Sul dibattito tra prezzi gonfiati e saccheggio

Di Alex McHugh. Originale: In Defense of Small Business: On the Price Gouging/Looting Debate, 27 marzo 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Mentre il mondo reagisce alla pandemia di Covid-19 (o coronavirus), nascono molte opportunità di evidenziare la prospettiva anarchista. Il mutuo soccorso, nel tentativo disperato di minimizzare l’impatto sul nord del mondo, è il protagonista del momento.

Dalle comunità che raccolgono fondi per chi è senza lavoro a chi offre alimentari e altri beni indispensabili a chi non sta tanto bene, le piccole reti mosse dalla compassione fanno quello che i governi di tutto il mondo non fanno. Molti anarchici colgono il momento per ottenere concessioni dallo stato. Dal congelamento di affitti e sfratti ad una minore presenza di poliziotti, alla possibilità di avere un reddito universale, molte grandi vittorie sono oggi più vicine che mai. E c’è anche chi suggerisce di convertire il blocco sanitario in uno sciopero generale. Dopotutto, abbiamo reti per la raccolta di fondi, non facciamo la fame per mancanza di lavoro, e ci stiamo esercitando a praticare quella disciplina che uno sciopero richiede. Molti anarchici, poi, denunciano le tante responsabilità dello stato come causa della pandemia, nonché le risposte pasticciate di istituzioni come gli Stati Uniti.

Ma mettiamo da parte le riflessioni generali e affrontiamo quella che è una questione particolare tra gli anarchici. Secondo una logica che forse esiste solo entro l’anarchismo di mercato, alcuni di noi difendono la pratica dell’aumento dei prezzi in tempi di crisi, quando i beni scarseggiano. Altri invece ritengono queste cose inefficaci e ingiuste, e pensano che la risposta più idonea, durante una crisi e sotto il capitalismo, passi dal saccheggio. Approfondiamo il dibattito e cerchiamo di capire qual’è la risposta ideale alla crisi, con particolare riferimento all’aumento dei prezzi, da un punto di vista anarchico.

I libertari (e gli anarchici liberali) presentano due buone ragioni a favore dell’aumento dei prezzi (detti, asetticamente, “prezzi di emergenza”):

• I prezzi alti evitano gli accaparramenti perché comunicano che le risorse sono scarse. Così avanza qualcosa per chi ha più bisogno. L’esempio classico è il ghiaccio durante un uragano quando manca la corrente. L’aumento del prezzo del ghiaccio significa che chi ne ha più bisogno, ad esempio per tenere in fresco l’insulina, ha più probabilità di trovarlo tra chi lo usa semplicemente per rinfrescare le birre.
• Secondo, l’aumento dei prezzi stimola i rifornimenti evitando scarsità. I prezzi più alti fanno da incentivo economico alla produzione e alla distribuzione. I prezzi, inoltre, segnalano quali risorse sono più richieste, assicurandone la precedenza.

Questo approccio è fortemente consequenzialista, ma ci sono anche ragioni etiche per preferire l’aumento dei prezzi ad altre pratiche. In particolare, l’approccio tramite i prezzi rispetta il diritto di chi compra e chi vende di impostare liberamente i termini della transazione. Per tanti anarchici, almeno, questo diritto di commerciare liberamente è un diritto da garantire.

Ma ci sono tanti altri anarchici per i quali esiste un’altra soluzione, non basata sul prezzo, per prevenire gli accaparramenti da parte dei più ricchi. Tra l’altro, aggiungono, contro gli accaparramenti i prezzi alti possono poco; quando i ricchi sono molto più ricchi degli altri, possono permettersi di prendere tutto anche a prezzi maggiorati. L’altra soluzione è il saccheggio. Che è necessario, spiegano, perché permette ai più poveri di accedere ai beni indispensabili per vivere. Bisogna ricordare che, se è vero che ci sono istituzioni extramercato che offrono un supporto ai “poveri”, è anche vero che lasciano i più bisognosi fuori dalla porta, soprattutto se parliamo della carità pelosa dello stato sociale americano o di quella affidata alle chiese. Il saccheggio garantisce a chi è escluso, vuoi perché usa sostanze vietate, o perché è una lavoratrice del sesso, o perché lavora troppo, di avere l’indispensabile in tempi di crisi.

Io credo che nell’attuale contesto sociale entrambe le parti abbiano ragione: aumento dei prezzi e saccheggi devono coesistere per ottenere il miglior risultato possibile. I libertari dicono giustamente che stimolare le forniture locali aiuta a prevenire la scarsità  ricompensando (o rendendo economicamente possibile) la fornitura di merci in aree colpite. A volte bisogna andare contro il prezzo imposto. Ma anche contro la legge che punisce il furto.

Perché? Perché i prezzi, soprattutto quando vengono impostati a livello nazionale da grosse aziende commerciali, non sono sufficientemente flessibili da tener conto del bisogno legittimo, e perché non danno la possibilità a chi vende di comportarsi umanamente e decidere quanto far pagare e a chi. Perché Walmart non può darsi una politica dei prezzi che tenga conto di quanto un cliente può pagare, e invece volta le spalle a chi ha bisogno? Perché dovrebbero fidarsi del personale alle casse. Ma come fa se lo tratta come un possibile ladro sul lavoro? Il saccheggio permette di soddisfare i bisogni primari. Non dovremmo incoraggiarlo, ma neanche fare i delatori. E dobbiamo opporci all’azione della polizia. Insomma, non possiamo scegliere quali leggi violare, dobbiamo violarle tutte.

Se il saccheggio e l’aumento dei prezzi sono risposte alla crisi di una società capitalista, io credo che in una società veramente anarchica la situazione sarebbe diversa. La differenza verrebbe dall’assenza delle multinazionali commerciali, sostituite da piccole imprese possedute e gestite da lavoratori. Da notare che parlo specificamente di distribuzione. Dubito che in una società postcapitalista esisterebbero enormi attività produttive con catene di distribuzione globali. Il recente articolo di Kevin Carson illustra una ragione per combattere la produzione su larga scala. Certo, però, ci sono idee della scuola austriaca che mi sembrano valide: specializzazione e divisione del lavoro significano efficienza (fino ad un certo punto), e le catene logistiche globali diffondere la mentalità cosmopolita.

Lasciando perdere questa questione, possiamo vedere la distribuzione locale come momento separato (fino ad un certo punto) dalla produzione. Dopotutto, le piccole attività attualmente si riforniscono (o acquistano beni di produzione) presso molteplici grossi produttori. Ma la realtà è che durante una crisi i piccoli dettaglianti possono decidere sul momento se fare sconti o non far pagare nulla a chi ha bisogno. A livello di quartiere è ancora più facile sapere chi ha veramente bisogno. E poi, come diceva Adam Smith, la vicinanza fisica e la conoscenza personale generano quel rapporto fatto di reciproca fiducia tipico di una comunità, che rende più inclini i commercianti a fare concessioni. Lo stesso accade in un’attività di proprietà di chi ci lavora: il commesso può decidere cosa fare senza dover interpellare tutta la piramide burocratica aziendale.

Da quando è cominciata la crisi ho riflettuto a lungo sul ruolo che le piccole imprese potrebbero avere nel mondo degli anarchici di mercato. Dico “piccole” ma so che sull’aggettivo ci sono opinioni diverse. Sono organizzazioni sociali positive a prescindere? Sarebbero indispensabili in una realtà postcapitalista? Molti anarchici preferiscono istituzioni più comunistiche. E però mi pare evidente che più abbassiamo il potere decisionale a dimensione d’uomo e più è facile prendere decisioni compassionevoli ed essere umani con gli altri.

Vale la pena citare un caso mio personale.

Chiudono i ristoranti e i lavoratori si preparano all’impatto economico del virus, ma so che molti sono costretti a scegliere tra lavorare col rischio e non mangiare. Questo vale soprattutto per chi lavora per grosse aziende e multinazionali come Walmart e Amazon. Io invece lavoro in un piccolo bar. Pur non essendo il massimo, e tralasciando alcune critiche sulla gestione, penso di essere fortunato perché lavoro per un datore che ha deciso di chiudere relativamente per tempo e sta facendo di tutto per darci la paga nonostante la chiusura forzata. Qualcosa si fa, solo roba da asporto, e presto ci sarà una riapertura parziale. Non è il paradiso, ma certo è molto meglio che lavorare con Walmart.

E questo è il cuore dell’alleanza tra anarchici di mercato di sinistra, mutualisti, anarco-individualisti e libertari di sinistra: assieme comprendiamo tutto ciò che è e che non è un’istituzione di mercato giusta e desiderabile. Ma su una cosa siamo d’accordo: il futuro ideale è un insieme di azioni radicali e di mercato. La proporzione esatta non la conosciamo, ma mi eccita sperimentare nuove forme sociali, edificare insieme un mondo migliore; un po’ saccheggiando, un po’ mettendo su piccole attività, e un po’ utilizzando gli strumenti e le tecnologie di cui disponiamo.

Governments have various ways to control the markets and attempt to preserve equilibrium. The most familiar one is price-fixing¹ and punishing the infringers by reliance on governments’ forces. The rationale behind this is that governments will allocate resources to the best interest of the community and, as they have authority, they can easily mobilize the resources to provide the statist approach. 

As a matter of fact, humans deal with scarcity every day and it is not possible to produce a sufficient quantity of things everywhere.² That is why many people believe that the governmental supervision on the market, controlling the level of supply and demand, and regulating the market to fix the potential failures, are not only necessary but also efficient. Ludwig von Mises stipulates:

In the eyes of all reformers such as Plato, the “body politic” could not operate without interference from the top. Intervention by the “king,” by government, and by the police was necessary to obtain action and results.³

This article is going to answer below the questions posed by Mises’ standpoint here as well as highlight the fact that government intervention in the market is destructive, and not necessary. It will also consider to what extent the government can interfere in the market, and whether such interference aims at the government’s discretion.

The shortage of face masks and sanitizing products due to the spread of coronavirus in Iran is an opportunity to experiment with the efficiency/inefficiency of the tools used by statesmen. In this case, the government envisages a contradiction between securing the free market and the satisfaction of consumers. The government believes that despite the possibility of higher prices in a hampered market, the lower price of face masks is vital to procure them for the consumers in an unhampered market.

Currently, there are 15 producers of face masks in Iran with the capacity of producing 1.5 million face masks per day, in particular, they can produce 300,000 pieces of Nano face masks daily. In a free market, according to Mises: 

…the economic calculation in the form of market prices provides the method through which entrepreneurs are able to estimate potential profits and possible losses from alternative lines and methods of production. Through this process, waste and misuse of scarce resources are kept to a minimum, so that many of the most highly valued goods and services desired by consumers may be brought to market.⁴ 

Hence, the producers, when considering the increased demand for face masks in the market, would be interested in investing in new lines of production. The main fact is that there is no special difference between face masks’ and pens’ economic rules of production.    

In spite of this fact, the government, by considering its mission to engineer the market and protect consumer rights, has promptly intervened in the market and fixed the price of face masks based on its own calculation. The Consumer Protection Organization has officially determined the price of face masks to be dramatically different from the market price. In line with this pricing, the government has banned the exportation of face masks, (the same act has been taken by China, Germany, Russia, and Taiwan) and sanitizing products in order to feed the internal market and eliminate the shortages.

According to this decision, no face mask can be sold higher than the given ceiling. This price maximum makes the market unclear and the demands exceed the supplies. Hence, the scarcity of face masks at that price leaves the consumers unsatisfied. Further, the number of hoardings, smuggling, and the tendency to create a spontaneous black market would increase. At this stage, the second tool is used by the government. The government has confiscated the property of hoarders and threatened them with severe punishments such as execution.⁵ 

However, even in an optimistic view, the shortages in the market cannot be eliminated by this leverage, and the negative externalities of the intervention have prevailed. When the pricing signal is disrupted by the government’s spending or price-fixing, market actors mistakenly prioritize the market needs and allocate scarce resources to less urgent needs. Mises emphasizes that:

There the economic problem is to employ these factors in such a way that no unit of them should be used for the satisfaction of a less urgent need if this employment prevents the satisfaction of a more urgent need. It is this that the market solves in determining the prices of the factors of production.⁶

To conclude, it is a prima facie fact that interventions of the governments to provide required medical devices such as face masks and to foster the positive externalities of people’s precautious actions not only deteriorate the market but also do not achieve the intention of the governments.⁷ Hence, it seems that the government has no specific role to provide such products for consumers. Nor does it have the rationality to interfere in the market and aggress against individuals’ rights in order to dictate what their experts’ desire. By contrast, the government should permit the media to provide reliable information regarding the virus as well as promote alternative ways of protection instead of leaving them to purchase highly-rated face masks.⁸ This can be achieved by not intervening in the market and sending a false signal about the price.

1. Although some governments such as the U.S. use another type of intervention, the government in Iran uses a much direct type of intervention. For instance, ‘the U.S. government is promising to buy all leftover face masks and respirators manufacturers may have on hand once the coronavirus scare subsidies and demand for them dries up.’ (See here.) Further, ‘Japan plans to subsidize up to 30 million yen ($273,000) per production line, the official said, adding two-thirds of the cost will be funded for major manufacturers and three-quarters for smaller companies.’ (See here.) In spite of this, both methods have equivalent impacts on the market in the sense that they gradually deviate the market.
2. ‘Use is made of the available factors of production for the realization of the greatest number of those projects that satisfy the most urgent needs without wasting factors of production by withdrawing them from more urgent to less urgent employment.’ Ludwig Von Mises, The Free Market and Its Enemies: Pseudo-Science, Socialism, and Inflation (Foundation for Economic Education 2004) 18.
3. Ibid, 3.
4. Ibid, 3, xviii.
5. Article 286 of Iran Penal Code: ‘Any person, who extensively commits a felony against the bodily entity of people, offenses against internal or international security of the state, spreading lies, disruption of the economic system of the state, arson and destruction of properties, distribution of poisonous and bacterial and dangerous materials, and establishment of, or aiding and abetting in, places of corruption and prostitution, [on a scale] that causes severe disruption in the public order of the state and insecurity, or causes harsh damage to the bodily entity of people or public or private properties, or causes distribution of corruption and prostitution on a large scale, shall be considered as mofsed-e-fel-arz [corrupt on earth] and shall be sentenced to death.’
6. Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (Yale University 1949) 339.
7. Ibid, 764.
8. ‘The CDC recommends to only wear a mask if a health care professional recommends it. A facemask should be used by people who have the novel coronavirus and are showing symptoms- that is in order to protect others from the risk of getting infected.’ (See here.)

For better or worse, the coronavirus has brought the world together. People are scared and worried and many no longer feel confident navigating social spaces they previously took for granted. Questions regarding the hygiene of the Other are now at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Governments and other public institutions are advocating for “social distancing” – a phenomenon which most likely was already an organic response to the heightened anxiety situation of an epidemic, but which is now being codified in the very social channels we once trusted would give us an endless stream of self-interested consumerism. Instead, we are being told that the question of values is at stake at even the level of engagement of the grocery store run, of eating practices, and questions like whether the Other knows how to cover their mouth, wash their hands, and maintain a safe public environment for the consideration of other Others.

In this sense, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan may suggest that coronavirus has taken the place of das Ding or, “the thing,” which organizes social life – whereas previously, life was organized around the “thing” of the commodity, or enjoyment – now, the thing on everybody’s mind is public safety and security. This concern cannot be directly mentioned as it would be socially devastating and insulting – instead, it can only be insinuated at by asking the Other questions like, “Man, have you been watching the news? How long do you think the pandemic will last?” meaning, do you pay attention to reality outside of your life and how long will we have to keep up the charade that we trust one another when really we don’t even trust ourselves, let alone you?

In these dark times, perhaps it may be useful to consider Michel Foucault’s argument in Security, Territory and Population, where he elaborates on the rise of the security state through the practices of the body, including codifications of hygiene in ancient legal systems. He goes on to discuss  the subsequent Christian pastoral effort to control the conduct of men towards the good, and identifies both of these factors as preconditions for a system which would identify health as the supreme value; health, in the sense of what Foucault calls “life in its most natural form.” Such a system, Foucault argues, has to locate the locus of political life in maintaining the sovereignty of the Other (namely, the sovereignty of the individual insofar as he is perceived by other individuals as a rights-bearing subject) to dispose of their life as they see fit. Since the horizon of life under liberal governmentality is one without transcendence and hence without any orientation towards what is good, then the aesthetic cultivation of pleasure, itself, becomes a work of art, and the legal imperative underlying such a society becomes to promote security through the development of sovereignty at the individual, national, and international levels — what Carl Schmitt would call a new “nomos of the earth.”

But when one considers the causes of the coronavirus, one should give pause as to whether the development of the nation state-form actually comprises the sort of values we identify with, or whether the security state is instead a paranoiac structure designed to keep us from feeling exploited by people we consider different. Much of the racist discourse towards Chinese individuals indicates that we may be in such a situation. 

While the origin of the virus has many factors, we can demarcate at least two vectors of analysis: the biological and the governmental response. Both, however, are related to the underlying imperative of “biopolitics” to produce a population to be governed. Whereas in the Christian medieval era, the notion of pastoral care was central in the project of forming particular kinds of subjects, Foucault believes that this pastoral project was superseded by biological accounts of the human as the basis of state governance. Hence, Foucault’s argument leaves us with a troubling conclusion: that economics, itself, is not a discourse tracing a truth which pre-exists it as a discourse (a discovery model of truth) but rather what he calls “the market as a site of verediction of truth” or the market as the site of the production of truth.

This has meant that the imperatives for population growth are internal to the international system itself. In order to produce themselves as modern subjects, third world alterity has had to articulate itself in the form of the nation-state. This imperative to produce oneself in a modern way, however, has led to a deepening divide between the rural and industrial populations in China. Furthermore, since the legitimacy of liberal governmentality stems from its ability to produce “bare life,” this leads to a situation where the body itself becomes politicized. Racial and gendered alterity start to organize the state not because of the interests of a particular class, but rather because of how truth itself is conceived in modernity. This is not to say that class interest does not exist, but rather, Foucault would insist that it is not the primary value which organizes the topology of the state. Europe’s ability to declare its supremacy through the invention of human rights required real concrete materials from the third world; and now the construction of third world alterity, in attempting to find justice in its situation and cultivate its own form of the nation-state, has produced a situation which threatens the entire world in common.

Like Simone Weil identified in The Need for Roots, there is a deep need for roots in the human soul. Nevertheless, this deep need for roots, when expressed through force, leads to a never-ending battle of paranoia and blame, and an inability to see how the totality of relations condition each particular perspective to act in their own interest and to justify it through the history of their violence which brought them to that point. The future cannot be built on resentment. Only a common human horizon, one which sees the mutual implication of different cultures in a single technical, economic, and problematic complex – liberal governmentality – a horizon based on the equal dignity of each individual and the unique recognition that each individual should be free to pursue justice in their own way, can shape up to reforming the concept of sovereignty in a way that does not succumb to racism but instead becomes about the inviolability of the human spirit, and the common solidarity that the species has for its ultimate ends in a peaceable world.

As the world responds to the COVID-19 (or coronavirus) pandemic, we’re seeing many opportunities to highlight the anarchist perspective. Right now, mutual aid is the shining star of the last-ditch efforts to minimize the impact on the global north. 

From communities passing the hat for those who are out of work, to neighbors dropping off groceries and other necessities to their immunocompromised neighbors, small, humane networks are picking up the slack of governments the world over. A lot of anarchists are also seeing an opportunity to fight for concessions from the state right now. From rent and eviction freezes, to reduced police presence, and even a potential universal basic income scheme — we’re closer than ever to a lot of big wins. In fact, some have suggested we roll the work stoppage resulting from coronavirus right into a general strike. After all, we’ll have built up fundraising infrastructure to keep us fed while we’re not working, and we’ll have a lot of practice exercising the kind of discipline that makes strikes work. Finally, many anarchists are pointing out the ways in which states have enabled a pandemic situation and all the many many ways the US, in particular, has bungled the response. 

For now, I want to put these broader considerations aside and address a somewhat niche debate going on in market anarchist circles. In a conversation that perhaps could only exist in the market anarchist world, some of us have been taking the libertarian line in defense of price gouging in times of crisis and potential shortage. Others of us, however, see price gouging as ineffective and inequitable and have advocated looting as an optimal crisis response under capitalism. So let’s dig into the debate on the ideal anarchist crisis response, and price gouging in particular. 

The libertarians (and liberal anarchists) make two good points in favor of price gouging (or in  more neutral terms, “emergency pricing”):

• They point out that higher prices can prevent hoarding by signaling to customers that resources are scarce. This preserves some supply for those with greater need. The classic example is ice during a hurricane when power has gone out. Price gouging on ice ensures that someone who needs it to, say, keep insulin cool, is more likely to get it over someone who just wants to chill their beer. 
• Secondly, price gouging stimulates increased local supply, thus preventing shortages. Suppliers ramp up production once it’s financially feasible to produce and transport more product, thanks to higher prices. The prices also signal to suppliers where the resources are needed most, ensuring they get there first. 

This is a heavily consequentialist approach to the problem, but there are other ethical reasons to prefer price increases to other approaches too. In particular, a price approach respects the right of sellers and buyers to set terms of sale on their own.  For many market anarchists at least, this right to truck and trade at will is a right worth protecting. 

Many anarchists note, however, that there’s another solution that doesn’t rely on price mechanisms to prevent hoarding by the wealthy — looting — and they also note that price gouging is not wildly effective at preventing such hoarding in the first place. After all, when the wealthy are so much wealthier than everybody else, they can afford to hoard at higher relative prices. Looting is necessary, they claim, because this allows the poorest among us to access life-saving resources. Remember, while there are non-market institutions that support “the poor” they often leave those most in need in the lurch, especially under the pearl-clutching rules of the American welfare system and in our church-based charity sector.  Looting ensures that people who get kicked off welfare rolls for imbibing unapproved substances, or for being sex workers, or for working too much, have their immediate needs met in times of crisis. 

In the current social context, I think both factions are right: both price gouging and looting must exist simultaneously for the best outcomes for all. Libertarians are correct that stimulating local supply helps to prevent shortages by making it worth it (or even just financially feasible) to transport more product to areas most affected. Price laws should be violated. But so should laws against petty theft. 

Why? Prices — especially when they’re set by large and sometimes nationwide retail corporations — aren’t flexible enough to account for legitimate need and they don’t allow sellers to make humane decisions about who to charge and how much. Why can’t Walmart create a policy whereby prices would be high for all customers reasonably able to pay, but waived for those with legitimate need? Well, they’d have to trust their checkout clerks to make those kinds of calls. As we all know, they barely trust their clerks not to loot the store themselves. Looting allows people in dire situations to meet basic human needs and, while we should not necessarily encourage it, we should absolutely not snitch on looters and shoplifters if we see them and we should resist police responses to such theft as well. In short, we shouldn’t be picking and choosing which laws to break — we should break them all. 

While looting and price gouging are both necessary adaptations to crisis under capitalism, I don’t think they would be in a truly anarchist society. The key change is the elimination of huge, multinational, retail corporations in favor of small, worker-owned and run enterprises. Keep in mind I’m discussing specifically distribution here. I’m not certain whether large scale production with global supply chains would or should exist in a post-capitalist society. Kevin Carson’s recent piece on pandemic risk lays out one case against such large scale production. On the other hand, some ideas from mainstream Austrian economics still hold water for me: namely, that specialization and division of labor are efficient (up to a point) and that global supply chains might have positive knock-on effects in terms of generating a more cosmopolitan outlook. 

Putting that discussion aside, we can focus on localist distribution as divorced (to an extent) from production. After all, small businesses currently often buy their stock (or inputs) from larger, separate, producers. In a crisis, a system of small scale retailers would be able to make snap decisions to waive or discount payment for people they know to be in need. Neighborhood scale distribution makes it a lot easier to tell who these people are and to verify claims of need. And beyond that, there’s the Adam Smith point that physical closeness paired with repeated economic transactions does help to generate fellow-feeling between people in a community, which makes businesspeople more inclined to give their neighbors a break. Similarly, worker ownership empowers clerks to make the call, without the need for long communication chains up and down a corporate bureaucracy. 

Throughout this crisis, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the role small enterprises might play in the unique vision of market anarchists. Not all of us agree, of course, on what counts as small, whether these forms of social arrangement are universally good, or even whether they would be necessary in a post-capitalist world. Indeed, many anarchists would prefer a fully-communal set of economic institutions. Still, it seems clear to me, that the more we can bring decisions down to the human scale, the easier it will be for people to make humane decisions and treat others well. 

An example from my own life is perhaps illuminating here. 

As restaurants close down and working-class people brace for the economic impact of coronavirus, I know many who are either stuck having to work and risk exposure or are without hours and therefore without pay. This is especially true of those who work for larger corporations and multinationals like Walmart and Amazon. I, however, work for a small establishment — a local bar. While it’s far from ideal and there are serious problems with how even this organization runs, I’m lucky right now to work for owners who made the call to close down relatively early and are taking aggressive measures to make sure we as employees continue to get paid throughout the closure. The owners are personally kicking in some money, and they’re working on a to-go only procedure so we can partially reopen soon. Again, there’s a lot left to desire there, but it sure beats working at Walmart right now. 

And this is the heart of the left-libertarian, individualist anarchist, mutualist, and left-wing market anarchist alliance: we cover a spectrum regarding what is and isn’t a proper and desirable market institution. But what we all agree on is this: there is some mix of radical action and market function that makes up the ideal future. We don’t know exactly what the right mix is, but I’m excited to experiment with new social forms and to build a better world together — through looting, through small enterprise, and with every other tool and technology we have at our disposal.

Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 20 marzo 2020 con il titolo Revealed Preference: A Parable. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Tre amici ereditano una casa in campagna da parte di un amico comune. Per questi giovani amici è un sogno che si avvera, stufi come sono della vita in città, ansiosi di coltivare autonomamente quello che mangiano. La casa è grande, bella e ben tenuta. Ha una cucina con diversi angoli cottura, il che è stupendo perché ognuno di loro preferisce cucinare per conto suo. La dispensa è piena, ci sono tanti attrezzi ben fornito e il pozzo trabocca, e ci sono anche ettari coltivati. Ciliegina sulla torta, c’è anche un frutteto che fornisce una gran varietà di frutti e bacche per tutto l’anno. Avocado, noci, pesche, fichi e così via. Non abbastanza per vivere solo di quello, ma abbastanza, una volta diviso in tre, da fare da complemento a tutto quello che coltivano.

Ma subito notano una cosa. Ci sono tre camere da letto, una delle quali è particolare. È quella al piano di sopra, che appare la migliore, mentre quelle di sotto, pur niente male, attirano meno. La stanza di sopra è un po’ più spaziosa, ha ampie finestre su due lati, ha un migliore isolamento acustico e il bagno.

Chi la prende?

I tre sono generosi ma sinceri. Ognuno di loro spiega perché preferisce la camera di sopra.

Amber è un’artista, vuole spazio per dipingere, e di sotto si sentirebbe oppressa. Per lei l’arte è importante e preferisce lavorare in camera.

Brandon è introverso, leggermente depresso, e desidera stare isolato, lontano dallo spazio comune del piano terra; e le due grandi finestre potrebbero essergli di grande aiuto: sole tutto il giorno senza il rischio che qualcuno si affacci.

Chris a volte diventa nervoso e si rinchiude in bagno per ore in una sorta di ritrovo spirituale. Ognuno preferirebbe avere il proprio bagno personale, ma non è giusto nei confronti dei due di sotto che dovrebbero condividere un bagno.

(Taggatevi)

Ognuno di loro tiene tantissimo alle proprie necessità, rinunciare alla stanza di sopra gli costerebbe psicologicamente caro.

Ma sono intimi amici, per cui il problema non degenera in conflitti o egoismi. Ognuno è sinceramente attento ai bisogni/desideri degli altri. Ognuno è pronto a sacrificarsi, ma al tempo stesso desidera fortemente la camera di sopra. I tre parlano, parlano, ma è difficile, parlando, capire chi ha più bisogno, o chi soffrirebbe di più la perdita. Cosa significa che uno desidera “fortemente” la camera? Cosa ha di diverso il suo desiderare “fortemente” rispetto a quello degli altri? I tre amici sono disorientati.

Alla fine, uno di loro trova una soluzione:

“Finora abbiamo dato per scontato che i frutti della terra saranno divisi equamente. E se cambiassimo le porzioni così che chi prende la camera di sopra prende meno?”

L’indignazione è immediata.

“Non si può imporre un prezzo alla salute mentale! È un’offesa. Non è giusto! Non è da amici! Essere buoni amici significa dividere tutto in parti eguali.”

“Va bene, ma nelle condizioni in cui siamo c’è un inevitabile squilibrio. Non possiamo rifare la casa, almeno non in tempi ragionevoli e con le energie e le risorse che abbiamo. Sto solo suggerendo di controbilanciare la cosa.”

“Ma sicuramente qualcuno ha bisogno della camera di sopra più degli altri. E bisogna rispettare questo bisogno, dobbiamo riparare al danno che fa agli altri, non prendergli qualcosa in cambio. Sarebbe una transazione, corromperebbe lo spirito altruistico che comporta la cessione della camera a chi ne ha più bisogno. E poi come facciamo a determinare quanto, in percentuale, ‘vale’ la camera di sopra?”

“Va bene, ma privare gli altri due di quella camera procura loro qualche danno, e noi dobbiamo riparare quel danno. Ogni mese che passa acuisce il danno, che potrebbe essere alleviato con una maggiore offerta di beni. Due hanno più fichi e avocado e il terzo meno. Così riequilibriamo la cosa. Possiamo sperimentare varie percentuali, per capire a quanto uno è disposto a rinunciare per avere la camera. Una frazione dei frutti è qualcosa di reale, tangibile; osservando come funziona il commercio possiamo capire come funzionano le preferenze in un modo che altrimenti, continuando a dire “quanto fortemente” desideriamo qualcosa, non riusciremo mai a capire. Se poi si giudica ingiusto lo scambio, possiamo sempre rivederlo.”

“E questo peggiora le cose, perché ognuno di noi valuta i frutti in maniera diversa. Qualcuno potrebbe attribuire al burro di noci un grande valore e altri nessuno. Qualcuno potrebbe anche rinunciare alla sua quota del frutteto. Per non parlare della differenza tra “frutto e frutto”: vuoi che scambiamo frazioni delle nostre richieste con avocado contro fichi?”

“Bè, io non volevo essere così pignolo giusto per una camera, certo se si guarda nel dettaglio l’accordo diventa troppo fiscale, richiede troppa cura e non ne vale la pena, ma cosa c’è di male se facciamo un po’ di chiarezza riguardo i pro e i contro? E poi non è detto che si debba pagare con frutti della terra; si potrebbe pagare con servizi, lavoro, qualunque cosa.”

“Allora tu vuoi che chi sta di sopra paghi un affitto agli altri due?”

“Ripeto, qui si tratta di compensare la perdita di chi andrà a vivere di sotto. Il punto è che prendendo in esame le possibilità di scambio possiamo trovare un accomodamento tale per cui ognuno trovapreferibile un certo particolare insieme fatto di camera più benefici più servizi. Per cui ognuno guarda alla situazione e preferisce un suo particolare arrangiamento. Un processo a somma positiva, insomma.”

“Per me non si possono generalizzare ‘desiderio’ e ‘danno’. Lo stress causato dall’impossibilità di stare tutto il pomeriggio al sole non può essere ‘compensato’ con qualche torta alla frutta. Si tratta di esperienze diverse, incommensurabili.”

“Ma è proprio così? Certo, per certi versi hai ragione. Ma la coscienza umana segue un filo unico, riduce ogni tempesta cerebrale ad un solo oggetto, ad una sola azione. Nella nostra coscienza individuale, piacere e dispiacere tendono all’unità. Siamo perlopiù unitari. Possiamo provare tanti desideri, ma siamo costretti a convergere su uno solo, o almeno su un certo insieme di desideri. Pensiamo: ‘Vivo una giornata felice?’ E rispondiamo aggregando tutti i piaceri e i dispiaceri della giornata in una sola conclusione, dirigiamo le nostre emozioni in una direzione precisa. Certo, a volte fatichiamo a trovare una conclusione, o a individuare il filo, il cervello è caotico. Ma, detto in termini pratici, siamo individui. Sarebbe interessante esaminare i modi in cui differiamo, ma un’immagine interessante non è necessariamente un’immagine accurata, e non dobbiamo promuovere la nostra eccezione fino a confonderla con l’andamento generale. Generalmente parlando, piacere e dispiacere nella mente vengono soppesate, possiamo compensare l’uno con l’altro.

“Pensiero molto meccanicistico, matematico, rischia di diventare traballante. Prima dici che dobbiamo scambiare la camera con porzioni di raccolto, ora mi sa che vuoi scambiare servizi con frutti per raggiungere un accordo sulle camere. Dove vuoi andare a parare? I nostri rapporti devono diventare materia contrattuale?”

“Il fastidio potrebbe subire la legge dei rendimenti decrescenti. Spesso amicizia significa far finta di non vedere molte cose, almeno le più insignificanti, non tener conto di tante cose che avvengono tra noi. Ma un contratto esplicito è davvero così orribile? Spesso ci sforziamo di rendere il più possibile esplicito il consenso. In questo caso, dato che la posizione della camera sembra essere molto importante per tutti, perché potrebbe avere un impatto quotidiano su ognuno di noi, io sto semplicemente suggerendo uno scambio, così che ognuno di noi, quanto a alloggio, servizi e frutti, senta di aver complessivamente guadagnato, così che non si trovi ad invidiare la situazione di qualcun altro.”

“E io dico che una ‘soluzione’ del genere non solo ci danneggerebbe tutti quanti, moltiplicando le cause di ingiustizia dalle camere alle camere più i servizi più i frutti, ma ci spingerebbe anche a risolvere altre questioni nello stesso modo. È un pensiero contagioso. Cominciamo con poche cose e la finiamo con tutta la proprietà, finché non resta più spazio per i rapporti informali e ogni interazione richiede un mucchio di discussioni. E se i due che stanno di sotto litigano sull’uso del bagno? Dovrebbero trovare un accordo quantificando l’utilizzo del bagno e dividendone il diritto d’uso, o scambiandolo con qualcos’altro? E cosa succede se uno di noi è più furbo nei negoziati? E se scopriamo che qualcuno ha un’indole burocratica ed è fissato con le minuzie di un contratto? Certo, entrambe le parti potrebbero beneficiare, ma, e se una parte beneficia più dell’altra? E poi, come facciamo a far rispettare le regole? E se qualcuno viene sorpreso a prendere più della sua quota di frutti? E se i due al piano di sotto si cronometrano la sosta in bagno e vogliono un risarcimento punitivo per eventuali violazioni? No, è meglio accettare la perdita in partenza. Accettare che una persona vada a beneficiare della camera di sopra e buonanotte. Qualunque altra cosa rischia di creare una spirale di mercanteggiamenti da incubo.”

“Cosa è che ci costringe a dover rispondere di qualcosa? Qualche accordo esplicito per correggere uno sbilanciamento nell’alloggio non dovrebbe cambiare il nostro atteggiamento. Se qualcuno rompe le scatole facendo il fiscale possiamo trattarlo come trattiamo qualunque altro rompiscatole. Non sto dicendo che dobbiamo prostrarci di fronte a qualche nuova divinità, a qualche nuovo regolamento, e obbedire incondizionatamente per sempre, ignorando o perdendo di vista le ragioni per cui abbiamo fatto questa scelta riguardo le camere. Sto solo dicendo che prendere in considerazione uno scambio può essere utile per ridurre i danni fatti a qualcuno e riportare in piano la situazione. Ma guarda dove porta la tua paura di risolvere la questione con uno scambio: ad accettare un equilibrio precario. Certo, c’è il rischio che si esageri con la mania degli accordi, in ogni casa si corrono grossi rischi ad essere troppo fiscali, si finisce per riempire minacciosi tazebao di istruzioni dettagliate su ogni cosa, ma una certa chiarezza è utile, aiuta a mantenere la pace e risolvere le questioni. E se pensi che ci sia malizia tra noi, perché non dici che affidare la cosa a chi riesce ad essere più persuasivo è l’ultima cosa da fare? Potrei capovolgere il tuo discorso e dire che la situazione potrebbe sfuggire di mano, e la poca chiarezza potrebbe dare la possibilità a qualcuno di prendere il sopravvento sugli altri. Sto solo dicendo che l’ipotesi di uno scambio ci consente di far quadrare le cose meglio di quanto non possano fare discussioni sconnesse sui sentimenti e le preferenze. Quando accetti uno scambio perché pensi che ne trarrai beneficio, stai rivelando chiaramente a tutti molto le tue preferenze. Ma l’accordo deve essere reale, deve concretizzarsi in uno scambio con qualcosa che noi riconosciamo come “nostro”, altrimenti possiamo anche dire che fingi e non arriveremo mai a conoscere le tue vere preferenze.”

“E qui ti voglio! Perché tu parli di proprietà e di scambi. Di titoli e di mercati. Già c’è dietro tutta una storia marcia, e marci sono anche quelli che difendono queste cose, ma il fatto è che è abbiamo già fatto l’esperimento. Basta guardare il mondo creato dal capitalismo per capire dove porta il mercato. Secoli di storia dimostrano che il mercato schiavizza e depreda. Quando lasci che qualcuno vanti diritti su qualcosa così da poter mercanteggiare tali diritti con qualcun altro, ecco che si scatena la competizione selvaggia, con tutta la violenza brutale che questo comporta, con sempre più ricchezze nelle mani di pochi e un mondo devastato.”

“Andiamo, sono tutte balle storiche. I mercati sono sempre esistiti perché le persone, praticamente in tutte le società, hanno sempre riconosciuto e rispettato i diritti esclusivi di possesso di certe cose, anche una camera da letto, lasciando che si scambiassero questi diritti. Certo le diverse società hanno adottato il mercato con scopi, norme e meccanismi molto diversi, ma la sostanza di fondo è che tutte hanno adottato il mercato. Il mercato è uno strumento che serve a capire quali sono le reali preferenze delle persone così da arrivare a soluzioni che sono vantaggiose per tutte le parti. Lo scambio può avvenire in molti modi, in maniera molto informale o molto formalizzata, tra stranieri che si scambiano beni personalmente, sul momento, o anche nel tempo sotto forma di prestiti o favori tra membri della stessa comunità. Il vantaggio del commercio è una chiarezza che va oltre le parole della  preferenza rivelata, e in più producono prosperità reciproca e una relazione a somma positiva. Certo, il mercato può essere storpiato e trasformato in qualcosa di violento. Qualunque strumento può essere preso e utilizzato da poteri piramidali e tirannici, compresa la scienza e l’arte. Ma la brutalità del capitalismo non nasce dal mercato. Le enclosure non sono state pianificate da un gruppetto di donne che vendevano verdura al mercato cittadino. Nessun artigiano di nessuna corporazione ha mai fatto soldi a palate con le sue mani o assoldato crumiri. L’orrore del capitalismo è passato per molte strade, il potere è stato edificato da tante parti interessate, spesso passava e si esprimeva attraverso il mercato, così come un sistema di potere può passare ed esprimersi attraverso la letteratura o la tecnologia, ma il suo potere nasce sempre in violente istituzioni sistemiche. E non sono le istituzioni a basarsi sullo scambio a somma positiva ma il contrario.”

“Non so, ma sembra quello che dicono i capitalisti.”

Lascio al giudizio del lettore stabilire quale dei tre protagonisti parlava con chi.

Dico solo che i tre alla fine non decidono di scambiare servizi o frutti con la camera di sopra. Quello che prende la camera di sopra non convince pienamente gli altri, cosa impossibile senza mercanteggiare la forza delle proprie preferenze, e gli altri la cedono più che altro per evitare conflitti e discussioni. Ma l’assenza di chiarezza significa che quelli che stanno in basso ogni tanto faranno qualche casino. Due di loro, però, continuano a guardare con sospetto chi ha proposto lo scambio come soluzione. Perché ogni buona persona di sinistra, ogni giovane, sa che non c’è niente di più subdolo del commercio.

Recently, we recorded a crossover episode of Mutual Exchange Radio with Joel Williamson of Non Serviam Media. As part of that project, our host Zachary Woodman was a guest on the Non Serviam Podcast this month.

You can listen to the episode here.

Episode description: Zachary Woodman is a Master of Philosophy student at Western Michigan University, a market anarchist, and the host of the Center For a Stateless Society’s Mutual Exchange Radio podcast. His research interests include political philosophy, meta-ethics, philosophy of social science, and decision theory. He’s particularly interested in the intersections of anarchist and liberal political theory, the legitimacy of political authority, and the practical implications of philosophical anarchism.

In this interview, we discussed why markets matter, democracy, borders, nationalism, Mutual Exchange Radio, Center for a Stateless Society, and a whole lot more.

Support Non Serviam Media — https://www.patreon.com/nonserviammedia

Support Mutual Exchange Radio — https://www.patreon.com/c4ssdotorg

If you’re involved at all in the micromanufacturing, hardware hacking, or open-source hardware communities, or interested (as I am) in their potential for economic relocalization and for undermining corporate power, you’ve probably seen a story going around about makers in Italy 3D printing valves to keep ventilators running for COVID-19 patients in critical condition. According to an article in Fast Company, a hospital in Chiari, a small town in Lombardy, couldn’t keep ventilators going for its coronavirus patients because it had run out of replacement valves and the manufacturer — Intersurgical — couldn’t supply any more on short notice. Cristian Fracassi and Michele Faini, using equipment at the digital manufacturing lab FabLab, printed out 100 replacement valves at a cost of around one Euro. Since the manufacturer — citing legal and safety issues — refused to release the design files, Fracassi and Faini reverse-engineered the valve design.

Although the tone in maker communities where the story has been circulated has been largely celebratory, it occasioned some debate over safety issues. One person with a background in biomedical engineering, who goes by @turzaak on Twitter, raised the question of whether the materials were biocompatible and whether they were sterilizable. She suspected based on the valve’s appearance that it was printed from Polylactic Acid (PLA) or Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), two common feed stocks used by 3D printer hobbyists. According to @turzaak these materials may be difficult to sanitize, decompose when exposed to moisture, or outgas toxic chemicals.

The actual information available on the safety of the 3D printed substitute is mixed. The Fast Company article may (or may not) provide at least partial assurances on the sanitary and biocompatibility front: “Though this was the first time Lonati SpA has printed something for the medical sector, Faini says the company’s SLS 3D printers can print with PA12, a material that can be sanitized and used for biomedical purposes.” Still, as @turzaak explained in response to my further query, PA12 isn’t used in biomedical devices because it’s a type of nylon and nylons soak up water.

In any case, according to the manufacturer the actual physical design of the printed valves may be suboptimal. “The original pieces work better than the 3D printed ones… because the intricate designs and small holes are difficult to 3D print. Fracassi also denied that the commercial valves were as expensive (10,000 Euros) as reported in some media outlets, although he did not indicate what the actual price was.

A March 14 article at The Verge reported that the unauthorized replacement valves have been used successfully on ten patients so far.

The same general caveats — sanitizing, biocompatibility, toxicity, etc. — also probably apply to older open-source ventilator projects like the Pandemic Ventilator prototype posted at Instructables twelve years ago during the avian flu (see also this). The discussion of materials devotes little or no attention to safety issues, and might well raise any number of red flags based on @turzaak’s long thread on biocompatibility issues involved in respirator design (“Biocompatibility. Basically it means you want materials that a) don’t fall apart, and b) don’t poison/kill when you use them in something that’s gonna interact with the gooey meat stuff.”). This part of the thread, in particular, made me think of the discussion of microcontrollers in the Instructables post:

Say you want to put some fancy electronics in here. What do you reach for? If you said “my spool of wire”, congrats, you possibly will kill someone, unless that spool is gold wire. Copper is toxic. You had better be REALLY SURE about encapsulation or not use it at all…. 

That means your adorable little RPi or Arudino control? Keep it far away from anything bio or dunk it in potting material. So much bare copper.

Naomi Wu (@RealSexyCyborg), a prominent figure in the maker community, raised similar concerns regarding 3D printed masks. The materials lack the flexibility needed for proper facial contact, she said, and the designs are mostly a gimmick to promote 3D printing and “sell unicorn filament.” Sewn cloth masks with bendable wire frames are far more appropriate.

In the debates over open-source ventilator designs and 3D printed parts, some critics have gone so far as to generalize that all regulatory design specifications exist purely for safety reasons, and that disregarding any of them is unethical. I’ve also seen claims that the elevated price of the commercial respirator valves (although what that price actually is seems to be up in the air, as we saw above) is owing entirely to the cost of biocompatible materials and not to patent markups.

Anyone familiar with the centrality of intellectual property to corporate profit models, or to the share of prices made up of embedded rents on intellectual property, will no doubt be skeptical of such assertions (not to say charmed by their naivete). It doesn’t take much of a tinfoil hat to suspect that many of the regulatory design specifications in any industry have more to do with grandfathering in the products of incumbent firms, or suppressing competitive pressures for design innovation, than about safety as such. Consider how much of building codes are written by lobbyists for incumbent contractors to prevent competition from cheaper, vernacular methods, or how zoning and other local regulations are used to protect brick-and-mortar businesses from competition by things like food carts or home-based microenterprises. 

The real difficulty facing any would-be open medical hardware project lies in determining which of the specifications reflect genuine safety concerns, and which reflect corporate interests in enforcing artificial scarcity and using artificial cost thresholds as entry barriers to restrict competition. The best way to do this is to eliminate the stovepiping, and improve communication, between the engineering and hardware communities on the one hand, and the medical user community and biomedical hardware specialists on the other. All these stakeholders need to be integrated into a cohesive p2p community at every stage in the design process, with constant feedback from the end users. That’s supposed to be one of the strong suits of commons-based peer production.

The supply chain disruption from the coronavirus pandemic is demonstrating the necessity of industrial relocalization and production for local use. The high cost of medical equipment and short supply of replacement parts is also showing the usefulness of micromanufacturing and open-source design. In both cases, micromanufacturing can be a lifeline to provide import substitution and increase community resilience in cases where the corporate logistic chains have failed us. But if the maker community jumps in to act as saviors without adequately considering the needs and concerns of its end users — particularly, in this case, safety — or listening to their own technological knowledge when it’s relevant to design, it will have wasted its opportunity.

Note: I am not an engineer or a maker. I didn’t know PLA from ABS until I Googled them. Nothing in this op-ed should be construed as a firm statement of opinion on my part regarding the safety issues around 3D printed ventilator valves or open-source medical equipment design more generally. This is simply my good faith effort to repeat the concerns or arguments of everyone, on multiple “sides” of the debate, who all know far more about the subject than I ever will, and to spark further discussion. I hope I pulled together information from the parties involved in a way that facilitates such further discussion.

Gamestop’s disdain for their workers is well known and the accounts are numerous. Whether it’s their Circle of Life program or low pay, if you work in-store at Gamestop, you’re likely not having a great time. But now the company has gone all-in on their exploitation.

Gamestop has recently responded to coronavirus by trying to deem itself “essential retail” and insisting that their stores stay open and operating during the epidemic. Initially, they required their employees to maintain full operation. Allowing customers to come in, peruse, and purchase as normal. They required that their employees still take trade-ins from customers, even if the customer was exhibiting signs of illness. They promised to provide cleaning supplies and hand sanitizers to their employees. Those supplies never materialized. When questioned on the whereabouts of these supplies, Gamestop corporate replied that the employees were free to go purchase these items with their own money and they would be reimbursed by the company… on their next paycheck.

After considerable public outcry once these heinous requirements were brought to light, and not-coincidentally after the launch events of two highly-anticipated video games that were not canceled or altered to suit the new pandemic landscape, Gamestop finally caved and moved their stores to curbside pick-up for an indeterminate amount of time. They will provide two weeks of pay to employees whose hours are eliminated due to this decision. No word on if they will provide pay to those that opt not to work due to legitimate fears of exposure or to those that become ill in the course of work.

All this, while the corporate leadership is likely working from the security of home. During a conference call to store managers, a member of corporate mentions that their customer service department is not “closed” but is only responding to e-mails. In a clear illustration of corporate ambivalence, this indicates that the office level employees are almost certainly working from home. Safe, sound, and insulated from the masses.

Gamestop expects its employees to endanger themselves so that it can capitalize on the fact that other brick and mortar competition has already complied with the suggested actions to curb the spread of coronavirus. They expect this because they know that their poorly paid employees don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

These workers are held hostage by the unwillingness of capital to put its employees’ safety above its profit margins, and by the incapability and unwillingness of Congress to meaningfully step in on workers’ behalf and provide adequate aid in this time of crisis. Gamestop’s mandate that their employees come to work during this epidemic requires the worker to choose between risk to their physical health and the loss of their financial livelihood. A loss of pay, for even a short period, would prove disastrous for many of these workers, and since there have been no guarantees made by state officials that their needs will be taken care of if they choose to comply with the necessary precautions of social distancing and isolation, then they are left in the lurch by both their employer and their government. 

While Gamestop trades their low-level employees’ safety for a short-term extension of their inevitable demise, the stewards of the state bicker and argue over barely there, insufficient band-aids to a mounting crisis. Meanwhile, the stock market and banks can get access to multi-trillion dollar injections of money to unsuccessfully stave off a crash. Because there are mechanisms in place to allow for emergency aid to capital, but not for the worker. The love affair between capital and the state has never been more apparent.

Gamestop’s anti-worker business practices have only been possible due to the complicity of the state in capital’s suppression of the rights of the worker over generations, forcing workers to be reliant on capital for their livelihood and selling out the negotiating power of the domestic worker by shipping production to wherever labor is the cheapest. The state globalizes the production and distribution chain on behalf of capital interests with no regard to the implications for global physical, environmental, or economic health.

We should not expect that the state will rescue us from a situation in which it is deeply complicit. At best we can expect that capital and the state will put in the minimum amount of effort to keep the majority of people buying into the status quo that they helped create. We are facing a financial crisis to dwarf that of the 2008 recession. If we rely on state authority to carry us through to the other side, at best we can only be guaranteed the same outcome. Bailouts for capital, under/un-employment for the workers.

During this crisis, we should focus our efforts on instituting meaningful alternatives to state reliance. Doing so will not only save lives in the present, the example it would set would undermine the entrenched power structure and help to save lives in the future. The more examples we can provide of community cooperation coming to the rescue of at-risk people, and the more examples we can show of how this crisis is the result of decades of capital and state mismanagement of resources, the more we can chip away at the assumed efficacy of capitalism and the state as a whole. 

If we show people localized, community-driven, cooperative distribution of need and labor, unburdened by and unmoored from the authority of the state, more people will join the ranks of, or at least be more open to, the philosophies of anarchism and socialism. This crisis does present opportunity. But where Gamestop saw opportunity for profit, we should see opportunity for liberation.

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés]

Whenever someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk is attacked from the left for their parasitism, the outcome is as certain — and much swifter — than the return of Halley’s Comet. Without fail, we see a swarm of outraged conservative, libertarian and centrist voices — ranging from Koch-funded op-eds and Stossel columns to bedbug commentaries at the New York Times to bootlickers in the Twitter replies — pointing out that Bezos and Musk are “value creators.” So let’s take a look at that value they create, shall we? 

Did Elon Musk come up with the idea for the electric car, or for the lithium ion battery? Did he even personally design an improved version, or even an improved component, of either of those things? No. The only halfway original thing that can be associated personally with Elon’s creative genius in any real sense is a damnfool unworkable underground tunnel system that impresses nobody but city councils and Twitter sycophants.

Every single car that came out of one of Tesla’s shops, every single component in it — every Tesla shop itself, for that matter — was built by someone other than Elon Musk, using materials that were previously shaped by someone other than Musk and ultimately dug out of the ground by someone other than Musk. The idea of making an electric vehicle more efficient, making a battery more efficient, or producing them more efficiently, was an idea that would occur to most people remotely familiar with the existence of electric cars. And while specific ideas for how these goals might be achieved, and of the most promising research and development paths for achieving them, might occur to a much smaller number of people more closely associated with the electric car industry, I would bet that just about any design engineer working for Tesla had better concrete ideas on the subject than Musk.

The same goes for Bezos. Automated warehouses using RFID tracking, automated logistics chains, and online shopping were all things that existed before Amazon. Much of his overall business model had already been pioneered by Walmart — not by the Walton family, but by engineers and logistics experts in their hire — and tying it together with the rest wasn’t some once-in-a-century insight waiting for a visionary genius on the level of Jeff Bezos to come up with. 

No. Not only the production labor, not only the materials, not only the designs, but even the parts of the overall concepts that required any actual work and expertise and weren’t obvious to anybody, were the doing of people other than Musk or Bezos. The only reason that either of them is spoken of with reverence today is that they had money, or were in a position to be listened to by people with money. Actually setting things in motion required money to prime the pump.

There is a constant flow of goods and services from those whose labor produces them to those who consume them, with the workers in one industry supplying the workers in another industry with the necessities of life they consume, as they in turn produce their own goods for workers in other industries to consume. At no step in the process does any material good ever come from anything but the labor of human beings or from free gifts of nature. At no step does Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos lift a finger extracting materials from the ground, transforming them into goods, or transporting them to anyone else.

What we have, in functional terms — what’s depicted in the upside-down world of capitalist ideology as Musk and Bezos “creating value” through their “investments” — is a system of workers constantly advancing the products of their own labor to each other through a system of mutual credit. This function of advancing liquidity, of priming the pump, is an entirely social function that could be performed cooperatively. There’s no stored up value involved — just a constant horizontal flow of goods and services from one group of workers to the other, as they produce them.

The ideas might occur to any number of people, all the materials and labor come from people other than Musk and Bezos, and in a more rational world the entire operation might have been set in motion entirely for the benefit of those producing and consuming the goods, without Musk or Bezos skimming their hundred billion off the top or making their workers live in RVs and piss in bottles.

But under the rules of the capitalist system that prevails over most of the world, the social function of priming the pump — of providing liquidity to get things moving — is reserved for those who have accumulated large stocks of money. The very function of creating money in the first place is legally limited by law to institutions with some minimum level of capitalization. The expansion of the money supply, the creation of the very medium of liquidity itself, comes from the owners of money lending it into existence, and accumulating more money in the process. And because this class has appropriated the function of financing production, it accumulates even more money through control of the means of production — money which, in turn, becomes the source of further rentier income, and so on. 

These are rules set up in the first place in the interests of those with such large stocks of money, by a state controlled by them, in order to enforce their monopoly over credit and over control of the means of production. To be in a position to prime the pump and set things in motion, you either have to be a billionaire yourself or know how to sweet-talk billionaires. And it goes without saying that all the billions in the possession of billionaires are the returns from previous monopolization of the credit function and from control of the conditions under which workers are allowed to produce.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider the sheer inefficiency this imposes on society, from a design standpoint, in order to enable the owners of capital to extract a surplus from the rest of us. The money function properly understood should be entirely one of horizontal flows, and not of stocks at all. The fact that stocks of any size are a prerequisite for a license to perform the money function — thereby making that function a source of rents for those who own the stocks — is the problem.

What it boils down to is that the function of providing liquidity and keeping things moving — a function that by rights should be organized horizontally and cooperatively as a social commons, with no cost beyond that of administering the zeroes and ones in a database — has been enclosed. And just as the class that enclosed the land commons used their monopoly to extract rents from those who worked it (and continue to so so!), the class that has enclosed the credit and money commons extracts rents from us going and coming.

In 1649 at St. George’s Hill, in England, a group of landless peasants who called themselves the Diggers told the landlords “Your claims to this land are based on robbery, and we declare them null and void.” They tore down the enclosures and began cultivating the land. It’s time for us to do the same with money.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 Rotator Graphic for af.mil. (U.S. Air Force Graphic by Rosario “Charo” Gutierrez)

Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato il 17 marzo 2020 con il titolo Pandemics: The State as Cure or Cause? Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Leggendo le notizie sulla pandemia di COVID-19 (o coronavirus), è difficile non arrivare alla conclusione che si tratta di una di quelle situazioni emergenziali che non possono essere gestite senza ricorrere a costrizioni sociali di larga scala. Cina e Corea del Sud, ridotte a pochi casi quotidiani, sembrano aver passato il picco. Ma ci sono arrivate con controlli sociali draconiani: divieto di viaggiare, restrizioni agli assembramenti e chiusura del traffico.

Ora facciamo qualche passo indietro e chiediamoci perché ci troviamo in questa scialuppa.

La pandemia è, più che altro, il risultato diretto dell’interconnessione. La peste bubbonica che devastò gran parte dell’Europa e il Medio Oriente nel quattordicesimo secolo era una malattia ricorrente veicolata dai topi e limitata alla steppa dell’Asia Centrale finché le carovane che passavano dalla Via della Seta non la portarono nelle aree densamente popolate. In un mondo fortemente interconnesso come il nostro, le pandemie stanno diventando un fenomeno ricorrente con cicli di alcuni anni. La più letale, finora, è stata l’influenza del 1918, ma poi abbiamo avuto la SARS, la MERS, Ebola e l’attuale coronavirus.

Le catene logistiche globalizzate, che connettono le reti produttive e inviano le merci dalle industrie offshore alle attività commerciali del nord del mondo, sono perlopiù creazione dello stato. Secondo Alfred Chandler (The Visible Hand), se negli Stati Uniti non ci fossero state le concessioni territoriali governative e altri sostegni a favore delle ferrovie, tutto l’attuale sistema continentale di linee ad alto traffico, con le conseguenti reti commerciali all’ingrosso e dettaglio, sarebbe stato impossibile. Fu la nascita di questo mercato nazionale unificato a permettere il consolidamento dell’industria in enormi aziende a livello nazionale. Secondo Michael Piore e Charles Sabel (in The Second Industrial Revolution), se queste politiche che non avessero spostato l’ago della bilancia verso la produzione di massa, la produzione di beni in America sarebbe probabilmente avvenuta in distretti industriali locali.

L’esportazione di capitali su larga scala e la delocalizzazione della produzione verso il sud del mondo, proprie di quest’ultimo quarantennio, sono state sostenute attivamente dallo stato a sostegno degli interessi capitalistici. Da decenni, la funzione principale degli aiuti internazionali e dei prestiti della Banca Mondiale è l’incentivazione dei trasporti e delle infrastrutture che rendono economicamente possibile la delocalizzazione. E la delocalizzazione della produzione in paesi a basso reddito dipende fortemente dalle leggi sui brevetti e i marchi commerciali – cuore di quasi tutti gli “accordi di libero commercio” approvati ovunque dallo stato – che danno alle aziende transnazionali il monopolio legale su tutto ciò che viene prodotto in appalto in manifatture indipendenti. E le navi portacontainer possono far quadrare i loro conti grazie alla US Navy che protegge le rotte a spese dei contribuenti.

L’obiettivo principale della politica estera statunitense – e degli altri paesi capitalisti industrializzati – è proprio l’imposizione di tale interconnessione a livello mondiale. Gli Stati Uniti entrarono nella Seconda Guerra Mondiale principalmente perché secondo gli analisti politici di Roosevelt l’economia statunitense dipendeva, pur se in misura minimissima, dai mercati e dalle risorse della “Grande Area” che comprendeva gran parte del sud del mondo, e il Giappone, con la sua “Sfera di mutua prosperità dell’est asiatico”, minacciava di sottrarre una grossa fetta di tale area al mercato globale. L’ordine americano postbellico fu pianificato in modo da assicurare che risorse e mercati delle ex colonie rimanessero integrate nelle economie aziendali occidentali, affinché nessun potere minacciasse di sottrarre una porzione significativa del mondo portandola nell’autarchia.

Lo stesso vale per l’industria dei trasporti aerei e i suoi voli da un punto all’altro del globo. Milioni di persone in tutto il mondo viaggiano quotidianamente su linee commerciali, in quella che è sostanzialmente un’industria creata dallo stato. Negli Stati Uniti, le iniziali infrastrutture dei trasporti aerei civili, come gli aeroporti, il controllo del traffico e tutto il resto, furono messe su con soldi dei contribuenti. I jumbo dell’aeronautica civile diventarono economicamente possibili solo quando il programma di sviluppo dei bombardieri pesanti della Guerra Fredda, nato alla fine degli anni quaranta, fece calare i costi dei macchinari che li producevano.

In breve, quella che chiamiamo “globalizzazione” è un prodotto dell’ingegneria sociale dello stato tanto quanto i piani quinquennali di Stalin: in altro modo, sarebbe stata irrealizzabile. In termini di efficienza, gran parte di questa connettività non è altro che una macchina di Rube Goldberg. La stragrande maggioranza dei beni che compriamo potrebbero essere prodotti più efficientemente in piccole attività vicino a casa nostra. E quasi certamente sarebbe così se non fosse per l’ingegneria sociale che ho appena citato.

Da notare che non mi riferisco solo ai paesi capitalisti industrializzati occidentali. È in fase di costruzione la Nuova Via della Seta, con il proposito di integrare il continente euroasiatico e parte dell’Africa su scala tale da ridurre l’imperialismo occidentale ad una barzelletta.

Non è mia abitudine partecipare a quelle discussioni della sinistra su Twitter, in cui marxisti leninisti e socialisti libertari dibattono se la Cina è capitalista o socialista, se ha intenzioni imperialiste o meno. Qualunque siano le ragioni ideologiche o di classe della Cina, l’obiettivo operativo che alimenta la corsa ad integrare il continente euroasiatico è la connessione, da ottenersi tramite catene logistiche ad alto volume di traffico e infrastrutture dei trasporti che si allungano su mezzo globo. E son sicuro che ad un virus non importa nulla se camion e container sono socialisti o capitalisti.

Il fatto è che lo stato ci ha precipitati in questa emergenza che, apparentemente, solo misure di emergenza attuate dallo stesso stato sono in grado di contrastare.

Certo, ci sono stati più competenti e altri meno. Molto meno. Da quando il coronavirus è giunto negli Stati Uniti, l’atteggiamento di Trump è stato quello di chi crede di essere una macchina inviata da Skynet per sterminare la razza umana. Reagisce alla pandemia esattamente come il sindaco Vaughn reagisce agli squali ne Lo squalo. Molti testimoni raccontano che, non solo ha minimizzato la severità della crisi, ma agli inizi ha anche scoraggiato i test perché un numero basso di infetti fa bene ai mercati e alla sua rielezione.

L’amministrazione Trump ha bloccato l’uso di un test approvato dall’Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità. Ha impedito a Helen Chu, ricercatrice sull’influenza a Seattle, di adattare un test influenzale al coronavirus. La percentuale dei test fatti negli Stati Uniti è bassissima rispetto alla Cina, la Corea del Sud e l’Italia. E ora arriva l’ordine esecutivo che vieta di utilizzare forniture mediche fabbricate all’estero.

Al freddo cinismo, evidente nella messa a repentaglio di milioni di vite per non turbare la sua rielezione, si aggiunge un’incompetenza di dimensioni tali da creare il suo stesso orizzonte degli eventi. A coordinare la risposta c’è il giovane creazionista Mike Pence, affiancato dal genero di Trump Jared Kushner nel ruolo di tuttofare. Ogni volta che Trump apre la bocca, è solo per dare false rassicurazioni o consigli spicci che fanno accapponare la pelle all’intera comunità degli epidemiologi.

Anche in Cina, che ora sembra essere riuscita a fermare l’ondata, l’iniziale insabbiamento sicuramente ha contribuito a peggiorare la situazione. Ma le malefatte della Cina impallidiscono di fronte all’amministrazione Trump, la cui gestione della crisi non sarebbe peggiore se il suo intento fosse di fare il maggior numero possibile di danni.

Anche in Cina l’attività dello stato è stata seguita da reti paritarie autoorganizzate, e fortemente integrata con queste. Generalmente, avviene così in tutte le società colpite da un disastro; è questa la trama di A Paradise Built in Hell, di Rebecca Solnit. Willow Brugh, esperto che studia come le comunità rispondono ai disastri, ha molto da dire sull’argomento.

Dunque, se ammettiamo che costrizioni di massa hanno stabilizzato la situazione in Cina e in Corea del Sud, è però vero che altre costrizioni di massa – durate secoli, in tutto il mondo – hanno creato quell’insieme di circostanze contro cui cui ora le istituzioni statali reagiscono.

Quel che è peggio, è che le stesse costrizioni di massa stanno operando al fine di impedire soluzioni astatuali alle pandemie, esponendoci così maggiormente ad esse.

Su Reason, Nick Gillespie dichiara fiduciosamente che “ci sono tutte le ragioni per credere che i normali cittadini americani stiano facendo tutto il loro dovere possibile per limitare la diffusione della malattia, da una maggiore attenzione per l’igiene ad un volontario ‘isolamento sociale’ e una riduzione del contatto personale.” Ma la realtà è che, molto più che in altri paesi occidentali governati dallo stesso sistema salariale e dalla concentrazione dei mezzi produttivi, le richieste di datori e padroni vanno in direzione esattamente contraria a questo isolamento sociale.

La stragrande maggioranza degli americani che cercano di affrontare la pandemia trovano che è pressoché impossibile applicare misure di buonsenso. Molti hanno un lavoro precario e se dovessero assentarsi per ragioni di sicurezza, sempre che possano permetterselo, verrebbero licenziati. Ipoteticamente. Già, perché la stragrande maggioranza dei lavoratori a paga bassa – camerieri, commessi di negozi d’abbigliamento, chi assiste malati e anziani e così via, ovvero le persone più esposte al rischio di contrarre malattie infettive – non ha il congedo per malattia, deve scegliere tra lavorare con la malattia e finire per strada.

Comunque, se è vero che lo stato può aiutarci a venir fuori dai pasticci in cui ci ha ficcato, è pur vero che l’azione astatuale ha un ruolo importantissimo nel limitare i danni causati dalle reazioni maldestre dello stato.

Una delle forme più importanti di controllo del danno, se non la più importante, è il mutuo soccorso di chi non può permettersi di andare in quarantena. Occorre, tra le altre cose, organizzare un sostegno finanziario e materiale per chi non ha diritto al congedo per malattia. Ma anche di fare pressione di massa sui datori di lavoro, sui padroni e su chi gestisce i servizi, e poi di organizzare boicottaggi e manifestazioni di solidarietà per chi è stato sfrattato, e per chi è costretto a lavorare malato o non ha il congedo per malattia. Molte istruzioni su come praticare il mutuo aiuto e la solidarietà si possono trovare qui.

Considerate le possibilità, però, la gamma di risposte all’attuale pandemia è nel migliore dei casi limitatissima, e consiste perlopiù nella limitazione dei danni. Fondamentalmente, la risposta dovrebbe essere incentrata attorno ad azioni di lungo corso, per evitare che azioni di questo genere si ripetano o per ridurre la nostra vulnerabilità.

Tra le cose da fare: riportare la produzione a livello locale, passare da un sistema salariale ai beni comuni gestiti secondo i principi dell’economia sociale, mettere su reti di mutuo soccorso per condividere rischi e costi. Serve un’economia meno connessa, meno roba che viaggia per migliaia di chilometri, meno persone che prendono l’aereo ogni giorno; un mondo in cui chi svolge un lavoro non indispensabile può stare a casa e assentarsi senza chiedere il permesso a un capo e senza rischiare di finire sulla strada. Ciò che dobbiamo fare per creare finalmente una società post-statuale e post-capitalista, è ciò che le urgenze di questa crisi probabilmente già ci spingono a fare sempre più.

In Accumulation Crisis James O’Connor scrive che in periodi di bassa, con forte disoccupazione o sottoccupazione, la gente soddisfa i propri bisogni ricorrendo all’economia informale e domestica. In periodi di crisi permanente e strutturale, come quella che vive il capitalismo da decenni, lo spostamento verso forme diverse di economia tende a diventare permanente.

Le ultime crisi economiche hanno coinciso con un certo progresso tecnologico in fatto di strumenti produttivi a basso costo e di piccola scala, adatti alla produzione in un’economia sociale. Già negli anni settanta, teorici anarchici come Colin Ward e Karl Hess parlavano di piccole attività a livello locale con macchinari e strumentazioni condivise al fine di riparare e rimettere in funzione apparecchiature guaste. Keith Paton, in uno scritto indirizzato alla Claimant’s Union in Gran Bretagna nel 1072, consigliava ai disoccupati di creare piccole attività, una sorta di fabbriche di comunità, al fine di produrre per il consumo proprio e altrui.

Da allora, i costi degli strumenti a controllo digitale adatti a piccole officine è calato di un ordine di grandezza, se non di più, mentre le capacità operative sono cresciute. La rivoluzione Makerspace, iniziata una ventina d’anni fa, comprende, tra le altre cose, il Global Village Construction Set, un ecosistema fatto di strumenti produttivi open-source sviluppati dal gruppo Open Source Ecology visibili presso il sito dimostrativoFactor e Farm. Alcune di queste macchine da banco (plotter da taglio, router, stampante 3D e altro) hanno un costo alla portata di molte officine comunitarie; altri macchinari, come il forno a induzione, il forno per la rifusione dell’alluminio e altro, probabilmente richiedono la condivisione dei costi tra più officine. In ogni caso, si tratta di macchinari molto meno costosi delle loro controparti industriali, e messi assieme possono produrre ciò che un tempo si poteva produrre solo con impianti industriali per la produzione di massa e investimenti superiori a un milione di dollari.

Aggiungiamo poi che molte persone già possiedono apparecchiature sottoutilizzate, come trapani, macchine da cucire e altro, che, condivise, possono eliminare gran parte degli acquisti fatti con il nesso di cassa. Parlo di librerie di strumenti per condividere apparecchiature sottoutilizzate, che consentono di risparmiare soldi evitando di acquistare due volte la stessa cosa; produzione casalinga per la zona (pane, alcolici, impianti idraulici, elettrici, e altro) utilizzando le attrezzature che già si hanno in casa; trasporti condivisi, assistenza ai bambini o agli anziani senza fini capitalistici; orti comunitari. Tutto questo, messo assieme, può ridurre di molto la necessità di avere un salario costante e creare un certo margine d’indipendenza.

È (come minimo) dai tempi dei primi scioperi nella Gran Bretagna di inizio ottocento che la gente ha imparato a mettere in opera le proprie capacità e i propri strumenti, così da poter produrre in maniera indipendente e scambiarsi i beni così prodotti pagando con moneta che rappresenta il tempo di lavoro impiegato (labor notes). Tra i tanti esempi, la Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization e la Unemployed Exchange Association dei tempi della Grande Depressione americana.

Lo stesso principio vale per la condivisione di risorse da usare in caso di calamità e, in un’economia solidale, per aiutare chi è disoccupato. Durante il crash del 2007-08 e immediatamente dopo, è venuta la proposta da parte di molti di istituire contro-istituzioni che facciano da cuscinetto per disoccupati e sottoccupati contro i peggiori effetti della Grande Recessione. Dougald Hine e Nathan Cravens proposero allora un insieme di organizzazioni sostenute comunitariamente: spazi di lavoro condiviso come Media Labs e Fab Labs, risorse per orti comunitari indipendenti e gli Open Cafe a loro associati. A quei tempi suggerii di ampliare lo schema alle case: coabitazione a basso costo, open-source, minimale, magari sul modello degli ostelli del YMCA, parchi per roulotte con reti idriche e elettriche, oppure campi di proprietà pubblica ma gestiti da migranti secondo l’esempio descritto da Steinbeck in Furore.

Un punto a favore di tutte queste soluzioni è la maggiore efficienza. Per secoli il capitalismo è cresciuto in un ambiente fatto di terre e risorse a costi tenuti artificialmente bassi, risultato di appropriazioni e colonizzazioni a cui si aggiungono socializzazione di costi e rischi, sprechi a spese altrui, e un modello industriale pensato in modo da massimizzare la produzione e incorporare obsolescenza al fine di tenere in movimento la produzione. Attualmente il capitalismo affonda sotto una montagna di costi amministrativi ed è piagato da problemi di informazioni e incentivi dovuti alla proprietà assenteista e alle strutture di controllo piramidali. In una controeconomia, invece, tutti i benefici vanno a chi contribuisce allo sforzo e alla conoscenza piuttosto che a chi estrae rendita. Essendo autogestita e organizzata su una base paritaria che agisce perlopiù senza dover chiedere permessi, i suoi costi amministrativi sono nulli. Infine, è costretta a ricavare il massimo con il minimo di risorse disponibili, come un cane randagio, tanto da poter vivere anche degli scarti dell’economia capitalista.

La superiore efficienza di un’economia basata sui beni comuni è ciò che, per dirla con Vinay Gupta, permette di “acquistare al prezzo più basso”.

“Fare di più con meno” è il metodo consigliato da Fuller per arrivare all’autosufficienza con un capitale minimo. È un approccio basato su una filosofia totale integrata che consente uno stile di vita sostenibile; la casa, gli attrezzi agricoli, i sistemi di controllo, tutto è progettato ispirandosi al pensiero di Fuller e di altri che miravano all’efficienza. Con il vecchio stile di vita, gli sprechi bruciavano il 90 percento del lavoro produttivo.

Mille dollari al mese in combustibili significano la tua vita che finisce nella spazzatura, perché il posto dove vivi ti succhia l’esistenza con perdite di calore, che significano perdite di soldi, che significano perdite di tempo. L’auto, la casa, quella parte delle tasse che lo stato spende in combustibili, elettricità, sprechi energetici… il tempo utilizzato per guadagnare quei soldi è sprecato perché si tratta di sistemi inefficienti, niente affatto ottimali!

Allargando lo sguardo, possiamo vedere i nuovi movimenti municipalisti europei di Barcellona, Madrid, Utrecht e Preston, quelli statunitensi di Cleveland e Jackson, e movimenti correlati, come quello zapatista nel Chiapas e quello di derivazione bolivariana di tipo comunalista e di vicinato in Venezuela: si tratta in ogni caso di movimenti impegnati nella edificazione di economie locali integrate basate sui beni comuni.

Un’economia del genere, pienamente sviluppata a livello di comunità, potrebbe allargarsi fino a comprendere mini attività produttive e hackerspace, concessioni di terreni su cui costruire condomini a basso costo con materiali tradizionali o con tecnologie ultraeconomiche come la stampa 3D, ma anche cooperative di ridesharing, wi-fi cittadino gratis, spazi in cui lavorare liberamente assieme, chioschi, valute comunitarie e molto altro.

Intanto il capitale si ritrova a far fronte alle vulnerabilità del capitalismo just-in-time con una gamma di incentivi radicalmente mutati. Le catene logistiche globali sono estremamente vulnerabili alla pandemia, di cui tra l’altro sono la causa principale. Due esempi in sé minori: John Feffer, presso Foreign Policy in Focus cita una conversazione con un architetto a cui è impedito di fornirsi dai cinesi. In un negozio di articoli per l’orticoltura, ma che vende vari prodotti per l’autosufficienza, mi hanno detto che non potevano portare stufe a legna a tempo indeterminato per la stessa ragione.

Le interruzioni, i crolli a intermittenza delle fragili catene di fornitura globali, porteranno probabilmente ad una forte rilocalizzazione produttiva. Così scrive Andrew Nikiforuk su The Tyee:

Vista con gli occhi di chi cerca di vivere con i cambiamenti climatici, la pandemia dà qualche buona notizia. La ridotta attività economica cinese, il principale consumatore di petrolio, ha già significato una riduzione del 25% dei gas serra e cieli blu. Il traffico delle portacontainer si è dimezzato, da 200 a 100 al mese. Le vendite di automobili sono calate dell’80% e le esportazioni sono calate di quasi il 20%.

In questi termini, il virus già ci prepara a quella che potrebbe essere la nuova realtà. Per combattere l’emergenza climatica dobbiamo rallentare l’attività economica, ridurre il traffico commerciale, rilocalizzare l’economia e limitare fortemente i viaggi.

Dal punto di vista dell’efficienza, le catene logistiche globali che si estendono dalle fabbriche di Shenzhen agli scaffali della Walmart in California sono pura assurdità. Gran parte delle macchine usate nelle fabbriche cinesi, macchine a controllo numerico, sono particolarmente adatte alla produzione mirata al mercato locale secondo il modello dei distretti industriali. L’unica “efficienza” data dalle catene di fornitura transoceanica è la possibilità di accedere a manodopera a basso costo. Altrimenti, la scelta più efficiente sarebbe ignorare brevetti e marchi delle aziende occidentali per cui si produce in appalto, continuare a produrre le stesse cose senza il marchio Swoosh o Apple, e venderle alla popolazione locale, ad un prezzo che riflette i costi di produzione ma senza i mostruosi sovrapprezzi della proprietà intellettuale. Attività simili, in un’economia rilocalizzata, potrebbero produrre direttamente per la comunità negli Stati Uniti.

Ricordo che già nel 2008 le dirigenze cinesi presero seriamente in considerazione questa possibilità. Forse stavolta avverrà la magia. Ora che le catene logistiche si interrompono e diventano imprevedibili, è il momento, per noi che stiamo da questa parte della catena, di ricostituire la produzione a livello locale.

Tutto quello che per anni è stato liquidato come impossibile o irrealistico, tutte quelle regole che sono state spacciate per inamovibili, tutto ciò viene radicalmente rivisto e ripensato in queste settimane. Per una vita ci hanno detto che questa scarsità artificiale, questa irrazionalità, fa parte della natura delle cose e non può essere cambiata. E ora tutto crolla in un soffio.

Ad esempio, dopo aver diffuso per vent’anni false promesse parlando di telelavoro e teleconferenze, ecco che ora si corre a adottarne tutte le potenzialità per ragioni sanitarie. Tutti quei lavori che per anni si è continuato a fare di persona, pur potendo usare le fibre ottiche, ora si fanno o ci si prepara a farle in connessione. E le comunità locali impongono moratorie degli affitti.

Sarebbe bello se la gente si abituasse a queste misure “straordinarie” o “d’emergenza”, misure che sono sempre state fattibili. Dovrebbero diventare la norma. Non accettiamo il ritorno al passato.

La pandemia di coronavirus, con il tanto atteso rallentamento economico che ha causato, è l’evento imprevisto il cui risultato ancora non si conosce. Un’infinità di sistemi estremamente complessi ed estremamente interconnessi si interrompe, i tempi sono propizi, tutto potrebbe ricristallizzarsi in una struttura diversa.

L’ultima crisi di questa portata fu la Grande Recessione del 2008, e da allora è accaduto l’impensabile. Moltissimi ventenni votarono per Obama affascinati dalla sua retorica finto progressista, salvo poi essere pugnalati alle spalle. Invece di salvare gli indebitati, i lavoratori, i consumatori, invece di ristrutturare l’economia, salvò le banche e l’industria dell’automobile, riportò la situazione allo status quo ante. La generazione tradita diede vita ad Occupy, Black Lives Matter e NoDAPL, fino alla rivolta scatenata da Sanders nel 2016 e oggi. Da dieci anni vivono di lavori precari, fanno eterni apprendistati gratis, sono tornati a vivere dai genitori. Sono stati presi in giro e ignorati dai dirigenti neoliberali, hanno visto due volte il sistema sabotare il loro tentativo di penetrare le primarie dei democratici.

Secondo tutti gli indicatori, ci stiamo dirigendo verso un’altra Grande Recessione, o peggio. Quasi tutti sotto i quarant’anni condividono la stessa esperienza formativa fatta di ripetuti tradimenti da parte delle istituzioni. Se l’ultima crisi ci ha dato Occupy e Bernie Sanders, credo che la prossima sarà inimmaginabile. Stavolta la gente non avrà la stessa pazienza, non si accontenterà delle stesse mezze misure. Siamo stufi di farci fregare.

Alla fine ci ritroviamo con tutti questi sistemi complicati che non funzionano più, e una grossa porzione della popolazione che è stufa, che cerca qualcosa di nuovo a tutti i costi. Quale nuova configurazione emergerà quando si ristabilirà l’ordine? Non si sa. Credo però che quello che ho detto più su in fatto di rilocalizzazione economica e produzione diretta per l’uso con beni comuni rappresenti un’ipotesi tra le tante riguardo la direzione del cambiamento. Comunque sia, ci troviamo in un punto di svolta, questo è il momento per spingere il cambiamento nella direzione giusta.

Come potrebbe essere questa spinta?

Ho letto di recente New York 2140, di Kim Stanley Robinson, un romanzo che parla proprio di una svolta. Milioni di persone che vivono precariamente in una Lower Manhattan allagata subiscono un uragano che costringe migliaia di loro ad andare a vivere in accampamenti d’emergenza a Central Park. Sempre più stufi per la mancanza di alimenti e di igiene, la folla migra verso Upper Manhattan, dove grattacieli residenziali con centinaia di piani sono vuoti, tenuti come investimento immobiliare da proprietari assenteisti. Forze di sicurezza mercenarie al soldo dei proprietari aprono il fuoco sui rifugiati climatici che cercano rifugio negli edifici vuoti.

Amelia Black, figura popolare che su internet produce un programma seguito da centinaia di milioni di spettatori, condivide un video che fa vedere la devastazione ripresa dall’alto, quindi i palazzi residenziali vuoti e infine i mercenari che sparano sulla folla dei diseredati. E conclude così:

Sapete cosa vi dico? Mi fanno schifo i ricchi. Mi fanno schifo questi che scorrazzano per il pianeta pensando solo ai propri affari. Lo stanno distruggendo! Io credo che dobbiamo riprendercelo e curarlo. E prenderci cura gli uni degli altri perché tutti facciamo parte del mondo. Niente più briciole. Ricordate quel Sindacato delle Famiglie di cui vi parlavo? Penso che sia tempo che ognuno di noi ci si iscriva, per poi fare lo sciopero. E che tutti scioperino. Penso che tutti dovrebbero scioperare. Ora. Oggi…

Per sciopero delle famiglie intendo smettere di pagare l’affitto e il mutuo… e magari anche il prestito scolastico e l’assicurazione. Tutti quei debiti che avete contratto semplicemente per tenere voi stessi e la vostra famiglia al sicuro. Insomma, per le necessità quotidiane. Il sindacato dice che tutti quei debiti sono una cosa odiosa, sono come un ricatto contro di noi, e noi chiediamo che vengano rinegoziati… Smettiamo di pagare e dichiariamo il giubileo? … È una parola antica. Dopo aver dichiarato il Giubileo, e finché non ci sarà una ristrutturazione che annulli gran parte del debito, non pagheremo nulla.

Voi direte che se non pagate finite nei guai, e così è se è solo qualcuno a farlo. Ma quando lo fanno tutti è uno sciopero. Disobbedienza civile. Una rivoluzione. Ecco perché tutti devono partecipare. Non è difficile. Basta non pagare le bollette!

Noi subiamo una pandemia mondiale che è il risultato diretto di un sistema capitalista globale interconnesso impostoci dallo stato. Oltre ad uccidere milioni di persone, costringe altri milioni tra i più vulnerabili a scegliere tra il contagio e la disoccupazione o la strada. E sta scatenando una crisi economica che molto probabilmente produrrà ancora più disoccupazione e sfrattati. La gestione di questa crisi, che è il risultato di un insieme di circostanza create dalla violenza dello stato, potrebbe richiedere inevitabilmente una qualche azione da parte dello stato.

Fate quello che sentite di dover fare per superare la crisi. Servitevi di qualunque aiuto lo stato vi offra. Rispettate i provvedimenti statali che appaiono sensati, come la quarantena e l’astensione dagli assembramenti. Se le pressioni dello stato costringono il vostro datore di lavoro a offrirvi un congedo pagato per malattia, o se l’amministrazione locale impone una moratoria degli affitti, approfittatene.

E speriamo che tutti gli espedienti che adottiamo per sopravvivere a questa crisi, per aiutare gli altri a farcela, diventino i semi di una nuova società in cui ognuno di noi possa vivere senza la paura che tutto ciò possa ripetersi.

Three close friends collectively inherit a house in the country from a departed mutual friend who built it. It’s a dream come true for these young friends, sick as they are of city life and longing to grow their own food. The house is big, gorgeous, and well-maintained. It has a large multifaceted kitchen, which is great because the friends prefer to cook separately. There’s a large stash of supplies, much equipment, a overrunning well, and acres for growing crops. To make matters better there’s a small orchard of genesliced trees that provide a variation of fruit and nuts throughout the year. Avocados, walnuts, peaches, figs, etc. Not enough to get by on exclusively, but — divided three ways — enough to provide a nice complement to whatever the friends grow with more active labor.

But as the friends survey the house they come to a realization. There are three bedrooms, but they are not of equal character. The upstairs bedroom is generally perceived to be the superior room, while the two downstairs bedrooms, although fine in their own right, are less enticing. The upstairs room has a bit more space, expansive windows on both sides, better sound insulation, and its own bathroom.

Who should have it?

The friends are nothing if not charitable and honest. Each explains why they would prefer the upstairs room.

Amber is an artist and desires the additional floorspace for her painting, she would feel crunched in the downstairs rooms by comparison. Her art is deeply important to her and she prefers to work in her own room.

Brandon is an introvert with slight depression and desires the silence of its insulation from the common space on the ground floor, he also finds the big windows on both ends incredible helpful — sunlight at all times of day, without the risk of people looking in.

Chris can be something of an anxious mess and finds comfort and spiritual reward in many hour long private baths; they would deeply prefer to have their own bathroom, and it wouldn’t be fair to the other person sharing the downstairs bathroom.

(Tag yourself.)

Each of the three friends feels their own need quite intensely, and each indicates a cost to their mental health in being deprived of the upstairs room.

These are, however, close friends, and so the problem doesn’t spiral out into conflict or selfish positioning. Each is sincerely attentive of the others’ desires/needs. Each is willing to sacrifice, but at the same time feels their own desire for the room sharply. The friends talk and talk, but it is hard to — by mere talking — figure out who’s desire is stronger, or for whom the loss would be harder. What does it mean that someone ‘very much’ desires the room? How does that compare to someone else saying ‘very much’ as well? The friends are flummoxed.

Eventually one of them hits upon a possible solution:

“Right now we’re all assuming we’ll take equal shares of the fruit and nuts produced in our orchard. What if we changed the percentages so that the person who takes the upstairs room gets less?”

Immediate outrage follows.

“You can’t put a price on mental health! It’s offensive. It’s not charitable! It’s not friendly! Surely being good friends means dividing everything equally.”

“Okay, but we’re in a situation with an unavoidable imbalance. We can’t take the house apart, at least not in any reasonable period of time and with the energy and resources we have. I’m simply suggesting we create a counter-balance.”

“But there’s surely someone who needs the room more strongly than the others. And that need should be respected, we should be endeavoring to repair the damage done to them by that need, not take something away from them in exchange. That would make it transactional, and corrupt or undermine the charity involved in giving the room to the person with the greatest need. And how are we to establish what percentage difference the upstairs room is ‘worth'”

“Okay, but taking the room away from the other two people still incurs damage upon them, surely we should seek to repair that damage. Every month they will feel some additional annoyance or pain at not having the upstairs room, but to have that offset by additional nuts and fruits might salve the damage. Two housemates get more fig spread and avocado toast, the other housemate gets less. In this we restore balance. We can go through possible percentages and see what people would be willing to sacrifice the room at what percentage loss of the orchard bounty. A fraction of fruits and nuts is a real, tangible thing; through considering trades we get a glimpse of someone’s actual preferences, in a way that talking in circles about “how intense” you desire something will never truly reveal. And if this exchange rate is later felt to be unfair we can revisit it, trading rooms again at possibly different rates.”

“This is just making the situation worse, because surely we each value nuts and fruit differently. Some of us may enjoy walnut butter strongly, others not at all. One person may be totally fine to surrender their percentage of the orchard’s bounty. This is to say nothing of the differences that exist within the category of “fruits and nuts” — are you going to have us trading fractions of our claims to avocados versus figs?”

“Well I wasn’t going to get quite so fine-tuned over just a room, I agree that at some level of detail an agreement becomes too legalistic and too attention-consuming to be worth anyone’s time, but where’s the harm in making some tradeoffs a little more explicitly with one another? And of course the remuneration for the upstairs room doesn’t have to come from a portion of the fruits and nuts harvest, it could simply take the form of chores, or labor in the garden, any number of things.”

“Oh so you would have the person in the upstairs room pay RENT to the rest of us??”

“Well again, this is to remunerate the cost inflicted upon the downstairs housemates for their living situations. The point here is that through considering possible trades we can find a situation where everyone prefers their current particulars of room + benefits + chores. Where each person looks at a trade and prefers opposite sides. A positive-sum situation.”

“I flatly deny that ‘desire’ or ‘harm’ can be generalized. A stress from not being able to take full-afternoon baths is not ‘repaired’ by extra peach cobbler. Those are separate and incommensurate experiences.”

“Are they though? Sure, you’re right to some degree. But human consciousness is a very real sense a single thread, whatever messy storm of things happen inside our brains, they tend to congeal to a single narrative, a single direction of action. Pleasure and irritation follow this same path to unity in our conscious experience as individuals. We are largely unitary. In every moment we experience many desires, but are forced converge on a single one, or at least a single arrangement of desires. We think ‘are we having a good day?’ and answer that by aggregating all the delights and troubles of the day into a single conclusion, a single direction to our emotion. Sure, sometimes we have trouble reaching conclusions or even a single thread of consciousness, the brain is a messy place. But we are individuals, practically speaking. It may be interesting to examine the ways we diverge from such, but a more interesting picture is not the same thing as a more accurate picture, and we must not promote exceptions in our attention until we confuse them with general trends. Generally speaking irritation and delight are weighed against one another in our minds, can outweigh one another.”

“This is a very mechanistic and mathematical way of thinking and it risks running rampant. At first you said you wanted us to trade rooms for fractions of our fruit and nut harvest, now I feel you’ve walked into trading chores for fruits and nuts as well as to settle room placements. Where does it stop? Should our every interaction as roommates become a contractual affair?”

“Well, I have noted that I agree there can be diminishing returns to fastidiousness. Much of friendship is being able to relax in our attention to one another, or at least redirect it from the trivial, to not keep close account of many of our interactions. But are explicit contracts always that terrible? Consent is often something we endeavor to make very explicit. In this case because the room placement seems to matter quite strongly to everyone, will possibly have daily impacts upon each of us, I’m merely suggesting that we work out a trade in this instance so that each of us feels better off, preferring our housing situation and chores or orchard shares so that we wouldn’t prefer the bundle another person has.”

“And I’m saying that not only would such a ‘resolution’ do damage to us all by expanding the overall number of situations of inequity from just rooms to rooms as well as chores and the orchard, it would also make it acceptable to solve other problems the same way. It’s an infectious way of thinking. One day the space of things we explicitly trade is small, the next day it might consume the entire house. Until there’s no more space for the informal, where every interaction between us requires an increased amount of attention. What if the downstairs housemates get into a conflict over bathroom use? Should they likewise settle their dispute by measuring usage and dividing up rights, trading them against something else? And what happens if someone is simply better at negotiation? What if one of us is revealed to have a more bureaucratic soul and fixates on contract minutia. Sure both parties may benefit in these trades, but what if one consistently benefits more? Lastly how is any of this going to be enforced? What if we catch one of us stealing more than their share of figs from the orchard? Or the downstairs housemates time each others’ bathroom breaks and seek punitive damages for contract violation? No, it’s better if we just take a loss from the start. Accept that one person is going to benefit from the upstairs room, and move on. Anything else risks starting a cascading nightmare of trades.”

“What holds any of us accountable to anything? Some more explicit negotiations to correct a room imbalance don’t have to change our character. If one of us turns into a greedy and legalistic little ass we can deal with that the same way we’d deal with any other misbehavior. I’m not proposing we all fall prostrate before some new god, some new absolute set of rules and heed to them forever and absolutely — ignoring or losing track of the motivation we have for embracing this solution to the rooms — I’m just saying that considering trades for the upstairs room is a useful tool here to reduce the damage done to a few folks and equalize the situation. But note what course of action your fear of trade resolves to in this situation: accepting a decidedly unequal status quo. Sure we could go overboard with explicit agreements — every household knows the risk of too much explicitness, something like a giant hyper-detailed chore board with passive aggressive notes — but some degree of explicitness is useful, it helps clear the air and settle problems. And if you’re going to assume malintent among the three of us, why not consider how leaving things up to who argues more persuasively for the upstairs room in a collective conversation is its own can of worms? I could spin another tale here, mirroring yours, about potential runaway situations where a lack of explicitness in agreements provides space for someone to seek and gain power. I’m merely saying that proposing trades allows us to have the rubber meet the road in a way that disconnected conversation about our feelings and preferences doesn’t. What trade you’ll accept because you feel like you’d benefit from it is a powerful way to reveal to everyone your actual preferences. And those trades have to actually be real — concretely actualizable in a change of what the rest of us recognize as “yours” — or else you could lie and we’d never really have comparable knowledge of your actual preferences.”

“I’ve caught you outright! You’re really talking about property and trade. Titles and markets. Never mind the rotten pedigree of that argument, never mind the horrible people who usually trot out defenses of those, the fact of the matter is we’ve done this experiment. One need only look at the world capitalism built to see where markets get everyone. Thousands of years of history are in: markets enslave and pillage. Once you allow people to claim things and trade their claims to them with one another you get runaway competition, with all the brutal violence that implies, ever growing spoils to the few victors, and a ravaged world.”

“Oh come on, that’s just historically inaccurate as fuck. Markets have existed throughout human history because humans in virtually every society have recognized and respected people’s exclusive title to some things — like a bedroom — and also let them exchange these titles with one another. Sure, different societies varied strongly in what they embraced markets in — the scope, norms, and mechanisms of those markets — but they virtually all embraced markets. Trade is a useful tool for resolving what people’s actual preferences are and the creation of mutually beneficial resolutions. Trade can take place in all sorts of ways, trade can be very informal or highly formalized, it can happen in a moment between strangers directly handing goods between one another, or over a period in the form of loans or favors between established community members. The benefit of trade is both the clarity beyond language provided by revealed preference and the mutual flourishing of positive sum relationships. Markets can be deformed and enslaved into sites of brutality, certainly. Any tool can be captured and used by hierarchies and tyrants, science and art included. But the brutalities of capitalism did not arise from markets. No gaggle of women trading vegetables in the town marketplace schemed the enclosures into existence. No guild artisan built runaway wealth from his own hand and hired strike breakers. The horrors of capitalism had many mechanisms, its power was built from many invested parties, it often flowed through and was expressed in the marketplace, just as systems of power can flow through and be expressed in literature or engineering, but its power originated always in systemic institutions of violence. Institutions not predicated on the positive sum transaction, but the reverse.”

“I dunno, sounds like what a capitalist would say.”

I will leave it to the reader’s biases to judge which housemate in this parable was which interlocutor.

Suffice to say that obviously the friends did not decide to trade chores or orchard shares for the upstairs room. The friend who got the upstairs room did not convince the others cleanly, as that was impossible without a trade to test everyone’s strength of preference, the others ceded it mostly to avoid conflict and further discussion. But the lack of clarity around the decision meant that those stuck with the downstairs room would every so often fester a little. Mostly though, two of the friends were suspicious of the roommate who had proposed a trade as a resolution. Because every good leftist or young person knows there’s nothing more insidious than trade.

Resistance to our oppressors can often seem like a monumental, if not impossible task. Facing off against massive police and military institutions can make any means we employ to resist them seem pointless. However, it is my contention that it is possible to resist even the greatest institutions of domination within our times, not by facing them head on, but by resisting them on our own terms, with our own power. No greater example of this can be found than in the resistance of Arminius to the Roman Empire. 

The Roman Empire (27 B.C.E. – 476 C.E.) rose out of the conflicts that led to the fall of the Roman Republic. The Republic ended in turmoil and sectarian fighting among the aristocrats of Rome, resulting in the near dictatorship of Julius Caesar and the eventual establishment of their adopted child Octavian (Later Augustus) as the first emperor of Rome. After the constant factionalism and infighting of the Late Roman Republic Augustus, after being elected consul in 28 B.C.E., sought to unify Rome and in doing so gained enormous favor. In 27 B.C.E. the Roman senate not only rejected their proposal to step down as consul, the chief political ruler of Rome, but charged them with ruling the territories of Syria, Spain, and Gaul while the Senate would rule the remaining Empire. 

This charge would essentially begin the reign of Augustus as the first emperor of Rome (27 B.C.E – 14 C.E.), a period that is historically associated with the empire’s growth, both in infrastructure and territory. The peace of a unified Rome allowed for trade to flourish within the interior of Rome while on the expansion of its frontiers was sought through various political and military means such as the establishment of client kings, annexation and outright warfare. One such region that came under the gaze of Rome were the territories beyond the Rhine river. 

It is here in Germania Magna (Greater Germany) that the Cherusci tribesman Arminius (18 B.C.E. – 19 C.E.) would call home. Born the son of the Cherusci chief Segimer, Arminius would be made a child hostage of Rome, to be taken back and raised under Roman culture. Arminius would rise through the ranks of Rome’s military, gaining not only Roman citizenship but also the rank of Equestrian. In 8 C.E. Arminius would find themselves transferred under the command of governor Publius Quinctilius Varus in the region of the Rhine. 

In seeking to turn Germania Magna into a territory of Rome, Varus took a heavy hand with the native populations, demanding tribute and treating the natives as though they were slaves. In the summer of 9 C.E. Varus marched three Roman legions and supporting auxiliary forces directly into the center of Cherusci territory, demanding tribute and executing Roman law. Meanwhile, Arminius was given the opportunity to reunite with their family and tribe. Arminius, along with their father Segimer, assured Varus in regard to the Roman occupation. 

This, however, was nothing more than a deception. Arminius, both through personal experience and as a first-hand witness, saw the way in which Rome treated their people. While the Cherusci had gained some status within Rome, this was seen as nothing but a farce as Arminius’ people would continue to have their children taken to serve in the Roman army and had their resources extracted by force. With this in mind, Arminius sought rebellion against Rome’s occupation of their homelands. 

This would not be an easy task, as the Roman army was well trained and equipped comparatively to the various tribes of Germania Magna. This is where Arminius’ experience within the Roman army would prove to be a huge advantage. Their knowledge of the strategy and tactics used by the Roman army allowed Arminius and their fellow tribesmen to develop a plan that put them in the most advantageous position possible, while exploiting the weaknesses within Roman military doctrine. 

To begin with, the Roman army needed to be drawn out of their large, easily defensible position within their camp. So with the coming fall season, the Romans would march back down to the Rhine, where they would potentially shelter for the winter. However, Arminius would tell Varus of a supposed rebellion to their north-west and recommend an alternate route in order to crush this rebellion before it got any worse. However, this rebellion was a complete work of fiction by Arminius in order to lure Varus and their legions into terrain that favored the Germanic warriors. 

It is here that Varus would find themselves marching through Teutoburg forest, a densely forested and hilly region that forced the Roman legions to march in column formation. This formation would leave the Romans quite vulnerable, something Arminius would have been aware of. Arminius would leave Varus during the march claiming they were going to gather reinforcements from loyal tribes in the area. In reality, Arminius was gathering the Germanic tribes together, readying them for the attack. 

To add even more problems for the Romans, thunderstorms on the second day of their march caused the ground to become muddy, knocking over trees and generally slowing the pace of the legions. It would be here at their weakest point that the Germanic tribes, under the leadership of Arminius, would launch their attack. The tribesmen would throw javelins and sling rocks into the Roman columns before engaging them directly in combat. The heavy armor of the Romans made it difficult to maneuver and were easily defeated by the much more lightly dressed Germanic warriors. 

By the third day, Varus and their legions had lost thousands to the Germanic attacks, just managing to make camp on the edge of Kalkrieser mountain to the north. It is here that they would meet their final end. During the night, a final assault would be launched against the Roman camp, slaughtering a massive number of the Roman forces. Before the Germanic warriors could reach Varus themselves, Varus would take their life, and fell on their own sword. Arminius and their fellow Germanic tribes had become victorious. 

This incredible defeat at the hands of the Germanic tribes was devastating for Rome. Not only did the conflict result in the loss of three legions of Roman soldiers, the emperor Augustus is quoted to have said “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” a clear cry of anger and defeat. This loss caused Augustus to abandon the conquest of Germania until their death in 14 C.E. Only to later be picked back up by Germanicus, the nephew of the new emperor of Rome, Tiberius.(14-31 C.E.) Germanicus sought to avenge the failures of Varus. 

After having put down a revolt of Roman soldiers in Germania Inferior (Lower Rhine), Germanicus focused their remaining anger towards the Germanic tribes. First they attacked the villages of the Marsi tribes before moving on to attack the Bructeri with four legions and additional forces. In doing so Germanicus’ forces were able to recapture a lost Roman eagle standard from Varus’ defeat, as well as locating the site of their death. Germanicus now set their sites on the Cherusci tribes of Arminius. 

First, Arminius would fall back into the woods, in order to avoid a fight with the much larger forces lead by Germanicus. Arminius almost managed to pin down the Romans cavalry in a swamp through an ambush, but was unsuccessful due to assistance brought by the Roman legions. Germanicus would break off their attack, returning with their four legions to the fleet on the Ems river, while the remaining forces led by Aulus Caecina Severus, would march back on an old Roman path that took them through a number of swamps, which Arminius easily exploited. The Romans were barely able to defend themselves, managing to survive through the night. 

The next morning, Arminius would personally launch another assault on Severus, but failed due to premature looting by their own forces. This allowed Severus to break out and establish a defensive position on better ground. Arminius wanted to wait until Severus’ forces were on the march and therefore vulnerable to the ambushes that had proven their effectiveness. However, Arminius’ impatient and overconfident uncle, Inguiomerus, forced an assault on the Roman positions. The Romans would barely manage to launch a successful defense, defeating the Germanic warriors and allowing themselves the ability to escape to the Rhine river. 

In 16 C.E. Arminius attacked a Roman fortress on the Lippe river in order to stall Germanicus, who was attempting to use a massive fleet of around 1,000 ships to reinforce and resupply their army. While this did stall Germanicus’ summer offensive Arminius’ forces lost the battle, allowing Germanicus to return to the Rhine river, reinforcing their army with Batavian cavalry under the command of their chief Chariovalda. 

After sailing through the north sea, Germanicus would re-enter the Germanic region through the Ems river, eventually disembarking and marching their forces east, towards Cherusci territory. It is along the banks of the Weser river that Germanicus would confront Arminius. Among the Roman forces was Arminius’ brother, Flavus. After exchanging taunts between the brothers, the battle would begin with Arminius’ forces ambushing the Batavian cavalry, crushing them and killing their chief Chariovalda. 

Rather than confront the rest of Germanicus’ forces directly, Arminius elected to fall back into a nearby sacred grove, before riding out on horseback to meet the Roman forces head on. Germanicus would respond in kind, riding out with their own praetorian guard. The battle was fierce, resulting in a Roman victory with the Germanic warriors suffering heavy losses. However, Arminius was quickly able to recover their losses thanks to the arrival of more Germanic warriors. 

Arminius would once again rely on the terrain, drawing the Roman forces into a forest battle located in the Angrivarii barrier, which separated the territories of the Angrivarii and Cherusci tribes. The Romans managed to win the battle, after pushing Arminius and their forces back against a swamp located in their rear. Inguiomerus took the lead in a counter attack, due to wounds suffered by Arminius. This attack would fail, resulting in yet another Roman victory. 

Even though the Romans had won the majority of the battles, they still suffered heavy casualties and their supplies were running extremely low. While attempting to make their way back home by boat, the Romans took a heavy hit when their fleet sailed through a storm. After having endured such severe casualties and with no real progress being made, emperor Tiberius would finally call an end to the campaign. In the end, Arminius and their fellow tribesmen won the war and their freedom. 

After driving out the Romans, Arminius would find themself in conflict with the only other power in the region, Maroboduus, king of the Marcomanni. Arminius would meet them in battle, defeating them and forcing Maroboduus to take shelter in Rome. Arminius now effectively had control over all of Germania. However, Arminius’ rule would not last for long, as due to infighting among the tribes and fears of Arminius’ becoming a king, in 19 C.E. Arminius would be assassinated. 

The life of Arminius and the struggle of the Germanic tribes provides many lessons for those seeking to resist domination. The strategy and tactics deployed by Arminius hold many important concepts for anyone who seeks to struggle against a larger, more powerful aggressor. As such, Arminius’ struggle against Rome is worthy of further examination. 

To begin with, Arminius was captured at a young age by Rome and educated not only in their culture but also in their understanding of warfare. This would prove to be incredibly valuable knowledge as it allowed Arminius to organize a strategy that took the strengths of the Germanic warriors and their homeland against the weaknesses within Roman military doctrine. This is why the deployment of guerrilla tactics proved their effectiveness, such as assaulting the Romans on the march when they were at their most vulnerable, within swamped and forested regions making the use of the Romans large scale formations and heavy armor effectively useless against the lightly armored and mobile Germanic warriors. In conjunction with this, the Germanic warriors did not need to necessarily win every fight and in fact, lost a number of them. They simply needed to wear down and tire out the Romans’ ability to fight by dwindling their numbers and supplies as much as they could, causing the war to become increasingly costly for the Roman Empire. 

Deception as well proved to be effective in that Arminius, through their relationship with Rome and their rank within the Roman army allowed them to deceive their commanding officer Varus, guiding them personally into a trap. This deception led to one of the most devastating defeats the Roman army had ever suffered, with the loss of three entire legions at the hands of Arminius and their fellow warriors. Until their assassination in 19 C.E., Arminius had proven themselves to be an effective and intelligent resistance leader, forcing one of histories most organized and well trained military formations at the time to leave their lands exhausted and defeated. Arminius proves that it doesn’t matter how powerful our oppressors are. What matters is that in confronting them we try to understand not just what makes them powerful but what makes them weak and exploiting that weakness in such a way that it takes advantage of our own power. Struggling does not mean doing so on our oppressor’s terms, but on our own and in doing so we can take the steps we need towards liberating ourselves.

Looking at the news on the COVID-19 (or coronavirus) pandemic, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is one of those lifeboat situations in which a crisis cannot be managed without a resort to large-scale social coercion. China and South Korea seem to have turned the tide on the pandemic, with a reduced number of new cases each day. But they’ve accomplished this through draconian social controls — travel bans, restrictions on public assembly, and lockdowns.

But it’s worth stepping back and taking a look at how we got to be in this lifeboat in the first place. 

Pandemics, above all, are a direct result of connectivity. The bubonic plague, which devastated most of Europe, the Middle East, and China in the 14th century, was a recurring rat-borne illness limited to the Central Asian steppes until Silk Road caravans carried it to densely populated areas. In our own heavily connected age, pandemics are becoming a recurring phenomenon every few years. The most deadly so far was the Influenza of 1918, but in this century we’ve had SARS, MERS, Ebola, and the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Globalized logistic chains, which connect distributed manufacturing networks and then ship the products of offshored industry to retail shelves in the Global North, are mostly creatures of the state. According to Alfred Chandler (The Visible Hand), without U.S. government land grants and other railroad subsidies a high-volume continental system of trunk lines, and hence national wholesale and retail networks, would have been impossible. And it was the creation of this unified national market that enabled the consolidation of industry into large national corporations. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel argued (in The Second Industrial Revolution) that without such policies to tip the balance toward centralized mass production, American manufacturing would likely have instead been distributed in local industrial districts. 

The large-scale export of Western capital and offshoring of industrial production to the Global South, over the past four decades, was actively facilitated by the state in support of capitalist interests. The primary function of both foreign aid and World Bank loans, for decades, has been to subsidize the transportation and utilities infrastructure without which the profitable offshoring of production would have been impossible. And outsourcing of production to low-wage countries depends heavily on patent and trademark laws — the centerpiece of virtually every “Free Trade Agreement” rubber-stamped by governments around the world — which give transnational corporations a legal monopoly over disposal of goods produced on contract by independent job shops. And the containerships that transport all those offshored goods have a much better bottom line thanks to the US Navy keeping the sea lanes open at taxpayer expense.

Indeed, the central focus of United States foreign policy — and that of the rest of the industrialized capitalist countries — has been to impose connectivity on the world. The United States entered World War Two in large part because FDR’s policy analysts determined that the US economy depended — at an absolute minimum — on the markets and resources of a “Grand Area” encompassing much of the Global South, and that Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” threatened to withdraw much of that area from the global market. The postwar American order was designed to ensure that the resources and markets of the former colonial world remained integrated with Western corporate economies, and that no major power would ever again threaten to withdraw a significant part of the world into autarky.

The same goes for the airline industry and the current scale of world travel. Every day millions of people around the world fly on commercial airlines — an industry essentially created by the state. In the United States the civil aviation infrastructure — airports, air traffic control, etc. — was originally created at taxpayer expense. And civilian jumbo jets were only economically feasible because of the Cold War heavy bomber program of the late ‘40s that made the expensive dies profitable.

In short, what we call “globalization” was every bit as much a product of state social engineering as Stalin’s Five Year Plans, and would have been impossible otherwise. And from the standpoint of efficiency, most of this connectivity is just a Rube Goldberg contraption. The overwhelming majority of the goods we buy would be more efficiently produced in smaller factories, in the communities or regions where we live. And that would almost certainly be the case if it weren’t for the social engineering project I described above.

Note that I didn’t limit it to Western industrialized capitalist countries. The Chinese Road and Belt Initiative is well on the way to integrating the Eurasian World Island and to some extent Africa on a scale that puts the previous efforts of Western imperialism to shame.

I’m not interested in jumping into the Twitter Left debates between Marxist-Leninists and libertarian socialists over whether China is capitalist or socialist, or whether it’s capable of imperialism. Whatever the Chinese state’s ideological or class motivations, the operational purpose of its drive to integrate the Eurasian landmass is connectivity through high-volume logistic chains and travel infrastructures that span half the globe. And I’m pretty sure that to a virus, one train, truck, or containership looks the same as another regardless of whether it’s capitalist or socialist.

So the state itself has put us in exactly the kind of emergency situation that, seemingly, only state emergency measures are sufficient to mitigate. 

Some states, of course, are less competent than others. Way less. Since coronavirus arrived in the United States, Trump’s behavior has been fully consistent with the hypothesis that he’s really a machine sent back by Skynet to exterminate the human race. He’s responded to the pandemic the same way Mayor Vaughn responded to sharks in Jaws. Multiple witnesses say he not only downplayed the severity of the crisis, but actively discouraged testing in the early days, because lower infection numbers would be better for both the stock market and his reelection chances. 

The Trump administration blocked use of a coronavirus test approved by the World Health Organization. It blocked efforts by Dr. Helen Chu, a flu researcher in Seattle, to repurpose a flu-testing kit for coronavirus. Testing rates per million people in the United States are an order of magnitude or more lower than in China, South Korea, and Italy. Now Trump’s banning, by executive order, the use of foreign-made medical supplies.

Aside from the straight-up venality of endangering millions of lives for the sake of his electability, there’s also incompetence on a scale sufficient to create its own event horizon. Officially overseeing the national response is young earth creationist Mike Pence, with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner serving as unofficial go-to guy. And every time Trump opens his mouth, he gives another false assurance or bit of advice that makes the entire epidemiological community cringe.

Even in China, which seems to have had the greatest success in turning the tide, the initial coverup almost certainly made things worse than they otherwise would have been. Still, Chinese state malfeasance pales in comparison to the Trump administration, whose handling of the crisis couldn’t be worse if it were deliberately trying to maximize casualties.

And even in China, state efforts were piggybacked on self-organized peer-to-peer networks, and heavily integrated with them. This is generally the case in all societies stricken by disaster — the theme of Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Willow Brugh, a scholar on distributed disaster response, also has much to say on this.

So, even stipulating that large-scale social coercion seems to have stabilized the situation in China and South Korea, it was also large-scale social coercion — centuries of it, on a global scale — that created the artificial set of circumstances to which governments are responding.

What’s more, large-scale social coercion is operating in many ways to hinder non-state responses to the pandemic, and make us more vulnerable to it. 

At Reason, Nick Gillespie confidently states that “there’s every reason to believe that regular Americans are doing everything they can and should do to minimize the spread of the disease, from being more careful about hygeine [sic] to voluntary ‘social distancing’ and minimizing contact.” But in fact, far more even than in other Western countries governed by the wage system and landlordism, the demands of employers and landlords are an active hindrance to such social distancing.

The great majority of Americans attempting to deal with this pandemic face the near-impossibility of actually complying with common-sense advice. Many people are in precarious jobs who will be fired if they take off work for safety reasons, even if they could afford to. But it’s a moot point; the vast majority of low-income workers — the kind in service jobs that involve serving food or selling clothing to the public, taking care of the sick and elderly, etc., and therefore pose the greatest risk of spreading infectious disease —  don’t have paid sick leave, and would have to choose between going to work sick and being evicted.

In any case, given that the state has backed us into a corner that the state will likely play some role in getting us out of, stateless responses still play a vital role in mitigating the damage resulting from the state’s inept response. 

One of the most important — possibly the most important — forms of damage control is mutual aid for those who can’t afford to self-quarantine. This includes, obviously, organizing financial and material support for those who don’t have paid sick leave. But it also includes mass pressure campaigns on employers, landlords, and public utilities, as well as boycotts and demonstrations in solidarity with those who are evicted, expected to work sick, or not given paid leave. You can find a lot of recommendations for mutual aid and solidarity in this great crowdsourced document. 

But given the hand we’re dealt, our range of immediate responses to the current pandemic is highly limited at best, consisting mostly of damage control. Ultimately our response has to center on long-term courses of action to keep this kind of thing from happening again, or to reduce our future vulnerability to it.

Such actions include relocalizing economies, shifting production from wage labor to the commons and social economy, and building high-capacity mutual aid networks for pooling risks and costs. We need an economy that’s less connected, with less of our stuff coming from thousands of miles away and fewer people hopping on jet planes every day, and where people in non-essential work can stay home and distance themselves without permission from a boss and without risking homelessness. The things we need to do, as long-term efforts to build a post-capitalist, post-state society, are pretty much the same things to which we are likely to be increasingly driven to by the ongoing economic necessities of this crisis. 

In Accumulation Crisis James O’Connor wrote that, during economic downturns and periods of high unemployment or underemployment, workers of necessity meet as many of their needs in the informal and household economy. And in periods of permanent, structural crisis such as capitalism has been experiencing in recent decades, some of the shift tends to be permanent.

At the same time, recent economic crises have coincided with ongoing technological progress in cheap, small-scale tools suited to direct production for use in the social economy. As far back as the 1970s, anarchist thinkers like Colin Ward and Karl Hess were calling for neighborhood workshops with pooled machinery and tools for putting defunct appliances back into operation. Keith Paton, in a pamphlet addressed to the Claimants’ Union in the UK in 1972, suggested the unemployed use such workshops as community factories to produce for their own and each other’s consumption.

In the decades since then the price of digitally controlled tools scaled to the small workshop has fallen by an order of magnitude or more, coupled with a similar increase in their capabilities. The Maker revolution since the turn of this century includes, among other things, the Global Village Construction Set — an entire ecosystem of open-source manufacturing tools developed by the Open Source Ecology group at its Factor e Farm demo site. Some of the tabletop machinery (cutting table, router, 3D printer, etc.) is within the range of affordable of a neighborhood workshop; other, more expensive tools (induction furnace, aluminum smelter, etc.) would probably require cost-pooling by several such federated workshops. But all are individually much cheaper than their commercial counterparts, and collectively are capable of the kinds of industrial production that once required a million dollar-plus mass production factory.

Aside from that, most people already possess a wide range of under-utilized household tools and appliances — power tools, sewing machines, etc. — that, pooled with their neighbors, could replace a major share of purchases through the cash nexus. Tool libraries for sharing under-used equipment and saving money on duplicate purchases; home-based production for the neighborhood (micro-bakeries, micro-breweries, plumbing and electrical work, etc.) using the spare capacity of tools people already own anyway; non-capitalist and cooperative car-sharing, baby-sitting, elder care, etc.; community gardens and edible landscaping; all these things together can reduce the need for wage income streams by a significant amount and create that much of a margin of independence.

The history of unemployed people putting their idle skills and tools to work for each other goes back (at least) to striking craft workers in early 19th century Britain who set up independent production and exchanged their wares through a labor notes system. Among other examples of similar practices were the Unemployed Cooperative Relief Organization and the Unemployed Exchange Association in the Depression-era United States.

The same goes for pooling resources against calamity and providing material support for the unemployed in the solidarity economy. During and immediately after the 2007-08 crash, a number of people proposed counter-institutions to cushion the unemployed and underemployed against the worst effects of the Great Recession. Dougald Hine and Nathan Cravens proposed a collection of community-supported organizations:  coworking spaces like Media Labs and Fab Labs, and resources for self-support like community gardens with associated free Open Cafes. At the time I proposed expanding the model to include housing: cheap, open-source, bare-bones cohousing, perhaps on models including YMCA hostels, RV parks with water and power hookups, or the government-owned, migrant-managed camp in The Grapes of Wrath.

What all these things have going for them is superior efficiency. Capitalism has grown up over the centuries in an environment of artificially cheap land and resources resulting from enclosure or colonization, socialized costs and risks, and heavily subsidized waste, with an industrial model designed to maximize production inputs and build in obsolescence in order to avoid idle capacity. It’s drowning in administrative overhead and riddled with information and incentive problems resulting from absentee ownership and hierarchical control. In the counter-economy, on the other hand, all the benefits are internalized by those who contribute the effort and knowledge rather than those who extract rents. Because it’s self-managed and organized on a largely permissionless or peer-to-peer basis, the administrative overhead is nil. And because, like a junkyard dog, it has been forced to maximize the output of the limited material resources available to it, the counter-economy can thrive on the discarded waste of the capitalist economy.

The superior efficiency of the commons-based counter-economy enables people, in Vinay Gupta’s phrase, to “buy out at the bottom.”

Fuller’s “do more with less” was a method we could use to attain self-sufficiency with a much lower capital cost than “buy out at the top.” An integrated, whole-systems-thinking approach to a sustainable lifestyle – the houses, the gardening tools, the monitoring systems – all of that stuff was designed using inspiration from Fuller and later thinkers inspired by efficiency. The slack – the waste – in our old ways of life were consuming 90 percent of our productive labor to maintain.

A thousand dollar a month combined fuel bill is your life energy going down the drain because the place you live sucks your life way in waste heat, which is waste money, which is waste time. Your car, your house, the portion of your taxes which the Government spends on fuel, on electricity, on waste heat… all of the time you spent to earn that money is wasted to the degree those systems are inefficient systems, behind best practices!

On a larger scale, the new municipalist movements in Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Utrecht and Preston in Europe, in Cleveland and Jackson in the U.S., and related movements like the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and the neighborhood and communalist offshoots of Bolivarianism in Venezuela, are actively engaged in constructing integrated, commons-based local economies.

Such an economy, fully developed at the community level, might include micro-factories and hackerspaces, land trusts with cheap cohousing constructed either with local and vernacular materials or with new ultra-cheap techniques like 3D printing, ride-sharing services organized on a cooperative basis, free municipal wireless, free coworking spaces and community spaces for food carts, community currencies, etc.

Meanwhile, the vulnerability of globalized just-in-time capitalism is confronting capital itself with a radically changed set of incentives. If globalized logistic chains are one of the chief causes of pandemics, they are also extremely vulnerable to it. To take a couple of examples, minor in themselves, John Feffer at Foreign Policy in Focus reports a conversation with an architect who said he’s been cut off from his Chinese supplier of carpets. And at a local garden and seed store which also sells other self-sufficiency products, I was told that they were out of wood stoves until further notice for the same reason. 

The disruption and intermittent breakdown of fragile global supply and distribution chains will likely lead to a considerable amount of economic relocalization. As Andrew Nikiforuk writes at The Tyee:

Viewed through the lens of climate crisis survival, the pandemic has produced some good news. Reduced economic activity in China, the world’s largest oil user, has already resulted in a 25 per cent drop in greenhouse gas emissions and blue skies. Container ship traffic across the Pacific has dropped by half to 100 sailings a month. Auto sales are down 80 per cent and exports have fallen off by nearly 20 per cent.

In this regard, the virus is readying us for what could be the new reality. To really address the climate emergency, we must slow down economic activity, reduce trade, re-localize economies and severely restrict travel.

By any legitimate standard of efficiency, global logistic chains extending from factories in Shenzhen to Walmart shelves in California are entirely irrational. Much of the actual machinery used in Chinese job shops — general-purpose CNC tools — is ideally suited to production on the industrial district model for a local market. The only “efficiency” served by the transoceanic supply chains is access to cheap labor. Otherwise the most efficient thing would be for those job shops to ignore the patents and trademarks of the Western corporations they’re producing on contract for, keep right on producing the same goods without the Swoosh or Apple, and sell them — at a price reflecting actual production cost, without the several hundred percent intellectual property markup — to the local population. Similar shops, in relocalized manufacturing economies, could produce directly for communities in the United States. 

As I recall, there were rumors that the Chinese leadership seriously considered taking such action in 2008. Maybe this time will be the charm. As logistic chains become disrupted and unpredictable, it’s certainly time for those of us on this end of the chain to consider rebuilding industry on a local level.

And all sorts of things that have been continually dismissed as impossible or unfeasible for years, countless rules that have been considered unbreakable, have been radically reconsidered and revised in just the past few weeks. All our lives we’ve been told that this artificial scarcity, that irrationality, is just part of the nature of things and can’t be changed. And now, at the stroke of a pen, it’s being done away with. 

For example, after twenty years of false promises about remote working and teleconferencing, the potential is finally being rapidly embraced as a public health measure. All the jobs that could have been done over the fiber optic lines all these years instead of face-to-face, but weren’t, are now either being done that way or well on their way to it. Local communities are imposing rent moratoria. 

It would be nice if people got used to such “extraordinary” and “emergency” measures, which were feasible all along, and they became the new normal. Don’t accept a return to the status quo.

The coronavirus pandemic, and the overdue economic slowdown it triggered, are black swan events whose ultimate outcome is anyone’s guess. A large number of extremely complex, extremely interconnected systems are being disrupted and things are ripe to recrystallize into an entirely different structure.

The last crisis on this scale was the Great Recession of 2008, and things came out of it beyond anyone’s imagining at the time. A lot of idealistic young people in their late teens and 20s voted for Obama based on his progressive-sounding rhetoric, only to be betrayed. Instead of bailing out debtors, workers, and consumers, and restructuring the economy, he bailed out banks and auto companies and restored the status quo. The generation that experienced this betrayal went on to form the backbone of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and NoDAPL, and to fuel the Sanders insurgencies of 2016 and this year. They’ve lived through a decade of precarious work, unpaid internships, no health insurance, and moving back in with their parents. They’ve been mocked and dismissed by a neoliberal establishment, and seen two attempts at working through the system in the Democratic primaries sabotaged.

By every indication, we’re on our way to another Great Recession or worse. Pretty much everyone under 40 has shared the same formative experience of repeated betrayal by the establishment. If the last crisis gave us Occupy and the Sanders insurgency, I suspect those movements will pale in comparison to the response this time. People won’t be nearly as patient this time, or settle for the same halfway measures. We’re tired of being fucked with.

So we’ve got all these complex systems being disrupted, and we’ve got a huge portion of the public who are fed up and ready to force through something new. What new configuration will emerge when some form of order reestablishes itself? Who can say, although I think the themes I discussed above of economic relocalization and direct production for use in the commons are as good a guess as any of the general direction of change. In any case we’re at a tipping point, and it’s time to push as hard as we can to affect the outcome in a positive direction.

What might this push look like?

I recently read a fictional account of a tipping point brought on by an economic crisis, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. By way of background, the millions of precarious people living in flooded Lower Manhattan were devastated by a hurricane, with countless thousands moving into emergency refugee camps set up in Central Park. Increasingly out of patience with the lack of food or sanitation, the angry crowds migrated into Upper Manhattan, where luxury residential high-rises hundreds of stories tall sat mostly empty, held as real estate investments by absentee owners. Mercenary security firms working for these absentee owners fired on climate refugees seeking shelter in the empty buildings. 

Amelia Black, a popular media figure whose program was followed by hundreds of millions of viewers in the cloud, shared aerial video footage of the hurricane devastation, the empty luxury high-rises, and the mercenaries firing on destitute crowds. Then she said this:

So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today….

What I mean by a householders’ strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages … maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated … So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? … That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.

You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!

We’re being hit by a global pandemic that’s the direct result of a hyper-connected global capitalist system imposed on us by states. Besides killing millions of people, it forces millions of the most vulnerable to choose between contagion and unemployment or homelessness. And it’s triggering an economic crisis that will most likely result in unemployment and homelessness on an even larger scale. The management of this crisis, the outgrowth of a set of artificial circumstances created by state violence, may well entail some unavoidable level of state action. 

So do what you need to get through it. Take advantage of whatever aid the state offers. Comply with state measures that seem like common sense, like quarantines and restrictions on large gatherings. If pressure from the state causes your employer to offer paid medical leave, or the local government imposes a moratorium on your rent, take whatever you can get. 

But let all the other expedients we adopt to survive through this crisis, to help each other survive it, be the seeds of a society where we can live without fear of it happening again.

When talking to your local anarcho-syndicalist on why someone should join their union, they usually give a long list of all the things taken for granted today that are the result of organized labor fights in the past, with the weekend being the most enthusiastically mentioned. Now it is easy to believe that the eight-hour workday came suddenly and out of nowhere, thanks to one, very big general strike, and then everyone had to work only eight hours, had good wages, and could enjoy their weekend. But reality is much more complicated. Trying to locate the point in time when working eight hours became the norm shows that there is no “first” victory, but many. Skilled workers, unskilled industrial union workers, and legal regulation have all earned the eight-hour workday over the course of a century. The earliest documented eight-hour workday ‘victory’ seems to be in New Zealand during the colonial era, likely as a result of labor scarcity, with a very amusing story.

The honour of introducing the eight-hour day in New Zealand is traditionally assigned to Samuel Duncan Parnell. A London carpenter, Parnell, on his arrival at Petone in 1840, insisted on working no longer than eight hours when erecting a store for the merchant George Hunter. In later years, other claimants have come forward as the “founder” of the eight-hour system, but Parnell’s claim remains the best. The idea of reducing the hours of work was in the air in 1840. It was discussed on the emigrant ships on the voyage out and was carried into practice on arrival. Carpenters were at the forefront of the movement; a meeting of carpenters outside German Brown’s (Barrett’s) Hotel, Wellington, in October 1840, is said to have pledged itself “to maintain the eight-hour working day, and that anyone offending should be ducked into the harbour.” 

What is considered more of a ‘real’ labor movement, however, started on May 1, 1886 with a strike in Chicago for the eight-hour campaign, which turned into a violent clash leading to bombing cops and executing anarchists, and ending with the New Deal era Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937. This was by no means a monolithic social movement, beyond the class-based labor movement, Jewish immigrants also pressed to have Saturdays off for religious reasons. To quote historian Michael Feldberg: “If the Jewish Sabbath had been on Wednesday, we would not have a weekend. We would have Wednesday and Sunday off.” During the same time, Henry Ford, who is no friend of organized labor or the Jews, made the decision to double his workers’ wages to five dollars a day in 1914 and to implement the eight-hour workday in 1926. This was a decade before the militant wave of strikes in the 1930s that got the United Auto Workers(UAW) into the shopfloor of the big three auto manufacturers. So it seems more likely that many factors converged at a critical moment to create the modern work schedule, including organized labor, religious communities, an increase in industrial productivity, and a new interest from within the business elite to increase consumption.  

This should not be misunderstood as some force of nature and inevitable progress, for example, in Shenzhen’s corporate work culture, they have a schedule known as 9/9/6, which means, from 9 AM to 9 PM, and 6 days a week. And this isn’t even for poor Chinese peasants who work in factories just to survive, but for highly skilled, and educated workers in the tech sector who belong to the middle class, in a new industry that only came into existence  two decades ago. It is said that some companies even advertise 6/6/5 as a more humane work schedule, in which it is only 12 hours a day with the weekend off. So technological progress in itself won’t bring a shorter workweek, even in industries that grow exponentially such as software

In the last few years, a situation similar to the early labor movement has started to form. Some class tension began to form after the 2008 crises, and no new industries have been created to replace the ever-shrinking blue-collar manufacturing union jobs. On top of that automation seems to be accelerating. Then you have some isolated bosses experimenting with a four-day workweek. A management company in New Zealand found no downsides, and better worker life satisfaction, Microsoft Japan tried the same and productivity jumped by 40%, even the notoriously brutal Amazon considered a 30-hour pilot, and with enough research, small companies have started to embrace a shorter workweek too. There is even a website dedicated to 30-hour jobs, currently showing about a dozen employers.

Now, a four-day workweek is in no way a radical proposal, it is still four days too much. Just to give some numbers, productivity since 1970 has doubled, and real wages have remained nearly flat, the cost of Intellectual Property represents 38% of GDP, one out of four renters pay more than 50% of their income on rent, and even the ‘privileged’  middle class pays 27%. In other words, of every 10 hours of work, four go to intellectual property costs which could be free without a government-enforced monopoly, and three to five hours go to landlords. And this is without measuring the overhead costs of management and bosses who should not even exist under worker self-management. The real limits of the workweek, when all the cruft is removed, is something extremely distant from 30 hours, and closer to 10 hours a week. We could even entertain the possibility of a post-work society not as a utopia, but as a reality on the horizon for the next generation.

The good news is that the four-day workweek campaign was accumulating gains before it even started. Out of the 52 weeks in the year, 10 of them have a legal day off, most of them on Mondays and Fridays, in other words, 20% is done. This could also be a strategy to continue — rather than demanding to wipe out Monday off the calendar, single holidays can creep in one by one each year, so that by the end of the decade it becomes easier politically to demand the remaining 25 days or so with a formal long weekend.

Along with the traditional labor movement, a broader coalition can be built, such as with students who tend to have a louder voice and are better at spreading the message, and the environmentalist movement who are interested in lowering carbon emissions with less commuting and workplace electricity use. It is also good that the numbers so far show positive results and better productivity, this could allow the Good Boss™ types to soften up the public, and allow more moderate politicians to follow along. Just like Henry Ford before, some modern oligarchs are not against even a 3-day workweek. While an alliance with the business elite should be avoided, especially when such an alliance could mean a compromise with a crucial part of the working class, there is potential to use the bosses to our own ends. From a strategic distance, we can allow them to speak while still maintaining some friction and make things slightly uneasy for a social movement to become a mild moderate or centrist one.

If a movement starts today, it seems likely given the current condition to achieve the results at some point during the next decade. What is important is to not make the same mistakes as the New Deal coalition, which first threw black workers under the bus as a compromise by not extending labor protections to sharecroppers, and then excluded black people from the GI Bill. This class treachery should not happen again.  A broad coalition could also negatively impact hourly wage workers, as they might simply be paid less as a result of less work, while salaried workers won’t be affected since they have annual contracts, so it’s important to include hourly workers in the fight for a four-day workweek. The same goes for the students who would be happy with their long weekend, and the greens who want to mitigate climate change. A four-day workweek should benefit all, and it might be necessary to follow suit with the New Zealand carpenters, who demanded a four-day workweek at the expense of others, with any dissenters being ducked into the harbor.

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 9 febbraio 2020 con il titolo Combating High Tech: An Agorist Response to the YouTube Strike. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Risposta agoristica allo sciopero contro YouTube

Dal dieci al tredici dicembre scorso (in Gran Bretagna, dal quattordici al diciassette per non limitare l’accesso alle principali notizie politiche sotto le elezioni), gli uploader di YouTube e i loro sostenitori sono entrati in sciopero rifiutandosi di caricare o vedere filmati o anche solo connettersi al sito per protestare contro i nuovi termini di servizio di YouTube. La nuova politica mette a rischio, per molti creatori di contenuti, la possibilità di guadagno, mentre per altri c’è la possibilità di vedersi cancellato il canale. Lo sciopero è il risultato dello sforzo collettivo delle campagne di YouTubers Union e FairTube e affiliati. Entrambe le campagne sono un esempio di quel sindacalismo spontaneo talvolta citato come esempio da anarco-sindacalismo e agorismo.

La tipica azione agorista contro un gigante aziendale come YouTube consiste nel creare alternative più decentrate. Fortunatamente, queste alternative ci sono, sono state create da attivisti e programmatori sensibili a questioni come la riservatezza e la libertà di espressione. BitChute, DTube, e PeerTube sono probabilmente i maggiori esempi sul mercato attuale. Se BitChute e DTube appaiono colonizzati da persone della destra alternativa sulla scia di precedenti politiche censorie di YouTube che sono riuscite ad allontanarne molte, PeerTube appare più amico della sinistra. Detto questo, però, non esiste una ragione per cedere una buona piattaforma alla destra alternativa solo perché loro l’hanno invasa per primi. Persone di sinistra e anarchici di tutte le risme dovrebbero migrare in massa verso queste piattaforme per sbilanciarne gli algoritmi e convincere qualche anima malcapitata a venir fuori dalla tana della destra.

Ma allora, se esistono alternative percorribili come PeerTube, DTube e BitChute, perché disturbarsi a cercare di sindacalizzare YouTube? Semplice: perché YouTube ha ancora il seguito più grosso. I creatori di contenuti potrebbero spostarsi su una piattaforma alternativa, ma non è detto che il loro pubblico li segua. E poi, anche se DTube e BitChute danno la possibilità agli utenti di premiare i creatori, e DTube addirittura premia con criptomonete il traffico generato, si tratta di fonti di reddito alternative meno affidabili dei guadagni pubblicitari generati dai canali di YouTube.

Mettete pure su il vostro canale su BitChute, DTube o PeerTube e finanziatelo con SubsribeStar o Bitbacker (ma possiamo lasciar morire Hatreon?), se volete, ma non dimenticate i poveri lavoratori che sgobbano per mettere assieme il pranzo con la cena creando contenuti per YouTube e che non vogliono abbandonare una piattaforma che loro hanno aiutato a diventare quell’azienda di successo che è oggi.

Ovviamente, lo sciopero non ha messo in ginocchio YouTube e gli scioperanti non sono riusciti a far passare la richiesta di cambiare i termini di servizio, ma questo si sapeva. Era giusto una prova, la prima pietra su cui edificare la solidarietà. Ma anche una piccola azione come questa è servita a dimostrare il nostro potere in quanto il traffico di YouTube, pur se di poco, è calato sensibilmente durante lo sciopero, mandando un chiaro messaggio ai giganti aziendali: sono costretti ad ascoltare i creatori di contenuti delle loro piattaforme se non vogliono subire contraccolpi finanziari.

Al momento di scrivere questo articolo, gli autori della campagna non hanno ancora annunciato il prossimo passo. Chi vuole tenersi aggiornato, può trovare informazioni sui siti di FairTube e YouTubers Union e sui social. Invece di consumare contenuti e basta, sostenete chi li crea.

Last night, we received the very relieving news that, after yet another suicide attempt while in confinement, a judge has ordered that Chelsea Manning be released after nearly a year of imprisonment for refusal to cooperate with a grand jury.

While this is very good news, it doesn’t come without continued challenges. In an attempt to further coerce Chelsea to cooperate, she was fine $1,000 per day for every day she was in prison. Now, those fines total $256,000. The good news is that you can help by donating to her official GoFundMe campaign organized by our dear friend Kelly Wright.

Here is the full campaign message from Kelly:

This campaign is being organized by her friend Kelly Wright. Funds raised here will be used only to pay legal fines, and will be held in trust for this purpose alone.

Either way, every penny will go towards these fines.*

Chelsea E. Manning is a network security and artificial intelligence expert, and activist. She is a former military intelligence analyst and political prisoner.

Chelsea was incarcerated at Alexandria Detention Center for nearly a year, due to her principled refusal to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the publishers of her 2010 disclosures. She was also fined $1,000 for each day she refused to testify, and those fines now total approximately $256,000.

On March 12, 2020, Judge Anthony Trenga ordered Chelsea Manning’s release after the apparent conclusion of the grand jury, but he further ordered that she pay $256,000 in fines that had accumulated over the course of her confinement.

Chelsea does not have the means to come up with over a quarter million dollars on her own, and is exhausted from this ordeal, and can really use your help repaying these fines.

Thanks so much for your support!

If you are interested in offering an in-kind donation or other support, please e-mail: ReleaseChelsea@protonmail.com

To learn more about Chelsea, check out her Twitter and Medium pages and the ReleaseChelsea.com website.

Consensual non-monogamy, that is romantic relationships with multiple partners,  has long been a prime candidate for the next battleground in America’s on-going culture wars. The issue got an unexpected push from the traditionally conservative state of Utah, whose Republican-dominated Senate recently voted unanimously on a bill that would remove the threat of imprisonment for polygamy.

Utah has an unusual relationship with this issue, being largely settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its off-shoots. The church permitted, and indeed encouraged its male members to marry multiple women in early days, but years later banned the practice and excommunicated those who engaged in it. Fundamentalist Mormon sects still engage in the practice and some 30,000 people are believed to live in polygamous communities in Utah. Unfortunately this practice has often been coercive, with young girls forced to marry much older men.

The Utah legislature has justified the decriminalization of polygamy as a means of making it easier for such abuses to be reported, while maintaining punishment for such related crimes as coerced marriage. Indeed, decriminalization of previously illegal activity does help to curtail it’s more harmful features. As with restrictions on drugs, immigration and more infamously alcohol, prohibition leads to black markets which are often plagued with violence as those involved have no legal recourse for addressing wrongs done to them.

This is largely a move in a positive direction and it is relevant to much less conservative communities than traditionalist Mormons in Utah. Consensual non-monogamy, or polyamory is a growing lifestyle, with countless variants, and the laws of a free society should not interfere with the wide range of relationships people form.

Ultimately the state should get out of the business of who should and should not get married as this should be a social institution between individuals, and their religious organizations, if they so choose. US law grants married couple’s numerous taxation, immigration, inheritance, Social Security and death benefits. Consenting individuals making their own choices, and facing the consequences of their actions will ultimately make the decisions that work best for them. By heaping benefits on some forms of relationships the state engages in a form social engineering that does not adhere to the values of a free society.

An unfortunate aspect of the discourse surrounding Utah’s new bill is the emphasis on men with multiple wives. While the bill applies to all genders, there has been little discussion about the freeing of women to have multiple husbands, or different combinations of the same or both sexes. The possibilities are limitless, and it’s time for the law to reflect this.

This increase in freedom is a positive step, that hopefully spreads throughout the US. It is always a welcome change when the state moves away from intruding into the personal lives of consenting adults. Sadly the same Utah Legislature went the opposite direction concerning adult entertainment. At the end of the day the state is an institution rightly associated with corruption, violence, and clumsy heavy-handedness. The less of our lives it touches the better.

Есть одна плохая и невидимая догма — все гонятся за экономическим благополучием. Государству все равно на людей, оно лишь используют их для улучшения экономических показателей. Людям все равно на свою жизнь и других, они лишь пытаются улучшить свое благосостояние. Все это происходит в единой игре, где все играют по правилам. И на это играющая не по правилам верхушка ответит только так — экономический материализм превыше всего. Зачем вообще работают люди? Самосовершенствование? А может быть новый диван и еда? Нас эти корпоративные штучки не должны интересовать вообще, однако за едой все лезут в супермаркет. Стоп. Давайте начнем жить по другому. Лайфстайл анархиста — то, что должно быть важнее мыслей в его голове. Давай кратко.

Против чего ты борешься?

Ты ненавидишь капитализм, но за что? Он не может тебе дать хорошую работу? Качественную пищу? Это тупо, но люди с таким мышлением есть. Вся человеческая цивилизация живет на основе экономического материализма, принимает устаревшие социальные институты и засирает планету. Все эти проблемы создают для людей единый и фиксированный образ жизни, который не выходит за пределы правил материализма. Важнейшее правило материализма — власть денег. Именно из-за денег случаются войны, есть преступность, коррупция и бедность, вражда между людьми и просто бесконечные ссоры близких. Изменив свой лайфстайл — изменится и окружающий мир. Смысл этой статьи в том, чтобы научить каждого человека потреблять осознанно, не гадить, не подчиняться корпорациям, не губить свою жизнь отравой и жить свободно. Можно разделить все «советы» на три категории:

• Живем правильно
• Спасаем планету
• Обманываем власть капитала

Как жить?

1. Не пей, не кури, не употребляй. Табачные и алкогольные корпорации делают невероятный профит, пока подсаживают людей на уничтожающие здоровье и мозг вещи. Алкоголь делает так, чтобы человек забыл про свое существование, чтобы он находился в мечтах и терял контроль над жизнью. Когда человек становится алкоголиком, то он по итогу отдает огромный мешок заработанных денег и уничтожает свое будущее. Когда это делают все люди — это огромная беда и отсутствие будущего для всех. Не пейте алкоголь вообще. С «нелегальными» наркотиками такая же проблема. В них нет смысла, а если вам приходиться жить в странах СНГ, то вы подпитываете деньгами крышующих наркобизнес ментов, даете криминалу больше власти в городе и помогаете им дурить больше людей. Не стоит.
2. Не ешь мясо. Здесь дело не совсем в этике и кровавых бойнях, а в последствиях. Из-за того, что люди убивают животных уже исчезло порядка 1000 видов животных. Исчезновение видов и потребление животных в качестве ресурсов является причиной шестого вымирания, которое происходит прямо сейчас. Если не брать это, то сама эксплуатация животных это страшная вещь. Они страдают, пока вся их короткая жизнь уходит в пользу комбинатов, лишь ради примитивных привычек человека. Один простой вопрос: зачем ты ешь мясо? Оно кажется вкусным? Оно кажется питательным? Хорошо, но знай, что ты, как и в любом другом описанном случае отдаешь огромные деньги корпорациям страданий. Каждый съеденный прожаренный кусок мяса равен огромному количеству боли. То, что люди вообще считают употреблять продукты животного происхождения — значит возвышать человеческий вид над другими, что не отличается от расизма, сексизма и обычного шовинизма. Мы ничем не лучше простых животных, мы лишь уничтожаем природу. Человек не должен быть ошибкой природы, а лишь тем, кто ее защищает от угроз. Употребление мяса — угроза существования всего мира.
   P.S. этот пункт больше подходит к этой категории, потому что затрагивает изменение основных привычек.
3. Ты не на цепи. Как и описанные выше вещи этот принцип не полностью касается всего потребительства. Дело здесь простое — ты полностью свободен в своих решениях. Просто всегда существуют ограничения, которые лучше не переступать, и ты именно так думаешь. Если тебе не хочется идти в школу, то не делай этого, настроение скажет тебе спасибо. Люди ходят в школу лишь из-за обязаловки перед родителями, но не для личных целей. Так же и с остальными вещами — ты сам выбираешь идти ли на учебу, работу, где учиться или работать, как поступить в неудобной ситуации и т.п. Понимание этого принципа поможет понять внутреннюю психологию потребления, потому что отсутствием осознания свободы воли пользуются все компании.
4. Альтруизм. Все корпорации и раздутый бизнес построены на огромной цепи эгоизма, каждая из этих компаний хочет, чтобы мы были эгоистами. Банально даже создание конкуренции за вещь по скидке делает нас эгоистичнее. Материализм хочет сделать так, чтобы мы думали только о себе, чтобы привлечь больше денег для толстосумов. К примеру, одним из принципов фашизма является социал-дарвинизм, когда жизнь становится борьбой. Соответственно, фашизм старается создать огромную конкуренцию в атомизированном обществе, чтобы люди смогли потакать режиму, пока борются между друг другом (хотя фашисты ратуют за солидарность и единство). Анархизм же является крайне альтруистичной идеей, потому что без альтруизма такое общество долго не проживет. На самом деле все проще — эгоизм это банально вредно. Что посеешь, то и пожнешь. Если долго использовать людей лишь в своих целях, то они начнут использовать тебя точно так же. Если ты так делаешь, то тебя уже могли предавать, кто-то мог уйти в нужный момент, однако сам же предал человека с самого начала. Совершенные добрые поступки вернутся обязательно, просто из-за существования добродушных людей. Солидарность и небезразличие всегда помогут, потому что благодаря этим качествам появляются близкие друзья, любовь и счастье. Прямо сейчас просто загугли в чем сама суть альтруизма и начни чаще помогать людям.

Спасаем планету

1. Не покупай мусор. Любая купленная ненужная вещь становится мусором по определению, это лишь вопрос времени когда человек ее выкинет. Лучше не покупай пакеты в супермаркетах, не упаковывай что-либо в пластик, не используй одноразовые вещи вообще, отказывайся от бесполезных подарков. Чем больше ты используешь эти вещи, тем больше приносишь вреда для природы.
2. Только многоразовые вещи. Раз купил вещь, то используй долго. Вместо одноразовых нужно использовать многоразовые: отыщи экосумку, используй металлические трубочки, да хоть даже многоразовую бритву. Ты сможешь сэкономить больше денег, да и спасешь матушку свою. Не сложно же!.
3. Одежда. Пусть одежда пылится в модных магазинах, лучше купить дешевле всю ту же, но использованную ранее в секонд хенде. Если ты одеваешься хорошо, то знаешь, что там вполне возможно найти крутую одежду . Можешь попробовать искать одежду не в локальном магазине, а заказать винтажную.
4. Ремонтируй. Поломалась любимая штука? Да просто попробуй ее починить, может прокачаешь ручные навыки и сможешь ей пользоваться дальше. Не все вещи после поломки надо выкидывать.
5. Фильтруй базар, сортируй мусор. Если научишься говорить «нет» в ответ на «пакет нужен?», то и начни сортировать мусор. Использованный пакет будет точно так же вреден, как и выброшенный на вонючую свалку мусорный пакет. Прочти об этом в интернете побольше, ничего сложного нет. Макулатуру, металлы, пластик, тетра-паки — сортируй, может даже подзаработаешь копеечку за принесенный пунктам вторсырья мусор.
6. Хватит бросать мусор где попало как быдло.
7. Никогда не покупай автомобиль. Ги Дебор не одобряет.

Никакой из этих пунктов не является трудным, за твое старание природа тебя будет бесконечно благодарить. Просто прогугли эту тему больше, она интересна и чрезмерно доброжелательна. Не поступай как капиталист — не гадь планете.

К черту капитализм

Наступила главная часть всей статьи. Здесь советов тоже много:

1. Не покупай бесполезную фигню. Это повтор совета про мусор. Даже если тебе все равно на природу, то просто не покупай эту пыль.
2. Не покупай без уверенности.
3. Выбрось рекламу из головы.
4. Скидки — обман. Капиталисты обманывают потребителей наценками.
5. Не следуй за модой. Одевайся и делай только то, что нравится тебе, а не толпе.
6. Лучше не используй деньги. Не корми государство и банкиров. Просто попробуй сделать так, чтобы расплатиться не ими, а какими-либо услугами. Результат тебя обрадует и обмен произойдет в том же ключе. Банально даже ты можешь хорошо поесть за помывку посуды.
7. Используй альтернативы. Важнее этого совета в этой категории нет ничего. Узнай о своем населенном пункте больше, пользуйся общественными инициативами. Хочешь бесплатно поесть? Тебе поможет коллектив Food Not Bombs. Хочешь обменять барахло? Беги в любой бесплатный магазин, либо же на Really Really Free Market (у них рынок свободнее, чем у либертарианцев). Инициатив — много. Если в твоей глуши нет таких, то организуй сам. Если не ты, то кто? Если не сегодня, то когда?
8. Do It Yourself. Пользуйся тем, что нам даровал панк-рок. Избавляйся от своих потребностей своими руками. По крайней мере начни хорошо готовить.
9. Избегай «помощи» капиталистов. Наплюй на супермаркеты и торговые центры, ответь им тем же. Это относится ко всем компаниям, которые ненавидят своих потребителей. Это относится ко всем компаниям, которые построены на эгоизме. Это относится ко всем компаниям, которые забирают труд своих рабочих. Не пользуйся пятерочками, банковскими картами, дорогими магазинами. Ты можешь найти все что угодно у независимых продавцов, можно найти полно людей, у которых можно найти еду или одежду. Честный труд лучше, да и можно помочь простым людям.
10. Всегда проси о помощи. В этом нет проявления слабости, взаимодействие с людьми лучше взаимодействия с богатыми свиньями.

    Проснись и живи свободно.

Всего существует несколько главных принципов философии анархизма: автономность, взаимопомощь, равенство и т.п. Автономия дарует людям возможность самостоятельно распоряжаться своей жизнью, по сути без этого принципа невозможно существование других. Да, автономия пересекается с понятием свободы, но лишь философски. Автономия это скорее что-то более анархическое, чем свобода как понятие, придуманное во времена Просвещения. Свобода стала ключевым концептом либерализма, идеей, благодаря которой европейцам удалось уйти от феодализма. Сегодня же понятие свободы искажено, оно скорее имеет юридический оттенок (любая Конституция имеет это слово), либо же связано с экспортом крылатой демократии, как это делали США в Ираке и Ливии.

Отличие автономии и свободы в том, что она не даруется государством или людьми из правящего класса, человек достигает ее сам. Жизнь в государстве автоматически ставит под удар самобытность, оно решает кому давать свободу и насколько много. Это похоже на продажу на развес, платящие больше люди получают больше грамм свободы, они попадают в высшие круги и сами начинают управлять людьми. Простому же народу из низшего или среднего класса платить нечем, они существуют по правилам игры и со стандартным уровнем «свобод». Отказ от игры по правилам и дарует автономию для каждого индивида, последовавшего по такому пути. Почему бы не прийти в этот магазин и не стащить свободу на глазах у продавца-государства?

Автономия позволяет формировать людям прочные связи друг с другом, не зависящие от кого-либо сверху. Группа автономных индивидов позволяет формировать коллективы, при соединении друг с другом которых создается единая сеть. Здесь же и приходят другие принципы анархизма, автономность позволяет зародиться взаимопомощи, дружбе и равенству. Сама по себе иерархия это лишь горстка ступеней, на верхушке которой обитают люди, контролирующие общество сверху вниз. Автономные коллективы же полностью ломают всю пирамиду, потому что существуют без единого центра и богов и господ. Каждый коллектив становится равным по отношению к другому коллективу, как и члены внутри каждого из них. Человек безусловно зависим от общества, но когда он пытается добиться индивидуальной автономии внутри неравного и централизованного общества — это грустное зрелище.

Автономные группы могут быть совершенно разными, это может быть даже профсоюз студентов, совет жителей дома, объединение потребителей, хоть даже профсоюз президентов! Каким бы не был коллектив, главное, что он принимает свои решения сам и существует без стоящих сверху людей, это и есть автономия.

Черные Пантеры были не только занимались патрулированием кварталов и протестами, но и старались улучшать свое сообщество. Они организовывали бесплатные завтраки для бедных чернокожих детей, предоставляли бесплатную медицину, сами же учили детей, обустраивали кооперативные жилищные сообщества и т.п. Они смогли создать больше 60-ти общественных программ, которые позволили им отделиться от угнетавшего их общества.

Примеров подобного устройства жизни много, автономии могут добиваться как и локальные группы анархистов, так и гигантские людские сообщества из Рожавы. Грубо говоря, автономия является ответной реакцией на существование власти над субъектом. Люди начинают добиваться ее лишь в критические моменты системы, когда не согласные с ней индивиды просто разрывают общественный договор. Внутри автономий легко формируется дружба и единство, в такой системе каждый знает друг друга не только исходя из сути группы. Если человеку сильно импонирует идея автономии, то… может он на полпути, чтобы проникнуться анархическим духом?

Невозможно назвать общество свободным, если оно не автономно. Лучше жить с царем в голове, чем при нем.

Joining me today is Joel Williamson of Non Serviam media. Joel is an individualist anarchist from Texas who has been involved in different activist projects over the years. These projects range from fundraising to support political prisoners such as Ross Ulbricht, organizing “counter-economic farmers markets, and engaging in varied direct action efforts. His activism has most recently been focused on Non Serviam Media, which is a small collective dedicated to exploring the world of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas through audio and video production.

If you spend much time in the left-libertarian or anarchist podcast space, you may have come across Non Serviam’s excellent podcast Joel hosts called Non Serviam. If you enjoy this show at all, you probably would enjoy, if you are not already enjoying, that show. I went back and looked at our guest backlog, and roughly half of our past guests have also appeared on Joel’s show. Because of the similarities between our shows and audience, we figured some cross-episodes between Non Serviam and MER were in order. I appeared on the latest episode of Non Serviam to discuss my work on democracy, nationalism, and political authority and, today, we are happy to have Joel on. 

This was a fun conversation that covers a range of topics from underlying philosophical foundations of Joel’s anarchist outlook, to agorism, to praxis and direct action.  It was much more exploratory and funny than previous episodes of MER, which made for a fun and insightful change in pace. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. Also, check out Joel’s interview with me on Non Serviam, as well as all his other episodes if you happen to enjoy this conversation.