Often the free market anarchist response to dealing with business misconduct includes the ability for workers to find a new job, consumers to buy a new product, etc. The more fleshed out version of this ideal includes wildcat unionism, mass boycotts, pickets, and demonstrations. And yes, workers should absolutely be able to use collective bargaining tactics to fight for better working conditions just as consumers should be able to engage in mass boycott campaigns to address their own concerns. But workers, employed in the same workplace, can more easily communicate with one another, and can utilize the union structure to communicate and achieve their goals; consumers do not have the same benefits.

Sure, grassroots consumer boycott movements have sprung up such as the March Against Monsanto and others. Consumers will also often show their support for union campaigns by participating in complimentary boycotts such as with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ ongoing boycott against Wendy’s and the recent Amazon and Uber/Lyft strikes/boycotts but this again benefits from the resources available to the workers organizing the campaigns in the first place. So how do consumers organize themselves? What’s the missing piece to this puzzle?

Consumer advocacy groups seek to protect people from corporate abuse like unsafe products, predatory lending, false advertising, astroturfing, and pollution. Consumer advocacy groups may operate via protests, litigation, campaigning, or lobbying. They can engage in single-issue advocacy (e.g. Right to Repair, which campaigns for the right of consumers to repair the products they own without corporate interference or barriers) or they may set themselves up as more general consumer watchdogs, such as the Consumer Reports or Public Citizen.

The roots of consumer advocacy groups can be traced back to two precursor organizations: standards organizations and consumers leagues, both of which appeared in the United States in the early 1900s. Trade associations and professional societies established standards organizations to reduce industry waste and increase productivity. Consumer leagues modeled themselves after trade unions in their attempts to improve the market with boycotts in the same way that unions sought to improve working conditions with strike actions.

Consumer advocacy groups can range from the more legislative-focused to the more market-focused. The more market-focused groups such as Consumer Reports provide members with independent product tests, professional reviews, crowdsourced personal consumer experiences, the ability to comparison shop to find the highest quality products, updates on strikes, boycotts, and legal actions, and more. This allows consumers to share their experiences, avoid shitty products and businesses with bad labor practices, and coordinate mass actions in response to business misconduct.

Consumer advocacy groups, along with apps such as Buycott, wildcat labor unions, alt labor organizations, and private certification groups, all offer us realistic ways to stop businesses from abusing workers, consumers, the environment, and the surrounding communities. We must actively dispel the idea that the free market would allow businesses to run free without any checks or balances. Instead we must prove that the market can be the best regulator of all by promoting and expanding these types of resources and organizations in the here and now. Without the state, it’s up to us.

Ayn Rand escreveu que “Fascismo, Nazismo, Comunismo e Socialismo são apenas variações superficiais do mesmo tema monstruoso – o coletivismo”. No entanto, acho que isso deve ser mudado para refletir todas as formas que o coletivismo, o inimigo da liberdade, pode assumir. Essa nova máxima seria “Fascismo, Nazismo, Comunismo, Socialismo de Estado e Capitalismo são variações superficiais do mesmo tema monstruoso – o coletivismo. ”Para meus leitores libertários (e leitores conservadores, se eu tiver algum), a ideia de que o capitalismo é uma forma de coletivismo soa ridícula e muitos capitalistas (como Ayn Rand) pensam que o coletivismo é um inimigo do capitalismo. Mas eles são um e o mesmo.

O epítome do capitalismo é a ganância. O acúmulo de propriedade e riqueza nas mãos de um coletivo, o 1% mais rico, é esta ganância manifestada. O capital para o estabelecimento de negócios é acumulado (assim como a propriedade) e, assim, as pessoas são privadas do acesso universal à riqueza. O capitalismo não é, desta forma, diferente de seus irmãos, o comunismo e o socialismo estatista, que buscam acumular propriedades e riquezas nas mãos do Estado e dos líderes partidários. Na verdade, o capitalismo, como seus irmãos, é uma criatura do Estado e seria incapaz de existir em uma sociedade livre. Mesmo o chamado “anarco” -capitalismo levaria a um Estado autoritário corporativo.

Compare o comunismo, o socialismo estatista, o fascismo e o nazismo com o capitalismo. Você descobrirá que as Cinco Formas de Coletivismo têm muito em comum. A principal dessas semelhanças é que todas requerem o acúmulo de capital e propriedade nas mãos de poucos e cada um requer que um governo esteja do lado de poucos. Seja por meio de regulamentações que protegem as corporações e punem as pequenas empresas (como no capitalismo), por meio de impostos que punem as pessoas e evitam a acumulação de Riqueza (como no socialismo estatista), evitando que toda e qualquer empresa privada exista (como no comunismo) , ou banindo o livre comércio e instituindo o planejamento econômico (como no fascismo / nazismo), o Estado intervirá para proteger o coletivo. Esse coletivo pode ser formado por líderes partidários, executivos corporativos ou ambos.

O inimigo do livre mercado é o capitalista, que espera que o governo atenda às suas necessidades, e o socialista estatista, que espera que o governo atenda às suas necessidades. O capitalista espera que as regulamentações ajudem a evitar que as empresas menores concorram com as grandes empresas e o socialista estatista espera que as regulamentações ajudem a impedir que as grandes empresas concorram com as pequenas empresas. Muitos acharam estranho ver o senador do Texas Ted Cruz e a deputada de Nova York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez colaborarem em um projeto de lei, mas eles acreditam na mesma coisa. Um quer que o governo intervenha para proteger as elites e o outro pensa que a intervenção do governo ajudará os pobres. No entanto, a intervenção do governo sempre ajudará as elites. Veja a Venezuela. As políticas para proteger os pobres apenas isolaram as elites. É um absurdo, então, que alguns anarquistas saiam em defesa de Maduro porque ele se autodenomina socialista. É uma tentativa patética e vã dos anarquistas de fazer com que a Esquerda mais ampla os reconheça – como um pobre rapaz tentando fazer uma garota da Twitch notá-lo por todos os meios necessários.

O melhor sistema econômico é aquele que fortalece e enriquece o indivíduo, o socialismo laissez-faire, que é um componente chave do anarquismo individualista, a única ideologia política em que um indivíduo é verdadeiramente livre. O coletivismo em qualquer de suas cinco formas é o inimigo do indivíduo.

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

Contrary to the assertions of some leftists there are in fact thoroughly monstrous people who are not just victims of their social conditions. Humans vary. We each follow somewhat random paths in the development of our values and instincts, buffeted by a million tiny butterfly wings of context that can never be managed or predicted.

A hundred cloned children with identical genes, given identical love and education, will nevertheless face moments of uncertainty where one must randomly pick a hypothesis or strategy from among those possible and run with it, to test out different models and values. Tendencies of course emerge in the aggregate, but they have exceptions. Sometimes these exceptions are themselves an aggregate phenomenon. An approach that is stable when adopted by 99% of a population may nevertheless be hard to keep stable at 100%, with random lone defectors seeing sufficient reward as to re-emerge. Game theory reveals that while compassion and mutual aid are broadly embraced in certain environments, this is often paralleled by the emergence of persistent minor tendencies of parasites and predators around the margins, with varying degrees of complexity. Most populations stabilize with a mix of individual strategies. Further, an individual’s life path is not only shaped by impossible to control random conditions, it also necessitates a degree of randomness in their personal exploration. Unfortunately there are certain perspectives that, once reached, aggressively wall themselves off from further consideration, adaptation, or mutation.

In the most harmonious and enlightened community, in the most advanced culture, in the most egalitarian and fair world, there will still emerge the cruel and callous, the manipulative and brutal. Those for whom other people are not an extension of their own existence as sites of agency, but objects to be crushed or used. These monsters can be drastically diminished in number by various institutional and cultural changes, but their emergence cannot be entirely suppressed. And they will invariably seize whatever means and tools are available to them to harm others and seize power.

Bad people will always exist.

We can problematize the fuzzy edges of “badness” and we can plunge into greater psychological detail on the variety of forms taken, but at the end of the day there is still the brute fact of individuals locked to bad values and habits. People not mistaken or confused, people for whom no therapy, argument, enticement, or punishment will ever work. People for all intents and purposes permanently locked to certain malicious values and perspectives. People whose exploration dead-ended in values and strategies that studiously seal themselves off from further development, from further engagement. People who are not just merely passing through badness, but who have taken it in and bonded to it.

These bad people are the walking dead, husks of former imaginative and inquisitive minds. They vary in how much insight they lapped down before they walled off the world, some become great specialists in certain domains of manipulation, some are inane and immediately visible. Often they are both, experts at certain games of power, bumbling fools at the world beyond.

But this is adamantly not a conservative argument for the state or any power system that might paternalistically ‘save’ us from such bad people.

A core anarchist realization is that we cannot guard against bad people by creating institutions of power because the same bad people will inevitably seize and wield those institutions. The only long term answer is to remove all positions of power, to make it, in a million ways, impossible for anyone to seize or maintain control over other people.

The left is repeatedly marred by the mistake of assuming that individual monsters are purely a product of social structures. This is anti-reductionist in the most grievously mistaken way. It thinks entirely in terms of the “forest” and ignores the actual trees. The left correctly notes that persistent societal macrostructures are reinforced by certain feedback loops, but then it often simplifies its model of the world purely into such terms. The agents it focuses on become things like nations, “capitalism,” “civilization,” et al., and these accounts are often quite good at mapping how these structures persist, or at least cutting through delusional liberal narratives about these abstractions, but they’re extraordinarily bad at predicting when such abstractions break down.

From above a “forest” might appear to behave like a single entity, but no one ever told the plants and animals beneath the canopy about our concept of a “forest.” They are not simply gears in a wider clockwork mechanism.

Because the left tends to think in terms of such grand structures it tends to assume that the arrangements of individuals are simply and directly caused by those grand structures, that they’ll just march along to further those narratives like rigid cells in a body. This is the source of the left’s persistent statism. It is why Leninists believe in capturing “control” over the state, believing that capitalism can be abolished top-down by a series of edicts.

Anarchists are smarter, we realize that change has to emerge bottom-up, but many unfortunately often inherit the left’s macroscopic thinking when it comes to futures after capitalism.

There is no better example of this than when it comes to policing.

Leftists are quick to point out that All Cops Are Bastards because of their functional role in the institution. It doesn’t matter if an individual means well as a cop, they’re bound up as components in an overall oppressive system. This is true enough, although it obfuscates opportunities for a committed infiltrator to disrupt policing. We might imagine a genuinely good person that goes undercover as a cop, and sets up the murders of fellow officers, ruins evidence to let hundreds free, or leaks critical intel.

Of course such extreme exceptions only prove the general rule, but this kind of top-down thinking of police purely in terms of their institutional function misses another way in which cops are monsters.

The police are rotten because policing attracts rot.

The role of the police is to preserve simplistic hierarchies and rules with violence. To maintain “order” — that is to say to make the world legible to the simple-minded. And to exercise unrivaled brute violence to make this so.

This is everywhere the same regardless of the flag the police are under, and regardless of the contours of the specific order sought. Forget the horrors of the USSR, even if the order to be maintained was a direct democratic commune of enlightened values, the role of policing this order would attract many of the very worst people. Incentives matter.

If police are “bureaucrats with guns” as David Graeber puts it, they are so both to serve our highest rulers and because a great many more — in hunger for simplicity — allow issues of conflict and security to be offloaded upon a very small number of people who are almost uncheckable.

Leftists are correct to point out that modern policing is a recent invention, and in america tied to slave patrols, but conservatives are right to tie policing with gangs and armies more generally. Just because the exact contours and trappings of these gangs has changed dramatically over history, doesn’t mean their core nature has. Anyone telling you otherwise is just trying to sell you a re-skin, not honest abolition. Police Abolition that doesn’t seek to undo a form of relating that dates back to the earliest city states is just tame reformism by another name.

Despite some occasional rhetoric, conservatives are broadly nihilistic realists about power, and they are right to remember that the state poses itself as the alternative to roving bands of marauders, a very real phenomenon. The state is a protection racket often formed by those same roving gangs of monsters setting up permanent shop. The more cooperative civilized folks get extorted for their crops and learn to tolerate these barbarians as “their own,” but the occupiers always have more in common with the vicious marauders. The same underlying cognitive strategies. The same personality. They may paint themselves as sheep dogs protecting the sheep against the wolves, but they are at the end of the day both meat-eating canines, and the sheep end up being butchered either way.

Cops today are very much a continuation of this recurring dynamic. Even the right-left dichotomy rapidly polarized to reactionary rural communities and left-leaning cities, while in north america the cops live in a suburban ring around the cities they terrorize. The narratives of simplistic gang warfare simply hold more appeal outside cosmopolitan spaces where people are pressed up against one another and forced to find more complex ways to cooperate and conflict. The survivalists fantasizing of marauding as warlords find deep common personality — and from there common culture — with the police that ostensibly protect against precisely that.

The legacy of white supremacy provides framing to this, and certainly the police help maintain white supremacy in complex structural ways, but many a reactionary without conscious racial animus instinctively sees a black cop at the bar as an ally, not because of any conscious evaluation that the black cop is functionally reinforcing white supremacy. No, at the most base level the black cop and the reactionary share a worldview and aspects of personality. It is one largely of zero-sum violent competition, fearful of messy complexity, disdainful of empathy, inquiry, and creativity, anything that might undermine hard resolve.

The role of policing attracts, facilitates, and is best performed by pre-existing bad people.

And like knows like.

Understanding affinities and predilections in terms of character, not just structural positions, is critical to understanding the world.

The reactionary explosion that was Gamergate and Trump has forged an alliance across all sorts of divides and differences that on paper look impossible. What united them was a general recognition that the world was removing operating space for bad people like them, at an accelerating pace.

This was as horrifying as it was unexpected for many of them. After all, their worldview tells them that brute violence and selfish opportunism are the True Nature of the world. The Way Things Just Are. They were playing The Game and everyone else was caught up in temporary delusions.

So how on earth could they be losing?!

The left often tries to parse the reactionary coalition in terms of axes of systemic oppression. Patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ableism, class, etc.. Those who fear losing their privileges often react with violence, that’s broadly true. But why are they losing? And simply looking at a person’s systemic privilege chart is not as predictive of their politics as such an account would suggest. What would drive a coalition together so fervently? Is it just the inevitable response to a black president and economic travails? This doesn’t explain the steady growth of reaction in numerous circles and it doesn’t explain the volcano of reaction online from Gamergate on. There are many complex explanations for the archipelago of grifters, militants, and opportunists working against their ostensible structural affinities, and most of them are right, to a degree.

But at root the reality is that in the last decade bad people and even just the moderately apathetic in almost every subcultural corner started finding a rapidly tightening noose around their necks thanks to the internet. What is derided as “cancel culture” is just old fashioned boycott dynamics supercharged by massive connectivity and the rapid progression of political/ethical discourse as the collective hive mind grows in size.

As people came online in greater numbers and greater activity the promise of the internet was fulfilled. The oppressed gained a voice and made their case. Radical ideas finally had their day in court. The altruistic were persuaded and mobilized. What were once extremely marginal (although correct) analyses of systemic injustice rapidly won out in the marketplace of ideas. Not in the sense that they persuaded literally everyone — some folks weren’t interested in listening, some were less connected, and some were indeed hostile to the loss of privileges these arguments prescribed — but in the sense that they accumulated large enough support to apply pressure.

You see, boycotts are an asymmetric tool. They require sacrifice on the part of the boycotters and they don’t present very many opportunities for personal benefit. A negligible transient status bump from signaling your participation and a massive energy drain to launch and keep campaigns going.

Let’s say that you get raped by Sam. The default self-interested calculus is to shut up about it and pretend like it never happened while avoiding him. The damage is done, the legal system and public opinion is overwhelmingly stocked against you. You could maybe inflict a little revenge, but you’d take massive damage. And as revenge, it wouldn’t be a stunning victory that would demonstrate your superior power to all those watching, no, you would appear weak. You were raped, you lost standing fighting him. You took the path of the damaged, self-destructive, crazy woman. No, better to shut up.

But what of the other people he could hurt? If you’re a selfish person you don’t care, or only care enough for a deniable whisper of warning here or there.

If, however, you’re an empathetic person for whom the rape of another person is akin to getting raped again yourself… the answer is obvious, you have to do what you can to stop Sam from raping again.

So you whisper and yell, you warn everyone you can.

And since people are mostly selfish or apathetic bastards most of them don’t give a shit. They continue being friends with Sam, they continue to provide him with access to spaces and people to prey on. So long as they can avoid the issue, so long as they can deflect or ‘both sides’ or whatever it takes to not have to sacrifice anything, they will.

So you demand that people pick a side or you’ll burn your bridges with them. The people more invested in Sam than you get outraged you’d damage them over this and drop you for Sam. You’re just one person, how much damage could you do to them.

But here’s the thing. The people sticking with Sam are purely some degree of Bad People. They’re not altruists. They won’t sacrifice to stop Sam from raping again. So you get a few altruists on your side willing to sacrifice to help you. If you get enough of them together, even when you’re a minority, you can collectively leverage a lot more. “If you stay friends with Sam you will lose not just one friend but five friends.”

Boycotts, like strikes, are most effective when they’re transitive in some manner. You don’t just boycott the tomato company, you boycott every company that buys from them as well. You get colleges to divest investments from anything near the tomato company. You threaten to boycott any state that continues giving the tomato company tax write-offs. You sacrifice collectively immense reputation, time, energy, money, etc, until the impact starts dissuading people. Then you target the remaining defectors. The moment another tomato company adopts the same practices you come out swinging hard, no matter the personal cost. You never allow defectors.

Every boycott requires a different critical mass to work, but that mass is not a 51% majority. The leverage individuals have varies, but what usually remains the case is that the sacrifice is not directly advantageous in net to the individuals involved, even if the boycott works. The benefit is usually over a large number of people.

Boycotts are not just a collective action problem, they’re often not even a benefit to the individuals boycotting. And this is why boycotts are a style of conflict that tends to slightly favor altruistic people.

The internet decreases networking costs and so it made different types of boycotts easier. Everywhere.

This is the noose that the shitbags could feel tightening. One day they woke up and saw their friend getting shit for calling someone the n-word, the next day it was for a minor joke, a joke! What were the boundaries of allowable etiquette one day seemed to suddenly ratchet the next day. It was absurd! To keep up you had to constantly pay attention, you had to waste a ton of energy acting like you cared about other people.

The whole thing was madness to anyone with a right mind (ie selfish bastards), because there was very little winning in this new game. At best a bad person might eek out a little prestige wearing sheep’s clothing and trying to herd them in their crusade against wolves, but the sheep inevitably came for them too. Sometimes the sheep even came for each other! Even if you could somehow brainwash yourself into being altruistic like them, that was no assurance you’d get power! Quite the opposite. There were no truly stable positions of power to be seized. And what good is a game if there’s no throne?

In all corners, in all walks of life, bad people had a collective shudder in horror and realized suddenly that to preserve the various games they’d been playing they’d have to do something weird: they’d have to unite.

Just one little teensy problem. They’re not that fucking good at it. Their core values and strategies leave them incapable of autonomously sacrificing for a collective good. They fight each other, they grab for power, they run grifts, they get bored. Heady moments of possibility invariably collapsed into grueling, whining shambles. Beside a few true believers — so damaged they’d sacrifice for the collective bad, the maintenance of The Game — most everyone turned out to not want to sacrifice.

They were willing to loudly vice-signal for years when that meant trumpeting their cruelty and bullying anyone that smacked of sincere altruism. They were willing to spend a few bucks a month subscribing to personal entertainment catered directly to bad people. But they weren’t generally willing to lay down their lives, much less their day-to-day comfort, and sacrifice in grueling unpaid unrewarding organizing and activism.

Bad people excel when there are external regimented hierarchies to weaponize them. But they are toothless without them, incapable of the sacrifice necessary to resolve collective action problems. Some of them are willing to do violence and die for The Cause, but dying is easy. It’s the drudge work with no personal reward that’s impossible.

And so, as the neoreactionary fascists say, “Cthulhu always swims left.” Not because institutions are captured in democratic spirals of majoritarian tyranny, no, democracy would be far more reactionary than boycotts. If the only way to change things was a mere vote almost every country would have more conservative institutions. No, boycotts on the whole super-empower altruistic minorities.

Obviously this includes mistaken altruists who sincerely believe that a fetus has a “soul” or that white people shouldn’t eat burritos. These particulars matter, but don’t derail the broad tendency of information age boycotting against the sort of games many have specialized at. It’s also true that centralized epistemic organizations have collapsed, and as a result the internet is a churning place, filled with Qanons and horoscopes, temporarily generating all kinds of batshit foam, but the long arc of discourse is towards greater accuracy.

As social complexity grew in bottom-up ways with urbanization, globalization, and various other increases of connectivity, reactionaries continued to win all the rock solid, easily identifiable hard power stuff, and the altruists in turn melted around their iron fists in a thousand complicated facets of culture and society.

Personal strategies that were tailored to a world of simple violence and simple small communities, have floundered in the face of a more complex world. It’s unfair. It’s unnatural. Trying to understand or keep track of the new game hurts many a poor little reactionary mind.

Some have adapted, of course, the left has many a grifter and opportunist, but they find themselves increasingly pressed. The rapist or careerist who thought they had a solid game going suddenly finds themselves cancelled, or gets fed up with the amount of energy they have to put into preference falsifying. And those who’ve tried to weaponize the new social norms into “give me something or I’ll call you out over nothing” plays face diminishing returns (because they’re unwilling to truly sacrifice) and rarely last more than a year or two before being themselves identified and marginalized.

This is why the more clearheaded selfish bastards look at the left and see a suicide cult, an astonishingly stupid game that can’t be won. “You’ll deserve it when they eat you alive.” They can never imagine being motivated by altruism in a self-sacrificing way, and so they see the boycotters as a storm of insanity and shortsightedness. Everywhere around them is empty virtue signalling. Actual righteous fury and passion — raised by increased direct connection to injustice — is beyond their comprehension or written off as the braying of irrelevant sheep.

The left often talks of establishing a world without class, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, ableism, etc, but these are merely flavors of power — they leave the promise of entirely new power systems emerging from the ashes. The replacement of one set of games with another. A young upper middle class person with floundering options for personal power under the Czar might see great opportunity in getting in on the ground floor of Bolshevism — at least they’d have a shot at establishing themselves higher up. But over time the left has not just added numerous modules of oppressions to be toppled, it has increasingly moved towards rejecting positions of power themselves. This anarchization of the left, of anarchism itself, is a horrifying nightmare to many.

A bad person — long ago calcified by a hunger for personal power — might be willing to watch as many particular ladders of status and control are eroded, but the idea of being left no ladders is intolerable in the extreme.

This is the problem we now face. While conscious anarchists are only one part of the overall ratchet, the world is waking up to the threat of anarchism, realizing for the first time that it is not just a specific set of abusers, rulers, or selfish jackasses that is threatened by the changing world, but all of them.

The sharpest disadvantage of anarchism is that, by its very nature as a radical rejection of all domination, it leaves no line of retreat. By targeting all evil, it offers nothing of appeal to fundamentally evil people.

There are, of course, even bad people who, for a variety of reasons, find anarchist circles to be stalking grounds more suited to their aptitudes than finance or human trafficking. They are inherently hostile to “cancel culture” or any theoretical approach that might cast judgement on individuals or frame anarchism in radical ethical terms. It should be no surprise that, for example, the white-nationalist Michael Schmidt tried studiously to strip the anarchist tradition of ethical and philosophical content, re-casting it as merely an anti-state and anti-capital movement, silent on everything else. Everyone knows examples of predators, rapists, abusers, etc., that have whined about anarchist critiques of power that ventured too close to their own chosen ladder. And we might expect that at least some of the left’s inclination to get lost in structural thinking is the result of intentional misdirection, to leave room for individual bad actors.

But while boycotts can and do fire in directions not aligned with anarchism’s aspirations, the overall ratcheting effect of internet-era boycotting has been both a strangling of the selfish by the altruistic, and an undermining of positions of power. Every throne is more precarious and short-lived. Every rapist now fears their survivors.

Anarchism, once written off as a fringe and preposterous cult of naive sheep, is now revealing itself to a number of people around the world as their worst enemy. The implicit logic behind a cleansing firestorm that risks demolishing every relationship of control, every position of power, every reassuring but violently-maintained simplicity.

While big self-reinforcing patterns of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc, are certainly real enough, it is individuals who make the future. And while class, race, gender, etc., help statistically prompt the emergence of certain habits of mind and orientations to the world, it is ideology and habituated character that directly propels a given individual to act.

It is often said that the internet has turned politics into a mechanism to sort ourselves by personality. This process is far from complete, but it is more real than not.

And if the reactionary alliance and the fascist resurgence we face today are dynamics of personal character, we cannot merely derail or smash something systemic and solve the problem. A fascist person will keep on being fascist, cloaked or not. And reactionaries who have woken up to the noose tightening around their necks will not soon forget the existential risk they face.

Bad people have achieved a certain degree of class consciousness.

The biggest open question is whether they can manage to slaughter enough of us to revert society to a simpler game that’s less biased against them.

There are a few pathways available.

The first is the ecofascist collapsism you find among Atomwaffen and their ilk. This is probably the most coherent grand picture thinking among reactionaries. Social connectivity is the root of the problem reactionaries face, the thing that’s allowing boycott dynamics to start to eclipse brute force dynamics, and so the grandest possible reset would be to wipe out not just the internet but cities as well. Hard to ‘cancel’ a marauding warlord for rape in the ruins of civilization. But there are countless significant challenges between a few kids building bombs while whacking it to Evola and Kaczynski and their goal. Their attack space is the widest, but even wider is the counter-attack space. They can bomb dams and poison water supplies, but can they stop every scientist and tinkerer on the planet from autonomously probing and inventing? Civilization, properly understood, is not a brittle megamachine but an emergent hive of collective collaboration. Ecofascist terrorists are a serious danger, but they are so small in number that wiping them out is conceivable.

The harder problem lies with the more popular pathways of reaction. From exterminationist Right Wing Death Squads to balkanization to sweeping institutional fascism. While more ecofascist and collapsist variants seek to permanently demolish the infrastructure that connects people and super-empowers altruistic minorities — letting the rubble of civilization serve as perpetual prison walls — this other path seeks to maintain proactive social control. Rather than transforming everything to something hopefully perpetually stable, this form of reaction seeks to preserve much of the existing order through unmitigated violence against the rest. You get to keep your surburban home and consumption rituals largely intact, in return for rivers of blood just over the horizon as all those unruly city/colored/queer folk are permanently silenced and the rest of the world more brutally enslaved.

These re-colonization fantasies are virtually everywhere in the US today. The liberals have made noise for too long, they’ve cluttered up your world with all kinds of complicated things you can’t quite grasp and a sense of entitlement to stop you from raping and hurting as you please. Won’t it be great when we get revenge. When the clean simple understandable game of violence is all that’s in play.

One thing to note about such — the hunger to grab guns you’ve never used and point them at protesters in your rich neighborhood — is that it’s in some twisted sense “defensive.” Someone in a surburban home will talk a lot of shit about the need for other people to genocide away the libs, but this stems from a deep aversion to risk, novelty, and complexity. He may donate a pile of cash to grifter thugs livestreaming fights with antifa, but he hesitates at facing risk himself. While borderline fascists are legion in number, they’re mostly chickenhawks. Like the old white man screaming himself into horrified hysterics when the lynch mob finds a black man armed with a gun, he knows that his social order is falling apart because it is brittle to this kind of collective action problem. The reactionary mob may outnumber the black man, but not a one of them is willing to make the first move.

Bad people have a hard time acting in their common interest without a hierarchical system to handle coordinating them. While bad people love to fantasize of a world without n-iterated games — shrunken down to a local patch disconnected from all else — where they can murder and rape without fear of consequences, they flounder in the face of decentralized complexities.

The recent nationwide freakout over “ANTIFA buses” is reactionary dysfunction in perfect miniature. The conservative media ecosystem is relatively centralized and in lockstep, leading to individuals with atrophied epistemic muscles and a completely inaccurate shared map of the world and their enemies. They’re mostly selfish bastards so there’s incentive for randos to make shit up for a semblance of importance. This spirals out into the most absurd dysfunction. Sure these chuckleheads have more guns — as they incessantly remind the world — but that doesn’t mean much if whenever Karen reposts a shit meme you deploy your troops to random big boxes in nowheresville.

There is of course a dangerous ratchet of tribal identity and shared delusion, but that’s because those things benefit all individual parties in the short term. In the long term if they actually do finally start the civil war they hunger for, reactionaries will be horribly hobbled by this kind of systemic inaccuracy.

Conservatives habitually assume anarchists must be “paid protesters” because they’d never put their lives on the line to fight the cops without a paycheck. And most would certainly never spend hours every day exhaustively tracking the opposition to zero personal acclaim.

Reactionaries endlessly think in military terms because such blunt hierarchical systems are the only thing capable of organizing them.

If they were to autonomously form up into gangs on their own there’s a good chance they’d squabble into catastrophic dysfunction, at least before reaching the scale necessary to create long-lasting institutional incentive structures that can bend selfish pricks to a collective purpose.

In contrast the police (an occupying military force designed to continually put down a population) don’t sacrifice, they have huge salaries and plush accommodations, absurd liability protections and expect everyone to bend over backwards for them, they whine and quit over the slightest inconvenience.

This is why dismantling the apparatuses of the police state is so pressing. But it is also the site of insufficiently examined danger. If existing hierarchical structures can be demolished or dismantled, how quickly and efficiently will police deputize other bad people as paramilitary auxiliaries? They would happily give guns to rapey incels from 8chan and tell them to start killing libs. And even if we do successfully dismantle the police/military command institutions capable of organizing other monsters, how do we clean up a world of such unemployed landmines.

If indeed 800 officers are quitting the NYPD in response to the George Floyd uprising those people aren’t magically going to stop being authoritarian thugs. They’re not doing it for ethical reasons, they’re quitting because popular revolt made the job harder for them. The absence of the badge, the removal of the institution that harbored them, won’t transform these rabid creatures into people with consciences. It’s not enough to abolish the institutions they congealed in. People don’t change overnight.

De-Ba’athification in Iraq removed the torturers and murderers from Saddam’s administrative and security forces, but it let those cops continue to fester as the base of new terrorist and paramilitary groups; unemployed professionals in violence have to do something. The police we merely fire today will be the core of the marauding gangs they warn will come in their absence. At worst they will provide a crystallizing seed of centralization and legitimacy capable of organizing bad people through to their collective self-interest.

This is adamantly not to advocate an exterminationist policy. There are seven hundred thousand law enforcement officers in the United States. They may be the worst of the worst, but offensive mass murder on anything near that scale should be unthinkable, and is clearly not on a path to anything like a liberated world. Mass imprisonment in some kind of Stalinesque re-education project is likewise beyond unconscionable, and even less likely than therapy to have a deep impact. The US currently incarcerates 2.3 million, they may be mostly far better people than the average cop, but simply putting the cops inside the prisons they currently run would reproduce the current carceral state with only modest reforms. No anarchist who truly believes in a world without domination can embrace endless bloodshed.

How then, do we live with these monsters?

Even if we remove institutions of power/terror, how will we stop them from rebuilding them?

As you can tell from my approach so far I think the answer is to really look at and understand the game theoretic dysfunction that stops all the non-cop monsters from organizing today.

Police make up far less than one percent of the population and yet they are able to imprison a larger percentage, able to hold back the rebellion of a much greater percentage. This is because an existing order is defended by collective action problems. Even when you have a huge base it’s hard to initially motivate and organize a sufficient mass of folks to act. The first few white supremacists intent on launching a pogrom are put down, if not they become a movement and soon a genocide. The first crew of former cops to try and return to criminality — whether raiding or setting up a protection racket — must be quickly and proactively stopped before their gang can metastasize.

As bad as leftists can fall to squabbling in pursuit of moral purity, and for all the few opportunists that try to momentarily exploit such within the ladders of the left, fascists backstab each other with even more ferocity. The only way the right has learned to solve collective action problems is with blunt tools like nationalism and racism. These are supremely undexterous mobilizing tools, which is why the right’s base is, for lack of better terms, astonishingly ignorant and stupid. They also only thinly paper over the vicious jockeying for personal power.

The left has its grifters and abusers, but the right is almost nothing but. Reactionaries are not prone to revolutionary breaks with the status quo in no small part because they are the people least capable of organizing such. Even when sociopaths feel under pressure enough to form a defensive union and reactionaries radicalize into self-conscious fascists, they still face serious challenges achieving critical mass. Antifascist groups run rings around neonazi groups because antifascists are altruistically self-sacrificing. Neonazis meme a lot about sacrificing for the white race or whatever, but they all realize — as Anglin and Spencer have made explicit — that race is just an empty and arbitrary construct they cling to because of its utility in pursuit of personal power. They can brainwash a few dipshit kids to die for the cause (more usually personal fame), but not much beyond that.

Cops are, to be fair, generally pretty stupid, but they are also overwhelmingly self-interested. Even the world of divorced old white guys wearing wraparound sunglasses in their cars — while they may delight in opportunities to publicly demonstrate their machismo and reaffirm comfortingly simple narratives — are still deeply selfish creatures. Willing to wear tacticool armor and scream, but only so they can sit and be served at Baskin Robbins or TGI Fridays. Their “America” isn’t an ideal of liberty for other people, it’s a deeply personal totem standing for their privileges and comfort, a set of norms and conditions.

If you want to stop former cops from immediately transitioning to genocidal gangs and insurgent terrorism, like the Ba-athists in Iraq, you have to build an appropriate incentive structure for them. Mobilize such universal and powerful self-defense forces from the bottom up as to make them afraid of being the first stepping across a fixed and clear line, but also — and this is the hardest part — leave them something to be invested in.

A friend of mine has long argued that we should pay the police double what they currently make to sit at home and not kill anyone. Police abolition through giant pensions. A kind of explicit extortion agreement where at least the extorted public can set and oversee the terms. I have my doubts that this could be implemented or overseen without a state, but further I have my doubts that they wouldn’t simply finance the creation of their own army were they so generously compensated.

What’s left is a kind of preservation compact. We agree to leave you that stupid house you bought in the surburbs, with firm social norms against violating such. You can operate on the market, collect food and basic needs from post-state social services, and we’ll retrain anyone to work in professions without power. But the moment someone organizes a hierarchy or fields an ex-cop gang to spread terror again that gang gets exterminated by every surrounding watchful civilian. We have to be willing to, at the drop of a hat, race out of our houses and confront and stop with violence the predatory gangs the ex-cops will try to form.

You’ll note that although reformulated so they can be secured through bottom-up social organizing rather than a state, such a prescription replicates many of the incentive structures the state uses. Reactionaries instinctively think in such terms because such incentive structures work on them. Obviously they do not work as well on everyone, as selfless martyrs in resistance struggles around the world prove. Reactionaries think you can shock and awe people into compliance, and then are eternally surprised when the subjugated are willing to make personal sacrifices to oppose injustice generally. While conservatives desperately want the rhetorical mantle of victim, a much smaller minority of them truly believe or are willing to sacrifice in any continuous sense.

This is not a defense of carceral justice, borders, etc, but it does require us to think about the incentives we create for the decidedly non-altruistic. Decentralized free association with sharp self-defense is in keeping with anarchist values, but we often hesitate to embrace certain degrees of sharpness. This can be a mistake.

There is an alternative to both mafias and marauders, but it requires the city folk, the “sheep” the self-proclaimed wolves dismiss, to take their security into their own hands. It requires that the altruistic get the apathetic to stop off-handing conflict to a distant few, that we stop shoving our problems into a black box.

Bourgeois Dignity‘s line of inquiry — at least as stated — is into the causes of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Fact” — the tenfold or more increase in the average person’s standard of living in a couple centuries’ time.

Her thesis that “the Fact” owed its origins to a culture of innovation, of openness to experimentation and tinkering, and respect for productive labor, is — to be fair — quite persuasive, as such. The problem lies with the rather incoherent way she groups all the things together that she identifies with this culture, and the assortment of things she considers inimical to it.

Her actual argumentation, to put it nicely, is somewhat muddled. What she’s actually engaged in an apologetic for seems to be an unstable amalgamation of everything she has an aesthetic affinity for, and varies from place to place in the book. But for the most part, the view of the world she’s advancing is that of Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies, but with more footnotes.

For example, she conflates an amazing list of things in the post-1848 “elite” opinion that shifted against innovation and technological progress: “in nationalism and then in socialism, and then in national socialism, and finally in environmentalism…” And this amalgamated body of “elite” opinion was characterized by this rigorously defined list of traits: “stubbornly anti-capitalist, protectionist, anti-technological, allied with anti-Americanism.” Her concept of what constitutes “elites,” incidentally, seems to contain no small amount of Babbitry, roughly coinciding with the Republican Party’s understanding of “coastal elites” as people with snotty cultural attitudes — as opposed to regular fellows who don’t know what fork to use, despite being billionaires, CEOs and similar figures who have (you know) actual wealth and power. She literally presents the Readers Digest as the embodiment of “non-elite” — and hence “anti-socialist” — opinion. The “bourgeoisie” is by definition non-elite, even when its wealth is measured in billions and a few hundred of its members own most of the world’s wealth, whereas the “elite” consists entirely of intellectual lotus-eaters like the Romantic poets and Marxist professors.

At the outset she stipulates that she’s not defending markets as such, or capitalism as such, but bourgeois values centered on innovation, dynamism, entrepreneurship, etc. It is these ideas, she says, and the forward-thinking attitudes they reflect — not material factors like accumulation — that are responsible for the Fact. Material factors can explain second-order phenomena like why the benefits of growth from the Fact are distributed among members of a given society, or why the advance in average material standard of living was a bit faster here and a bit slower there. But the Fact, as such, results from cultural attitudes toward entrepreneurship and innovation.

But it’s not clear who she thinks she’s arguing against in promoting this thesis, other than perhaps John Zerzan or John Michael Greer and his disciples. Marx was second to none in celebrating the unprecedented forces of production unleashed by industrial capitalism in its “rule of scarce one hundred years,” and socialists in general are quite willing to admit the astonishing, unprecedented rate of technological progress and productivity growth in the modern era. They simply argue that capitalism distributed the gains in a very unequal way, and that increasingly irrational social relations of production are impeding further such growth. 

And — getting back to the material factors she herself acknowledged affecting the actual distribution of gains — it’s simply indisputable that assorted forms of artificial property rights and rent extraction have shifted the bulk of the material gains to the upper stratum of society. Leaving aside the lingering structure of ownership resulting from Enclosures and other robberies of the early capitalist period, and the separation of labor from its possessory rights in the means of subsistence, the bulk of corporate profits and billionaire wealth to this day results from economic rents of one kind or another.

True, McCloskey denies that primitive accumulation (in the Marxian sense) was responsible for the Fact; but that’s really tangential to the actual significance of primitive accumulation in radical historiography. What figures most prominently in radical historiography of the enclosures (both the lowercase kind of the late Medieval and early modern era that turned open fields into sheep pasture, and the uppercase Parliamentary kind on the eve of the Industrial Revolution) is their role in establishing the wage system and facilitating the extraction of surplus value — not in facilitating the technological takeoff as such. And primitive accumulation played a huge role in creating the structural power differentials and inequality of bargaining power that determined how the fruits of increased productivity were distributed. The latter association would be a much more important thing — and a much harder one! — to disprove, for capitalist apologetic purposes.

One thing McCloskey deserves credit for is minimizing the role of capital accumulation as such as a driver of increased productivity and wealth — a position which sets her apart from an endless amount of dreck that appears almost daily at right-libertarian websites. I will readily admit, and cheerfully so, that orthodox Marxists are wrong in their degree of emphasis on the scale of capital accumulation as a source of productivity — an emphasis they share not only with the Austrians but with liberal mass-production ideologues like John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. Mumford, Kropotkin, and Borsodi are much closer to the truth, as I have argued repeatedly in my own treatment of technological history. 

Enclosures and other forms of primitive accumulation were far less important as a source of investment capital for the industrial revolution than as a source for the power differentials that enable extraction of a surplus from labor. “[M]odern economic growth did not and does not and cannot depend on the scraps to be gained by stealing from poor people.” No; but the distribution of the fruits of economic growth between classes can, did, and does depend on the bargaining leverage gained by depriving poor people of direct access to the means of production and subsistence. Primitive accumulation may not have been the reason for the growth of the pie, but it is very much the reason the rich get such a giant share of it.

“Stealing from poor people is not a good business plan.” Actually it is. It may not be a good plan for accumulating initial investment capital, but it is an excellent plan for shifting the balance of power in order to steal a major part of the future output of those poor people and their descendants when you employ them. 

McCloskey herself at one point argues that human capital is a bigger source of productivity than accumulated investment capital. Yes! And the relative bargaining power of workers and employers determines how much of the output generated by that human capital goes to whom. Apparently she is unfamiliar with all the political economists, from Wakefield to Oppenheimer, who have argued that it is much harder to exploit labor when you have to compete with the possibility of self-employment — or the public polemics and private commentary of the propertied classes of England during the Enclosures, in which they argued that rural laborers would not work for wages as long, as hard, or as cheaply, as desired so long as they had the alternative of subsisting on the commons. The Enclosures may not have been a large source of initial investment capital, but they were vital to creating the defining institutional feature of capitalism: the existence of a propertyless class forced to sell its labor on terms offered by owners of the means of production.

Similarly, she argues that imperalism, slavery, and Apartheid did not benefit the average European, white American, or white South African in the sense of promoting the overall wealth of the country or the rate of growth. But despite her constant — and irrelevant — insistence that it didn’t benefit imperialist countries “as a whole,” she does admit that it benefited a small minority of rich people who directly profited from it. And again, it’s the surplus extraction function (the size of the exploiter’s slice), and not the growth function (the size of the pie), that’s most relevant to a critical analysis of capitalism. 

This is directly analogous, as an example of failure to understand power issues, to right-libertarian arguments that racist employers are irrational because they limit their own ability to hire the most productive workers without regard to race — thus ignoring the role of labor market segmentation, as explained by Harry Braverman and others, in weakening labor solidarity and increasing the ease of exploitation. 

Such is the argument, similarly, of capitalist commentators who argue that mercantilism, the Corn Laws, slavery, etc., were finally ended because people “understood” better — and not because they were no longer useful to the minority that had previously benefited from them. In referring to this or that extractive policy as a “failure,” without specifying clearly for whom it was a “failure,” McCloskey reveals her own failure to grasp class analysis, or what constitutes “success” or “failure” from the perspective of a ruling class.

Right-libertarians, in general, are very bad at understanding the class power implications, or benefits to wealth extraction, of the things they dismiss on the grounds of seeming “economic irrationality.”

Moving on, she argues that the Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century did not “cause the industrial revolution.” But it did shape the subsequent institutional structure of capitalism, and the rate of extraction of surplus labor. Specifically, the commodification of land, the abrogation of communal rights in the open fields and common pasture, the conversion of peasants to tenants at will, and the mass waves of rack-renting and eviction, were central in transforming the peasantry into a landless rural proletariat, and in creating the structure of the wage labor market against which background the Industrial Revolution took place. So McCloskey’s asking the wrong questions.

And she repeatedly makes it clear that, her disavowals notwithstanding, her enthusiasm is not just for innovativeness as such but for the specific model of “free market capitalism” [sic] that emerged in the early modern West. Moreover, the specific things she sees as impeding the innovation and dynamism she supports are, primarily, deviations from the neoliberal model. Take, for example, her reference to “unhelpful economic policies (such as South-African labor laws based on German models and supported by leftist ideologues and trade unionists eager to give the really poor corrupting handouts to keep them away from the job market).” What inherent connection is there between a culture of innovation, as such, and an institutional framework in which labor is rendered so precarious and powerless as to be forced to enter the job market and accept work on whatever terms are offered by capitalists? Why are “handouts” “corrupting” for labor, when the plutocracy’s income comes primarily from economic rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcities enforced by the state, or from state subsidies? The incentives to productivity would be much greater, arguably, given an institutional and property structure in which income was tied more closely to actual productivity (e.g., an economy of commons-based natural resource governance, free and open-source knowledge, and stakeholder cooperative governance of the firm). If anything is corrupting, it’s the ability of cowboy CEOs to expropriate workers’ contribution to productivity, via Hayekian distributed knowledge, in the form of executive compensation.

This is, please note, the same person who repeatedly stresses the relative unimportance of “institutions” and “incentives” compared to cultural attitudes towards innovation. Apparently that flies out the window when it comes to institutions that increase the precarity of labor and reduce its bargaining power, presenting it with the incentive to accept work on whatever terms are offered. And apparently economic security or robust bargaining rights — let alone actually vesting decisions about product and process innovation in workers rather than shareholders — are inconsistent with a culture of innovation. Growth may result from technological advancement and the culture of innovation that fosters it, but apparently giving a greater degree of control over production to the very people who are most directly familiar with the production process is somehow at odds with such innovation.

Either material and institutional factors are important, or they are not. McCloskey says they are not, but rather than setting them aside, she instead smuggles them in disguised as “cultural” matters.

McCloskey also minimizes the extent to which the “free market” model she celebrates was no such thing, but was imposed by state force (she’s also one of the leading voices in challenging the 1619 Project’s emphasis on the role of slavery in the development of American capitalism). So she has little in the way of coherent criteria for defining the core features of such economies, directly responsible for the Fact, from the accidental ones. Given her negative views of trade unionism and handouts, presumably she regards the predominance of the wage system and more specifically what the Washington Consensus euphemistically calls “labor mobility” or “labor flexibility” as among the positives, and essential to some degree to the Fact’s occurrence. But in fact these things were brought about through all the forms of institutionalized violence she dismisses as unimportant to the Fact.

It’s ironic that she points to Soviet planners’ treatment of capital inputs as a “free good” as an example of calculational chaos, when capitalism has for centuries pursued a growth model of treating enclosed land and natural resources, and state-subsidized material inputs like transportation and trained labor-power, as artificially cheap and abundant goods. And, on the other hand, following a profit model overwhelmingly focused on economic rents from artificial scarcity of information.

Also ironic is the fact that the closest real embodiment of her bourgeois ethos of innovation and the dignity of tinkering in present-day society are the open-source peer-producers and open hardware hackers creating means of production scaled to commons-based direct production for use in the informal and social economy, or even the engineers who actually came up with all the ideas Elon Musk profits from. As I have argued elsewhere, the role of the “entrepreneurs” and “investors” McCloskey lionizes as the heroes of innovation is largely extractive and parasitic, based on the enclosure of actual innovative labor as a source of rents. The real innovation comes from the social intellect and cooperative labor of the very people whose unions and bargaining power she sees as a barrier to innovation.

Likewise, the related fact that the most significant form of central planning in the world is that of the large transnational corporation which encloses those same innovators and tinkerers within its walls of intellectual property for the benefit of people like Elon Musk, who are every bit as parasitic as any aristocrat living off the labor of peasants on his estate.

A good example of her misplaced regard for such people: “If you personally wish to grow a little rich, by all means be thrifty, and thereby accumulate for retirement. But a much better bet is to have a good idea and be the first to invest in it.” With its assumption that the people who have the ideas that increase productivity are the ones who get rich from them, or that vulture capitalists play some indispensable role, this could be a line from a John Stossel or Thomas Sowell column.

But it’s entirely fair to say that not one of the ideas that constitute Tesla or Amazon, nor the ideas for how they were combined, actually came from Musk or Bezos. All the basic building block concepts already existed, all the improvements in their existing implementations came from engineers and workers, and there was nothing that ground-breaking in the way they were put together. The only thing supplied by Musk and Bezos was the capital to prime the pump, as I argued in the article linked above. 

The irony is that McCloskey herself argues for Schumpeterian “credit theories of money” against the importance of capitalist thrift and abstention as a source of accumulation. So she is implicitly conceding, as I argue, that the pump priming function is something that could be carried out entirely as a system of horizontal flows, through cooperative credit, if the function of advancing credit had not been monopolized by capitalist banking institutions with the help of the capitalist state. Hence the parasitism of those who simply parlay a monopoly on the right to supply credit into a property right in the productivity created by other people’s innovation. The status quo, in which Bezos and Musk derive passive income from wealth actually created by the creativity of others, is far more “corrupting” a “handout” than anything McCloskey wrings her hands over in the German industrial model.

So again, it’s far from clear which aspects of actually existing capitalism are integral or essential, and which accidental, to the culture of innovation that McCloskey lionizes. More than anything, she identifies that culture with all the things — never clearly or exhaustively specified — which she likes in the status quo.

In addition to everything else, the book overflows with vulgar libertarian talking points that might have come from PragerU or Turning Point USA:

• Slavery existed everywhere but was only abolished by the West.
• Stagnation of wages in the US is misleading because of technological advances and quality improvement (an argument I tore into here).
• Of course there’s the obligatory reference to Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb as the Malthusian foil for her observation — which might have been lifted word for word from any of a hundred Ron Bailey columns at Reason — that things are getting better and better. At least she doesn’t repeat the thing about Rachel Carson and malaria.
• Or this, God help us: “Private property is not optional, and market socialism is a contradiction in terms.”

(I should note that, believe it or not, I rewrote my original draft to be a bit less snarky and mean-spirited. Professor McCloskey seems to be delightful as a person; considering Phil Magness is the other major figure in the anti-1619 project, I guess she deserves credit for not being awful.)

So this book is pretty decent at demonstrating the thing McCloskey ostensibly sets out to prove, but quite atrocious at proving all the tangentially related assertions — incidentally the ones more likely to make the hearts of capitalist apologists go pitty pat — she makes along the way. In fact, the material that advances her actual thesis goes a long way towards making a case for libertarian socialism as well.

Can an anarchist be socially conservative? Yes. I see no reason why someone who is anti-abortion or has fundamentalist views on sex or drugs can’t be an anarchist. Anarchism is about building a society in which no one forces their beliefs on others. As long as you respect the views and lives of others, your personal views don’t matter.

Historically, there are a few examples of conservative anarchists. One such thinker was Dorothy Day, a Christian anarchist and anarcho-distributist who died in 1980 (about nine days before John Lennon, actually). She wrote extensively in her organization’s penny-a-copy newspaper, The Catholic Worker. Going through the hundreds of articles she wrote, one will begin to see a few topics that she wrote about often. She wrote about cooperatives communes (especially farming communes), about the need to care for the poor, and about her support for private property and collectives. She also wrote about how she thought pre-marital sex was wrong and that abortion and birth control amount to genocide.

In The Catholic Worker, in December of 1972, she wrote, 

I feel that, as in the time of the Desert Fathers, the young are fleeing the cities–wandering over the face of the land, living after a fashion in voluntary poverty and manual labor, seeming to be inactive in the “peace movement.” I know they are still a part of it–just as Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ Movement is also part of it, committed to non-violence, even while they resist, fighting for their lives and their families’ lives. (They, together with the blacks, feel and have stated this, that birth control and abortion are genocide.)

About pre-marital sex, she wrote in September of 1963, 

I have been asked to express myself on these matters, especially since there has been a pamphlet published in England by the Quakers which is said to condone premarriage sexual intercourse “if the parties are responsible.” My reaction to this is that of a woman who must think in terms of the family, the need of the child to have both mother and father, who believes strongly that the home is the unit of society.

While these views are uncommon among anarchists, they’re not uncommon among the people of Appalachia where anarchist distributism would do well in an area that prides itself on its individualism yet has a strong sense of community. Combine it with an ardent social conservatism and anarchism would explode here. Many forget that Appalachians don’t vote. Turnout is quite low here. Even if you, like me, aren’t a social conservative, you can alter your message and focus on the aspects of anarchism that could appeal to social conservatives.

Many forget that most social conservatives would be okay with a “leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone” approach to these issues. My readers may think that I’m too sympathetic to the average social conservative. I should remind you that only 7% of Americans use Twitter. The conservatives on Twitter (much like the liberals) are a small, small fraction. The average conservative is much more like Dorothy Day. They hold conservative views on social matters but do support things that strengthen the individual and community and would be open to anarchism if it was presented to them in a friendly package.

Now, there are certain views that are incompatible with anarchism such as race realism, racism, and the like. One can be anti-abortion as long as they don’t believe the State should intervene and there is a case for reducing abortion without a State by reducing poverty and establishing a voluntarily-funded paid family leave plan. An anarchist can be for school prayer and for traditions as long as they don’t believe the State should enforce it. As long as they don’t hold views fueled by hate, I see no reason why a conservative anarchism cannot exist.

Dorothy Day was a model for how one can be conservative and an anarchist. While I am not a social conservative, I know and am friends with many. I believe her work could appeal to conservatives, Appalachians, Southerners, Christians of all denominations, and the Right. If we ignore conservatives, we’ll doom anarchism. Why? If we don’t bother appealing to people who would be receptive to our message then we might as well give up.

Goed, de problemen met anarcho kapitalisme. Of ‘anarcho’ kapitalisme, vanuit individueel anarchistische (linkse) hoek. Ik noem zeven problemen. De zeven zonden van het anarcho kapitalisme ?

1

Kapitalisme biedt de mogelijkheid om extreem rijk te worden. Rijk zijn, is niet hetzelfde als vrijheid. Je hebt zeer rijke mensen, die zich onvrij voelen. Gevangen in hun bedrijf, hun huwelijk, de maatschappij. Anarcho kapitalisme richt zich op rijkdom, als project van individuele emancipatie. Dit is eenzijdig en oppervlakkig. Vrijheid komt van binnenuit, niet van buitenaf. Armoede leidt tot onvrijheid, maar rijkdom leidt niet tot vrijheid. Vrijheid is veel moeilijker dan het hebben van een dure auto. Er zijn verschillende religies, die dit zullen beamen, die dit met mij eens zullen zijn.

2

Anarcho kapitalisme zou leiden tot neo feodalisme. In de tijden van het feodalisme, waren er geen staten in Europa, alleen maar kleine vorstendommen. Een landheer, had een stuk grond en verschillende mensen onder zich werken, zogeheten horigen. In een anarcho kapitalistische toekomst, heb je geen staat meer, maar een aantal extreem vermogende families die de baas zijn, een beetje zoals in het Europese feodalisme dus. Zodra deze genoemde families vervolgens samen komen, de handen ineen slaan, dan heb je alweer een staat. Zoiets heet dan geen staat, maar het komt wel op hetzelfde neer. Tien zeer vermogende mensen komen samen, en leggen een grens om hun gezamenlijke mega property. Dan heb je een staat. Anarcho kapitalisme : Een rijke familie geeft vastgoed door aan kinderen. Kapitaal stapelt zich op in de zakken van enkelingen. Je wordt geboren met een enorm privilege, of een enorme achterstand, in zo’n systeem. Je erft honderd hectare land en hoeft dus nooit meer te werken, of je groeit op in totale verpaupering. Is dat vrijheid ? Misschien is het een soort vrijheid, maar niet mijn soort vrijheid. Mijn definitie van vrijheid is veel strenger.

3

De maffia is anarcho kapitalistisch. Waarom ? Men is ingesteld op het maken van geld, buiten de staat om, meer niet. Daarnaast heeft men een eigen private legermacht. Denk een beetje aan de kartels in Mexico, de drugskartels in Mexico. Dan zit je in de richting van anarcho kapitalisme. Roekeloos geld verdienen, voorbij de staat. Is dat vrijheid ? Misschien is het voor sommige mensen vrijheid, maar het is niet mijn vrijheid. Het is vast een vorm van vrijheid, maar het is niet het soort van vrijheid waar de meeste mensen op zitten te wachten.

4

Je betaald geen belasting, in het anarcho kapitalisme ? Ja, maar wel een torenhoge huur, voor alles wat je doet en overal waar je gaat. Huur = belasting. Belasting = huur. Overal waar je zal gaan, zal de grond in handen zijn van een grootgrondbezitter. Aan deze persoon betaal je geen belasting….Maar wel gewoon huur. Het komt op hetzelfde neer, het heet alleen anders. Betalen om te mogen bestaan. Betalen voor eigenlijk niets. Overal waar je zal gaan, zal jij je op het grondgebied bevinden van iemand. Je zal dus altijd aan iemand moeten betalen, je zal dus per definitie onder de knoet zitten. Je zit per definitie in een maatschappelijke constructie vast. Je wordt hierin geboren. Je individualiteit wordt beperkt door een maatschappelijk keurslijf. Stel dat op een gegeven moment de kapitalisten al het drinkwater in hun bezit hebben. Ben je dan vrij ? Kan je dan een individualist zijn, of zit je geheel klem ?

5

Ik hang de arbeidstheorie van waarde aan. Arbeid schept waarde, bezit niet. Voor individueel anarchisme, is arbeid nog steeds het zwaartepunt. Als arbeider maak je waarde. Een kapitalist roomt de waarde af, die door een ander geproduceerd is. Fabrieksarbeiders creëren de meerwaarde, maar hun loon is veel lager dan de meerwaarde die ze creëren. Je kent dit verhaal.

6

Anarchisme was een reactie op het negentiende eeuwse giftige ( letterlijk en figuurlijk ) kapitalisme. Anarchisme was /is een inherent antikapitalistische beweging. Jezelf anarcho kapitalist noemen, is als een black lives matter activist, die zich bij de clan aansluit. Het is een feminist, die vind dat vrouwen geen rechten zouden moeten hebben. Het is een veganist, die iedere dag zoveel mogelijk vlees eet.

7

Het idee van de NAP ( non agression principle, vaak aangehaald door anarcho kapitalisten ) is een spook. Wat bedoel ik met een spook ? Het is een abstractie. Je mag iemands property niet afpakken, zegt de anarcho kapitalist, want ‘de NAP’. Kraken mag niet, want het mag niet. Als zei zeggen dat iets ‘niet mag’, dan mag het niet. Dit is niet heel anders dan de statist die zegt ‘dat hebben we zo afgesproken’.

Men heeft dus een autoritaire instelling. Men legt een moraliteit op. Dit is dus niet anarchistisch. Vanuit een filosofisch opzicht gezien, is het zeker geen anarchisme.

Max Stirner schrijft over zijn ‘unie van egoïsten’ als zijn model voor sociale ordening.

Wat moeten we hierbij voorstellen. En is dit niet gewoon een soort paradox ? Een verbond van egoïsten ? Zijn het dan nog wel egoïsten ? Is het niet rommelen met woorden ?

Wat moet jij je voorstellen, bij een verbond van egoïsme ? Ik denk dat dit idee het meest in het verlengde van het anarcho mutualisme ligt. Wederkerigheid, is waar mutualisme vanuit gaat. Ik doe iets voor jou, als jij iets voor mij doet, maar ( en dat is heel belangrijk ) we moeten er BEIDE beter van worden. Dat is het streven van het anarcho mutualisme. Mutualisme is iets dat we ook zien in de natuur. Dieren en planten die samenwerken, om samen te overleven. Denk aan bloemen en bijen.

Hoe moet je de unie van egoïsme dan in de praktijk zien ? Hoe ga je een unie van egoïsten aan ? Het is eigenlijk vrij eenvoudig. Je gaat relaties/transacties aan met mannen en vrouwen, als jullie er beide beter van worden. In wat voor setting dan ook. Je gaat met je vrienden om, als jullie er beide iets aan hebben. Dan is de vriendschap waardevol. Je gaat een liefdesrelatie aan, of een seksuele relatie aan, als jullie er beide iets aan hebben. Dan is het voor jou ook leuk. Ik bedoel, je wilt niet een vriendschap, met een vriend die jou niet aardig vind. Je wilt geen relatie met een man/vrouw, die jou niet ziet zitten. Als je seks hebt met iemand die jou niet wilt, hoe noemen we dat dan ook alweer ? Zo wil je niet zijn ( neem ik aan ). Anarcho mutualisme trekt dit gegeven verder door. Ook in het economische verkeer willen we consent en wederkerigheid.

Sociaal gedrag en egoïsme lopen dus zo in elkaar over. Twee tegenpolen, die elkaar bestaansrecht geven. Dat is het idee.

Solidariteit Netwerken, zijn een soort unie van egoïsten. Jullie slaan de handen ineen, om elkaars belangen te behartigen. Zolang je er niet meer iets aan hebt, verlaat je het netwerk. Maar zolang je erin zit, gaan we uit van solidariteit. Jij helpt mij in een conflict op mijn werk ? Dan zal ik jou ook helpen. Waarom ? Dat spreekt voor zich, dat heeft te maken met enig eergevoel. De meeste mensen hebben dit ( wijst de praktijk uit ). De buurman heeft een maand op je kat gepast en vraagt of jij wilt helpen met het klussen in zijn huis, voor een dag. Verreweg de meeste mensen zijn dan niet antisociaal en helpen de buurman.

kapitalisme is duidelijk geen unie van egoïsten. Het is een bolwerk van één specifieke egoïst/tiran. Één persoon mag de egoïst zijn, de rest moet zich onder deze persoon schikken. Eigenlijk niet heel anders dan een staat, of monarchie. Een bedrijf is dan ook een soort sub staat, micro monarchie. Kapitalisme ( en dus anarcho kapitalisme ook) is niet het soort van individualisme waar Stirner op doelde. Voor veel kapitalisten is Stirner dan ook te radicaal.

De kapitalist in kwestie is overigens niet écht vrij ( hij/zij is zijn leven niet zeker, want de arbeiders gaan zich keihard tegen hem/haar verzetten. (Denk aan eindeloze agitatie, van de arbeidersbeweging )

En, de arbeiders zijn natuurlijk ook niet vrij in het kapitalisme, dat spreekt voor zich. Zowel meester als slaaf, is onderdrukt in deze constructie. De meester(es) moet op zijn/haar hoede zijn en de slaaf wordt rond gecommandeerd.

Wat ook vreemd is, als je erover nadenkt. De meester heeft een slaaf in zich ( incompetentie, wereldvreemdheid ), de slaaf heeft een meester in zich. Het zijn van een slaaf, maakt mensen namelijk gehard en strijdbaar, fatalistisch ( meesterschap )

Maar is het wel mogelijk, een verbond van egoïsten ? Uiteraard is het mogelijk. Zoveel is het niet gevraagd. Als je wil kan jij je leven zo vormgeven. We zijn gewend aan kapitalistische hiërarchie, maar het ligt in onze eigen handen of wij ons naar dit model schikken.

Persoonlijke vrijheid komt pas tot bloei, als mensen voorbij een meester/slaaf dualisme handelen. Een mens die geen meester en geen slaaf is, in die zin heeft het anarchisme ook wel wat met Friedrich Nietzsche te maken. Nietzsche verlangde ook naar een mens ontwikkeld voorbij meester/slaaf. Een mens die zich niets laat vertellen en een mens die meesterschap uitstraalt, maar een meesterschap voorbij een maatschappelijke setting. Een persoon die meesterschap uitstraalt over zijn/haar eigen bestaan, maar zelf geformuleerd. Een vrijheid van binnenuit. Een kapitalistische Directeur is geen übermensch, voor Nietzsche. Nietzsche verlangt levenskunst van de mens, zelf vorm gegeven. Dit is een overeenkomst tussen Nietzsche en Stirner.

Hoe gaan we deze ‘unions of egoists’ dan vormgeven ? Daar moeten we het over gaan hebben. Daar is C4SS voor.

How to ethically cover social unrest is a complex debate, it is also an increasingly necessary one

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Martin Luther King, 1966

Bogota, Colombia – Civil unrest is often the only available tool for people without voices. From the United States, to Berlin, to India, to Moscow, popular movements arise and take to the streets for a cause. Sometimes they topple empires. More often they are stomped into the footnotes of history. They are complex, amorphous, and spontaneous: told through the eyes of thousands of independent vantage points, constantly evolving and adapting to ever-changing power dynamics and conditions. 

The chaotic, complex, and ephemeral reality of a social movement is difficult to encapsulate and raises serious ethical quandaries and responsibilities for the journalists attempting to document them — especially in the information age, where misinformation has instant and global reach as well as immediate consequences. 

In the theater of the street protest, how a movement is perceived is a critical factor in its success or failure. The people clamor against established power and the State survives by painting them as agitators, thugs, or treasonous foreign agents as a prelude to crushing them with force. The tactic is as old as tyranny, and has been used the world over against every large protest movement the world has ever seen.

In the 20th century, civil movements were completely dependent upon fickle global media to get their message out to the world. Attention was difficult to attract and even more difficult to sustain. 

Technology has changed that dynamic — empowering movements worldwide who now possess the ability to craft their own narrative through social media and citizen reporting. But classic media still have a crucial role to play in parsing the truth from the fog of conflict and providing nuance to complex events.

And as they do so, journalists possess a grave responsibility not to harm those they report on. 

In the same way that technology has changed the very form of social movements, it has also given law-enforcement new tools to spy upon and prosecute those attending. Irresponsible coverage feeds into their power and gets people hurt, jailed, or even killed. 

Inspired by nationwide protests in the United States, journalists in English-language media have finally begun an important conversation about the ethics of protest-coverage, and in doing so they have begun looking to social movements in other parts of the world who have a history of opposing oppressive States or operating in areas of conflict. 

Perhaps more importantly, they are starting a dialogue with the protesters themselves. As part of an effort to further this conversation I reached out to activists about the role they feel media plays in modern social movements, ethical considerations journalists in the field should keep in mind, and mistakes journalists make in the heat of the moment.   

Give voice to the voiceless

Every activist I spoke with for this article expressed frustration with journalists who show up to cover protests without making any effort to understand the communities protesting. Whether “parachute journalism” or those just seeking video of riots for attention (“riot porn,”) this behavior leads to distorted coverage through a lack of understanding of the dynamics at play in the street. Whether the journalist has bad intentions towards a protest or not, not doing the necessary footwork to develop a relationship with sources on the ground will make responsible coverage impossible.

If a journalist hasn’t taken the time to understand the social movement they are reporting on, it isn’t merely bad journalism, it’s engaging in unethical and potentially dangerous behavior that misrepresents a complex reality.

“Journalists often think they can drop in to a community or event and get candid responses,” said Håkan Geijer, a medic based in Europe and author of Riot Medicine, a book for street medics working at protests. “This is often met with standoffishness or mild hostility because activists don’t know if it’s safe to share things without being misrepresented.” 

“Establishing trust takes time and a track record of doing good reporting on theirs or similar causes,” he continued.

“Before covering a specific protest journalists should consider reaching out to the organizers to ask if they have any specific thoughts or concerns,” said Ella Fassler, a writer, researcher and activist. “But they should also keep in mind the views of the people with the megaphone are not usually indicative of everyone there. Ideally, a community will learn to trust a particular journalist.”

Understanding the real power-dynamics of a community, their obstacles, and their goals, isn’t only an ethical imperative for someone trying to present a complicated truth, it also makes for a much more compelling story.

Official sources will have no problem getting their story before an audience. Police and government officials hold nationally televised press conferences, have social media accounts with hundreds-of-thousands if not millions of followers, and possess direct access to both national and international legacy newsrooms, as well as pundits who specialize in amplifying their claims. The State already possesses the ability to dominate a news cycle, and they are not reliable sources for what is happening on the street. 

A much more compelling, often-overlooked, and essential part of documenting social movements is the story of the groups and individuals in the streets who do not control the levers of power. Theirs are the voices that lack amplification. Whether a journalist is covering riots or a peaceful rally, these sources are a basic and integral factor in creating quality work.

In the most of basic journalistic terms, they are the who and the why. They are the ones whose story is likely to go untold, and they are the voices street-journalists should be amplifying.

Speak truth to power

At it’s best, journalism is a safeguard of democracy, a tool to empower the citizenry with information. It’s purpose is to question power, not uncritically amplify those who possess it.

“The most important advice I ever got from a journalism mentor was ‘cops lie,’” said Lindsay Beyerstein, an investigative journalist in Brooklyn. “In most jobs, your supervisor is likely to be very concerned if she catches you blatantly lying to the public…Not so for cops. Even under oath.”

Journalists covering civil dissent have a special obligation to fact-check statements from authorities. In every protest I have ever covered, in any country, State forces have planted disinformation as well as lied to press, and the US has been no exception. 

“One of the biggest mistakes that journalists make is taking police statements at face value and acting as the PR wing of the police department,” said Geijer. “This erodes trust activists might have for them.”

It also presents an inaccurate view of a complex reality. This has started a conversation within media about whether the old rules of “neutrality” still apply.

“Journalists are always choosing a side between the oppressor and the oppressed based on what and who they decide to film and whose safety they prioritize,” said Fassler. “What they don’t realize is one moment of recklessness on their part could result in someone being thrown into a cage for decades.”

“Journalists need to be honest with themselves about the role they are playing,” said Bobby London, a writer and protest participant in L.A. “Unbiased isn’t a thing. Any action a journalist takes is serving some aspect of the power dynamic.”

“I’m more interested in rigor in journalism than neutrality,” said Beyerstein. “Demand evidence.”

A Changing Role

In the 20th century, the media were the gatekeepers of global news. That has changed. A video from a citizen reporter on the ground has the power to capture global attention, and the media often follows.

Some activists I spoke with feel legacy media no longer plays a productive role. Unlike during the U.S civil rights movement, when protesters often tried to attract favorable press by engaging in direct actions designed to provoke a response from law-enforcement, some modern activists feel they are capable of drawing global attention without help from journalists. 

“We don’t have to get the media to cover us anymore,” said London, from L.A. “That approach is outdated. Now direct action reflects achieving an objective rather than playing to an audience.”

Many activists are wary of photographers at demonstrations due to misrepresentation or State persecution. Local police departments in the United States have repeatedly requested footage of protests for the purpose of arresting those who attended. The FBI has used photographs posted on social media to retroactively charge demonstrators, and the power of Open Source Investigative Techniques, or OSINT, has been fully embraced by both law-enforcement and intelligence to both expose and infiltrate domestic activist groups.

“Journalists may think they are acting in a manner that preserves the privacy and safety of the subject, but this requires making assumptions about the ability of State and non-State actors to employ OSINT to identify the subject,” said Geijer, the street medic.

“Most people, journalists included, are not capable of accurately assessing these things. This leads to photos and video being used to dox (reveal the identity of) or prosecute the subject.”

Fassler stressed that journalists need to be aware how even benign photos taken at protests can have consequences for activists who are later arrested. “I was a former J20 (a protest in 2017 in Washington DC) defendant who faced seven felony charges,” she said. 

“I watched the government enter movement media as evidence to convict my co-defendants during trial. Oftentimes the photos and videos didn’t expose an individual’s face but other photos allegedly did. Then the prosecutor and detective would attempt to cross reference the images to prove someone’s identity.”

Ramifications and criminal charges stemming from those protests continued for two years, and resulted in the home of at least one activist, (who wasn’t even at the protests,) being raided by D.C police. The Department of Homeland Security was recently exposed running active surveillance of both journalists and protesters at Black Lives Matter in the United States as well. 

“I view anyone with a camera at a protest as a threat,” said London.

Other activists offered a bit more nuance. “True safety would mean next to no photos,” said Geijer. “That said, some risk may be acceptable if the benefits outweigh unlikely costs. 

“If journalists want to understand this dilemma better they should consider reading up on modern OSINT and how [protesters have been] doxxed, indicted, threatened by counter-protesters and prosecuted…to help them better understand what may happen after they take a photo.”

The cost-gain tradeoff of protester security versus obtaining a powerful image that may drive a story is a complicated one that must be carefully weighed. Just as often as they may harm however, protest images have also been a critical tool for holding the police accountable.

Propublica recently published an in-depth investigation using images from live-streams and videos posted on social media to expose 68 instances of the U.S police either initiating violence on Black Lives Matter protesters or making dishonest claims to the public. 

A protester live-stream in Seattle drew millions of views during the early weeks of the protests, considerably heightened national press attention, and exposed Seattle police as lying about deploying tear-gas against demonstrators only in self-defense. 

In Buffalo, New York, footage taken by public radio station WBFO of an elderly protester being gravely injured by police for no discernable reason attracted international news coverage and sparked an investigation of the officers responsible.

The death of George Floyd, captured live on video, was the catalyst that ignited the biggest protests in the United States in over 50 years. 

Images often possess a power that words lack.

“I’m skeptical that media is completely outdated in this regard,” said Beyerstein, the investigative journalist. “We’ve lost the monopoly on interest and imagination certainly, but good journalism still matters.”

Everyone interviewed for this article strongly suggested journalists explicitly ask the permission of everyone included in the frame of a photo when possible, and that coverage of protesters using Direct Action Civil Disobedience tactics be edited to protect their identity. 

Journalists operating in conflict zones have often operated with this basic assumption, and my personal experience in the field covering violent protests in multiple countries has deeply confirmed this. 

Live-streams are particularly problematic as transmission is instant, with no editing filter available to ensure protester safety. Journalists who use these tools should do so extremely carefully and understand that they may face pushback or even violence from protesters rightly concerned about possible consequences.

“The most important considerations for a journalist to keep in mind are, vulnerable and marginalized people do not have the protection, the platform or the training possessed by police or State forces,” said Beyerstein. “Some journalists view anything happening in the ‘public sphere’ as fair game for coverage, and I want that rule to be true when I’m going up against the powerful.”

“But in the arena of the street protest, we need to understand there are ethical questions beyond what is ‘legal’. Are we endangering someone? Are we lifting up marginalized voices? Or are we attacking and silencing them? Our actions have consequences.” 

Both the right of the citizenry to dissent and the duty of the press to inform are paramount to a free society, and more often than not the issues are deeply related. “Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.” wrote Justice Hugo Black, in the landmark decision to allow the publishing of the Pentagon papers in 1971.

The truth is worth struggling to uncover, and in doing so we owe an ethical obligation to our sources. In their treatment of street-protest, States virtually always err on the side of injustice. 

It is our job to correct that. 

Notes and Resources: Safety is a primary concern for journalists covering civil unrest. A number of organizations provide guides, aid, training, and resources for those in the field. I strongly recommend reaching out to them to learn more as well as basic data security. Field journalists should be aware that being arrested or having equipment seized by police or State forces can dangerously expose sources or protesters and should have a contingency plan for this eventuality. 

The street-medic interviewed for this story, Håkan Geijer, has a free, very comprehensive, and open-source guide for first aid in the field (whose title was the inspiration for this article) called Riot Medicine, which can be downloaded here. 

Resources for Reporters Covering Civil Unrest

Useful resources for reporters covering civil unrest:

1. Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): provides information including downloadable manuals on safety and security, insurance, gear-rental, and protection on behalf of journalists worldwide.
2. Reporters Without Borders (RSF): Information on reporting safely globally, links to HEAT (Hostile environmental awareness training), health-insurance, gear and real-time assistance in the field
3. The Red Cross: The Red Cross offers security and first-aid classes to aid-workers and journalists in most of the regions they operate in. These classes are a great resource for understanding local threats in an area you may not be familiar with as well as rudimentary medical training in the field.
4. Fundacion Para Libertad de la Prensa (FLIP): FLIP is an organization similar to RSF, concentrated in Latin America. They have helped me when I was detained by Venezuelan officials. In addition to other services, they have contacts in most Latin American governments.

Ayn Rand wrote that “Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme – collectivism.” However, I think this should be changed to reflect all the forms that collectivism, the enemy of liberty, can take. This new maxim would be “Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Statist Socialism, and Capitalism are superficial variations of the same monstrous theme – collectivism. ” For my libertarian readers (and conservative readers if I have any), the idea that capitalism is a form of collectivism sounds ludicrous and many capitalists (such as Ayn Rand) think collectivism is an enemy of capitalism. But they are one and the same.

The epitome of capitalism is greed. The hoarding of property and wealth into the hands of a collective, the richest 1%, is this greed manifested. Capital for establishing businesses is hoarded (as is property) and, thus, the people are deprived of universal access to wealth. Capitalism is, in this way, no different from its sisters, communism and statist socialism, who seek to hoard property and wealth into the hands of the State and party leaders. In fact, capitalism, like its sisters, is a creature of the State and would be incapable of existing in a free society. Even so-called “anarcho”-capitalism would lead to a corporate authoritarian State.

Compare communism, statist socialism, fascism, and Nazism to capitalism. You will find the Five Forms of Collectivism have a lot in common. Chief among these similarities is that each requires the hoarding of capital and property into the hands of a few and each requires a government to be on the side of said few. Whether it is through regulations that protect corporations and punish small businesses (as in capitalism), by taxes that punish people and prevent the accumulation of Wealth (as in statist socialism), by preventing any and all private enterprise from existing (as in communism), or by banning free trade and instituting economic planning (as in fascism/Nazism), the State will intervene to protect the collective. This collective may be party leaders, corporate executives, or both.

The enemy of the free market is the capitalist, who expects the government to cater to his needs, and the statist socialist, who expects the government to cater to his needs. The capitalist expects regulations to help prevent smaller businesses from competing with big businesses and the statist socialist expects regulations to help prevent big businesses from competing with small businesses. Many thought it was weird to see Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez collaborate on a bill, but they believe the same thing. One wants the government to intervene to protect the elites and the other thinks government intervention will help the poor. However, government intervention will always help the elites. Look at Venezuela. Policies to protect the poor merely insulated the elites. It is absurd, then, that some anarchists come to Maduro’s defense because he calls himself a socialist. It is a pathetic and vain attempt by anarchists to get the broader Left to recognize them — like some poor guy trying to get a Twitch girl to notice him by any means necessary.

The best economic system is that which empowers and enriches the individual and that is laissez-faire socialism which is a key component of individualist anarchism, the only political ideology in which an individual is truly free. Collectivism in any of its Five Forms is the enemy of the individual.

Roman incursions into Britain began with Julius Caesar between 55-54 B.C.E. with two separate attempts. The first invasion (55 B.C.E.) was launched on the grounds of supposed support from the Britons towards the Gallic tribes against the Romans during the Gallic Wars (58-50 B.C.E.). This first attempt ended in failure, loosing their cavalry boarded on ships due to bad weather and constant guerrilla attacks by the Britons forced a stalemate. The second invasion (54 B.C.E.) proved more fruitful for the Romans and Caesar as they managed to fight their way to the river Thames as well as establishing a number of treaties and trade partners with local tribes living in the south-eastern parts of the territory. 

It wouldn’t be until about a hundred years later that Rome would even attempt to set foot in Britain again. When it did return in 43 AD under the Roman emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus it would be with much greater success. Rome had wanted access to Britain for some time due to rumors of great material wealth, both in metals and food that were always in need by the large, imperial government of Rome. It would be under these conditions that Boudica of the Iceni tribe would rise to become queen of her people and lead a brutal insurrection against Roman occupation. 

The Romans invaded Britain when Boudica was around eighteen years old, having either previously or within recent times married their husband Prasutagus, whom may have been related to the then king of the Iceni, Antedios. Meanwhile their neighbors to the south in the Catuvellauni tribe, in alliance with other tribes, waged a guerrilla campaign against the Roman army. After a successful battle against the Catuvellauni lead rebellion Claudius established a legionary fortress located at Camulodunum, now modern day Colchester in Essex, as well as the submission of eleven British tribes, including the Iceni under Antedios. 

In 47 AD Ostorius Scapula replaced the first, previously established Roman governor of Britain. Ostorius arrived to the territory under guerrilla attacks and as such, decided to disarm the British tribes, including the Iceni. This was seen both as a threat and an insult to the Britons Celtic traditions and as such rebelled. However, this rebellion would fail and at some point Antedios would die, leaving Prasutagus and Boudica as king and queen of the Iceni. The Romans seized more land around Camulodunum to establish a colonia of veteran Roman soldiers, resulting in the enslavement and execution of many local tribes in an attempt to expand Roman influence, both materially and culturally in an effort to “Romanize” the territory. In 52 AD the king of the Catuvellauni, whom had been a leading figure in much of the resistance up to this point, was captured by Rome. That same year, Ostorius died, replaced as governor by Didius Gallus. 

In 54 AD Emperor Claudius was poisoned, possibly by the mother of his successor, Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus who became emperor of Rome. Later in 58 AD Caius Suetonius Paullinus, replacing Didius Gallus, became governor of Britain and began a vicious military campaign in Wales. After successfully pushing to the north-western borders in 61 AD, Suetonius reached the sacred Celtic groves on the isle of Mona. There, they attacked the isle slaughtering the druids and what resistance was there, cutting down the sacred groves that were located on the isle. This would most likely have been an incredibly painful moment for the Celtic tribes of Britain, and it wouldn’t have been unlikely for Boudica to have heard of this assault against such an important spiritual location. 

In conjuncture to the brutality at Mona, Boudica’s husband Prasutagus died. In death, Prasutagus left a will that was meant to split power between Rome and the Iceni, however this had no legal precedence either in Roman law or Celtic tradition and was therefore ignored. Under Roman law the death of a client king meant that either a new one was to replace them or Rome would take control of the territory directly. In this case, it would be the latter. Boudica, now acting as the sole ruler of the Iceni, was confronted by the procurator Decianus Catus, a financial official of Rome. They began to take inventory of Iceni property and lands, now considered property of Rome. When Boudica objected to this, Boudica was beaten and their daughters were raped. This violent act against Boudica and their daughters wouldn’t silence them however. It would spark a fire that would be felt across Britain and would not be forgotten. 

After uniting with a number of other tribes resistant to Romes imperialism, Boudica attacked Camulodunum, slaughtering the inhabitants and burning it to the ground. The Roman legion Legio IX under the command of Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus attempted to halt the rebellion, but was ambushed by Boudica’s forces, escaping with their cavalary leaving his remaining infantry to be slaughtered. At this point Suetonius would learn of the rebellion and made their way from Mona to Londinium, Boudica’s next target. However, much like Camulodunum, Londinium had no walls or defenses and so Suetonius ordered the town evacuated. Those whom remained were brutally executed by Boudica’s forces. 

Similarly to Camulodunum and Londinium, Verulamium, which had been granted the title of municipium by Rome which allowed for a limited amount of autonomy and participation in Roman government, was raided by Boudica. Suetonius gathered an army of around 10,000 soldiers, made up of the combined forces of Legio’s XIV and XX, as well as a number of auxiliaries gathered from around the local area. Dio wrote that Boudica’s forces number at around 230,000 warriors from various celtic tribes that had allied themselves to Boudica’s cause. Where exactly Suetonius and Boudica’s forces met in battle isn’t exactly known, though some suggest it to be located around Watling Street (A5). 

One might initially think that Boudica’s numbers would have played a decisive factor in the battle. However, the training, equipment and strategem of the Roman army would prove itself once again against the might of the Celtic rebels. The Romans chose to position themselves in a defile in which the woods would be at their back, with open country in the front, taking advantage of an essentially natural fortification. Boudica’s forces met Suetonius’s in the field, Boudica reportedly riding in a chariot, commonly used by the Celts in warfare. The Romans opened the battle with their throwing javelins, followed by a charge in wedge formation, supported by cavalry on their wings. The long swords of the Celtic warriors, which required relative space to swing properly, were rendered ineffective on the cluttered battlefield that favored the Romans shield formations, stabbing with their short swords into Celtic lines. The chariots that the Celts favored proved completely useless against an enemy that had effectively fortified their position. The Celtic warriors weren’t even able to effectively retreat as they had brought their wives in wagons, set up behind their lines to witness the battle, effectively barricading themselves against retreat. The result was an overwhelming Roman victory, slaughtering the Celts and pushing Boudica to suicide, most likely in order to avoid capture by the Romans. Tacitus reports around 80,000 causalities for the Celts and 400 for the Romans. 

Boudica’s revolt resulted in the death of about 70,000 Roman civilians and 7,000 Roman soldiers, if Tacitus’s numbers are to be believed. Boudica’s revolt, while a failure, shocked Roman society with its tenacity and violence. Rome would eventually take control of Britain, but the effects of Boudica’s rebellion are still felt to this day and much can be learned from them and the Celtic warriors that fought by their side. Lessons can be drawn from the successes, failures and context of the insurrection itself. 

Which is what Boudica’s revolt must be understood as, an insurrection. 

An insurrection is a general uprising against the power structure. It is usually a sustained rebellion over the course of days, weeks, months or even years. It is a type of class war that involves a whole population in an act of armed or semi-armed resistance. Sometimes mistakenly called a rebellion, its character is far more combative and revolutionary. Rebellions are almost totally spontaneous, short-term affairs. An insurrection is also not the revolution, SINCE REVOLUTION IS A SOCIAL PROCESS, RATHER THAN A SINGLE EVENT, but it can be an important part of the revolution, maybe its final phase. An insurrection is a planned violent protest campaign which takes the spontaneous revolt of the masses to a higher level. Revolutionaries intervene to push rebellions to insurrectionary stage, and the insurrection to a social revolution. Source.

Under this definition, Boudica’s revolt meets all the criteria for an insurrection. When we consider the revolts that proceeded Boudica’s from the beginning of the Claudian invasion in 43 AD all the way to their own ending in 61 AD, there exists eighteen years of prolonged insurrectionary activity within Britain. Though not necessarily able to be classified as a revolutionary process, the Celtic tribes of Britain certainly were united in a sustained, multi-year long process of warfare against Roman occupation. Boudica’s revolt was an extension of this campaign, which is especially obvious when we consider the targets that the Celtic insurrectionists chose and the kind of violence and destruction unleashed upon Roman colonists and soldiers. Of note is Boudica’s first target at Camulodunum, due to its establishment as a colonia and especially for the temple to the emperor Claudius that had been constructed there by emperor Nero in their honor. In assaulting Camulodunum, the soldiers and survivors that were able to escape the initial attack took shelter inside the temple itself. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Celts burned Camulodunum to the ground, including the temple. The Celts also, according to Roman reports, slaughtered and mutilated much of the towns inhabitants, though to what extent the Romans could judge with their own use of rape, torture, slavery and gladiatorial blood sports is questionable. 

Suffice it to say, the Celtic insurrectionists sought to remove the Romans, and anyone who would ally with them, from Britain entirely. Of the three locations that were assaulted by Boudica’s forces, Camulodunum and Londinium were colonia. Verulamium itself was a Celtic community that had accepted a degree of Romanization and was therefore seen as a threat to Celtic autonomy due to their loyalty to Rome. A clear path of anti-imperialism is present in the insurrectionary campaign of Boudica, for personal as well as social, political, economic and spiritual reasons. This campaign would culminate in the battle against Suetonius. 

The Celts made a number of errors in regards to this particular battle. Equipment wise, the Celts were highly under prepared for the type of engagement that they were about to undertake. While the style of weapons and battle dress of the Celts did not necessarily spell defeat for them, it had to be undertaken with their strengths in mind against whatever weaknesses could be exploited against their opponents, namely the Roman military. However the Celts choose to meet the Romans in open battle, something they were incredibly experienced with, in a position that highly favored the Romans. Not only that but the Celts, under their own arrogance, brought their wives in wagons with them, which would later prevent them from escaping Roman slaughter. The Celtic failure at this battle is quite disappointing given resistance up to this point, especially given the strategic knowledge Boudica had employed previously. There is an argument to be made that, had the Celts been successful in this battle it very well may have completely halted Roman incursion into Britain, at least for some time. 

Boudica’s insurrection demonstrates that the struggle against domination and oppression is not one that can be accomplished over night. It is an evolutionary social process. Boudica’s insurrection was not the first in Britain but rather a part of an established historical struggle. Without that, Boudica would have had little to no reason to resist with the tenacity that they did, barring their own obvious personal reasons for doing so. This history would have given Boudica an understanding of what and why Roman imperialism needed to be resisted. The colonization, enslavement, murder, torture, rape and destruction of spiritual practices and ritual sites that had taken place before Boudica’s insurrection deeply informed their actions and strategy. It is why for example they chose to burn Camulodunum and the temple built there as they represented, both materially and symbolically, Roman domination over their lands and peoples. 

In order to struggle for our freedom against domination, we must understand the history of that struggle for us to understand the context of our current one. Not only that, but we must be united in our struggle, otherwise it may fall apart without direction or understanding of what we are fighting for. Finally, struggling against domination must be understood within the evolutionary social process, that the struggle for freedom itself will contain the potential for a free society within it. These are the lessons that Boudica’s insurrection teach us, ones that I am of the idea must be understood if we are not only to understand the context of rebellions in our own time, but so that we may push them towards their insurrectionary and quite possibly, revolutionary potentialities.

Di Asem. Originale pubblicato il 9 luglio 2020 con il titolo We Are in Midst of a Seismic Shift, It Is up to Labor to Decide the Outcome. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Un decennio fa usciva The Third Industrial Revolution, seguito alcuni anni dopo da The Zero Marginal Cost Society dello stesso autore, un economista tradizionale politicamente moderato che fa da consulente per il governo tedesco e la Ue. L’autore si lanciava in previsioni estreme come il passaggio a una società senza denaro per effetto dello sviluppo industriale. Nello stesso periodo uscivano The Homebrew Industrial Revolution di Kevin Carson e Postcapitalism di Paul Mason. Sulla base di un’analisi simile, Carson immaginava un’economia politica basata su una produzione indipendente di quartiere, mentre Mason invocava una “socialdemocrazia estrema”. I tre arrivarono indipendentemente a conclusioni simili: il segnale costituito dai prezzi del mercato capitalista è destinato a sfumare in una qualche complessa entità gestionale e coordinativa. A dividerli era il risultato finale prospettato, che andava da un forte stato sociale ad un’economia socialista pianificata al baratto e lo scambio basato su monete locali.

Politicamente, il Green New Deal appare il candidato più probabile, ma non per meriti suoi oggettivi, bensì perché è la cosa più facile da mettere in pratica nell’attuale cornice liberaldemocratica. Questo programma, quando arriverà la crisi, sarà la realizzazione più facile; per riavviare, sostanzialmente, il progetto socialdemocratico. È un programma che farà uscire milioni di persone dalla povertà e migliorerà le condizioni di vita di tanti, ma è anche una pezza e non pone in questione la legittimità di tante istituzioni sociali attuali. Per capire come le cose possono andare nella direzione sbagliata, basta pensare al New Deal originale e ai suoi programmi sociali, che hanno portato a due terzi del mercato azionario nelle mani dei fondi pensioni; col risultato che i lavoratori hanno “vinto” perché sono diventati i legali proprietari dei mezzi di produzione ma, per effetto delle stratificazioni strutturali che attraversano l’economia, nel negoziato con i datori di lavoro vengono trattati sempre come classe nullatenente, mentre le istituzioni finanziarie usano i loro fondi pensionistici come leva contro di loro e a vantaggio di una minoranza di investitori del mercato immobiliare in crisi.

Il punto debole delle attuali istituzioni sindacali è che perdono efficacia nel giro di poche generazioni. Dalle corporazioni si passò alle associazioni di lavoratori dipendenti specializzati in settori particolari, finché i datori non riuscirono ad annullare il loro potere contrattuale introducendo la catena di montaggio che richiede personale non specializzato. Questo diede la possibilità ai sindacati industriali di riorganizzarsi secondo linee di classe, cosa poi superata dalle catene logistiche globali che aumentavano la mobilità del capitale rispetto al lavoro. In fin dei conti, l’economia politica si adatta per evitare frizioni, come accadde con l’anarco-sindacalismo tra le due guerre quando non poteva più essere ignorato. Il movimento dei lavoratori era consapevole del fatto che l’organizzazione non era fine a se stessa ma serviva alla transizione verso una società migliore, transizione che però restava nel lontano futuro e dipendeva da fatti come uno sciopero generale o una vittoria dei socialisti alle elezioni. Raramente, però, era vista come qualcosa da attuare qui e ora.

Immaginare una società dell’abbondanza materiale non è una novità. Risale almeno al 1971, quando Bookchin pubblicò Post-Scarcity Anarchism. È dagli anni sessanta che in Nord America è materialmente possibile vivere in una società con un surplus tale da permettere di distribuire le risorse senza affidarsi ai segnali costituiti dai prezzi e senza accapigliarsi sulle relazioni sociali. Col passare dei decenni, le barriere all’ingresso si sono progressivamente abbassate e oggi la transizione verso una nuova società è diventata pressoché inevitabile. Oggi un quartiere può avere l’autosufficienza energetica al 90%, e considerando che il solare dovrebbe salire del 16% annuo in termini di chilowattore per dollaro, ecco che l’autosufficienza diventa fattibile. Col calo dei prezzi, poi, sarà sempre più fattibile distribuire l’energia in eccesso a chi ha bisogno e senza scambi monetari. Lo stesso si può dire della produzione manifatturiera, con una capacità informatica che raddoppia ogni due anni generando una crescita esponenziale e un calo progressivo dei costi dei beni di consumo, tanto che alla fine le relazioni sociali potrebbero non basarsi più sullo scambio di merci e si potranno distribuire i beni seguendo preferibilmente il bisogno.

Per tanti beni e servizi una società post-scarsità non esiste ancora, ma è fattibile per tante necessità di base come l’alimentazione, l’acqua, gli alloggi e l’energia per uso domestico. Se non viviamo in una società in cui certi beni fondamentali sono distribuiti secondo il bisogno mentre gli altri sono lasciati al mercato – capitalista o meno – è perché occorre risolvere la questione dell’azione collettiva. I mercati non aiutano, anche se possono far calare i costi dei beni abbastanza da permettere ad attori collettivi non di mercato di risolvere il problema. Il più ovvio tra gli attori collettivi non di mercato è lo stato, che quando è democratico ha i suoi costi generali determinati dalla messa in pratica della volontà emersa dalle urne, e necessita di una maggioranza anche per l’atto più semplice. Tolti stato e mercato, c’è pochissimo. Dalle associazioni civili alle istituzioni comunitarie, si tratta perlopiù di gruppi con interessi particolari relativi a gruppi religiosi o comunità etnico-linguistiche, sono inadatti all’organizzazione di massa. Il resto è formato dai partiti, operanti fuori dall’ambito elettorale, e i sindacati.

Non si vedono molti partiti basati su linee esplicitamente antielettorali tranne, forse, i bolscevichi. Quelli esistenti tendono a diventare organizzazioni politiche sotto forma di organizzazioni di lavoratori. I sindacati, quando non sono occupati a fare negoziati con i datori di lavoro, possono offrire ai loro iscritti servizi utili in termini di “calcolo economico interno”, come assicurazioni e credito. Oggi non gestiscono più le risorse con la dovuta efficienza, ma c’è stato un tempo in cui i Cavalieri del Lavoro avevano al loro interno cooperative di consumo che fornivano servizi essenziali ai loro iscritti. Questi servizi e questa capacità organizzativa è proprio ciò che occorrerebbe ai moderni movimenti dei lavoratori per gestire la transizione verso un mondo post-scarsità piena o relativa.

Il movimento dei lavoratori, in quanto organizzazione di massa, è particolarmente adatto a coordinare il passaggio oltre lo scambio economico e altro. Data la sua posizione, può inserirsi negli ingranaggi, diventare l’attore e la guida principale della transizione, e allo stesso tempo migliorare le condizioni di lavoro sotto le vecchie istituzioni, dove ogni dollaro guadagnato dai lavoratori accresce i costi operativi e apre la porte ad ulteriori alternative. Uno degli aspetti peggiori del capitalismo è rappresentato dal villaggio operaio con le attività commerciali di proprietà dell’azienda, per cui il denaro dato con i salari tornava indietro con gli affitti e la vendita di beni. Questa “economia circolare” non può restare a vantaggio esclusivo del capitale; i lavoratori possono ribaltarla chiedendo che l’azienda finanzi e costruisca la rete elettrica a proprie spese, e imponendole per contratto che acquisti da cooperative della comunità una determinata percentuale dei beni necessari. Questo non risolve il problema della coordinazione, ma comporta che questa coordinazione facilita il transito delle risorse dalla vecchia economia politica ad una nuova. Seguirà un periodo di transizione, ricco di sperimentazioni, finché non si troverà il sistema ottimale che non faccia assegnamento sui segnali di prezzo. Tornando all’esempio dell’elettricità, sarebbe meglio distribuire una quota minima a tutti e mettere a disposizione il resto, o non converrebbe monitorare i consumi e, in caso di necessità, staccare per primo chi spreca così da incentivare un consumo attento? Molti sistemi simili dovranno essere sviluppati singolarmente al fine di risolvere problemi relativi ai vari generi di risorse, senza dover ricorrere ai segnali di prezzo, ma per fare questo occorre il giusto ambiente e sufficienti risorse materiali. Dunque occorre prima far transitare le risorse fuori dalla vecchia economia politica.

Tra tutti i testi sul socialismo cibernetico, il più libertario è apparentemente Information Technology and Socialist Construction, forse scritto da De Leon o da qualche comunista consiliarista. Nel libro, la coordinazione è ancora troppo basata sulle gerarchie e i consigli democratici dei lavoratori, ma almeno dimostra che è possibile pianificare l’economia senza uno stato centrale coordinatore. L’economia è diretta dai lavoratori, che manifestano apertamente i propri bisogni e le proprie capacità nei consigli. Il modello immaginato per coordinare il sistema in maniera ottimale, pur considerando i consigli dei lavoratori, e non i singoli lavoratori, l’organo principale della società. Quando Rudolph Rocker coniò il termine anarco-sindacalismo, trasformò la prassi attuale del sindacalismo in un programma politico e l’unione nel veicolo che avrebbe dovuto edificare la società anarchica, secondo una pratica che poi si rivelò utile alla realizzazione del maggiore esperimento sociale anarchico avvenuto durante la guerra civile spagnola. Se vogliamo risolvere il problema dell’azione collettiva, deve accadere qualcosa di simile: un movimento di lavoratori che gradualmente risolva il problema della distribuzione, una classe di risorse per volta. Contemporaneamente, occorre migliorare la situazione dei lavoratori salariati con una transizione ferma. Ovvero, come vuole la tradizione del sindacato Wobbly, costruire il nuovo mondo nel guscio del vecchio.

The tricky business of violence against the state (or other systems of power) is really defined by two questions: When is violence acceptable and justifiable on principle, and when is it the best tactic to achieve your goal? There are times when violence is both justifiable and strategically useful. However, there are also times when it can be justified, but would be a major tactical error that risks (among other things) bringing the full force of the state down on both those directly and indirectly involved in it, setting back the potential for positive outcomes — especially considering most people are not currently positioned to win a, direct, all out, violent battle against all unjust institutions of violence 

An absolute pacifist (believing violence is always and everywhere unjustifiable, even in cases of self-defense) could never logically be a proponent of violence. However, other than a person with that sort of belief, it’s safe to say that we’re all proponents of violence at times. Even those who say violence or force is only acceptable in self-defense are only making a claim about when it is justifiable.

This is also true for those who consider themselves a “law-and-order” person. This archetype is at best confused. They feign a principled aversion to violence, and claim the police are the thin blue line between order on the one hand and violence and chaos on the other, but neglect to mention how maintaining their version of order means using violence on principle — and, practically speaking, it means using lots of it.

In any case, someone who claims a certain circumstance justifies violence on principle is also saddling themselves with the burden of explaining why, and rightfully so. The person who has violence or force used against them never has to justify first why it shouldn’t be used against them.

Anyone with a reasonable moral compass can navigate the basics of when violence is justifiable on principle. And, there are a variety of reasonable conclusions one might come to, on a theoretical level, if they rely on any of the number of established moral theories — from the non-aggression principle favored by libertarians, to the issue of proportionality of much concern to legal philosophy.

No matter how you deliberate the moral justifications, however, at some point, we all have to leave that question and get on to the tougher business of deciding whether violence in a given circumstance would be a tactical error. And, of course, that starts with the consideration of what ultimate goal the violence is supposedly in service of.

To use a recent example, those of us who feel that some (or most) of the material destruction and resistance to police accompanying the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are justified, are now faced with the heavy lifting required for the second question of violence. And, luckily, we don’t have to always rely on distant history for all the answers to our questions. Certain events and their outcomes have already proven what goals violence can help achieve. 

If the goal is driving awareness and getting messages heard loud and clear, then certain communities and groups — sick and tired of the structures of policing (and the crimes and injustice perpetrated by them) — have demonstrated violence can work. When it comes to general opinion, most people tuned into current events certainly aren’t questioning why people are angry about recent tragedies and the structures that enabled them,and even find themselves agreeing with specific instances of destruction. As for elite opinion, the message of resistance and unrest has been sent to the tables and boardrooms of authority around the world loud and clear — they aren’t discussing if there is a message, a problem, or unrest, but what to do about it. In some recent cases, the immediate search for accountability in the face of police violence (even if ultimately symbolic and inconsequential) indicates justifiable public outcry is something both anticipated and feared.

So, sometimes violence can work. The problem starts when violence is looked at as the always-and-everywhere tactic for achieving any goal. I’ve been in discussions with many who have gone so far as to claim that violence against the state, or just in general, is now the only option worth pursuing to render positive outcomes. They say if we want to see change, then we need to put our foot down on the violence gas pedal and not let up.

This is where serious meditation on violence is needed. The lack of it means the potential for mistakes skyrockets for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact there’s an already-established player on the field of violence ready to engage in it at a moment’s notice, and at this point in time they are more prepared for action than most of the population can hope to be.

In the U.S. and many other Western countries, the state’s entrenched monopoly on violence won’t be broken by bottom-up violent acts any time soon, despite fantasies and wishful thinking that have convinced some otherwise. Completely beating the state at a game it is very comfortable playing to totally replace it with more just arrangements simply isn’t in the cards we hold today. This is not always true, but it is true so long as most people don’t want to see the state removed from its position of power, and benefit from the current arrangements to some degree. Sometimes when it comes to the decision between non-violent tactics that drive reform or violence that drives revolution, those who truly want to see practical changes that will positively impact people’s lives in the short run are better off dealing with reform for the time being, and revolution in the longer run.

I know how many will react to this statement, and I sympathize with the sentiment as much as I wish the circumstances were different. Often, a call for non-violence and an appetite for comparatively smaller changes can feel like a half-hearted compromise, and there is good reason for this skepticism. It is true that institutions of power themselves are the source of most problems of oppression and unjustifiable violence in the world, and that improving certain aspects of their existence and the arrangement doesn’t change their overall impact on society

 However, non-violent reforms aren’t useless when we consider short run gains that, in the meantime, encourage and bring about small wins and positive changes using the current structures and avenues available. It is possible to push for positive changes that will make differences in people’s communities and lives in this lifetime, and simultaneously build toward a more just society in the long term. And, this is preferable if the alternative is a violent flash in the pan that takes us one step forward with short term awareness and consciousness followed by one or two back with a clamp of violence the state will necessarily tighten.

 Ultimately, no one person or movement can be relied upon for all the answers to both questions of violence, and that’s a good thing. Which roads we use to travel toward a more just society should be the subject of constant debate and discussion in communities and groups — a bottom-up process where no authority takes the reins and asks us to charge into battle at their side based on our trust in them or their slogans alone. 

Opinions on what the goals are, when violence is justifiable on principle, and if it’s reasonably expected to achieve those goals need to change as the evidence, circumstances, and the consciousness of individuals change. Sometimes that will mean the answer to a certain problem is violence, and sometimes it won’t. Sometimes that will mean reforming an institution, sometimes it will mean destroying it.

 There’s no escaping the tricky business of violence and the careful thinking it requires. Trying to avoid tough discussions by deciding violence is always and everywhere justifiable, and will do just nicely to achieve a given set of goals in almost every circumstance (or always feeling the contrary), is a mistake of militancy and one-dimensional thinking that will hinder opportunities to bring about better outcomes for the very people one claims to want to help, or the circumstances they wish to improve.

Emmi Bevensee’s article “Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation” is an excellent and important introduction to the challenges that complexity poses for economic planning. I think Emmi’s conclusion—that we need to sketch what the limits of planning are and pursue alternative mechanisms beyond this point—is a good one, as is pointing out that problems arise when anyone (and in particular some authority figure) attempts to make society seem less complex than it really is. My response doesn’t seek to challenge this conclusion; instead, my response focuses more on the problems of “revealed preferences”, their relationship with deliberation, and the necessity of a market in facilitating their discovery.

As Emmi states in the article, the “revealed preference problem” is “the sense that what we say or think we want, and what we’re willing to put skin in the game to prioritize are generally not exactly the same things”; as a result, “deliberation without currency makes it difficult to signal demand with any fidelity” and “individuals, communes and federations are incentivized to drift in the direction of stockpiling resources simply because accurate evaluation is extremely difficult.” The resultant inefficiencies would not only make people worse off, but any incentive to hoard resources would likely undermine the egalitarian aims of anarchism:

In the most dystopian case it means unpopular individuals are unable to get basic necessities like medication, food or shelter from their commune. Just as corporations reward the most cutthroat and manipulative, collective resource allocation can become more tightly coupled with informal social capital as the popular charismatic comrade’s’ needs get more easily heard than the awkward and shy loner who has not mastered or otherwise opposes in-group social positioning […] All of this disastrously slow coordination and forced pleading happening at the scale of the world, is… well, terrifying and sad. It’s also a subtle recreation of the competition that is so awful in capitalism and markets. Competition then, whether in the commune or at the level of the individual, serves two masters: it serves greed/in-group preference and meta-level coordination of revealed preferences. Finding the balance of these trade-offs is the great problem of economics.

These are all important points to make, and as I said, I think Emmi’s observations are highly insightful. But I also think that the deliberative process isn’t quite as powerless against discovering accurate preferences as Emmi assumes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some form of successful deliberation is necessary for market-transactions to be successful, and so the discovery process has less to do with “signalling demand” via currency than the evolving, communicative relationships that market participants naturally form. 

Now, there are a number of important questions to ask when talking about successful deliberation—such as, for instance, what should be deliberated on and what types of institutions should exist to facilitate deliberation. Probably the most common notion of deliberation—particularly, deliberative democracy—sees communication between people occurring in some sort of assembly, though the network approach of sociologists such as Fuyuki Kurasawa sees deliberation in a much more organic fashion.¹ Each individual question is worthy of an essay in of themselves, so I want to focus more on deliberation and revealed preferences; what I mean by “deliberation”, though, is communication between individuals in such a way that a comprehensive plan can be formed and executed by all participants, with some agnosticism on how many participants are too many. This disclaimer is me saying that I’m not trying to ignore those questions, only that I’m narrowing my focus for this particular response.

Consider how “markets” have traditionally been conceived. 

Standard economic theory has assumed that the market was an impersonal space since at least Max Weber: in defining markets as existing only at the point where a good or service is being exchanged—and for no longer than that—Weber argued that the “market community […] is the most impersonal relationship of practical life into which humans can enter with one another” due to its singular focus on commodities and nothing more (1978: 636). Similarly, Albert Hirschman argued that economists simplified society and frequently saw competitive markets as containing large numbers of “anonymous buyers […] without any prolonged human or social contact between the parties” (1982: 1473). And James Buchanan, in describing the typical psychology of a market participant, wrote that while markets are efficient at distributing resources

I do not know the fruit salesman personally; and I have no particular interest in his wellbeing. He reciprocates this attitude. I do not know, and I have no need to know whether he is in direst poverty, extremely wealthy, or somewhere in between (1975: 17). 

Taken together, markets are thought to (cribbing a term from Daniel Dennett) provide coordination without comprehension—“comprehension” in this case of the preferences of others—so long as certain general rules are followed (like, for instance, not stealing). That’s all that’s required, though; prices can do the heavy lifting on the coordination side of things.  

The key assumption here is that individual preferences don’t extend out past your own head: you worry about what you value, and as Buchanan outlined, don’t care much about what’s going on inside someone else’s head. And for a very long time, an additional assumption was that preferences are invariant over time: if you like ice cream, you’ll continue to like ice cream and will plan your consumption patterns around maximizing total ice cream enjoyment. The economics profession has slowly begun to turn away from the first assumption though, as ignoring social preferences and things like empathy leads to economic models that leave out a massive amount of human nature. Similarly—and Emmi points this out when sketching the limits of pure deliberation—not only are preferences not necessarily invariant, but individuals don’t necessarily have perfect knowledge of their own preferences either. A person might have to actually come into contact with ice cream in order for them to learn that they have a preference for it, and the exact details of their preference for ice cream (what flavours, at what time of day, at what quantity, etc.) would only become known through repeated interactions.  

Building from these points, but also from observations of actually existing markets, economists such as Samuel Bowles note that only some markets can be described as “impersonal” and actually fit the definition of a market that relies solely on prices chosen by anonymous buyers. Any market that suffers from asymmetric information or incomplete contracts, for instance, will rely on continual contact and trust between participants to function—Bowles identifies labour and credit markets as distinctly “personal” ones for those reasons (1998: 87, 77).²

Now, to an important extent, some of the problems associated with asymmetrical information are because of capitalism, but Bowles and his co-authors (2017) have argued elsewhere that, if we take Hayek’s insights on information distribution seriously, then this is an inherent feature of markets in general—whether they’re freed or not.³ Complete contracts are impossible so long as perfect information is impossible, regardless of whether an economy is seen as capitalistic or socialistic or something else entire: no agent can possibly establish contractual conditions that cover every possible action. But we can move beyond markets that suffer from extensive failures to impersonal settings, like a supermarket, that economics textbooks traditionally consider to be as close to perfectly functioning as possible (Bowles 1998: 77): we can think of friends, relatives, immediate family members, and so on feeding us information about prices, selection, problematic brands, and more in order to help us make better decisions as consumers—we might not interact with the staff of a supermarket in a personal way, but social relationships still underpin our decisions in these impersonal spaces. Indeed, this particular means of acquiring information has likely become all the more important during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as hoarding, supply chain disruptions, and similar problems have distorted market prices.⁴ Contra what Buchanan argued, then, a potentially substantial amount of economic activity does involve, and in fact requires, someone to know the other party and be at least somewhat interested in their lot in life.

I think it’s impossible to deny that deliberation is a key ingredient in maintaining the continual contact that “personal” market interactions require. These people will have to communicate plans and solve conflicts with one another over a broad range of issues, involving a wide number of preferences. Back to some of the points that Bowles has made, incomplete contracts in particular invite increasing levels of Coasian Bargaining (2004: 221-222), and all bargaining centres on effective and extensive deliberation. While Bowles points out the problems with some of Coase’s assumptions (such as zero bargaining costs and unequal initial endowments), he notes the important insight that decentralized coordination through bargaining is an integral part of achieving efficient resource distributions beyond using market exchange (ibid: 229). Deliberation is an integral part of correcting the market and also steering it, which we shouldn’t expect to see if the process was incapable of overcoming preference-related problems. 

Consider what would be required for someone to know another person’s preferences, or learn about their own, and how deliberation doesn’t automatically preclude these requirements from being fulfilled. Repeated interaction and discussion would provide ample opportunity for learning and refining your understanding of both the other person’s preferences and your own, so long as the environment where this interaction is taking place allows this sort of relationship to form. It also gives people the opportunity to change their preferences in light of new information—again, so long as the social environment allows for this to happen, and in a free and non-coercive manner. In fact, if knowledge about your own preferences is limited, one could make the argument that deliberation is the best way to learn what these preferences actually are. If another person asks for reasons why you prefer X (in as non-invasive a way as possible, hopefully), or they simply ask you to clarify what you mean by X, you’ll likely begin to consider your own tastes and behaviour. This is true even if you intend to lie to another person, but in a situation where you’ve built up trust with another person and some form of mutual recognition (such as in markets that depend on these types of interactions), then providing a satisfactory answer will require quite a bit of introspection.⁵ We could contrast this with a person who has to discover their preferences through only market exchange: the possibility of you actually making this discovery depends on numerous external constraints, such as time and number of available choices, which in almost every circumstance are not unlimited. It’s not impossible to discover your true preferences through impersonal market exchange, but I think that it’s more likely when done through introspection, and deliberation has a lot of potential in facilitating good introspection. Importantly, deliberation also ensures that you have access to alternative points of view if you wish to change your preferences, to whatever extent that’s actually possible.  

There is, it should be said, a growing body of literature showing that experiments in deliberative democracy have resulted in better distributed information and more informed participants,⁶ and so providing a space for people to hear alternative perspectives and ask questions for clarification seems like it can be an effective learning mechanism (something that I think is doubly important if we consider how “exit”, even under ideal circumstances, isn’t always an option).⁷ My above comments aren’t so far-fetched. The gap between what your stated preferences are and what you actually prefer may not be that large when people are repeatedly interacting and discoursing with one another; you may not need to have “skin in the game” via some sort of currency to accurately state what your preferences are. 

So in the case of the types of markets described above, when coordination through prices and currency isn’t possible, then deliberation even in large-scale spaces can find a way to effectively handle preferences; indeed, deliberation may be the only thing ensuring that markets approach efficiency in these circumstances, even if perfect efficiency isn’t actually reached.⁸

It’s important to always be aware of the limits of any coordination mechanism that’s been proposed, and I think that Emmi Bevensee does an excellent job of exploring these limits. But I do think that a closer look at actually existing markets provides a larger role for deliberation in dealing with preferences, while traditional market mechanisms might actually be less successful at that, given certain conditions. I’ve only briefly argued for ways that deliberation, through things like repeated and personal interactions, might reveal and modify preferences, and so substantially more work is required to actually delineate deliberation’s potential in an anarchist economy. 

Similarly, while I did say just above that deliberation’s important role in market coordination could apply to large-scale spaces, and not just small communities or communes, how much deliberation can be scaled is an open question. Emmi is right to point out the problems of scaling for any sort of planning, and my arguments about deliberation and preferences have no impact on that important insight. My final comment, however, might be that if deliberation is not as powerless in the face of preferences as assumed, then cosmopolitan networks ala Kurasawa’s research might allow deliberation to scale without sacrificing too much information.⁹

But how we’d ensure effective communication across borders is, again, an essay all its own.   

Endnotes

1.  See his book The Work of Global Justice (2007) for example, and his article “An Alternative Transnational Public Sphere?” (2014) as examples. Some of Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel’s work on deliberative democracy—in particular, their notion of a “directly deliberative-polyarchy” (1997)—also approach a more network-oriented view of deliberation, rather than traditional views of citizens gathering in a room somewhere for meetings. 
2. This means that you’re required to continue interacting with the other participants in this market, in a fairly close fashion, for as long as you want to be a participant in that market—assuming, of course, that exit is possible. We can likely assume that you have an incentive to be honest in your interactions and not be manipulative, only because if trust is required for this market to function then acting inherently untrustworthy will eventually lead to a catastrophic market failure. More optimistically, we could take Adam Smith’s line—and indeed some more modern research on empathy—and note that continual interaction even with people who are initially strangers makes it more likely for you to genuinely care about these people and take their considerations into account when making decisions, at least to a noticeable extent.
3. Note: I’m using a still fairly limited definition of markets here, in that I’m emphasizing the use of some kind of cash-nexus as being the defining feature of a market. If we define markets in a broad fashion—say, as simply a space in the public sphere where goods and services change hands, with any number of coordinating mechanisms or currency-alternatives besides money being allowed—then asymmetric information may be less of a structural problem. But that’s beyond the scope of this essay.
4. This point could be contested by those of a particular Austrian bent by saying that price gouging is impossible, as market transactions are voluntary and thus perfectly incorporate all parties’ subjective value. I think this assumption is generally ludicrous during a pandemic; moreover, it’s hard to square this assumption with some of the research that Amartya Sen has done on markets during disasters like a famine.
5.  See Endnote 2.
6. See, for instance, Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell (2002) and Warren and Pearse (2008).
7. While the ability to “exit” is, I would argue, heavily restricted to the point of non-existence under capitalism (not only do you have to work to survive, but you have to be accepted at whatever job you apply for and have the resources necessary to uproot yourself and possibly others simply to have access to work), I think it’s also true that even in a perfect anarchist world, it would be impossible to guarantee the right to exit in every circumstance. This point too is beyond the scope of this essay, however.
8. Again, I’m not denying the importance of markets, but I think there are enough situations where deliberation works and the use of currency to signal preferences doesn’t mean that we can’t just assume “use markets unless a different mechanism shows itself to be superior.” Instead, we should be looking at instances where markets that already exist require deliberation to be successful. 
9. A working assumption of mine is that information is always sacrificed, simply because no system is perfect and the nature of things like tacit knowledge or complexity can’t be completely solved for. It’s sort of a case of looking for “the least inefficient” option, rather than searching for a perfectly efficient one. 

Bibliography

• Bowles, S. 1998. “Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions”, Journal of Economic Literature 36(1): 75-111. 
  •  2004. Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 
  • Kirman, A., and Rajiv Sethi. 2017. “Retrospectives: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(3): 215-230.   
• Buchanan, J. 1975. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  
• Cohen, J. and Charles Sabel. 1997. “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy”, European Law Journal 3(4): 313-343.   
• Hirschman, A. 1982. “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?”, Journal of Economic Literature 20(4): 1463-1484.  
• Kurasawa, F. 2007. The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 
  • 2014. “An Alternate Transnational Public Sphere? On Anarchist Cosmopolitanism in Post-Westphalian Times”, in Kat Nash (ed.) Transnationalizing the Public Sphere. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pg. 79-97.  
• Luskin, R.C., Fishkin, J.S., and Roger Jowell. 2002. “Considered Opinions: Deliberative Polling in Britain”, British Journal of Political Science 32(3): 455-487. 
• Warren, M. and Hilary Pearse. 2008. “Introduction: Democratic Renewal and Deliberative Democracy”, in M. Warren and H. Pearse (eds.) Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens Assembly. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pg. 1-19. 
• Weber, M. 1978 [1922]. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology Vol. I and II (G. Roth and C. Wittich eds). Berkeley: University of California Press.  

Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience.

Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email editor@c4ss.org or emmibevensee@email.arizona.edu.

I’m a big fan of Aurora and hope that her contribution to this symposium helps encourage more anarchists to engage fearlessly with the mathematical dynamics of an anarchist society. But I must admit my disappointment, I was hoping her contribution would seriously engage with the arguments for markets and either present a novel alternative or the foundations of an alternative research project. Anarcho-communism is in dire need of resuscitation, without a modern economics program more enticing than the bureaucratic quagmire of Parecon, it risks being overrun by denialists and crackpots. The basic pitch remains salient, but the moment adherents run across arguments for markets most now retreat to obtuse and tepid attacks on the entire academic project of economics, hoping to, by sleight-of-hand, transmute valid but limited critiques of applicability and scope into an excuse to ignore anything and everything.

Thus have anti-market anarchists ratcheted themselves inexorably towards rejections of mathematics, measurement, science, abstraction, etc. It’s particularly frustrating because, in the context of broader polarizations in the Two Cultures of academia, this has likewise caused the left to broadly abandon analytic conversations. I would desperately like to avoid a future where analytic nerds are automatically shuffled into the hands of right-libertarians defending hierarchy while obscurantist poets claim exclusive ownership over the left. In such a dystopia we left market anarchists will be left trying to chart an ever tighter course between Scylla and Charybdis, attacked by those who think you have to pick either compassion or clarity. Aurora’s work on the social complexity of anarchist societies is a refreshing counter to such incipient anti-mathematics tendencies. But regrettably I find it entirely orthogonal to the topic of whether markets are most useful at the sort of complex economic coordination anarchists aspire to.

Aurora seeks to lay the foundations of a “cybernetic communist infrastructure of computation that would replace the profit optimization mechanism of markets” but what she actually covers — with a detour into measures of complexity and the integrated information project — is mostly that highly networked non-hierarchical systems can be said to have a high degree of complexity. While it may be a necessary counter to more stalinist conceptions of communism to emphasize a need for complexity, this seems rather trivial.

While physicists and computer scientists have been — as is our wont — more cavalier about models and term usage than strict mathematicians, there are strong reasons for our association of entropy with complexity and information entanglement. When separated systems are put into contact with one another, lines of internal causality grow more complex and become computationally harder and harder to track or tease apart. What’s critical in all this is the limits of our brains. When we watch a drop of ink enter a cup of water, the ink-water system at first appears relatively simple, then grows increasingly complex in noticeable features, before finally concluding in a state of indiscernible greyness. This final state appears “simple,” but only because our limited brains “lost the plot” as the ink-water system grew in complexity with diffusion.

As societies and cultures grow in scale or come into greater contact with one another, so too does their entanglement grow and what were once simple dynamics get mixed up into increasing complexity. Reactionaries — being small minded creatures fearful of the spiraling “unintended consequences” of rapid evolution — fear this complexity because they can’t keep track of it; it all looks formless and grey to them. Hence why polemics against “globalism” try to paint our churning interconnected world of constantly forking subcultures as “dreary” or “uniform.” The static fuzz on an old television set might appear contentless, but in reality it’s the combination of countless sources of background radio waves, a rich tapestry of causes we are simply too limited to parse.

I feel it should go without saying that a more networked and less centralized or hierarchical society would be a more complex society, and have more integrated information that is spread across it in ways not discernible from individual elements in isolation.

What Aurora wants with a measure like Phi is a guide to at least one necessary component to maximizing integration and agency,

Maximizing integrated information (in an effective complexity version) would mean obtaining a system that realizes the maximal possible integration of informational complexity across all possible subsystems and the highest degree of causal interconnectedness of subsystems.

But the implication that this will cash out in a prescription of anarcho-communism is a leap too far.

There are two broad objections:

1) It’s not clear that maximizing integrated information cashes out in terms of actual human needs. A highly complex society is not necessarily an optimal society. There are many different complex configurations a society might be in where that complexity is not efficiently applied to achieving our needs and wants. One might imagine a highly bureaucratized system with a high degree of internal connection, where information is spread out in complex ways and one person can affect everything, but done so dysfunctionally that no one actually gets fed. One might term this the problem of Mud Pie Complexity, a society that is exceedingly complex, but only in the service of making mud pies rather than anything truly useful. Aurora presents integrated information maximization as necessary but not sufficient, but if there are other values we’re supposed to be maximizing there’s still the question of when and how do those values get weighed against one another? Simply saying we should have more information integration is not the same thing as saying we should maximize it. I would doubt that it’s truly orthogonal with other values we might have, thus one is forced into the same problem virtue ethicists are faced with when describing multiple virtues or variables to maximize at once. How do these values couple to one another? When faced with a tradeoff between more integrated information and more happiness, say, at what rate do we trade one for the other?

2) Even if we posit it as a most underlying value and assume a kind of forward-thinking optimization process towards phi that necessarily optimizes for human health, happiness, flourishing, agency, etc, as a byproduct, it’s not at all clear that this excludes markets. It may well be the case that markets are a critical necessity to efficiently satiating the complex desires and preferences of individual humans. Indeed there are well established arguments towards this conclusion and Aurora does not engage with them.

What points she makes in passing against markets are twofold:

1) Markets supposedly lead to runaway accumulation:

The  profit  driven  maximization  process  of  markets  is  not  a  viable  option,  not because “profit” is a bad word (it is!)  but because of the way the dynamics works: even if one could start with an ideal initial condition of equally distributed wealth, even very small fluctuations will get largely amplified, rapidly reproducing a situation of  uneven  accumulation.   In  the  profit  dynamics  of  markets  an  equitable  wealth distribution  is  necessarily  an  unstable  condition.   That’s  in  essence  why  markets cannot be liberated from capitalism. Markets are an automated generator of capitalist wealth inequalities,  which can quickly and easily wipe out any hard-won gains that cost major social upheavals and difficult revolutionary actions to achieve.

2) Competition in markets encourages secrecy which limits the profusion of useful evaluative information:

Maximizing our integrated information Φ favors cooperation over competition, since competition tends to break apart a system into separate competitors and this decreases the Φ function, while cooperation increases connectedness and enlarges the network of mutual causal influences, leading to an increase of Φ.

I am honestly annoyed that it’s 2020 and folks still make these arguments without even mentioning, much less responding to, standard left market anarchist points on them, but let’s quickly go over them for the record.

Just as there are accumulative dynamics that can amplify small perturbations of wealth in a market society, so too are there dis-accumulative dynamics — or as Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier put it in the introduction to their 2012 compilation Markets Not Capitalism, there are “centrifugal tendencies” to markets that spread out wealth and in the right societies and situations can overwhelm and outpower accumulative tendencies.

These centrifugal tendencies are myriad and operate at different scales in different ways, but to assume from the outset that the capital accumulative tendencies will inherently outpace and overpower the centrifugal tendencies is to just bypass the entire conversation.

Just to begin with we all know that in a perfectly decentralized/competitive abstract market profit margins would fall to zero or so close as to make no difference. In this idealization a stray extra penny might be randomly found here or there, and primarily used to help course-correct inefficiencies, hardly capable of much runaway compounding. It is certainly the case that existing markets are not perfectly decentralized or competitive, as well as many other ways they deviate from the spherical cow type abstractions studied in economics 101, but most if not all of the sources of wealth and control centralization in our actually existing economy are the product of very specific legacies and policies of state violence. Mutualists throughout history like Benjamin Tucker have painstakingly traced the myriad avenues by which such violence is cloaked or embedded in seemingly small details and yet creates vast inequality and injustice, creating monopolies or comparable concentrations to horrific effect.

It is worth reiterating that markets — networks of exchange of property — have existed throughout history in various roles, in various cultures, including ostensibly stateless ones, and some with quite complicated machinations. Insofar as the centralized violence of state power was absent, these markets tended towards more decentralized / egalitarian norms. David Graeber, no big fan of markets, admits this much in Debt: The First Five Thousand Years.

Similarly James C Scott, another market skeptic, details how bottom-up emergent markets in different cultures have tended towards some strategies of aggressive illegibility precisely to prevent control by states or would-be-state actors. In this respect markets have often been a site of deliberately unruly resistance to power, a kind of emergent routing-around the damage of would-be monopolies of any form. Black markets are a kind of check, albeit a desperate last-leg, one of unruliness, that stops cancers of accumulative wealth/power from completely strangling a society and instead helps nurture elements of resistance capable of ultimately overthrowing those powers.

State communists, taking their cue from Marx, have tended to envy the vast and centralized industrial production chains of capitalism. Businesses like Walmart are able to exploit economies of scale to produce a vast number of commodities in a uniform fashion for much lower costs per unit. But where did these economies of scale come from? The vast majority of them are the product of state violence. To give just one example, when imperialist conquest and capitalist enslavement builds roads and train tracks that would otherwise have never been built it removes transportation costs, making businesses profitable at a larger scale than they otherwise would be, and driving out more dexterous local production, as well as suppressing investment opportunities for technologies that assist such smaller scale production. Walmart would not even be profitable if it had to pay proportionally for the wear and tear its trucks inflict on public roads.

But diseconomies of scale are not just matters of the state putting its finger on the scale to warp costs of labor, infrastructure, and resource acquisition to the benefit of capitalists and corporations. Organizations naturally suffer from severe internal coordination and calculation dysfunctions as they scale up. Firms are in practice miniature command economies, little islands of tyranny to make the Soviet Union blush, and they face the same systemic limitations and inefficiencies. Bosses don’t understand the conditions on the shop floor and it’s hard to communicate that. Paperwork flurries of bureaucratization emerge to keep track of everyone the boss or investors are trying to keep track of, to sharply diminishing returns. The larger the company, the harsher the dysfunction. But even within the warped topsy-turvy “market” of capitalism it’s been repeatedly shown that cooperatives are more efficient than hierarchical businesses in many economic spaces. Still cooperatives face inefficiencies from scaling too large. We don’t have to worry about a single cooperative achieving a tyrannical marketshare to the detriment of other cooperatives. And these diseconomies of scale in social coordination apply even to individual attention — a single rich entrepreneur finds it harder to invest with the precision and attention per dollar than a slightly poorer entrepreneur. As capitalism repeatedly demonstrates for us there is no one stupider and more disconnected than a billionaire. In a society where literally every structure wasn’t set up and reinforced with brutal violence to preserve their wealth and power, those with a sharp pool of wealth would see it evaporate alongside their own increasing disconnect.

For a host of further examples of natural diseconomies of scale, and how states/etc have actively suppressed them to the benefit of capitalists, see much of the work of Kevin Carson, particularly Studies on Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory.

But why else have markets outside of modern capitalism and some similar imperialist societies in history largely avoided runaway wealth accumulation to the scale we see today? Well there’s a few more tendencies of free societies and actually freed markets that erode wealth inequalities.

The first and most plain of which is that most pre-capitalist market societies were and are not anonymous, actors within the economy know each other and their histories. Indeed famously on the Island of Yap, folks minted huge coins as currency but then never bothered to actually move the coins, when someone traded ownership to someone else both parties simply informed the entire community. And when you know the economic context of members of your community that gives extraordinary leverage to those with less. In every conventional bottom-up marketplace around the world if you are seen or known to be wealthier you will pay a higher price for goods than people who have less.

This is because value is in a very real sense subjective, although the consequences cut in directions the Austrian economists rarely like exploring. A dollar is simply not worth as much to a richer man as it is worth to a poorer man. And that means in a fair negotiation he’ll be inclined to part with more of them. Every old woman selling fish and vegetables has charged a tax on rich gringos, and that tax can be considerable. Even if someone achieves a level of wealth where he can pay an intermediary to hide the ultimate recipient of a good, he’s still stuck paying that intermediary, who now has leverage in terms of exposure.

In a world very far away from wealth equality the truly rich can leverage vast sums to outmaneuver the small extra taxes they might pay at the village square, but the point is that when a market starts from rough equality, small perturbations in wealth can be quickly handled by these kinds of directed bottom-up taxes.

Finally, but critically, if truly pernicious accumulations of wealth are somehow achieved, there are a host of more active ways to erode that wealth out from underneath the privileged without leaping to full blown guillotines. This is because property titles are not themselves objective and immortal truths, but constantly contested and emergent detentes between actually existing people. General respect for property only emerges without state violence when respecting other people’s property is (in aggregate, on average) a net win for you as well. Property titles are concessions of respect for a claim that have to emerge organically from a bottom-up consensus. We respect that these crops are yours because you tilled the land to grow them, and we wouldn’t want people stealing what we work to produce. But when claims become truly pernicious — as say someone holding preexisting title to the only barrel of water to survive a shipwreck — there’s no reason for the community to respect that title, it becomes null and void.

Around the edges this can look like those with more being forced to invest more in the protection of what they have from burglars, etc. It’s easier to steal a million dollars from one person than a thousand dollars each from a thousand people. Under the state the violence of the police is a subsidy to protect the absurdly misbegotten pernicious property claims of a few disconnected rich.

None of this is to hold up some specific historic example of non-capitalist markets as a blueprint, most heretofore existing societies have sucked in one manner or another. But markets are what we make of them, they’re framed and shaped by individual decisions, culture, social activism, etc. Realizing that markets are always pressed between by a host of accumulative (capitalist) and a host of centrifugal (anarchist) dynamics allows us to fiddle with the dials as it were. To contest and explore configuration space. To find one where the benefits of markets — of their capacity for the efficient application of computational and informational complexity to satiate the complex desires of all — can be had while avoiding collapse into the rampant inefficiencies and inequalities of capitalism.

It is in no way proven that one person having a telescope and another person having a guitar, when those have different exchange values, automatically sets off a ratchet effect of compounding wealth inequality. We do in fact have every reason to believe that there is room for people to have enough varying wealth for market incentives towards honest trade to function, while avoiding actually meaningful inequality.

As to the question of competition creating secrecy. Well the whole point of trade is to provoke and incentivize more honest evaluations of personal preference than can be had in a meeting or via any sort of verbal discussion.

Human brains are complex and human language has too low of bandwidth for us to rapidly export the content of our brains with high fidelity. This is a simple brute fact. As a consequence aspirations like maximizing integrated information necessarily runs aground on the particulars of a species that does not have efficient brain-to-brain communication technologies. I fully and readily admit that were humans to evolve ourselves into a hive mind with a vast degree of functional telepathy the utility of markets would evaporate. We are not there. And so the integration of information between individuals must deal with a host of constraints and optimization problems. What trade does amazingly well is force people to tell something far closer to the truth about how much they desire something. This is not merely a problem of people not being angels. Even perfectly earnest and sincere angels would have trouble comparing personal desires without concrete actionable trades.

Yes, competition can incentivize momentary bouts of secrecy, but the market overall bends against secrecy in aggregate. It takes, once again, state intervention in the market to create cancerous absurdities like intellectual property and espionage laws. A more decentralized market (equivalently: a more egalitarian market) with more “competition” in the sense of choices, would create very strong incentive to steal secrets and shop around. Cooperatives attempting to keep a recipe or strategy secret would have to pay an increased premium to their employees not to defect. Further there will be no healthy market without a proliferation of roles we now weirdly make the select domain of journalists, consumer reports, muckrakers, etc. We can also expect broad social pressures to quickly and viciously cancel any cooperative or individual hustler who deceives or is less than transparent. Of course markets can emerge in complex highly path-dependent ways, so it’s on us as activists and community members to pressure and work proactively to shape prosocial norms of transparency.

One more way the market can be made more transparent is to normalize transactions in public ledger marketplaces or currencies where, like it was in more traditional markets, it’s easy to track every single transaction every person made. There are exceptions to this, of course, in our present highly unequal society, just as we have little reason to respect most property title in our bloodsoaked world, so too do we have every incentive to leverage the potential for illegibility in markets, embracing new constructions of anonymous currency to help finance the activity of comrades. States have historically encouraged anonymous currency — eg with the introduction of specie metals — so as to allow agents of its violence to cloak the source of their wealth. This is reason to ultimately prefer the more public ledger styles of traditional markets, but only to transition when wealth is redistributed. Of course we will never entirely avoid anonymity, but the ways in which markets can facilitate that should be seen as a pressure valve.

The simple fact of the matter is that while secrecy ultimately tends towards a constraint on everyone’s agency, there are a great many situations where we want secrecy to be an option. It is common for communists these days to decry the impersonalism of market exchange, but where they see alienation I see individual resiliency against community abuse. As anarchists we want people to have options outside of participation in a collective, indeed having many collectives and individual, more anonymous modes of interaction that one can shift or rescale investment between is a positive, it provides people with checks and balances.

And that’s what “competition” means at the end of the day — checks and balances. Not hostile egotistical opportunism, but a more fluid society where individuals have many choices in association and collaboration, rather than a few collectives. Individualism is properly understood not as egoism, but as fully consistent with altruism, a kind of intensification of options at every scale, and in the marketplace not just cooperatives but also individual hustles. I have yet to see a real communist alternative that embraces individual agency in such a fractal way.

I honestly wish there was one.

It would be great if we didn’t have to, as individuals, contest and fiddle with the knobs on market norms to build a functioning anarchist society, where we could just with one fell blow come together and decide to be nice and bam, no more hierarchies, no more economy, just some ignorable accounting app on our phones. Decades of work in collective process and studies in computer science have thoroughly disabused me of this notion.

As an opening work in a much longer and wider research project, Aurora’s essay is very exciting, I do hope more than a few anarchists — including anarcho-communists — will pick up her torch. But it’s sadly been my experience that the moment some defender of communism adds equations to a paper, no matter the actual argument, people will endlessly bandy it as proof we don’t need markets to solve complex economic coordination and allocation problems. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience.

Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email editor@c4ss.org or emmibevensee@email.arizona.edu.

Di Siddharth Sthalekar. Originale: Memetic Propagation and Mediation: Tools for the Distributed Economy, 6 luglio 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

L’ordine di stare a casa imposto durante la pandemia mi è tristemente famigliare. Mi ricorda il mese di coprifuoco durante le rivolte di Bombay, quando avevo undici anni.

La vita comunitaria dominava la nostra società indiana. Se lo stato funzionava secondo rigidi principi monopolistici sovietico-socialisti, la vita quotidiana era invece immersa in una genuina diversità culturale. Tutto attorno a me era vibrante di vita e multidimensionale, dall’arte al cibo alle filosofie. Parlavo cinque lingue (non dialetti) senza sapere che era una cosa insolita.

Le rivolte, però, rivelarono gli aspetti negativi della vita comunitaria. Sbirciavo dalla finestra, cosa che non dovevo fare, e vedevo gli adepti di una comunità religiosa che sfasciavano le case di un’altra comunità. Mi chiedevo cosa li spingesse, dopo generazioni di convivenza. Ci vedevo la vulnerabilità della fiducia reciproca.

Per l’India questi fatti furono una svolta. Negli anni novanta arrivò il tanto atteso ingresso nella globalizzazione. Si aprivano le frontiere al commercio, eravamo incoraggiati ad unirci alla tendenza neoliberale che stava conquistando il mondo. Il patto era semplice: abbandonare (o mettere a tacere) le nostre caotiche identità culturali e partecipare al flusso mondiale iperefficiente e senza frizioni di capitali e lavoro. Liberarci dai pericoli del tribalismo e unirci alla monocultura degli adoratori di Michael Jordan. Il mondo era piatto, e piatte erano anche le nostre identità.

Ma sapevamo anche che il patto era un imbroglio. E lo rivela il covid-19 che segna l’inevitabile collasso del neoliberalismo. Il confinamento nel mio alloggio di Singapore mi ricorda il coprifuoco a Bombay. Ma se le rivolte spingevano verso la centralizzazione, questa crisi sembra imporci il ritorno ad un’espressione culturale più genuina.

La possibilità di ricostruire un’organizzazione decentrata potrebbe essere contenuta nei principi del Gram Swaraj[1], un movimento creato da Gandhi durante la lotta per l’indipendenza.

Il movimento nacque quando si capì che chiedere agli imperialisti di lasciare l’India non era sufficiente alla realtà nascente. La colonizzazione era parte del cuore dell’industrializzazione, la sua forza omogeneizzante aveva un potenziale distruttivo per un paese edificato sulla diversità estrema. Se si vuole ricreare la capacità organizzativa decentrata occorre instillare un orgoglio genuino per le nostre identità senza però scadere nel tribalismo.

Il Modello Economico del Gram Swaraj

La forma iconica del charkha, o filatoio, potrebbe essere considerata la rappresentazione ideale del modello economico utilizzato dal movimento. Ogni comunità aveva accesso alle tecnologie a basso costo alla base del charkha, ognuno poteva copiarne lo schema di base, adattarlo alle proprie necessità tecniche o al tipo di cotone coltivato. Questa filosofia, unita ad una rete diffusa di “Satyagrahis”, servì a far rivivere le varie identità culturali del paese.

Il contrasto tra il charkha e l’industria tessile dava un’idea perfetta del contrasto tra il modello economico centralizzato e quello decentrato. Il modello industriale vive grazie alla sacralità del design, che serve a generare un flusso di introiti verso chi ne detiene la proprietà. I modelli decentrati considerano sacri i confini, mentre le tecnologie possono essere adattate al contesto.

In poche parole, passare dal centralismo al decentramento non basta se non c’è una teoria sottostante che sostenga le diversità culturali. La cultura unica è l’antitesi della rete diffusa. La diffusione dei meme è il fattore chiave di un design che funzioni per la comunità e che eviti che guardiani ne impediscano gli adattamenti.

I principi organizzativi di queste realtà possono essere così riassunti:

Economie Centralizzate: “App o Business”
Prodotto di Tecnologie Specifiche e Cultura Generica

Economie Decentrate: “Circondari”
Prodotto di Tecnologie Generiche e Cultura Specifica.

L’importanza della Formalizzazione

Come può una comunità costruire una cultura specifica senza cadere in uno schema socio-patriarcale tradizionale che spesso diventa tribalismo? L’opera dell’economista gandhiano JC Kumarappa illustra alcuni principi che servono a legittimare le varie forme di valore, in quanto capitale, usando un ampio spettro di valute. Parte di queste teorie sono state modificate da autori come EF Schumacher e, più di recente, da studi sugli schemi valutari come Metacurrency Project e Commons Engine.

Il gandhiano Rajni Bakshi’s in Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom articola la questione come se fosse un’estrazione delle forze di mercato dal tessuto sociale[2].

Forse è importante creare un linguaggio economico formale che unisca il tessuto sociale e che faccia da complemento al capitale monetario, o che sia in competizione con esso.

In altre parole, possiamo riprendere le nostre identità culturali se creiamo linguaggi economici formali che ci aiutino ad articolare il capitale sociale.

Simili schemi si possono ottenere amplificando l’utilizzo delle monete basate sulla reputazione (come proposto da organizzazioni come Sacred Capital). Queste monete sono tendenzialmente endogene, contestuali, relative, e a somma non zero e forniscono il tessuto più adatto al processo di cattura, ma anche mantenimento, della natura sfumata della cultura.

Questo è possibile grazie alla graduale ascesa di tecnologie agentocentriche (un piccolo sottoinsieme dei sistemi a contabilità distribuita) come Holochain. Qui ogni utente mantiene la propria invariabile versione personale di contabilità, e questo fa sì che non ci sia bisogno di registrare la “verità” in qualche luogo universale. Si possono così assemblare pezzi di realtà fortemente contestuali e, cosa più importante, dare la capacità ad ognuno di intervenire sul proprio registro.

Il bassissimo costo di mantenimento di questi registri comporta la capacità di formalizzare non solo ciò che è monetariamente importante, ma anche ciò che è contestualmente critico.

Due sono gli strumenti che permettono di rivitalizzare i temi principali del Gram Swaraj:

Propagazione Memetica:

La natura agentocentrica di queste tecnologie dà la possibilità di “duplicare” molti strumenti tecnici al fine di adattarli ad un’ampia varietà di contesti. Iniziative come Holo-REA, Value-Flows, Sacred Capital, tutte sotto l’egida di Economikit, offrono questa possibilità. Questo significa che ogni comunità può articolare una propria cultura invece di essere costretta ad operare sotto una globale generic culture imposta da imperi tecnologici in nome di tecnologie di facile utilizzo.

Tradizionalmente, le economie centralizzate utilizzano un sistema misto monetario e normativo al fine di articolare la cultura, e agevolarne la diffusione all’interno del loro ecosistema. Al contrario, le tecnologie agentocentriche democratizzano la possibilità di articolare formalmente la reputazione e di controllare il potere interpretativo all’interno di qualunque comunità, a prescindere dalle sue dimensioni. L’utilizzo di un tessuto reputazionale permette la propagazione per risonanza, e non basata sulla ricerca di una rendita, a causa della sua natura a somma non zero. Poiché idee e meme sono creati dalla comunità, la loro diffusione avviene attraverso un processo di propagazione memetica simile al processo evolutivo del DNA. Progetti e conversazioni sviluppate da Microsolidarity ne sono un esempio.

Mediazione Memetica

Le tecnologie agentocentriche permettono ai singoli utilizzatori di esportare i propri dati reputazionali in tutto l’ecosistema attraverso il consenso. Questo significa che ogni individuo si affaccia alle nuove reti o comunità non da straniero, ma con un importante contesto alle spalle.

Attraverso il processo della mediazione, possiamo immaginare ponti funzionali contestuali che si allungano tra comunità prima escluse da tali possibilità. (Progetti come “Neighbourhoods” e Reputation Vault giocano qui un ruolo chiave). Alla lunga, questo facilita l’uscita dal tribalismo, man mano che le comunità sviluppano meccanismi di feedback che permettono la collaborazione e la comunicazione reciproca. Da qualche decennio, il ponte per eccellenza tra le tribù del pianeta è rappresentato dal “commercio”. Dato il calo di questi ultimi due anni, c’è la possibilità che nasca un altro ponte basato su un processo di mediazione e evoluzione culturale condivisa.

L’acquisizione della capacità di padroneggiare l’arte della mediazione e della propagazione memetica, che avverrà nel decennio a venire, non solo offrirà soluzioni al problema dell’organizzazione e della condivisione delle conoscenze, ma potrebbe anche aiutare a porre paletti al flusso dei capitali, dei contenuti e del lavoro nel lungo termine.

Esportare capacità può finalmente servire a creare reti di intelligenza sociale che guidino il coinvolgimento e le interazioni all’interno di una comunità e tra una comunità e l’altra. Questa potrebbe essere un’alternativa, incentrata sull’agente e decentrata, alla nostra dipendenza dal coinvolgimento algoritmico centralizzato. L’attrattiva che esercita l’efficienza dell’intelligenza artificiale alla luce della pandemia, dei cambiamenti climatici e degli choc monetari è forte, pur essendo proprio questa forma di pensiero ad inasprire i problemi. Man mano che cresce la percentuale dei profitti aziendali generati dalle grosse aziende, le nazioni più popolose del pianeta pongono seriamente in dubbio il ruolo dell’agenzia umana, e si chiedono se dare potere all’imprenditorialità sia davvero la strada che porta alla ricchezza economica di una nazione. È dunque importante generare nuovi cicli di feedback che articolino e amplifichino nuove dimensioni di valore se si vuole creare una visione che migliori le sorti di un’ampia fetta della popolazione.

Note

1. Gram (n): villaggio, comunità; Swaraj (n): Auto-sovranità che emerge dall’agenzia. Il Gram Swaraj, concetto creato dal Mahatma Gandhi e poi sviluppato da Vinoba, promuove la trasformazione di ogni villaggio in un’entità autonoma autosufficiente in cui sono disponibili tutti i sistemi e le strutture atte a vivere degnamente. L’ideologia gandhiana ha insegnato ad unire la felicità con la crescita sostenibile. Swaraj è l’autogoverno che tende continuamente verso l’indipendenza e l’autosufficienza. Il Gram Swaraj, o autogoverno del villaggio, è decentrato, umanocentrico e ripudia lo sfruttamento. Favorisce la tendenza ad una semplice economia di villaggio e all’autosufficienza.

2. Le transazioni economiche hanno sempre fatto parte della società ma erano inserite nel tessuto sociale (si contrattava anche aggressivamente ma l’attività era limitata alle stesse persone all’interno della comunità). Con l’ascesa del commercio mondiale, invece, i mercati sono separati dalla società e questo ha generato una forza omogeneizzante che domina su tutto.