more violent. The objectivities that guide, such as market logic and private property, are simply theories of perfect conditions rather than descriptions. The actual origin of such concepts is shrouded in ideas of a mythical beginning from either an anarchic, war-like society of all against all or a society where commons slowly transitioned to private property through voluntary means.

But of course because these are so contestable as theories, alternatives can easily develop which can change fundamental socio-economic narratives and thus realities. Authority can be reconstituted back toward the level of the communal. This is what Buen Vivir attempts to do. In South America, the lost decade entailed the destruction of peasant ownership and the emplacement of the haciendas. Buen Vivir presents a realistic alternative that draws from traditional knowledge and practice and combines with new ideas in the realms of economic and social commons. It entails the re-commonising of life for peasant communities, and a new discourse of the fundamental parts of what is economic development that moves toward understanding humanity and nature as a harmonious, spiritual whole, a confederation of experience and religious ideology that encompasses the realm of the tangible and spiritual.

[1] Federici, S. 2004, 173-174

[2] Rowland, C. 1999, 23

[3] Balch, O. 2013

[4] Deneulin, S. 2012, 6

[5] Balch, O. 2013

[6] Balch, O. 2013

[7] Gudynas, E. 2011, 444

[8] Gudynas, E. 2011, 444

[9] Bennett, J. 2010, 99

[10] Scott, P. & Cavanaugh, W. 2004, 379

[11] Scott, P. & Cavanaugh, W. 2004, 380

[12] Gudynas, E. 2011, 444

[13] Gudynas, E. 2011, 447

[14] Shaw, C. 2016

[15] Balch, O. 2013

[16] Milbank, J. 1988, 15

[17] Milbank, J. 1988, 15

[18] Milbank, J. 1988, 15

[19] Milbank, J. 1988, 15

[20] Federici, S. 2004, 140

[21] Federici, S. 2004, 148

[22] Bennett, J. 2010, 113

[23] Federici, S. 2004, 148

[24] Bennett, J. 2010, 113

[25] Benjamin, W. 1921

[26] Blencowe, C. 2013, 23

[27] Benjamin, W. 1921

[28] Blencowe, C. 2013, 23

[29] Blencowe, C. 2013, 16

[30] Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006, 55

[31] Blencowe, C. 2013, 24

[32] Jung, C. 1960, 229-230

[33] Blencowe, C. 2013, 13

[34] Federici, S. 2004, 141

[35] Federici, S. 2004, 142

[36] Federici, S. 2004, 21-61

[37] Wood, A. 2002, 50

[38] Federici, S. 2004, 48

[39] Balch, O. 2013

[40] Milbank, J. 1988, 6

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