On the libertarian Right — including Reason, the magazine for “free minds and free markets” — you hear a lot of lip service to opposing something called “crony capitalism.” And they periodically trot out the Ex-Im Bank or federal insurance for beach homes as their standard throwaway examples. But for the most part they love it. Reason writers enthused over crony capitalist water utility policies by the “emergency managers” in Michigan — until after the Flint scandal erupted, when they backpedaled faster than Michael Jackson (“that’s crony capitalism, not privatization”). They defend oil and gas pipelines, which couldn’t exist without stealing land via eminent domain and imposing regulatory caps on liability from spills. They defend corporate-owned “charter cities,” straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia, build on stolen peasant land (with the help of regimes established by right-wing military coups). And of course, they absolutely love charter schools (Nick Gillespie, “Why We Need School Choice,” Jan. 23).

Let’s get something straight. If charter schools don’t meet the definition of “crony capitalism” — politically connected, for-profit corporations getting their revenue stream from the taxpayers — then nothing does. Charter schools are about as “free market” as private prison corporations. Or as Blackwater, the notorious mercenary corporation whose founder Erik Prince (also brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education) became a billionaire commiting war crimes against Iraqis and against the people of New Orleans after Katrina. Reason‘s Ed Krayeski (“White House Hasn’t Announced Any National School Choice Week Events,” Jan. 23) tap dances around Democratic “grandstanding” against DeVos because her family (AHEM!!!) “supports various political and social causes.” Reason has been feverishly kissing DeVos’s bee-hind ever since she got the nod from Trump.

Even using the weasel term “school choice,” like Gillespie does, is a flat-out lie. Krayeski touts the high percentage of Americans polled as favorable to charter schools, and right-libertarians like to frame them in populist terms. Odd, then, that the charterization movement was drawn up largely in the bowels of corporate lobbyists like the Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation, or that charter schools tend to proliferate in areas where normal democratic procedures have been suspended and sleazy outfits like the above-mentioned foundations can work behind the scenes in cahoots with de facto local dictators. Charter schools are usually imposed from above in highly undemocratic circumstances of the sort Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism”:  the all-out corporate looting of New Orleans after Katrina and subsequent ethnic cleansing; Detroit under the state-appointed Emergency Managers (about as democratic as Bremer’s puppet regime in conquered Iraq); Chicago under authoritarian dirtbag Rahm Emanuel; Little Rock after the Justice Department supplanted the school board.

And the Waltons and Gateses aren’t interested in “empowering” anyone besides corporate employers like themselves, and the national charter school corporations in league with them. Like “Core Curriculum,” charterization is all about serving the real clients of the state:  capitalists who need a technically trained, but docile, work force.

It’s especially disingenuous for a magazine with “free minds” on its mastheads to endorse charter schools. If you’re genuinely sympathetic to human freedom and interested in applying that principle in the educational realm, you’re probably most familiar with ideas like unschooling or deschooling, and writers like Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire and John Taylor Gatto. Charter school educational models, for the most part, are about as far from such ideas as you could possibly get. On the other hand, if you like the kinds of quasi-military “boot camps” Dr. Phil used to send teens to on his TV show, you’ll absolutely love charter schools.

Charter schools are an abomination to genuine ideas of freedom in another way. They’re about increasing the top-down authority of administrators at the expense of those engaged in the actual work of teaching kids. If you claim to believe the stuff Friedrich Hayek wrote about distributed knowledge — basically, that those in direct contact with a situation know more than pointy-haired bureaucrats and bosses — then you should know how stupid that is. But apparently school administrators are the one kind of government bureaucrat whose power right-libertarians love to increase.

Charter schools are not about freedom. Period. They’re just another development in the history of collusion between the state and big business that gave rise to the public schools in the first place. If you claim to believe in freedom, or claim to oppose “crony capitalism,” and you support charter schools, you should just shut up.

Welcome back to the Daily Molotov, all the news that’s fit to make you hate the state. Here’s today’s headlines.

From the New York Times

Donald Trump told lawmakers that the reason he lost the popular vote was because of “illegal immigrants.” It’s not true.

Also from the New York Times: Trump gathered the CEOs of major corporations to the White House to threaten them with a “border tax” if they took jobs out of the country. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Brexit needs Parliament to give it the go-ahead. El Chapo is being held at a prison that former inmates call “tougher than Guantánamo Bay.” The US has abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. Sean Spicer had another press briefing; this time it wasn’t as confrontational.

From the Washington Post

Senate Democrats, in a ridiculous (and kind of hilarious) move, are mulling over a $1 trillion infrastructure plan.

Also from the Washington Post: A former mayor of Hiroshima has urged Trump to meet the remaining survivors of the bomb in an effort to make the President take nuclear weapons seriously. And yet, this is a man who named his own inauguration day the “National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” so I don’t know how serious he’s going to take survivors of a nuclear weapon strike. Julia Hahn is going to advise Steve Bannon. Hahn was a writer at Breitbart. And the CDC abruptly canceled a panel on climate change and its effect on public health, and no one knows why.

From Politico

Republicans are having a hard time keeping things together over the Affordable Care Act repeal.

Also from Politico: Donald Trump is assembling a shadow cabinet in order to keep the actual cabinet he appointed in line. Kellyanne Conway has a Secret Service detail because she’s afraid of the media. That’s super weird. Sean Spicer was bothered by being called a liar. In related news, the CEO of Dippin’ Dots tried to mend fences with Spicer. Spicer has continued to give the confectionery the cold shoulder. I’ll see myself out.

From Mic.com

As Trump signed an anti-abortion executive order yesterday, West Virginia became the newest state in the union to only have one abortion provider within its borders.

Also from Mic.com: Trump’s nominee for labor secretary called Carls Jr. employees “the best of the worst.” Not quite sure how to take that from a man whose last name can be modified to read “putz,” but whatever.

From Infoshop News

Here is a running global tally of the Women’s March.

From It’s Going Down

“What Counts as Violence? Why The Right Can Shoot Us Now.” Also, here’s an interview with Alexander Reid Ross.

From Jacobin

Kenzo Shibata has an article on the Women’s March up. Also, “We Can Make the Nazis Back Down.”

From The Nation

Dave Zirin was at the inauguration. It was tiny.

From the Intercept

Lawmakers in eight states now have proposed laws that would criminalize peaceful protest.

From Antiwar News

The United States has vowed to keep China from claiming islands built by China.

Thanks for reading the Daily Molotov, curated for C4SS by Trevor Hultner. You can submit news tips to trevor@c4ss.org, tweet at us either at @c4ssdotorg or @trevor_c4ss, or leave a comment below. Your continued support of the Center for a Stateless Society means we can continue to roll out new features like this.

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I. Deleuze, Guattari, Accelerationism

There’s been a lot of talk about Deleuze and Guattari around both academic and activist scenes for quite some time. Sometimes they are objects of unfounded derision (decried as “holy fools” by traditionalist socialists like Richard Barbrook), and other times they are the beneficiaries of overtly non-critical praise (see the endless application of their theories to every topic under the sun). They’ve been labeled as secret agents for neoliberal capitalism (as charged by Slavoj Zizek) and as tacticians for revolution in the era of globalization (according to the transnational alter-globalization movement that arose in the 1990s). They’ve been invoked as joyful, hippie celebrants of cosmic emergence (certain points in the recent “new materialism” canon), as forerunners to chaos and complexity theory (Manuel DeLanda), and, perhaps most delightfully, as scribes of a “mad, black communism” that feasts on conspiracy and negativity (Andrew Culp). Before his turn towards neoreaction, Nick Land described Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of their two-part collaboration titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as “less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.”ⁱ

With so many different interpretations, which run the gamut from spot-on to the exceedingly problematic, it might seem like an inescapable cul-de-sac to look to their works for elucidating power dynamics in the world today. Their capture by the academy, that assembly-line of homogeneous thought, only compounds this weariness. It is my contention, nonetheless, that Deleuze and Guattari (henceforth D & G) has much to offer us today, and constitute a radical break (or, in their lingo, a schiz) is the annals of leftist theory that points the way towards a vision of the future that is similar to what Benjamin Tucker described as “anarchistic socialist” – or, in the parlance of today, left-wing market anarchism.

The suggestion that D & G’s political praxis overlaps with that of market anarchism, even one that is vehemently anti-capitalist, is bound to rankle many, and will undoubtedly court charges of “accelerationism”. The consummate political heresy of the last decade, accelerationism – a vague term that been applied in numerous, frequently conflict ways – emerges from a pivotal passage in Anti-Oedipus. In the wake of the failures of the left to overcome capitalism during the revolts of the 1960s, and the turn by the ‘Third Worldists’ towards nationalist capitalism, D & G suggest that the proper “revolutionary path” may indeed be one in which we need “[t]o go further still, that is, in the movement of the market… Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”ⁱⁱ

The charge of accelerationism is one that should not be warded off, but embraced, but only with a delicate unpacking. Light readings, lacking in nuance, have attached D & G’s reflections as one-off musing at best, and at worst, an uncritical acceptance of the then-emergent neoliberal capitalism, with its rhetoric of global markets, deregulation, and openness. The identification of accelerationism with the latter should be avoided (as well as the more recent association of accelerationism with state-centric technological development); instead, lets look to the possibility of an accelerationism that is ‘anarchistic-socialistic’ in nature, utilizes markets, and operates in unbridled antagonism to the conditions of the present. To do so, tracing out the positioning of markets against capitalism in D & G’s work should be carried out. What follows a cursory exploration of this, though it is by no means an exhaustive treatment. But first, we must look to D & G’s own stance towards the political itself, as individuals and together.

II. Marxists, Anarchists, Both, or Neither?

Providing a precise set of political coordinates for D & G’s theories, other than a very far-left orientation, is itself a rather difficult task. Like Foucault, Baudrillard, and others lumped together under the problematic sign of ‘post-structuralism’, D & G are often invoked by anarchists, particularly those in insurrectionist, communization, and and post-left currents, but debate over their status as anarchists has persisted over the years.

With ties to the borderline anarchists Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy, Guattari described his project as “autonomous-communist-anarchist”, though neither himself nor Deleuze had much to say on the history of anarchist thought at all. Deleuze’s lecturers made passing reference to Proudhon, though it was undoubtedly the strawman Proudhon of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (this is unfortunate, as Proudhon’s own ontology of flux and becoming, as detailed in The Philosophy of Progress, clearly foreshadows Deleuze own). Meanwhile, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze makes passing reference to Max Stirner; while it is hard to say if he was directly influenced by the egoist, Saul Newman has detailed numerous points of overlap between each of their philosophies.ⁱⁱⁱ

It is not, of course, relation to the history of ideas or the name-drops one makes that dictates proximity to anarchism. Aside from tangential relationships with anarchist and quasi-anarchist groups (Guattari through the Autonomists, Deleuze through the Prisoner Information Group, an anti-prison activist network set up by Foucault), it is clear that the philosophy suggested by D & G is teeming with positions and propositions well familiar to anarchists. Among other things the two reject the state, capitalism, the USSR, fascism, the police, democracy, racism, colonialism, taxes, and even nostalgia, managerialism, and fixed identities.

To what extent can D & G be considered Marxists? It is undeniable that Marx holds an important position in their work – particularly in Anti-Oedipus, which sets its revolutionary praxis up as a combination of Nietzsche and Marx. Two decades prior to his collaboration with Deleuze, Guattari could be found in the thick of the two major intellectual tendencies of post-war France: existentialism and Marxist communism. In the late 1940s he was a prominent figure in the French section of the Fourth International of the International Communist Party, itself a band of militant Trotskyites; throughout the 1950s, he would drift towards a more libertarian communist position, working with other radicals and writing detailed critiques of the Soviet Union’s state structure and organizing against the Stalinists in the mainstream of French communist politics. In 1964, when this left opposition began to identify as Maoist, Guattari broke with them and began to move in the direction of the anarchic sectors of the students movement.

Deleuze, on the other hard, had avoided these sorts of politics. While having been an enthusiastic reader of Sartre, existentialism didn’t appeal much to him, nor did the orthodox forms of Marxism. Towards the end of his life he did describe himself as a Marxist (“Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps”),^iv and at the time of his death was preparing to write a monograph on Marx. His late texts such as 1992’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” were self-described as being Marxist, though it is a very funny kind of Marxism: when notions of resistance briefly raises its head, it isn’t the proletariat seizing factories, but “piracy and the introduction of viruses” into computer networks.^v And while one would expect a self-described Marxist writing a Marxist text to use something akin to a Marxist theory of history, Deleuze’s vision of development doesn’t focus on class struggle, but on technological development. Instead of Marx, his point of reference is Foucault – a figure whose on relationship to Marxism is contested and complicated.^vi

‘A very funny kind of Marxism’ is probably the best way to describe Anti-Oedipus, as the very subtitle of Capitalism and Schizophrenia signals. The book, as Jean-Francois Lyotard would later argue, might try to remain ostensibly Marxist, but it is an undeniably variant – or more properly, mutant – form. For Lyotard, “the book’s silence on class struggle, the saga of the worker and the function of his party” helps craft a post-Marxism (or anti-?) that is scrubbed of the “[b]ad conscience in Marx himself, and worse and worse in the Marxists.”^vii What might be the nature of this bad conscience? It is, Lyotard suggests, a feeling of guilt or repulsion for being entranced for elements within the dynamics of market processes – namely, the ability to shake the foundations of the entrenched: “[i]n the figure of Kapital that Deleuze and Guattari propose, we easily recognize what fascinates Marx: the capitalist perversion, the subversion of codes, religions, decency, trades, educations, cuisine, speech…”

III. Behind the Veil of Capital

As far back as the Communist Manifesto, Marx draws our attention, usually through the use of ecstatic and poet imagery, to the positive aspects of capitalism in that it both destabilizes old formers of power while simultaneously carrying out processes of ‘modernization’. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations”, as the famous passage goes, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of his life, and his relations with his kind.” It is for this reason that D & G use terms like line of flight, deterritorialization, and decoding to describe capitalist relations: “lines of flight” because it follows a snaking trajectory of desire towards the new; “deterritorialization” because it uproots things from where they are stuck and allows them to circulate; and “decoding” because it breaks down codes, that is, the strictures of tradition, identity, culture, and other imposed value systems.

Does this not, however, fall rather short from the reality of capitalism? Marx was able to somewhat chart a course between being enthralled by the intertwining of economic circulation and exploitation, on one side of things, and the exploitation and violence on the other – though he still fell victim to series of critical inconsistencies that ultimately helped in undermining much of his project, be it confusion between the state and the market (as drawn out by Kevin Carson in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy),^viii his repugnant and Eurocentric support for British imperialism in India, or the ambiguous relationship between capitalist development and liberation in the core of his philosophy of history – discussions surround which helped shape the paths taken following the Bolshevik revolution.^ix

D & G offer an escape from these inconsistencies and ambiguities, but it is an escape route that changes the very nature of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, and with it, the revolutionary goals that this analysis is intended to point towards. What is essential to note is that the elements that are identified as being ‘positive’ in capitalism – lines of flight, deterritorialization, decoding – are also the very things that become associated with liberatory politics. To wage a non-fascist revolt against the world – which is indeed the very goal of a book like Anti-Oedipus – is to revolt against the old in order to break open the possibility for new forms to arise. For Deleuze and Guattari it is desire itself that motors this process, just as it is desire that motivates all attempts at to move along a line of flight, to deterritorialize, and decode. Similarly, forces like deterritorialization and decoding put into play new desires that were not previously there. Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire is productive and tends towards excess and circulation, as opposed to the notions of desire rooted lack (as offered in earlier psychoanalytic discourses of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan).

Does this mean that capitalism can be identified as the expression of desire itself, a suggestion that sounds remarkably close to the rambling utterances of the vulgar libertarians and “anarcho”-capitalists? Not exactly. D & G argue for an understanding of capitalism not simply as a system, but as a constantly unfolding process. This process is not merely a reflection of desire filtered through the exchange patterns of the market, but a host of social relations tangled up in immanent relations of power and domination. No matter how flexible power relations may become, they always require some sort of rigid and fixed foundation at their base, some territory in which their codes operate. It would seem then that the elements of explosive creativity exhibited capitalist entrepreneurship and circulation – the market processes themselves, in other words – would stand opposed to this power, yet it does not. This is because, D & G argue, deterritorialization and decoding are only half of the capitalist process, and are conjoined with the reciprocal processes of reterritorialization and recoding. What’s more is that reterritorialization and recoding are presented as ‘stabilization mechanisms’ of sorts for the system itself, without which capitalism itself would cease to be. To quote them at length,

…capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this tendency [towards dissolution] while at the same time allowing it it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending towards that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, individual, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. This what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed”… The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more the ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.^x

That capitalism requires a state to maintain itself is no new revelation (nor is anything in the paragraph above). The best of Marx’s writings laid out, in incredible detail, the way the evolution of the modern state played a fundamental role in the birth of capitalism, while Benjamin Tucker’s excellent analysis showed how state action built up capitalism, as opposed to deterring it. The post-Marxist Regulation of School, which includes figures like Michel Aglietta and Bob Jessop, has conducted numerous studies of the way regulatory systems allow capitalism to ‘reproduce’ its relations. What D & G are describing here dovetails with these various analyses, but they are concerned with a very specific function: the way the state ‘seizes’ or ‘captures’ increasingly larger and larger elements in the forces that are being unleashed as a means of maintaining the entities that profit from this unleashing. While this might sound somewhat esoteric (and counterintuitive, especially in the face of traditional economic discourses), this process is more or less a depiction of networks of power relations being ‘reproduced’ by the constant co-production of capitalism and the state.

D & G take this notion from two primary sources. The first is the study of money that was carried out by Foucault and presented as part of his series of 1970-1971 lectures at the College de France on “the will to know”. In these lectures, Foucault illustrates how ‘fixed money’ – money that imposed by the state, as opposed to the ‘spontaneous currency’ that appears to occur naturally – in ancient Greece operated as a regulatory mechanism for the whole of society. Money in Greek society “prevents excess, pleonexia, having too much… But it also prevents excessive poverty…”^xi Taxation, for Foucault, is an essential aspect of the function of fixed money, and not some aberration to its evolution or something applied later by unscrupulous bureaucrats. Instead, it was created with taxation in mind, as something that could create a taxonomy of classes, help keep class structures stay relatively rigid in their make-up (primarily through debt accrued by the lower classes and the upward flow of tax money to the upper classes), and to facilitate public work projects necessary for the expansive of economic interests beyond their natural scope. Looking the modern era, D & G write that “the Greeks discovered in their own way what the Americans discovered after the New Deal: that heavy taxes are good for business… In a word, money – the circulation of money – is the means of rendering the debt infinite.”^xii

The second source is the position of the neo-Marxist Monthly Review school put, as put forward by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their book Monopoly Capital. Controversial in the annals of Marxism for their transgression of many of the central tenets of Marxist orthodoxy (such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall), Baran and Sweezy were primarily concerned with the increasingly ‘organized capitalism’ that had grown in period running from the 1880s through the 1960s. This stage of capitalist development was marked by high levels of centralization of economic power in small handfuls of firms, the market activity between which could only be best described as monopolistic competition. Such a system becomes intractably top-heavy, Baran and Sweezy argue, making the economy tend towards stagnation by running up too much excess production and by slowing money’s circulation through the economy. Thus the state comes to pick up the slack, absorbing excess production and capital to ‘pump energy’ back into the economy, be it through welfare programs, infrastructure renewal, military spending, or any other ‘productive’ form of taxpayer-funded government enterprise. Sounding a bit like Foucault in his study of money, Baran and Sweezy suggest that

…since large-scale government spending enables the economy to operate much closer to capacity, the net effect on the magnitude of private surplus is both positive and large… To [the ‘big businessman’], government spending means more effective demand, and he senses that he can shift most of the associated taxes onto consumers or backwards onto workers. In addition… the intricacies of the tax system, specially tailored to fit the needs of all sorts of special interests, open up endless opportunities for speculative and windfall gains. All in all, the decisive sector of the American ruling class is well on the way to becoming a convinced believer in the beneficent nature of government spending.^xiii

D & G expand these insights into a more generalized phenomenon, which they dub “capitalist” or “social axiomatics”. A mechanic process essential to the functioning of capitalism, these axiomatics are the means through which anything deterritorialized or decoded is rerouted back into the state-capitalism assemblage. It applies not only to the capture of monetary flows by the state via taxation, or the much earlier capture of exchange and circulation itself by the overcoding of spontaneous currencies with fixed money, but to things like the recuperation and co-optation of oppositional forms into the logic of power, so on and so forth. “There is a tendency within capitalism”, say D &G in A Thousand Plateaus, “to continually more axioms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depression and the Russian revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms, to invent new ones dealing with the working class, unemployment, union organizations, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and domestic markets, Keynesian economics, and the New Deal were axiom laboratories. Examples of the creations of new axioms after the Second World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transformation in the monetary system.”^xiv

As is plain to see, sitting at the center of these interrelated concepts and models – reterritorialization, recoding, the addition/subtraction of axioms – is the state itself. D & G’s conception of capitalism is like a hydraulic system, where everything, be it capital, goods, people, and even desire, moves in flows that are constantly productive. Yet at the center of this system is the regulator that makes it work: “The state, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production.”^xv

IV. Against the State

In A Thousand Plateaus, these dynamics get recast as a struggle between state apparatuses and war machines. In Anti-Oedipus, divergent, deterritorialized and decoded flows and forces are treated as having “nomadic” qualities; the “war machine” is the next stage of this analysis, focusing on the more intransigent and conflict-driven aspects of their functions. War machines, in other words, make exactly what their name implies, and the target of this war is the state itself (D & G here were drawing on the anthropological work of Pierre Clastres, which analyzed the way certain indigenous societies made the repelling of the state the very rationale of their social quasi-orders). War machines come in many different forms: your affinity group is a war machine, the agorist is a war machine, street gangs and pirates, even certain kinds of commercial organizations. Not all war machines are positive: they’re capable of being darkly violent, tribalistic, even fascistic. While much could be said about this, it is the specific confluence of the war machine with particular economic functions that concerns us here.

Against the war machine, D & G suggest, is the “apparatus of capture”, which is a function of the state that seizes or appropriates the divergent movement and makes it a part of itself. Such a force fits quickly comfortably along the treatment of reterritorialization, recoding, and axiomatics; indeed, D & G identify the apparatus of capture with the “megamachine”, which was Lewis Mumford’s term for large, stae-organized ‘socio-technical’ system that regiment and discipline the people bound up within it.^xvi Importantly, they draw a further correlation between the megamachine and certain economic and political phenomena and mechanisms: the apparatus of capture “functions in three modes…: rent, profit, and taxation.” This schema, D & G tell us, is a recasting of Marx’s famous “trinity formula”, which he used to the describe the way the relations of capital become social relations. What makes D & G’s treatment different from Marx’s is twofold: first, because it positions the state, not the pure economic logic of capitalism, at the center of things; and second, because it is no longer a question of how capitalism becomes a social relation, but how things outside of the purview of the state become enmeshed in these various power relations. “It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production”, they write, “quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode.’”^xvii

Of taxation we’ve already said quite a bit, so it is rent and profit that must be addressed. While taxation is obviously correlated to state function, for many the suggestion that rent and profit – two fundamental aspects of the capitalist market economy – arise from the functions of the state might appear as absolutely erroneous. But consider the little-acknowledged understanding, even in conventional economic discourses, that the more open the systems of exchange and circulation are, the more the capacity to maintain rates of profit accumulation in the long-term falls. With the capacity to enter freely, or to subtract entire sets of relations, from market systems, the ability for certain actors to assume an inordinate share of the market becomes untenable – which is precisely why reliance on state-granted and enforced monopolies becomes necessary for entrenched power structures to shore themselves up against this deterritorializing tide.

The same could be said for rent, which is contingent, in the capitalist system at least, on private property rights backed by the state and rendered in the form of standardized titles. Perhaps the relationship between rent and the state is even more obvious than that of the state and property, given the undeniable role of the state in partitioning older property systems, and setting them into a circulation beneficial to economic, social, and political elites. The assault on rent that would occur in the void of the state was summed up best by Robert Anton Wilson: “Of course, since Austrian ideas exist as factors in human behavior, I will admit that people, hoodwinked by these ideas, will continue to pay rent even in freedom, for a while at least. But I think that, after a time, observing that their Tuckerite neighbors are not submitting to this imposture, they would come to their senses and cease paying tribute to the self-elected ‘owners’… I myself would not pay rent one day beyond the point at which the police… are at hand to collect it via ‘argument per blunt instrument’.”^xviii

So who or what are the war machines that are captured in these three mechanisms of capture, tax, rent, and profit? D & G spend a significant amount of time discussing figures that would be dismissed in the annals of Marxism as ‘petty-bourgeois’: artisans, craftsmen, stone masons, metallurgists, merchants, etc. The existence of these figure does not, of course, remove from the picture of the exploitation of the peasant – and later proletarian – classes, but for D & G it is their nomadic and autonomous nature, “since their existence did not entirely depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus”, that makes them attractive for prefiguring new political ways of thinking and acting that escape from and attack the state. Referencing the historical development of metallurgy, D & G emphasize the way that the state’s drive to monopolize economies and maintain the status quo of power linked the capture of these actors to the exploitation of the lower classes: “State overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic foreign trade in the service of the ruling class, so that the peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations.”^xix

A more contemporary example of these dynamics in action would be the way 1) tinkerers and hackers produced paradigm-shifting innovations in information-communication technology; 2) the subsequent capture of these innovations under the state’s enforcement of IP laws and their service to large, top-heavy multinational corporations; and 3) the way further innovations from these developments are obstructed. Thus we can suggest a direct continuity between the reflections on artisans, craftsmen and metallurgists in A Thousand Plateaus to the musings on piracy and hacking in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” alluded to earlier.

So what we ultimately have, stepping back looking over these various tracings, is a contested space, a space of conflict, on one side of which is the state, capitalism, and the multi-scaled ecology of power that runs through these formations. On the other: autonomous movement, dynamic exchange and circulation, creative ecologies driven by desire. The former makes the latter the raw materials for itself, makes desire, creativity, the impulse to flee and transgress traditional territories, borders, and limits (is to destabilize not the most fundamental desire there is?), something that upholds more imperceptible forms of domination by way its various mechanisms and apparatuses. The most egregious of these is the way in which these ecologies force so many would-be breaks to simply fold inwards, and return to supporting the systems they supposedly contest. Liberation from capitalism is often synonymous with the retreat to social democratic variants of the same, which is no break from capitalism, but the strengthening of it by calling on the full forces of the state to flex its power. When we leave the question of blood-and-soil identity and aesthetic accouterments to the side, how different can we honestly saw these basic mechanics of the social democratic state are from the fascist state? With this in mind, let us return to the notorious accelerationist passage in Anti-Oedipus, which hopefully by this point take on a new appearance:

[W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – to withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Is this not a vision of militant, leftist (or even post-leftist) articulation of how systems of exchange and circulation, operating on a global level, can undermine dominant ecologies of power, and that crude brutalism they inexorably tend towards – fascism? It is not a secret ode to neoliberal globalization, or the breakthrough of the capitalist world market; following their vision of the state and capitalism as forces bound up together as a common, modular, and reactive assemblage, ‘neoliberalization’ and all that comes with it (the slippering sloganeering of ‘privatization’, ‘deregulation’, ‘austerity’, ‘structural adjustment’, etc.) is nothing more than the next unfolding of the processes of adding and subtracting axioms. A positive left-wing anarchist accelerationism would have to position the horizon of their political activity beyond axiomatics, in a future space that breaks apart these ecologies. This is a future where desire operates at the “molecular” level, not at the level of some abstract collectivity.

It would be utterly incorrect to say that the entirety of D & G’s praxis is about some ‘free-market communism’, as it has been described by Eugene Holland.^xx It would be equally incorrect , however, to pretend that the relationship between markets and liberation does not matter in the great scheme of their work (as so many leftist commentators, be they academic or not, have done). Any market anarchist elements that are gleamed must be married to their wider gamut of concerns – futurity, globality, the unleashing of desires to their fullest extent, the dissolution of all externals and internal dynamics of power, on and on. As the late Mark Fisher described, the accelerationism of D & G was “about accelerating certain tendencies which capitalism itself has to keep at bay… when those tendencies are accelerated, we go beyond those standard forms of subjectivities, life, and work that capitalism depends upon.”^xxi

Welcome back to the Daily Molotov! It’s been… an interesting weekend, but it’s time to get back to the daily grind. Here are today’s top headlines from across the media landscape.

From the New York Times

President Trump’s first weekend was… fairly goofy. And not in any sort of endearing way. Against a backdrop of protest demonstrations taking place on literally every continent, Trump’s (and his administration’s) gaffes looked more like the mad scramblings of a tinpot dictator than a peaceful transition of power. From a press secretary who spent his first press briefing yelling at the press about crowd sizes, to a counselor who peddles “alternative facts” on political talk shows and who announced Sunday that Trump unequivocally will not release his tax returns, this weekend was wild.

Also from the New York Times: Foreign payments to Trump businesses violate the constitution, according to a new lawsuit. The Women’s March protests around the country (and world) gathered nearly 2.5 million people into the streets of major cities and small towns. Now people want to know: what happens next? Cervical cancer is killing a larger number of people in the US than originally thought. And tornadoes ripped through the Southeast US.

From the Washington Post

Margaret Sullivan comes in with the sharpest hot take, of course. Sean Spicer has ended the old way of reporting on the president. From Sullivan: “White House press briefings are ‘access journalism,’ in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.” Good!

Also from the Washington Post: An historic concrete ship was smashed to bits by California storm waves. Marco Rubio might not approve Rex Tillerson. But he probably will. Gambia’s former president took off with literally all of the country’s wealth. France is moving to the right, politically. The field failure analysis has come back from Samsung over why its Note 7 blew up last fall: “the battery components in the Galaxy Note 7 did not properly fit in the battery’s casing,” and “several manufacturing issues, including inadequate welding at the battery manufacturer, as the company raced to produce those new phones” in the second batch. So that’s unfortunate.

From Politico: Federal workers are upset by Trump’s hiring freeze. Trump gives FBI Director James Comey a pat on the back for being “more famous than me.” And Wikileaks has called Trump out for not releasing his tax returns.

From Antiwar News: The cost of the air war between us and ISIS has reached $11 billion.

From The Intercept: The new CIA director-nominee is into torture. ALSO: Jeremy Scahill is starting a new podcast, first episode out on Wednesday!

From The Nation: Scott Pruitt is not super great on the environment, which is a thing you know if you live in Oklahoma.

From It’s Going Down: Texas prisoners are being punished for revealing horrid conditions. Also, IGD has a whole slew of protest reportbacks from this past weekend. Check them out here.

Thanks for reading the Daily Molotov, curated for C4SS by Trevor Hultner. You can submit news tips to trevor@c4ss.org, tweet at us either at @c4ssdotorg or @trevor_c4ss, or leave a comment below. Your continued support of the Center for a Stateless Society means we can continue to roll out new features like this.

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[Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 14 gennaio 2017 con il titolo Is It Time for the Next Dread Pirate Roberts? Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.]

Il venti settembre 2010, craigslist.com è stato costretto a chiudere la sezione “adulti” dal suo portale perché molti annunci erano usati per pubblicizzare servizi sessuali. Dopo la rimozione, molti professionisti del sesso sono passati a pubblicare annunci in sezioni simili usando parole in codice. Questo sistema clandestino ha dato un po’ di sicurezza ai professionisti e ha permesso a craigslist di mantenere un certo divieto. Ma è pur sempre un sistema facilmente identificabile e molti professionisti restano esposti alla legge.

A febbraio 2011 Silk Road ha debuttato su darknet per la delizia di agoristi, fan di bitcoin e commercianti di droghe con il pallino della tecnologia. Silk Road era molto più di un mercato della droga: molte delle sue conquiste più importanti riguardavano l’avanzamento della libertà e la sicurezza per gli operatori del mercato. L’uso di bitcoin e di pratiche come tumbling, e il fatto che si potesse accedere su darknet tramite TOR, hanno esaltato l’anonimato, mentre le recensioni dei clienti, l’ampia scelta e le istruzioni per la spedizione lo hanno reso più sicuro e conveniente per il consumatore. Dalla sua chiusura nel 2013, e la chiusura di Silk Road 2.0 l’anno dopo, su darknet sono comparsi molti altri mercati come Agora e Open Bizarre, con diversi gradi di successo.

A luglio 2015, Visa e Mastercard hanno fatto pressione sul sito clearnet backpage.com affinché chiudesse la sezione “adulti” perché era usata per pubblicizzare servizi sessuali. Invece di cedere, backpage ha lasciato Visa e Mastercard per usare bitcoin come principale mezzo di scambio. La decisione è stata celebrata ovunque dai sostenitori di bitcoin. Sono nate guide per principianti che insegnano ai professionisti del sesso come usare bitcoin, /r/Bitcoin ha visto un’impennata di sottoscrittori e partecipanti ansiosi di imparare, mentre alcuni fan di bitcoin hanno coordinato gli sforzi per raggiungere diverse città e tenere corsi informali per gruppi e singoli.

In seguito ad un recente rapporto del senato americano, backpage è stato costretto a chiudere le sezioni “adulti” sulla base di quello che i rappresentanti di backpage chiamano “censura governativa incostituzionale”. In ogni sezione, a caratteri rosso vivo, c’è la scritta “censurato”. Cliccando, compare questo messaggio:

CENSURATO
Il governo ha censurato incostituzionalmente questo contenuto. Cosa è successo? Scoprilo
Proteggi la libertà di espressione su internet. Vai su: Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, e Cato Institute.
Usa i tuoi social media per sostenere #FREESPEECH #BACKPAGE
Fai una donazione a Children of the Night, un’organizzazione dedicata alla liberazione dei bambini dalla prostituzione.

Nonostante il colpo, backpage.com ha promesso che proseguirà nella lotta per la libertà di espressione, come quella che Ross Ulbricht, alias Dread Pirate Roberts, stava portando avanti con il suo Silk Road. È una lotta che accomuna la madre di Ross, simpatizzanti, creatori e utenti del mercato deepweb e dei siti clearweb nati in seguito, come backpage, ma anche siti di pirateria come The Pirate Bay. La questione non è se il creatore di un sito debba essere responsabile o meno delle azioni degli utenti, ma anche se cose come la pirateria, la droga o i servizi sessuali debbano essere illegali.

Secondo il senato, la sezione adulti di backpage.com doveva essere chiusa perché usata da trafficanti che costringono bambini a prostituirsi. In realtà, backpage è servito ad ostacolare il traffico di minori tramite la collaborazione con Children of the Night:

“Per i bambini americani costretti alla prostituzione è un giorno triste,” ha detto il dottor Lois Lee, fondatore e presidente di Children of the Night, importante telefono amico e programma di protezione nazionale dedicato alle vittime del traffico sessuale con base a Los Angeles. “Backpage.com era uno strumento investigativo importante a cui attingevano detective e agenti americani sul campo per localizzare e liberare bambini di cui si sono perse le tracce nonché arrestare e processare gli sfruttatori.” Poi aggiunge: “La possibilità di rintracciare bambini potenzialmente sfruttati su un sito che si offre ad aiutare e cooperare con la polizia come ha fatto Backpage è assolutamente unica. Non solo ha agevolato il compito delle autorità, ma ha anche permesso la liberazione dei piccoli e l’arresto degli sfruttatori.”

Qualche libertario può giustamente essere scettico riguardo la collaborazione con la polizia di un sito che dice di lottare per la libertà dei professionisti del sesso, ma dalla sua c’è anche il fatto che spesso ha collaborato con gli inserzionisti per rendere le inserzioni meno smaccate ed evitare di avere brutte sorprese con la polizia. Sebbene imperfetta, questa strategia a due punte aiuta le vittime proteggendo allo stesso tempo il diritto di chi volontariamente usa il sesso per guadagnarsi da vivere.

Anche se Backpage promette che continuerà la lotta, nell’immediato occorre aiutare chi è più colpito da questa perdita. Molti professionisti utilizzavano backpage.com come principale fonte pubblicitaria. Qualcuno ha anche pagato anticipatamente per una serie di inserzioni e non sa come fare per riavere indietro i soldi. Ora queste persone per farsi pubblicità non hanno un posto che sia altrettanto fidato e frequentato. Molti confidano sui servizi sessuali come principale fonte di guadagno e questo significa che andranno incontro a grosse perdite con conseguenti rischi.

Molti di loro stanno tornando ai messaggi in codice nella sezione appuntamenti di backpage e craigslist, mentre altri si azzardano a promuovere e condividere altre opzioni.

Se conoscete di queste persone, o se siete voi professionisti del sesso e disponete di più risorse di altri, contattateli ed offrite aiuto. In tempi così duri, un po’ di soldi o di bitcoin, qualcosa da mangiare, un cuscino su cui poggiare la testa, ma soprattutto un aiuto a trovare altri mezzi pubblicitari, possono fare molto in termini di sicurezza e relativa stabilità per gli amici professionisti del sesso. Se non ne conoscete, potete donare ad una delle tante associazioni come Global Network of Sex Work Projects, e Sex Workers Outreach Project, e molti, molti altri che offrono risorse e aiuti legali a chi ne ha bisogno.

Offrire risorse a chi è più colpito da questi provvedimenti funziona nell’immediato, ma non è una soluzione di lungo termine. Siti come backpage offrono ai professionisti del sesso la possibilità di essere indipendenti e lavorare per se stessi invece di affidarsi ad un magnaccia o altri. Forse il settore abbisogna di una sua Silk Road. Forse gli occorre un altro Dread Pirate Roberts.

In movements like the struggle for economic justice or against the authoritarian state (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, etc.), we usually see arguments for “diversity of tactics” made by radicals against liberal criticism of black block tactics like smashing windows and things of that sort. There’s still a lot of that kind of criticism, obviously — for example liberal reactions to the smashing of Bank of America windows, torching of limosines and whaling the almighty tar out of neo-Nazi celebrity Richard Spencer. But lately, since Trump’s election, I think there’s been at least as much criticism — much of it quite contemptuous — from Leftists dismissing liberal tactics like peaceful marches, factual corrections of Trump’s lies, denials of legitimacy, etc., as ineffectual (“This is not how you beat fascism”). And I think appeals to diversity of tactics apply just as much to the latter case as to the former.

First of all it’s true, as many Leftist critics say, that Trump’s hardcore fascist voters simply don’t care if liberal commentators, mainstream journalists or fact-check websites prove his statements to be lie; they just laugh. And they just laugh at repeated statements that “this is not normal,” from liberals who judge the behavior of Trump and his henchmen from traditional civics textbook standards of legitimate behavior.

But that’s not the point. We’re not talking about converting hardcore fascists or racists; they may be his base, but they were probably well under half of total Trump voters. The Trump vote included a sizeable number of people who voted for him only reluctantly, and are already experiencing buyer’s remorse. Some of them voted for a black man in 2012, but just couldn’t stomach Clinton. Bad as she is, I really have to wonder about someone who considered Clinton less tolerable than Trump; but be that as it may they’re not fanatics and more of them regret their decision every day. And then there are the people who voted for Obama, and normally would have voted for a Democrat this year, but just stayed home because… well, you know. All these groups are reachable by exposing Trump’s lies, showing them how he’s materially hurting him, and pointing out his extreme deviations from previous standards of normalcy.

I’m not saying all these things are enough by themselves. They must be combined with some demonstration — even a small one — that resistance exists, and that it’s effective. We got that to some extent with the post-election protests, and to a larger extent with concrete actions by advocacy groups and state and local officials demonstrating their intent to resist authoritarian federal encroachments. But the demonstrations on Inauguration Day, and the Womens’ Marches around the world — in Washington alone twice the depressed turnout at Trump’s swearing-in — were a huge show of willingness to resist.

John Robb, a national security theorist who specializes in networked resistance movements and writes at Global Guerrillas, sees it as the potential spark for what he calls an “open source insurgency” against Trump (“The Open Source Protest to Oust Trump,” January 21). He has used that term in the past to refer to Al Qaeda Iraq, the Tahrir Square movement, M15 and Syntagma, Occupy, and the insurgencies for Sanders and Trump last year.

The Women’s March provided what Robb calls a “plausible promise,” which is essential for open source insurgencies. In practical terms, it’s more or less what I described as a demonstration that resistance exists and it’s effective. That starts a feedback of further protests, with strengthen the plausible promise and generate still more protests. These have brought down autocratic regimes like the Shah’s, Ceaucescu’s and Mubarak’s.

Robb dismisses criticism that all the attendees at the Women’s March, or all the potential components of an anti-Trump insurgency, are not on the same page about objectives or tactics. Like liberals and members of the verticalist Left who dismissed Occupy for not having “representatives and a platform,” they miss the point. The only thing they need to agree on is the demand for Trump to go, and be replaced by someone or something that is not as bigoted or pro-plutocrat as he is.

And they don’t need to agree on tactics or operate from a single playbook. Far better is a stigmergic, permissionless movement of movements, with a full-court press by all sub-currents, tendencies and affinity groups engaged in whatever they feel most comfortable with and they are best at. The most agreement that’s necessary is to cut each other some slack in the way of tolerating diversity of tactics, or at least putting more effort into fighting Trump than into criticizing each other’s methods.

To my fellow occupants of the left end of the anti-Trump spectrum, I would add that, like it or not, we won’t win without the help of liberals and center-left types — including those who voted for Clinton, and even those who continue to support her. And like it or not — pace Robb — short of impeachment Trump is less likely to be removed by insurrection or replaced by a soviet of workers’ deputies, than by a Democratic candidate in 2020. I say, without any apologies, that this will help our cause. I argued earlier, when I thought Clinton was likely to win, that — awful, authoritarian neoliberal war hawk though she is — hers would likely be a caretaker administration in which both the country and the Democratic Party would shift further leftward. And more importantly, it would be a more conducive environment for social, economic and technological shifts outside the state towards economic decentralism, self-managed and networked institutions, and commons-based peer production, without fear of large-scale state repression. I think these shifts will continue under four years of Trump; but they’ll continue that must faster under even the most shamelessly opportunistic neoliberal Democrat (think Cory Booker), as surely as they would have under a Clinton administration. And given the way Berniecrats have already started taking over party machinery in states where he won the primaries, and the replacement of a four-year contingent of Boomers by one of Millennials, there’s a pretty good chance the 2020 Democratic nominee will be significantly better than Clinton or Booker.

Either way, as an anarchist, I don’t see electoral politics as the main avenue — or even a significant one — for positive action to build the kind of society we want. But — again — I make no apologies for offering aid to those fighting to replace the current regime with one more conducive to our process of building counter-institutions.

In the meantime, mass demonstrations aren’t the only kind of resistance we’ve got. Divisions within the state threaten to severely weaken Trump. Even though they’re not exactly our allies, large blocks within the ruling machinery — including not only officials at the state and local level, but disgruntled members of the permanent bureaucracy and “Deep State” at the federal — will likely be quietly resisting and monkey-wrenching Trump in ways we can scarcely imagine. These include sabotage like bureaucratic delay and working to rule, as well as leaks from all levels of the bureaucracy. Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent interview that it will be the easiest time ever for journalists to get dirt from very high-ranking “anonymous sources.” You can bet that whatever kompromat Putin has on Trump, it pales in comparison to what’s lying around in the basements at Ft. Meade and Langley. And remember — Edward Snowden wasn’t a high-ranking official. He was just some schmoe contract worker who know how to download stuff onto a thumb drive; the NSA has no way of knowing how many other people have done, or continue to do, the same thing.

We saw some limited displays of what looked to be sabotage from the national security bureaucracy, via leaks and so forth, against the Bush administration after the scandals surrounding Richard Clarke and Valerie Plame. Some speculated it would evolve into a full-blown war by the Deep State to unseat Bush in the 2004 election. It didn’t happen — that time.

Put together mass resistance to encroachments by the authoritarian state, and sabotage by disgrutled state functionaries at every level of government, and you get what Frances Fox Piven calls for: “Throw Sand in The Gears of Everything” (The Nation, Jan. 18). And such throwing of sand in the gears, she argues, deepens elite cleavages at the very top.

Even ordinary householders can take in and shield immigrants. And all of us can render registries useless by insisting on registering ourselves as Muslims or Mexicans or Moldovians. A sanctuary movement gives lots of people a role that matters. Most important, in our complex federal system, where the policies of the national government depend on cooperation by state and local authorities, these local movements have the potential to block initiatives by the incoming Trump regime.

If movements are to become an important force in the politics of the Trump era, they will have to be movements of a somewhat different kind from the labor, civil-rights, and LGBTQ activism of the recent past that we usually celebrate. Those were movements focused on progress, on winning measures that would remedy long-standing injustices, and they were movements that some elites also endorsed. Now the protests will have to aim not at winning, but at halting or foiling initiatives that threaten harm—either by redistributing wealth to the very top (the Trump tax and energy plans), or by eliminating existing political rights (the cancellation of DACA, the Obama executive order that protected undocumented-immigrant children, known as Dreamers), or by jeopardizing established protections and benefits (the looming prospect of privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or the threat to turn funding for public education into a system of vouchers for charter schools). So how do resistance movements win—if they win—in the face of an unrelentingly hostile regime? The answer, I think, is that by blocking or sabotaging the policy initiatives of the regime, resistance movements can create or deepen elite and electoral cleavages.

Even the most conventional and civics texty form of such cleavages — this is me talking, not Piven — like peeling off the three most moderate Republicans to deny Trump a Senate majority, is more likely when the public is perceived to be angry and unruly, and Trump to have feet of clay.

And our own most important order of business — actually building the kind of society we want, right now — is also an important component of the resistance. Creating ways to support ourselves and each other outside the state — small-scale open-source manufacturing in neighborhood cooperative workshops with tools a handful of blue collar salaries could pay for, permaculture community gardens on vacant lots and rooftops, edible landscaping on yards in the cul de sacs, community land trusts, squats in abandoned buildings, community policing by armed Black Panther patrols and Copwatch, community technology initiatives in cheap, open source off-grid power and waste recycling, barter currencies, free culture and open source software, multiple-household cohousing institutions, micro-villages, friendly societies and other associations for pooling costs and risks and organizing mutual aid, new radical labor unions on the pattern of OURWalmart and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, revived guilds and cooperative temp agencies for freelancers and precarious workers — every one of these things is not only a building block of the future post-capitalist society, but strengthens us against Trump and his ilk right now. And every one of these things shows people that, while Trump’s promises of help only lead to betrayal, our own ability to create a better world for ourselves working together is very real. And that is a plausible promise indeed.

Many of us are afraid. We’d be fools not to. But they should be more afraid.

[Di Vishal Wilde. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 18 dicembre 2017 con il titolo Compulsory Education Fosters Climate Ripe for Sexual Abuse. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.]

Notizie di abusi sessuali subiti da piccoli calciatori da parte dei loro allenatori adulti continuano a scuotere la Gran Bretagna, e cresce la frequenza e i club coinvolti. È molto importante denunciare i casi di pedofilia ma anche esaminare il ruolo svolto dall’obbligo scolastico. I bambini sono le persone più oppresse della società, quasi mai hanno voce e sono ingiustamente ignorati.

A rendere possibile l’abuso non è solo la natura dei piccoli, più debole di quella degli adulti, ma anche i condizionamenti mentali e sociali a cui sono sottoposti.

Per fare un’analogia, l’abuso sessuale della donna è ancora diffuso nelle società tramite le varie forme di “cultura dello stupro”; ma sempre più donne (vittime ed ex vittime) vengono allo scoperto, denunciando apertamente la loro esperienza. Le denunce erano molto più rare quando le donne non potevano lavorare, istruirsi, votare, e non avevano altri diritti basilari (lo stupro coniugale era legale e ancora oggi continua ad esserlo in molti paesi). Questo nuovo potere è arrivato solo quando molte donne hanno cominciato ad usare la libertà per opporsi, agire e comportarsi come volevano, e questo grazie a predecessori e alleati che hanno sofferto, lottato, dato la vita per queste libertà basilari.

I bambini che vorrebbero denunciare sono in condizioni possibilmente ancora più precarie. Per questo è importantissimo discutere e analizzare apertamente i loro problemi. La “scuola” dell’obbligo può anche vantare la “educazione sessuale”, i “corsi sul rapporto consensuale” o di “morale civica” in genere, ma si tratta di sfacciata ipocrisia. Come possono queste istituzioni, che obbligano l’individuo a conformarsi alle loro richieste, educare seriamente e legittimamente al consenso e alla virtù?

Mentre la scuola cerca di imporre, a chi è preda della sua morsa parassitica, valori e moralità spacciate per oggettive, i suoi piccoli prigionieri sono lentamente condizionati a subire la punizione, indotti con il terrore a non deviare dalle aspettative e dai valori della struttura di potere a difesa dello status quo.

Se fin da piccoli si viene pungolati, obbligati ad obbedire, ascoltare e comportarsi bene, pena il castigo, è il mondo che porta a credere che il consenso non serva e il primato morale della libera volontà non esista. Diventa così più facile per chi ha intenti criminali (in questo caso il pedofilo) assalire piccoli innocenti che in condizioni diverse potrebbero opporsi e denunciare il fatto. Nessuna meraviglia se molte vittime dicono di sentirsi colpevoli, di essere ricattati e costretti ad ulteriori abusi da parte di persone che li tengono in pugno emotivamente e psicologicamente. E la natura dell’obbligo scolastico non fa che rafforzare costantemente e significativamente l’obbedienza cieca alla figura autoritaria.

Più in là nella vita, gli effetti di questo condizionamento ritornano pesantemente su chi subisce abusi sessuali da parte di suoi pari nell’istruzione superiore, di colleghi nel luogo di lavoro, manager, boss e così via, accrescendo così il blocco psicologico. Pur essendo coscienti del male subito, il conflitto mentale è permesso dai condizionamenti che li spingono ad accettare l’ingiustizia e a sottomettersi a pesanti abusi di potere.

Se crediamo in una società in cui le azioni volontarie consensuali, frutto della libera volontà, hanno un’importanza centrale nelle relazioni, l’obbligo scolastico è la strada sbagliata. Se si vogliono indagare le radici della pedofilia e dell’abuso sessuale, occorre riconoscere il ruolo formativo che ha l’obbligo scolastico nel perpetuare questi atti spregevoli.

Donald J. Trump has been sworn in as the 45th President of the United States amidst a backdrop of citywide protest actions from various groups.

Check out Infoshop News and It’s Going Down for ongoing coverage of the action, and if you’re on Twitter, make sure you’re following #disruptJ20.

Infoshop News

It’s Going Down

Well, here it is. The final hours before Donald Trump takes his place at the head of the United States. Starting at 12:00 pm Friday, Trump will control the military, influence domestic and foreign policy, and lay the groundwork for future generations.

We’re all fucking doomed, but I’ve come to terms with this.

I’m not ready for tomorrow. Nobody I know is. The future has never been as uncertain in my memory as it is right now, and maybe it never has been. What I do know for sure, however, is that we have to fight.

What am I fighting for? I’ve been thinking about that question a lot over the past 70+ days since the election. Who am I fighting for, and more importantly, with?

I look at my friends and loved ones who are going to be hit hardest by Trump’s policies. I’m fighting for them. I look at the people the last president unfairly imprisoned for a variety of reasons – whose lives are about to get that much worse under Trump. I’m fighting for them. I’m looking at a door that is steadily closing on a free world for everyone. I’m fighting to keep that door open.

Part of me is motivated by fear, but underneath that thin peel of fear is a thick core of love. I fight for the people in my life who are set to be destroyed by the incoming administration because I love them. I can’t fucking explain to you how much I love them. I love everyone I work with here at the Center, I love my friends, my partner, my parents… I want them to come out of the next potentially horrendous four years and be okay.

I am determined to make sure they are okay on the other side of this nightmare.

Let’s begin.

It’s just kinda weird how there’s one person who somehow has the ability to sign off on Chelsea Manning being continuously imprisoned in, or released from, a monitored, regimented, surveilled life in a cage. I don’t know what it feels like to have another adult human’s very existence as a free individual in the palm of my hands and I don’t really want to. Feels sort of unnatural to me.

All the appreciation towards the person who held the key to her cage, to her life and happiness, for seven years, but didn’t do anything, is even stranger. I have no idea what magic can give someone the right to hold not only Chelsea’s key, but the key to millions of others locked away, rotting in cages, the domestic collateral damage to Democracy and Progress.

I don’t have much anger or disappointment directed at the man who happened to hold her key the past seven years, though. He is ultimately a cog in the machine, twisted into the evil scum that he is because of his role as the Leader of the Free World. This dastardly role will soon be handed over to someone else. Someone much scarier.

But it’s vital that we not confuse an institutional problem for a personality problem. Neither of these men would hold those keys if not for their role. It is not the existence of either of them that is evil, but the fact they are handed the keys to others’ freedom.

The prison guard and prisoner have the potential to be cooperative, joyful people, interacting for mutual benefit. But we will never see if that world is possible as long as we take for granted the absolutely bizarre notion of one person deciding who remains caged and who goes free. There’s no time to wait for the prison guards to decide. Let’s burn the prisons down instead.

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 18 gennaio 2017 con il titolo On Lemon “Free Trade”. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.]

Nella politica americana (dai Berniecratici all’establishment neoliberista centrista, ai libertari di destra, ai nazionalisti reazionari come Trump e i suoi seguaci) c’è molto disaccordo sul TTIP e altri accordi commerciali. Ma una cosa li accomuna: lo chiamano “libero commercio”. A torto.

Su Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is Over,” 4 gennaio), Matt Welch dice che neoliberismo e patti commerciali come TTIP significano “libero commercio”, e sono il contrario del “mercantilismo” della persona messa da Trump a capo della US Trade Representative (idiozia del secolo per chiunque conosca l’essenza mercantilistica dei trattati commerciali neoliberisti). Secondo i nazionalisti di destra (o “fascisti”) come Trump e Pence, il “libero commercio” e il “libero mercato” hanno distrutto posti di lavoro nell’industria manifatturiera americana. Anche quel secchione di centrosinistra di Max Ehrenfreund, sul Washington Post (“Trump is bringing in the big guns to roll back free trade,” 4 gennaio), descrive l’USTR di Trump “una ritirata del libero commercio”.

Cretinaggini.

Precisiamo: La funzione primaria dello stato capitalista consiste nel servire gli interessi di lungo termine della classe di potere economico. Nessuno stato capitalista ha mai promosso il libero commercio, né lo farà mai. Ad un certo punto, lo stato capitalista interviene, o non interviene, con un pacchetto politico fatto su misura per servire gli interessi del capitale. Trump sta semplicemente sostituendo una forma mercantilistica con un’altra.

TTIP, NAFTA, l’Uruguay Round del GATT e tutti gli altri “Trattati di Libero Commercio” non riducono il protezionismo né rendono il commercio più libero. Semplicemente spostano la protezione da una formula non più congeniale agli interessi capitalistici dominanti, ad una più adatta.

Quella che le élite di governo chiamano “riforma di libero mercato” o “liberalizzazione del commercio” è in realtà la controparte di ciò che un tempo si chiamava “socialismo al limone”, ovvero una politica statale come la nazionalizzazione delle industrie un tempo essenziali allo sviluppo del sistema capitalistico e ora non più proficue e divenute un peso per il privato. Ad esempio, la nazionalizzazione di industrie infrastrutturali di importanza centrale come le ferrovie, il telegrafo e il carbone. La socializzazione dei costi iniziali del capitalismo (istruzione vocazionale/tecnica, ricerca & sviluppo, autostrade, aeroporti, spesa sociale per le persone rese obsolete dal capitalismo, eccetera) è, come nota James O’Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State) una funzione basilare dello stato capitalistico.

Le “riforme di libero mercato” o il “libero commercio” al limone funzionano al contrario. Lo stato cessa di avere una determinata funzione perché non serve più gli interessi della grande industria.

L’esempio classico di “liberalismo commerciale” vantato dagli opinionisti libertari di destra, l’abolizione delle Corn Laws nell’Inghilterra ottocentesca, è un altro esempio di “libero commercio” al limone. Questo cosiddetto “libero commercio” fu adottato solo dopo che lo stato britannico ebbe conquistato e colonizzato gran parte del mondo, assicurandosi il monopolio di gran parte del commercio globale tramite la flotta mercantile britannica, e dopo che i grandi interessi terrieri dei Whig si furono arricchiti ed ebbero adoperato le ricchezze accumulate per finanziare la rivoluzione industriale. Ottenuto ciò, misure protezionistiche come le Corn Laws persero la loro funzione perché la classe capitalistica era in gran parte passata da un’economia agraria dominata dai vecchi Whig ad una industriale operante su scala globale.

Oggi, con la politica neoliberista di abbattimento dei dazi doganali tra una nazione e l’altra, accade la stessa cosa. Cento anni fa, le principali industrie manifatturiere sostenevano i dazi protezionistici perché era nel loro interesse. Le acciaierie premevano affinché il governo americano limitasse l’importazione di acciaio, proteggendo il loro monopolio nazionale. Oggi i dazi non servono più gli interessi di aziende globali, con unità produttive e catene distributive a livello mondiale. Anzi impediscono il transito di beni tra le diverse controllate nazionali, o il rimescolamento della produzione esternalizzata all’interno della catena distributiva aziendale.

Poi c’è la “proprietà intellettuale”, che è una forma di protezionismo di importanza ancora più vitale per le aziende globali americane di quanto non lo fossero i dazi doganali per le manifatture di un secolo fa. La “proprietà intellettuale” è altrettanto protezionista dei dazi, solo che è imposta ai confini aziendali, non nazionali. È questa che permette al capitale occidentale di non produrre più alcunché, e di esternalizzare tutta la produzione vera e propria in Cina o Vietnam continuando a mantenere il monopolio legale sulla vendita del prodotto.

Il TTIP nasconde in realtà un massiccio aumento delle barriere protezionistiche. Rafforza drasticamente le forme protezionistiche economicamente più significative su cui si basa fortemente l’attuale modello aziendale, lasciando in parte decadere quelle forme protezionistiche obsolete che al capitale globale non servono più. Il TTIP e gli altri “Accordi di Libero Commercio” sono una Smoot-Hawley a protezione della “proprietà intellettuale”.

A recurring theme in recent commentary on the Dakota Access Pipeline is that it’s becoming an increasingly high-risk investment, and that all the political controversy and uncertainty in the news surrounding the pipeline will result in investor flight — in the end, leaving the unfinished pipeline as a “stranded asset.”

In the specific case of DAPL, the Obama administration’s denial of an easement in November has delayed completion of the project until — at best — some indefinite time in 2017. Advocates of the project warn that delay of completion past New Years caused a number of contracts to expire, leaving oil producers free to abandon their commitment to use the pipeline. And even with an oil industry- and pipeline-friendly Trump administration, the highly visible public opposition to DAPL combined with the bureaucratic uncertainty involved in overturning the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision, and the declining profitability of unconventional oil recovery, mean investors will be taking a second and third look at the wisdom of keeping their money in such a shaky ventury or investing in similar projects in the future.

Even without a political decision by the Obama administration, continued obstruction by water protectors might well have delayed completion of the Missouri River crossing into this year.

And in any case — again, even without official political vetos — large-scale demonstrations with non-violent direct action to hinder construction seem to be becoming a standard feature of all new pipeline projects. Just today, I saw in the news that Energy Transfer Partners is planning to build a new stretch of pipeline in Louisiana — the Bayou Bridge project — to carry oil from the completed DAPL to the Gulf. A public hearing in Baton Rouge was packed by hundreds of people, and anti-pipeline activists promise that if construction is approved Atchafalaya Basin will become the next Standing Rock.

We can safely predict that every projected pipeline route that comes near vulnerable water resources, populations, or significant natural or cultural landmarks, will become the site of tent cities and extremely ugly confrontations between highly unsympathetic paramilitary police forces and non-violent local populations. The costly delays and hiring of rent-a-cops will become a standard feature of every pipeline project, figuring into the cost projections of prospective investors. And where multiple unfinished projects are planned in coordination with each other, the uncertainty of completing any one project or rendering it unfeasibly costly — as with DAPL and Bayou Bridge — will increase the uncertainty of the other projects as well.

Also entering into the lifetime cost calculations of planners and potential investors in future pipeline projects will be the unavoidable fact that even after completion, pipelines will pass through hundreds or thousands of miles of sparsely populated and indefensible country, and include numerous pumping stations and other vulnerable chokepoints that cannot be effectively defended without making total costs prohibitive. Another potential cost is the divestment movement, with mutual funds, university endowments and the like threatening to dump billions in securities from companies that invest in pipelines.

For that matter, oil company, pipeline company and investment company executives might just get tired of being splashed with oil every time they go to church or the country club or eat out at a restaurant. As Utah Phillips observed, the people killing our Mother Earth have names and addresses.

Unconventional recovery methods like shale fracking and tar sands were already only marginally profitable at best, simply because of basic principles of physics like Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI). Such expensively recovered oil produces a much smaller margin of net energy over and above the energy costs of extraction and refining, compared to older high-EROEI reserves like Saudi light sweet crude, and the profitably recoverable portions of such reserves are considerably smaller than reserves in the Persian Gulf projected to go offline. In the meantime, solar energy’s cost per watt continues to drop, and renewable energy production capacity grows exponentially, further reducing demand for costly unconventional fossil fuels.

When you add to these facts — which have been on the table for some time — the additional costs of direct action and obstruction by protestors, it’s a totally different world for potential pipeline investors. And probably one they don’t want to live in.

[Di Chad Nelson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society l’otto gennaio 2017 con il titolo The State Doesn’t Conserve, It Only Destroys. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.]

Recensione di: Janay Brun, Cloak and Jaguar: Following a Cat From Desert to Courtroom

Se non avete mai sentito parlare dell’ormai defunto Macho B, non siete soli. Con voi ci sono molte persone fuori dall’Arizona (forse anche il Nuovo Messico). Macho B era un giaguaro selvatico che gironzolava al confine tra il Messico e il sud-ovest degli Stati Uniti. Che si sappia, al tempo della sua tragica morte, nel 2009, era l’unico giaguaro di casa negli Stati Uniti. Poiché era una tale rarità, Macho B (in spagnolo, “Maschio B”, perché era il secondo giaguaro maschio di cui si avesse notizia negli Stati Uniti alla metà degli anni 2000) fu subito mercificato dalle autorità ambientalistiche e da un’organizzazione privata di “tutela” che voleva catturarlo e controllarlo per questioni di fama e successo. (Alla fine del libro, quando appare chiaro che i sedicenti tutori fanno più male che bene, anche altri lettori si sentiranno obbligati a mettere tra virgolette la parola tutela).

Si sa che noi umani in generale rispettiamo poco gli animali. Certo teniamo alla vita degli animali domestici che vivono con noi, ma poi regolarmente martoriamo, cacciamo, torturiamo, uccidiamo e mangiamo senza necessità tutti gli altri, facendo di noi stessi le vere belve. La vita di Macho B non era un’eccezione: stroncata dal nostro atteggiamento di dominio verso gli animali e tutta la natura. Il gruppo rock Pearl Jam esprime perfettamente questo atteggiamento in un suo brano del 2000, Do the Evolution:

Sono avanti, sono un uomo
Il primo mammifero coi calzoni, sì
In pace con la mia brama
Posso uccidere perché credo in dio, sì
Questa è l’evoluzione, piccolo.

Poiché i giaguari nordamericani vivono esclusivamente a sud del confine, Macho B è diventato preda ambita per gli assassini dietro il velo della “ricerca”. Ma la loro pretesa ricerca scientifica non ha retto all’indagine sull’accaduto dopo la morte di Macho B. Questo grazie a Janay Brun, un’informatrice ora sotto accusa. Senza di lei la verità sull’uccisione di Macho B non sarebbe mai venuta fuori.

Janay Brun vede Macho B per la prima volta nel 1999, durante una camminata nel deserto con i suoi cani, e subito la sua presenza la incuriosisce. La scoperta la interessa a tal punto che essa stessa diventa ricercatrice, e apprende da sé l’arte di seguire e osservare i grandi felini. Qualche anno dopo viene assunta da un’organizzazione privata per la tutela della natura, alla quale a suo dire interessa seguire le orme e documentare i movimenti e le abitudini del giaguaro. Nonostante gli sforzi della Brun, per Macho B il destino è segnato.

La storia narrata dalla Brun si divide in tre periodi di tempo. Il primo è a cavallo dell’avvistamento di Macho B. Stimolata, ispirata e innamorata di Macho B, la Brun cerca di unire passione e carriera.

Quindi la seconda fase, con la Brun nelle vesti di volontaria e poi dipendente della Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project (BJDP), organizzazione privata no profit capeggiata nientemeno che da un cacciatore: Jack Childs. Lei apprende subito che la protezione dei giaguari è un obiettivo remoto e secondario. Molto più importanti, per la BJDP e le sue controparti pubbliche, Arizona Game & Fish e United States Fish & Wildlife, sono i riconoscimenti accademici e i soldi pubblici da incassare dalla cattura di Macho B. La Brun illustra in dettaglio, con parole tragiche che catturano l’attenzione, quella spirale discendente che era il lavoro con gli uccisori di Macho B. Anche immaginando l’esito finale, non si può non simpatizzare con Macho B che sfugge alle autorità. Uno degli episodi più tristi della vicenda, per me, è quando la Brun si mette a sabotare di nascosto le trappole che i suoi compagni hanno preparato per Macho B (trappole che secondo loro servivano solo a studiare i leoni di montagna e gli orsi), senza però riuscire ad agire in tempo per salvargli la vita.

La terza parte descrive gli eventi dopo la cattura, l’uccisione e gli insabbiamenti degli uccisori. Questi negano di aver catturato intenzionalmente Macho B con una tagliola per mettergli un radio-collare. Ma visto che ce l’hanno, lo “studiano”; così dice la loro versione pubblica. Negano anche che la causa della morte siano le torture pesanti che il vecchio giaguaro ha subito da parte dei suoi cacciatori. Ancora oggi negano e respingono l’accusa di non aver “liberato” Macho B nel suo ambiente, nonostante le prove contro.

Come quasi sempre accade a chi rivela la verità, Janay Brun è diventata l’accusata principale della giustizia federale. Questo nonostante sia l’unica persona in tutta la vicenda ad avere a cuore le sorti di Macho B. Come nota lei, la sua incriminazione l’ha portata a vedere lo stato per quello che è: una banda criminale decisa a tutto pur di mantenere segretezza e potere. Molto dopo la conclusione del caso legale, continua ad essere minacciata dagli uccisori di Macho B per aver rivelato la verità pubblicando la richiesta di informazioni dovute per legge sul suo blog, Whistling for the Jaguar.

Temo ciò che potrebbe accadere a Janay Brun per aver scritto il libro. Dovesse accadere qualcosa, spero proprio che animalisti, anarchici e associazioni ambientaliste, oltre a tutti quelli che riconoscono la sacralità della vita di tutti gli esseri senzienti, aiutino la Brun a difendersi.

Le ultime due parti del libro illustrano quella burocrazia assurdamente contorta che sono le istituzioni federali di “gestione” e “tutela” della natura. Come si capisce dal processo alla Brun, queste stesse autorità sono confuse e disinformate riguardo i loro compiti e le normative sulle specie a rischio. Eppure vanno avanti con questo genere di “studi”, mettendo a rischio la vita di molte persone e animali solo perché c’è un dollaro da guadagnare o uno studio da pubblicare.

Un ruolo importante ce l’hanno anche le autorità sull’immigrazione con i loro muri, che distruggono l’integrità del territorio che per Macho B e molte altre specie è la loro casa. Lascio immaginare quanto la situazione possa peggiorare con l’amministrazione xenofobica, anti-ambientalista di Trump.

Il libro termina menzionando, tra le altre cose, l’avvistamento di un altro giaguaro (magari il figlio o il nipote di Macho B, dice lei) nello stesso territorio frequentato da Macho B. Si spera che persone come la Brun, che ora è al corrente degli attacchi a cui questi begli animali sono soggetti, trovino il modo di sabotare il tentativo di catturarlo e ucciderlo delle autorità ambientali statali e di chi dice di voler tutelare l’ambiente.

Distruggete le trappole, eliminate le tracce degli animali, e lasciateli vivere in quella pace, libertà e anonimato che spetta loro!

Welcome to the Daily Molotov, all the news that’s fit to hate the state. We’re finally back on schedule and at our regular posting level again after a tumultuous – yet exciting – couple of days. Let’s check out some of our latest headlines from across the media.

From the New York Times

The biggest story right now is still that Barack Obama has granted Chelsea Manning clemency, reducing her sentence to end on May 17, 2017. The fact that Manning will be a free woman almost seems like a dream. With Billionaire Freddy Krueger about to take office, my fear is that he’s going to make Manning’s remaining few months in prison a living nightmare. There’s still work to do.

There’s definitely more news, though. Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia has been extended. The Trump transition team has barely communicated at all with the National Security Council. Eighteen million people could lose their health insurance with the repeal of the ACA. Gambia’s current president has dug in, refusing to accept the results of a recent election. Israeli security forces fatally wounded a Palestinian teenager on Monday and it was caught on video, sparking outrage.

From the Washington Post

Secretary of Education pick Betsy DeVos has been in hearings to see if congress will confirm her for the job. So far, that road is looking kind of rocky. Yesterday, the hearing devolved into a full-on shouting match.

Thirty members of the House of Representatives are boycotting the inauguration, but no senators are following suit. They’re chasing power. Apparently one of Donald Trump’s heroes is… uh… well, read this. A buildup of hydrogen sulfide and methane gas under a manhole in Key Largo, Fla. killed three workers and severely injured several more.

From Politico

Trump claimed he would “drain the swamp” under the Beltway by removing lobbyist influence. He didn’t. Also, he will be entering the White House without much of his cabinet, and apparently he “doesn’t like tweeting.” Finally, the transition team is looking at “retooling” the State Department to focus primarily on terrorism. You know, like the other four departments that do that.

From Slate

Rex Tillerson’s confirmation may be in jeopardy. Also, Tom Friedman doesn’t know anything – but you knew that. Betsy DeVos says guns are necessary in schools to fend off grizzlies, which, I mean. Finally, student data  security at public schools is unsurprisingly bad.

From The Nation

Symbolic protest is not enough. We need to “throw sand in the gears of everything.”

From Jacobin

Joe Soss responds to a terrible New York Times article on food stamps.

From Anarchist News

Here’s a letter from a French anarchist in prison about justice.

From It’s Going Down

Denver Anarchist Black Cross has called for support of a political prisoner in Colorado, Coyote Acabo.

From CrimethInc.

“Five Principles of Direct Action,” an analysis of the 2001 anti-inauguration protests.

From the Libertarian Institute

Erik Prince’s mercenaries are bombing Libya.

From Antiwar News

Douchebags think Chelsea Manning’s freedom is a national security risk.

From the Intercept

Erik Prince has been covertly advising Trump.

Thanks for reading the Daily Molotov, curated for C4SS by Trevor Hultner. You can submit news tips to trevor@c4ss.org, tweet at us either at @c4ssdotorg or @trevor_c4ss, or leave a comment below. Your continued support of the Center for a Stateless Society means we can continue to roll out new features like this.

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There’s a lot of disagreement in American politics — from Berniecrats, to the centrist neoliberal establishment, to right-libertarians, to nationalist reactionaries like Trump and his followers — on TPP and other trade agreements. But there’s one thing they all agree on: calling it “free trade.” And they’re all wrong.

At Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is Over,” Jan. 4), Matt Welch equates neoliberalism and trade pacts like TPP to “free trade,” and contrasts all of those things to the “mercantilism” of Trump’s US Trade Representative nominee — which should be the howler of the century for anyone aware of the mercantilist essence of neoliberal trade agreements. Right-wing nationalists (aka “fascists”) like Trump and Pence regularly claim that “free trade” and “free markets” have destroyed American manufacturing jobs. And center-left wonk Max Ehrenfreund at the Washington Post (“Trump is bringing in the big guns to roll back free trade,” Jan. 4) likewise describes Trump’s USTR pick as “rolling back free trade.”

Bull hockey.

Let’s get something straight: The capitalist state’s primary function is to serve the long-term interests of the economic ruling class. No capitalist state has ever promoted free trade, and no capitalist state will ever do so. At any given time, the capitalist state adopts a package of intervention and non-intervention that optimally serves the interests of capital. Trump is simply replacing one form of mercantilism with another.

TPP, NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, and all those other “Free Trade Agreements” don’t reduce protectionism or make trade freer at all. They simply shift state protectionist intervention away from forms that no longer serve the dominant capitalist interests, toward forms that better serve them.

What capitalist governing elites call “free market reform” or “trade liberalisation” is really just the counterpart to what was called “lemon socialism” — i.e., state policies like nationalizing industries that were vital to the functioning of the capitalist system as a whole, but that private capital no longer found sufficiently profitable to operate on their own nickel. Examples included nationalizing centrally important infrastructural industries like railroads, telegraphs, and coal. Socializing the input costs of capitalism — vocational/technical education, R&D, interstate highways, airports, supporting the surplus population rendered obsolete by capitalism, etc. — is, as James O’Connor pointed out (The Fiscal Crisis of the State) a basic function of the capitalist state.

Lemon “free market reform” or “free trade” does just the opposite. The state ceases to perform a function that no longer serves the interests of big business.

The classic example of “trade liberalism” touted by right-libertarian commentators — the repeal of the Corn Laws in 19th century Britain — is also the classic example of lemon “free trade.” This so-called “free trade” was adopted only after the British state had conquered and colonized a major part of the world and secured a monopoly on most global trade by the British merchant fleet, and the great Whig landed interests had enriched themselves and used their wealth to fund the industrial revolution. These things having been accomplished, protectionist measures like the Corn Laws no longer served their function for a capitalist class in which industrialists had largely replaced Whig agrarian capitalists as the dominant party, and operated on a global scale.

The same is true today of the neoliberal move to lower tariff barriers at national borders. A hundred years ago, the dominant American manufacturing firms supported tariff protectionism because it was in their economic interest. U.S. Steel wanted the U.S. government to restrict imports of foreign steel,  protecting its steel monopoly in the domestic market. Today, tariffs no longer serve the interests of global corporations with production facilities all over the world, or with global supply chains. They actually impede the transfer of goods between national subsidiaries of corporations, or of shuffling around outsourced production within corporate supply chains.

“Intellectual property,” on the other hand, is a form of protectionism even more vital to American global corporations today than tariffs were to U.S. manufacturers a century ago. “Intellectual property” is every bit as protectionist as the tariff — it’s just enforced at the corporate boundary instead of the national boundary. It’s IP that enables Western capital no longer to actually manufacture anything, to outsource all actual production to China or Vietnam, but still maintain a legal monopoly on disposal of the product.

So TPP is actually a massive net increase in protectionism in trade barriers. It drastically increases the most economically significant form of protectionism that the dominant corporate interests’ business model most heavily relies on, while partially phasing out an obsolete form of protectionism that global capital doesn’t need any more. TPP and other such “Free Trade Agreements” are the Smoot-Hawley of “intellectual property” protectionism.

Welcome to the Daily Molotov, all the news that’s fit to hate the state with. 

Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower who was arrested in 2010 for leaking documents about the Iraq and Afghan Wars to Wikileaks, will be released in May after outgoing president Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her sentence.

Excuse us while we celebrate instead of post a normal blog post. Congratulations to all of the activists and supporters who pushed for Manning’s release. We’ll see you tomorrow.

From the New York Times: Obama commutes the bulk of Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

Welcome to the Daily Molotov, all the news that’s fit to hit the state with. Here are some of today’s important headlines.

From the New York Times: Hey, listen, we’re all screwed.

Also from the New York Times: One of the Samsung heirs might be going to jail. And Trump’s connections to Russia go back three decades.

From the Washington Post: Some members of the Deep State were “NeverTrump” folks, and they’re probably gonna be ignored.

Also from the Washington Post: Monica Crowley won’t take the National Security Council job because she plagiarized from a foot doctor. Over 30 Democrats will be skipping the inauguration.

From Politico: Donald Trump is by no means a uniter. Also, Gene Cernan, the last person to walk on the Moon, has died at 82.

From Slate: That whole overtime raise thing didn’t happen. Also, Trump at one point called Russia “our biggest problem” before running for president.

From Infoshop News: DisruptJ20 was filmed by some nerds called “Project Veritas,” and have released a statement accordingly.

From Anarchist News: Here are some resources for #DisruptJ2o.

From Antiwar News: Shockingly, Iran doesn’t want to renegotiate its nuclear deal.

From CrimethInc.: A history of counter-inauguration protests.

From Libcom: A look back on Obama’s deportation regime.

Thanks for reading the Daily Molotov, curated for C4SS by Trevor Hultner. You can submit news tips to trevor@c4ss.org, tweet at us either at @c4ssdotorg or @trevor_c4ss, or leave a comment below. Your continued support of the Center for a Stateless Society means we can continue to roll out new features like this.

Want this directly in your inbox every morning? Subscribe to our mailing list below.

Howdy, folks! It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for me to share with you all sorts of fun stuff related to the work we do here at C4SS.

MORE NEWS DIGESTS!!

In addition to the Weekly Libertarian Leftist Review, last week we launched the Daily Molotov. Here’s what we’re doing with that. For now, what you see is what you get: a daily digest of “All the News That’s Fit to Hate the State With,” but we plan on adding other stuff, including podcasts, original reporting and more. This is part of our ongoing efforts to expand what the Center does and how it functions.

The Week in Commentary

Kevin Carson’s “No Right to Free Water – Except for Nestlé” got picked up by Counterpunch, the Augusta Free Press, Dinâmicas Sul-sur, MB3-org.com, Abundant-hope.net, and mvprogressives.org. Logan Glitterbomb’s “Combating hate: A Radical Leftist guide to Gun Control,” got picked up at the Augusta Free Press.

This has so far been a really good month for commentaries, but I’m already late as is SO I’m going to wrap this up. We are a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that relies on your tax-deductible donations to keep rolling along, putting anarchy into the hands of folks all over the world. Come say hi at ISFLC 2017, be like the generous individuals who have already donated this month, or follow us on Twitter at @c4ssdotorg.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? email me at trevor@c4ss.org or tweet at me at @trevor_c4ss.

As I’ve argued many times, there are plenty of reasons why people who believe in human freedom and free markets should oppose so-called “right-to-work” laws. And University of Arkansas Professor Michael Pierce, in a recent article for Labor Online (“The Origins of Right-to-WorkVance Muse, Anti-Semitism, and the Maintenance of Jim Crow Labor Relations,” Jan. 12), now gives us some new ones.

“Right-to-work” laws are, as I have argued before, fundamentally opposed to free market principles. To begin with, at their core they are a restraint on freedom of contract. They prohibit an employer from signing a contract with the representative of a bargaining unit requiring new hires to join the union.

That doesn’t stop a lot of self-proclaimed “libertarians” of the Right from enthusiastically supporting them, of course. These are people who can’t write the word “union” without “bosses” attached to it — never mind that “bosses” has a long-standing negative connotation for reasons that have nothing to do with unions, and everything to do with the business management workers formed unions to protect themselves against.

Right-libertarians’ hearts bleed at the thought of an employer running roughshod over workers’ rights by forcing them to join a union against their wishes.

Of course, joining a union is the only conceivable issue on which right-libertarians would defend the “freedom” of workers from the right of management to hire or fire for any reason they see fit — or no reason at all. When workers complain of intrusive social media monitoring by their employers, or restrictions on their rights of free association or free speech outside the workplace, the typical right-libertarian will snarl, “You don’t like it? Look for another job!” Which is strong reason to suspect that the exception they make for union membership isn’t primarily about workers’ interests. Right-libertarians aren’t noted for siding with workers against employers, and right-to-work isn’t an exception to the rule. After all it’s employers — particularly employers in the worst low-wage banana republics of the American South — who are the biggest lobbyists for right-to-work.

But aside from all this, Pierce argues, “right-to-work” has its origins in Jim Crow, and the interest of employers in enforcing the “color line” that kept the labor force internally divided along racial lines and easier to exploit. Arkansas was one of the first three states back in the 1940s to consider “right-to-work” ballot measures, along with Florida and California (it failed in California).

A major political force behind the initiative was Vance Muse of the Christian American Association — as his grandson described him “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.” Lest this description be dismissed on the grounds of possible ideological bias, consider that Muse himself said “I am a Southerner and for white supremacy,” and published an anti-FDR pamphlet with a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt (in his words) “going to some n****r meeting with two escorts, n****rs, on each arm.”

Muse had previously backed Arkansas anti-strike legislation which held unions solely responsible for any violence during strikes. He promoted it as a means to empower “peace officers to quell disturbances and keep the color line drawn in our social affairs,” and to “protect the Southern Negro from communistic propaganda and influences.” Muse’s Christian American Association propagandized for “right-to-work” on the grounds that the union shop meant “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes . . . whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

It’s no coincidence that right-to-work legislation was initially backed by, and primarily served the economic interests of, the constellation of class forces in the South that imposed regional Apartheid after the end of Reconstruction and maintained it for a century through lynch law and denial of voting rights. And these same class forces today, acting through some of the most reactionary currents in American politics, are not only continuing to promote the spread of right-to-work legislation; they also, like their predecessors, are attempting once again to prop up banana republics under Apartheid rule by using gerrymandering and racist voter ID laws to roll back the legacy of the Second Reconstruction.

So-called “right-to-work” is inseparable from the political and class agenda of its primary backers, and no self-described “libertarian” should have anything to do with it.

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