In Ursula K Le Guin’s classic short “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” she considers a prosperous and happy society whose success is somehow purchased through a dark bargain — the torture and abject immiseration of a single child. Despite the positive good won for the many, a few starry-eyed children of Omelas refuse to temper their hunger for a better deal, and reject this otherwise utopian society, albeit with no alternative blueprint in hand. Simply insisting that there must be something better, or that their lives should be devoted to at least searching for it.

To opponents of markets they pose an equivalent faustian bargain; no measure of background wealth and technological advancement is worth the price of social hierarchies of wealth or even a single person in poverty. Many would rather live in an “equality of the mud” with no economic benefits beyond subsistence farming if it avoided even a single person, disabled and without friends, starving or being forced to prostrate themselves before a charity. Never mind the feasibility of their alternate proposals, I am deeply sympathetic to this evaluation. In fact I have always been more of the mind that those merely walking away are abdicating a moral responsibility to do more. Mere exit is no more than the gutless wiping of one’s own hands. The anarchist cry is that so long as even a single person in the universe is oppressed we owe them active resistance. And oppression can obviously look like impoverishment in material freedoms, as well as severe differences in relative capacity or status.

The central problem with liberalism is that it constructs “good enough” societies, so locally optimal that no easy transition can be undertaken to improve them except through titanic catastrophe. To secure some advances or benefits, liberalism builds up walls against future improvements, a tradeoff it calls pragmatism. And inevitably these walls allow what positives it secures to be eroded away internally.

So how would we avoid Omelas situations in some utopian anarchist market? If we were able to equalize wealth in some magical revolution and for the first time launch an actual freed market, how might we avoid getting accidentally locked in at some stable point — some local optimum — with an underclass? There are many norms and institutional configurations or distributions possible in a market. Path dependence might be a thing and, by quirk of random trajectories, we might end up in a decidedly less than egalitarian configuration. Perhaps even one where the immiseration of a few is quite sharp, and yet the whole economy “pareto optimal.” Even if a situation is not technically pareto optimal a market may have such a warped ecosystem as to make the gradual resolution of this inefficient satiation of desire involve prohibitively long timescales. What does it matter to the de facto slaves in a company town that they could slowly save enough over centuries to eventually liberate themselves and compete against the company enslaving them?

Well I think the answer depends on going back to the differences between market prescriptions and non market prescriptions and analytically extending our existing solutions to certain problems.

Part of the anarchist argument for markets is that they provide a counterpressure to a persistent problem of oppression in non-market societies. In a gift economy your social standing and ties play a critical role in determining your livelihood. Embedded in a community or social landscape you are at risk of being dependent upon games of social capital. To be a pariah, to have a different brain architecture, or even to simply be less gregarious than others, could mean death or exclusion from the means of production or basic needs. Whatever egalitarian values an institution or community might proclaim, there’s nothing objectively forcing them to stick to such. Small towns and hippie communes often end up looking a lot like Omelas. Further, even if no one denies you food, the implicit status hierarchies of charity can be all the more pernicious in a society where they constitute the final word on everything — whether through the centralized commune or a decentralized web of friends you are expected to maintain.

To resolve this issue we can expand what is possible in our anarchist economy by permitting people to make spot transactions, that is to say exchanges, thus facilitating collaboration between strangers or untrusting associates. You may become a pariah in the neighborhood association/commune for your fashion sense or uncut lawn but you will still be able to benefit from economic collaboration/competition on the market, the network of exchanges, thus providing a pressure valve to check the pernicious abuses of social capital(ism).

It’s important to note here that a gift economy can be considered a market — albeit deformed from its full potential — limited to a stark subset of possible feedback loops and information flows. Proponents of gift economies often object to exchange itself as unethical because it arguably allows, encourages, or fundamentally involves competition, something seen as less than “friendly” and thus objectively unethical. One common refrain from the Graeberians is, “If you fully trusted one another there’d be no point to do a spot transaction.”

What’s fascinating to me is the degree to which most anarcho-capitalist “walmart minus the state” models of a supposedly ideal market themselves depend upon cutting out a vast variety of possible feedback loops on ultimately similar rationales.

By taking property titles as a given — as an objective ethical reality, as natural law — they suppress the haggling over which titles people feel inclined to respect.

Just as the advocates of gift economies would suppress the autonomous emergence of exchange, the advocates of “walmart minus the state” markets require the suppression of theft, sabotage, assassination, etc. That is to say issues emerging from contested claims. The polycentric legal system of such ancaps is just assumed to reach and maintain a near perfect equilibrium (heeding closely to some supposed “natural law”). But it is in fact an important component of austrian arguments that, while markets have equilibrating tendencies, they are never in equilibrium. And things like theft and sabotage can themselves be critical market functions — in the more primordial reputation market prior to the emergence of any consensus on titles. There will probably always be a few people on the margins who see little or no reason for mutually beneficial detentes to recognize the claimed titles of certain other people, or even their lives.

While there are reasons we should expect and encourage broad settlement on market norms and peaceful cohabitation — and thus impede some of these reputational dynamics to some degree — to exclude them entirely is to remove feedback mechanisms by which the market can course-correct itself. Just as accepting at least some measure of trade and rivalrous competition allows for greater prosperity (and thus the capacity to gift more), so to does accepting some measure of theft, sabotage, assassination, etc allow for greater prosperity by tearing down and disincentivizing centralized cancerous monopolies of wealth, power, etc, thus allowing the broader economy to run smoother.

If even one person is truly trapped and immiserated in Omelas there is a pressure valve: they can revolt. The destitute can steal from the rich. Those subject to negative environmental externalities can sabotage the factories of those responsible. The oppressed can eliminate those holding power. If, despite the best intentions of anarchists, a freed market goes awry for some reason and starts to develop cancerous accumulations of wealth and power, or just the catastrophic immiseration of a few, as a solution we would not require some binary revolution, some universally disruptive jubilee that once again resets the playing field to try a freed market again, rather resistance can be much more nuanced and gradual. Rather than a “permanent revolution” a permanent insurrection, at least at the margins.

It’s worth noting how much smoother this is than conflicts within communes, or the “townships” that Kropotkin said would be able to somehow collectively decide to deny specific people food, etc. If a single person starts monopolizing title over a resource to the detriment of everyone, other individuals can start autonomously disregarding their claimed title. Insurrectionary forms of resistance thus remain an option, and are likely to smoothly increase in frequency and strength as a concentration grows more pernicious. This individual-to-individual resistance is much more gradual and fluid than the resistance necessary to overcome the edicts of a collective entity.

Mild perturbations of wealth are not objective, because value is not objective, especially in an actually-existing market that never perfectly clears and/or a freed market that doesn’t collapse its transmitted information to prices in a single universal currency. It’s thus a bad idea for those around the median wealth to disrespect each others’ property claims. General upheaval or contestation of titles doesn’t benefit anyone, even if your house is somewhat smaller than your neighbors. The risk is too high, the possible payout too small, stability a general good. And thus profit signals can actually work, exchange happen, etc. But in the face of severe inequality the cost-benefit ratio changes.

Note that this puts caps on maximum wealth without turning to the arbitrary and dangerous means of the state. No state planner can know what the maximum wealth should be, or how hard to disincentivize wealth accumulation past a certain point, but the market can know. The aggregate knowledge and needs of poor thieves being yet another market pressure, far more dexterous than some central planner. And note also that this would enforce a cap on wealth, not really a cap on income. An insightful but poor entrepreneur would have more to gain than a similarly insightful entrepreneur quite comfortably situated, thus further encouraging a churn of wealth. After all it is typically those on the bottom who have more insightful entrepreneurial ideas, being closer to the particulars that need solving.

Marxists have long sneered that anarchism is an alliance between the petite bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat, and so it is with some relish that I have long noted this notion of a freed market that embraces insurrection constitutes their worst nightmare. Of course I doubt any petite bourgeoisie would accept such an expanded market, giving relative license to the poor to raid the coffers of the rich so long as the “middle classes” are left alone, and a few class war ideologues in anarchist circles have derided me a lumpen and traitor for not wanting to cleave the heads off middle class snots, but I’m uninterested in the paroxysms of full revolutionary violence and think this proposal strikes a fair balance.

Beyond irritating marxists, it is also here that the two most common libertarian arguments radically break with one another. The consequentialist argument that the decentralization and feedback channels provided by markets (leveraging the accuracy of revealed preference through exchange) assures greater dexterity and wealth for all than centralized systems grinds into conflict with the deontological argument for respecting property as some kind of a priori “natural law.”

I’ve argued this position several times before, underlining that reputation and interpersonal relationships are inalienable to minds in a way that physical goods are not, but it’s also worth emphasizing the unity this offers between the two historical branches of individualist anarchism: insurrectionary and market.

Many anarchist admirers of markets for their dynamism have long also admired the dynamism at play in insurrection and fourth generation warfare, but the theoretical synergy on this front is insufficiently examined. It may even be the case that in an anarchist society some background measure of “theft” may come to serve as an indicator of the health of our economy, in the same way that certain neoclassicals think some measure of unemployment secures the health of (the capitalist class in) a capitalist economy.

Today’s neoreactionaries fetishize the notion of “exit” from a society, playing the “if things get bad enough you can always just leave” card, and many anarchists advocating strong and persistent collective bodies have the same flippancy to concerns about what to do if things start to go bad in their utopias. But not only is such “exit” all or nothing, it implicitly accepts the legitimacy of those collective entities, or at least certain “democratic processes” for appealing against capricious or oppressive collective edicts. But why should you have to leave? They’re the assholes. Similarly if there are just a few things going wrong in ways unfixable through the collective process, why should you have no choice besides tolerance or total cataclysmic revolution?

Markets provide much more fluid means of detaching yourself from dependence, and the union of insurrectionary and market anarchist insights provides much smoother and less destructive means to rectify any creeping accumulations of power.

If in an anarchistic society a Robber Baron tyrant or similar instance of oppression were to somehow start to emerge without the helping hand of state power as all prior have, we need not give up and flee, and indeed should not.

Endless pages could be written criticising Bernie Sanders’ platform and voting record, but despite his affinity for trying to pass off milquetoast social democracy as democratic socialism he has suggested some useful solutions on occasion. One such occasion was when he introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act or the Stop BEZOS Act.

As the name suggests, this bill was inspired by stories of Amazon employees surviving on state welfare such as food stamps and public housing assistance despite working for the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. Sanders claims, as have many libertarians, socialists, and anarchists from across the spectrum, that employee welfare is actually a form of corporate welfare. Instead of paying their workers a living wage, despite making more than enough in profit to do so, companies like Amazon, WalMart, and McDonald’s instead encourage employees to seek out government benefits. This form of welfare abuse allows companies to skirt by without paying the full cost of the labor they employ, instead passing that cost off to taxpayers.

Such welfare abuse costs taxpayers around $153 billion per year. The typical solution is to call for the enactment and enforcement of minimum wage laws. But seeing as how many libertarians and anarchists are rightfully skeptical of blanket minimum wage laws, other solutions must be pursued. The usual anarchist response is to organize on the job for better wages however this is a long process that usually leads to many people getting fired for even trying.

So what is Sanders’ solution? The Stop BEZOS Act would require any company with over 500 employees to pay the full cost of any government benefits received by their employees. This puts such companies in the position of either having to adequately compensate people for their labor in the first place or pick up the costs after the fact by paying the welfare costs of any employee not paid a living wage. This means that taxpayers no longer have to subsidize labor for large corporations that can easily afford to adequately compensate their employees.

Living under a rigged market system flooded with various forms of government subsidized corporate welfare leaves us with a lot of work to do if we ever wish to truly see a free market society. In order to achieve such a society, we must attack corporate welfare on every level. This is far from the ax that strikes the root of corporate welfare, but it does go a long way towards both ending a major form of corporate welfare while also significantly decreasing the number of people who have to rely on personal welfare programs, which will also significantly decrease the amount of tax money needed to cover the costs of our welfare programs. Such a net reduction in taxpayer expenses is not only the fiscally responsible thing to do but it also directly aids a large portion of the working class. Sadly, it’s doubtful such a bill would have a chance at success anytime soon, at least not without a major grassroots movement backing it and forcing it into the public conversation much like folks did with subjects such as cannabis decriminalization, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “archaeology” as “the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains.” The OED also defines the word “zombie,” in the context of popular fiction, as “a person or reanimated corpse that has been turned into a creature capable of movement but not of rational thought, which feeds on human flesh.” The former word’s definition would generally be taken as meaning that humans actively uncover essentially inert objects. But what if those objects are themselves active? What if they force themselves upon us? Instead of us brushing aside the dust of ages to reveal our own past, artifacts rise from the grave—bursting forth and dragging our history back to us. This is where the zombification comes into play.

Now, certainly many professional archaeologists would reject the previously stated “inert objects.” Archaeologist Michael Shanks describes his field as “an active engagement with remains of the past in the present” and explains its mission as seeking to “understand how people connect with the things they make, to place people in the networks of others – other people, things, other species, environments – that make them who they are.” But all this is still about the human present analyzing the human past, as opposed to that past malignantly and physically haunting our present. Instead, the necromantic behavior of abandoned items I have in mind presents itself as a zombie archaeology.

If capitalism is good at anything, it is making things. I mean “things” not in an ontological or otherwise formal sense but more in the manner that declutter gurus use it: general assorted human-made and/or human-claimed objects. Karl Marx himself characterized the capitalist system as necessitating a constant expansion of production in order to sustain its functioning. At the same time, a central part of the Marxist theory of economic crises is quite literally that too many commodities are produced to be profitably sold. In the middle ages, commodities were individually handmade and, if damaged, hand-repaired. There were no Fordist assembly lines to produce shoes, and if one ruined a pair there were no Targets or Walmarts down the street to get another.

In the 21st century, the world is now veritably swamped with commodities. According to APLF ltd., American consumers purchase an average of 7.5 shoes per capita per year. The LA Times reports that “the average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards.” I am not by any means claiming that everyone is an affluent borderline-hoarder. One of the fundamental problems of capitalism is the unequal access to this seeming abundance of goods. With so much paraphernalia in the world, it is inevitable that significant portions will be wasted. In an article for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explains that in a year the world creates around 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage—“the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings.” Much of this is food waste, but many inorganic items are produced with cheap plastic and other materials that fall apart quickly. Some companies, such as Apple, even reportedly preprogram their products to stop functioning properly after a certain amount of time in order to force consumers to buy new wares at a much greater rate than they otherwise would.

All this waste, all this stuff tossed away, has to go somewhere, and this is where the notion of zombie archaeology begins. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda, in an interview for New Materialism, says, “It is absurd to think that complex self-organizing structures need a ‘brain’ to generate them. The coupled system atmosphere-hydrosphere is continuously generating structures (thunderstorms, hurricanes, coherent wind currents) not only without a brain but without any organs whatsoever.” This point is crucial. Mindless or even inorganic denizens of the natural world are still capable of acting in an organized manner. Even more essentially, as human trash piles up, it gains the ability to enter into those natural systems described by DeLanda and become active—returning to life by ecosystemic reanimation.

In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, we have the famous Mount Rumpke, one of the largest landfills in the United States, which in 1996 experienced a massive landslide—apparently, a geological event. A more horrific version of this occurred in Mozambique, when an enormous pile of garbage collapsed, killing seventeen people. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a literal island of garbage, was formed and is continually expanding by means of waste disposed of in the ocean and caught in Pacific currents. This aquatic trash not only becomes part of large-scale oceanic processes but also enters into multi-species biological ones when the toxins from plastic are carried along the food-chain back to human beings. Although not the product of the consumer economy, orbital junk also constitutes a valid example. According to NASA, there are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the earth at speeds up to 17,500 mph. All these cases have caused or have the potential to cause expansive and systematic damage to our current existence. The corpses of our used-up and discarded impedimenta have formed mass graves, and these necropoleis have begun to stir. The objects of our past have crawled their way through the proverbial graveyard, pushed aside the stone doors of their mausoleums, to wreak havoc upon the living.

Capitalism has produced more stuff than past generations could ever have dreamed, but all these things are quickly used up and wasted in behemothian quantities. Such rubbish becomes part of the planet’s topography, enters into its ecological systems, and eventually returns to the human sphere of interaction—much to human detriment. This is zombie archaeology; when the remnants of our past are not uncovered by human beings but return to us by themselves with a vengeance. In this age of capitalism-induced ecological collapse, zombie archaeology is certain to become only increasingly suited for describing the world. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, writes of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus,

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But . . . [t]he storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

But what happens when the wreckage and debris—both literal and figurative—begin shambling towards the present? When the dead are, in a sense, awakened? Zombie archaeology poses these questions.

8/16/20: In the second paragraph, I seem to imply that Shanks’s approach to archaeology grants no agency to non-human objects despite its “active engagement” with them. However, he very openly writes that “[t]things and artifacts are material compositions, and can hold agency, affecting the (human) world around them, in organic symbiosis.” My intention was not to misrepresent Shanks’s position regarding this (particularly because it is quite similar to the point I am attempting to make), but rather to invert the normal conception of archaeology—with objects ‘seeking us out’ instead of the conventional reverse—so this amendment feels necessary. However, as must be obvious this piece is not really about actual archaeology at all (just as it is not really about actual zombies) but is rather an implicit case for some form of anti-consumerism and degrowth through the lens of environmental philosophy and new materialism.