Di Camilo Gómez. Originale pubblicato il 27 giugno 2019 con il titolo Trumpism Reveals the Danger of Fusionism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Ultimamente si parla tanto di fusionismo, termine coniato da Frank Meyer della National Review durante la Guerra Fredda per indicare l’alleanza tra conservatori e libertari contro i comunisti allineati con i repubblicani. Qualcuno si chiede se è veramente morto; io mi chiedo come faccia ad esistere ancora.

L’alleanza tra conservatori sociali e libertari non aveva molto senso, ma questo non vuol dire che non abbia avuto effetti significativi sulla storia. I maggiori pensatoi conservatori, come l’American Enterprise Institute e l’Heritage Foundation, sono noti per la propaganda del mantra fusionista, e assieme a loro molte altre importanti organizzazioni della destra americana.

La miscela di tagli fiscali, conservatorismo sociale e interventismo estero ideologicamente era incoerente, ma faceva vincere le elezioni. Reagan è un ottimo esempio. Tutti quelli che sono arrivati alla nomination repubblicana dopo di lui hanno cercato di essere un suo clone. Ci sono state sfide al sistema, come Pat Buchanan negli anni novanta e Ron Paul nei 2000, ma solo con Trump sono comparse grosse crepe nella coalizione.

Il fusionismo dura dagli anni cinquanta, ma in Trump sembra aver trovato il nemico più formidabile. Trump non sa nulla di filosofia politica, ma si lascia guidare dal suo istintivo nazionalismo etnico e dal populismo. Non ama parlare di libertà e non è amante del libero commercio. Odia apertamente gli immigrati e le minoranze etniche ed è noto per le simpatie verso i dittatori.

I conservatori precedenti, sia politici che attivisti, non erano santi. Molti di loro avevano i suoi stessi pregiudizi; ma almeno loro non definivano i nazisti “brave persone.” È vero che l’elemento libertario dell’alleanza fusionista spesso era giudicata debole, ma come ha notato lo storico Joshua Tait, conservatori e libero mercato hanno un rapporto complesso. Già prima di Trump il fusionismo veniva criticato sia dai conservatori che dai libertari, ma oggi tale critica si rafforza.

Se è vero che i conservatori stanno allontanandosi da qualunque idea di libertà, ci si chiede perché mai i libertari vogliano ancora rimanere a destra. Anche i tagli fiscali erano destinati ad aiutare i ricchi, mentre molti lavoratori hanno subito un aumento delle tasse. E pur parlando di libertà, ciò che i conservatori vogliono difendere è il capitalismo, non la libertà dei mercati.

Pur essendo il fusionismo originariamente espressione del pensiero politico americano, gli Stati Uniti lo hanno usato per estendere la propria influenza in America Latina grazie a pensatoi di destra. Come riporta The Intercept, molte di queste organizzazioni ricevono denaro dal governo americano. Il risultato di questo progetto politico è la vittoria di persone come Jair Bolsonaro, un populista di estrema destra che in Brasile si è candidato con una piattaforma razzista, sessista e omofoba ma anche col sostegno dei libertari per certi vaghi accenni al libero mercato. Ora che è al potere, si oppone anche a certe miti riforme come la depenalizzazione delle droghe. Qualche libertario comincia ad esprimere dubbi su Bolsonaro, ma è troppo tardi; oltre ad ammirare le dittature militari ha l’appoggio dei neonazisti. Se non altro, Bolsonaro è la dimostrazione che il fusionismo è un pericolo mondiale, non solo per l’America.

Come diceva il filosofo Charles Johnson, il grande errore di tanti libertari è che trattano capitalismo e libertarismo come sinonimi. Il capitalismo attuale è aiuti alle aziende, proprietà intellettuale e cattura del regolatore: non è libero mercato, ma il suo stravolgimento. E il panorama americano è ancora più misero del solito. Secondo l’economista Samuel Hammond, a prestar fede alle statistiche, la Scandinavia, spesso accusata di essere “socialista” dai conservatori americani, ha più libero mercato dell’America.

Il partito repubblicano ora vede nazisti dichiarati che si presentano alle primarie con l’elogio di Trump. I conservatori hanno assunto una posizione più aspra anche riguardo l’immigrazione, con provvedimenti che separano i figli dai genitori. Bambini sono stati rapiti e stuprati in quelli che anche i media tradizionali chiamano campi di concentramento.

Cosa aspettano i libertari ad abbandonare i conservatori? Il fusionismo era una pessima idea già in principio. Era la base intellettuale di un sistema che spingeva alla guerra contro i poveri e gli emarginati tanto in patria quanto fuori. Il fusionismo non è poi così diverso dal trumpismo. Sono due facce della stessa medaglia. Il trumpismo è ancora più ripugnante del fusionismo, ma si spera che almeno così i libertari vedano questo dittatore in fieri e vogliano uscire dal passato. Chi vuole la libertà non può allearsi con persone il cui obiettivo è la diffusione del potere autoritario.

I conservatori non hanno mai abbandonato l’idea del libero mercato, semplicemente non ci hanno mai creduto. E non hanno mai abbandonato l’idea della libertà perché per loro era un semplice slogan elettorale. I libertari erano sinceri riguardo le intenzioni politiche? Forse. Più probabilmente, si sono serviti della parola libertarismo perché è di moda, acchiappa. Forse qualcuno tra loro credeva veramente nella libertà. Il fatto è che il fusionismo era pericoloso già in partenza, e ora vediamo dove può portare.

Paul Cockshott, the author of Towards a New Socialism, is essentially a NazBol. Everyone seems to ignore this, and I have no idea why. He is quite open about his hatred of gay men, sex workers, immigrants, and trans women — and his policy proposals are filled with horrific implications and unworkable ideas. 

This isn’t something he’s hiding. I wouldn’t call this a call-out post, because of how blatant he’s been. He has a section on his personal blog marked ‘gender’, and it is 8 essays of anti-queer bigotry — though, it should be noted, one is written by a computer (and so may not actually count as bigotry, or even an article) and another is a reprint of an article written by someone else. 

In Genders or Sex Stereotypes: Part 1, he and K.A. Cortes say:

…that laws, originally meant to protect women, are in danger of becoming ineffective; if men who claim to be women are treated as legally being women this not only goes beyond the intention of the original law, but it may place women at a disadvantage4. We have strong sympathies with these objections. In this article we will be arguing that genders, in the sense of sets of people, do not exist.

Prior to the late 1960s the word Gender was used in English to refer to sets of nouns and the rules for matching pronouns and adjectives to them in various, mainly foreign, languages… 

From the end of the 1960s there is a dramatic change in usage. Genders were no longer categories of words but categories of people… 

…did the new use of gender designate a new invention, a scientific discovery, a cultural fashion?

If you follow that footnote (the one on “disadvantaged”) down, you’ll find this: 

Examples cited are the risk to women in prison if male sex-offenders are able to be reassigned to such prisons after taking on a female persona or unfair competition in women’s sports.

This is not his only anti-trans essay — it’s actually something of a theme with him. 

In Class and the LGTB lobby (I am legitimately not sure why he bothers saying “the LGTB lobby” and not ‘the gay agenda’ — they’re basically synonyms), he says:

You might initially think that economic class position had nothing to do with homosexuality, but it does not take long looking at the empirical sociological literature to come to the conclusion that this is mistaken. There is a connection, but it is that the interests of gays tend to be aligned with that of the propertied classes, rather than being independent of conflicting class interests. First, the literature on class attitudes to homosexuality shows that working class people are more likely to be hostile to it, and people from higher social classes more likely to be favourable or tolerant towards it… Second, published data shows that gay couples are, on average, significantly better off than straight ones. On both attitudinal grounds and economic grounds therefore, the gay straight polarisation axis, rather than being independent of the class polarisation axis turns out to be tilted with respect to it.

Yeah, that’s right. Our boy Paul takes Stalin’s line on gayness. 

He’s also not a fan of open borders or immigration, in general, and thinks that the whole thing is a capitalist plot. He wrote not one, but two papers on this. In Trades Unionism and Migration he says: 

I showed in my last post how migration increases the exploitation of the working classes by the employing class.  This has become the deliberate and conscious policy of the rulers of the European Union, one shared by our own employing class. With Brexit having been voted on by the people, the business interest are desperate to do a deal which will still secure them access to cheap labour. This is why they so favour the Norway option.

[Note: linking is my own]

And, of course, he’s also not a fan of sex workers, as is clearly laid out in Socialists can Never Support Prostitution. He makes much of the ‘victories’ of socialist states in forcing sex workers to give up their craft, and talks about how much of a fan of the Nordic Model he is. Nothing particularly exceptional in his disdain for autonomy and workers — I’d expect it from any liberal. It’s here, though, that the ideology running under all his bigotry becomes most clear: 

What about the claim that prostitution is work?

There is no doubt that sex involves time and effort, but is it really work?

If sex is work, was the dancing a couple did before they got off with one another also work?

If a cohabiting couple fuck, is it only her working, or are both working when they are at it?

If both work, both emerging sweating from effort, the justification for calling prostitution ‘work’ vanishes. Are we to call the clients too, sex ‘workers’?

What liberal appologists [sic] mean by work, is not the effort of making things, but being paid for doing things. So when a woman cooks a meal for her children is that work?

It is, and even most economist [sic] would not deny this, but it does not figure as work in the UK National Accounts. To liberal economics, to count as work it must exchange for money. Were mothers able to sell meals to their kids, liberal economics would then treat it as adding to national income.

Anything that brings in money counts for them as productive activity. So we have the nonsensical situation where things like gambling and brothel keeping are called industries. There is no doubt that these are all are businesses, but not all business is industry, and not all business is productive.

Take gambling, a moment’s thought is enough to see that it merely redistributes existing wealth, and produces nothing new of value. It is as foolish to talk of a gambling industry or sex industry as it would be to call pickpocketing or bank robbing industries.

In the Kollontai quote [sic] there is a commonsense obviousness, under the changed social conditions of Soviet Russia, about why prostitution is unproductive. In a society where goods were allocated on ration, a prostitute was seen to be taking the rations of others and not contributing to national wealth and general welfare. When economic relations were no longer disguised by money but seen in physical terms, this was a commonsense practical observation, and if it was obviously true in an unveiled economy, it must already have been true, behind the money veil, in the previous capitalist economy. Gilded by money, unproductive activities in a commercial economy appear productive, intercourse becomes `sex work’.

[Note: bolding my own]

His hate is nothing special — but this explicitness with which he justifies his hate is something remarkable. His hatred follows from his underlying assumption — that everyone’s labor belongs to some grand collective; call it ‘humanity’, ‘society’, ‘the nation’, ‘the workers’, or perhaps ‘the commune’. It doesn’t really matter — I choose to call it ‘the abstraction’.

From that perspective, one can see the labor theory of value as a sensible way to look at things. After all, if one is going to say that everyone belongs to this abstraction, then one can attempt to look at things from this abstraction’s point of view. The only resource of any value to the abstraction, aside from its possession of all the land beneath it, is the labor that the abstraction has available to it — labor to be spent on extracting goods, processing them, producing people, maintaining them, and forming a plan about how to go about it all in order to accomplish whatever obscure and inhuman goals that the abstraction might have for itself. 

Even the strange fungibility with which the labor theory of value treats hours of labor begins to make sense. Sure, to people like you and me, an hour of a janitor’s labor is not worth the same as an hour of a doctor’s labor — one produces more value in an hour than the other does. But, to the abstraction, this is a ridiculous idea — as silly and sickening as trying to argue the relative worth of one’s foot and one’s hand. The abstraction owns every hour of everyone’s day, and it will use every such hour as best it can — the janitor, for one thing, the doctor in another, and every mere body in its proper place. 

Within this alien worldview, the sex worker is absolutely a thief. They have stolen their own labor back from the abstraction. That they are providing value to others in the form of sexual services, and that those others gladly compensate them for their labors at an agreed-upon price, is entirely irrelevant. The labor was not the sex worker’s to trade, and the compensation was not the john’s to pay. 

This view, of course, could easily be applied to any sort of other worker providing services — the busker on the street, the masseuse, psychologists, actors, etc., etc.. Anyone who goes against the plan of the abstraction — and, after all, the abstraction will (at least given its view on sex workers) presumably not plan to give it’s bodies too much entertainment. Not that it would be any less of an outrage a planned economy did have sex workers — it is endlessly fascinating to me that anti-sex work marxists routinely recognize this, and recoil from it, but are unable to apply that revulsion at planned and (at least semi-)coercive sex work to any sort of non-sex work. 

Cockshott also has a hatred of all wanderers upon the earth, he backs it up with his bizarre worldview. 

In Brexit, Immigration, and Exploitation he says:

Does competition with immigrant labour tend to reduce real wages?

To test this I have regressed the rate of exploitation in the UK against the number of people comming [sic] into the country each year. The rate of exploitation measures how many pence of profit and interest each worker generates for their employer.

…Overall the correlation between immigration and exploitation was 75%.

…Now statistical explanation does not necessarily imply causation.

…there is a theory explaining why we should expect this. It was set out in the chapter of Marx’s capital dealing with the law of capital accumulation. He described a process whereby periods of rapid capital accumulation would drive down unemployment, raise wages and reduces exploitation. This, he said, would then provoke a reaction. Slower accumulation would then increase unemployment and allow exploitation to rise. Basically [sic] the more competition workers faced from what Marx called the Reserve Army of Labour, the higher would be the rate of exploitation and vice versa.

…Exploitation and profitability depend on rapidly expanding workforces. For the left to adopt the Blairite cant that immigration does not degrade the social position of working class voters would be to cede realistic political economy to UKIP.

Anarchists, of course, have never stood for closed borders. Even the liberals, for all their other ideological errors, manage to (at least some of the time) get much closer to the obviously morally correct position… though, of course, Trump is (arguably) ultimately a liberal as well.

That’s because the position in support of open/no borders flows smoothly from considering things from the perspective of the individual, while fixed positionality flows from privileging the perspective of the abstraction. If we look at things from the perspective of individuals, there’s no obvious reason to stop anyone from roaming the earth as they please — after all, isn’t finding a better place in the world a potent tool for bettering oneself? And, if one can find that place, doesn’t that mean that one has found relationships with others by which to sustain oneself? Regardless of your views on property — capitalist, communist, based in occupancy-and-use, etc. — you can easily agree to such an easy and inoffensive sentiment. 

If one sees the abstraction as important, though, one can easily think instead that individuals have no right to decide where they should go. After all, individuals belong to the abstraction — it’s not up to them where they should settle. If we go by Cockshott’s comments in regards to “national wealth and general welfare,” then we can easily say that he views wealth — and therefore his particular version of the abstraction — in national terms. If the abstraction of a nation’s workers might get a lesser portion of a nation’s wealth by allowing in someone, then that person should not be allowed in — or, at least, the national abstraction has every right to keep that person out. So says Cockshott, at least. 

It’s worth taking a small side-bar just to point out that Cockshott graphed and talked about ‘rates of exploitation’ but didn’t talk about total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at all. It’s entirely possible that the total wealth goes up faster than the share afforded to workers under capitalism goes down, thus leaving open borders as both the moral and practical policy. Cockshott never even considers the possibility. 

In Class and the LGTB lobby, the trend of justifying bigotry using the labor theory of value (and it’s ultimate ideological justification within the abstraction) continues. In it, he says: 

How do you define class position in Marxist terms? At its most basic the distinction between exploiting and exploited classes rests on whether a person receives goods and services involving more labour than they contribute to society. This is a general definition that applies across all class societies, slave, feudal or capitalist. If you get back more than you put in in terms of labour then you, at least partially, benefit from exploitation.

This idea of exploitation, resting in labor hours, is bizarre to me. In my view, and the view of most LWMAs, and (to a lesser extent) anarchists in general, exploitation revolves around property ownership. A property owner exploits people by taking money from them without working for it — for every dollar of value you produce, your boss takes a portion because he owns the business and it’s means of production, while your landlord takes a portion because he owns your house, and the state takes yet another portion because it owns the violence of the state — and thus the ability to collect taxes from you. 

Cockshott’s view of exploitation, however, seems to happen by magic. It’s not a matter of clear and immediate use of violently-enforced social constructs by which specific people take from specific others. Instead, it’s simply the act of making more than average per hour of labor that makes one an exploiter — regardless of your relationship to property, or to others. Anyone making more than average exploits no one in particular, and anyone making less is exploited by no one in particular. It’s a nonsensical view of the world.

Cockshott seems to mostly apply his logic within the realm of individual states, but I see no reason in particular to do this. The global GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) was $17,300. This means that, on a global scale, you’re an exploiter if you make more than that. For those slow on the uptake, that would mean $8.32 an hour, assuming 40-hour work-weeks and no vacation. I guess anyone in American with a minimum wage job or two and enough hours to kind-of cobble-together a life for themselves was secretly bourgeoise all along. 

Cockshott goes on to admit that his system doesn’t really even work, even to his satisfaction:

Just taking wage income into account is obviously too simple. People may have property income as well, and on the negative side they may be exploited by banks to whom they pay interest, or landlords to whom they pay rent. But simple income figures give you a first cut.

Cockshott focuses on exploitation as though it only happens at the point of production. Exploitation happens in a much wider variety of circumstances than that, and acting as if it’s a fact of income rather than of ownership leaves one having to construct theories of exploitation that lead one into ever-more overly-complicated theories, trying to make up for a fundamental and idiotic misunderstanding. 

He goes on, lapsing back from economic idiocy into homophobic bigotry, saying:

There is a large body of data establishing that the gay population is disproportionately drawn from the middle and upper middle class, with, as a result, disproportionately small proportion being working class…. Given this difference in jobs and education, one would expect that there would be a significant economic disparity between the position of gay and straight families. This is indeed what we find.

…gay couples earn more than heterosexual couples who in turn earn more than lesbian ones. This is unsurprising since male earnings are pretty consistently higher than female ones, so an all male household would be expected to earn the most and an all female one the least.

…the median wage of gay men in couples was higher than that of heterosexual married men, which in turn was slightly above that of lesbian women, who in turn earned more than married heterosexual women.

…The family is also a place where work is done… child care time will vary according to whether the household has children and depend also on the number of children… From this we see that straight couples perform much more unpaid socially necessary labour time.

…You do not save for your old age by putting cans of beans and sacks of flour in a cellar to sustain you; instead you rely on freshly produced food, clothes etc, produced by the labour of the generation that follows you. If you rely on a state pension then the next generation will be taxed to support you. If you have a private pension it will be invested in government bonds to produce interest. That interest will again come from tomorrow’s tax payers. If it is invested in shares, then the pension will come from the employment of tomorrow’s workers.

The unpaid labour of raising children, labour predominantly done by mothers, is socially essential and all the current generation, whether they have children themselves or not, benefit indirectly from it. Gay activists are wont to identify their campaigns with campaigns against women’s oppression, but the economic analysis so far shows that this concept is fallacious. Not only are gay couples financially better off, they also, in the main, often opt out of the socially necessary unpaid labour that is at the root of the disadvantaged position of women/wives. The establishment and normalisation of gay marriage will tend to increase the inequality of men and women in this respect. Insofar as a portion of the male population were once covert homosexuals, who would have hidden their preferences, married women and helped to bring up children, they can now move directly into a respectable gay marriage where they are statistically very unlikely to do any unpaid child raising work. The net effect is obviously to accentuate the disparity between men and women, and shift even more of the burden of raising the next generation onto women.

…the cumulative result of the economic advantage that gay couples enjoy. It enables them to accumulate property faster than other couples, so they have more to share on the death of a partner. Gays are twice as likely to own dwellings in the highest property band as heterosexuals.

…The conclusion from the evidence so far is that the gay marriage movement is fundamentally conservative, aimed at the securing of relatively privileged property ownership and it makes the relative position of women in society slightly worse.

For the third time, we have a bigoted conclusion that follows inexorably from Cockshott’s assumptions, couched in the labor theory of value. 

After all, why shouldn’t the abstraction look on the (non-reproducing) gays with disdain? Aren’t they (often enough) refusing to provide workers for its great factory of society? And, after all, doesn’t the abstraction own them, too? Aren’t they thieves, just as much as the sex workers are thieves? 

One wonders why Cockshott doesn’t apply his same logic to abortion, frankly. Isn’t abortion access largely gated by income level? Doesn’t abortion access lead to greater later-life incomes for women? Doesn’t it result in women who have abortion access doing less domestic labor than women without abortion access? And isn’t the pro-life movement (on average) of lower-income than the pro-choice movement? Are we to conclude that the pro-life movement is really a capitalist-aligned plot to enable women in blue-states to better exploit women in red-states?

This is where privileging the abstraction over the individual leads: to arguing about who should give birth and raise children, rather than letting the individuals themselves decide for themselves. 

In so far as I can tell, there’s no connection between Cockshott’s hatred of trans women and his belief in the abstraction. I’m a little disappointed by this, and it’s entirely possible that there’s some post on his blog which makes the connection loud and clear, but I simply don’t have the energy or stomach to go looking for it. As far as I’m concerned, Cockshott simply doesn’t like trans women, and he wants you to know about that. For some reason. 

All of this, then, makes it somewhat unsurprising that Paul Cockshott’s ideas on planned economies are equally torturous and full of sickening and bizarre implications. How could they not be? After all, any idea of an economic plan –of any sort– requires an idea of overall collective wellbeing to be maximized: some sort of utility function for the collective. That is to say, it requires you to consider things from the point of view of the abstraction — not from the point of view of the individual. 

In Calculation, Complexity And Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again He starts with some of his trademark bizarre statements, such as: 

…Skilled labour may be treated in the same way that Marx treats the means of production in Capital, namely as a produced input which ‘transfers’ embodied labour to its product over time. Given the labour time required to produce skills and a depreciation horizon for those skills, one may calculate an implied ‘rate of transfer’ of the labour time embodied in the skills…

Which is nonsensical. However convenient it might make one’s accounting to pretend otherwise, one does not unlearn how to make an item by making items of that type — one usually gets better at it, actually. And, of course, this marxian over-focus on a society-as-a-factory means that Cockshott completely ignores skilled services — which play a massive role in advanced economies. In his defense, though, that might be on purpose. Just as he dismissed the sex worker as a mere thief, perhaps he treats other providers of services as equally valueless. After all, what is the point of the atmosphere of a good meal in a nice restaurant, a spa day, a concert, etc? To stretch a metaphor, Cockshott seems quite able to imagine vast fields of factories producing bread 24/7, but seems completely unable to conceptualize the point of setting aside a single square foot of land for the sake of a solitary and sickly rosebush. Bread and roses, Mr. Cockshott. Bread and roses. 

Cockshott also seems intent on re-inventing the concept of getting paid on commission rather than hourly: 

Aside from the issue of skills which require labour for their production, we also recognize that not all workers of a given skill level accomplish the same work in an hour. In cases where it is possible to assess individual productivity with some degree of accuracy, labour of a given skill level might be graded into different productivity categories (say, above-average, average and below-average) and appropriate multipliers could be determined empirically for these grades. Workers might, for instance, be evaluated periodically (by themselves and their peers) and assigned a productivity grade. Unlike the case of skilled versus simple labour, the multipliers in this case might reasonably be used for determining differential rates of pay. Not every worker need be a stakhanovite; one might choose an easier pace of work while accepting a somewhat lower rate of pay.

This is really not the innovation that he seems to think it is. Nor does it particularly seem to conform to what Cockshott says he believes. He seems to believe that all hours of everyone’s time create equal amounts of value — and thus should be compensated as such. It seems very much as though he’s able enough to half-acknowledge that he’s wrong — to the point that he’s able to design around the non-viability of this, despite never quite admitting that that is what he is doing!

He then dives straight into attempting to defend the Langian model of socialism. I won’t bother to attack the infeasibility of such a proposal here, as other and better such articles have been written. Instead, I will be taking the Langian (or, given Cockshott’s modifications, perhaps ‘neo-Langian’) model seriously. As such, I will comment on what Cockshott’s defense of the Langian model reveals about his values and ideals. 

Cockshot says: 

A… objection to Lange made by the Austrians concerns the static nature of his solution…. Lange employs a static equilibrium theory… When Mises denied that economic calculation was a problem under static conditions, on the other hand, he had in mind true stasis, where “the same events in economic life are ever recurring” 

To elucidate all this in more common and more modern terms, the issue with economic planning –even if we are to imagine that it worked in all other respects, which it doesn’t– is that it imagines that there is a finite list of goods (services seeming to be totally absent from Cockshott’s imagination) which it can restrict itself to providing. In other words, those in favor of central planning imagine that the only job of the planner is to determine how much of each good to provide — rather than determining what goods to provide. 

The obvious way that this fallacious thinking manifests is in the realm of ever-advancing technology. After all, there are always new and substantial innovations coming to market. Sometimes, despite all of the tech bro experts loving these innovations, they are completely discarded by the general public. Sometimes, despite various such experts finding little to no use for a new good, it takes off — usually when some marginal demographic (i.e., one not likely to be represented amongst the experts) finds some use for it. Clearly, ‘experts’ cannot be trusted to determine for us what new technologies we would like to adopt — if technological progress is to be maintained in a way that we would find meaningful, we (the end-users) must maintain some level of sway over what is and what is not produced. There are already far too many experts interceding between the consumers and the producers — all the venture capitalists throwing exploitation-derived money at idiotic avenues of advancement has done the world a great deal of harm. It might even have allowed the capitalists to push technological advancement along avenues more hospitable to continued capitalism. 

One might object that we could all come together and vote on which technologies should and should be produced. This, though, runs into several problems. 

Firstly, it is difficult for consumers to know ahead of time what they would like — as opposed to having it presented to them, and then deciding after the demonstration whether they would like to make use of it. 

Secondly, that would be a truly massive number of meetings. Can you imagine how it would go if every single VC funding round was replaced by a national referendum? That would be an impossible number of items to vote on — and, of course, both whether to invest and how much to invest would have to be decided on. Further, there would be little to no incentive for most voters to check up on the long-term consequences of their vote — who would oversee the results of the investment to catch unscrupulous supposed-scientists? And, if some person did exist, how could their calls about who was and was not wasting the voter’s money be anything but a reflection of the referees own desires and preferences? A cop just for science is still a cop, after all. The current system of VC funding at least manages to provide clear incentives to invest in innovations that are (at least perceived as likely to be) desired by a sufficiently large consumer base. Even trying to avoid these problems using representative, rather than direct, democracy solves nothing. The representative is going to be a representative of the majority, after all.

Third, the use of voting for such subjects cannot be anything but majoritarian — at least in some senses and some cases. What if the technology is considered to be a useless waste of investment by most, but an absolute necessity for others? Would such a majoritarian system be likely to invest much into cheaper HRT, or more efficient processes for making kosher food? Or would a market be likely to drive towards such things, especially if income disparities for minority groups was rectified? 

As a better question, would such a system of central planning even produce HRT, kosher food, or Muslim prayer mats? 

Cockshott anticipates these issues, and proposes his own solution: 

A socialist economy could set up an ‘innovation budget’, whereby an agreed fraction of social labour time is devoted to just such experimentation with new processes and products. Existing enterprises or groups of people with new ideas could apply for a share of this budget. The disposition of the budget might be divided between two or more parallel agencies, so that prospective innovators have more than one chance to have their ideas funded (hence lessening the risk of ‘ossification’ of the process). As the results of such experimentation come in, successful new products could be incorporated into the regular plan, and successful technologies ‘registered’ as an element of the regular input–output structure of the economy

The issue here is that Cockshott is actually being less inventive than most advocates of central planners are, because “there are a couple of people who hold all the money, and if you can manage to convince them to give you some you can spend it on research” is exactly how the economy currently works. That’s literally just a description of how venture capital funding works! It’s also a description of how getting a research grant funded works! And we all know how well those work out. Cockshott is really great at reinventing basic, already existing aspects of modern neoliberal capitalism and then calling them socialism. 

The difference here is that the enterprises have no incentive to spend all that torturous effort getting funding, and then trying to make something new with it — what, are they going to get paid more for having a more in-demand product? 

Cockshott runs into more problems, as well: 

If… is claiming that such decisions may be made conscientiously, with due attention to risk but without excessive conservatism, only by individuals motivated by the prospect of great personal wealth (in case of success) or personal financial ruin (in case of failure), then we flatly disagree. 

We do not have space to expand here on the institutions required for the planning of major investments and structural economic change under socialism; a brief comment must suffice. We agree with Mises that this function will not be entrusted to pseudo-capitalists; it must involve a combination of expert opinion and democratic methods. We can expect that the ‘experts’ who are called upon to exercise their judgment in such matters will gain in prestige and garner the admiration of their peers if successful, and will be demoted and lose influence if unsuccessful. It is important that there should be a climate of open debate and accountability, but not that the winners should amass great fortunes and the losers be cast into penury… One further point should be stressed here: the other side of the coin of successful innovation is that the planners must have the right to close down uneconomic enterprises. While guaranteed employment is of course a basic socialist principle, there can therefore be no guarantee of permanent employment in any particular industry or trade.

Saying that you “flatly disagree” isn’t an argument. It’s a handwave. It’s an article of faith.

Cockshott’s partial solution here is that bureaucrats (people employed by the government, up for promotion and demotion, etc.) will handle the planning. Bureaucracy is not particularly great at getting things done now, and there is no particular reason to believe that some mythical revolution will magically change this. 

Further, even if bureaucracy was effective, one would still not want it to be so for this purpose. Having oneself offered jobs, and having those jobs closed down, on the say-so of a bureaucrat rather than on the say-so of one’s customers is a deep indignity. Rather than having the impersonal forces of the market upon which one might decide to try one thing or another, one is given a function not necessarily of one’s choosing and ordered about — not metaphorically, by the natural circumstances of one’s horizontal interactions with others, but literally and through a vertical relationship one has with the planner who decides whether or not one has a job. 

The great irony of authoritarian marxists has always been thus. They start out critiquing capitalism, a system in which everyone is a slave to their boss or a master to their employees, and in which one generally finds oneself selling of their time on this earth by the hour — and, through some strange alchemy, the system that they propose to remedy this is one in which one still very much has a manager and in which one is still very much paid by the hour. It seems non-coincidental that these same marxists seem to hate co-operatives and other forms of workplace democracy so very much. Even when they do support workplace democracy, they always want the production targets and inputs to be externally decided — i.e., they want to take all the most important decisions about production out of the workplace. 

At a later point in that paper, Cockshott presents an argument as to how it is possible to determine the labor-time incorporated into an arbitrary good. I have no particular desire to know if this is actually true, so let us assume that it is. He concludes his math by commenting: 

Admittedly, the above argument says nothing about the task of gathering the vast amount of data required to implement such a calculation—an issue of which Mises and Hayek make a great deal. We do not have space to address this issue here, but we have argued elsewhere… that this should also be feasible, using an economy-wide network of cheap personal computers, running spreadsheets representing the conditions of production in each enterprise, in conjunction with a national Teletext system and a system of universal product codes.

The issue with this, of course, is that “can what is where be communicated to the proper people?” was never the question in regards to the gathering of the data. The question was always along the lines of ‘how can you incentivize people to tell the truth?’, ‘how can one keep the producers from systematically over-representing inputs and under-representing outputs so as to benefit themselves?’, ‘how can one get people to reveal their desires, rather than over-represent them?’, etc.. These were all issues within the economy of the Soviet Union, and continue to be issues even within modern-day large-scale government bureaus and corporations. 

Paul Cockshott appears not to actually understand what he is arguing against. 

He continues: 

If planned supplies and consumer demands for the individual goods happen to coincide when the goods are priced in accordance with their labour values, the system is already in equilibrium. In a dynamic economy, however, this is unlikely. If supplies and demands are unequal, the ‘marketing authority’ for consumer goods is charged with adjusting prices, with the aim of achieving (approximate) short-run balance, i.e., prices of goods in short supply are raised while prices are lowered in the case of surpluses. 

Cockshott’s plan appears to be –essentially– to speed up production if there is a line for a good, and slow it down if there is not. The issue with this is, of course, these people get paid by the hour. They have no incentive to accurately report how much they are producing — and they have a clear incentive to report that there is no shortage, so as to avoid having to work harder and longer hours. 

Both this passage, and the previous passage, convince me that the only way that Cockshott’s imaginary economy could work would be with a system of vast surveillance, covering every single factory (for Cockshoot imagines an economy of factories, and nothing else) in his grand “socialist” state. This could be in the form of an unelected manager in every factory — and I imagine that is what Cockshott most clearly intends, rather than some vast and ever-present surveillance system. The issue with this is that the manager has no particular incentive to give accurate information, either. Perhaps one can threaten to hire or fire a manager who is doing a bad job, but a manager mostly interacts with those underneath him and it is generally hard to get information on what he is doing. This is a problem in capitalism, too, as I have covered elsewhere. 

Cockshott’s vision of socialism seems to have no resemblance to my own. He wants, in the end, a place without trans women and sex workers — a place where everyone still has a boss, but has even less choice in regards to that than they do now, and where the economy is even more inefficient than it is now. He wants a world where what goods are produced, and what technologies are investigated, is decided by state-selected experts. Given that he seems to want us to exclude gay men and immigrants on his path towards his utopia, I don’t hesitate to say that he wants these experts to be mostly white, straight, cis, and likely mostly non-religious. I should suspect that these experts will choose to produce goods and investigate technologies that keep things under their control and mostly benefit people like them. If this is the sort of “socialism” that you support, then you are certainly no comrade of mine. 

All of his horrible politics seem to flow quite smoothly from his idea of what I have called, here, ‘the abstraction’ — a sort of organism composed out of all of us, that owns all of us — and, flowing out of the abstraction’s perspective, the idea of any sort of objective theory of value. After all, an objective theory of value of any sort implies some sort of objective observer. This is why I oppose so strongly what others sometimes call ‘collectivism’ (though that name may not actually be accurate) — it leads inexorably here. Say what you want about Cockshott, he is at least consistent — and thus, he reveals not just why he is garbage, but why his ideas are garbage, too. 

Либертарианство призвано защищать экономическую свободу, а не большой бизнес. Мы защищаем свободный рынок, а не корпоративизм. А как вообще будет выглядеть свободный рынок? Он будет иметь ничего общего с регулируемыми рынками, которые существуют сегодня. Но как часто мы слышим доводы про массовую безработицу, финансовые кризисы, экологические катастрофы и экономический статус-кво, приписываемые прожорливому свободному и неограниченному рынку? Как будто они были вокруг нас!

Кризисы, возложенные на принцип невмешательства являются кризисами не связанных с этим принципом рынков. Когда критики начинают спорить с нами по поводу корпоративных преступлений, структурной нищеты или социоэкономической маргинализации, нам должно быть ясно, что рыночные принципы не предусматривают защиту крупного бизнеса любой ценой. Большая часть того, что осуждают эти критики, вытекает из государственного регулирования и правовых привилегий. Как модель для анализа политического преимущества корпоративной власти и методов защиты рынков снизу вверх, мы, либертарианцы XXI века, можем взглянуть на наши корни девятнадцатого века — на идеи американских индивидуалистов, особенно их самого талантливого представителя Бенджамина Рикетсона Такера (1854–1939), редактора журнала анархо-индивидуалистического толка «Либерти».

В классической трактовке «позолоченный век» в США изображают как пример воцарения принципа невмешательства, где была безжалостная эксплуатация вместе с экономической свободой. Но Такер утверждал, что стереотипные черты капитализма в его дни были продуктами не самого рынка, а деформирующих рынок политических привилегий. Такер не использовал подобные формулировки, но в целях анализа мы можем выделить четыре тенденции у данного деформированного рынка: закрытость рынка, появление эффекта храповика, концентрация собственности и изоляция обосновавшихся на рынке фирм.

Типы искажений

Закрытые рынки. Юридические мандаты и государственные монополии создают закрытый рынок, на котором потребителей искусственно привязывают к определенным услугам и продавцам за счет обеспечения спроса политическими потребностями властей, но без подобной поддержки они не нашли бы одобрения. Например, рынок авто страхования формируется законами, которые в свою очередь обязывают всех автомобилистов страховаться и регламентируют минимальное количество необходимых для приобретения услуг. Закрытые рынки юридически гарантируют привилегированным компаниям доступ к постоянному количеству клиентов, что сопровождается угрозой штрафов и арестов.

Эффект храповика. Юридические тяготы, искажения цен и закрытые рынки сливаются в повышение постоянных затрат на жизнь, которые в условиях свободного рынка были бы ниже. Чтобы выжить, людям приходиться покрывать подобные негибкие издержки продажей рабочей силы, покупками страховок, залезанием в долги — в искусственно жестких обстоятельствах. Храповики продолжают преследовать очередные зарплаты людей, создавая перманентную вероятность финансового кризиса для бедных.

Концентрация. Конфискации, регрессивное перераспределение собственности и узаконенные монополии лишают работников каких-либо ресурсов, все это происходит при условии концентрации богатств и экономического контроля политически привилегированным бизнес-классом. Изо всех сил, пытаясь покрыть фиксированные храповиком постоянные издержки, работники лишенные средств к самостоятельной жизни выходят на рынки, где право собственности на землю, капитал и иные ключевые ресурсы юридически сосредоточены в руках немногих. Поэтому многие работники зависят от отношений с боссами и их корпорациями гораздо больше, чем на свободном рынке, экономическая деятельность превращается в иерархические отношения и ограничения рентной экономики.

Изоляция. Закрытые рынки и санации защищают больших игроков, в то время как узаконенные монополии, регулятивные барьеры входа и антиконкурентные субсидии препятствуют появлению субститутов и конкуренции снизу. Государство искусственно поддерживает большой бизнес, удушая рынок и увеличивая социальное давление, которое может быть оказано в сторону бизнеса. Изолированный бизнес может относиться к своим сотрудникам и потребителям с гораздо меньшим вниманием или сдержанностью; между тем, вмешательство закрывает альтернативные варианты, блокируя мелких, низовых и неформальных конкурентов. 

Большая четверка Такера

Таким образом, мы можем обратиться к центральной идее Такера: в книге «Государственный социализм и анархизм» (1888) Такер утверждал, что «четыре монополии» фундаментально сформировали экономику «золотого века» США – четыре центральные области экономической деятельности, которые правительство усиливает, концентрирует и изолирует. Все это приводит к деформации рынков в «классовые монополии». Все рынки регрессивно изменяются по мере того, как эти эффекты вырываются наружу.

Земельная монополия. Право собственности на землю в Америке XIX века не имело ничего общего со свободным рынком. Все «незанятые» земли индейцев, мексиканцев и независимых «сквоттеров» были захвачены государством с помощью военных. Огосударствление собственности и предоставление преимуществ монополизировали доступ, исключая существование бесплатного жилья (гомстед-акт разрешил передачу в собственность гражданам США незанятых земель на западе, закон установил жесткие правовые ограничения, которые могли эффективно перебороть только некоторые средние коммерческие фермеры. Более же мелкие фермы и нефермеры на это не способны). Такер определил эту концентрацию прав собственности на землю в руках элиты как «земельную монополию», при которой создается класс привилегированных землевладельцев, лишая тем самым рабочих рыночных возможностей получать безусловное право на собственность и избегать ренты.

С 1888 года земельная монополия драматично расширилась. Государства во всем мире начали национализировать ресурсы нефти, природного газа и воды; в Соединенных Штатах права на добычу полезных ископаемых и разведку ископаемого топлива в основном осуществлялись через правительственные лицензии, поскольку оно владело 50% американского запада. Стоимость земли регулировалась, а собственность концентрировалась с помощью зонирования, принудительного отчуждения частной собственности, муниципальных рэкетов «для развития» и местной политики, направленной на повышение цен на недвижимость. На свободных земельных рынках будет существовать более индивидуальная и широко рассредоточенная собственность; земля будет более дешевой и зачастую более свободной и чистой; пустующие земли будут более открыты для приусадебных участков и землевладения будут основываться на основе трудового вклада так же легко, как и при использовании наличности для обмена. Многим людям больше не нужна была бы аренда; те, кто сделал выбор в пользу аренды, обнаружат, что конкуренция значительно улучшила цены и обусловила появление имеющихся на рынке новых условий.

Денежная монополия. Для Такера самой разрушительной из «большой четверки» являлась денежная монополия, «привилегии, предоставляемые правительством определенным лицам . . . владеющими определенными видами собственности, выпуском обращающихся денег», в нее также входит политическое манипулирование денежной массой, запрещение альтернативных валют и картелизация банков, денег и кредитов. Такер видел, что денежно-кредитный контроль не только обеспечивает монопольную прибыль для изолированных банков, но и концентрирует экономическую собственность во всей экономике, что благоприятствует крупным устоявшимся предприятиям, с которыми предпочитают иметь дело крупные устоявшиеся банки.

Такер определил денежную монополию как главную экономическую силу 1888 года — до того, как ФРС и местные фиатные деньги, ФКСВ, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, МВФ или триллионы долларов помогали «слишком большим для банкротства» банкам. Сегодня регулирующие картели и политические мандаты Америки также захватили страхование, наряду с кредитами, сбережениями и инвестициями, как оплот денежной монополии, заставляя рабочих выходить на фальсифицированные рынки, не допуская некорпоративных, низовых форм взаимопомощи.

Идеи и вымогательство

Патентная монополия. Такер осуждал монополии, защищенные патентами и авторскими правами — «защищающие изобретателей и авторов от конкуренции на срок, достаточный для того, чтобы они могли вымогать деньги, . . . награда чрезвычайно превышает . . . их услуги». Поскольку копирование идеи не лишает изобретателя идеи или какой-либо материальной собственности, которой он обладал раньше, «интеллектуальная собственность» означает лишь легализацию монополии в отношении конкурентов, которые могли бы имитировать или дублировать его продукты по более низкой цене.

«Интеллектуальная собственность» (ИС) активно вырастала с 1888 года, поскольку средства массовой информации, технологии и научные инновации сделали контроль над информационной экономикой основой корпоративной власти. Монопольная прибыль в сфере ИС является эффективной бизнес-моделью таких компаний из списка Fortune 500, как GE, Monsanto, Microsoft и Disney, которые требуют практически неограниченных юридических полномочий для защиты от конкуренции. Срок действия авторских прав увеличился в четыре раза, в то время как массовые, синхронизированные экспансии интеллектуального протекционизма стали стандартными элементами неолиберальных «соглашений» о свободной торговле, таких как НАФТА и КОРУС ФТА (Соглашение о свободной торговле между США и Южной Кореей). На свободном рынке такие бизнес-модели бы рухнули, а вместе с ними и растущие расходы, которые потребители платят за доступ к культуре, медицине и технологиям.

Протекционистская монополия. Такер определял протекционистские тарифы как монополию в том смысле, что они изолируют политически выгодных отечественных производителей от иностранной конкуренции и, таким образом, повышая ежедневные издержки для потребителей. 

С ростом транснациональных корпораций и неолиберальных торговых соглашений, тарифы снизились за прошлые годы. Но конкретный правовой механизм был менее важен для Такера, чем назначение контроля за торговлей, созданного для защиты действующих должностных лиц. В 1888 году таковыми являлись тарифы. В 2011 году это означало обширную сеть политического контроля, используемого для управления «торговым балансом»: экспортные субсидии, манипулирование валютными курсами и такие многосторонние гос. учреждения, как Всемирный банк и МВФ.

Метастатическая монополизация

Большая четверка Такера стала более распространенной с 1880-х годов. Но в прошлом веке также наблюдалось метастатическое распространение государственных регулирующих органов, предназначенных для реструктуризации новых сделок и захвата новых рынков. Среди множества современных монополий пять особенно распространены:

Агробизнесовая монополия включает в себя систему «Нового курса» картелей Министерства сельского хозяйства США, скупки излишек, субсидирование орошения, экспортные субсидии и похожих мер, способствующих росту цен, искажению выращивания субсидируемых сельскохозяйственных культур и концентрации сельскохозяйственной деятельности в крупных капиталоемких монокультурах. Они, несомненно принятые от имени всех «мелких фермеров» меры, неизбежно начинают приносить пользу крупным фабричным фермам и конгломератам агробизнеса, таким как ADM и Tyson.

Инфраструктурная монополия включает в себя физическую и коммуникационную инфраструктуру. Правительства строят автодороги, железные дороги и аэропорты с помощью принудительного отчуждения собственности и налоговых субсидий, а также навязывают картелизацию большинства видов общественного транспорта. Ограниченный доступ обеспечивает монопольную прибыль для изолированных перевозчиков; конфискация денег и имущества для субсидирования междугородних перевозок и доставок создает налоговые возможности для агробизнеса, крупных розничных сетей и других предприятий, зависящих от дальних перевозок. Действующие телекоммуникационные и медийные компании, такие как AT&T, Comcast и Verizon аккумулируют свои империи путем картелизации трафика; контроль частот вещания сосредоточен с помощью политического ассигнования ФКС-ом, а право собственности на телефонный, кабельный и волоконно-оптический трафик сконцентрирован на локальных монопольных концессиях для каждой среды.

Коммунальная монополия предоставляет контроль над электроэнергией, водой и природным газом крупным централизованным производителям с помощью комплексного планирования, субсидий и региональных монополий. Семьи состоящие из нескольких поколений, полицентрические системы соседства или альтернативы вне системы вытесняются или регулируются до смерти.

Регулятивный протекционизм

Регулятивный протекционизм может быть наиболее распространенным среди многих других монополий. Как и представление Такера о протекционистских монополиях, она сочетает в себе концентрирование и изолирование действующих поставщиков, создавая препятствия для потенциальных конкурентов. Учрежденные компании сдерживают конкуренцию снизу, лоббируя нормативный бюрократизм, сборы за вымогательство и комплексное лицензирование для всего, от вождения такси до парикмахерских услуг. Отраслевые стандарты, которые в противном случае были бы установлены социальными нормами и рыночными экспериментами, исключаются из конкуренции и определяются политическим влиянием. Высокие затраты на соблюдение нормативных требований изолируют действующих состоятельных сотрудников, от конкурентов, которые не могут этого сделать, закрывая бедных от предпринимательских возможностей и независимого источника средств к существованию. 

Монополия в сфере здравоохранения обладает эффектом домино среди других монополий, но заслуживает особого внимания из-за всепоглощающего роста медицинского сектора, а также из-за того, что здравоохранение и страхование так сильно влияют на принятие решений связанных с работой, деньгами и финансовым планированием. Центральным экономическим фактом здравоохранения является существующий эффект храповика. Патентные монополии увеличивают стоимость лекарств и изолируют прибыль для Pfizer и GlaxoSmithKline. FDA и медицинское лицензирование представляют собой форму регулятивного протекционизма, ограничивая подготовку врачебных кадров, снабжение больниц и поставку фармацевтических препаратов, концентрируя прибыль и дополнительно взвинчивая расходы. Медицинская необходимость может привести к катастрофическим затратам, фактически требующим комплексной страховки. Рабочие когда-то получали страхование через братские общества взаимопомощи, но денежные монополии теперь полностью акционировали страховой рынок посредством субсидий, мандатов и регулирующего контроля. В настоящее время работники привязаны к своим работодателям из-за стоимости страховых «пособий», несмотря на постоянную опасность утраты страховки, отклонения требований и бремени задолженности.

Анализ Такером четырех монополий, контролирующих экономику «золотого века» США и дополненные новой «большой пятеркой», которую ввела наша собственная эпоха, в значительной степени показывает, почему существующие рынки работают так, как они работают, и терпят неудачу среди народа. Это может также вызвать некоторые возражения со стороны современных либертарианцев.

Многие монополии деформируют рынки в сторону стереотипно «капиталистического» бизнеса, но правительство вмешивается в более чем одно направление. А как насчет правил или программ социального обеспечения в интересах бедных людей или ограничений для крупных консолидированных фирм? Они существуют, но не обязательно достигают своих предполагаемых целей. Как показано в «Триумфе консерватизма» Габриэля Колко, структура регулирования и далеко не ограничивающие крупный бизнес антимонопольное законодательство во время эры прогрессивизма образовали ядро регулятивного протекционизма, картелизации и изоляции большого бизнеса. Здесь есть также вопросы приоритета и масштаба. В то время как я возражаю против кредитования SBA или TANF (Временная помощь нуждающимся семьям) в той же степени, что и любой рыночник, в этот период банкротства банков на триллион долларов, даже когда правительство кладет пальцы на обе стороны шкалы, один палец давит сильнее другого.

Как насчет объяснений, предлагаемых экономистами-рыночниками для повышения эффективности корпоративных фирм, основанного на разделении труда, экономии на масштабе или выгодах от торговли? Разве крупные корпорации не победят более мелких конкурентов, даже без субсидий и монополий?

Но Такер не отвергал разделение труда, выгоды от торговли или крупномасштабное производство. Скорее он предлагал труд, торговлю и масштабы, организованные по разным направлениям. Независимые контракты, кооперативы и управляемые работниками магазины являются формами специализации и торговли не меньше, чем централизованные фирмы. Масштабы могут быть интернализированы через централизованное управление или выведены через полицентрическую торговлю. Корпоративная экономика – это только одна из многих возможностей для разделения труда и обмена ценностями. Вопрос в том, преобладает ли она из-за экономических сил, которые будут существовать на рынках, свободных от структурных привилегий, или же из-за затруднений, которые исчезнут, когда конкуренты будут свободны предлагать альтернативы с меньшей централизацией, меньшим количеством управления и большей торговлей и предпринимательской независимостью для обычных работников. 

Если анализ Такера что-то подтвердит, то это докажет, что в экономической жизни есть много мест, где обычным людям трудно пихать деньги, которые они не хотели бы тратить с торговыми партнерами и иначе не сохранились бы. Наиболее распространенные, далеко идущие правительственные меры стимулируют экономическую концентрацию, коммерциализацию, гипертиреоидальный масштаб и консолидированную иерархию, необходимые для управления ею – не потому, что они естественным образом растут в рыночной экономике, а потому, что они выходят из-под контроля в теплице социализированных затрат и сдерживают конкуренцию.

Пояс и кости

На протяжении большей части двадцатого века американские либертарианцы считались защитниками «капитализма» (см. сомнения Кларенса Карсона в отношении этого слова в статье журнала The Freeman 1985 года «Капитализм: да и нет»). Казалось, что большинство либертарианцев и почти все их противники согласны с тем, что либертарианство означает защиту бизнеса от нападок «большого правительства», а цель laissez-faire состоит в том, чтобы освободить существующие формы торговли от политических ограничений.

Это было почти полным изменением позиции традиционных либертарианцев, таких, как Такер, которую мы могли бы назвать «антикапитализмом свободного рынка». Он был одним из самых известных защитников свободного рынка в Америке XIX века, с радостью подытоживая свои экономические принципы как «абсолютная свобода торговли, . . . laissez-faire как универсальная норма». Таким образом, для Такера либертарианство означало посягательство на экономические привилегии путем устранения политических привилегий, которые их поддерживали, демонтажа монополий, подвергнув их конкуренции снизу.

Многие монополии распространены повсеместно и в основном определяют повседневную реальность корпоративистской экономики. Так почему же не только противники, но и сторонники свободного рынка так часто пропускают анализ Такера, когда прогрессисты постоянно возлагают вину за неравенство, эксплуатацию и корпоративную власть на «нерегулируемые рынки», тогда как «прокапиталистические» либертарианцы отвечают оправдываясь экономическим статусом-кво? Как это ни парадоксально может оказаться, но подход Такера частично забыт из-за самой глубины и распространенности проблем, которые он определяет. 

Интервенции либертарианцев двадцатого века с наибольшей вероятностью выступали против прогрессивных налогов, социального обеспечения, экологических норм, которые являлись экономически поверхностными вмешательствами. Стремясь реформировать или ограничить корпоративную государственно-капиталистическую экономику, они принимают ее основные характеристики — концентрацию, изоляцию, чрезмерные издержки и корпоративную власть — как должное, стараясь лишь сдержать свои самые неприглядные разрушительные последствия. Компенсирующие «прогрессивные» регуляции подобны поясу, надетые капитализму. Мужчине может понадобиться ремень, или он может выглядеть лучше без него, но его тело остается таким же с или без ремня. 

Политические средства, которые консолидируют многие монополии, не только вмешиваются в решения существовавших раньше рыночных структур. Государственно-капиталистические привилегии определяют основные формы собственности, доступа и стоимости основных товаров и факторов производства. Они коренным образом реструктурируют рынки, изобретая классовые структуры собственности, увеличивая издержки и сдерживая конкуренцию, из-за чего появляется наемный труд, рента и корпоративная экономика, с которой мы сталкиваемся. Эти первоочередные интервенции не являются поясом для государственного капитализма, который можно было бы носить или снимать; они являются его костями. Без них то, что осталось бы, — не другой вид одного и того же тела — совершенно другой организм.

Поскольку ваш ремень внешне видим, легко увидеть и легко представить, как вы можете выглядеть без него. Либертарианцы двадцатого века справедливо осудили то, как ремень был обвязан через государственное принуждение, но редко замечали, что, хотя анти-бизнесовый пояс ограничивает естественную форму государственной капиталистической экономики, без пояса он все еще остается политическим продуктом, сформированным вмешательством в его про-бизнесовые кости. Монополии, которые создают капиталистов, помещиков и финансистов и поддерживают корпоративную власть, настолько глубоко укоренились в существующей экономике и в консенсусной политике, что их легко принять за обычный бизнес в рыночном обществе.

Мы могли бы сказать — извиняясь перед Шуламит Файерстоун — что политическая экономика государственного капитализма настолько глубока, что она невидима. Или же это может показаться поверхностным набором интервенций, проблемой, которая может быть решена с помощью нескольких правовых реформ, возможно, устранения случайных займов или экспортных субсидий, сохраняя при этом нетронутыми основные узнаваемые структуры корпоративной экономики. Но на карту поставлено нечто более глубокое и распространенное. Полностью свободный рынок означает освобождение важнейших командных пунктов в экономике от государственного контроля, которые необходимо вернуть для рыночного и социального предпринимательства. Рынок, который возник бы, выглядел бы сильно отличающимся от всего, что мы имеем сейчас. Это столь глубокое изменение не может легко вписаться в традиционные категории мысли — например, «либертарианцы» или «левые», «laissez-faire» или «социалисты», «предприниматели» или «антикапиталисты» — не потому, что эти категории не применяются, но потому, что они недостаточно большие: через них прорываются радикально свободные рынки. Если бы было другое слово, более всеобъемлющее, чем революционное, мы бы использовали его.

Перевод гражданина Ильи.

There is a lot of talk lately about fusionism, the term coined by National Review writer Frank Meyer in the Cold War to describe the alliance between conservatives and libertarians against communists that aligned them with the Republican Party. Some wonder if fusionism is truly dead; I wonder why it lived so long.

The alliance between social conservatives and libertarians didn’t make much sense to begin with, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have a significant effect on history. The main conservative think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, are known for openly promoting the fusionist mantra — like most of the other leading organizations in the American Right.

The combination of lower taxes, social conservatism, and hawkish foreign policy didn’t make a coherent ideology, but it was effective at winning elections. Reagan was a good example of that. After Reagan, everyone running for president for the Republican nomination wanted to be a clone of him. There were challenges to the consensus like Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, and Ron Paul in the 2000s, but it wasn’t until Trump that the cracks in their coalition were fully opened.

Fusionism has lived since the 1950s, but in Trump it might have found its most formidable enemy so far. Trump lacks knowledge of political philosophy, but his instincts are ethnonationalist and populist. He is not someone who likes to talk about liberty, nor is he a fan of free trade. He has openly espoused hate for immigrants and ethnic minorities and is well known for his love for dictators.

Conservatives before Trump, both politicians and activists, weren’t saints. Many of them have harboured the same prejudices as him — but at least they didn’t call nazis “fine people.” It is true that the libertarian element of fusionist alliance was at many times not considered enough, but as historian Joshua Tait has pointed out, free markets and conservatives have a complex relationship. Although there was criticism for fusionism from both conservatives and libertarians before Trump, these arguments take more power now.

If conservatives are abandoning any commitment to liberty, one wonders why some libertarians still want to stay on the right. Even the tax cuts were focused on helping the rich — many working class Americans have seen tax raises. While conservatives have used the rhetoric of freedom, most of the time they just defended capitalism — not real free markets.

While fusionism was originally a unique expression American political thought, the US has sought to use right-leaning libertarian think-tanks in Latin America to extend their influence in the region. As reported by The Intercept, some of these organizations even receive money from American government. The result of this political project is the victory of people like Jair Bolsonaro a radical right-wing populist in Brasil who ran on a racist, sexist, and homophobic platform but got support by libertarians for his vague free-market rhetoric. Now in power he is opposed to even mild libertarian reforms like drug decriminalization. Some libertarians are starting to express doubts about Bolsonaro but this seems too late since Bolsonaro has praised military dictators and was endorsed by neo-nazis. If anything, Bolsonaro shows that fusionism is a danger not only to America but to the world.

As pointed out by philosopher Charles Johnson, the great mistake many libertarians make is to use capitalism as a synonym of libertarianism. Today’s capitalism is corporate welfare, bureaucratic IP laws, and regulatory capture — not a free market, but a distortion of it. What happens in America is even more pathetic than usual. According to economist Samuel Hammond, if one is honest about the relevant indicators, Scandinavia — which has been attacked as “socialist” by American conservatives — is more of a free market than America.

The GOP now has literal nazis running in their primaries, and Trump keeps praising them. Conservatives have taken a more hardline position on immigration too, with policies separating children from their parents. Kids have been murdered and raped in what even the mainstream media calls concentration camps.   

Why are libertarians waiting to leave conservativism? Fusionism was a terrible idea. It was the intellectual foundation of a system that promoted wars, at home and abroad, against the poor and marginalized. Fusionism was not that different than Trumpism. They were two shades of the same coin. Trumpism is even more repugnant, but at least libertarians should see this wannabe dictator as a sign to leave the past behind. If one is committed to the flourishing of liberty, one cannot be allied with a group whose goal is to promote authoritarian rule over others.

Conservatives never abandoned the free market, they were just never serious about it to begin with. Conservatives never abandoned liberty, they just used it as a campaign slogan. Were libertarians honest about politics? Maybe. Most likely, some used the term libertarian to sound hip and interesting. Maybe some of them really thought about the possibilities of liberty.  The fact remains, fusionism was a dangerous game from the start, and we’re now seeing exactly where it can lead. 

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 5 giugno 2019 con il titolo Peer-to-Peer Ridesharing, Not Corporate Profiteering! Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Capita che degli anarco-capitalisti distratti portino Uber e Lyft ad esempio di impresa agorista. Saranno anche leggermente più agoristi del tradizionale servizio di piazza, ma sono tutt’altro che ideali. Più che di agorismo, parlerei di vecchio capitalismo clientelare che cerca di camuffarsi da “economia della condivisione”. Solo che la vera economia della condivisione è paritaria, mentre Uber e Lyft sono terze parti che si intromettono e decidono unilateralmente. Non sono il prodotto di un processo decisionale a partecipazione paritaria.

Questa assenza di partecipazione democratica paritaria, unito al modello aziendale gerarchico, genera insoddisfazione tra molti lavoratori di Uber e Lyft. Diversi tentativi di sindacalizzare i tassisti hanno prodotto un effetto valanga culminato in uno sciopero e un boicottaggio di solidarietà l’otto maggio scorso. L’iniziativa ha avuto un certo successo e una certa eco sui media, ma è solo l’inizio.

È accaduto di recente a Washington che i tassisti di servizio all’aeroporto Reagan si sono coalizzati e hanno fatto ricorso a pratiche creative per aumentare il guadagno. I tassisti di Lyft e Uber si ritrovano nei loro parcheggi. Alcuni di loro controllano l’applicazione e danno istruzioni agli altri. Quando arriva un volo, tutti i tassisti disattivano l’applicazione. L’improvviso aumento della domanda, unito alla forte carenza di offerta, fa schizzare i prezzi alle stelle. Chi sta di guardia controlla i prezzi, e non appena questi raggiungono livelli giudicati sufficienti, dà il segnale agli altri, che quindi riattivano l’applicazione e bloccano il prezzo il più in fretta possibile. Una seccatura per i clienti, che devono pagare di più, ma con Uber e Lyft che prendono il 40-50% di ogni singola tariffa questo è l’unico modo per andare avanti. Il fatto è che una corsa non può costare meno della benzina consumata, cosa che purtroppo prima dello stratagemma capitava spesso. È sostanzialmente una versione aggiornata dello sciopero bianco, ma con risultati immediati. Ancora una volta, l’azione diretta dà i suoi frutti.

Sostenere lo sforzo di migliorare le proprie condizioni di lavoro è importante, è un ottimo inizio, ma non basta. Un agorista dovrebbe andare oltre e creare la propria alternativa. Già esistono molte piattaforme paritarie locali di ridesharing. Alcune operano tramite applicazioni simili a quelle di Lyft e Uber, mentre altre operano tramite gruppi di facebook, tutte però sono operativamente limitate.

Volendo optare per un servizio più frequentato e diffuso, c’è Cell 411. L’applicazione funziona in maniera paritaria, nessuno fa la cresta alle transazioni, il che significa contrattazioni dirette tra clienti e tassisti. I tassisti possono fare il loro prezzo, e anche scegliere la forma di pagamento accettata, se contanti, criptomonete, metalli preziosi o baratto. Si possono anche accettare donazioni libere in cambio dei soldi. Un raro caso di potere nelle mani dei lavoratori.

Come diffondere l’uso di queste alternative considerato che molte sono semisconosciute o poco utilizzate? Per iniziare, si può optare per una qualunque piattaforma disponibile localmente, anche se al momento è poco nota o sconosciuta. Si inviano richieste tramite questa piattaforma per incoraggiarne l’uso. Si possono distribuire biglietti da visita o volantini, se possibile. Basta un semplice foglietto con un indirizzo web stampato sopra (es. GetCell411.com) a mo’ di promemoria per il cliente. Quando poi non si trovano alternative e si è costretti a rivolgersi a Uber o Lyft, è buona pratica informare l’autista delle alternative e dargli un biglietto da visita.

Per il tassista che cerca alternative o ha ricevuto materiale pubblicitario da qualche cliente, la cosa è semplice. Basta scaricare l’applicazione del servizio alternativo locale per cominciare a ricevere richieste. Non bisogna preoccuparsi se finora il servizio è poco diffuso. Si può continuare a lavorare per Lyft e Uber e mantenere Cell 411 o qualche altra alternativa a portata di mano. Così, la scarsa diffusione delle piattaforme alternative non scoraggia il coinvolgimento. Gli stessi autisti possono distribuire volantini o biglietti da visita alla clientela al fine di incoraggiarli ad usare i servizi alternativi in futuro.

Biglietti da visita e volantini possono anche essere diffusi in altri modi, ad esempio negli alberghi, nei bar, presso le scuole, gli uffici informazioni, le biblioteche, le comunità e tutti quei posti in cui si pensa che potrebbero attirare l’attenzione. Ognuno di questi metodi promozionali può servire a garantire la crescita dei servizi alternativi, e con questi anche il controllo del lavoro da parte dei lavoratori tramite piattaforme paritarie. La vera economia della condivisione è questa. Sta ad ognuno contribuire.

I’m mostly writing about morality because I would very much like to stop writing about morality.

I say this because morality is, ultimately, a social construct — which isn’t to say that it’s nothing, but is to say that it’s malleable. It’s a feeling. You can’t whip out a morality-o-meter and measure morality. Even further, wildly divergent moral theories can justify the same actions — and actions are what actually matter. Further, despite how people tend to talk about various moral tendencies (deontology, consequentialism, etc.) pretty much everyone seems to be able to reason within multiple of them, and will even switch between them without thinking about it. When you get into neurology or evolutionary psychology the whole thing gets even more muddled — we might not even have the agency required for morality in the way that we think of ourselves as having moral agency.

More maddening, these issues will only get weirder in the future, with increasing technological change. Today, we debate whether or not it is morally permissible to farm animals. Decades from now, will posthuman intelligences be debating whether or not it is morally permissible for them to farm us? Today, we debate whether or not abortion is morally permissible. Decades from now, when artificial wombs change the conversation, will we be debating whether ownership of such an artificial womb allows you to turn it off with a fetus inside?

Looking at more grounded individual tendencies, things don’t appear much better.

Consequentialism falls apart when one acknowledges that the world is extremely hard to predict. That humans are deeply prone to motivated reasoning over what we believe plays into this as well — regardless of what I think of the strength of my evidence, it’s probably not going to convince someone who doesn’t already want to be convinced. Like many forms of moral realism, consequentialism fails to accept the limits of human knowledge and intuition.  Antifascism is a great example of this — for all my arguments as to the effectiveness of antifascist action, there are plenty of people who think that it actually makes the far-right even stronger — despite the evidence of the last four years, as well as the evidence of the last seven decades. Even further, the ultimate aims of consequentialism are in question. If we don’t really understand how the world works, there’s no way to be sure that our idea of an optimally/perfectly moral world actually functions how we think it does. It’s technically possible (this is an example) that the existence of neo-nazis (I don’t actually think this is likely to be true) is somehow necessary for the maximization of freedom. If we don’t actually have a great understanding of how the world works, then how we could we be certain one way or the other? Alternatively, it’s entirely possible that we might have two goals in mind (for example, no nazis and maximization of freedom — again, this is an example, I’m not actually in favor the existence of neo-nazis) that ultimately come into conflict with each other. Consequentialism looks more and more viable in the shorter and shorter term, but is ultimately unworkable as an absolute moral theory.

Virtue ethics is sort-of true, in the sense that people will usually act in similar ways to how they have in the past — and so, if one wants to be courageous (for example) in the future, one can start by being courageous today. But there’s nothing to guarantee that you will definitely choose the right proxies for the abstract ideal of a virtue, nor is there anything to guarantee that shifting circumstances won’t render your training counter-productive. For example, one might train oneself to be fine with working with marxist-leninists to fight neo-nazis, and thus end up not fighting marxist-leninists when the neo-nazis are disposed of. Even more than that, it often results in people coming up with ‘moral’ actions where they keep their hands clean of supposed wrongdoing, but avoid actually doing things to help others — for example, resigning from a position in protest; a useless way to keep one’s hands clean.

Utilitarianism is totally non-viable. There are so many problems with the theory, that it’s become almost a joke. Hell, just google ‘existential comics utilitarianism’. If you actually take utilitarianism seriously, you wind up with results that are horrifying to pretty much everyone. All it takes is one utility monster, and the whole system is utterly worthless. The only reason that it sticks around is that it’s a pretty decent moral framework for justifying statist policies — it is the Lysenkoism of moral theories.

Role ethics is micro-nationalistic and often hierarchical, and so unsuitable for anarchists. There’s a reason that it only becomes popular in strictly regimented societies where roles are already reified and can be misconstrued as having developed through some sort of natural and unavoidable process. Absent this socially constructed illusion, it seems horribly limiting to try to say that your moral choices only apply to certain people in certain contexts. People seeking autonomy need a universalist sense of morality.

Even nihilism doesn’t work — after all, if we don’t acknowledge that some things are preferable to others, then there isn’t really a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Which might technically be true, but also, I don’t care — I choose the less boring thing.

Care ethics is micro-nationalistic, but in a (largely) non-hierarchical way. An anarchist could certainly follow it, in comparison to role ethics (to which it is most similar) but the question remains as to whether this is really a moral worldview in the way that we are accustomed to thinking of morality — a distinction that, I believe, many of its advocates would acknowledge. It is carefully non-universal, contenting itself with the here and the now. Perhaps there is wisdom in that. Philosophers I have known have actually accused me of following care ethics — though I don’t know if I would agree. Is valuing one’s friends and caring for them really a moral act? Or is it merely an act of self-interest? Many have claimed that morality is what we do when we don’t benefit from it.

Ultimately, morality is just a feeling. Based on that, if I had to choose to call myself anything, I’d call myself an emotivist — or perhaps a casuist, a particularist, or even a deontologist. Morality is mostly based on things that one knows intuitively and without question to be moral or immoral, and moral reasoning is largely about defining how an ambiguous situation relates to an unambiguous one: from this, one can construct abstract rules that one finds to describe what feels moral and what feels immoral. One knows that slavery is wrong, and so one can understand wage-labor, the state, etc., etc to be wrong. One knows that being a neo-nazi is wrong. So: one understand punching a neo-nazi, or disrupting their activities less directly, to be right.

But, beyond all this, it simply isn’t important that we fight people with differing moral views from ours. I do not conduct my politics only with deontologists, in the same way that I only conduct my politics only with anarchists or the anarchist-adjacent. I don’t care about other people’s moral worldviews — I care if I can work with them. I care if they can make and keep deals.

When we act, we usually don’t do so alone. We do so with other people — and what we do with other people, we usually do so within the context of some sort of expectations of how those dealings will work. We make deals with them — I’ll do this if you do that, a spirit of reciprocity and mutually-beneficial cooperation. Of course, sometimes, deals are forced upon us — we are not exactly asked if we would like to opt into the law, or provided with the opportunity not to sign that contract of adhesion. In those cases, nothing about the person enforcing the rule matters to me that much — I can’t really negotiate with them, after all. It simply matters to me whether or not I decide to follow their rule. So, the specific form of post-moral thinking we must consider is not just how we act in the context of others, but instead specifically how we should act in the context of others of approximately equal power. In other words, the sort of people that we can engage in freed market “contracts” (such contracts are really more of gentlemen’s agreements, backed by reputation) with are the sort of people that we apply this sort of post-moral reasoning to.

In a sense, we could say that this means that the only things we consider to be people are things that can engage in deals with — deals that both parties must go through actual, meaningful negotiations on and then be (roughly) equally careful to respect.  This has several consequences that are both somewhat shocking and rather satisfying.

This means that, of course, rocks, animals, machines, the braindead, fetuses, etc. are not people. We cannot engage with them non-hierarchically. It might be possible to do something with an animal that one might call a ‘deal’, but it is almost certain that you could easily trick the animal — your superior intellect means that, even if you are currently acting as though you were engaging with them as an equal, you always have the option of dropping the act. Non-materially enforced equality is always just that: an act. You cannot really have an “equal” relationship where one of the participants can decide (at any given moment) whether or not the relationship will be equal.

But, this also means that you cannot really regard authority figures as people, either. After all, they are similarly incapable of engaging with you non-hierarchical. In practical terms, you can’t really negotiate (in a freed manner) with a cop. They can always simply arrest you for something or other, and that would be that. Or, as unionists frequently remind us, the boss is still a bastard even when he pretends to be your friend. And that is the operative word: pretend. Social relationships maintained by those with power over you are always full of lies and pretensions — they are methods of softer control, not true forms of friendship. The boss and the cop are, to you, not actually people: they are authority figures, and not people.

That is one of the more shocking parts of my definition: who is and who isn’t a person is subjective. Just as morality is subjective, just as value is subjective, so is personhood.

This argument can be extended into the hypothetical as well, what is often reserved for science-fiction. Some day, humans will be modified, or modify themselves. Completely synthetic intelligences may be created. Animals may be genetically modified into something that is not a mere animal anymore. The coming technological singularity may very well create intelligences that are to me (now) as I am to a dog.

We must be ready to answer the question: are these people? And if so, why?

The answer seems to be that if we can make non-hierarchical (which rules out post-human super-intelligences as being ‘people’ to us, but seems to include the rest) deals with us, then yes — they will be people, regardless of how “alien and strange” they otherwise might be. And this alienness and strangeness will be bridged within the freed market.

Frank Miloslav, in his review of The People’s Republic of Walmart, said:

Prices let us compress the complexity of our subjectivity and knowledge into a single number that helps us interact with others, allowing the distances between our capabilities to be bridged by assumptions… The capacity for prices to enable autonomous positive-sum relations between individuals is what has made capitalism capable of overcoming hurdles and challenges that would have destroyed any other system. However at the same time the current system must restrict our freedom of action so as to maintain the disparities of power…

Capable of compressing a vast amount of information into a single value, money allows for the negotiation of preferences at a level that no other technology has achieved to date… Its capacity for enabling distributed, stigmergic action and it’s flexibility in how it can be created and used makes it one of the most impactful technologies we’ve ever uncovered, worthy of sitting alongside such inventions as language in terms of expanding our capacity for action.

So, while democracy may give us warm fuzzies when it comes to making collective decisions, it’s currency that lets individuals of radically different backgrounds work together, find common ground, and develop positive sum relations, or at the very least respect their differences.

I hold that this isn’t just true for prices, but for deals in general — though, of course, prices are features of some of the most refined and easiest to navigate deals; I don’t need to share a language, just the ability to point, grunt, and write legible numbers in reference to a common currency. All our differences whether small or incomprehensibly vast, don’t matter if we can work together — and who we can work together with varies from individual.

The boss and the cop are not people to us, but they may very well (by my same definition) be people to each other. Similarly, while we cannot see the post-human super-intelligences as people, they will likely see each other as such. From the perspective of this unusual conclusion, a certain similarity emerges between the freed market and anarcho-transhumanism: both are prospective projects with the ultimate aim of putting everyone in a position to recognize anyone’s personhood.

Trust is the backbone of not just economies, but also the social fabric more broadly. With it, new worlds are possible, and without it, collapse is inevitable.

Trust is built on dynamic and complexly layered reputations. We each have our own methods of building trust, and different communities have their own systems for developing reputation. Mana in Maori culture maps and flows differently than social capital in western activist scenes, but they all point to the meaty question of how we can engage more deeply with each other. A healthy reputation system allows for these diverse and dynamic ecosystems to consensually co-mingle.

When someone unknowingly engages with a person who has harmed people under similar circumstances in the past, this is a failure of information sharing around reputation. A whisper through informal networks that someone has an abusive past works similarly to a price signal in markets. Whisper networks are inefficient and sparsely connected reputation markets. Whisper networks transmit local knowledge to impact the contextually dependent preferences of other actors. If the harm someone did is relatively minor it only shifts your trust preferences slightly. If it’s severe it prevents you from wanting to engage at all. This process is analogous to the way price changes based on factors downstream in the supply-chain. Markets are a form of information network. If environmental and labor ethics crises make the mining of coltan excessively expensive, iPhone consumers will likely change their preferences to something cheaper. The price reflecting market conditions shares a stripped form of information across geographic distance.

This market-based information sharing holds as long as Apple can’t rely on corporate subsidies and colonial trade-agreements to externalize the costs of production and maintain an artificially low price. Similarly, without the artificial subsidies and accumulation, illegitimate forms of social capital, like coercive charisma and high school popularity, whither on the vine. In either case, faster and more informative signals diminish illegitimate hierarchies while simultaneously boosting the resilience of actors on the margins such as a new competitive firm or a new entry to a social network.

The existence of and problem-space functioning of reputation markets are the same under any political or economic model, even if the details of how they play out are different. A charismatic (anarcho-)communist committee member still has informal power deriving from their attractiveness, charisma, fluency with ingroup signals or manipulation, and their control over privileged information. This process functions similarly to when Elon Musk smokes weed with Joe Rogan and makes illegal business comments on Twitter and Tesla stocks tank. Healthier reputation systems would help to map the hit of a #metoo allegation more effectively against the trustworthiness of politicians. Since reputation networks already exist, and are critical to solving game theoretic coordination problems, the more important question isn’t ‘do they exist’ or ‘should they exist’ — it is ‘how can they be made better and more egalitarian?’

A Brief Primer on Trust and Reputation

There’s a glut of scholarly research on reputation largely from within different schools of economics. Trust is generally seen as the expectation that someone will or won’t do something. One mechanism of reputations is the bootstrap method which is just repeated interactions (or games). Most of this literature revolves around the concept of moral hazard (asymmetries of information, knowledge, and its relationship to risk-taking) and punishing or disincentivizing defection. The second trust mechanism is the Bayesian update which is just about changing your beliefs based on new information.

In a more technical sphere, reputation is generally thought of as a tool for facilitating interactions. In describing digital reputation system design, Dellarocas says, “Reputation is a summary of one’s past actions within … a specific community, presented in a manner that can help other community members to make decisions… whether and how to relate to the individual.” Reputation is closer to the Bayesian update method and has to do with expectations of what you expect someone to be, rather than to do. Reputation and trust are generally modeled game-theoretically, though modern approaches can model much more complex incentive ecosystems than that of a traditional prisoner’s dilemma, including things like repeated games, complex social signaling, and community standing.

It’s a Feature Not a Bug

Efficiency means less accumulation, less coercive hierarchy, and fewer obstacles to entry. All these factors lead to people being less able to artificially protect their reputation. For example, a very popular person can often squash stories about their abusiveness. The more efficient reputation markets are overall, the less this is possible. In addition, people who are less able to natively grasp social dynamics to accumulate informal power around themselves are given much more numerous and meaningful opportunities to build the healthy forms of social capital such as resilient networks of friendship solidarity. So the intricate beauty of a shy and socially awkward person can more easily grow and network but a scene patriarch will have a hard time building an excess of power that makes them untouchable.

As laid out by Gillis and others, reputation is a constant site of contestation where equilibria are reached only through competing signals and claims. A reputation structure not prone to monopolistic accumulation allows for a range of other implications such as the legitimization or delegitimization of property titles. A robber-baron prone to exploitation loses favor in the community, which increases the costs of guarding their wealth as community favor begins to shift in favor of those who would decentralize their wealth. A massive polluter living in the hills will face exponential difficulty in hoarding their empire if the externalities are placed on the shoulders of those living at the base of the hill. Without state subsidized policing and banks, their entire business model could flounder under the weight of both labor and consumer resistance. This is made more likely if the true nature of their crimes is able to spread through people’s awareness which requires efficient and transparent reputation systems.

Similarly, individuals are better able to learn and grow with access to better information. As in non-technological reputation systems, people aren’t just represented by a single totalizing score but are instead comprised of richly textured webs of reputational information forming a more accurate, changing, and holistic interpretation of a person. Through this, people are also able to better understand and learn from the incongruencies between how they view themselves and are seen by others. Because the market is flattened, there are much wider pathways for building new trust. Additionally, because there are such diverse types of overlapping reputation systems, a bad score in one area is more easily seen in context with other information, having an additional flattening effect on the network topology.

In a future-tech system, this is made possible through the types of data that are made visible to the person, though users can also post private reviews about others. Then each user also has their own reputation metrics which can be reviewed when looking at the ways they’ve reviewed others publicly. Different systems of both anonymity and transparency will compete for ethical utility.

Aside from just the increased overall trust and concomitant economic coordination and abundance provided by reputation, there is also increased transparency around the fungibility of things like social capital through which murky exchange rates often protect those most manipulative. The tensions of legibility and illegibility should wrestle in a timeless battle for efficacy and egalitarian ethics.

No, Actually It’s a Bug

For many, this may read as an obvious dodging of the sheer terror of ubiquitous reputation, rankings, scores, and mutually suspicious judgment. At the most extreme end is the Black Mirror episode where social scores become the metric for class positionality and overall limits to personal agency favoring neurotypicality and productivity above all else. People could hack reputation systems to artificially inflate the reputations of paying clients. Reputation systems can pin people other against one another in artificial scarcity and vicious competition despite the non-rivalrousness of trustworthiness. Ableism could become further structurally entrenched, valuing those most neuro-normatively able to recreate the status-quo. Reputation systems could contribute to the quantitative oversimplification of people. After all, the beauty of people is their sheer complexity and in a sense, describing any one feature of someone is minimizing the wholeness of them.

These and other dangers are real. But they’re also already real. These systems exist already — both in informal relational ways, and in massive state and corporate databases. Each individual is scored and judged by everyone and everything in constant myriad ways. This doesn’t displace the dangers, but it does put them in perspective. There is no Eden we can return to of perfect non-judgement where reputation ceases to exist. Gillis notes, “There’s a reason credit preceded currency — as Graeber had to remind a number of economists — trust and goodwill are simply the foundation of the world we move in.” We need avenues for those of us whose skills are not commodifiable by traditional markets to assert ourselves and our right to exist with maximized agency.

It’s impolite to acknowledge that we judge each other. But when I share my car keys with someone I’m taking a rough heuristic of many variables surrounding their trustworthiness and reputation — and that makes sense. If they’re aren’t good at driving safely I probably shouldn’t lend them my car, or they should have to find a different more net-beneficial and low-risk way of getting around. The advantage of relative abundance and low barriers to entry is that these alternative strategies become increasingly accessible and can be coupled with profound social safety nets.

We shouldn’t just think of each other as numbers, but we also need to get a sense of how to trust each other. Everyone deserves love and access, but not everyone deserves my car keys. So these forces of complex de-quantified love and solidarity, coupled with accurate understandings of each others strengths and limits should be in tension. Systems that help us navigate these tensions should be analyzed, critiqued, and improved.

Existing Reputation Networks

To understand the functioning of possible reputation systems — both good and bad — it is important to analyze existing systems.

Dark Market Yelp

Dark markets that traffic in illegal drugs are able to simultaneously remain anonymous and build trust through reputation markets. This means that they are horizontally legible to buyers while (ideally) vertically illegible to the state. When someone seeks to buy a drug locally they are forced to accept the quality of whoever they personally know and the amount of trust is only relative to a small number of local buyers. Dark-web markets radically cut down on low-quality or dirty drugs through massive reputation markets, using tools like chemical purity testing that would make less sense at smaller scales. This also minimizes violence between buyer and seller by making robbery more difficult. In a sense, this is an agorist form of Yelp and provides the same benefits that Yelp does.

Even if users may skew Yelp reviews through exaggerated positive or negative reviews, it still provides a forum for economic resistance against malicious or harmful firms. If a shop employs neo-nazis or massively pollutes, people can write that in reviews, and most reasonable consumers will choose a different shop and cost them economically. Reputation markets are the backbone of things like boycott as well as quality assurance.

Common Pool Resource Management

Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking work on Common Pool Resource (CPRs) management shows how local reputation, coupled with things like graduated sanctions can effectively deter defection and prevent a tragedy of the commons. If you see local actors regularly, you have an incentive to maintain trust with them. Things like social pressure and social capital intersect to help people effectively manage rivalrous goods in common property. Unfortunately, this method is largely scale-dependent and so works differently on global CPRs such as the ozone or oceans.

Secure-Scuttlebutt and the Decentralized Web

Problems of identity, like Sybil attacks, and reputation are being widely mapped and explored in the decentralized web space. Reputation is generally broken into two categories. The first is trust graph which has to do with trusting someone through networks of trust as in liquid democracy or page rank. The second is behavioral reputation, which is the accumulation of one’s past actions, and must be Sybil attack resistant. It’s often easy to spin-up a new identity on things like the blockchain so reputation becomes meaningless.¹ This is a strange feature of so-called “trustless” economies. Similarly, if you try to impose scarcity on trust systems with something like voting with one’s own crypto-currency, you just structurally enforce plutocracy in which the wealthiest secure their future power — similar to the property titles of landed elites stolen through colonialism and slavery. For these reasons, they tend to rely more heavily on the trust graph than behavioral reputation.

Secure-scuttlebutt (SSB) is different from the foundation. SSB is a peer-to-peer protocol for devices to communicate beyond the constraints of traditional internet infrastructure. It can run without the centralized infrastructure of modern internet and was designed to fulfill the requirements of an interstellar communication system for a galactic council. Currently, many different platforms and tools are built on top of it — including social media platforms. Scuttlebutt is different than traditional p2p technologies, like blockchain, in that it replicates through trust rather than being designed for trustlessness. Your reputation allows your messages to spread farther because each user replicates the messages of people close to them in the network. All blocks are visible so if, for example, I see a bunch of femmes I trust have blocked a guy, I can assume he is probably creepy and refuse to replicate his messages. This increases the health and resiliency of the network as a whole, by limiting the ability of malicious actors to harm others and spread harmful messages while simultaneously helping people discover people who are good-faith actors in a similar way to how meatspace networking works. Gossip is the name that scuttlebutt uses for blobs of information people can pass on from each other. Your choice on with whom and how to gossip is built on trust which is built on reputation. In these ways, SSB is more tied to behavioral reputation in that while you can easily create a new identity, you have to build trust, reputation, and friendships again from scratch.

China’s Social Credit (社会信用) Scores

There are seemingly endless waves of frenzy around China’s social credit system. Dystopian horror stories abound of people’s scores being used to justify denial from flights and train trips — or even ending the college enrollment of family members of someone else with a low score. Forms of ingenuity and resistance to the centralized system have already developed, such as phone cradles that mimic the user taking steps while they relax to increase their score.

Other reports suggest that the system is less coherent and more complex than it is usually painted in often inaccurate or biased western media. Regardless of whether it is as much of a totalitarian surveillance system as those in the U.S. see it as, it nonetheless makes clear the dangers of the priorities of states determining the trustworthiness of individuals and then stigmatizing or fast-tracking users based on these characteristics. However terrifying the details of the more experimental features of the social credit system are, credit scores in the U.S. are also ubiquitous and malicious in their arbitrary and expansive power. The difficulty that marginalized people face in building their credit scores turns into a vicious structural cycle that expands intergenerationally and maintains the impact of illegitimate property titles descended from things like slavery and indigenous dispossession.

Sex Work Client Blacklists

Some of the most important reputation networks in sex work are client reviews and blacklists in the form of websites like preferred 411. P411 is a reputation network that allows sex workers to review clients, especially those that are dangerous, as a way of deterring violence and police sting operations. Unfortunately, as a result of infrastructure centralization, FOSTA-SESTA was able to repress the website p411, who stopped offering new accounts. This puts sex workers, especially those most marginalized, at increased risk of violence while also preventing good clients from sharing their positive reputations. Sex work positive platforms like Switter and Tryst provide not only a venue for networking and advertising, but also to show trust in and boost other workers while posting the details of violent clients.

Possible Reputation Markets

Although there are pros and cons to the ways that reputation markets are presently employed, they open difficult and essential conversations for the existential and intimate challenges facing humanity. Imagination can help to chart a positive direction for this delicate needle threading. If there were grassroots, transparent, and accountable reputation systems that were also competitive with each other, we could have all kinds of niche systems designed to solve different types of problems.

Climate Change

One of the most powerful aspects of the digital currency space is the ability to incentivize non-zero sum behaviors that benefit the collective, but would normally be outranked by selfish but inefficient choices by so-called “rational actors.” For example, something like Solar Coin can incentivize the collectivized sharing of surplus solar, in a way that traditional markets wouldn’t. Similarly, the Nori carbon-offsetting marketplace is designed to incentivize carbon reduction.

Thinking in this domain could help solve the incentive problems of environmental common pool resources at a scale that is inadequately solved by Ostromian localized solutions. If everyone had a carbon output reputation that both prevented their ability to collect various forms of capital if they were offenders, and also artificially incentivized carbon-negative behavior, we could break the cycle of negative environmental externalities. Corporations and their leaders could be more effectively held accountable, steered, or abolished. These scores and qualitative stories would likely reveal the inefficiency of massive hierarchical multinationals, and as such could help create more sustainable resource creation organizations.

Augmented Reality Dating

Imagine entering a club and hoping to meet someone. You flip on a projected screen in front of your eyes that scans the room for shared preferences and interests and suggests some people for you to chat with and some possible topics for you to discuss. As you approach someone you speedread their various reputation details. They share your kinks and hopes for the evening, but they have one critical review from an apparent ex amidst a bunch of mostly positive stories. You read further into the critical experience and something about it seems strange — so you check out the reviews of the person who wrote the review.  All of their reputation notes are about them making up stories, so you decide to take a chance with the person you were matched with originally. The two of you have a lovely evening of engaging conversation, and joyous dancing, before deciding to leave together. Knowing in advance each other’s preferences and needs you are able to trust each other more deeply — making the consent process, both yesses and no’s, so much more fluid. As a whole society, consent is more effectively incentivized and facilitated leading to an almost complete eradication of sexual coercion.

Totalizing Fascism

As a response to the rapid adaptations forced by climate change, a more powerful and technologically-advanced hyper-authoritarian era emerges. The promise of order is delivered through an iron-fist of repression and the social cleansing of undesirable elements. With the ubiquitousness of 3d-printing and decentralized internet, the world has become too complex to be administered with traditional methods of dictatorship, and so a new techno-dictatorship is developed to control the illegible populace. It is run through state-controlled reputation markets that become so efficient at surveillance that all persons are rendered completely legible to centralized enforcement. Every single action is monitored by state intelligence agencies down to the smallest dissenting gesture. No one whispers against the state or glances too long at its horrors for fear of being disappeared. Resistance is forced into the most extreme margins and reputation is enforced with sheer brutality. Those who fail to maintain adequate scores are re-educated through torture or just liquidated in the margins of society as their very existence compromises the utopian fascist myth of revitalization through ultra-violence (techno-authoritarian palingenesis).

Commons Quality Assurance App-ified

As in the guild societies of late-medieval times studied by Kropotkin and others, stateless quality assurance commons can arise through voluntary, bottom-up, competitive reputation networks (Carson, Desktop Regulatory State, p 221-240). These networks can transform the prisoner’s dilemma into an assurance game where people compete to build their reputation, but obstacles to market entry are still low. They serve the additional function of being illegible to centralized state entities while being highly legible to individuals embedded in local networks. The technological era transforms both the dangers and potentials of these systems into new scales.

Many apps could compete to be the centralized source of various reputation and quality assurance organizations, allowing users to quickly choose the aspects of a given product that are most important to them, and engage based on their values and needs. Similarly to the assurance game played by firms, the quality assurance organizations themselves are in an assurance game and building trustworthy reputations. This Russian doll of reputation provides a more resilient, customizable, and modular approach to ensuring that quality assurance cartels cannot be sustained to the detriment of market entry, while still maintaining the benefits of various forms of safety and ethical consumption consideration tools.

Whuffie

Whuffie is a fictional reputation currency introduced in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Cory has since written that “inequality is even worse in reputation economies.” While his critiques are generally insightful, they point only to a very specific type of reputation economy in which the reputation system is not transparent, is centralized, and is the primary currency.  

With regard to transparency he writes, “Unlike other virtual currencies like Bitcoin, Whuffie isn’t something you buy and sell: it’s a score that a never-explained set of network services calculate by directly polling the minds of the people who know about you and your works, reducing their private views to a number.” First off, if brain-to-computer interfaces become seamless, then we have already achieved rapid, strong-AI takeoff and have bigger issues to contend with. Additionally, that “never explained” bit is pretty important because it belies that there is no transparency and that people don’t really have a stake in which reputation services themselves have reputations. If the systems are not state-run or monopolistic and are themselves subject to boycott and reputations they will be incentivized to address problems of monopolistic reputation systems as well as inscrutable systems of calculation. If the majority of users are screwed over, they will stop supporting these reputation services in favor of a system that better handles complexity, transparency, and equity. The absence of transparency and competition are the keys to black-boxing a system into the hands of those most powerful.

Doctorow is right to acknowledge that “reputation is a terrible currency.” Currency must be fungible and a store of value to be usable as a basis for an economy, but reputation can facilitate transactions with more traditional currencies. As much as he may dislike the anomalies where Ebay’s store-keeper reputation model fails, it downplays the fact that Ebay is currently worth around $33-billion. While one should be appalled at their near monopoly, it’s pretty clear that reputation markets alongside traditional markets have facilitated trade amongst strangers.

However failing whuffie may be, it’s important to acknowledge that there is some nebulous exchange value between various forms of currency. Reputation does function like a regular currency, just with different strengths and weaknesses. That’s because social capital has market dynamics and reputation is a form of money. You can trade popularity for money and money for popularity. That’s precisely why capitalism is so dangerous, and why meritocracy is a dog whistle for “born rich and dominated my enemies,” along the lines of Hinduvatna caste supremacy and Elon Musks across the world.

Any system that protects artificial concentrations of wealth around any kind of capital, will facilitate inequality. This is why the state protects big banks and tech giants from competition through IP laws, beck-and-call policing, subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of many-monopoly creating corporate welfare, and in turn, those corporations protect the state. This is similar to the ways that people like abusers can use the threat of violence to artificially protect their reputations and why a credible reputation market-style wikileaks for exposing rapists is so important even if there is a risk for system abuse at the margins. Removing insulation around accumulation prevents the type of ‘meritocracy’ that “ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top.”

Anyone who can hold a solid reputation without these forms of market manipulation could be said to have a form of healthy social capital. The kind that is just built through being a decent, trustworthy, person who works to do right by people. Of course, there is “no objective measure of merit” and that’s why a unitary reputation system is so preposterous. Monopoly is dangerous and anything that fuels it is inhumane and leads to dystopias.

In this uninsulated network of overlapping markets, the geniuses born as “Syrian refugees” or the “one brilliant scientist with ALS” are more able to enter the fray despite the circumstances they were born into. No doubt the system envisioned by Doctorow is dystopic but it’s quite different to the idealistic versions I advocate.

Doctorow’s commentary on the danger of trolling reviews is well-played. Gamergate et al will use anything for a weapon, but so will anti-fascists and the like. Though culture-wars would obviously play out on reputation networks, it would be possible to test and amplify systems of abuse protection such as banning users found to be abusing the system. Additionally, one’s own reputation would show affiliation with a white-nationalist or gamergate milieu, so review readers could have filters against those with those views. But the point isn’t whether I can propose a patch in this essay, but more so that patches compete in the real world to achieve ethical efficiency.

Economic Abundance and Automation

After a period of difficult transitions into the post-total automation era, society has reached a state of relatively maximal personal and interdependent freedom through high trust. This era of peak coordination is facilitated by a combination of incentive engineering and highly efficient reputation networks. As a result of the economic abundance created by competitive, overlapping reputation systems, a profound social safety net and borderless Universal Basic Income is developed that supports people to live peaceful and meaningful lives in relative safety and abundance regardless of personal competitive advantages. The concomitant technological advantages self-compound into worlds more fantastic than that we can imagine.

How Can We Know Each Other?

The most important part of reputation networks, technological or in our minds, is that they be accurate. They should not be exaggerated positively or negatively, and should as close as possible hold the intricate and beautiful complexity of a human. From that, we should have effective feedback mechanisms and cultivate the ability to learn from those results with bravery and right-sized humility. This could be technologically, or just through the words of trusted friends.

The more reputation systems we have interacting with each other, the better we can model each other. The ability to accurately model each other is the bedrock of trust-building and everything that entails. Through overlapping horizontal networks of reputation, we can break away from the dangerous myth of high-trust bordered societies, and into the evolutionarily agile realm of networked co-development. However high the potential of healthy reputation networks, the dangers of authoritarian and hyper-capitalist drift are not just dire, but already happening. As such we need to be innovative in our adaptation and resistance.

Teach me how to trust you and I’ll try to do the same.

1. Sybils are possibly less of a problem in the types of systems I hope for because anyone with an across the board empty reputation in adulthood would be looked on with suspicion. People would know that they had spun up a new identity, and it would be harder (but possible) to rebuild reputation. This would prevent the need to centralize power in order to stop people from creating new identities.
2. In an assurance game there is an additional Nash Equilibria strategy, mutual cooperation, whereas in a prisoner’s dilemma it’s just mutual defection.
3. I’ve never read this book only explanations of it so apologies if I misunderstand it but multiple people pressed me to include it in this piece and it offers interesting fodder nonetheless.
4. Doctorow says, “A few people do very badly, and get downranked and eventually punted off the system – something that a normal complaints tipline would handle just as well.” but that’s not how that works at scale at all. If it was, then Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube would be in much better shape than they are with regard to nazis and there wouldn’t be a huge cottage industry of machine learning auto-moderation springing up.

In a concerning development for radicals everywhere, Russian officials have been cracking down on journalists with renewed vigor. In particular, journalist Ivan Golunov was recently arrested on fabricated drug charges and help for six days. While Golunov was released on June 11th, following a massive outpouring of support from journalists and citizens alike, there remains a great danger to the free flow of information.

Police arrested hundreds of protestors during a Moscow march in support of Golunov, and have been generally responding with violence to the spread of the #FreeGolunov movement and related anti-repression demonstrations. Thankfully, though, there does seem to be some response to the public pressure in support of journalists. Two police officers have been fired for Golunov’s arrest, in what appears to be a direct response to mass protests and public pressure over the incident. It goes to show how important public pressure can be for fighting back against repression, but the important thing to remember is that this is not over.

Like many governments, Putin’s Russia goes through cycles of repression, backing off when the pressure at home and internationally becomes too much, but maintaining a position of opposition to journalists and other political types. It’s important to stay aware of the obstacles facing radicals around the world, and Russia’s recent attempt to target journalists should worry us greatly. We can help keep the pressure on internationally by keeping abreast of the issue, and supporting journalists like Golunov when they are targeted with arrest and other repressive tactics. An injury to one is an injury to us all.

Di Mila Ghorayeb. Originale pubblicato il 3 giugno 2019 con il titolo Iran: Compliance for Thee, but Not for Me. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

L’obiettivo degli Stati Uniti dopo l’undici settembre 2001 non era solo il rovesciamento del governo iracheno. Nel piano del segretario alla difesa, Donald Rumsfeld, rientravano sette paesi: Iraq, Siria, Libano, Libia, Somalia, Sudan e, infine, Iran. Paesi che non hanno rapporti facili con gli Stati Uniti, l’Arabia Saudita ed Israele, ovviamente. A giustificazione della necessità di aggredire questi stati il dipartimento di stato, fonte informativa unica in fatto di politica estera, ha spiegato che rappresentano una minaccia per gli americani.

Questa è la classica frenesia neoconservatrice che annuncia guerre e cambi di regime. La guerra contro l’Iraq, ad esempio, nasce come strascico dell’undici settembre. Saddam Hussein e lo stato iracheno furono considerati complici di al Qaeda e responsabili degli attacchi in suolo americano, cosa che giustificò l’attacco, almeno in parte, come autodifesa.

Agli obiettivi riguardanti la sicurezza, ovviamente, se ne intrecciavano altri. Sicurezza non significava tanto sopravvivenza degli Stati Uniti, quanto dominio. Rovesciare Saddam Hussein, l’ex alleato, non bastava. Occorreva pianificare un nuovo ordine politico che rendesse “sicuri” ed economicamente ricchi gli Stati Uniti. Mantenere il controllo degli stati petroliferi è importantissimo per il mantenimento dello status di potenza mondiale. Gli Stati Uniti hanno bisogno di alleati che diano loro accesso alle proprie risorse, ed è per questo che hanno sostenuto il soffocamento della Primavera Araba in Arabia Saudita e Bahrein.

L’ossessione iraniana di Trump e della sua amministrazione è, almeno a parole, incentrata sulla sicurezza. Nel 2015, l’Iran ha firmato l’accordo internazionale sul nucleare, con cui si impegnava a fermare il proprio programma atomico in cambio del ritiro delle sanzioni. Dopo il ritiro unilaterale degli Stati Uniti, però, l’Iran ha deciso di non rispettare più alcuni punti dell’accordo. Ad aumentare la tensione il fatto che gli Stati Uniti abbiano accusato l’Iran di aver danneggiato quattro navi nel Golfo Persico. Tutto ciò rientra perfettamente nel discorso sulla sicurezza: gli Stati Uniticonsiderano l’Iran uno stato canaglia da “addomesticare”.

Arriviamo così a quello che il diplomatico inglese Robert Cooper chiama “imperialismo difensivo”. Gli Stati Uniti attaccano quegli stati canaglia sospettati di voler possedere armi di distruzione di massa. Sono poi sempre gli Stati Uniti, in qualità di poliziotto mondiale, a convertire questi stati in “democrazie”.

Pur affondando le radici nel colonialismo (il selvaggio terrorista contro il civilizzato occidente), l’imperialismo difensivo non è tecnicamente un atto colonialista. È però vero che poggia su secoli di colonialismo e di forma mentis colonialista che hanno creato l’immagine di una minaccia terroristica mediorientale. Poiché non condividono i valori “occidentali”, o poiché non obbediscono al dettato delle potenze occidentali, sono considerati una minaccia per la sicurezza americana, e questo giustifica una guerra imperialista preventiva. In epoca coloniale, gli stati occidentali si sentivano autorizzati a violare la sovranità di altri stati e a colonizzarli. Perché? Perché leggi internazionali e diplomazie erano esclusiva dei “civilizzati”.

Il fatto è che il volto (imperialista) delle potenze occidentali traspare nel modo in cui “rispettano” le regole.

Ovvero, le regole valgono solo per gli altri. Se gli Stati Uniti non le rispettano, come è successo con gli accordi del 2015, non è perché sono uno stato canaglia. È perché, dice il governo americano a giustificazione del suo atto, devono essere duri e “inflessibili” con gli “stati canaglia”, non scendere a negoziati.

Implicito è l’eccezionalismo americano. Optare per la violenza, che si tratti di sanzioni o di guerra, è giusto se si vuole un’America e un mondo più sicuri, e noi dobbiamo fidarci.

Per i paesi nemici, l’osservanza o meno delle regole non fa differenza. Nei primi anni duemila, nel tentativo di attirare la benevolenza dell’occidente, Gheddafi rinunciò alle armi nucleari e risarcì le famiglie delle vittime dell’attentato di Lockerbie. In cambio, le potenze occidentali avrebbero dovuto togliere le sanzioni e migliorare i rapporti con la Libia.

Sappiamo come è andata a finire. La Libia fu bombardata comunque sulla base di informazioni false o sospette, Gheddafi sodomizzato e ucciso e gli estremisti islamici portati al potere, così che ora la Libia è uno stato fallito attraversato dalla tratta degli schiavi.

Qual è il messaggio in fatto di osservanza dei trattati? Se gli Stati Uniti già all’indomani dell’undici settembre stavano pianificando il rovesciamento del governo libico, apparentemente non c’era modo di dissuaderli.

Lo stesso vale per l’Iran. Possono rispettare la comunità internazionale e gli Stati Uniti, e tutto dimostra che hanno rispettato i termini del trattato del 2015, ma Trump è uscito comunque dal trattato, dimostrando di preferire la guerra alla diplomazia. A questo punto, se gli Stati Uniti hanno già espresso la loro intenzione di cambiare il regime, cosa può fare l’Iran? Il rovesciamento di Gheddafi ha fatto capire agli altri stati che l’osservanza delle regole non basta, e che, visto che l’attacco arriva comunque, è meglio tenere le armi nucleari come deterrenti.

Qualcuno nota che anche altri paesi avversari dell’America, come la Corea del Nord, hanno appreso la lezione dalla vicenda libica. Nonostante le urla della comunità internazionale, la Corea del Nord mantiene il suo arsenale nucleare. Il ragionamento appare logico: o rinunci al nucleare e ti abbattono con un pretesto diverso, oppure ti tieni il nucleare e lo usi come deterrente contro chi cercherà comunque di abbatterti. Oltretutto, gli Stati Uniti in Corea del Nord hanno un passato di violenze tale da mettere i nordcoreani, in quanto attori internazionali razionali, in allerta riguardo le intenzioni americane.

Similmente, anche l’Iran ha poche ragioni per abbandonare il nucleare se i governi americano e saudita sono intenzionati comunque a cambiarne il regime. E credo che il governo americano sia abbastanza intelligente da capirlo. C’è molto da apprendere dalle questioni nordcoreana e libica. Già in passato gli Stati Uniti hanno cercato di cambiare il regime iraniano (tra l’altro, pare che abbiano un debole per l’islamismo). E dopo quello che è successo in Libia, se l’Iran seguirà gli ordini dell’America non gli sarà torto un capello?

Ironicamente, secondo gli opinionisti americani l’Iran è irrazionale. Ma anche gli Stati Uniti esiterebbero a rinunciare alle armi se vedessero gli alleati fare una brutta fine anche dopo il rispetto dei trattati. Così farebbero tutti gli altri stati di cui il piano ultradecennale del dipartimento di stato prevede l’eliminazione. Perché a minacciarli è lo stesso stato che in passato ha agito così.

Ma alla fin fine, i bellicosi leader americani non ammetteranno mai che gli altri stati sono attori razionali con problemi di sicurezza, esattamente come l’America. Uno stato “canaglia” che rispetta le regole è un’eccezione. Quando è l’America a non rispettarle, le conseguenze sono poche. I criminali di guerra possono essere scusati. Si può promuovere una guerra illegale senza timore che altri stati minaccino di invadere e “addomesticare” gli Stati Uniti. E anche gli alleati dell’America possono commettere crimini, come far morire di fame gli yemeniti, e farla franca.

Questo non è altro che il potere all’opera. Da potenza egemonica, gli Stati Uniti possono decidere quali sono gli stati “buoni” e quali quelli “cattivi” sulla base del pensiero imperial-colonialista. Se uno stato è buono, può andare contro le regole e usare la forza perché semplicemente difende la sua sicurezza. Uno stato “cattivo”, al contrario, dev’essere schiacciato.

Significa che dobbiamo aprioristicamente prendere le parti del governo iraniano? No. Ma dobbiamo capire su quali vere basi poggia la retorica che giustifica la guerra. Non farci ingannare dall’idea secondo cui l’Iran è solo uno stato canaglia, un attore irrazionale che vuole il male perché sì. Se i piani dello stato americano sono ben calcolati e chiari, i trucchi usati a sostegno delle sue guerre sono molto più subdoli (ricordate questo?). Capire i meccanismi nascosti dietro le parole e gli obiettivi è d’importanza cruciale.

Se mi freghi una volta, tanto peggio per me. Se freghi la gente cento volte, fai politica estera.

I have a personal rule — I think you should never review a book that you strongly disagree with or strongly agree with. If you entirely agree, then a “review” would be nothing more than an echo. But if you strongly disagree there’s also little point to writing a review, the disagreements cannot be isolated but expand fractally. Foundational differences — differences of worldview, values, epistemology, etc. — grow too large to be covered, much less amicably debated.

For example I never published a review for Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future because I found our disagreements too vast. It became evident that no review would be possible without relitigating the universe of differences in values, analysis, and strategy that divide anarchists from state socialists.

Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl tested me in much the same way. I am glad I acquired a physical copy — but only because my kindle wouldn’t have survived being repeatedly thrown across the room in outrage and disgust. Disappointment breeds a unique fury.

This is a book I wanted to like, that I tried to find value in. Many of my friends in the cryptocurrency space found Posner and Weyl to be fellow travelers, wanting to use markets as tools to secure socialist ends. This is the bread and butter of the Center for a Stateless Society, the historical base for conversations in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, and I hoped that something along the way would provide ground for common collaboration. But the difference between an anarchist and a statist is too vast. I cannot even suggest that we have similar values, because every step of the way, through every one of their proposals, I felt like I was watching a lovecraftian horror take shape. It is not enough to say that our instincts in the face of certain problems are different, I have become convinced our differences extend to almost every level.

Let me walk back the rhetorical emphasis a tad.

While Radical Markets attempts to change our narratives and lenses, it is primarily a set of policy proposals. And Posner and Weyl assume the existence of a state that will enact them. While they never lay out a concrete model of social change, their implicit approach seems to be that think tank scholars will write a bunch of white papers with clear blueprints for legislation and clear quantifications of claimed benefits. Small communities or projects will test them, proving their worth, and then some kind of magic will happen that causes politicians or electorates to vote for them.

Never mind public choice theory, and never mind deep institutional and cultural allegiances. In this approach social change is treated as something of a black box, activism as some kind of largely orthogonal consideration that just happens and either wins or doesn’t. (They probably see its success as a function of how well dressed the activists are.)

“Anti-Statism” and Anarchism

Weyl claims to identify as an “anti-statist” but to pull this off requires him to define “anti-statism” in an astoundingly thin way. I will avoid fisking the blog post where he does this except to relay his definition of statists as those who “generally ignore or minimize the problem of governance.” “Antistatists,” in this formulation, are thus those merely concerned with the administrative capacity of a state. Those who, in short, object to the instinct of “we’ll just have the government solve this problem” without too much critical thought into the dangers and efficiencies of various ways of having a government do something.

I’m a little hard pressed to understand precisely how Posner and Weyl could get to the point where they see “anti-statism” not as opposition to the existence of states but a mildly critical default attitude towards schemes for state administration. I suspect it has something to do with confused young minarchists (who only support the worst functions of states like police and prisons) attempting to frame themselves as “anti-statist” and our authors overhearing, picking up the ball, and running.

Over twitter, Weyl has expressed a desire to see the state eventually wither away, but there is no sign of that in Radical Markets. They present no path towards state abolition, nor the erosion of state power. It’s a bit like Chomsky suggesting that social democracy is the best next step on the road to anarchy, or Lenin claiming his dictatorship was, or Hoppe defending Pinochet-like dictatorship. In all these cases we are told to radically expand the state’s power and footprint in order to somehow eventually abolish it. I suppose we should feel flattered that modern authoritarians feel obliged to try to appropriate the banner of anti-statism, however awkwardly. As long as you tack a “Step 2: ??? Step 3: The State Withers Away!” to the end of any proposal you can call yourself an anti-statist or even a full-fledged anarchist.

(In case Posner & Weyl read this review let me clarify: “anti-statism” stands for abolishing the state, “anarchism” stands for abolishing all power relations. The critiques of anarchism extend far further than merely the state to any and all power relations.)

Maybe it’s worth taking a second to clarify how anarchists have historically approached the question of dissolving the state, and how our approach differs from statists who have abstractly claimed the same end.

Even back in the era of Malatesta, et al. the notion of a single overnight bloody revolution leading us to utopia was a strawman. Abrupt revolutions can of course be necessary or useful — but only in the sense that all real evolution is punctuated. Instead, the most standard anarchist theory of change is threefold: 1) persuading people and pressuring changes to culture, 2) prefigurative building of alternative infrastructure, 3) broad resistance and insurrection so as to make the mechanisms of power incapable of operating. If you smuggle guns to slaves they can better revolt and shoot the slave owners. If you smuggle dynamite to workers they can better revolt and bomb the plutocrats. If you smuggle code to teenagers they can better revolt and pirate intellectual property. The goal of resistance is to increase the costs to rulership, to bust apart centralizations from the ground up, rather than attempting to utilize other centralized structures against them. Ideally said resistance can take forms that are easily replicated and leverage the inefficiencies of power against itself.

What’s common across these three fronts is that they don’t trade away future advances for immediate ones. Anarchists have always been intensely aware of the risk of getting locked into inadequate equilibria. Some reforms improve conditions, but also impede the adoption of further reforms. While economic equality may be a pressing desire, there is little hope of putting a radically expanded state apparatus back in the box once it has accomplished that (if it ever does).

Posner and Weyl present five distinct proposals united in theme by using the government to expand the scope of market dynamics: 1) a scheme where the state owns everything, rents it out, and can force you to move out if there’s a higher buyer, 2) a voting scheme for state elections, 3) a foreign worker sponsor scheme, 4) an antitrust scheme for states to marginally blunt some effects, 5) a scheme that retains monopolies like Facebook and Google intact but monetizes user contributions to their giant centralized data systems.

The worst of these involve a truly radical expansion of state power. The best still centralize power to varying degrees, while also creating new traps that it will be even harder to escape.

The Land Value Tax Revisited: Evaluating COST

The first of their proposals is by far the most horrifying. They refer to it as the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST), a scheme that is in many ways an extrapolation of Georgist Land Value Tax.

Henry George is often seen as a fellow traveler to the libertarian left and many georgists were prominent in the old Alliance of the Libertarian Left and Movement of the Libertarian Left. But georgists are rare among specifically anarchist ranks, and the reason isn’t hard to see.

George was deeply concerned with the pernicious effects of feedbacking wealth from rents. You don’t (in general) create land, and in our world it is quite scarce. Why then should an individual be said to have tyrannical control over a patch of earth? Surely the earth is the common treasury of all, the property of society, and surely it is society that should be seen as ultimately owning space and raw resources.

The georgists have a relatively sharp plan for both utilizing the economic efficiency of markets while avoiding spiraling capitalist rent-seeking and the emergence of monopolies. They want “society” to tax “owners” of land by a percentage of the market value of that land. The idea is that what you didn’t labor for — but instead nature endowed — should not be locked up and portioned out to people at obscene rates. At the same time, “owners” will be economically incentivized to productively utilize the land they hold. It’s a cute and simple enough idea that many have come to it separately.

Today georgists are once again flourishing, in something of a minor resurgence, in part spurred on by growing ecological awareness. And some argue that it can be integrated with the institutional analyses of the Ostroms into a more fluid framework than “the state” as such.

But the concept of “society” — so casually thrown in — is deeply catastrophic. How can “society” be said to own anything, much less make decisions with it? While its concerns with rent-seeking and monopolies are truly justified, georgism doesn’t actually resolve them, it leans into them, under the premise that sprinkling some democracy on a company town would fix it.

As my landlord, I trust “The People” no further than I do a capitalist. The anarchist goal is to abolish rulership, not centralize it into the hands of some collective body. “Democracy” is constantly invoked by liberals as an applause line or magic salve, but to say it has fundamental failures would be to undersell the situation. It’s not merely that “democracy” is trapped between letting seven billion strangers vote on what you have for dinner or, instead, turning to some kind of horrific fractal neighborhood nationalism. Democracy fundamentally retains the notion of monolithic collective decision making, of collaborative domination. I’ve written before at length on the anarchist critique of “democracy,” available online and soon to be published in another of our Mutual Exchange compendiums.

If I can’t stand the centralization of seven people in a room for a co-op meeting, then the level of social centralization necessary for many of the ownership schemes in Radical Markets is straight-up terrifying.

The COST proposal represents a jaw-dropping lack of understanding of the danger of the state and the collective action problem it represents, but it also fails to fully understand the stakes in resisting economic centralization more generally. I was honestly flabbergasted to discover the authors took Elon Musk’s attempts to build a hyperloop across California as an example of a worthy project unfortunately held up by homeowner intransigence and market counter-pressure.

Here we have a dastardly capitalist trying to establish a project that will give him monopolistic standing in the market, and Posner and Weyl take his side. The real villains in their eyes are the farms that won’t just sell him their land at its current price, but will hold out and negotiate him down to his last penny of expected profit. Wouldn’t it be better, they say, if the state could send police in to force farm owners to sell to Elon Musk at “a fair price.”

I shit you not.

Thankfully it is not just georgism but also market anarchism in the vein of Benjamin Tucker’s mutualism that has seen a modern resurgence too. A contemporary of George, Tucker was likewise deeply concerned with the monopolies and rent-seeking that underpinned capitalism. But his critique extended further and has been expanded in the century since. In particular, Kevin Carson writes at length of the transportation monopoly — the way that fundamentally statist projects like the highway system reinforce and scale-up the size of businesses on the market. There are, as anarchists identify, deep diseconomies to scale that would otherwise check the rise of would-be capitalist power, but these diseconomies are suppressed by the state’s engine of uncontested violence.

That Elon Musk faces decentralized market intransigence in his attempt to seize even more power is a delightful feature and not a bug. It is something that should be encouraged and intensified.

Today oil pipelines are being built across north america, in part thanks to the violence of the state’s eminent domain. These projects are systematically evil, they require titanic top-down capitalist investment (pools of money that would never accumulate in such reserves in a truly freed market and themselves find their origin in other atrocities), they reinforce centralization in how they will pay out, the logic of the infrastructure they build, and where the profits will flow. But they also are predicated upon the state’s violent power being unparalleled, not only to force through the sale of land, including unceded indigenous land, but to stop and suppress the insurrectionary resistance to them. And of course, as a product of their very centralized nature these pipelines are incredibly stupid, endorsing incredible broad social and ecological risk for short term gain in the hands of a few. Anarchist solidarity incontrovertibly lies with those activists sabotaging these pipelines, fighting back in both violent and non-violent means. As I have written, markets are in many ways extensions of insurrectionary resistance, and insurrection itself an extension of the market. We should be instinctively aligned with cultivating their means of resistance to the perverse externalities of centralization.

That the farm owners of california will collaborate to shave away Elon Musk’s profit margins is a grand success of resistance to power. If a hyperloop is truly a social positive, something to be built for the benefit of many and little to no losses, then let it be a collective investment involving all those displaced by it. Why should one man walk away with monopolistic control over a centralized infrastructure and the profits from it?

Forcing people to sell solves the problem of corporations irritated that eminent domain doesn’t evict grandmas fast enough, but it’s astonishing that anyone would openly take that side in print, much less attempt to sell it as resistance to centralized market power.

Who sees Musk or his hyperloop as sympathetic projects rather than villainous? Are Posner and Weyl speaking only to silicon valley tech workers? Do they know literally anyone else? Are they in contact with any other political movements or traditions?

Yes, without the ability to send SWAT police to murder grandmas who refuse to sell their home to gentrifiers, some brute economic “productivity” would be blunted. But is that really the sort of economic productivity we should want? And what would be the cost of such a system?

I’m all for the market chewing through traditions and romantic nonsense, all that is solid being turned into air, the bridge-building rootless cosmopolitanism that marxism and fascism hated so violently… but you can’t force people into such. And you certainly should not attempt to with a state apparatus.

It is often said that “neoliberalism” is an overused term, but I think we can safely say that COST is neoliberalism at its most flagrant — using the state to force a market configuration and market norms that would never have emerged voluntarily without it.

Yes, in many respects we want more honest information to flow in the market, but some illegibility is a small price to pay to stop large profit margins and power accumulation. Power and organizational scale are themselves are far more economically devastating in the long run. And note the asymmetry to what information flow COST forces: the buyer reveals nothing about their expected profit margins, the sellers are forced to give up a ton of information about their preferences.

Think of what a boon COST would have been to the railroad tycoons of George and Tuckers’ era — barely any different from the mass grants and violent transfers the state built their empires with. A tycoon could buy up land for essentially the market rate prior to his project. Small farmers couldn’t demand the actual price of their land — the price that would reduce the tycoons’ profits to just above zero — because if he chose not to buy they wouldn’t have sufficient wealth to pay tax on that assessed land value.

Those with piles of money could invest freely, those without would be denied any sort of leverage against them. The asymmetry of risk and information creates an inherently tiered system.

If a healthy market sees profit margins collapse to zero and persistent accumulations of wealth eroded, then what Posner and Weyl are advocating with COST is not “radical markets” but “radical capitalism.” A system structured to reinforce the centralization of power and wealth.

COST is deeply skewed towards benefiting the rich. Can you assess the value of wealth held by the richest person in the world if no one can pool together the money to buy it? He would simply be able to declare the lowest price at which purchase would be impossible and then pay far less in tax than the actual value it would make for him. This is trivial to see in a situation where the effective wealth of a single person outweighs the combined wealth of everyone else in the world. And when say 26 people own as much as the bottom half of society this pricing problem is still there in some degree.

For those of us below such super rich, under COST the more you value the things you use, the more you would be taxed, but this valuation has no necessary tie to market exchange value of the good. And this becomes incredibly problematic when we consider goods that constitute extensions of a person’s body or unique goods of an inventor or tinkerer.

Should the person building the first radio telescope array have to pay literally every cent they have to assure that the weird thing they’re working on isn’t swiped out from underneath them mid-development?

There are many respects in which property title can be more important than efficient supply and demand calculations.

COST would impede development that doesn’t result in exchange value but just personal value. During his lifetime Van Gough’s paintings may have a negligible market rate, but if he had to live in fear of the canvass he was using getting swiped out from beneath him mid paint stroke he would have produced less of personal value. COST essentially prohibits many personally valuable material projects that have low exchange value.

The authors handwave about materialism being bad, but this is, frankly, abhorrent. 1) The whole point of incentivizing economic productivity comes from the assumption that material things are of value, otherwise we could take a buddhist or stoic position and not fucking care if we’re getting rained on under a tree or going without a smartphone. 2) There’s a vast world of personally valuable experiences embedded in physical explorations and developments that are not exchangeable.

We might all agree that our neighbor’s paintings are shit, but how fucking dare we bid the canvass out from under their fingertips and ruin the immense — perhaps incalculable — personal value they provide to said neighbor.

Or should some indigenous community have to pay through the roof to maintain control over the spiritually important mountaintop they’ve used for hundreds of years?

Posner and Weyl of course handwave about how reasonable legislation, exceptions, and boundaries should be put in place to blunt such failure modes, but this is kicking the can down the road with promises that a wizard will take care of it.

This is related to the bundling problem — how do we bundle what things should be sold? And it’s a deeply non-trivial problem. Any government regulatory body capable of setting or evaluating bundling structures is subject to regulatory capture. COST places literally everything in the hands of government regulators. Because “owners” have no right to refuse sale, those who get to write the rules of the game determine virtually everything. I’ve never seen a blueprint more attractive to corruption.

And Weyl has the temerity to declare himself an anti-statist!

Universal Slavery As Liberation

Let us remember that no law is enforceable without violence. All possible punishments require the threat of ever more brutal escalation. To ban the sale of loose cigarettes is to murder Eric Garner. No technocratic scheme — no handwaving — can get around this brute fact.

Posner and Weyl bury a second proposal for COST on human labor towards the end of Radical Markets. Yeah, that’s right. Everyone would pay a tax based on what they think their hours are worth, and be coerced into working for anyone willing to pay that rate.

Our intrepid authors are not so blind as to not grasp that they are describing literal slavery, but what is their response? Well the present normalized wage system is coercive and their system could totally have “design tweaks” to “avoid the coercive elements of the system.”

No side-eye, looks-directly-into-the-camera gif could possibly convey my skepticism.

This is exactly the same sort of “surely there will be design tweaks possible to make everything nice” handwave that Stalinists constantly make. When the fundamental design of your system is gulags no administrative wonk is going to be able to “tweak” that into liberation by changing the paint color or elevator music. No restructured feedback form is going to change the nature of what is going on.

A COST on human capital would ameliorate this form of unequal freedom by requiring the talented people to pay a tax if they do not want to work a job that is most efficient for society.

Every last libertarian and anti-work post-leftist or left-communist is screaming in agony.

It is no doubt the case that there are differences in the talents of individuals and the value society-in-aggregate finds in those talents. But the problem is the resulting piles of wealth, and thus power, that could conceivably be stockpiled by those whose talents are most in demand. Our response should be to target for erosion accumulations of wealth that grow truly pernicious and dangerous. It should not be to enslave those whose talents are most demanded. We might think it unfair that a skilled surgeon not apply her talents, but she has no agency if she cannot make her own choices about association and labor. What if someone’s most desired talent perceived in aggregate by society is the beauty of their body?

In the present system a beautiful person can ignore the prospect of a million dollar check for sex work and instead choose to work as a restoration ecologist or slack off writing poems in a punk squat. She pays tax on what she makes, not what she could be making at a different job. But under a straightforward COST in human capital where she is obliged to work for any price above what she sets as the value of her labor, the cops will arrive to FORCE her to sleep with the wealthy man willing to pay.

Posner and Weyl will of course duck and weave around this specific ad reductio, saying that tax rates should be set at some magical rate that avoids this, that there should be categorical exceptions for types of labor, etc.. But the underlying logic is the same, and to force the surgeon to do surgery is ultimately the same thing. Just imagine the radical expanse of state power implicit in declaring categories of labor in this context.

Posner and Weyl talk about cops forcing someone to do labor for someone willing to pay, as a positive accomplishment of social justice. Forcing, for example, bigoted bakers to make a cake for a gay couple. Certainly there were some positive consequences to the state’s involvement in the struggle for desegregation (or appropriation of pre-existing struggles), but it is just as often the case that discrimination is itself a critical necessity in social justice struggles. Freedom of association is critical not just in the abstract but in countless everyday situations. A cooperative should not be obliged to hire a rapist. A survivor should not be obliged to work for an abuser. A cafe should not be obliged to serve a cop.

I want to be clear that these are not necessarily objections of “rights” — what is going on here is a devaluing of individual agency in favor of an astonishingly flat notion of utility. Rather than seeking to expand and enshrine individual choice, this slapdash approach instead seeks to satiate aggregate desires by force. The distinction is subtle but very important. As an anarchist I want a world of connectivity and efficient satiation of desires because that expands individual choice. The final criteria are in terms of the agency of all involved. The neoliberal impulse is to flip the ordering, to force markets at the cost of human agency at root.

Like Pinochet torturing and slaughtering thousands of student dissidents “for freedom”, the ordering here is so wretchedly incoherent it screams. Never mind the massive state intervention, the slicing away of the options people most immediately want, and the psychological damage of this removal of choice, some marginal increase in the efficiency of the provision of goods and services for consumers must totally be worth it.

The Limits of “Democracy”

The central claim of Posner and Weyl is that COST will harm wealthy people at the margin while helping poor people. But the real cost of COST is structural — decreasing diseconomies of scale that impede the emergence of large organizations and centralized power.

The veto exercised by a property owner is not democratic, it’s anti-democratic. And often all the better for it. No homeowner’s association or neighborhood commune should get a say on the color of your house. Autonomy is a critical social norm.

Anarchists don’t believe in democracy, we believe in consensus and — when that cannot be built — autonomy. In our consensus meetings we give every single affected individual a veto. Emphasizing independence — freedom of association — over collective cohesion.

The promise of personal property is that one can stand before the entire world and refuse to sell. To always be free to declare our bodies and their extensions to be of infinite personal value to us, not on the market. As magical a site of positive-sum collaboration as the market can be, it means nothing before the freedom of an individual to not participate. To refuse to sell their home, their labor, etc..

COST would turn the marketplace into a democracy in the very worst sense of the term. All it offers for safeguards is the same technocratic liberal naivety that has continuously failed throughout history to check tyranny. It’s a pattern that continues throughout Radical Markets.

Considering anti-trust legislation, Weyl and Posner take examples like two mines in the same town merging to argue for federal intervention — while the two mines may make up less than 1% of the national industry, locally they’ve just created incredible bargaining power against local workers. This is certainly true.

But it is physically painful as an anarchist to read such examples and proposals. Oh are two corporate firms better for workers than just one? I suppose, but in the same way that Clinton was arguably better than Trump. To ignore the massive gains to be achieved by just stringing up the bosses and running things with worker cooperatives is jaw-dropping. What sort of miserly pursuit of freedom is this?

They argue that some level of such enforcement is arguably possible under existing anti-trust legislation, should courts and bureaucrats choose to interpret the laws so. Perhaps? I can’t bring myself to care much. Breaking apart existing firms would be technically positive, but hardly something very likely to happen given regulatory capture.

Again, what is missing is a theory of change. Are regulators supposed to read some white papers and get inspired? I suppose it could conceivably happen, and I wish such folks well, but I’m in no way convinced it has a high return on investment for activists. But — more pertinent to claims of “anti-statism” — there’s no evident path forward without the state. Let’s say you’ve created a hugely invasive anti-trust regulatory apparatus to surveil the market and somehow it’s hasn’t become a site of corruption but has gotten really good at busting up large firms… how do you then dissolve the state? How do you even limit or bring to heel the massively expanded state apparatus you’ve built?

The task of resistance to power should not be outsourced to one wing of power itself.

It’s a tale as old as the state. The leviathan eats up formerly independent positive social functions — whether they be murder detectives or anti-segregation activists — and makes such work entirely its purview. All alternative decentralized institutions or movements dry up, leaving society less and less prepared for the removal of the state.

Instead of growing fluidly responsive and decentralized alternatives to work in parallel and eventually erode and replace functions of the state, Posner and Weyl spend Radical Markets trapped in a frame of mind that sees the state and democracy as a tool.

How should it run? How should its failure modes be checked? Radical Markets offers only one signature proposal, a scheme for how to count votes: quadratic voting.

The classical scheme of one-person-one-vote is notoriously unresponsive to stake. On the market one can price one’s degree of desire for something, but a vote transmits nothing more than a single binary. Some activists may have encountered dot voting which responds to this by giving everyone multiple votes that they can use up to different degrees on different things. So if there’s one issue you really care about you could spend all your votes on it. Thus a large group of people who each kinda want something can be outvoted by a small minority of people who really intensely could not live with it.

Quadratic voting is basically the same thing but with casting extra counted votes on an issue costing quadratically as many credits. So to cast two votes on an issue you have to pay four of your credits, to cast three votes costs nine credits, and so on.

It’s arguably a market system, enabling degree of consumer/voter desire to be communicated quantitatively, but with everyone getting an equal number of credits. And I want to be clear — both quadratic and dot voting are often better than straight majority voting, but that’s the lowest possible bar.

What’s unexamined is how the array of choices voters face dramatically distorts the votes. The structure of the options (determined centrally by say some election commission) critically influences the results.

With quadratic voting a central voting board could easily structure a ballot to involve say a ton of abortion related measures, thus watering down the capacity for those with extreme feelings to be heard. Issues don’t neatly separate!

Further, quadratic voting with a base currency that rolls over would require voters to predict what measures/candidates would likely be up on future ballots, and to which proportion. Since the ballot itself is constructed through centralized political means this is forbidding.

Anarchists all know the failures of “consensus” processes that don’t center free disassociation (where folks just go their separate ways when consensus can’t be reached) but instead try to force collective decision-making. In these cases who structures the measures determines the outcome.

Posner and Weyl claim that quadratic voting will ‘magnify the positive effects’ of their other proposals, but what they will really magnify is the centralization of power. Again and again they propose systems that would scandalize any public choice theorist, but then totally fail to explain how institutional checks and balances would work.

And ultimately — you guessed it — they propose allowing direct purchasing of votes with money. Let us bypass reiterating all the standard critiques of money in politics, especially in our wildly inegalitarian hellscape, and instead emphasize two things:

1) The political centralization here leads to economic centralization. If you control ballot creation you control who has to constantly spend money to secure their freedoms. A dozen different anti-gay ballot measures on a single ballot in a conservative area means draining the entire gay community of cash. Suppressing your competition is no different.

2) It’s not clear that this is separable from the existing and kinda inherent market for votes. Nevermind that it’s hard to police the direct purchasing of people’s votes, there’s no way to match the votes-for-votebux curve to the curve of the actual market for votes. The actual “how many votes can X dollars buy” curve is unknowable because it’s not a static equilibrium in a perfectly clearing market, but it is still in principle there. The state would thus essentially be imposing an arbitrary exchange rate, in some places above and in some places below the votes per dollar curve that independently exists. Why is this arbitrary curve a priori better?

In any case, making a voting system responsive to degree of desire will never be a comprehensive fix for tyranny of the majority. Small enough minorities could still be ganged up against. An individual could save literally all her votebux for the vote targeting her specifically and still not be able to outvote the rest. Stopping injustice ultimately requires channels of resistance outside the democratic process.

I don’t have much to say about Posner and Weyl’s worker sponsorship proposal for similar reasons. Open borders are relatively mainstream now, anything less than them is both a total abomination and something that should be fought with all means — made impossible to enforce.

It does not matter if a majority believes a genocide should be committed, we can bomb the railroad tracks and shoot the concentration camp guards and just STOP them. Much the same is true with borders — at the very least you can just cut the fences and build underground railroads. There is zero reason to fuck around with dehumanizing sponsorship programs, much less those that depend on handwaving to explain how human rights will be protected and this won’t just be the horrors that typify the Saudi peninsula.

Big Data Monopolies

When it comes to big data companies Weyl & Posner don’t question the value of turning the internet into giant walled gardens run by state-like monopolistic entities with extreme surveillance capacity. They propose merely to reimburse participants on social networks “for their data.”

There are strong reasons to prefer a decentralized internet infrastructure, and the reasons a centralized infrastructure has arisen is not “natural” market preferences, but a result of a) intellectual property, b) centralized massive VC stores of capital, c) state subsidies in a variety of other more direct forms, d) the targeting and suppression of those working towards better ends (cf Aaron Schwartz).

Today’s monsters are able to finance themselves only through the advertising industry. But advertising is symptomatic of a vastly inefficient market. In a free society protocols would dominate the infrastructure. Mastodon, RSS, etc, with apps as frontends for these uncontainable networks. If you need to search for a product or service you can directly search for it, with vast consumer reports immediately available and parseable. Without a centralized repo controlled by a middleman there’d be no capacity to inject ads. Endorsements would flow directly through your friends or social contacts and relationships would be mappable.

Prediction engines would have to be local (something you run on your device as part of the app parsing available goods on the protocol/network), or they would be pooled. But this pooling would be much more conscious and agential, few would give away the contents of their direct messages, for example, to some random hackable third party.

Users may ask for a say in what sort of data mining is done using these collective pools of their data, and there is a fringe chance some will choose to monetize their data.

Posner and Weyl propose pay for data — but they avoid examining how this data would be priced by Facebook, which is notoriously bad at internal pricing, giant firms being, after all, planned economies, just like state socialism. The current advertising industry isn’t an efficient market with clear price signals conveying the utility of an additional degree of knowledge of a user — it’s a pile of lies perpetuated by conmen at every level and junction.

The house of cards that is much of online advertising and Silicon Valley will eventually come crashing down unless the state intervenes. What Posner and Weyl propose is exactly the kind of intervention that might be used to prop up the existing dystopian order. The technocratic liberal angle always being, rather than demolishing cancers in the market, just deputizing them under the state.

It is also interesting that Posner & Weyl denounce things like Facebook as feudalism because “lords insulated their serfs from fluctuations in markets and guaranteed them safety … in exchange, lords took all the upside of the market return on serfs’ agricultural output.” Because in such terms the current wage labor system, where everyone collects minimum wage regardless of the value they create, is also feudalism.

Gargantuan organizations and the structural economies of scale that prop them up (via obfuscated state violence or their legacy in infrastructural forms) have widely normalized feudal forms, and reformist attempts to merely control monopsony organizations rather than dissolve them has consistently served to reinforce their power.

But the thing is we don’t need antitrust legislation to kill Facebook and Google, we only need alternate technologies, and either the abolition of intellectual property or greater willingness and tools to make it unenforceable. We can build alternatives to social connections and product finding that make advertisements obsolete and crush their business model. Rather than utilizing the state to kill these monsters in some (unlikely) binary policy win, we can incrementally build insurrectionary resistance and alternative infrastructure from the bottom up.

Instead of focusing on dissolving the giants Posner and Weyl do things like talking of a “data labor movement” creating one big union to negotiate for users of sites versus Facebook and Google. This is the shortsightedness of liberalism personified, best exemplified by the deals cut between gargantuan labor unions and gargantuan corporate powers in the middle of the twentieth century. The AFL-CIO model is despised by radicals because it not only reinforced titanic power structures, but it ossified all gains labor had made, preventing further success and allowing the slow whittling away. It also led to truly perverse economic devolutions — the normalization of getting your health insurance through your employer created much of the current healthcare crisis.

Examining a number of ways the “data labor” struggle would fail, Weyl and Posner admit “it is entirely possible that large inequalities would emerge and have to be disciplined by future reforms.” Well there’s the catastrophe of liberalism in a nutshell. Rather than solving the underlying problem of power they append awkward reforms that cause a cycle of further blooms of power and dysfunction, leading to more such reforms.

Misunderstanding Markets and Resistance

At the center of Radical Markets are two things: 1) an accurate image of markets as massively distributed parallelized computation, and 2) the belief that markets are only ever artificial creations of states, and thus the state can be wielded without limit in creating them.

There is nothing natural about market institutions. Human beings create markets — in their capacity as judges, legislators, administrators… the market is the appropriate computer to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. If we see it as such, we can fix the bugs in the market’s code and enable it to generate more wealth that is distributed more fairly.

It’s certainly the case that markets are social creations, institutions we create, same as anything like a technological infrastructure or a subculture. But we can build them from the bottom up, or from the top-down. There is nothing natural or inherent about judges, legislators, and administrators. We can grow markets in fluid ways negotiated consensually between free and equal individuals, like a small ecosystem of weeds growing up between the cracks, or we can impose them with the sweeping imperialism of a planner, laying rows of crops.

Trade can be fluid and egalitarian, it can emerge free from the shadow of systems of power, and with the right culture and robust struggle, markets — as well as broader societies — can settle into norms that steadfastly resist the runaway accumulation of centralized wealth, the creation of monopolies, and rent-seeking. Sadly, nothing in Radical Markets is so radical. Despite the pretensions of Posner and Weyl, their blueprint is not one of radicalism but fundamentalism. They worship the market form as an ends unto itself, an instrument pulled up abstractly and detached from its utility to the freedom of actual human beings, and thus worthy of any means no matter the dangers or externalities. Despite Weyl’s statements, I see zero understanding of the dangers of state power as a means.

This top-down notion of market creation is the essence of neoliberalism and the opposite of market anarchism.

Posner and Weyl seem sincerely nerdy, and I would love to see them actually grapple with anarchist theories of economics and resistance, with critiques of state power, democracy, and regulation, to even begin to fill in the handwaving at checks and balances. But I feel forced to write this review — so filled with edited down adjectives that do not even begin to express my revulsion — less to promote a conversation than to make a public declaration of difference.

There is a truly dark path being outlined in Radical Markets and not only do I want nothing to do with it, it’s desperately important that their project be called out from inception.

It’s not so much that Marx was well intentioned and made some mistakes, Marx was always a would-be-tyrant — one anarchists exposed and opposed during his lifetime. We perfectly predicted the catastrophes of marxism long before Lenin entered that German train. We did the same with the failures of liberalism. One cannot paint the failures of a prescription as an accident if there are people prominently explaining the negative consequences of it from the start.

It falls to anarchists to consistently call out the authoritarian traps in other traditions’ thinking. If only so that when the failures are finally manifest there can be no doubt that they were not innocent woopsidaisies, but had their root in wrongheaded instincts.

American vanguard parties have not been doing well lately. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) voted to dissolve itself, over what would once have been nothing but a “routine” rape scandal — though, hilariously, a splinter of a splinter of their party continues to try to run their newspaper. The LA Red Guards started a fight with an anarcha-feminist collective, found themselves facing the wrath of the greater LA anarchist community, endured and ultimately lost running street battles, and finally formally dissolved themselves in an attempt at making some sort of peace for their members. Last year, the Socialist Alternative (SA) split and the splitters released the full internal files of the organization. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, I am told, is teetering — details are hard to come by.

Though I think that it would be silly to declare some sort of final victory over the vanguardists at this time, it’s worth discussing why the vanguardists are running into the issues that they are — and why now and all at once, in particular. The unifying cause is, oddly, the internet.

In the post-2015 era, the relationship between American activism and online radicalism has changed. Once, online radicalism was marginal. Now, though, online radicalism has replaced integration with activist communities as the main path towards radicalization. Though it is unclear to me why this happened in 2015 and not 2005, I believe the narrowing of space on the internet to less than a dozen social media sites may have been a factor — or, alternatively, the proliferation of widespread and cheap smart-phones may have allowed the economically downtrodden voices greater access to these platforms. Regardless of the cause, the shift is a clear and empirical fact — and it presents new, perhaps insurmountable, difficulties for vanguard parties.

Vanguard parties, when not able to take on violence as a tactic –i.e., when not able to act as a state, criminal cartel, armed revolutionary group, etc.– have always relied upon the centralization of information, and sometimes resources, to maintain control over their members. The design of a vanguard party is one that privileges the leadership of the party over the rank and file. The leadership ends up with access to a greater flow of information than most of the party, and so it becomes difficult for the party’s rank and file to act effectively without the guidance of the party’s leadership. The leadership is both able to selectively with-hold information from the party’s rank and file, and is incentivized to do so to maintain their power. These issues grow as the party does, of course.

However, in this new internet-using age, the party members have access to greater amounts of information relative to the party’s leadership, especially over long distances. The ability of the party’s leaders to control their members slips, at least somewhat.

The policy of democratic centralism has always been a somewhat ridiculous choice for a party that was out of power. How, after all, was the party supposed to enforce its decisions on its members? An activist group in modern America can’t actually use any form of direct coercion to enforce its decisions. The only real sort of leverage available is for the group to dissociate from an individual — i.e., kicking them out of the party. So in reality, vanguardist organizations end up acting just like anarchist ones.

By this, I mean that these parties must effectively operate by consensus, and must effectively use freedom of (dis)association as their only discipline. By consensus, I mean that the parties cannot compel their members to do anything they really do not want to do — if they would rather quit the party than obey the party, they are always free to do so. On a daily basis, this can take an almost insurrectionary form — the party members will simply decline to volunteer for things that disinterest them, or just not show up to meetings they find pointless and boring. The DSA experiences this, often enough — some local chapters have many members in theory, but so few in practice that they have trouble making quorum!

However, abandoning a party isn’t always a slow process. Sometimes, members do so en masse and form a new group. The internet era makes this problem worse, too: what previously might have been a local split can now easily spread.

Ultimately, these party leaders are left with only the recourse of withholding funds, though there are usually minimal funds to withhold in the first place. But even this is less effective: the internet era makes soliciting donations quick and easy.

(rattles cup)

Before now, of course, the anarchist groups in America have mostly been more effective at accomplishing immediate, short-term goals than vanguardists. The Black Panthers stand out as an exception, though one operating under rather different circumstances. Forming a specialized group of a dozen or less in order to achieve a specific goal is usually going to be more effective at accomplishing that goal than forming a much larger group that mainly aims at growing its numbers and influence and may accomplish more immediate goals as a side-effect.

Further, small groups without central leadership are much more resistant to police infiltration.

They are also much more politically pluralistic. There isn’t a party line in an affinity group. You’re all there to accomplish a mission, and bigger differences don’t matter as long as you can work together. I generally work perfectly fine with anarcho-communists, despite being a mutualist, for example. Vanguardists, however, end up continually splitting into antagonistic and competing groups — which not only leads to unnecessary conflict, but also to them mutually delegitimizing each other. After all, they can’t all be “the leader of the workers.”

Di Black Cat. Originale pubblicato il 26 maggio 2019 con il titolo Liberate People, Not Peoples. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Dico subito che sono americano. Le questioni esposte qui riguardano (non solo, es) la sinistra americana. Il mio paese ha orribili responsabilità in fatto di interventi in tutto il mondo, i militari americani hanno lasciato il loro marchio di fuoco in molti paesi. Non intendo qui scusare o giustificare i crimini commessi dagli Stati Uniti o da qualunque altro potere imperiale o coloniale, né voglio sconfessare chi vuole opporsi a tutto ciò. Credo che sia ragionevole vedere negli Stati Uniti la principale, la più pericolosa mostruosità. Non voglio neanche criticare chi vorrebbe far fuori il drago. Voglio invece illustrare l’incapacità di farlo, spiegare dove spesso conducono i buoni propositi.

Detto ciò, non ho la fissa per i dittatori. Non m’importa se stanno dalla parte dell’America o contro. Non fa differenza. Può sembrare una banalità, e in un mondo diverso nessuno starebbe qui a dire queste cose. Ma è a questo che siamo arrivati.

La parola “antimperialismo” mi dà i brividi. Chi la usa ha la fissa per i dittatori. Io non sono ossessionato da loro, ovunque siano.

Se gli “antimperialisti” si limitassero ad opporsi agli interventi di uno stato contro un altro stato, troverei molto difficile criticare la cosa. Sono guerre che fanno sempre vittime civili. Muoiono anche militari di leva costretti ad andare in guerra e, anche se non li metto sullo stesso piano dei civili inermi, riconosco che anche questa è una tragedia: anche loro sono schiavi dello stato. Gli stati non fanno la guerra per altruismo, per quanto dicano il contrario. L’America non ha portato la libertà in Iraq, Afganistan, Siria, Libia né altrove. Ha solo lasciato montagne di morti. E affari per le aziende americane.

Forse c’è qualche ragione per scrollare le spalle anche davanti a questo antimperialismo duro e puro. Dopotutto, per chi fare il tifo quando due stati si fanno la guerra? Quando uno stato conquista un altro stato, forse anche questo fornisce qualche possibilità. Gli stati più grandi hanno meno possibilità di schiacciare il dissenso a causa delle dimensioni. Come dice il detto cinese, “le montagne sono alte e l’impero è lontano”. O forse no. Sarebbe fin troppo facile per me, seduto in poltrona in America, tifare per il successo di una società rivoluzionaria ignorando i morti che l’hanno preceduta.

Ma ci sono “antimperialisti” che non sono proprio contrari a questi orrori. Sennò sarebbero più coerenti. Fanno strane contorsioni e finiscono per mostrare simpatie per qualche dittatore, purché sia di un altro stato. Maduro, Khamenei, Assad. Questi qua. A volte anche Putin, i vari Kim e/o Jinping. Purché non sia americano, o appoggiato dall’America.

Intendiamoci, non parlo solo dei rossi, come fanno tanti anarchici. Basta andare su twitter e reddit per trovare tanti esempi.

È sempre nel nome dell’“antimperialismo” che certe persone di sinistra vorrebbero che i curdi abbandonassero la loro lotta contro il genocidio e restituissero ai “siriani” le “loro” terre. Sempre nel nome dell’“antimperialismo” queste persone di sinistra interpretano come propaganda capitalista qualunque critica della Corea del Nord.

Un vero antimperialismo ha pochissimo a che vedere con il fatto di essere contro le stragi di innocenti operate dallo stato fuori dai propri confini. Ci sono “antimperialisti” a cui non interessa molto il fatto che stati geopoliticamente rivali degli Stati Uniti uccidano i propri civili a migliaia, se non milioni. Si degnano di “riconoscere” (non possono fare molto!) una qualche opposizione solo quando questa viene da forze locali di sinistra.

Sono traditi dall’ossessione geografica: puro statalismo nazionalista, con una maschera di sinistra, espresso in maniera insolitamente equilibrata. Considerare legittima l’azione di uno stato entro i propri confini geografici, e illegittima, “antimperialista”, l’azione esterna, porta a legittimare anche il costrutto legale delle frontiere. Considerare legittima una rivolta di sinistra finché avviene solo entro lo stato, e dire che è illegittima, traditrice, imperialista e capitalista quando accetta volontari stranieri o un (peloso) aiuto da altri stati, significa basarsi sulla stessa logica che riconosce la legittimità delle frontiere.

Una grossa fetta della sinistra, anche anarchica, è in fondo cripto-nazionalista. È un atteggiamento che si sta diffondendo anche tra l’estrema sinistra americana. Troppi sono ancora malati di ideologia nazionalista, per quanto questa sia complicata e camuffata da estremismo. Comprensibile ma non scusabile.

Ci sono anche persone di sinistra che mi accusano di essere un colonizzatore perché penso di emigrare all’estero, in paesi a popolazione in maggioranza non bianca. O anche per aver detto di voler andare a vivere a Detroit. Ci vorrebbero interi saggi per decifrare questa questione e altre simili. Sono questioni che ora non m’interessano; m’interessa solo dimostrare come la retorica antimperialista alimenta un nazionalismo tutt’altro che anarchico.

Quando una persona si definisce “antimperialista” è bene interrogarsi sul significato di questa autodefinizione.

Ma c’è anche un altro aspetto. L’“antimperialismo”, anche il più duro, è del tutto impotente. La protesta contro la guerra non funziona, l’idea secondo cui ha un qualche effetto è propaganda di stato che serve a far confluire i liberal nel pacifismo. Pubblicare meme antimilitaristici non ferma la guerra. Basta pensare alle proteste contro la guerra in Iraq e alle vite che non hanno salvato.

A meno che non si uccida un politico o non si compiano azioni di sabotaggio di una base militare, è difficile che si riesca a salvare qualche vita umana. Se qualcuno dovesse farlo, avrebbe la mia gratitudine. Sarebbe un eroe al pari di Leon Czolgosz. Ma non credo che tra i lettori ci sia qualcuno così determinato da rischiare il carcere o la morte per una cosa del genere. Quasi nessuno.

Bene così. Non posso neanche influenzare quello che succede nella mia città, figuriamoci quello che succede dall’altra parte del globo. Se pensate di essere “antimperialisti” e ponete l’“antimperialismo” al centro del vostro attivismo… lasciate perdere. Fatica sprecata. Trovate qualche piccola causa vicino a voi. Sarà molto più utile ad aiutare gli altri.

Cascadia, Cascadia. What is there to say about this complicated movement?

I suppose I should start by explaining what it is, and what it isn’t. After all, there are quite a lot misconceptions out there. Bioregionalism is not, on paper, nationalism in a green hat. Cascadia was originally largely an anarchist project, coming out of anarchist ideals and an anarchist worldview, and was not intended to become secessionist social democracy, or secessionist libertarianism. Further, despite its co-option by small groups of fascists, it is overwhelmingly (though not entirely) an anti-fascist movement.

The project comes out of a philosophy called ‘bioregionalism’. I won’t evangelize that here, or at least I’ll try not to. But I do have to explain bioregionalism, to explain Cascadia. Bioregionalism builds on the observation that human communities have to coordinate around non-localizable resources — things that we need that are also inevitably things that we share. The biggest one of these is water. If someone upstream takes more of the river than their fair share, or dumps into it in any noticeable quantity, then those downstream are going to have problems. But, those problems —if there is any justice— won’t stay downstream. Those downstream will walk upstream, and stop those upstream by any means necessary. They have to. It’s a matter of life or death. It’s a matter of water.

Water isn’t the only resource like this, though. Just the most precious, and the widest ranging. Wildlife, too, doesn’t obey the strictures of property lines, county lines, state lines, or even the U.S.-Canadian border. Despite this, of course, we want to hunt them — and we can, in moderation. This, too, requires coordination over large areas defined by ecological features. The forests, that help to maintain our climate, must also be managed on a cross-county, cross-state, and cross-border manner. None of these, though, is as important as water.

Thus, you get these sort-of pseudo-borders (many people in the Cascadia movement, even the libertarians and the social democrats, advocate for open borders as a matter of principle) that are based around collected watersheds throughout what’s called an ecoregion. Don’t pay too much attention to it. It doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that this always seems to go towards talking about flags, anthems, national character, and regional identity. I’ve heard some justifications — oh, it’s not nationalism because it doesn’t gesture at the state — oh, it’s not nationalism because it’s about where your feet currently are rather than where you were born or who you were descended from; after all you, by definition, can’t have a Cascadian diaspora.

I think that it’s still nationalism. It’s a rather strange form of nationalism that is, actually, mostly harmless — but it’s still nationalism. If I had to come up with an explanation for why an idea about how to share water rights seems to, through some strange alchemy,  produce nationalism… well, there are a couple of theories I could advance. Maybe it’s because the idea of even porous borders, of ins and outs, is inherently nationalistic. Maybe it’s because nationalist ideas infect most people at some level.

For a while, I thought the claims that the Cascadia movement was nationalistic were based on fundamental misunderstandings of bioregionalism. I used to be pretty into Cascadia. I actually still own a large blanket with the pattern of the Doug Fir flag. I got into the idea in my mid-teens. At the time, my politics basically reflected those of reddit (basically, social democrat) because I more or less got my political opinions from Reddit. In my defense, I was literally fifteen.

The romance of the idea is a fairly obvious one, if you grew up around here. Every time one heard about ‘America’ or ‘American-ness’, it’s always in justification for doing something obviously against my values and interests — unity with homophobes and racists, compromise with political enemies, subsidies for farmland. The ‘real America’ (blue-collar, white, rural, etc.) is only about a fifth of the American population. At least growing up, I thought of them as, essentially, welfare queens — people engaged in inherently unprofitable pursuits, subsidized on the dollar of people like me, voting against everything I stood for, and hating me for being unlike them.

So, if one can only conceptualize nationalism (and no exposure to anti-nationalism), one must conclude that one needs a different nationalism to fight American nationalism. I had no conception of a critique of nationalism, I saw it as natural — instead of as a way for elites to control the masses. Thus, when I heard of Cascadia, I leapt upon it. I had no idea of its anarchist roots at the time — I saw it as an essentially social-democratic idea. It was more of a comforting fantasy than anything else, really. Just a flag to wave, little more. I wasn’t going to rallies or meetings or what-have-you. I would say that in all this I am not unusual in the PNW — such sentiments are common enough among younger liberals who were born in, and have spent their lives in, the urban parts of the region.

When I became an anarchist, I found that there were pro-Cascadia anarchists, and so I delightedly concluded that Cascadia had been an anarchist idea all along — I told myself that, though there were similarities, this was really about water rights — not nationalism. I created, and –for a time– actually ran the (as far as I know, only) Discord server for it. Last time I checked, they’re actually still using the graphic I came up with for ‘the cascadia free territory’.

Eventually, my relationship with that project was ended though. What precipitated my fall from grace was that people wanted me to add a channel to the Discord for the purposes of learning Chinook Jargon — a trade pigdin native to the region, composed of Chinook, Nootka, Hawaiian, various more minor Indigenous languages, English, and French. It was invented, spoken, and went extinct in the 1800s.

The people in the Discord almost all agreed (if I recall correctly, there were one or two people on my side, but the vast majority disagreed with me) that there should be a channel for the purpose of learning the language, so that they could all speak a ‘uniquely Cascadian language’, and perhaps one day forget English. They also (almost) all insisted that there was nothing remotely nationalist about wanting to intentionally induce ethnogenesis by adopting a dead language to supplement a pre-existing vaguely defined regional identity, thereby allowing that identity to be more clearly and binarily established.

It was at this point that I realized that the critics of Cascadia were at least partially right. Language reconstruction is always an inherently nationalistic project. There’s no reason not to speak English (or Latin, French, Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) if you don’t care about ‘preserving’ your culture and establishing a boundary between insiders and outsiders. If those things aren’t priorities, then there’s really very little benefit to being the only speakers of a marginal language, rather than one of billions of speakers of a world-wide trade-language.

I had seen signs before this — people saying that bioregionalism meant that geography culturally shaped people, and so every progressive tendency in the PNW was geographically determined — people saying that the culture of the region made it uniquely prone towards left-libertarian though — so on and so forth. But I hadn’t wanted to see it. This, though, I had to see. It was a line-crossing act that I couldn’t ignore. So, I shrugged, and decided that if this lot wanted to LARP together, I wasn’t going to stand in the way — but I had better things to do. I handed off the whole business.

I’ve distanced myself from the movement since then. Still, though, the dismissive critiques of it as mere settler nationalism miss a certain amount of subtlety.

After all, it’s not an all-white movement, and the idea that it is one seems to smack of defaultism — online, without a clear show of non-white faces, people simply assume that something not explicitly non-white must be completely white. It’s as false as right-wingers assuming that anti-fascist work is exclusively done by white dudes — after all, to them, who else could be under all that identity obscuring clothing? According to their prejudices, anyone not clearly a woman must be a man, anyone not clearly non-white must be white, etc.. A similar sort of racist logic seems at play with people assuming that Cascadia is an all-white project.

Further, it should be noted, such claims clearly have some amount of empirical invalidity to them. Every time I have seen the fascists and the anti-fascists clash in Portland, it is our side that has people flying the Cascadian flag — not the fash. And when the fash does try to co-opt the name and message of Cascadia (as they end up trying to do with so much else in leftism) they find it necessary to adopt clear variations of the flag. For all my criticisms of the movement, I will say that I don’t denounce it as evil. Most of the people involved in the Cascadia movement are basically good sorts, or at least useful sorts. They’re just deeply misguided.

That, I suppose, is the best practical summary of Cascadia as a movement: ‘basically good sorts… just deeply misguided’. The simple fact of the matter is that Cascadian sentiment is common among much of the left of the PNW. Nationalism is a pervasive enough idea that anything close enough to it gets sucked in and becomes it — nationalism is the black hole of ideas. We live in such a nationalistic era and place that even the anti-nationalists become nationalists — merely of a different, stranger, and perhaps less dangerous sort.

Uber and Lyft sometimes get cited as agorist ventures by misguided anarcho-capitalists. While it could be claimed that these models are slightly more agorist in nature than the traditional taxi industry, it is far from the model we should be striving for. Instead of being an agorist model for transportation services, it is merely traditional crony capitalism attempting to repackage itself as the “sharing economy.” This is despite the fact that the sharing economy is traditionally defined as being truly peer-to-peer. Uber and Lyft, however, both have third parties which intervene and make decisions unilaterally — instead of being made via a peer-to-peer participatory decision-making process.

This lack of peer-to-peer democratic participation and hierarchical business model has led many Uber and Lyft employees to become disillusioned with these companies. Multiple attempts at starting drivers’ unions in various locations all ended up snowballing into an all-out strike and solidarity boycott of the two ridesharing companies on May 8th, 2019. While this made quite the splash and brought a lot of media attention to the issues at hand, it seems they are only getting started.

Recently in Washington, D.C., drivers servicing Reagan National Airport have banded together in the pursuit of higher wages by engaging in some rather creative methods. Lyft and Uber drivers all gather in their designated parking lot at the airport. Lookouts stand on all corners of the parking lot and watch the app, giving directions to the other drivers. When a flight lands, they all shut off their apps at once. This sudden increase in demand partnered with the extreme lack of supply kicks off the apps’ surge pricing. The lookouts monitor the rising surge rates until they get to a high enough level before directing everyone to turn their apps back on and lock in rides at that price as fast as possible. Yes, this might inconvenience the customer a bit since they’ll have to pay more, but with Uber and Lyft taking 40-50% of every ride payment, it’s the only way many drivers can afford to continue. It’s just not cost effective to drive someone through airport traffic and to their destination for less than the gas cost to get there, and unfortunately, that was sometimes the case before they came together to devise such an ingenious workaround. It’s basically a modernized slow-down strike, but with immediate results. Yet again, direct action gets the goods.

Supporting these efforts by Lyft and Uber drivers to improve their working conditions is important, and a great start, but we can’t stop there. As agorists, we can go further in creating our own alternatives. There are a number of localized peer-to-peer ridesharing platforms already in existence. Some operate through their own apps similar to Lyft or Uber, while others operate via other platforms such as facebook groups, though all are rather small operations.

For those looking for a more widely used and less localized peer-to-peer ridesharing service, one can always turn to Cell 411. The app operates on a peer-to-peer level and no one takes a cut of any transactions coordinated via the app, thus meaning that drivers and customers get to negotiate directly. Drivers can set their own prices and even choose what forms of payment they wish to accept, including cash, cards, cryptocurrency, precious metals, or barter. Hell, a driver could even operate on a gift economy if they’d like and refuse to charge payment at all. The power is truly in the hands of the worker.

So how do we spread the use of these alternatives considering many of them aren’t widely known or used. Well, start out by jumping onto whatever alternative platform is available — even if it’s not being used much, or at all, in your area currently. Always send out ride requests via that alternative platform first to encourage its use. Print out cards or flyers for said ridesharing alternative, if you can. It can be as simple as a blank background with a website address printed on it (i.e. GetCell411.com) as a reminder to the receiver. Whenever you can’t find a ride via one of these alternatives and instead turn to Uber or Lyft, be sure to talk to your driver about other options and hand them one of those cards.

If you are already a driver and are looking to make the leap or have received a card or flyer from a customer encouraging you to do so, it’s a simple task. Just download the necessary app or platform for whatever alternative is being used locally and start taking any ride offers that may pop up. Don’t worry if no one is using it as of now. You can keep driving for Lyft and Uber while also driving for Cell 411 or some other alternative, so the fact that these alternatives are not as used now should not be discouragement for getting involved. In fact, drivers can also print out flyers or business cards to pass out to customers to encourage them to request future rides using these alternatives.

Similarly, flyers and business cards can be placed around town at various locations including hotels, bars, college campuses, infoshops, libraries, community centers, and pretty much any other public place you can think of that might catch attention. Using these promotional methods can help to ensure growth in the use of these alternatives, thus allowing for more worker control via truly peer-to-peer platforms. This is the real sharing economy. Will you help it to grow?

In the 90’s, the anti-(corporate) globalization movement was at the forefront of the conversation in radical political circles. From the Carnival Against Capital to the Zapatistas to the Battle in Seattle, the fight against global capitalism raged on. This battle raged on side-by-side with the fight against sweatshop labor with protesters targeting companies like Gap and Nike for their use of child labor, workers’ rights violations, and environmental destruction.

Since then, Gap has put out a series of public statements denying prior knowledge of these problems, and promising to investigate and correct the issues — while time and again continuing to be caught engaging in the same practices. Nike has made a conscious effort to green their image, and reduce their environmental impact (in certain areas) with programs such as Nike Grind and products like the Trash Talk shoe. Yet, it seems that they’ve done little-to-nothing to improve their labor practices in any meaningful way. Nothing more than typical greenwashed capitalism.

With the rise of fast fashion culture, the problems of the fashion industry are only multiplied. Such a culture demands that new cheap products be released on a continuous basis, with old products being rotated out typically every week. This not only leads to increased consumption, as people strive to maintain the latest fashion trends, but it also vastly increases waste output as we toss more of our old clothing in the garbage. Such cheaply made clothes are not made to last and such an increase in demand for new products only amplifies the problems in the production process.

With the increase in demand for cheap clothing material, many manufacturers are turning to inexpensive synthetic materials such as polyester instead of natural materials such as cotton. The petroleum-based synthetic fiber has become one of the most used clothing materials worldwide, consuming up to 70 million barrels of oil a year. This doesn’t include the fossil fuels used in the rest of the extraction, production, and distribution process. Polyester, being non-biodegradable, takes between 20-200 years to break down and is also one of the largest contributors to microplastic pollution in our water systems.

For those that do use cotton or other natural materials, high demand is met by the use of industrial farming methods which typically include the use of toxic herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides which can harm the soil and flow into our water systems. Such farms often utilize other harmful practices such as monocropping or worker abuse as well. All those child laborers didn’t stop making clothes, they started making even more to meet the higher demand. Fast fashion has lead to worse working conditions and more abuse, all for the sake of cheap new clothing.

Yes, Students United Against Sweatshops still exists, but what else can we do to help combat these industries in our everyday lives?

Divest from these corporations as much as possible. Boycotts, informational campaigns, and calls for other institutions to divest from these companies could all play a part in advancing this cause. But this also means divesting from the state, which props these entities up via subsidies, immunities, and favorable regulations, by avoiding paying the very taxes which fund these actions. This can be done by operating in the informal economy — by means of gifting, barter, and alternative currencies such as precious metals, labor notes, or cryptocurrency. #DivestWallStreet is encouraging individuals to do just that by exchanging at least $1 into a cryptocurrency of their choice every single day for the next year as a means to slowly transition people to using crypto as their main currency.

Boycotts and divestment are only half the answer to combating fast fashion, however. We must still tackle the issue of building ethical alternatives — otherwise, people will have nothing to turn to instead. As of now, few exist. Even the ones that do exist still have issues of their own. The best thing folks can do is to get their clothing second-hand instead of buying new. Yes, you can always buy from thrift stores but there are plenty of other options as well. Clothing swaps, free stores, hand-me-downs, free boxes, and even dumpster diving (especially behind thrift stores) are all ways you can find free clothing. These are also resources we can use to decrease our waste. Instead of throwing away clothing we no longer wear, give it away to someone who will use it! One can also repurpose old clothes into new designs and outfits with just some basic sewing or crafting skills, while some clothing can even be recycled to make brand new clothes or other products.

Teemill has been at the forefront of the fight against fast fashion. Their model attempts to be as sustainable as possible at all points in the product’s lifecycle. They use organic farming methods to produce the cotton they use for their products. They run as much of their operations as possible using solar and other forms of renewable energy, and also have an in-house water filtration system for their factories. All their clothing is printed on-demand to decrease waste and overproduction and is shipped out in sustainable paper packaging made from cotton scraps left over from the production process. Their products are meant to last and can be sent back when the wearer no longer wants it, no matter the condition, so it can be recycled and made into new shirts, thus completing the circular economy.

This model seems to be leading the way for a new environmental standard in the fashion industry. However, they are still a capitalist company and operate on a hierarchical model that is inherently built on worker exploitation, and thus a worker-controlled model is still very much a necessity.

Another company looking to tackle the waste created by the clothing industry is Rent the Runway, which attempts to solve the problem by utilizing the sharing economy. Much like tool libraries or ridesharing, Rent the Runway allows folks to rent clothing for a few days at a time a return it either in person at one of their retail locations or via mail. This idea on its own does little to discourage fast fashion itself, as Rent the Runway customers can still seek the latest fast fashion trend via the service, but it does help tackle the problem of waste and gives us another model to look to when developing our own.

In the realm of footwear, Liberty Shoes has made waves recently for their anarchist-themed designs. Started with the desire for an agorist shoe-maker, Liberty Shoes unfortunately currently operates through a larger on-demand shoemaking company based in Italy. But much like Teemill’s print-on-demand service, their on-demand service also greatly reduces waste by ensuring that products are only made upon purchase thus ensuring no overstock. Other information on their extraction and production methods is sparse, however, and it is unknown how sustainably sourced their materials are or what their working conditions, electricity and water usage, or environmental policies are. Of course these are things that we as consumers are purposely kept in the dark about in most cases, which is why ethical consumerism is essentially impossible under our current system, but thankfully the future plans for Liberty Shoes includes raising enough money to begin manufacturing independently — which would allow for them to have more control over the materials used and the labor standards set and to operate in a much more agoristic fashion.

Of course, Adbusters beat Liberty Shoes to the game almost a decade ago with their Blackspot brand shoes. Touted as the most ethical shoe ever made, their Converse knock-off is made from organic hemp with recycled bicycle tire for the sole — and is 100% vegan and union made. While the Blackspot Unswoosher design looks great, their selection is limited to just the one design, and their plan to challenge Nike’s sales has yet to take off.

Aside from Adbusters, one of the few other radical alternatives comes from the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico where the Zapatista community has established thriving agricultural and clothing industries which export around $44 million worth of goods each year to communities worldwide while striving for ecological sustainability. While they are probably most famous for their coffee, via their online store you can also find shirts, blouses, hats, shorts, bandannas, boots, bags, scarves, and more.

In their quest towards ecological sustainability, the Zapatistas have discontinued practices such as the extraction of oil, uranium, and precious metals in their communities and have also embraced organic farming methods which eschew the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Despite this, they have been criticized by both environmentalists and the local indigenous Lacandon Maya people for their use of protected areas of the Lacandon Jungle for practices such as logging, farming, and settlement construction. So even while their practices may be more sustainable, they are still using protected wildland to grow the crops and raise the livestock which are later used to create the clothing they sell.

At the end of the day, no matter where you get your clothing from, there are still other concerns, be they environmental or economic. Even if you buy locally made organic clothing from your local worker-run union shop and recycle every scrap, there are still other concerns to be had.

As stated previously, microfibers are one of the leading causes of water pollution, although they are far from the only microplastics released into our water systems when we wash our laundry. Other factors such as electricity, water, and chemical use should also be considered.

Some tips to reduce these concerns include washing clothes only when necessary, only in full loads, and at lower temperatures. Since friction produces more microfiber debris, it is advised to separate hard and soft fabrics when sorting laundry, to only use liquid detergent (yes, this means no soapnuts or washing balls), to never wash clothing with hard items such as shoes, and to lessen your spin cycles. Microfiber filters come pre-installed in some washing machines, but for those without, one can be manually installed. Alternatively, one could use another form of filtration such as microfiber filtering laundry bags or items such as the Coraball. Hand washing or using a manual wash bag is also a solid alternative, although it still comes with the same concerns over microfibers entering our water systems, so it all depends on how you filter and/or dispose of the water you use. Concerning detergent, it is best to use organic unscented detergents since they are less likely to contain toxic pollutants. You can always add in a few drops of their favorite food-grade essential oils if you enjoy scented detergent. Finally, avoid tumble dryers if at all possible, for the same reason you want to avoid long spin cycles. Clotheslines are always a classic alternative.

All of these models offer something to build off of when creating our own models moving forward. We need to build a fashion industry that is built on organic farming, sustainability, reuse, repurposing, sharing, recycling, democratic control of the workplace, tax avoidance, and the circular economy while also shifting the ways we consume, wash, and dispose of our clothing. We need to build a more anarchistic fashion industry.

After 9/11, the United States did not only aim to overthrow the government of Iraq. Its Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, sought to overthrow the governments of seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally — Iran. Predictably, these are countries whose governments were not on ideal terms with the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. In order to justify fighting with these states, the State Department — which is responsible for informing the public on foreign policy issues — pushed the narrative that these states were real threats to US citizens.

These are the classic neoconservative agitations for war and regime change on the rhetorical level. The Iraq war, for instance, largely rested on the aftermath of 9/11. The Iraqi state and Saddam Hussein were deemed complicit in Al Qaeda’s attack on American soil, thus rationalizing the war — at least partly — as self-defense.

Obviously, these security goals were intertwined with other concerns. That is, American security was not simply about survival, but domination. It was not enough to topple Saddam Hussein, their former ally. Instead, an entirely new political order needed to be engineered for the United States to be “secure” and economically prosperous. Having a firm grip on oil-rich states has been vital for the United States’ status as a global power. Thus, the United States requires friendly allies that give them access to their resources, which is why they had a reason to support Saudi Arabia’s and Bahrain’s crackdowns during the Arab Spring.

Trump and his administration’s fixation on Iran has also been, on the rhetorical level, concerned with security. Iran became a party to an international nuclear deal in 2015, where they vowed to stop their nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions being lifted. However, after the United States unilaterally withdrew, Iran suspended some of its commitments to the deal. To make matters more tense, the United States is now blaming Iran for the damage of four ships in the Gulf. This fits into a security narrative rather neatly, because the United States considers Iran to be a rogue state that needs to be “tamed.”

This brings us to what British diplomat Robert Cooper calls “defensive imperialism.” Rogue nations that are suspected of having the intent to possess weapons of mass destruction are subject to American attack. Hence, it is the role of the world police, the United States, to transform these states into “democracies.”

While defensive imperialism has its roots in the colonial era — i.e., it relies on conceptions of the savage terrorist versus the civil west — it is not technically a colonial act. But it rests rather stably on centuries of colonialism and colonialist thought that have strongly constructed the image of the threatening Middle Eastern terrorist. Because the “rogue” state does not possess “western” values or comply with western powers, they are seen as a threat to American security, and pre-emptive, imperialist war is justified. In the colonial era, western states felt justified violating other states’ sovereignty and colonizing them. Why? Because international law and diplomacy were only for the “civilized.”

The problem is, the western powers show their (imperialist) cards in the kind of “compliance” they demand.

One may call this “compliance for thee, but not for me.” If the United States does not comply with its previous commitments — such as through pulling out of the 2015 deal — it is not because they are rogue. Instead, the United States’ government justifies its actions by claiming they need to be tougher and have a “firm hand” with a “rogue state” rather than negotiate with it.

Implicit in this argument is American exceptionalism. Choosing violence, be it through sanctions or war, is a righteous decision that will make America and the world safer, and we just have to take their word for it.

But whether America’s enemies comply or not makes little difference. In an attempt to be friendlier with the West, for instance, Gaddafi gave up Libya’s nuclear weapons and paid compensation to the Lockerbie victims’ families in the early 2000s. In exchange, western powers were to lift economic sanctions and have better relationships with Libya.

Well, we know how that turned out. Libya was still bombed based on false and suspect information, Gaddafi was still sodomized and murdered, Islamist extremists were still empowered, and now Libya is a failed state with a slave trade.

So what message does that send about compliance? Well, if the United States was planning to overthrow Libya’s government since after 9/11, it does not seem like there was much they could do to convince them not to.

The same is true of Iran. They can be compliant with the international community and with the United States, and all the evidence shows that they followed the terms of the 2015 treaty, but Trump still pulled the US out of the deal, signaling a preference for war over diplomacy. If the United States has already expressed its intent for regime change in Iran, what ought Iran to do at this point? The overthrow of Gaddafi signaled to other states that compliance is not enough, and that it might be wiser for a state to retain its weapons as a deterrent rather than give them up if an attack is imminent anyway.

Some have noted that other American adversaries like North Korea have learned from the overthrow of Gaddafi. Despite outcry from the international community, North Korea maintains its nuclear arsenal. This seems like a rather logical calculation: either give up your nukes and get overthrown with a different pretext presented, or keep your nukes and use them as a deterrent against those that, well, are going to try and overthrow you anyway. Not to mention, the United States has a violent history in North Korea that would naturally make the state — qua rational international actor — wary of American state behaviour.

Iran, similarly, has little incentive to give up its nuclear arsenal if the American and Saudi Arabian governments are intent on regime change in Iran, anyway. And the American government must be intelligent enough to know this. Between Libya and North Korea, there are glaring issues to be learned from. The United States has also engaged in regime change in Iran before (at this point, one has to wonder if they like enabling Islamism). Yet, after Libya, Iran is supposed to trust that if they follow America’s every command, they will be done no harm.

Ironically, American pundits and politicians like to conceive of Iran as irrational. But America would be reluctant to surrender its weapons if it watched its allies be taken down even after nuclear compliance. They would behave no differently if a State Department’s over-a-decade-old plan to remove their government was revealed explicitly. And they would behave no differently if the state threatening to take them down was the same state that had done so in the past.

But at the end of the day, America’s pro-war leaders are not willing to publicly concede that other states are rational actors with security concerns, just like them. If a “rogue” state complies, it is an exception to the rule. If America does not comply, there are few to no consequences. War criminals can be pardoned in spite of their illegal behaviour. Illegal wars can be instigated without other states threatening to invade and “tame” the United States. And if you happen to be an ally of the United States, you may also be able to get away with criminal behaviour, like starving Yemenis to death.

Really what this is is the operation of power. As a global hegemon, the United States has the power to shape the narrative of “good” and “bad” states that rests on the robust pillars of colonial and imperialist thought. If a state is good, it can break the rules and behave violently because it is simply defending its safety. If “bad” state behaves defensively, it means they must be forcibly crushed.

Do we need to normatively support Iran’s government in making this argument? No. But we need to learn what this justificatory rhetoric for war really relies on. We ought not to be fooled by the notion that Iran is just a rogue and irrational actor that wants to damage peoples’ safety just because. While the American government’s plan is fairly calculated and straightforward, the tricks it will use to gain support for their wars are more insidious (I mean, who can forget this?). Thus, it’s crucial we understand the inner mechanisms behind both their real motives and their rhetoric.

After all, if you fool me once, shame on me. If you fool the public a hundred times, that’s foreign policy.

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Sorry for the delay! May’s episode is out now and features Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Dr. Rojas is an expert who works on the sociology of political movements and social theory. We are exploring what a world with little to no immigration restrictions might look like and Dr. Rojas’ case for why it would be preferable, both on economic and on ethical grounds. Dr. Rojas addresses some of the most common objections to open borders from the left and the right. He is a very knowledgeable expert on the sociology of immigration as well as a passionate advocate for immigrant rights and that really comes through in our conversation.

Next month, we welcome Kelly Wright, a writer at C4SS and due process advocate, to discuss the targeting of whistleblowers, activists, and journalists through the application of legislation like the Espionage Act and the CFAA, as well as the problem of prosecutorial abuse and other methods of quashing dissent. Grand juries and other legal tools have been used with increasing aggression in recent years to target and silence American dissenters. Tune in next month to learn more about these methods of state repression, and how people are resisting.

One reason for the delayed release this month was the addition of our first bonus episode to the production schedule. To hear this first bonus episode, you’ll need to be a patron of C4SS and Mutual Exhcnage Radio. In it, host Zachary Woodman, producer Tony Dreher, and C4SS editing coordinator Alex McHugh discuss the US ban of Huawei telecommunications equipment and increasing tensions with Iran. We end with a discussion of Impossible Burgers and other green meat alternatives.

Una definizione di guerra

Di Aaron Koek. Originale pubblicato il due maggio 2019 il titolo War Anarchic: Defining War. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Articolo originariamente pubblicato su blackstarwritings blog come prima parte di una serie su anarchismo e guerra.

La guerra è tra gli argomenti che più mi incuriosiscono ultimamente. Con le sue origini che risalgono agli albori dell’umanità circa cinquemila anni fa, la guerra è uno di quei fattori storici che influiscono non solo sugli esseri umani ma sul mondo intero. L’uomo l’ha analizzata e teorizzata praticamente nel corso dell’intero arco storico. Vi hanno contribuito Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Jomini, Federico il Grande, Napoleone, Mao, Che Guevara e infiniti altri, perpetuandola o estraendone elaborazioni teoriche. La guerra ha tanti studiosi e praticanti quanti ne ha la storia dell’arte.

Credo però che a gran parte degli studi sulla guerra storicamente e teoricamente manchi di qualcosa. La definizione di guerra varia enormemente secondo le epoche, i luoghi e i punti di vista, e questo crea un nesso tra modi di definire e capire la guerra che sono talvolta simili ma fondamentalmente diversi. All’interno di questo nesso, però, troviamo un concetto ricorrente in tutta la teoria, ovvero il fatto che la guerra non possa prescindere da una struttura di tipo gerarchico.

Tra i primi studiosi della guerra troviamo Sun Tzu, generale sotto la monarchia Wu attorno al quinto secolo. Nel libro L’arte della guerra, al capitolo “Pianificazione”, prima frase, dice:

Dice Sun Tzu: L’arte della guerra è di importanza vitale per lo stato.

Una semplice dichiarativa con profonde implicazioni. Una delle quali è che la gestione della guerra è oggetto specifico dell’autorità statale. Questo per lo stato è d’importanza vitale non solo perché gli permette di imporre la propria volontà sui suoi oppositori, ma anche perché le conoscenze e le capacità riguardanti la condotta della guerra devono restare prerogativa dello stato, altrimenti potrebbero essere usate contro di esso.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) sembra concordare con l’idea generale secondo cui, da un lato, la guerra serve ad imporre l’obbedienza, mentre dall’altro è affare esclusivo dello stato:

La violenza, quella fisica (qui non c’è forza morale senza concetto di stato e legge), è lo strumento; il fine ultimo è l’assoggettamento forzato del nemico al nostro volere.[1]

Non voglio qui fare un confronto diretto tra le teorie di Sun Tzu e quelle di von Clausewitz; i due sono vissuti in tempi e luoghi diversi e si sono accostati all’argomento in modi quasi interamente diversi. Ma la coerenza del tema, ovvero che la guerra è affare di stato e che richiede un ordine gerarchico, sono elementi che idealmente accomunano i due teorici. Io aggiungerei anche che quasi tutte le teorie belliche riconoscono la necessità dello stato e di una struttura gerarchica.

Anche nel discorso dell’estrema sinistra domina l’idea della guerra come di qualcosa che richiede un ordine gerarchico. Uno dei più noti teorici della guerriglia, Mao Tse Tung, ha scritto molto sulla necessità di una cooperazione tra esercito rivoluzionario professionale e spontanee formazioni di guerriglieri popolari. Ma per quanto abbia capito la necessità di una tale cooperazione in termini di capacità combattiva dei civili, pone l’accento sulla necessità di affidare le scelte tattico-strategiche alle gerarchie dell’esercito regolare:

(3) Alle spalle del nemico, scegliamo alcuni elementi giovani, forti e coraggiosi tra la popolazione locale, e organizziamo piccoli gruppi che accettino il comando di persone, mandate da noi, che sono più esperte e preparate, e che sono state precedentemente addestrate sul luogo dell’azione. L’attività segreta di questi gruppi consiste nello spostarsi dalla propria zona ad un’altra, cambiando uniforme, matricola e aspetto esteriore, usando ogni mezzo per coprire il più possibile le proprie tracce.

(5) Le unità guerrigliere possono essere classificate secondo la loro natura. Quelle formate da volontari selezionati sono dette unità guerrigliere speciali. Quelle organizzate perlopiù da elementi del nostro esercito sono dette unità guerrigliere di base. Quelle organizzate dalla popolazione locale sono dette unità guerrigliere locali. Quando unità di base e locali agiscono combinatamente, stanno agli ordini del comando unificato dell’unità di base.[2]

In pratica, il comando delle formazioni guerrigliere è soggetto alle gerarchie dell’esercito regolare. E anche così queste forze non erano destinate a restare autonome a lungo; la loro integrazione sotto il comando dell’esercito regolare era considerata importantissima per il mantenimento della coesione all’interno del nascente stato comunista.

Alcuni, vedendo la violenza dello stato, bellica o poliziesca, decidono di rifiutare la violenza in toto. Sulla scorta di ciò che abbiamo detto finora, sembra una conclusione logica. Se si vuole una società senza oppressione, è normale che si voglia la fine della violenza per mano dello stato, è normale che ci si ponga moralisticamente al di sopra della violenza di stato. L’ironico paradosso di questo approccio è che, rifiutando la violenza, si finisce di riflesso per legittimare la violenza dello stato:

Una massiccia, colorata, cosciente, ferma protesta davanti ad una base militare, una protesta che non costituisce una minaccia per i poliziotti che ne proteggono il perimetro, che non promette sabotaggi notturni, non fa che migliorare l’immagine dei militari, perché solo un esercito coscienzioso e civile tollera le proteste davanti ai propri cancelli. Una simile protesta è come un fiore infilato nella canna di un fucile. Non gli impedisce di sparare.[3]

Finché la resistenza allo stato è nonviolenta, legittima la violenza centralizzata dello stato. Quando ci appelliamo al senso morale dello stato, presumiamo implicitamente che lo stato sia un’istituzione generalmente benevola e che gli attuali sistemi oppressivi siano semplici difetti morali dell’istituto, non caratteristiche innate di un sistema autoritario a struttura gerarchica. Il problema della nonviolenza è che dà per scontato proprio quei sistemi che in vario modo causano o perpetuano l’oppressione e il dominio.

Ci ritroviamo così in un’apparente impasse. Da un lato la guerra appare in larga misura una questione di ordini gerarchici, dall’altro il suo rifiuto paradossalmente la rafforza. Da qui la domanda: come interpretare la guerra? Come detto all’inizio, la guerra è stata definita in molti modi e non si presta ad un’interpretazione generale. E però, all’interno di questo paradigma esistono tratti comuni alle diverse teorie della guerra. Non abbastanza da poter essere riuniti in una teoria generale, ma abbastanza da ritrovare una certa unità in certi fondamenti teorici di base. Un filo comune, quello delle gerarchie di guerra, l’abbiamo già individuato. Io penso che ne esista un altro, un filo comune che migliora molto la possibilità di capire gli aspetti ricorrenti della guerra. È da questo filo comune che spero di estrapolare una nuova analisi della guerra che sia storica e specificamente anarchica.

Torniamo brevemente a von Clausewitz. Nel brano citato, definisce la guerra “… la sottomissione forzata del nemico al nostro volere…” specificamente attraverso l’uso della violenza. Qui la guerra non è semplicemente conflitto tra individui, ma tra gruppi di persone. Ognuno di questi gruppi usa la violenza nel tentativo di sottomettere l’altro. Perciò penso che la guerra debba essere vista come violenza reciproca e collettiva da parte di gruppi di persone.

Data questa basilare definizione, possiamo abbandonare l’aspetto gerarchico senza necessariamente contraddire gran parte delle teorie. Scostandoci dall’interpretazione gerarchica, possiamo analizzare diversamente la guerra, fare un’analisi che ruoti attorno alla storica lotta dei popoli contro l’oppressione e il dominio. Dalle prime ribellioni degli schiavi alla lotta collettiva delle donne e delle popolazioni indigene, alle rivolte contadine e dei lavoratori, alla pirateria, alla rivolta sociale, alle insurrezioni, tutto ciò rappresenta la guerra degli oppressi contro gli oppressori.

Per questo ho scelto il titolo “Anarchici di Guerra”, per dare un’idea del filtro interpretativo con cui spero di fornire una lettura delle lotte storiche, dei tanti modi in cui le persone hanno combattuto guerre per la propria libertà, lottando contro le gerarchie sociali, politiche ed economiche del loro tempo. Il titolo non significa che queste lotte sono di natura specificamente anarchica, anche se alcune delle più recenti potrebbero essere definite tali. Piuttosto queste guerre hanno una natura “anarchica” perché sono una lotta violenta, collettiva, contro forze dominanti e strutturate gerarchicamente, una lotta che serve a dare significato alle parole libertà e eguaglianza, o almeno ciò che incarna la libertà e l’eguaglianza all’interno dei diversi contesti storici.

Questo per me è il fine ultimo degli Anarchici di Guerra: continuare quella guerra che, nel corso della storia, i popoli hanno combattuto contro i sistemi di oppressione e dominio. Nel fare così, spero di riuscire a creare un corpus teorico e storico a cui attingere al fine di cominciare a capire meglio come noi, almeno in teoria, possiamo combattere la nostra guerra contro il sistema di dominio e oppressione attuale.

Riferimenti:

Carl von Clausewitz. “What Is War?” On War, 1873, pp. 1–2.

Mao Tse-Tung.“Basic Tactics: IV Organization.” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 1937

Peter Gelderloos. “Nonviolence is Statist.” How Nonviolence Protects the State. Detritus Books, 2018.