Italian, Stateless Embassies
Il Nazionalismo Nero di Murray Rothbard

Di Thomas J. Webb. Originale pubblicato il 4 settembre 2018 con il titolo Murray Rothbard’s Black Nationalism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Il ruolo di primo piano di Rothbard nel formare il carattere del movimento libertario americano è innegabile. Agli inizi il movimento era formato da poche persone che, come in un villaggio, si conoscevano tutte tra loro. La successiva rapida espansione ha prodotto un effetto del fondatore. Le particolari idiosincrasie dei fondatori si sono impadronite sempre più dei nostri cervelli man mano che nuove generazioni di libertari rileggevano i classici e i nuovi testi venivano influenzati da quei fondatori.

Luogo comune del movimento libertario, secondo che si giudichi da destra o da sinistra, è che Rothbard fosse buono (o più a sinistra) negli anni Sessanta, salvo poi riparare a destra. È vero che tendeva a sinistra negli anni Sessanta e a destra poi (e infine verso elementi malfidati dell’ultradestra). Vista dalla distanza, l’evoluzione culturale di Rothbard pare un pendolo impazzito, ma osservando bene si scorgono elementi di continuità.

Man mano che le strategie politiche (o l’ideologia: difficile dire dove finisse la sua irrealistica realpolitik e dove iniziasse il suo personale fallimento ideologico) fluttuavano verso l’estrema destra americana, crescevano le alleanze con mascalzoni e canagliume della peggior specie. Queste strategie finirono per attirare nel movimento libertario persone di insana fede statalista. Negli anni Novanta in “Right-Wing Populism” arrivò ad elogiare il programma politico dello stregone del KKK David Duke:

La cosa affascinante è che nel programma o nella campagna di Duke non c’era niente che un paleoconservatore o paleolibertario non potesse condividere: taglio delle tasse, smantellamento della burocrazia, tagli allo stato sociale, attacchi alla discriminazione positiva e alle preferenze razziali, uguali diritti per tutti gli americani compresi i bianchi… cosa c’è che non va? Ovviamente, la coalizione anti-Duke aveva programmi diversi. Ma anche quelli più a sinistra ammettevano a denti stretti che c’era qualcosa di positivo. Eppure l’establishment adottò quella stessa “propaganda negativa” che odiava a parole.

Come fece Rothbard, uno che negli anni Sessanta elogiava le Pantere Nere, a scantonare così tanto in pochi decenni? In effetti, c’è molta più continuità di quanto non appaia. Nel suo saggio del 1970, “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”, punto di rottura dalla sinistra, criticando il femminismo di quei tempi fa il paragone con il movimento di liberazione dei neri, a suo dire separatista:

Quanto al movimento di liberazione della donna, forse dovremmo prendere sul serio l’analogia che esso stesso fa con il movimento di liberazione dei neri. I neri sono passati dall’integrazione al potere nero, ma la logica che sta dietro è semplice: nazionalismo nero, una nazione indipendente di neri. Se le moderne femministe vogliono lasciare l’“integrazione” uomo-donna a favore della liberazione, la logica impone un Potere Femminile, ovvero un Nazionalismo Femminile. Perché non diamo un territorio vergine, magari le Black Hills o l’Arizona, a queste bisbetiche? Che mettano pure su la loro Repubblica Democratica delle Amazzoni Karateka e buonanotte. Il virus del loro comportamento e delle loro ideologie malate verrebbe isolato e rimosso dal corpo sociale, e noialtri amanti della vecchia buona eterosessualità potremmo continuare a vivere indisturbati. (Enfasi mia)

Sarebbe una valida critica del femminismo dell’epoca, se l’analogia con il movimento di liberazione dei neri fosse davvero così diffusa come fa capire. A giudicare da come liquida la questione femminile non pare uno che appena qualche anno prima sosteneva la giustizia sociale. Detto francamente, il Rothbard del 1970 somiglia già a quello del 1992. Ma ciò che fa più disperare è che apparentemente credeva che il movimento di liberazione dei neri fosse separatista. Soprattutto se pensiamo che la sua reputazione di sinistra se l’era conquistata con l’appoggio alle Pantere Nere. Non che le Pantere Nere fossero necessariamente separatiste, ma il suo appoggio si basava sull’idea che lo fossero. In questo suo editoriale del 1969 esprime il suo disappunto per l’apparente rinuncia al nazionalismo nero:

Le Pantere hanno tre grandi pregi: (1) l’enorme capacità di irritare fino all’esasperazione i poliziotti bianchi semplicemente andando in giro armati e in uniforme, presunto privilegio costituzionale di ogni americano libero evidentemente negato ai militanti radicali neri; (2) la loro grande capacità di organizzare i giovani neri; e (3) idee grandiose in fatto di nazionalismo nero, soprattutto l’idea di una nazione nera con il suo territorio nella Black Belt o nel Sud, come Eldridge Cleaver auspica in alcuni suoi scritti.

Ma ci sono tendenze che vanno in senso contrario e che sono così serie da mettere in dubbio i meriti generali delle Pantere. In primo luogo, cresce la tendenza ad abbandonare quasi completamente il nazionalismo nero a favore dei virus della Vecchia Sinistra che preferisce un’azione marxista bianco-nero della classe lavoratrice. Il problema non è solo un’infusione di retorica marxista nel sangue delle Pantere, ma anche la voglia maledetta di stringere alleanze con l’estremismo bianco, contraddicendo così tutto il pensiero del potere nero, che vuole lo sviluppo di movimenti neri separati che portino all’autodeterminazione di una nazione nera. (Enfasi mia)

Ovviamente, Rothbard non amava i marxisti. Ma il suo disappunto per la direzione presa dai neri riguardava “in primo luogo” il loro apparente abbandono del nazionalismo nero. Ovvero del separatismo.

Caratterizzare i movimenti di liberazione unicamente come separatisti o integrazionisti trascura, nel migliore dei casi, importanti sottigliezze, sottigliezze che dovrebbero interessare ogni libertario. Curioso è anche il fatto che una persona possa avere un’ideologia cosmopolita e antistatale e contemporaneamente liquidare l’integrazionismo dopo decenni, o secoli, di segregazione forzata ad opera dello stato.

Ancora più preoccupante è che il suo sostegno al separatismo nero sia perfettamente coerente con le sue successive aperture ai nazionalisti bianchi. Non sto dicendo che chiunque non sia nero ma favorevole al nazionalismo nero debba augurarsi che i neri vadano affanculo. Né commento il conflitto all’interno del liberazionismo nero in fatto di assimilazione. Non tocco queste cose. Ciò che voglio dire è che il sostegno alla causa del separatismo nero da parte di un bianco è coerente con il sostegno al suprematismo bianco, come Rothbard ha fatto successivamente. Ovvero, in tema di questioni razziali c’è continuità tra il primo Rothbard e quello più tardo.

La tendenza fascista emersa in questi ultimi decenni, di usare una strategia pan-secessionista al fine di collegare il nazionalismo degli oppressori con quello degli oppressi, concorda perfettamente con la caduta di Rothbard nella “strategia paleo” e con le tarde aperture all’estrema destra. Come scrive diffusamente Alexander Reid Ross in Against the Fascist Creep, il pan-secessionismo può fungere da esca per attirare estremisti alla causa del nazionalismo bianco. Spiega in un’intervista sul libro:

Senza neanche capire come queste idee ambigue vengono applicate ai diversi milieu, come l’anarchismo nazionale o il nazionalismo autonomo e cose del genere, i radicali possono cadere preda di facili luoghi comuni. Esempio notevole è il pan-secessionismo. Quando un radicale comincia a parlare della necessità di una politica separatista senza avere una chiaro seguito strategico cosmopolita, non fa altro che esporsi all’influsso di un fascismo strisciante, e c’è la possibilità che idee e movimenti fascisti facciano proseliti in ambienti estremisti e nelle più ampie sottocultura e cultura tradizionale. Quando comincia a parlare di separatismo etnico, soprattutto di separatismo bianco di diritto o di fatto, ha già praticamente rinunciato alla lotta.

Apparentemente, il quasi di sinistra Rothbard abboccò. C’è una lunga storia di suprematisti bianchi che sostengono la causa del movimento di liberazione dei neri se e solo se questi cercano uno stato nazionale per conto loro. Come dice l’exposé on the KKK’s networking with Nation of Islam (servizio sulla collaborazione tra il KKK e la Nazione Islamica) su SPLC:

Attorniato da una dozzina di camicie brune con la svastica al braccio, Rockwell ha rivelato davanti ad un pubblico di devoti alla nazione di essere “orgoglioso di stare qui davanti a dei neri. … Elijah Muhammad è l’Adolph Hitler dei neri.”

Ci sono stati contatti sporadici tra musulmani neri e suprematisti bianchi dopo l’istituzione di una falange della Nazione Islamica da parte di Louis Farrakhan nel 1975.

Il capo del Klan Tom Metzger è rimasto così impressionato dalla pomposità antisemitica di Farrakhan, da donare 100 dollari alla Nazione dopo un suo raduno a Los Angeles a settembre 1985. Il mese dopo, Metzger e altri 200 suprematisti bianchi statunitensi e canadesi si sono radunati in una fattoria 50 miglia ad ovest di Detroit, dove hanno giurato sostegno alla Nazione Islamica.

Non dico che Rothbard partecipasse ad un complotto segreto per unire i separatisti e produrre una balcanizzazione razziale del mondo. Il suo interesse per il nazionalismo nero scemò quando capì che i liberazionisti neri avevano cambiato idea per abbracciare il marxismo. Col beneficio del dubbio, credo che fosse sincero quando sosteneva la secessione come passo avanti verso la secessione individuale, per quanto mi sembri insensato. Piuttosto, credo che le alleanze fatte a suo tempo e i corteggiamenti con la nuova sinistra fossero un preludio alla sua tarda vocazione. C’erano già segni premonitori, e se riusciamo a vederli possiamo evitare che altre celebrità libertarie acquisiscano troppo potere d’influenza e facciano troppi danni.

Feature Articles, Guest Feature
The Future of Digital Proudhonism

Gavin Mueller’s recent article for the boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” is a Marxist critique of what Mueller describes as “Digital Proudhonism,” a catchall term for those who believe that technology is lowering class barriers. Digital Proudhonism is not a formal ideology but rather an undercurrent expressed by a variety of individuals from all over the political spectrum. For Mueller, Digital Proudhonism is the unofficial ideology of those who think that simply by removing intellectual property we can destroy concentrated wealth and unjust power structures in society. He sees this as a pro-capitalist position, or at least one that lends itself to use by capitalists. In particular, he claims many of its proponents have capitalist leanings or sympathies.

The first problem is that the Digital Proudhonists he describes are from a variety of political and economic backgrounds. To make my analysis easier I’ll only include the main left wing thinkers he discusses (as those on the right/center presumably don’t care about ending capitalism all that much). But even restricting our search to this group, the thinkers he critiques are not as simplistic as claimed.

A survey of their beliefs:

  • Cory Doctorow is some sort of uncommitted generic libertarian leftist, and has openly entertained the idea of a planned economy.
  • Paul Mason is a self-described “radical social democrat” who sees government intervention in the financial and energy sectors as vital for a transition to a postcapitalist society as well as supporting reforms like universal basic income.
  • Finally, Kevin Carson is an anarchist without adjectives who wants to move as much economic activity as possible outside the cash nexus, while also recognizing the utility of markets for coordinating activity.

But even beyond the complexities these thinkers display, Mueller is wrong about how essential intellectual property is for modern capitalism. The statement that most demonstrates his ignorance of how capitalism works is his assertion that capitalism without intellectual property is “capitalism precisely as Marx described it.” Such a statement reveals a deep, deep lack of understanding of our modern economy. Today profits are not primarily generated through extracting surplus value from workers, but instead by deriving various rents on economic activity. While some of this rent extraction is through the physical ownership of property, much of it stems from financialized rents on products or services, as well as intellectual property.

I’m curious as to what Mueller sees as the post-intellectual-property business model of various companies. Off the top of my head, intellectual property no longer being enforceable would annihilate the entertainment industry and the software industry, as well as cripple the hardware and biotech industry (and that’s just the short term effects). Sure we’d probably still have industries like agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and energy production in the hands of capitalists, but refusing to enforce intellectual property would still result in the biggest transfer of wealth ever seen in human history and could be done entirely by simply refusing to enforce the law against those who transgress. Unlike physical property, which can be protected even without the state, intellectual property quickly escapes individual ownership once freed.

Mueller also argues markets naturally concentrate over time, but gives no justification for why other than Marx’s 150+ year old critique. But as we’ve already seen, modern capitalism is reliant on rent extraction through artificial scarcity backed by the state which means that orthodox Marxism is horribly out of date as an analytic model through which to understand modern capitalism. Dismissing the arguments of Kevin Carson as “petty producer fantasies” ignores his rigorous, radical analysis of modern capitalism and various alternatives. In Mueller’s description of how Digital Proudhonism might work for the production of physical goods, he conflates Chris Anderson’s (liberal) vision of how makers might send CAD files to manufacturers to have things built with Kevin Carson’s significantly more radical proposal.

Because Carson is not just against such economic approaches for ethical reasons but also economic ones! Mueller’s critique of him completely overlooks his extremely detailed argument for why we should return to localized peer production of material goods. Such calls aren’t the dreams of returning to yeoman self-sufficiency, deliberately crippling economic output so to live out fantasies of information age makers, but are instead the result of a radical analysis of how markets were deliberately bent towards mass production and mass distribution for the benefit of the state and capital. Kevin Carson has shown in painstaking detail how the industrial factory model of production was only sustainable in the 20th century thanks to unprecedented levels of state intervention in the economy, as well as the supremacy of the United States in the postwar era, which led to this industrial model being exported around the world.1 Conflating a radical economic analysis with that of Chris Anderson who writes for a popular audience is obviously fallacious.

This doesn’t mean the Marxist critique is completely outdated. I still think it has some teeth when it comes to questions around industries that are extremely capital intensive, such as microchip foundries, or futuristic technologies like nanomachines or modular thorium nuclear reactors that are likely to be initially expensive. Such technologies could potentially result in the runaway economic concentration that Marxists fear. Grappling with such problems is vital going forward and I would love to see them get more attention in anarchist discourse. But Mueller’s reliance on Marxist dogma is hardly progress on these issues. Just because economic concentration is possible does not make it guaranteed. Market anarchists have devoted considerable time to considering the variety of mechanisms that erode this accumulative tendency, as well as the various ways in which the state suppresses such countervailing forces on behalf of capital.

However Mueller isn’t completely wrong. One good suggestion he makes is that: “[C]reative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicle of class politics.”

While this misses the fluid, decentralized potential of digital labor, I do think that there’s ample room for critique of the “digital artisans” who utilize electronics that have significant negative impacts on the countries in which they are made or disposed of. What considerations should the anarchist hacker writing cryptography or building a cop-monitoring drone have for the workers who produce the complex hardware that enables such technology that they work on? Workers who, more often than not, have shitty working conditions and deal with environmental toxins. Such questions are of course relevant.

But even here the Digital Proudhonist critique of intellectual property has teeth! Modern electronic hardware is not built to be disposed of properly, nor is it built to be easily upgraded or even recycled. We don’t have modular technology that we can fit together as we desire and we’re forced to work with what we’re given. Such a state of affairs is largely the result of intellectual property law making it illegal to modify your tech, while also making it difficult for upstarts to manufacture technology that would be more sustainable. You can’t just ignore the impact of such dynamics on how societies structure their economies.

Another line that shows Mueller has done the bare minimum of research is Mueller’s strawman argument that “this revolution is a quiet one, requiring no strikes or other confrontation with capitalists.” But Carson, being an anarchist, has of course written countless words on current struggle against the state and capital.He has also provided a fantastic summary of what various thinkers see the future of networked conflict being like.2 It is by no means exhaustive or the final word, futurism being an art and not a science. But it is a substantive argument for why decentralized networked forces might be able to take on much larger, much better equipped hierarchically structured forces. Obviously he’d like to avoid outright conflict in the process of reaching a better world, but to say that he is in denial about the possibility of it occurring is laughable.

From where I stand, Mueller’s solutions are hardly an improvement. Calling for the  “democratic control” of digital labor is a nice pleasantry, but what does it actually look like? The administrative problems we’ve seen on social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter do not arise because of a lack of democracy, but rather as a result of size. I trust nationalized “democratic” social media even less than I trust private monopolies. Also what does it mean to democratically control the means of cultural production? Do we really need democratic oversight for the creation of production tools like GIMP or Audacity when users can modify the programs as they see fit? Even special effects heavy Hollywood movies (to give one example of where socialization might actually be appropriate) largely rely on labor to create those effects with the physical tools being relatively cheap in comparison.3 What does socializing tools mean when the main costs involved are not the physical equipment but the individual talent. The Digital Proudhonian answer is to give everyone access to the equipment, open source all the software, and let individuals self-organize as they see fit. The computationally intensive processes could be done by timeshared supercomputers or networked clusters. Mueller’s solution of “unions and political parties” is not only vague, it also ignores what has already been achieved through direct action by creatives using open source software or pirating proprietary software, in other words seizing the means of production for themselves. Sure there’s maybe a space for parties or institutions to open doors that individuals couldn’t but ideally our praxis should prefigure the world we want as possible. Trying to impose a 19th century solution on a 21st century problem raises all sorts of complications.

But all this is nothing compared to Mueller’s strawmanning of Digital Proudhonists by comparing them to actual fascists through guilt by association. In the most jaw-dropping paragraph of the essay, Mueller claims:

Proudhon and his beliefs fit naturally into the dominant ideologies surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: that economic problems stem from the conspiratorial manipulation of “fiat” currency by national governments and financial organizations such as the Federal Reserve. In light of recent analyses that suggest that Bitcoin functions less as a means of exchange than as a sociotechnical formation to which an array of faulty right-wing beliefs about economics adheres, and the revelation that contemporary fascist groups rely on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency to fund their activities, it is clear that Digital Proudhonism exists comfortably beside the most reactionary ideologies. Historically, this was true of Proudhon’s own work as well. As Zeev Sternhell describes, the early twentieth-century French political organization the Cercle Proudhon were captivated by Proudhon’s opposition to Marxism, his distaste for democracy, and his anti-Semitism. According to Sternhell, the group was an influential source of French proto-fascist thought.

This is the sort of trollish conflation and simplistic pattern matching I expect out of an InfoWars video or a Breitbart article, not a Marxist academic in a fucking peer reviewed journal. First of all suggesting that the Digital Proudhonists who are avowedly on the left – Mason, Carson and Doctorow – “exist comfortably” alongside the most reactionary ideologies is absurd. Mason and Carson have written longform strategies on how to fight the recent reactionary resurgence in the West. Meanwhile Doctorow is a longstanding champion of technological freedoms that impact everyone, being one of the most prominent figures against the “war on general purpose computing.” If that’s existing comfortably alongside fascism, I’d love to hear what Mueller thinks an aggressive stance looks like.

Then there’s the fact that Proudhon was not a goldbug, with his view of currency being much closer to David Graeber’s than any libertarian viewpoint (i.e. currency is created out of debts instead of limited commodities that have intrinsic value). Those closest to Proudhon’s intellectual tradition, like many at C4SS, have not uncritically accepted Bitcoin. Since the technology emerged, the Center has had commentary from a variety of perspectives on Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency more broadly). While the Center has no official stance many figures have emphasised the necessity of a diversity of options going forward.

Consider Kevin Carson’s analysis of the problems with Bitcoin:

But far more important than questions of security and opacity to the state is the question … of Bitcoin’s functional role as a store of value or specie-mimic. So if neither party to a transaction has Bitcoins … there is no source of liquidity for an exchange of services between them. … [I]t’s maladapted to the primary purpose of an alternative currency: to provide liquidity for exchanges between people in a local economy who need a way to transform their services into purchasing power in a stagnant economic environment in which there’s “no money.”4

Or William Gillis’ critique of the current approach to cryptocurrencies:

[T]he implicit goal of One Big Currency is just as unreasonable as One Big Union. Any flat global currency will radically fail to match the topologies of trust, reputation, and other diverse human realities it floats on top of – lurking instabilities are inherent. Introducing parallel competing currencies all modeled on the dream of a universal standard hardly solves the problem.

My own inclination is that exchange facilitating human reputation systems will trend towards a rhizomatic federative model with every community, collective or congealing association floating their own “currency” in a sense, built to be dynamically recognfigured, and with routing protocols fluidly negotiating the network topology on the fly for individual transactions while retaining far more directed information regarding lines of trust and repute.

Such an analysis of cryptocurrency is likely missing from the vulgar libertarians that have either drifted to or are drifting towards the alt-right, because they tend to assume that any scarce resource such as gold or cryptocurrency naturally becomes a currency.

But this is both theoretically and empirically false! As Graeber described in detail credit proceeds currency and is based entirely on trust and therefore is intensely subjective. As for rare metals, Chris Shaw shows that so-called universal currencies like gold were not the result of individuals converging upon a single solution, but instead imposed through the state both controlling the supply of gold while also being able to give it value through coercive taxation. Imposing currency on a populace via coercive taxation destroys what should be an organic ecosystem of trust replacing it instead with a static rigid construct that not only serves power but also fails catastrophically.

Such analysis of the intersection of trust and control and how that impacts how currency operates is missing from modern Marxist analysis of capitalism. Marxist assumptions that markets a priori concentrate as a result of competition simplifies dynamics to the point of ignoring not just these problems with currency, but other entropic forces that would countervail against such concentration like broader issues of trust, information flow, barriers to entry, coordination problems, lack of non-market means of meeting one’s needs, etc. Ironically enough the Marxist simplification of the market to the dynamics described in Das Kapital limits radical analysis the same way neoclassical economics assumes highly rational actors and disregards environmental consequences. In failing to consider dynamics in the economy that might counteract the trends towards concentration through making large institutions increasingly more costly to maintain, Marxism becomes epistemically blind towards a whole host of dynamics that are essential for theorizing about any non-capitalist economy.

And these dynamics are absolutely what we should be talking about! In 2019, we will hopefully see the publication of Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworki’s The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, both of which argue that non-market socialist economies are possible, and present formulations for how they might function. Phillips and Rozworki in particular will examine the economic calculation problem using the internal management software of Wal-Mart and Amazon (both of which have internal economies larger then the USSR at its peak). And there’s good reason to believe that such considerations about distribution mechanisms won’t just be the subject of campus socialist clubs and Jacobin think-pieces, but rather could in fact influence the policy of the left wing parties in the West. For example, Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, in conjunction with the UK Labor party, has hosted a series of conferences articulating new economic visions for the 21st century. While speakers included individuals that fit within the social democratic politics like Joseph Stiglitz, Yanis Varoufakis, and Mariana Mazzucato, it has also hosted radicals like Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek who’ve openly argued for the supersession of capitalism. Furthermore there’s every reason to believe that we’ll see such ideas gain traction among leftist intellectuals who serve as the base for other political parties or movements, just as the emergent reactionary right has created a “globalist anti-globalism” which has exported figures and ideas across borders, we’re also seeing something similar with the left, both top-down from the intellectuals or the policy makers and also bottom-up through social media debate and discussion (and of course, memes).

As there is very real reason to believe that such theorizing could at some point form the basis of left wing politics going forward, the Center for a Stateless Society and the radical critiques it has made of collective action problems should absolutely be part of the discussion. I’m certainly a fan of comparing modern capitalism to the USSR (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism or David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory) but if the only debate going forward is over whether we want Jeff Bezos, a democratically elected Jeff Bezos or mass voting to decide upon economic decisions I’ll be incredibly disappointed. Collective action problems are intrinsic to any complex society and retreating to either management by technocrats/algorithms or constant involvement in the local assembly is hardly progress towards a world I would want.

But I welcome such analysis all the same. While I may disagree with the directions such authors ultimately want us to go, there is absolutely value to be had from analyzing the internal planning software of firms like Amazon or Wal-Mart and having discussions about how they might be used to solve various collective action problems. Left wing futurism that is both optimistic and high-tech has, unfortunately, been underdeveloped for decades now and I welcome its return to the discourse.

And hopefully such a turn to futurism will also drag Marxists into the 21st century.  Both in terms of understanding the technological possibilities, but also in terms of the ideological fault lines that are emerging. The Marxist conflation of markets and capitalism have resulted in centuries of confusion that still befuddles them to this very day. The so-called Digital Proudhonists are beginning to move beyond such errors, or have resolved them completely. It remains to be seen if academic Marxism can do the same.

  1. Kevin Carson, Homebrew Industrial Revolution describes how the so-called “economies of scale” were promoted by massive state intervention.
  2. See Chapter 3 of The Desktop Regulatory State, Networks vs. Hierarchies: The End Game, as well as Bring on the Drones!
  3. The main cost of special effects in Hollywood movies is either human labor or computational processing. To give one example the 2013 Pixar film Monsters University used a 2,000 computer data centre that included one of the top 25 supercomputers at the time of writing to render the film. Each frame took 29 hours (!) to render. From Special Effects Aren’t Cheap: The Cost of CGI, Misk, Dan Martens.
  4. Kevin Carson, The Desktop Regulatory State, pg. 194
Italian, Stateless Embassies
Una Semplice Riforma

Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 6 settembre 2018 con il titolo A Simple Reform. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Se il problema delle tasse è che sono una violenza, allora ogni riformismo fiscale coerentemente e consistentemente libertario come prima cosa dovrebbe diminuire il numero di persone derubate. Questo, ovviamente, significa eliminare completamente le tasse sui più poveri.

Secondo il principio di non aggressione (PNA), un balordo che, pistola in pugno, ti prende il portafogli commette un crimine a prescindere dal valore che tu, soggettivamente, attribuisci al contenuto del portafogli. Dunque, se il braccio armato dello stato prende 20 dollari da un poveraccio o 2.000.000 di dollari da un ricco, commette in un certo senso lo stesso crimine. Il problema principale, dice il PNA, è la violenza, l’aggressione, la minaccia di un danno fisico, non tanto ciò che se ne ottiene.

Abolire completamente le tasse su, diciamo, il 50% più povero non solo sarebbe la riforma fiscale progressiva più coerentemente libertaria, perché eliminerebbe il maggior numero di furti con un costo minimo, ma avrebbe anche il beneficio di costringere la sinistra statalista a spiegare perché presume di saper spendere i soldi dei poveri meglio di loro. Sarebbe semplicissimo: i rappresentanti libertari presentano un disegno di legge che innalza la soglia dell’esenzione totale di qualche migliaio di dollari. Sarebbe come liberare dal carcere di milioni di persone. E l’impatto netto sul bilancio sarebbe minimo, meno di tanti altri tagli fiscali. Sinistra e liberal, d’istinto contro ogni taglio fiscale, non potrebbero gridare al “taglio a favore dei ricchi”, sarebbero costretti a spiegare direttamente ai poveri perché si ritengono “più saggi di loro”.

Certo qualcuno potrebbe obiettare inorridito che è “ingiusto” tassare alcuni e non altri. Dopotutto, tanti conservatori “flat-taxisti” pensano di sapere meglio di chiunque che è meglio tassare tutti che lasciare qualcuno fuori dalle grinfie statali. Ma è una logica antilibertaria. Dovremmo dire no ad una riforma che libera dal carcere solo alcuni drogati? Certo dobbiamo cercare di liberarne il più possibile. E se il senso della giustizia suggerisce che ognuno è equamente aggredito dallo stato perché non dire anche che dovrebbe essere equamente ricco?

Qualche leccapiedi potrebbe dire che rubare ai ricchi è sostanzialmente peggio che rubare ai poveri. È un ragionamento piuttosto arduo per tante ragioni, non ultima perché il denaro per i poveri pesa più che per i ricchi. Disperazione, costo opportunità, barriere all’ingresso, eccetera colpiscono di più i poveri. Se il 50% del reddito di un ricco ha un peso relativamente marginale, il 5% del reddito di un povero ha spesso un peso drammatico. Chi obietta sostenendo che l’utilità è fortemente soggettiva, e che forse il ricco attribuisce un valore enorme ai milioni extra, esagera perché sarebbe come dire che i due furti si equivalgono. Anche senza estrapolare deduzioni sul valore soggettivo, rimanendo nell’ambito di un qualche valore morale oggettivo indipendente dal valore del denaro carpito, occorrerebbe escludere interamente l’ingiustizia del furto violento per far apparire il furto ai danni dei poveri come poca cosa rispetto alla somma più grande estratta ai ricchi.

E con questo arriviamo a perché i libertari in generale non lottano per liberare i poveri dal fisco.

Nonostante tutto il parlare di principi di non aggressione e antistatalismo, il movimento libertario resta in gran parte ancorato ad una visione di destra del conflitto di classe per cui i poveri sono parassiti e i ricchi perlopiù demiurgi ingiustamente gravati. Da qui la fama di difensori delle élite, che giustificano la violenza che storicamente ha creato e mantenuto le assurde ricchezze, e che talvolta arrivano a sostenere nuovi orrori pur di salvare dette élite. Quest’oscenità, che è sempre stata nascosta dal velo sottilissimo del sostegno alla libertà, deve essere affrontata quando cerca di appropriarsi e di usare come arma gli argomenti retorici degli assolutisti del PNA.

Quanto a me, sono sincero riguardo le mie opinioni in questioni sociali: non credo nel PNA, sono un consequenzialista e voglio l’allargamento delle libertà di tutti. Credo che, concentrandosi sull’aggressione immediata e visibile, il PNA funga da copertura per quei trucchetti che servono a nascondere la coercizione e l’oppressione sistemica. Per creare un mercato davvero liberato occorre prima abbattere le gerarchie economiche autoperpetuanti originate da titaniche violenze storiche e una multiforme attività di sostegno statale, e per mantenere detto mercato una volta creato occorre un’attiva pressione socioculturale che lotti per impedire in tutti i modi il riemergere delle élite economiche e delle strutture di classe. Da anarchico non solo sono convinto che possiamo farlo senza rafforzare o ricorrere ad un apparato violento centralizzato come lo stato, ma penso anche che l’unica strada percorribile sia quella che fa a meno dello stato.

Personalmente, sosterrei l’abolizione delle tasse sui poveri non solo perché così diminuirebbero i furti commessi dallo stato, ma anche perché penso che i poveri nella nostra società trovino molti più ostacoli dei ricchi e che meritino un risarcimento per tutte le ingiustizie che hanno prosciugato e frustrato la loro esistenza. Credo anche che i poveri siano, generalmente parlando, traboccanti di creatività e capacità produttiva non riconosciuta o soppressa, la cui liberazione sarà un beneficio gratuito per tutti.

Le tasse esplicitamente pagate dai poveri allo stato sono solo una piccola parte dei loro problemi in questa nostra pseudofeudale economia distorta, abbastanza però da provocare orrore e offesa in chiunque abbia una coscienza.

I socialisti potrebbero obiettare che un programma che abolisce le tasse per i poveri senza contestualmente alzarle ai ricchi potrebbe far collassare il sostegno pubblico ai servizi sociali statali, con lo stato che verrebbe catturato dagli interessi di pochi contribuenti e trasformato in servizio esplicitamente di autotutela, mentre lo stato sociale verrebbe usato unicamente per contenere i disoccupati ai fini dello sfruttamento. Ma che differenza ci sarebbe rispetto ad ora? Cosa si ottiene costringendo con la forza i poveri a pagare, con grandi sacrifici personali, una piccola parte del bilancio statale? Dire “tutti contribuiamo” è un modo orribile di giustificare la ridistribuzione. Se la democrazia è il fine, come puoi giustificarti quando nascondi agli elettori i tuoi valori e i fini reali?

Se uno pensa che indebolire la giustificazione del “tutti contribuiamo” significa indebolire anche il sostegno allo stato e alla democrazia maggioritaria, impedire che la gente veda il tutto come un “impegno collettivo”, per me tutto ciò è positivo.

Con la pressione sociale, la porzione della popolazione che paga le tasse potrebbe ridursi ai più ricchi in assoluto, e questi, al fine di evitare le tasse, potrebbero a loro volta cedere le loro enormi ricchezze ingiustamente acquisite o lasciare che vengano ridotte quasi a zero. In uno scenario del genere lo stato scomparirebbe, e questa sarebbe certamente una vittoria per tutti! Senza lo stato e ridotti a zero, potrebbero anche tornare ad accumulare ricchezza, ma senza sotterfugi e tasse l’accumulazione sarebbe soggetta ad un forte calo dei profitti e ad una diffusa condanna sociale. Buon per loro se riescono a fare qualcosa senza partire dal furto e senza l’aiuto delle istituzioni plutocratiche.

Sono d’accordo coi socialisti quando dicono che i poveri sono pesantemente oppressi. Prima di arrivare a qualcosa che somigli anche lontanamente ad un libero mercato o a una società libera occorre un’enorme ridistribuzione delle ricchezze. Ma da anarchico credo che le riforme debbano venire dal basso, non dall’alto. Lo stato non farebbe che riprodurre quella centralizzazione e quella violenza che sono al suo cuore.

Eliminare lo stato dalla nostra vita. Io sarei per la rivoluzione, ma se si vuole essere riformisti cominciamo dall’abolizione delle tasse per i poveri. I socialisti contrari non farebbero altro che denunciare il loro amore per lo stato paternalistico. Quanto ai libertari, rivelerebbero la loro adorazione per l’aristocrazia plutocratica.

Commentary
State-Sanctioned Cover-Ups and the Legacy of Church-State Oppression in Ireland

Towards the end of August, Ireland became the subject of much media attention. The reason was quite simple: Pope Francis was scheduled to make a two-day visit to the country, leading many in the media to ask whether “his Holiness” would acknowledge and apologize for the never-ending list of sexual, physical, and psychological abuses the Catholic Church has inflicted upon Irish men, women and children.

To his credit, the Pope did one of those two things. He did acknowledge that the Church had covered up decades of abuses both in Ireland and elsewhere. He did not issue an apology however, instead asking the Irish people to ‘forgive’ the Church for its sins. Aside from this being a rather pathetic cop-out on his part, the visit and the lack of clear apology from the Church also raises questions (at least in my mind) about the state’s role in a myriad of cover-ups.

Since Ireland gained full independence in 1937, the relationship between Church and state in Ireland has always been a close one. Eamon De Valera, the country’s first post-1937 Taoiseach, built strong and lasting links with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for decades before full independence. These strong links between church and state in Ireland were epitomised by Article 44 of Ireland’s first post-1937 constitution. Article 44 was initially worded in a way that recognised the Catholic Church as the only legitimate religious body in the nation. Following a series of later re-drafts, the constitution recognised all religious bodies, Catholic or otherwise. However, whilst such a redraft aimed at being inclusive of all faiths, the initial purpose of state-sanctioned and protected privilege for the Catholic Church remained for all to see. The final version recognised and protected other denominations and faiths, but it was to be the Catholic Church that would guide Irish law and serve as the “guardian” of the faithful.

Many at that time would’ve been forgiven for thinking that this so-called ‘special position’ of the Church was one in name only. However, the litany of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse inflicted upon successive generations of Irish citizens shows that Article 44 placed the Church above the law, with state agencies like the Gardaí and many government officials helping turn what started as an internal Church cover-up into a state-sanctioned one. A report written in 2009 on the issue found that over a period of 30 years, the Gardaí and state, in collaboration with various Catholic parishes, wilfully and knowingly mocked, repressed, and ignored calls from abuse victims.

The Taoiseach – Leo Varadkar – was right to note during Pope Francis’ visit that the Church has to do better, reform further, and face up to the fact that it has inflicted pain not just upon Irish citizens but also others throughout Europe, the USA, and the developing world who lack the ability or courage to speak out. The previous Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, was right to condemn the joint workings of the Church and state that led to the tragedy of the Magdalene Laundries, institutions where single mothers and ‘unwanted women’ were shipped off and subjected to psychological torment. However, neither of them, nor the state-at-large, have been willing to fully sever the now ever more frayed and pointless link between church and state. Calls for the removal of church control of schools have been growing ever louder, and whilst some progress has been made, the government and the state’s two largest political parties are unwilling to fully wrestle control of education from the churches, Catholic or otherwise.

Until this is done, the Church shall still retain some form of state-sanctioned privilege in Ireland. Until this is done, it’s legacy of abuse and oppression shall continue to live on.

Italian, Stateless Embassies
Alternative dal Basso alla Guerra alla Droga

Guida anarchica alla riduzione del danno

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 26 agosto 2018 con il titolo Community Alternatives to the Drug War: An Anarchist Guide to Harm Reduction. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Scritto in collaborazione con Syd Eastman. Riposa in forze, Syd.

La guerra alla droga è un fallimento e pare che sempre più persone se ne accorgano. I numerosi arresti arricchiscono poche avide aziende che lucrano sul lavoro schiavistico dei detenuti. La crisi degli oppiacei infuria. I medici prescrivono pillole per profitto mentre la repressione di stato costringe i tossici, risultato dell’azione corporativa, a trovare alternative sulla strada. È innegabile che molti dei cosiddetti problemi legati all’uso della droga siano in realtà causati dallo stato, il capitalismo e l’atteggiamento della società di fronte all’uso delle droghe. Ma è ingenuo sostenere che l’uso delle droghe con comporti rischi intrinsechi. Da anarchici, riteniamo che chiunque debba essere libero di consumare ciò che vuole. Come persone, vogliamo sì una società edificata sull’aiuto reciproco, ma anche la riduzione del danno.

Quando si parla di “riduzione del danno” a livello di società si parla generalmente di legalizzazione, solitamente limitata alla cannabis e altre droghe “leggere”. Ma la legalizzazione fa pochissimo per risolvere i problemi, che anzi per molti altri versi aggrava. In primis perché la legalizzazione non comporta l’amnistia e la cancellazione dei reati per chi è stato condannato per droga. Legalizzare è praticamente inutile se non si scarcerano le persone. La legalizzazione non fa altro che imporre ulteriori norme, togliere l’attività dal mercato nero che ha creato il business, e metterlo nelle mani delle aziende, minacciando al contempo di mandare in galera chiunque continui a fornire droga sul mercato nero. Ma anche in un mercato legalizzato spesso chi ha precedenti non può lavorare per le attività legalizzate. Un anarchico, a qualunque tradizione appartenga, non può appoggiare uno stato di polizia che toglie il mercato nero dalle mani di lavoratori intraprendenti affinché i capitalisti borghesi traggano profitto proprio da chi vive di quei guadagni.

Dunque quali riforme legislative vogliamo, se le vogliamo? In fatto di riforme, una depenalizzazione farebbe moltissimo per liberare il mercato e tenere lo stato di polizia lontano dai più emarginati. A differenza della legalizzazione, la depenalizzazione non significa ipso facto la nascita di un mercato legale della droga. Significa solo che il possesso, l’uso, e in alcuni casi anche la vendita da persona a persona, non sono più reato. Significa che l’attuale mercato nero può agire liberamente, senza la preoccupazione che le industrie farmaceutiche o qualche altro interesse aziendale possa rubare quei pochi, onesti posti di lavoro con cui il sottoproletariato può ancora contare di sopravvivere sotto il capitalismo. Uniamo depenalizzazione, indulto e cancellazione dei reati e possiamo cominciare. E a differenza dei liberal, noi non vogliamo solo la depenalizzazione della cannabis, ma di tutte le droghe.

Tutta l’industria farmaceutica dovrebbe essere deregolamentata. Se, da un lato, è un male che si prescrivano più farmaci del dovuto per gonfiare i profitti delle industrie farmaceutiche, dall’altro l’imposizione di limiti alla prescrizione di oppiacei è una delle cause principali della cosiddetta “epidemia” di oppiacei, perché chi non può ottenere oppiacei legalmente si rivolge al mercato nero.

E cosa facciamo con le droghe “cattive”? Informare apertamente e onestamente. Togliere lo stigma, soprattutto. Si fa così tanta propaganda da decenni che molti hanno un’idea dell’uso di droga che è peggio della realtà. Un’informazione onesta, aperta, non pregiudiziale, può fare tanto per ridurre il danno anche nel caso di droghe con effetti collaterali negativi. Siti come Erowid.org e Bluelight.org svolgono un lavoro ammirevole nell’informare liberamente su un’ampia varietà di droghe.

Certo, conoscere gli effetti delle droghe in forma pura serve a poco quando vengono tagliate, se non sostituite, con altre sostanze. La regola in questo caso è l’informazione sulla strada, sapere con cosa le droghe vengono sostituite. Esistono strumenti come l’applicazione Bad Batch Alert, che aiuta chi fa uso di droghe a tenersi in contatto con la comunità, informando su possibili adulterazioni. Chiunque può fare da sé il controllo della droga servendosi di strumenti come le cartine reattive e i reagenti di Ehrlich. È più facile curare l’overdose quando si sa cosa si è assunto. Questo vale anche se la droga non è stata adulterata.

Quanto al trattamento dell’overdose, è bene ricordare che non dobbiamo fare diagnosi ma solo trattare i sintomi e garantire la sicurezza. Tra i sintomi comuni dell’overdose ci sono vampate, ansia, paranoia, disidratazione e semi-incoscienza o incoscienza totale. Per trattare le vampate e la disidratazione occorre bere acqua ed elettroliti. In casi estremi si possono togliere i vestiti e fare un bagno freddo. Se sopravvengono attacchi paranoici o di ansia, la persona, sotto assistenza, deve essere portata in un ambiente sicuro e dall’aspetto rassicurante e/o con attività rilassanti. In caso di perdita della conoscenza la miglior cosa da fare è chiamare immediatamente un medico. L’overdose da oppiacei può essere contrastata con il Narcan. L’overdose da anfetamine si può trattare con benzodiazepine. Indicazioni su come trattare una persona che ha avuto un brutto trip psichedelico si trovano sul Manual of Psychedelic Support della Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, o altri simili. In caso di overdose da caffeina, “bere acqua, fare un po’ di esercizio, mangiare cibi ricchi di potassio o magnesio come banane o verdure a foglia larga” sono d’aiuto in attesa che i livelli di caffeina si abbassino, mentre nei casi più gravi è meglio andare al pronto soccorso, farsi controllare le pulsazioni, e prendere lassativi per vuotare lo stomaco se necessario.

Se si sa per certo che un certo venditore taglia il prodotto, è bene farlo sapere agli altri. Gruppi come le Pantere Nere erano soliti affrontare gli spacciatori fraudolenti e violenti per emarginarli dal mercato. Questo, assieme all’azione di supporto e promozione di fonti sicure, aiuta a preservare la sicurezza di chi usa droghe e ad abbattere la criminalità del settore.

Dopo l’abbattimento della Via della Seta, sul web sommerso sono comparsi molti altri mercati che offrono un sistema più sicuro per il commercio di droghe su larga scala. Fornito di guide su come spedire in sicurezza usando spedizionieri pubblici o privati, recensioni dei clienti che permettono di scartare il prodotto scadente, e con un’ampia selezione a cui attingere, il web sommerso rappresenta una miniera d’oro per chi vuole allargare il proprio raggio d’azione. Anche per questo dobbiamo mantenere viva l’attenzione sul caso di Ross Ulbricht e lottare contro la censura di internet. Questo significa in ultima istanza non accedere ad internet tramite fonti statali o aziendali e optare per una rete autonoma.

Altro modo di ridurre il danno passa dall’eliminazione dello scambio delle siringhe. È dimostrato come l’uso di siringhe nuove abbatta l’incidenza di malattie infettive come l’HIV. Per contribuire si possono distribuire siringhe nuove fuori dai centri dove si dà il metadone, almeno finché non si viene cacciati via dalla proprietà privata, o distribuendo siringhe da casa in zone dove il tasso d’uso è alto. In casi estremi, quando non ci si può procurare aghi puliti, si possono sciacquare a fondo con acqua quelli usati per almeno trenta secondi, risciacquarli con candeggina o coca cola per altri trenta secondi, e fare un ultimo risciacquo di trenta secondi con acqua prima di riusarli. Pare che questo riduca il rischio di contrarre l’HIV, ma è una pratica che si dovrebbe seguire solo in casi di emergenza. Quando è possibile, è sempre meglio usare un ago nuovo.

Molto importanti sono anche le sale autogestite per il consumo controllato. Insegnare come iniettare la droga in modo sicuro serve non solo a combattere le malattie ed evitare danni, ma anche a rendere più autonomi gli utenti. Una persona che confida in un’altra per farsi iniettare la sostanza riceve quelle conoscenze che poi gli permettono di diventare autonomo nel caso in cui la relazione diventi pericolosa.

Per chi vuole uscire dalla dipendenza esistono gruppi di supporto come gli Alcolisti Anonimi e Narcotici Anonimi modellati attorno alla pratica anarchica. Questo genere di mutuo aiuto va talvolta oltre le terapie di gruppo e individuali. Le attività di recupero non istituzionali forniscono un’indispensabile alternativa alle istituzioni di tipo aziendale, e permettono un’assistenza molto più individuale. L’aiuto può assumere varie forme: l’alloggio o un contributo per l’affitto, cibo, medicine, conforto, distrazioni o compagnia.

All’estremo opposto delle sale di consumo controllato e spazi simili sono gli spazi di sobrietà. Capitano persone che vogliono stare lontano dalle tentazioni, o ex dipendenti che cercano ambienti “puliti”. Questi sono spazi che permettono a chi è in recupero di frequentare una cerchia sociale lontano da quei vizi che stanno cercando di dimenticare.

In conclusione, non riusciremo mai ad evitare che le persone prendano droghe. Se ne fa uso per divertirsi, sfuggire l’instabilità, dimenticare. Abolire il capitalismo e lo stato significa alleviare povertà e alienazione, e dunque attenuare il bisogno di evadere, ma non vale per tutti. Per chi vuole concedersi dei vizi possiamo solo cercare di ridurre il danno.

Commentary
How the Bootleggers & Baptists Tale Shows TERFs’ True Colors

The Bootleggers & Baptists allegory is a helpful illustration for understanding the motivations of actors within a regulated industry. Popularized by economist Bruce Yandel, it helps to explain how two seemingly unaligned groups can come together to support the same policy prescription — when they both stand to benefit from the outcomes.

It goes like this. Christian conservatives were successful, and in some areas remain successful to this day, in pushing for laws that prohibit the sale of alcohol on Sundays. They did so for moral reasons, arguing that sobriety, especially on the Sabbath, was of particular moral concern. The bootleggers, who enjoyed more business on the days when the above-ground market was closed, had considerable incentive to work with the prohibitionists (Baptists) in preserving this black market, however temporary. The baptists claimed the moral high ground openly while the black market dealers profited behind closed doors.

This framework allows us to understand why, in the last few years, an alliance has emerged between TERFs and Christian conservatives. TERFs are trans-exclusionary “radical” “feminists.” I use scare quotes because I believe them to be neither radical nor feminist. Adhering to debunked notions of biological essentialism is not radical, but rather reactionary, and defining women as essentially walking incubators is distinctly anti-feminist.

A few years ago, a colleague forwarded me an invitation for an event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation titled “Biology Is Not Bigotry.” This event was billed explicitly to showcase an unlikely alliance between these self-described “radical feminists” and Christian conservatives against the growing acceptance of transgender individuals. Events like this have been replicated around the world and show that this alliance is not unique to the US. In most cases they include out lesbians who argue that the mere existence of trans women in space and time is a violation of their privacy, and even their identity.

This was definitely the case at the Heritage Foundation event. If you’ve ever interacted with TERFs you have probably seen the language they use to co-opt the language of privacy rights into a cudgel used to demean and exclude trans people (though almost exclusively trans women) from public life. For what it’s worth, the argument that coexisting with trans people is a violation of cis people’s privacy has been rejected by courts across the country.

At the Heritage event they spoke of North Carolina’s controversial and illegal “bathroom bill” as a “privacy law.” This bill, HB2, would make it illegal for anyone to use a bathroom that didn’t correspond to the gender marker on that individual’s originally issued birth certificate. It shouldn’t shock the reader to suggest that Christian conservatives don’t have a history as staunch defenders of the rights of lesbians or other gender and sexual minorities, or even that of privacy rights. So why are they working with “radical” feminists concerned about “privacy rights”? Just like in the tale of the bootleggers and baptists — there’s more to this alliance than meets the eye.

Heritage has routinely come down on the side of the federal government when it comes to issues like dragnet surveillance and has staked out an antagonistic view with regards to Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that overturned Texas’ ban on sodomy, decrying it as a case of judicial activism. Heritage has routinely come to the defense of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008 which created much of the legal infrastructure for the NSA spying complex that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on in 2013.

It seems that Christian conservatives are fine recognizing an unenumerated right to privacy when it means barring trans people from public bathrooms or regulating the conduct of consenting adults in the privacy of their own bedrooms, but not when it comes to the ability of the people to be free from warrantless surveillance.

All of this is to say that, unsurprisingly, that Christian conservatives have a selective interpretation of what constitutes privacy, or even liberty for that matter. And they are willing to set aside their very apparent disdain for gay people, feminists, and feminism if it means they can target trans people for further marginalization.

To that end they find what, at first glance, seems like an unlikely ally in the form of self-avowed “radical feminists” like those in attendance on Heritage’s panel.

Another point to make here is that very often throughout history biology has in fact been used to justify bigoted beliefs. Misogynists referred to brain size for decades in order to justify denying suffrage to women and appeals to skull shape and physicality were cited to justify chattel slavery. The claim that “biology is not bigotry” is actually pretty easily debunked with even a cursory understanding of history. Conservatives have been resorting to the naturalistic fallacy since practically the beginning of time to stand athwart advances in social progress. They did it to deny same-sex couples the freedom to marry, and they’re doing it today to deny trans people access to bathrooms.

The Bootlegger & Baptists analogy carries over beyond Christian conservatives playing the role of the Baptists. I see TERFism as a form of half-baked, “bootleg” feminism. This strain of feminism finds its roots primarily in second-wave feminism which originated more or less alongside the Civil Rights era and the Sexual Revolution that saw greater visibility and progress for feminism and the Gay Rights movement. Almost as soon as the Gay Rights movement began, around the time of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, divisions sown by intragroup respectability politics emerged between the lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities and the transgender community.

It is from this period of time — and the blending of gay rights and feminism — that many TERFs draw their ideological influences. 1979 saw the publication of the seminal text of trans-exclusionary feminism, Janice Raymond’s The Transexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. This era also saw the formation of lesbian separatist groups that emphasized biological distinctions between men and women as the crux of gender-based oppression. Groups like the notoriously trans (women) exclusionary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which was first established in 1976, grew to prominence. The festival was billed exclusively as a space for “womyn-born womyn.” Anti-sex work feminists also date back to around this era. The venn-diagram of trans-exclusionary and sex worker-exclusionary feminists is very close to a perfect circle.

Recently at a LGBTQ+ Pride march in London, England, a handful of TERFs hijacked the lead contingency in the Pride parade with signs and slogans that implied that the very existence of trans women “erases lesbians.” TERFs seem to believe that queer liberation (to the extent that they even advocate queer liberation) is a fixed or zero-sum situation. Many TERFs, though by no means all, are in fact lesbians who feel that trans women pose an existential threat in the sense that trans women will take up resources or space meant for cisgender women, be they gay or straight.

You can see this on display at London Pride earlier this year, or at the notorious “Michfest,” the now infamous and defunct gathering of lesbians and queer women in Michigan that was billed as exclusively for “genetic” women. I believe it is this misguided fixed-sum view of womanhood and feminism that brings many TERFs to align with Christian conservatives. Christian conservatives get their win in the form of legislating their religious beliefs with respect to gender and sexuality, and TERFs get to further monopolize the limited resources and spaces that are available for women.

From the perspective of the radical feminists, growing societal acceptance for trans women is a direct threat to progress made for cis women in the sense that if trans women are using women’s locker rooms or have access to shelters for battered women then, to them, that means that they necessarily exclude “real” women from those very spaces. Nevermind that trans women as a demographic face disproportionate rates of violence due to a sinister blending of transphobia and misogyny (transmisogyny). As this article was being written, the number of trans women murdered so far in 2018 rose to 19 as of early September. That puts 2018 on track to be the deadliest year for trans women.
I want to stress that people’s lives are hanging in the balance here, and that this issue is more than just an academic discussion about hypotheticals. As I was writing this piece a case out of Oklahoma made headlines across the country as several parents in a closed Facebook group threatened a twelve year old transgender girl with castration for using the girl’s restroom at school. This is the inevitable conclusion of the logic put forth by the Christian conservative caucus and their TERF allies.

Trans individuals face some of the highest levels of discrimination across the board including discrimination in employment, housing, and access to healthcare. This discrimination is felt most acutely by trans people of color. A major issue in feminist circles is that of the pay gap between men and women, but that pay gap pales in comparison to that experienced by trans women. This is the result of a society that still has not come to grips with trans womanhood, and people like those who crashed London Pride are contributing to this climate.

You can see this play out in more academic circles too, like with the unity between conservative pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson and second wave feminist icon Camille Paglia who have made profitable careers out of scaremongering on the trans issue. Both have implied, falsely, that young transgender children are having irreversible surgeries. Paglia has gone so far as to say that societal acceptance of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals is a sign of impending civilizational collapse.

Paglia has frequently cited Simone de Beauvoir, who is often credited as being the first second-wave feminist, for her early interest in feminism. This is surprising to me as I consider de Beauvoir’s magnum opus The Second Sex to be a rather compelling argument that women and womanhood should not be defined by biological essentialist notions of sex and gender. De Beauvoir famously remarked in that text that, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” This is yet another example of the bastardization of feminism that one must resort to in order to reconcile their trans-exclusionary beliefs.

In this episode of the culture wars historically antagonistic forces in the form of Christian conservatives and radical feminists are comfortable uniting forces to stem the tide of greater acceptance and tolerance of trans people. The tale of the bootleggers and baptists helps us to understand why.

Feature Articles
Looking for Daylight: Minarchist Strategy’s Missteps

Reason magazine editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward have recently debated the question of minarchism (i.e., minimal government) vs. free-market anarchism.

As an anarchist, I’m obviously on Mangu-Ward’s side of the debate. But both writers make some assumptions about strategy that I find problematic.

I’ll start with Gillespie, who expresses impatience with “boring, tedious, and fundamentally irrelevant discussions about hypotheticals, first principles, and extreme a priori-ism that are light-years removed from anything to do with the world we actually live in.” Gillespie mockingly admonishes us anarchist nerds to drop the philosophizing and wake up to pragmatic reality:

Why bother figuring out what school choice programs should look like? Haven’t you heard? TAXATION IS THEFT, and nonvoluntary government institutions are not simply misguided – they’re absolute violations of the [Non-Aggression Principle]. If that’s true, then conversations about policy, much less libertarian approaches to literature, art, community, religion, and everything else humans do on a daily basis, might as well be planting a flower garden in a concentration camp. …

Some things will always be subject to political consensus, but let’s limit those to the few that are absolutely necessary. That isn’t a clear line but a constantly shifting border that will always have to be negotiated. But one clear benefit of small government over anarchy is that it swaps out bull sessions about first principles for a conversation that most of us are already having, which is where and when to draw the boundary of governmental control over us.

But the contrast that Gillespie draws is puzzling. How is one supposed to answer questions about “where and when to draw the boundary of governmental control,” if not by appeal to principles?

Gillespie’s answer is that we should seek to “increase the spaces where we get to choose (or invent) how to live,” without necessarily being committed to a description of the ultimate goal. “I know the direction in which I’m walking,” Gillespie writes, “even if I don’t yet know my final destination.”

But that can be true of anarchists too. I don’t think of the abolition of the state as a final destination; I think of it as one step – albeit a crucial step – along the path of combating coercion and domination, a struggle that may never be finally completed.

Just as the struggle for racial equality wasn’t over merely because formal slavery had been abolished by the 13th Amendment, the anarchist’s job won’t be finished just because the state gets abolished. (Though I think taking a week off for a massive party would be appropriate.)

All the same, having radical goals in view can be of vital use in moving that “shifting border” to which Gillespie refers. In the words of William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the most prominent American abolitionist:

Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend. (The Liberator, 13 August 1831)

Has not the experience of two centuries shown that gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice? (The Liberator, 28 December 1838)

Or, as C4SS Senior Fellow Charles Johnson puts it:

[I]f you start out asking for what you actually want, rather than what you think you can get, you’ll often end up getting less than you wanted in the end. But you’ll do a damn sight better than if you start out asking for what you think you can get, and then bargain down from there.

Gillespie, by contrast, sees visions of ultimate success as an obstacle to progress. Gillespie writes:

Duke political scientist Michael Munger makes a useful distinction between what he calls directional libertarians and destinationist libertarians. The latter tend to be anarchists, and their focus is on very specific and absolute outcomes: The only good government is no government. Anything that stops short of that is a mistake. Directional libertarians instead deal in relative terms and ask the question: Given where we are at any moment in time, what policies and mindsets increase the available options for how to live?

Again, this seems like a false dichotomy. Why can’t you have the abolition of the state as a goal, and still favor steps that increase freedom along the way?

The answer, for Gillespie, seems to be that these incremental steps necessarily involve working within the established political system – something anarchists tend to eschew as involving unacceptable compromises. Gillespie even advocates trying to make common cause with Bernie Sanders and Rick Santorum on various legislative reforms. But is conventional political activism really the most promising venue for incremental progress? Is it better to try to reform the system from within, or to try to subvert it from below?

According to agorism, an approach developed by libertarian thinker Samuel E. Konkin III in the 1970s (though one with affinities to the historical anarchist tradition more broadly), a more promising strategy for change than piecemeal legislative reform is the “counter-economic” approach of building alternative institutions to bypass the state and ultimately render it powerless and irrelevant. Agorism in effect gives a free-market spin to such traditional anarchist notions as “dual power,” “prefigurative politics,” and “building a new world in the shell of the old.” In that sense, agorism follows in the tradition of Proudhon, who wrote:

Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statesmen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy.

Recall also Gustav Landauer’s famous formulation: “The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another.” And another anarchist, Paul Goodman, has noted: “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.”

As Charles Johnson explains

One of the chief advantages that counter-economics has as a strategy is that there’s very little chance for progress at the margin with traditional party politics, because … well, what do you need to do in order to get an issue passed? You need 50% plus one to vote. … In order for any politician to be able to accomplish much of anything, you need to be able to have this very large backing …. And if you get 30% of the vote … you’re no further along than you were before. … The upshot is that in electoral politics you have to be in a position to win everything before you can win anything. … Whereas with counter-economics, you don’t need majoritarian support, you don’t need political parties …. All that you need is enough capacity to get around the particular forms of government oppression that are affecting you right now ….

If you look at the way that people actually live their lives, of course people are able to do that all the time. You know, government says drugs are illegal, but people sell and take drugs. Government says that it’s illegal for you to exist in the United States without a signed permission slip from immigration and customs enforcement, but you know, millions of people come in every year in spite of that. And so if you want to figure out “how do we get to a free society from where we are?” – look at what those folks are doing, because the forms of free association that they’re practicing in order to get the things that they want are things that you can start applying in your own life right now; and you can make small changes on the margin to get yourself closer and closer and closer to a free life than where you are now. You don’t need the backing of 50% plus one of the population. And so it allows for small progress along the line. … It provides an actual route to get from where we are now to where you ultimately want to be, which steadily improves all the way.

And so because there’s this chance for incremental progress that there isn’t in party politics, you get this definite strategic advantage … because you don’t have to figure out some grand plan to make a global free society right now. What you start doing is you start improving your life in the process of working together with other people to get the things that you want independently of the state. And it allows you to get to where you want to be, step by step by step.

Defenders of traditional political activism tend to reject counter-economic approaches as impractical and ineffective. In reply, Johnson invites us to compare “the practical success that the immigration reform movement has had in liberalizing immigration laws over the past thirty years or so” (which is pretty much nil) with “the success that illegal immigrants, state-side family members, coyotes, good samaritan ranchers, off-the-books employers, et al. have had in getting people across the border in defiance of immigration law, while avoiding or minimizing government interference.” By that standard, as Johnson notes, “if I’m looking for a going concern, I’d say that the root-striking approach seems to be making a lot more concrete progress than the branch-pruning approach.”

Agorist-minded anarchists have no objection (to put it mildly) to exploring what Gillespie calls the “policies and mindsets [that] increase the available options for how to live.” But they do not see such exploration in terms of devising plans for what the government should do next. From an agorist perspective, we, as opponents of state power, are not likely to be in a position to dictate our enemy’s agenda; instead, we need to focus on developing and implementing our own agenda.

Now, to be sure, Gillespie does include private-sphere activities as part of the reformist strategy he champions, as when he calls for “advocating and living out the general social attitudes [of] tolerance, pluralism, optimism, skepticism toward public and private concentrations of power, etc.” But he seems to see such activities as adjuncts to “discussions about public policy,” i.e., attempts to influence government policy. I’m not saying that such attempts can never be worthwhile. But to focus on them as one’s primary strategy seems to me a suicidal mistake.

Mangu-Ward, by contrast with Gillespie, refers with sympathy to the agorist strategy of “engaging in black market counter-economic activity to undermine the state without violently overthrowing it.” So far, so good. But it’s unclear how deep her appreciation of the agorist approach goes.

To begin with, I have some terminological quibbles with Mangu-Ward’s choice to refer to agorism as a “gradualist” strategy, as “incrementalist anarcho-capitalism,” and as a version of “ancap political philosophy,” as well as her choice to contrast agorism with “revolutionary anarchism.”

Konkin himself always regarded counter-economic strategy as a form of revolutionary activity, not an alternative to it; an entire section of his New Libertarian Manifesto is titled “Revolution: Our Strategy.” He obviously did not see revolution as limited to attempts to take over the state.

Moreover, Konkin, who rejected the “whole concept of ‘worker-boss’” as a “holdover from feudalism,” certainly did not regard agorism as a form of capitalism; to the contrary, he defined capitalism as “state rule by and for those who own large amounts of capital.” As Derrick Broze points out in the aptly titled “Agorism Is Not Anarcho-Capitalism,” from the very start Konkin was “consciously making an effort to distinguish his brand of ‘revolutionary market-anarchism’ from the growing Anarcho-Capitalism movement.”

As for whether agorism, by embracing incrementalism, is thereby to be considered a form of “gradualism,” Johnson makes a useful distinction:

[T]here’s a difference between gradualism in ideals and incrementalism in strategy …. Defending immediate and complete abolition on principle, and the abolition of any coercive program you may get the opportunity to abolish, doesn’t entail any particular order of priorities in terms of the scope or order in which you might concentrate your own limited resources towards making opportunities for abolition that didn’t previously exist.

It’s also hard to reconcile Mangu-Ward’s sympathy for agorism with the words of reassurance with which she closes her initial brief for anarchism:

For the nonce, there is no daylight between the policy prescriptions favored by the gradualist anarchist and the minarchist. We should rightly be part of the same libertarian coalition for free minds and free markets. I assure you, the lowest-priority items on my government-smashing to-do list are the elements of the night watchman state that most minarchist libertarians would like to preserve.

Is it really true that there should be no real difference between anarchist and minarchist activism in the short run – that, to quote a popular libertarian saying, the anarchist and minarchist are riding on the same train, and differ only in that the latter will get off one stop before the former? Here Mangu-Ward seems to agree with Gillespie that right now we should focus on direction, and leave worries about destination for later.

For the agorist, any such assumption is radically mistaken. For the “elements of the night watchman state that most minarchist libertarians would like to preserve,” the ones that are the “lowest-priority items on [Mangu-Ward’s] government-smashing to-do list,” are precisely the elements that make the other, supposedly more objectionable aspects possible – and so, from an agorist perspective, the ones that should be targeted first.

What would we have to believe, in order to agree that there is “for the nonce … no daylight” between the agorist and minarchist programs? To quote Johnson once more:

I would have to accept that the most likely way to significantly reduce the scope and power of government is to spend the next several decades working from within the state system in order to prune away this or that invasive policy – drug laws, abortion laws … the war in Iraq, especially stupid provisions of copyright law, egregiously high taxes, the most outrageous parts of immigration law, or whatever – and then only to go after the supporting pillars of state power – government policing and prisons, government courts, government military, government “border control,” the existence of even minimal taxation, etc. – once all the policy issues have been cleared out of the way. That may seem obvious, but actually it’s a substantial claim in need of defense, and I have not yet been given any reason to believe that this is true.

The agorist strategy, by contrast, is to identify those “supporting pillars of state power” as the root of all the other forms of statist oppression, and to concentrate our efforts on dissolving those pillars, by withdrawing the human support on which they rest. As Étienne de la Boétie wrote in the 16th century:

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

To revert to the train metaphor: the agorist doesn’t want to stay on the train for one stop longer than the minarchist (assuming the minarchist would let the agorist stay on, which presumably they wouldn’t). The agorist wants to get off the train immediately, and hike overland via a direct route to the goal, rather than taking the minarchist’s long, roundabout detour. The agorist objection to the minarchist train ride is not (or not only) that it ends one stop too soon, but primarily that it takes a needlessly lengthy, indirect, and uncertain route.

In Johnson’s words:

[I]f you can establish effective means for individual people, or better yet large groups of people, to evade or bypass government enforcement and government taxation, then that might very well provide a much more effective route to getting rid of particular bad policies than getting rid of particular bad policies provides to getting rid of the government enforcement and government taxation. …

[But] to set up and sustain the kind of resources that are necessary to enable evasion and resistance of government laws, you’re already trying to take the train to a station where the minarchist passengers don’t want to go: that is, you’re creating counter-institutions that are directly competing with, and attempting to undermine, precisely those state functions (law enforcement, the courts, military and paramilitary defense of the state against its declared enemies) that minarchists intend to keep.

No daylight between the anarchist and minarchist programs? There had better be. In Thoreau’s words: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
Reign of Fire

Are the wildfires that have been devastating California a gift from government?  So argues William Finnegan in a recent article, “California Burning.”

According to Finnegan, the seeds of disaster were planted when the mission of the U.S. Forest Service was expanded in the early decades of the 20th century:

The Forest Service, no longer just a land steward, became the federal fire department for the nation’s wildlands. Its policy was total suppression of fires …. Some experienced foresters saw problems with this policy. It spoke soothingly to public fears, but periodic lightning-strike fires are an important feature of many ecosystems, particularly in the American West. Some ‘light burning,’ they suggested, would at least be needed to prevent major fires. William Greeley, the chief of the Forest Service in the 1920s, dismissed this idea as ‘Paiute forestry.’

Finnegan explains the “Paiute” reference:

Native Americans had used seasonal burning for many purposes, including hunting, clearing trails, managing crops, stimulating new plant growth, and fireproofing areas around their settlements. The North American ‘wilderness’ encountered by white explorers and early settlers was in many cases already a heavily managed, deliberately diversified landscape.

These facts incidentally give the lie to the common notion that American indigenous peoples were not entitled to property claims to their lands because they had not engaged in sufficiently transformative labor upon them.

Greeley’s sneering dismissal of ‘Paiute forestry’ was ill-placed. As Finnegan reports:

The total suppression policy of the Forest Service and its allies (the National Park Service, for instance) was exceptionally successful, reducing burned acreage by 90 percent, and thus remaking the landscape again — creating what Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist at the Forest Service, calls an ‘epidemic of trees.’

Preserving trees was not, however, the goal of the Forest Service, which worked closely with timber companies to clear-cut enormous swaths of old-growth forest. (Greeley, when he left public service, joined the timber barons.) The idea was to harvest the old trees and replace them with more efficiently managed and profitable forests. This created a dramatically more flammable landscape.

In other words, an alliance between big business and big government is responsible for rendering America’s wilderness areas exceptionally vulnerable to massive wildfires.

Commentary
Abolish ICE! End the Wars!: 9/11 17 Years Later

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, many began to grow increasingly skeptical of the state’s response. Even many of those who were not in the anti-war movement ended up questioning the Bush administration’s reaction. While the official story placed the blame at the hands of al Qaeda who were currently hiding in Afghanistan, our military was sent on a side mission to Iraq based on unprovable claims concerning weapons of mass destruction and lies about their ties to the 9/11 attacks.

It wasn’t just the needless warfare that upset the population, but also the increasing encroachment on our basic civil rights, namely the right to privacy. Between wiretapping scandals, the PATRIOT Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, people started to grow increasingly distrustful of their government.

However 17 years later and the anti-war movement has barely gone anywhere. Sure we can thank Edward Snowden for the National Security Administration leaks. In response there were everything from Restore the Fourth rallies to efforts like Reset the Net. Despite pushback against the PATRIOT Act it mostly survives intact, extended via legislation with equally Orwellian names such as the USA FREEDOM Act.

The Iraq War may have officially ended in 2011 but private mercenary work still continues on Iraqi soil under the authorization of the american government, the War in Afghanistan still rages on, and we have expanded to War on Terror across the Middle East, influencing the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Two years after 9/11 launched the creation of the Department of Homeland Security which took the recently formed Transportation Security Administration under its banner. But while the TSA garnered huge amounts of public attention and scrutiny, one of its other branches which was created in 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, went largely unnoticed by all except those directly affected by its existence. But recently the tides have turned.

Occupy ICE is still going strong, even after many of the physical occupations have been evicted. Many groups, including various chapters of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, and Occupy Prisons have thrown their weight behind the Dream DefendersGEO Cages divestment campaign which targets GEO Group, one of the largest profiteers behind ICE.

Abolishing ICE is becoming an increasingly mainstream battlecry. But let’s expand that battlecry and call for the abolition of the entire DHS, the repeal of the PATRIOT Act in all its updated forms, and a complete end to the War on Terror.

 

Italian, Stateless Embassies
Ricordando il Patto Molotov-von Ribbentrop

Di Darian Worden. Originale pubblicato il 23 agosto 2018 con il titolo Remembering the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Tutti i regimi autoritari sono infidi e violenti. Il patto firmato da Molotov e von Ribbentrop, accordo tra Unione Sovietica e Germania nazista in vigore dal 1939 al 1941, mostra il pericolo che i programmi degli autoritarismi rappresentano per chiunque stia entro il loro raggio d’azione. Il patto aiutò Hitler a lanciare la sua tanto ambita guerra razziale, aiutò Stalin nelle sue guerre espansionistiche, e terminò con un tradimento e milioni di morti.

Il patto rientrava nella cornice ideologica e negli obiettivi strategici di Stalin. Stalin era un opportunistico espansionista che agiva come se il suo regime fosse la punta avanzata di una rivoluzione sincera. Era convinto che capitalisti e fascisti, in lotta contro l’Urss, si sarebbero indeboliti a vicenda. L’obiettivo di Stalin non era solo star fuori dalla guerra imminente, ma trarne guadagno alla prima occasione. I pianificatori sovietici pensavano che guadagnando territori in Polonia avrebbero rafforzato le capacità difensive dell’Urss e indebolito il nazionalismo polacco. Alla fine degli anni Trenta, Stalin avanzava forti richieste territoriali.

Adolf Hitler vedeva nell’Unione Sovietica un nemico particolare. Parlava dei bolscevichi come di un nemico ideologico alleato degli ebrei, che il Nazional Socialismo doveva annientare. A posteriori, Goebbels definì il patto “una macchia sul nostro scudo”. Un patto tra i due paesi poteva aver luogo solo se i due leader avessero esercitato l’opportunismo più cinico, con uno Stalin incredibilmente convinto delle sue capacità di trattare con Hitler.

Furono gli eventi dei tardi anni Trenta ad avvicinare i due improbabili alleati. Stalin aveva bisogno di tempo per ricostruire l’Armata Rossa devastata dalle purghe di fine decennio. Ed era sempre più diffidente di Francia e Gran Bretagna perché non reagivano energicamente alle azioni di Hitler e Mussolini.

Gli Accordi di Monaco del 1938, con cui Francia e Gran Bretagna lasciarono che Hitler si annettesse la Sudetenland (trampolino di lancio dell’occupazione cecoslovacca) infransero ogni fiducia di Stalin negli alleati occidentali. Il rifiuto del primo ministro britannico Neville Chamberlain di invitare Stalin ai negoziati confermò questa sfiducia. Stalin vedeva nell’accordo con la Germania l’unica possibilità per dividere l’Europa in sfere d’influenza. Come gli alleati occidentali, anche lui equivocò enormemente le intenzioni e la voglia di guerra di Hitler.

Nella primavera del 1939, l’Urss inviò messaggi diplomatici alla Germania nazista al fine di promuovere relazioni più amichevoli. Avviando la nuova linea diplomatica, Stalin iniziò una purga del corpo diplomatico per eliminare gli ebrei presenti. L’ex ministro degli esteri Maxim Litvinov fu congedato e sostituito con Vjačeslav Molotov. I componenti dello staff diplomatico furono arrestati e, in qualche caso, uccisi. Stalin, che vedeva nei leader ebrei un ostacolo alla riconciliazione con Hitler, diede l’ordine di “Ripulire la ‘sinagoga’”. Contemporaneamente cercò di negoziare una possibile alleanza con Francia e Gran Bretagna, pur con esiti improbabili. I gruppi diplomatici inviati in Unione Sovietica erano insignificanti, ma Stalin non smise mai di chiedere che le forze armate sovietiche avessero libertà di movimento in Polonia e Romania in caso di ostilità.

A conti fatti, Hitler e Stalin avevano altro da offrire l’uno all’altro. Un accordo avrebbe permesso a Hitler di dare inizio alla guerra senza dover subire la reazione dell’Unione Sovietica… almeno all’inizio. Quanto a Stalin, pensava di poter ricostituire le forze sovietiche mentre la Germania veniva logorata dalla guerra. Entrambi vedevano l’occasione per soggiogare la Polonia, mentre Stalin aspirava ai territori degli stati baltici e altri territori in Romania.

I negoziati ebbero luogo durante l’estate del 1939 e si conclusero con il ministro degli esteri tedesco Joachim von Ribbentrop che portava una sua delegazione a Mosca per incontrare Molotov e Stalin. L’amichevole conferenza subì una breve interruzione quando von Ribbentrop contattò Hitler per chiedergli il parere riguardo le richieste territoriali avanzate da Stalin, richiese che Hitler approvò immediatamente. Il 23 agosto 1939 fu firmato il patto tedesco-sovietico di Non Aggressione, detto anche Patto Molotov-von Ribbentrop. Il patto conteneva parti pubbliche che promettevano relazioni pacifiche tra i due paesi, ma anche protocolli segreti che delineavano le aree di influenza in Europa Orientale e le linee guida degli interventi aggressivi.

Il primo settembre 1939 le forze tedesche invasero la Polonia. La guerra di Hitler era cominciata.

Con l’inizio della guerra si rafforzò la cooperazione tra nazisti e comunisti, e i nemici ideologici diventarono alleati militari. In Revolution from Abroad, Jan T. Gross spiega come i sovietici, seguendo gli accordi, diedero l’ordine alla stazione radio di Minsk di ripetere spesso la parola chiave “Minsk” durante le trasmissioni come assistenza alll’aviazione tedesca. Alla vigilia dell’invasione della Polonia, prevista per il 17 settembre, i sovietici inviarono alla Germania copia della bozza di un messaggio destinato all’ambasciatore polacco. Il messaggio fu adattato alle richieste tedesche. Germania e Urss discussero in varie occasioni il ridisegno delle aree di influenza e la coordinazione dei movimenti delle truppe. Ad ottobre, durante un comizio, Molotov si vantò: “Due colpi rapidi alla Polonia, prima l’esercito tedesco e poi l’Armata Rossa, e niente è rimasto di quello sgorbio partorito dal Trattato di Versailles.”

Le conseguenze della cooperazione tedesco-sovietica furono terribili per la popolazione oggetto della doppia occupazione. I sovietici uccisero oltre 20.000 tra ufficiali polacchi e altri considerati potenziali leader, mentre centinaia di migliaia di polacchi ed ebrei furono deportati in zone remote dell’Urss dove vissero in condizioni disperate. Da parte tedesca, la guerra razziale di Hitler si fece seria. Le truppe tedesche uccidevano indiscriminatamente i civili, giustiziavano in massa i prigionieri di guerra e rinchiudevano gli ebrei in ghetti sovraffollati con poche risorse. Gli ebrei venivano derubati e uccisi impunemente. Solo l’invasione sovietica bloccò il progetto di ripopolamento razziale delle terre polacche.

Intanto ad est Stalin continuava le sue mosse espansionistiche. Nel 1939-40 lanciò una disastrosa invasione della Finlandia, indebolendo ulteriormente l’Armata Rossa e creandosi un nemico sicuro. Estonia, Lituania e Lettonia capirono cosa significava firmare un trattato con il vicino sovietico quando quest’ultimo occupò i loro territori con l’Armata Rossa. L’estate seguente, l’Urss si annesse i tre stati baltici e cominciò la deportazione di migliaia di persone in Siberia.

Ad occidente, Hitler attaccò i suoi vicini a cominciare dall’invasione francese del giugno 1940. Il patto siglato con Stalin assicurava alla Germania la fornitura di tutto ciò che occorreva a portare avanti la guerra, come i preziosi cereali, il petrolio e le risorse minerarie. L’Urss faceva anche da mediatrice per altri commerci, compreso quello della gomma.

Nel periodo intercorso tra la firma del patto e l’invasione dell’Urss, le organizzazioni partitiche comuniste controllate da Mosca appoggiarono gli sforzi militari nazisti. Racconta David Wingeate Pike che dopo la resa della Francia nel 1940 i comunisti francesi agirono autonomamente con atti di sabotaggio e propaganda antinazista, ma senza l’aiuto dei vertici del Partito Comunista Francese. Il quotidiano del partito scrisse: “I rapporti amichevoli tra i lavoratori parigini e i soldati tedeschi fanno enormi progressi. Ne siamo felici. Stringiamoci la mano.” Il partito in seguito disse che si trattava di un tentativo di indottrinare e demoralizzare i soldati tedeschi, ma è difficile leggere nell’articolo qualcosa di diverso da da un’esaltazione della collaborazione con la macchina da guerra della Germania nazista.

Hitler pensava che, prima o poi, la Germania nazionalsocialista avrebbe dovuto attaccare il suo nemico ultimo, l’Unione Sovietica bolscevica, e la guerra prometteva essere una lotta esistenziale senza pietà per il nemico razziale. Intendeva così portare le risorse sovietiche sotto il proprio controllo così da dimostrare alla Gran Bretagna che non poteva confidare nell’Urss. Nonostante gli ovvi pericoli di una guerra su due fronti, Hitler volle attaccare l’Urss approfittando della sua momentanea debolezza.

Anche Stalin pensava che la guerra con la Germania fosse inevitabile, ma non immaginava che Hitler avrebbe attaccato in quel momento, per quanto i documenti in suo possesso dicessero il contrario. Stalin si approntava alla guerra con la Germania fin dalla fine del 1940, ma riteneva gli apparati militari ancora impreparati e sperava di ritardare il conflitto con la diplomazia e l’acquiescenza. Ancora alla vigilia della guerra, obbedendo agli interessi politici più che all’esperienza e alle tecniche militari dell’Unione Sovietica, ordinò una serie di purghe che aumentarono il caos.

Già nella primavera del 1941, le spie avevano rivelato a Stalin la data prevista per l’invasione tedesca. Ma Stalin agiva come se Hitler fosse un capo di stato razionale, non lo riteneva capace di iniziare una guerra su due fronti in quanto la divisione dell’Europa Orientale andava a vantaggio di entrambi. Stalin vacillò nervosamente nei mesi precedenti la guerra, confidava nei suoi pii desideri e nella timorosa obbedienza dei suoi luogotenenti. Pur ritenendo la guerra inevitabile, Stalin si rifiutava di credere alle prove evidenti della sua imminenza, e ancora due settimane prima dell’invasione se la prese con i generali Timošenko e Zhukov che citavano i dati dello spionaggio.

Con l’approssimarsi della guerra, nonostante gli avvertimenti di numerosi disertori tedeschi che l’attacco era imminente, Stalin liquidò le mosse tedesche come provocazioni, non come preparazioni in vista di un’invasione. Arrivò anche ad ordinare l’esecuzione di un comunista tedesco, fuggito dalla sua unità per avvertire dell’attacco, accusandolo di diffondere “disinformazione”. Ancora alla vigilia dell’invasione, i treni sovietici trasportavano beni in Germania.

La mattina del 22 giugno 1941, la macchina da guerra della Germania nazista, assieme ai suoi alleati, iniziò il massiccio attacco contro l’Unione Sovietica. Ma anche alla notizia dei numerosi attacchi Stalin continuò a credere che si trattasse di provocazioni da parte di singoli ufficiali tedeschi, non opera di Hitler in persona, finché non fu l’ambasciatore tedesco a consegnare la dichiarazione ufficiale di guerra.

Con le prime bombe sulle città, il patto Molotov-von Ribbentrop divenne carta straccia. I tedeschi e i loro alleati lanciarono una guerra indiscriminata contro tutti e incoraggiarono i pogrom, mentre i nazisti mettevano in pratica uno sterminio razziale fatto di pallottole, fame e, infine, gas. I campi di sterminio, messi su dai nazisti in territori presi alla Polonia, divennero l’epicentro del massacro in quel furioso genocidio che avrebbe portato alla morte sei milioni di ebrei. Ottimisticamente, i nazisti avevano previsto la morte di altre decine di milioni di esseri umani nell’Europa Orientale, a cui si sarebbero aggiunte milioni di persone deportate o ridotte in schiavitù. La popolazione sovietica lottò con coraggio, brutalità ed eroismo contro il massacro, svolgendo un ruolo chiave nella vittoria delle truppe alleate contro il fascismo. Per milioni di loro, la brutalità e l’avventatezza di Hitler e Stalin significarono la morte.

La guerra finì per rafforzare enormemente le manie espansionistiche di Stalin. Se nel 1939 voleva che la Polonia scomparisse dalle mappe, alla fine della guerra già immaginava una Polonia comunista con un governo fantoccio. Nel 1944, l’esercito nazionale polacco (Arma Krajowa) iniziò la rivolta di Varsavia per liberare la città dagli occupanti tedeschi. Le truppe sovietiche, pur presenti in Polonia, non corsero in aiuto. Il fatto che le forze sovietiche fossero esauste non spiega perché si rifiutarono di fornire assistenza ai rivoltosi polacchi, né spiega gli ostacoli posti da Stalin agli aiuti che britannici e americani intendevano mandare con un ponte aereo. Arma Krajova combatteva da solo, non rispondeva né a Stalin né al “Comitato Polacco di Liberazione Nazionale”, controllato dai sovietici e che Stalin intendeva instaurare al potere.

I nazisti si scatenarono sulla città di Varsavia, tra crimini di guerra, migliaia di morti innocenti e una campagna di distruzione feroce.

Per non alimentare miti nazionalistici, è bene notare come la presenza di numerosi atti eroici da parte della popolazione polacca contro l’occupazione tedesca non cancelli il fatto che c’erano anche polacchi che collaboravano con i nazisti e contribuivano alla guerra razziale contro i loro vicini ebrei. Anche molti tra i soldati sovietici che sconfissero i fascisti nell’Europa Orientale commisero crimini di guerra, tra cui stupri di massa contro le donne nei territori invasi.

Il patto Molotov-von Ribbentrop fu un accordo tra due dittatori che sapevano che prima o poi si sarebbero combattuti e volevano ritardare lo scontro per perseguire obiettivi più immediati. Ogni parola del documento presagiva le terribili invasioni che sarebbero seguite, il fine ultimo era una guerra talmente violenta che poteva essere scatenata solo da entità che vedevano nel nemico qualcosa di subumano.

La storia del patto può servire da codice interpretativo dei pericoli dell’autoritarismo e della necessità di opporvisi. La violenza del fascismo e la pericolosità di chi ne ammira i maggiori criminali dovrebbe essere chiara, ma è bene ribadirla. Importante è anche dubitare di coloro che a sinistra parteggiano per personaggi autoritari come Putin e Assad e le loro tendenze belliciste. Dobbiamo stare alla larga da chi trasforma la politica di partito e il culto della personalità in un ostacolo alla lotta contro il fascismo e l’autoritarismo. È bene mettere in dubbio chi ignora o giustifica i mali di Stalin, chi dice che gli esempi storici della politica di acquiescenza non possono costituire un insegnamento da utilizzare nell’attuale lotta contro il nazionalismo autoritario e la sua variante fascista. Chi ha una coscienza deve agire ora che le forze autoritarie vogliono dividere il mondo in zone controllate così da poter realizzare i propri fini con tutta la violenza di cui sono capaci.


Per approfondimenti:

  1. Antony Beevor. The Second World War. Little, Brown, and Company, 2012.
  2. Saul Friedlander, Orna Kenan. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, Harper, 2009. (Goebbels quoted on page 200).
  3. Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton University Press, 2002. (Molotov quoted on page 12).
  4. “Killing Centers in Occupied Poland, 1942.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  5. Mark Mazower. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. Penguin, 2008.
  6. David Wingeate Pike, “Between the Junes: The French Communist from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia.” Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol.28 (1993), 465-485. (Communist newspaper quoted on page 470).
  7. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. (“Clean out the ‘synagogue’ quote on page 304).
  8. Anthony Read and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941. W.W. Norton, 1988.
  9. Raymond James Sontag and James Stuart Beddie, Eds. Nazi-Soviet Relations: 1939-1941. US Department of State, 1948.
  10. “World War II: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939).” Jewish Virtual Library.
Commentary
Quaker Guilt & Unintended Consequences

Quakers, the religious sect with which I most closely identify, have a long history of radical action. Historically, Quakers were leaders in the American abolitionist movement and adherents have long been allies of black liberation, womens’ rights, and other social justice struggles. Today, that tradition continues, with many meetings (the equivalent of a congregation) explicitly supporting Black Lives Matter efforts, prison abolition, and the end of the drug war. Some of this is just historic contingency, but it’s also rooted in the central principles of Quaker thought. There are two main tenets in the tradition: to be welcoming (friendly) to all, and the idea that everyone has a connection to divinity. To this end, there’s little to no congregational hierarchy and, in a sense, everyone is a minister.

This is all very laudable and I’m proud to be involved in a tradition that’s so committed to direct action, social justice, and non-hierarchical organization. But even such deeply justice-oriented traditions make mistakes, and Quaker commitment to prison abolition in the current age is driven in part by guilt over such mistakes. After all, it was Quakers who invented the modern prison system.

Particularly egregious was their inclusion of solitary confinement as a key aspect of prisoner “rehabilitation.” At the time, it was considered a liberatory idea. As Brooke Shelby Biggs relates in Mother Jones, this is where we get the term “penitentiary”:

Between Philadelphia and New York, a schism in philosophies emerged: The Philadelphia system used isolation and total silence as a means to control, punish, and rehabilitate inmates; the Auburn or “congregate” system—although still requiring total silence—permitted inmates to mingle, but only while working at hard labor. At Walnut Street, each cell block had 16 one-man cells. In the wing known as the “Penitentiary House,” inmates spent all day every day in their cells. Felons would serve their entire sentences in isolation, not just as punishment, but as an opportunity to seek forgiveness from God. It was a revolutionary idea—no penal method had ever before considered that criminals might be reformed. In 1829, Quakers and Anglicans expanded on the idea born at Walnut Street, constructing a prison called Eastern State Penitentiary, which was made up entirely of solitary cells along corridors that radiated out from a central guard area. At Eastern State, every day of every sentence was carried out primarily in solitude, though the law required the warden to visit each prisoner daily and prisoners were able to see reverends and guards. The theory had it that the solitude would bring penitence; thus the prison—now abandoned—gave our language the term “penitentiary.”

Eastern State still stands and is open as a museum today. While the Quakers thought they were building a more humane approach to criminality, the terrifyingly stark cells, panoptic central guard tower, and tiny windows show the facility for what it really was: a new form of torture.

Michel Foucault’s work on social discipline and the prison system outlines how insidious such “humanitarian” reforms can be and how efforts like this have simply made torture less visible, rather than eliminating it. In Discipline and Punish we get this analysis:

Similarly, the hold on the body did not entirely disappear in the mid-nineteenth century. Punishment had no doubt ceased to be centred on torture as a technique of pain; it assumed as its principal object loss of wealth or rights. But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment — mere loss of liberty — has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement. Are these the unintentional, but inevitable, consequence of imprisonment? In fact, in its most explicit practices, imprisonment has always involved a certain degree of physical pain. The criticism that was often levelled at the penitentiary system in the early nineteenth century (imprisonment is not a sufficient punishment: prisoners are less hungry, less cold, less deprived in general than many poor people or even workers) suggests a postulate that was never explicitly denied: it is just that a condemned man should suffer physically more than other men. It is difficult to dissociate punishment from additional physical pain. What would a non-corporal punishment be?

There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice — a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system.

It used to be the case that the “criminal” was punished bodily: hanged, or beat, or made to do hard labor. Today, the torture takes a primarily psychological form. Of course, imprisoned people still face corporal punishment, beatings, and other bodily harm. But these injustices tend to be somewhat sidelined in modern prison revolts. The biggest concern for many incarcerated people — from those behind the Pelican Bay revolts to the currently ongoing prison strike — is the use of solitary confinement and other forms of isolation and division.

There’s something particularly horrible about division and isolation. Humans are social beings, and separating someone from the rest of humanity has been shown to do significant psychological harm. It goes beyond solitary too.

Prison administrations take care to sow division among incarcerated people, sometimes using tactics known as “gang enhancement” to encourage in-fighting and create uncertainty. Furthermore, prisons are placed far away from population centers and obstacles to visitation and contact are constantly increasing. For political prisoners, being cut off from outside communication is a common tactic of repression. I’ll never forget the time I was speaking with an incarcerated acquaintance and he asked me to please tell folks on the outside what prison conditions were really like. In one phrase he summarized a main tactic for prison abolition: “If folks outside could see the way we live, they wouldn’t allow this to continue.”

He’s right. Most people have moral intuitions that leave them repulsed at the way incarcerated people are treated, especially with regard to isolation and division. And so, many Quakers are dedicated prison abolitionists because we feel an immense guilt over the role we played in developing this horrific system that tortures through isolation.

As we head into the final days of a nationwide prison strike, it’s important to remember this history. As prison abolitionists, we have to be very careful about the reforms we propose and support. What might look like a reasonable stepping-stone position to a non-carceral society might end up causing more harm than good.

Private prisons are another great example. Many libertarians supported or support private prisons in theory, assuming that a corporation would run prisons more efficiently and with higher quality than the state. This was supposed to lead to better treatment for incarcerated people — maybe better food, and more efficient grievance processes. Like charter schools in relation to public schools. The actual result, of course, was an explosion in prison slave labor, even more horrible conditions, and increased lobbying for more prisons and harsher sentences.

Public choice theory is illuminating here. When thinking about the incentives at work in institutional contexts, we need to ask who has a vested interest in what. Since the companies running “private” prisons have to win contracts from the government and are paid on a per-prisoner basis, of course they’re going to lobby to put more people behind bars. If they were instead paid according to their ability to say reduce recidivism, or improve prisoner health, we’d see much different outcomes.  

There are tons of examples of policies (often reformist ones) that look great on paper, but cause more harm in the end. The recent investigations into “Ban the Box” efforts, which showed that such policies increase racial disparity in hiring are just another example. Ban the Box laws prohibit employers from inquiring about an applicant’s criminal history during the hiring process — either until a final offer is being made, or for part of the process. One intention of these laws is to address racial disparities in hiring that could result from racial disparities in criminalization. But racism is a persistent evil and seems to be having an even worse effect where Ban the Box is in place.

While this should give us pause, there are plenty of criminal justice reform positions that do have a good chance of alleviating suffering while we work toward the eventual goal of prison abolition. We just need to be careful about how we support and evaluate these positions.

Some particularly good and well vetted proposals are included in the current list of strikers’ demands:

  1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.
  2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.
  3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.
  4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.
  5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.
  6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.
  7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.
  8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.
  9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.
  10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count!

These are just a few of the ways that prison life can be somewhat improved for the time being — and some folks’ chances of escaping this system can be increased.

In the long-run, however, nothing is going to do the work of actually creating a non-carceral society but actually doing it. So this is a warning, but it’s also a call to action. We shouldn’t rest until we’ve achieved the ultimate goal of ending carceral institutions entirely. Anything short of that is just reorganizing suffering.

Feature Articles
A Simple Reform

If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest.

By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on you to take your wallet is a crime, regardless of how much you subjectively value your wallet’s contents. Thus the government’s armed thug taking $20 from a poor person is in a certain sense categorically the same crime as said armed thug taking $2,000,000 from a rich person. The biggest problem by far, the NAP says, is the stickup, the aggression, the threat of bodily injury, less so the particular thing obtained by it.

Abolishing taxes entirely on say the bottom 50% would not only be the most consistently libertarian incremental tax reform — in that it would stop the largest number of violent robberies for the lowest cost — it would also have the benefit of forcing the statist left to defend their paternalist claims to know better than the poor how their money should be spent. Think of how simple such reform efforts would be: libertarian representatives could just introduce a bill to increase the un-taxable portion of income/payroll by a few thousand dollars. It would be akin to letting millions of people out of prison, out of being taxed entirely. Meanwhile the net impact on the national budget would be minimal, less than many other tax cuts. Leftists and liberals instinctively opposed to all tax cuts would be incapable of wailing about a “tax cut for the rich” and would have to directly tell poor people “we know better than you.”

Now of course some might object in horror to the “unfairness” of some people being taxed while others are not. There are, after all, a number of “flat tax” conservatives who think it far better that everyone be taxed than a few escape the state’s thugs. But this logic is patently un-libertarian. Should we oppose reforms that would let some drug users out of prison while others remain? Surely we should try to liberate as many people as we can from aggressive violence. If one’s sense of justice is that everyone be equally aggressed against by the state then why not also or instead assert that they should be equally rich?

Lastly of course some bootlickers might try to argue that robbery of the rich is substantially worse than robbery of the poor. This is a very hard argument to make for a lot of reasons, not least of which is because surely money matters more to the poor than it does to the rich. Desperation, opportunity costs, barriers to entry, etc, strike the poor dramatically. 50% of a rich person’s income might have relatively marginal impact upon them whereas 5% of a poor person’s income is much more frequently disastrous. If you object to this on the grounds that utility is intensely subjective and maybe the rich person more desperately values the extra millions above their daily needs, well you’ve proved too much because then we cannot differentiate between the theft acts at all. But even if you refused to extrapolate insights into subjective value and fixated on some kind of objective and context-independent moral value to each fiat dollar stolen, you would still have to drastically discount the unjustness of the act of armed robbery to make robbery of the poor somehow dwarfed by the greater net money extracted from the rich.

And this points to why libertarians as a whole aren’t agitating to free the poor from taxation entirely.

Despite much noise about principled non-aggression and anti-statism, the libertarian movement remains almost widely grounded in a right-wing narrative of class conflict wherein they broadly imagine the poor as moochers and the rich as mostly unfairly burdened creators. Thus their reputation and draw as defenders of the elites, defending the violent subsidies that historically built and maintained absurd wealth, even in some cases advocating for new violent horrors to save said elites. Such vulgarity has always operated with the thinnest of veneers of support for liberty, but it’s worth confronting when it attempts to appropriate and weaponize the rhetorical arguments of NAP absolutists.

I, on the other hand, am honest about my broad social evaluations: I am not personally an adherent of the NAP, I’m a consequentialist seeking to maximize freedom for all. I think the NAP’s focus on the most immediate and visible acts of aggression provides cover for complex shell games of coercion and systemic oppression. To create a truly freed market would require the tearing down of the self-perpetuating economic hierarchies rooted in titanic historical violence and myriad active forms of state subsidy, and to maintain a truly competitive market once we are freed would require active socio-cultural pressure in myriad ways to organize against and undermine the emergence of new economic elites or class structures. As an anarchist I not only think we can do all that without appealing to or empowering a centralized apparatus of violence like the state, in fact I think non-statist means are the only possible way to achieve such.

Personally I would support abolishing taxes on the poor not only because it would limit the number of robberies the state performs, but because I think the poor are by far more impeded than the rich in our society and are owed restitution for everything that has immiserated and constrained their flourishing. I also believe that they are, broadly speaking, brimming with unrecognized or suppressed productivity and creativity, and liberation from their chains is low hanging fruit that will benefit everyone.

The explicit taxes paid by the poor to the state are but a tiny fraction of their impediments in our grotesquely warped and quasi-feudal economy, but it should unquestionably be a site of horror and outrage to anyone of conscience.

Socialists might object that a program of abolishing taxes on the poor without raising them on the rich might collapse public support for state-provided social services, allowing the state to be captured by the interests of a few taxpayers as a kind of explicit self-protection service, with welfare systems only existing to manage unemployment pools for exploitation. But how would that be any different than things are now? What pretense is really achieved by forcing the poor at gunpoint to pay in a meager portion of the state’s budget at great personal cost? “We all pay in” is a terrible excuse for a redistribution project. If the point is to embrace democracy, how can you justify obscuring from the voters what your actual values and goals are?

Of course if you think that the erosion of “we all pay in” justifications would erode support for the state and majoritarian democracy and cause people to stop seeing it as “just the things we do together” well to me that’s a feature not a bug.

And if by popular pressure the percentage of the population that pays any tax increasingly shrinks until it encompasses only the absolute richest and they in turn give away their vast and undoubtedly unjustly acquired wealth to avoid taxation or are whittled away to nothing, causing the state to disappear entirely — well surely that would be something of a victory for all camps! With the state and their wealth gone they can happily try to accumulate wealth again, in the open, free of taxation, only subject a starkly declining rate of profit and diffuse social sanction against centralizing accumulation. If they can actually make a buck without the seed plunder and plutocratic institutional structures benefiting them, great for them.

I agree with socialists that the poor are massively oppressed — vast redistribution is clearly called for before we can ever achieve any semblance of a free market or free society — but as an anarchist I believe that economic reform and restitution must come organically from the bottom-up, not the top-down. The state will only reproduce the centralization and violence that constitutes it.

So get the state out of our lives. I’m more of a revolutionary on this front, but if you must be a reformist let’s start with abolishing all taxes on the poor. Socialists who object will be exposed as the paternalist state worshipers they are. Libertarians who object will be exposed as acolytes of the plutocratic upper classes.

Italian, Stateless Embassies
Una Rivoluzione Verde Decentrata

Guida anarchica all’ambientalismo

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 23 agosto 2018 con il titolo Decentralizing the Green Revolution: An Anarchist Guide to Environmentalism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Davanti al problema dei cambiamenti climatici o di altre forme di inquinamento, abbiamo solitamente due strade: da un lato l’individuo con il riciclaggio, le luci spente, la bicicletta, il televisore staccato quando è spento; dall’altro lo stato con la messa al bando delle cannucce di plastica, la carbon tax, gli investimenti pubblici. Proteggere l’ambiente prima che sia troppo tardi e senza l’intervento dello stato (oltre a come trattare il crimine e come fornire un’adeguata assistenza sanitaria) è una delle questioni che un anarchico si trova ad affrontare.

Onestamente, finché lo stato esiste, è preferibile che si occupi di ambiente e sanità piuttosto che di guerre e polizia. Certo, con quel mostro grigio chiamato governo americano scomparirà anche l’EPA (l’agenzia federale per l’ambiente, ndt). Ma prima di abolire le certificazioni Energy Star e gli standard sull’acqua dobbiamo eliminare l’ICE (il controllo di frontiere e immigrazione, ndt), la polizia, le carceri e il complesso industrial-militare. Detto ciò, la protezione governativa dell’ambiente è una farsa. Agenzie come l’EPA sono state catturate dalle stesse entità aziendali che l’agenzia dovrebbe regolamentare, come avviene per tutte le agenzie. L’EPA non è servita né a prevenire né a risolvere la crisi idrica di Flint ed è più che sicuro che non fermerà le petroliere.

Sono state proposte diverse versioni di un nuovo New Deal Verde, e l’idea è molto apprezzata a sinistra, anche da chi ha tendenze libertarie. Ma come qualunque legislazione ispirata al New Deal, punta soprattutto ad aumentare le tasse, sostenere le aziende e creare nuovi posti pubblici, quanto basta perché gli anarchici guardino con scetticismo ciò che parrebbe una buona causa. Dopotutto, lo stato e le aziende sussidiate sono tra i maggiori inquinatori del pianeta ed è molto improbabile che impongano normative a se stessi. E allora qual è la soluzione? Ci rinchiudiamo nella tattica individualistica dei liberal del “riduci, riusa, ricicla” lasciando le cose come stanno per paura che facendo di più si risvegli l’oppressione dello stato? Bè, no.

Nessuno dice che non si deve riciclare, ma, ammettiamolo, il programma di riciclaggio dello stato è un piano escogitato dalle aziende per scaricare le colpe aziendali sull’individuo. Invece di attribuire la responsabilità degli sprechi e del degrado ambientale alle aziende che confezionano i loro prodotti con materiali non sostenibili, si dà la colpa al consumatore che getta via e non ricicla. Certi programmi sono una truffa, gran parte di ciò che si getta nei contenitori appositi finisce nella discarica perché il trattamento è problematico. L’unica differenza è che occorre più benzina per far andare un camion apposito a raccoglierlo separatamente. E anche quando il rifiuto è effettivamente riciclato, non si tiene conto dell’energia necessaria al processo e dell’inquinamento causato dalla rifusione di certi materiali.

L’approccio migliore sta nel ridurre la quantità di rifiuti. E per quanto riguarda il riciclaggio dei rifiuti che comunque si producono, ci sono sistemi molto più efficaci e affidabili come il riuso, il riciclaggio creativo, la trash art, il compostaggio, nonché strumenti come Precious Plastic che riciclano la plastica producendo oggetti e materie prime per stampanti 3D.

L’ambientalismo anarchico ha un passato ricco di organizzazioni che vanno da Earth First! a Food Not Lawns all’Earth Liberation Front fino all’Institute for Social Ecology di Murray Bookchin. Ognuna di queste organizzazioni per raggiungere i propri scopi si serve di un mix di ecologia sociale, tecnologie intermedie, azione diretta e mutuo aiuto. Cosa ci insegna la loro storia? Come possiamo servirci del progresso per riparare i danni già fatti ed evitarne altri futuri?

Come Fermarli

Innanzitutto, invece di chiedere aiuti di stato per le energie rinnovabili o tassare la CO2, occorre andare alla radice del problema rappresentata dagli stessi aiuti alle aziende. Bisogna prima di tutto finirla con i sussidi per il petrolio, il gas, gli allevamenti e l’agricoltura industriale, e anche con tutti gli altri aiuti alle aziende. I sussidi, di qualunque genere siano, scaricano sugli altri i costi aziendali, compresi quelli ambientali, permettendo alle aziende di sopravvivere nonostante le pratiche precarie. Occorre poi spezzare il monopolio dei servizi imposto dallo stato, che soffoca la competizione e punisce chi esce dal sistema.

Ma abolire i sussidi non basta. Occorre bloccare i loro progetti. Occorre, ad esempio, vietare la fratturazione idraulica e le miniere a cielo aperto, abolire gli espropri per pubblica utilità, chiedere il rispetto dei diritti di proprietà, soprattutto delle popolazione indigene, contro i poteri aziendali, servirsi maggiormente di studi legali ambientalisti come Water Protector Legal Collective e Earthjustice per combattere stato e aziende. Fra le tattiche estreme c’è il blocco degli oleodotti, l’occupazione di cantieri, il sabotaggio, il danneggiamento della proprietà, tree sitting e tree spiking, l’embargo e l’affossamento delle miniere. Gruppi come Water Protectors e i suoi alleati si servono di un mix di denunce, richieste di diritti di proprietà, occupazioni, embargo e sabotaggi per realizzare i propri fini.

Dobbiamo anche fermare le pratiche dannose dell’agricoltura e dell’allevamento industriali. Gli allevamenti industriali sono dannosi non solo per gli animali coinvolti, ma anche per l’ambiente in generale, tra abuso di antibiotici, spreco di risorse e produzione concentrata di metano. Aggiungete poi le monocolture, e i pesticidi e i diserbanti sintetici. Ci sono organizzazioni come Food Not Bombs che si battono per dare ai bisognosi alimenti che altrimenti verrebbero buttati.

Altre organizzazioni, come l’Animal Liberation Front, combattono gli allevamenti industriali andando a liberare gli animali per offrire loro un rifugio, e distruggendo gli impianti. Movimenti come March Against Monsanto, che combattono l’agroindustria, fanno ben sperare, anche se l’accanimento particolare contro gli ogm e la retorica antiscientifica che ne segue distolgono l’attenzione da questioni più vaste e urgenti. La March Against Myths About Modification è stato un tentativo di correggere gli errori di tanta propaganda sui “frankenfoods” generata dalla March Against Monsanto; purtroppo, ignorando gli errori della Monsanto, ha dato l’impressione di essere contro la March Against Monsanto.

Nel lungo termine, però, non si può arrivare alla vittoria se non sono in atto alternative al sistema attuale.

Il Nuovo Mondo nel Guscio del Vecchio

Questo significa, tra l’altro, diffondere l’uso di tecnologie appropriate come il solare, l’idroelettrico, l’eolico, i biocarburanti e le biomasse. Le piccole pile a combustibile e la microgenerazione aiutano a decentrare la produzione energetica, riducendo il bisogno di reti elettriche di grandi dimensioni.

Un modo per ridurre l’inquinamento generato dai trasporti passa per la bicicletta, il trasporto pubblico, il carpooling, il ridesharing, i biocarburanti e le auto elettriche. Grazie a progetti come Local Motors si possono produrre automobili localmente, riducendo l’inquinamento generato dal trasporto dei singoli pezzi e delle auto finite sulle lunghe distanze. Tutto ciò può essere integrato con l’uso di materiali riciclati, come fa Precious Plastic, nuove fonti di energia come i biocarburanti, le auto a batteria (come le auto open-source di Tesla Motors): è un esempio di come i trasporti a lunga distanza potrebbero diventare più ecocompatibili.

Importanti sono anche le alternative all’attuale industria alimentare. In opposizione ai metodi industriali esiste la permacoltura, l’agricoltura verticale, il biologico, i piccoli allevamenti, la caccia, l’acquisto locale, l’acquisto diretto e forme di mercato come le cooperative zapatiste che producono caffè. E grazie a tecnologie come gli ogm si possono coltivare terreni ostili, aridi, si possono sviluppare specie resistenti agli insetti e altri parassiti comuni per ridurre l’uso di antiparassitari, mentre grazie alla ricerca scientifica si può arrivare a produrre carne in laboratorio ed eliminare completamente gli allevamenti.

Il passaggio a queste alternative è un inizio obbligato, ma non risolve i danni ambientali già fatti. Ma non mancano le soluzioni.

Ripulire il Cesso

Riforestazione, bonifica delle discariche, tecnologie per depurare l’acqua e l’aria, robot mangiaspazzatura, Precious Plastic, compostaggio e altro: tutto ciò può servire ad ovviare ai danni fatti dall’uomo.

Praticamente, dobbiamo ripulire ciò che è stato sporcato dai nostri predecessori, dai nostri vicini e da noi stessi. Fissare un giorno per ripulire la vicina spiaggia, il parco, la strada o il quartiere. Piantare alberi e altre essenze indigene. Mettere su rifugi in cui possano essere riabilitate o ospitate le specie a rischio, gli animali feriti e quelli ridotti in cattività. Occorre poi pensare a come eliminare le isole galleggianti di spazzatura che vagano per i mari.

In caso di fallimento, non ci rimarrebbe che abbandonare la terra e andare nello spazio, ma anche così dobbiamo imparare a vivere in modo ecosostenibile se non vogliamo continuare al solito modo e distruggere altri pianeti. Che poi, avendo le tecnologie per rendere abitabile un altro pianeta così da poter sostenere la vita basata sul carbonio, perché non utilizzarle per riparare i danni fatti sulla terra?

Speranza nel Futuro

A conti fatti, eliminare lo stato e il capitalismo servirà a salvare l’ambiente molto più di qualunque agenzia per l’ambiente, dipartimento per l’energia, accordo di Parigi o New Deal verde. Un approccio ambientale decentrato, dal basso, è fattibile. Dobbiamo fermare i loro piani, creare le nostre alternative, riparare al danno fatto finora. Assieme possiamo farlo. È compito nostro.

Commentary
Murray Rothbard’s Black Nationalism

Rothbard’s role in shaping the character of the American libertarian movement cannot be overstated. In the early years, the movement was made up of a small number of individuals and, like a small town, everybody knew each other. The rapid expansion since then gave rise to a founder effect. The particular idiosyncrasies of our founding fathers and mothers latched onto more and more brains as new generations of libertarians read up on classic texts, and modern texts were influenced by said founders.

It’s a common refrain in the libertarian movement, depending on how you feel about the left or the right, that Rothbard was good in the 60s (or at least further left), but then defected to the right afterward. It is certainly true that he reached out to the left more in the 60s and more to the right later (and later still, the most unsavory elements of the far right). From a distance Rothbard’s intellectual evolution may look like a wild roller coaster, but on closer inspection, there may be more continuity than initially meets the eye.

As Rothbard’s political strategy (or his ideology — it’s difficult to tell where his unrealistic realpolitik ends and his personal ideological failures begin) drifted further and further into the right fringe of American politics, he pursued alliances with the worst sorts of scoundrels and riff-raff. These strategies would attract people with noxiously statist beliefs to the libertarian movement itself. In the 90s he went as far as praising former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke’s political program in “Right-Wing Populism”:

It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what’s wrong with any of that? And of course the mighty anti-Duke coalition did not choose to oppose Duke on any of these issues. Indeed, even the most leftist of his opponents grudgingly admitted that he had a point. Instead, the Establishment concentrated on the very “negative campaigning” that they profess to abhor.

How did Rothbard, someone who was praising the Black Panthers in the 60s, drift so far afield in a few decades? Again, there may be more continuity than meets the eye. In his 1970 essay, “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature,” which on paper represents a critical breaking point from the left for him, he criticizes feminists of the time in a way that suggests a view of black liberation as simply separatism (emphasis mine):

As for the women’s liberationists, perhaps we might begin to take their constantly repeated analogies with the black movement more seriously. The blacks have, indeed, moved from integration to black power, but the logic of black power is starkly and simply: black nationalism – an independent black nation. If our New Feminists wish to abandon male–female “integrationism” for liberation, then this logically implies Female Power, in short, Female Nationalism. Shall we then turn over some virgin land, maybe the Black Hills, maybe Arizona, to these termagants? Yes, let them set up their karate-chopping Amazonian Women’s Democratic People’s Republic and bad cess to them. The infection of their sick attitudes and ideology would then be isolated and removed from the greater social body, and the rest of us, dedicated to good old-fashioned heterosexuality, could then go about our business undisturbed.

These are surely valid criticisms of feminists of the time if his accusation of this crude analogy to black liberation really was as widespread as he suggested. Nonetheless, his dismissal of women’s issues makes it difficult to imagine him having been on the side of social justice just a few years prior. 1970 Rothbard, quite frankly, already sounds like 1992 Rothbard. But it’s more damning that he apparently believed in a consensus among black liberationists in favor of separatism. Particularly when his earlier support of the Black Panthers was one way he established his leftist cred. Not that the Black Panthers were necessarily separatists, but his support may have been based on the idea that they were. Here in his 1969 editor comment, he expresses his disappointment at their apparent abandoning of black nationalism (emphasis mine):

The Panthers have three great virtues: (1) their enormous ability to upset and aggravate the white police, simply by going around armed and in uniform—the supposed Constitutional privilege of every free American but apparently to be denied to radical militant blacks; (2) their considerable capacity for organizing black youth; and (3) excellent black nationalist ideas—particularly in emphasizing a black nation with their own land in such areas as the Black Belt of the South—as expressed in some writings of Eldridge Cleaver.

But there are growing offsetting tendencies so serious as to call the overall merit of the Panthers into grave question. In the first place, there are increasing tendencies for the Panthers to abandon black nationalism almost completely for the Old Left virus of black-white Marxist working-class action. The problem is not only increasing infusions of Marxist rhetoric into the Panther material, but an unfortunate eagerness to reach out and make alliances with white radicals, thereby contradicting the whole point of black power, which is to develop separate black movements resulting in black national self-determination.

Rothbard didn’t like Marxists of course. But his disagreement with the direction they were allegedly going was “in the first place” their apparent abandonment of black nationalism. That is, black separatism.

At best, characterizing liberation movements as simply separatist or integrationist discards important subtleties, subtleties that should concern any libertarian. Also curious is that someone could hold a cosmopolitan, anti-state ideology but still dismiss integrationism after decades, centuries even, of forced segregation by the government.

More worrying still is that support for black separatism is perfectly consistent with his later overtures to white nationalists. I am not making the case here that any and all non-black people who support black nationalism must simply wish for black people to fuck off. I’m also not commenting on the conflict within black liberationists on the subject of assimilation. I’m not really touching these subjects. Instead, I only claim that support for black separatism by a white person is consistent with also supporting white supremacists, as Rothbard later did. Meaning that race is an issue for which there is continuity between the early and late Rothbard.

Indeed, the growing tendency of fascists over the decades to use a pan-secessionist strategy to network nationalism of the oppressor with those of the oppressed, fits nicely with Rothbard’s descent into the “paleo strategy” and the aforementioned overtures to the far right. As Alexander Reid Ross notes throughout Against the Fascist Creep, pan-secessionism can work as a wedge to bait-and-switch radicals into supporting white nationalism. As he notes in an interview about his book:

Without understanding the way that those ambiguous ideas are applied in different milieus, like with national anarchism and autonomous nationalism and those sorts of things, radicals can fall for easy platitudes. Pan-secessionism is another great example. When radicals start talking about the need for separatism without a clear, cosmopolitan follow-up strategy, they leave ourselves wide open to their influence and the insinuation of fascism and the ability for fascist ideas and movements to gain ground in the radical milieu and also in the broader subcultures and in mainstream cultures. When they start talking about ethnic separatism—particularly white separatism, whether de jure or de facto—they’ve basically given up the field.

It seems that the quasi-leftist early Rothbard took the bait. White supremacists supporting black liberationists when and only when they pine for a nation-state of their own has a long history. As noted in SPLC’s exposé on the KKK’s networking with Nation of Islam:

Flanked by a dozen storm troopers in swastika armbands, Rockwell told an audience of 5,000 Nation devotees that he was “proud to stand here before black men. … Elijah Muhammad is the Adolf Hitler of the black man.”

Sporadic contacts between Black Muslims and white supremacists continued after Louis Farrakhan set up his own branch of the Nation of Islam in 1975.

Klan leader Tom Metzger was so impressed with Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic bombast that he donated $100 to the Nation after a Farrakhan rally in Los Angeles in September 1985. A month later, Metzger and 200 other white supremacists from the United States and Canada gathered on a farm about 50 miles west of Detroit, where they pledged their support for the Nation of Islam.

I’m not claiming here that Rothbard was secretly part of a strategy to link up separatists and bring about a racially balkanized world. He lost interest in black nationalism as soon as he was convinced black liberationists themselves had largely abandoned these ideals for Marxism. And I give him the benefit of the doubt that he was sincere in supporting secession as a step in the direction towards seccession of the individual, however nonsensical I find that view. Rather, I believe the kinds of alliances he made and the positions he took during his era of flirting with the new left were a prelude to his later career. Some warning signs were already present and if we understand them we can avoid letting further libertarian celebrities gain too much influence and do too much damage.

Center Updates, Supporter Updates
Director’s Report: Summer 2018

This summer saw an array of developments at the Center, and we’re on the edge of revealing even more.

After a long preparation we launched an in-house store with books, zines, stickers, buttons, and apparel. Your support since launch has been overwhelming, but thanks to the amazing work of our financial coordinator we’ve stayed on top of orders. This fall we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be integrating a host of further materials from the old Distro of the Libertarian Left. In addition we’ve listened to feedback and we’re in the process of contracting artists and designers to further expand our offerings.

Translation efforts have continued apace, this month we’ll be publishing a complete French translation of Kevin Carson’s seminal book, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy. We’re still looking for translators in a number of languages that anarchists have less of a footprint in, so if you’re a native speaker in for example Arabic, get at us if you’d like to earn a little coin.

We’re in the lead up to our next Mutual Exchange symposium, this one on the subject of revolution. Work our Mutual Exchange compilation books is nearly finished and ready to be sent off to the printers.

It’s important that we stay open and share what talents we have, in that vein for many years now we’ve offered internships for up and coming anarchists looking to get paid experience. We’re in the process of selecting a new batch, but if you have a interest in editing, translating, graphic design, and audio production there’s still time! Write us if you’d like to get involved.

In the rest of 2018 we’re looking forward to launching a podcast and moving more recorded materials to our youtube channel.

Commentary
Against Slavery, Environmental Disaster, and Fascist Nations: BDS in Action

With the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel causing so much mainstream controversy, other BDS movements often get overlooked. Alongside the current ongoing prison strike that started August 21st and is stated to go on until September 9th, there is also a BDS movement concerning companies that profit from prisons and prison slave labor. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is also known for using similar tactics against companies to pressure them to sign onto the Fair Food contract, while other groups have used these tactics to combat environmental damage.

Dream Defenders recently launched their GEO Cages campaign targeting GEO Group, who is one of the top three largest profiteers of the private prison industry. GEO Group supplies everyone from juvenile detention centers to ICE camps and everything in between. Shortly after the campaign was launched, GEO Group sent a cease and desist letter to Dream Defenders and threatened to sue but thankfully the ACLU has taken to defending the Dream Defenders on the basis of free speech.

Dream Defenders is currently urging folks to download their Freedom Papers Toolkit which contains information and resources on how to pressure politicians into refusing to take GEO Group money through means of bird dogging, social media, community outreach, and their Freedom Pledge which they are pushing politicians to sign.

In addition to that there are also independent efforts to urge the following corporations and individuals to divest from and/or cease their business dealings with ICE as well:

Profiteer Relationship Contact
GEO Group ICE’s largest contractor. (561) 893-0101
Core Civic Billion-dollar prison corporation that runs the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. (615) 263-3000
Microsoft $19.4 million contract with ICE, providing technology services. CEO Satya Nadella has received a letter from his own personnel who asked the company to sever ties. By participating in this call, you’re supporting workers AND immigrants. 1-800-642-7676
Northeastern University $2.7 million contract with ICE for “exploratory methods mapping process services for data sets.” (617) 373-2652
Ernst & Young $4 million contract with ICE to provide “accounting, program management, budgeting and financial services,” and $98,000 for “leadership training.” (404) 817-4450
Thomson Reuters $4.7 million contract through 2021 for “web of science subscription service.” CEO Stephen Rubley is on the board of directors for “ICE Foundation,” a pro-ICE organization. (646) 223-4000
Motorola Solutions $3 million contract to provide “core upgrade/GPS project/mobility project” and other “integrated hardware/software/services solutions.” 1-800-668-6765
Deloitte $1.2 million contract with ICE for “administrative data/records management support services.” as well as $13.5 mil for “program management office support services.”  Contact Here
John Hopkins University $992,000 to provide tactical medical training and $455,000 to provide “historical training and decision-making skills.” (410) 516-8171
Dell $500,000 for software and $42,000 for laptop licenses. CEO Michael Dell “advocates for immigration reform that supports our businesses, customers and families.” 1-800-624-9897
Xerox $130,000 and $4,000 for an unspecified reason (likely technological). 1-877-979-8498
Canon $53,000 for “multifunction copiers and repairs,” possible second contract of $44,000. (631) 330-5000
Amazon $12,000 for “RRT supplies–which may mean rapid response team.” 1-866-216-1072
Time Warner Cable $6,000 agreement to provide cable and internet services to two Texas ICE locations and another in Buffalo, NY. 1-800-892-4357
Comcast $4,800 to provide ICE with cable through November. 1-800-934-6489
LinkedIn $3,600 contract with ICE to provide “license agreement for unlimited library access.” Email: customerservice@linkedin.com
United Parcel Services $3,500 for “domestic delivery services”. Potential to raise up to $31,500 contract. (404) 828-6000
Charles Prather / Birchwood INS, L.C. ICE/DHS Tampa property owners and landlord. (727) 896-1080
Sheriff Bob Gualtieri One of the architects of the Basic Ordering Agreement declared in January 2018 in which several Florida sheriffs will now work with the ICE gestapo to hunt, trap, cage and deport Undocumented persons.

(Demand that Florida sheriffs END complicity and sever BOA agreement with ICE.)

(727) 582-6201

There is also an effort to boycott and protest companies who use prison labor such as, Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart and Wendy’s.

Do your research, produce and distribute infosheets, place informational stickers on products, protest outside of their businesses, do a banner drop, or use whatever creative means one can to spread the word and increase participation in these boycotts.

CIW and their allies are currently boycotting Wendy’s due to their refusal to sign onto the Fair Food Program which, “is a unique partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for the workers who pick fruits and vegetables on participating farms.” CIW has also recently endorsed the March for Our Lives’ call for a boycott of Publix Supermarkets, who is also refusing to sign onto the Fair Food Program. However, during their long running campaign against Publix, they themselves have never called for a boycott. March for Our Lives of course is boycotting Publix for completely different reasons than the CIW would if they had called the boycott themselves. Instead of protesting labor practices, they are calling for Publix to divest from politicians who take NRA money and are pledging to boycott them until they do.

Obviously the NRA is an awful organization that has historically fought against black gun ownership and tends to care more about protecting the profits and interests of gun manufacturers than gun owners, but the March for Our Lives movement isn’t concerned about that. They are concerned with pushing an agenda of gun control, an agenda that explicitly calls for expanding the police state and violating medical privacy rights. So while the NRA is awful and the CIW has attached their cause to the boycott, it is understandable that many anarchists will not fall into supporting the March for Our Lives in any way.

Groups such as Divest Gainesville and college movements such as Divest UF and the similar push from students at USF and other campuses and cities, have called for colleges, universities, and state and federal governments to all divest from the private prison industry, the use of prison slave labor, and investment in arms manufacturing, and fossil fuel companies.

As such they have called for individuals, schools, and governments to divest from and continue to boycott not only the companies listed above but also energy companies including, but not limited to, Coal India, Adani Enterprises, Duke Energy, Exxon, BP, Shell, and Chevron, as well as supporting and expanding boycott and divestment efforts spearheaded by the Water Protectors and their allies.

As part of their efforts in combating the Dakota Access Pipeline and other similar pipeline projects, the Water Protectors have called for boycotts and divestment from all banks who have invested in various pipeline projects including Bank of Nova Scotia, Citizens Bank, Comerica Bank, US Bank, PNC Bank, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Community Trust, HSBC Bank, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, DNB Capital/ASA, SunTrust, Royal Bank of Scotland, BBVA Compass, Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Citibank, Mizuho Bank, TD Securities, Credit Agricole, ABN Amro Capital, Intesa Sanpaolo, ING Bank, Natixis, BayernLB, ICBC London, and Societe Generale.

Of course, with a long history of human rights violations and the oppression of the Palestinian people, the state of Israel no doubt still needs to be dismantled. In opposition to the practices of the Israeli state, a decentralized grassroots BDS movement sprung up, calling for boycotts against Israeli products and companies, pressure campaigns to get states and companies to divest from Israel, and calls for state sanctions against Israel. While most anarchists are less invested in using means of the state to combat Israel and therefore tend to be less invested, if at all, in calling for state sanctions, few would disagree with the first two.

While the call is to boycott all Israeli products generally until the apartheid stops, to simplify things companies and products that have been singled out for consumer boycotts include Israeli produce, Caterpillar, SodaStream, Ahava, HP, and Sabra, as well as all Israeli universities. Artists have even joined the movement by refusing to tour in Israel or participate in any cultural or artistic events in Israel or sponsored by the Israeli government.

BDS tactics have worked historically to tackle apartheid in South Africa and other abuses, so there is definitely a precedent set that shows it can be used effectively in combating fascist states. However BDS tactics also work on non-state actors as well, as the countless current campaigns listed show. We should definitely support the BDS movement against Israel but we should not let it be at the expense of exposure for these other boycott and divestment campaigns. Whether it’s the state or private corporations, we must stand against all forms of abuse that threaten our freedom and safety. From Palestine to prison cells, we will fight for this planet and the dignity of the people on it.

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
How to Support Striking Prisoners

Starting August 21st, prisoners nationwide went on strike, demanding better working and living conditions. There are currently strike actions confirmed at: Northwest Detention Center, Georgia State Prison, Broad River Correctional Institution, Lee Correctional Institution, McCormick Correctional Institution, Turbeville Correctional Institute, Kershaw Correctional Institution, Lieber Correctional Institution, Hyde Correctional Institution, New Folsom Prison, Toledo Correctional Institution, Wabash Valley Correctional Institution, Lea County Correctional Institution, Charlotte Correctional Institution, Dade Correctional Institution, Franklin Correctional Institution, Holmes Correctional Institution, Apalachee Correctional, Burnside County Jail, Stiles Unit, and Michael Unit, with more suspected prisoner strike activities being silenced to outsiders, and hundreds of solidarity actions continuing to happen nationwide among outside supporters. Going into week three it is important to assess where we are at and how we can help efforts moving forward.

Aside from solidarity actions such as banner drops, leafleting, business boycotts, divestment campaigns, noise demos, and other forms of solidarity protest, we can also provide much needed resources behind the scenes. Write letters to striking prisoners, coordinate and participate in phone zaps, and support the strike fund.

One of the most important forms of communication in this campaign has been letter writing. Most of the work of groups like the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) consists of corresponding with inmate organizers via mail, and checking in on them and their needs as they organize behind bars. On their website, IWOC has a list of prisoners who are currently striking and would love to hear from you. Write them and let them know they are not alone. Let them know that you are here to help however you can. Knowing they have the support of those on the outside keeps them strong and regular correspondence lets guards know that people are keeping tabs on them.

Phone zaps have also been an indispensable tactic during this strike and others before it. Phone zaps let their targets know that folks are paying attention and are outraged. It lets them know that there is public support for these demands and that they are not going away anytime soon. Phone zaps have been used to halt the torture of prisoners, convince politicians to change their stances, and harass business owners and other public figures into amending their practices. An updated list of phone zap campaigns can be found here.

Finally, if nothing else, throw a few dollars into the official strike fund and/or spread it around to those who will. In the aftermath of these types of actions, many prisoners face state repression and will need things like legal help and other resources. The groups involved in the fundraiser include not only IWOC but also Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, San Francisco Bay View, and the Anarchist Black Cross who will use that money to continue to organize to support prisoner efforts to organize for their own freedom.

These three simple actions provide endless amounts of support and all play their part in helping make this a sustainable movement that can reach its goals. Together we can make a difference. So let’s stand in solidarity with our comrades behind bars.

Commentary
Celebrate Labor Day by Supporting Incarcerated Laborers!

Most of us in the radical labor movement are well aware of the historical bait-and-switch pulled with May Day and the modern American holiday established by the state known as Labor Day. Despite this many anarchists still take Labor Day as an opportunity to spread the message of worker liberation and freedom from capitalism. In fact, that’s just what the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World is encouraging people to do. Specifically IWOC is asking folks to celebrate Labor Day this year by standing in solidarity with incarcerated laborers and demanding an end to prison slavery.

IWOC has recently put out an official statement urging outside supporters of the ongoing prison strike to take things to the next stage. While we should not stop writing letters, participating in phone zaps, donating to the strike fund, supporting boycott and divestment efforts, and organizing solidarity protests and noise demos, there is a call to escalate tactics in tandem with the actions taken by those behind bars.

Inspired by the recent actions of another wing of the prison abolitionist movement, Occupy ICE, as well as by our inmate comrades holding it down on the inside, IWOC and others have chosen to put themselves on the line and even risk arrest to disrupt business as usual for those who profit from prison slave labor.

We are being called upon to not only protest at the local prison, jail, or work camp, but to blockade prison labor facilities, refuse to let prison work vans get to their destinations unhindered, and establish occupation encampments outside their operations. We must stand strong and refuse to budge until our demands are met or we are forced out. And if we are forced out of our physical blockades and occupations then we promise to come back even bigger and with more refined tactics. It is through solidarity and direct action that we will get the demands of these prisoners met.

Their demands are simple:

  1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.
  2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.
  3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.
  4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.
  5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.
  6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.
  7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.
  8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.
  9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.
  10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count!

So as Occupy ICE inspires yet another Occupy movement against prison slavery, we must gather our camping supplies and put them to good use, whether by going out there ourselves or by donating to those who can. Let’s make this year’s Labor Day something to remember by using it to launch the next stage of the movement to end prison slavery. This Labor Day we celebrate ALL workers.

Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory