We at C4SS are excited to announce that we will be attending the 2020 NYC Anarchist Book Fair, which is being held virtually this year due to the pandemic. The NYC Anarchist Book Fair is a yearly event where various anarchist groups and individuals gather to share materials and host workshops, panels, and skillshares on topics related to anarchist politics.

Not only will we at C4SS be attending as a virtual vendor selling books, stickers, zines, and more (page goes live Friday, 9/25), but I, Logan Marie Glitterbomb, will also be hosting my own panel entitled Don’t Call the Pigs: Creating an Anarchist Justice System modeled after my similarly named article on the same topic and the updated zine version which can be found for sale here.

At a time when protesters are taking to the streets to demand the defunding of the police and some of the largest prison strikes in recorded history are happening behind bars, the topic of this panel could not be more relevant. It is not my goal to be prescriptive in discussing what I believe should be our end goal, so much as to highlight the various work those in the anarchist movement are already doing and piece it together to show a vision for how to possibly create a more just justice system in the general direction that those projects are already heading. It is my hope that by putting these projects in perspective and to help to guide others to see the importance of collaboration between these projects and provide a general organizing guide around these issues.

So please join me this Friday from 6-8pm EST on Jitsi for this important discussion. The full schedule of panels can be found at anarchistbookfair.net where links to the live streams will be posted beforehand. And be sure to drop by the virtual C4SS table to check out our amazing selection of merchandise and organizing materials. Can’t wait to see y’all there!

Radical writer and thinker William Anderson has been running a fundraiser in support of former Black Panther Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and his partner JoNina. They need help with living costs and medical costs, and it’s a great reminder that we shouldn’t forget our heroes as they get older and fall out of the spotlight.

With $10,000 raised so far, they’re only $5,000 short of the goal! Donate here.

Ervin and his partner continue to organize and struggle. Here’s the fundraiser description from William Anderson:

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin has risked his life consistently while doing revolutionary work over the years. This former Black Panther Party member has been a political prisoner before. He’s also battled surveillance and continued harassment in order to provide people with his groundbreaking writings like “Anarchism and the Black Revolution.” These are just a few of the reasons we need to continue supporting Lorenzo.

The importance of making sure our revolutionary, movement elders have survival funds shouldn’t be lost on us. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin has paved the way for all sorts of activists, thinkers, and intellectuals.  And he’s influenced generations of rebels along the way.  Lorenzo and his partner JoNina continue to support, organize, and teach people across the world while in need themselves. In the midst of a pandemic, they’ve fallen ill and been subject to some difficulties as aging activists. This fundraiser is to help them with their material needs like the cost of living, bills, and medical expenses. It’s the least we can do for them considering how much they’ve done for us.

Di Kevin Carson. Originale: Credit as an Enclosed Commons, Part II, pubblicato il primo settembre 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

In un precedente articolo, spiegavo che chi elogia Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos e simili per la loro capacità di “creare valore” dà credito alle persone sbagliate. Ogni componente della Tesla, tutto il modello logistico e commerciale online di Amazon, esistevano già. L’“idea geniale” su come combinare le parti, lungi dall’essere una di quelle idee che vengono una volta ogni cento anni a qualche grande mente imprenditoriale come Musk e Bezos, era invece piuttosto ovvia. Bastava quella “genialità” che viene ogni fine settimana a migliaia di studenti dei college che si fanno le canne in cameretta, quella genialità che  dimostra Musk tutte le volte che compare in un podcast. Quanto alla realizzazione, ovvero mettere assieme e ottimizzare il tutto, è tutta opera dei lavoratori, che si tratti di tecnici dei gruppi di sviluppo o di chi lavora in impianto.

L’unica funzione di Bezos e Musk è stata di fornire i finanziamenti, dato che loro hanno i soldi. E se quelli che fanno il vero lavoro hanno potuto confidare su ricchi investitori per il capitale iniziale, e se poi questi investitori si trovavano in possesso di tale capitale, è una questione di storia e di difetti strutturali del sistema.

Nel mio articolo precedente prendevo di mira soprattutto la natura di questi difetti strutturali – in particolare, il sistema creditizio capitalista – che impediscono a tecnici e lavoratori produttivi di organizzarsi e finanziare da sé le proprie iniziative. Ma non voglio rivangare.

Ma mentre spiegavo come si attribuisca a Musk e Bezos la disponibilità di tutti i prerequisiti, oltre ovviamente alla capacità di organizzare il tutto secondo un certo schema, non ho detto che questa banalizzazione degli accadimenti deriva dal concetto storico di “tempo della macchina a vapore” (il fatto che un’invenzione sia il prodotto dell’opera simultanea di un concorso di persone in luoghi diversi, ndt). Gran parte delle maggiori innovazioni sono il prodotto dell’intelletto sociale. Quando i prerequisiti tecnici o i vari componenti sono presenti nella collettività, ed è evidente la necessità di una particolare innovazione, ecco che quell’innovazione compare simultaneamente in luoghi diversi.

Un esempio famoso è quello di (ironicamente) Edison e Tesla. Ma pensiamo alla matematica. Greci e arabi hanno elaborato il calcolo trigonometrico, mentre gli arabi hanno sviluppato l’algebra. Ad un certo punto l’uomo si è trovato ad aver bisogno di uno strumento matematico in grado di calcolare, ad esempio, la traiettoria dei proiettili d’artiglieria, e cosa è successo? Che Newton e Leibniz, indipendentemente l’uno dall’altro, hanno sviluppato i necessari strumenti matematici.

Tanta innovazione è ottenuta combinando in maniera creativa componenti creati dall’intelletto sociale, in risposta ad un problema attuale. Quando emerge un problema, un’opportunità o un bisogno, ecco che un certo numero di innovatori, singoli o gruppi, comincia a prendere quei componenti per combinarli.

L’innovazione è un fatto collettivo così come Wikipedia o il software libero open-source. È il risultato di un processo stigmergico, privo di restrizioni che aggrega contributi piccoli e grandi in un progetto generale; è un prodotto sociale più grande della somma delle singole parti, e non attribuibile a nessuna di esse in particolare.

Persone come Elon Musk e Jeff Bezos possiedono decine di miliardi di dollari che con la pandemia, mentre gli altri subiscono la depressione, sono destinati a raddoppiare, ma questo non avviene in virtù di una qualche particolare capacità intellettuale, acume o originalità. Il loro acume, pur non essendo universale, è comunissimo. Le loro ricchezze derivano dal fatto di avere il monopolio su una funzione che è indispensabile a mettere in pratica acume e immaginazione: il capitale di rischio, o credito. E una volta che l’innovazione ha preso corpo, ecco che sfruttano un altro monopolio – la proprietà intellettuale – per estrarre ulteriore rendita.

La ricchezza aggregata dei miliardari equivale a migliaia di dollari per ogni essere umano. Ed è ricchezza estratta innalzando barriere che impediscono – e a cui impongono una tassa – quella funzione elementare che consiste nel prendere i componenti creati dalla nostra collettività, dall’intelletto sociale, per metterli assieme in maniera originale secondo le indicazioni fornite dall’intelletto collettivo. A causa di questo pedaggio, le innovazioni create dall’intelletto sociale, invece di arricchire noi in termini di aumento della qualità della vita e diminuzione della fatica, vengono rese artificialmente scarse e costose. E quello che si paga in più finisce nelle loro tasche.

Sono redditieri che sfruttano il loro monopolio sulla funzione del capitale di rischio per ingabbiare le capacità intellettuali dei veri creatori di valore, e per sfruttare i bisogni dei consumatori. E sono stati messi in questa posizione da un sistema creato per arricchire loro a spese di tutti gli altri.

Un sistema che bisogna distruggere.

Someone dear to me (who I’ll leave unnamed) has a rule that before you say anything, you should consider these three questions: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? And if two of the three criteria are met then you can go ahead and speak your mind. I’m afraid what I have to say about Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton’s recent piece published on Mises Wire “America’s Riots Are Just the Latest Version of Marxist ‘Syndicalism’” is not kind (though I hope it is at least moderately polite), but it is, at least to my mind, both true and necessary.

There are so many misleading, poorly researched, and often downright nonsensical claims throughout the whole thing that I genuinely find it difficult to find a place to begin. For one, Thornton—starting out by outlining the turmoil that 2020 has consisted of—claims that “[t]his chaos in the streets is being facilitated by mayors, governors, and police chiefs who are unwilling to enforce the law.” This must firstly be countered with the obvious observation that the whole situation was sparked by the absolute brutality of law enforcement against Black people* like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Justin Howell, Tony McDade, Jacob Blake, Sean Monterrossa, David McAtee, and numerous more. Furthermore, it is observably ridiculous to say that “mayors, governors, and police chiefs . . . are unwilling to enforce the law” when, throughout the United States, cities are taking paramilitary style action with their police forces against any kind of perceived dissent, resulting in countless injuries and several deaths. I am not sure which United States Dr. Thornton is living in where the local and state governments and law enforcement are sitting idly by, enjoying the view like Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burns, but it is certainly not the same one I am in. 

And Thornton makes an offhand remark—lazily placed after specifically condemning “Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and especially the ‘anarchist provocateurs’”—that “[o]f course, there is also some violence on the right, some of which I witness on the campus of Auburn University.” This underhandedly contradicts the conclusions of the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that shows right-wing violence is far more prevalent than almost any other kind, which can be perfectly demonstrated by the horrific shooting of protesters by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin (which occurred only a short time before Thornton’s article was published.) It also contradicts draft documents by the Department of Homeland Security concluding that white supremacists are likely to remain the most “persistent and lethal threat” to the country into 2021. This is not even to mention—if one is going to talk about chaos perpetuated by local and state governments and law enforcement—the explicit protective relationships between the police and violent right-wing gangs like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon and Rittenhouse receiving both praise and water from Kenosha police officers before his vicious shooting.

But the most academically egregious aspect of Thornton’s article is his complete historical, political, and economic misunderstanding of syndicalism. He first carelessly states that “[i]n general, I define syndicalism as being able to do whatever you want at the expense of others.” Where he got this definition or understanding is completely beyond me. Never once in any publication I have ever read on the subject—from Rudolf Rocker’s Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice to Emma Goldman’s “Syndicalism: the Modern Menace to Capitalism”—have I ever seen a syndicalist identify or indicate that their ideology means “being able to do whatever you want at the expense of others.” He later more specifically defines “political syndicalism” as “direct violent revolutionary action against the institutions of capitalism, such as security forces, property, particularly business property, and the rule of law” but his claim on this front revolves in many ways upon his reference to Georges Sorel—”who thought relentless violence should be used against the institutions of capitalism. This would include the ‘general strike’ so familiar in Europe to this day”—as a major (if partial) originator of syndicalism. This is not the worst summary I have ever heard of Sorel’s work (though to say the labor strikes in modern Europe are what Sorel envisioned is a stretch at the very least), but David Graeber (rest in power) gives a more precise outline in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology: 

Sorel argued that since the masses were not fundamentally good or rational, it was foolish to make one’s primary appeal to them through reasoned arguments. Politics is the art of inspiring others with great myths. For revolutionaries, he proposed the myth of an apocalyptic General Strike, a moment of total transformation. To maintain it, he added, one would need a revolutionary elite capable of keeping the myth alive by their willingness to engage in symbolic acts of violence.

But even accepting Thornton’s understanding of Sorel as essentially accurate, Kevin Carson, in a C4SS email exchange, comments that “pointing to Sorel — a Machiavellian political theorist focused on the general strike as a motivational myth rather than on syndicalism as a serious organizational model — as the primary inspiration for syndicalism is questionable at best. There were many more appropriate figures to reference, De Leon and Rocker not least among them.” 

And what does this all even have to do with Marxism fundamentally? Sorel may have taken inspiration from Marx (and has influenced a few later Marxists), but, as historian Zeev Sternell argues, of the three most prominent socialist thinkers in France at the turn of the century—Paul Lafargue, Jean Jaurès, and Sorel—it was only the last who “broke with Marxism and, after delving into [Karl] Marx and [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon, [Friedrich] Nietzsche and [Henri] Bergson, moved toward various forms of national socialism”—essentially proto-fascism. But Thornton makes no real effort to connect the term “Marxist” to his flawed understanding of “political syndicalism” beyond saying that Marxists (and anarchists and fascists) all apparently utilize it. As Carson further comments, “There is a syndicalist branch of Marxism, but Marx himself never really got that specific about the organizational model of industry, aside from references to the ‘associated producers’ and such.” And I strongly suspect that Thornton’s use of the term “Marxist” is not in reference to this strain of thought but more so as the almost meaningless buzzword tossed around by right-wingers in an attempt to villainize genuinely liberatory movements—Marxist or otherwise. 

Admittedly, Thornton does refer to “The Other Type of Syndicalism” as “the better-known syndicalism as a social system, which is an alternative to socialist central planning.” And he follows the traditional Misesian analysis of syndicalism which concludes that with its implementation “production plummets and prices become unhinged from market prices. The ‘economy’ would collapse if syndicalism were attempted on an economywide basis.” Carson responds to this by pointing out that “[a]s for Mises’ commentary on what he called ‘Syndicalism,’ he actually conflates a market in producer goods with a market in firm equity — something he did more than once in his career — so his opinion on the subject is basically worthless.” But this is not even fundamentally a discussion about the economics of capitalism versus syndicalism, but much more about the tossing around of terms like “Marxist” and “syndicalist” with little to no regard to their predominant meaning, tying them to a violent and fairly niche historical thinker like Sorel, and using those two strategies to villainize protests against police brutality occurring now in the United States. It is lazy and disingenuous. 

And what is Thornton’s solution to this “Marxist ‘syndicalism’” you ask? Well, he describes what he calls an “individualist option” whereby… 

[p]eople are arming themselves in various ways. They are using various security devices like cameras and stronger locks. Businesses are hiring security firms and protecting storefront windows. Others are simply moving from cities to the suburbs and beyond. Don’t expect government to solve the problem, although more secessionism and decentralization would surely help. 

Though he mentions a few things that are appealing—pretty much just an armed population and decentralization—what this sounds like is simply class war by owners against non-owners. It is the drawing of even more arbitrary lines and barriers, the protection of the interests of the elite over-and-above all others, and the creation of a society more and more ingrained with mistrust instead of care and mutuality.

But here’s a dash of kindness for the sake of my anonymous friend’s rule. I hope Dr. Thornton is doing well in these strange and unhinged times. I genuinely do. But I also hope he takes this time to actually look at the plight of those who are protesting and at least attempt to understand their pain. I also hope he genuinely and thoroughly reads about both Marxism and syndicalism, not just by means of the strawmen presented by right-wing thinkers like Ludwig von Mises, but by those who actually profess those ideologies. Lastly, in refusal to create more divisions in such a divided world, I extend my hand in the name of care and mutuality to Dr. Thornton and would love to hear maybe a public response to this piece or perhaps to even have a civil dialogue privately.

*Note: The author has chosen to replace the term “BIPOC people” with “Black people” in order to emphasize the particular anti-Blackness of the police violence described. Amended 11/18/21.

Di Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Originale pubblicato il 2 settembre 2020 con il titolo Mask or No Mask: This Should Not Be the Question. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Con una pandemia in corso, l’ultima cosa da mettere in discussione sono le protezioni. Quando gran parte degli esperti medici raccomandano l’uso della mascherina per rallentare la diffusione dell’infezione, l’ultima cosa da fare è protestare contro l’uso della mascherina. Contemporaneamente, però, vediamo proteste di massa contro la violenza della polizia, richieste di taglio dei fondi, anche l’abolizione, e allora ci chiediamo: dobbiamo dare alla polizia il compito di far rispettare l’uso della mascherina? Lo stato è la soluzione migliore?

No, come sempre. Già vediamo come le leggi e la forza vengono applicate in modo sproporzionatamente diverso con le persone di colore. Data l’iniquità dei profiling razziali, vediamo persone nere o ispaniche perseguitate per via della mascherina, soprattutto quelle di fattura casalinga, bandane, sciarpe e alternative improvvisate usate da chi non possiede le apposite mascherine chirurgiche. In un Wallmart dell’Illinois due persone di colore sono state inseguite da un agente di polizia, costrette ad uscire scortate dal poliziotto con la pistola in pugno perché indossavano la mascherina. E non una mascherina improvvisata, ma una chirurgica. Ecco quindi che molte persone di colore o ispaniche si chiedono che sicurezza c’è ad indossare la mascherina visto il rischio di subire violenze razziali, e devono soppesare questo rischio con il rischio di restare infettati. Si aggiunge problema al problema, dato che le persone di colore e gli ispanici hanno molte più probabilità di morire a causa del virus a causa del più alto tasso di povertà, alloggi sovraffollati, alto tasso di incarcerazione e mancanza di adeguate risorse e/o assistenza medica.

Ma neanche rinunciare alla mascherina apparentemente serve ad evitare persecuzioni. In certi video si vede la polizia, spesso senza mascherina, che più e più volte fanno violenza contro neri e ispanici perché privi di mascherina. Sbagli se fai e sbagli se non fai, dunque, e questo dimostra ancora una volta che il rispetto dell’uso della mascherina non dovrebbe essere affidato alla polizia. Il problema è tale che anche la candidata alla vicepresidenza, l’ex procuratore generale Kamala Harris, se n’è accorta e ha scritto una lettera aperta assieme al senatore Cory Booker per denunciare il problema; senza, ovviamente, far nulla per risolverlo.

La polizia è arrivata a sequestrare mascherine che attivisti neri avevano in programma di distribuire in alcune delle loro comunità, rendendo così più difficile il rispetto della legge e unendo al rischio medico quello legale.

L’attenzione è stata così forte che l’Ohio ha cercato di approvare una legge che esenta specificamente chi non è bianco dall’obbligo della mascherina, causando la reazione di chi ha visto nell’esenzione su base razziale una forma di razzismo. La proposta è stata pertanto ritirata.

Non parliamo poi del movimento dei cosiddetti “sceriffi costituzionali” che si rifiutano di far osservare le leggi in vigore, rendendo così le leggi dello stato ancora meno efficaci.

Ma qual’è l’alternativa? L’obbligo della mascherina negli spazi pubblici richiede le leggi dello stato? No. Il fatto è che gran parte dei luoghi che si frequentano sono proprietà privata. Il luogo di lavoro, il supermercato, la palestra, i ristoranti, i ritrovi… tutti proprietà privata. Questo significa che possono imporsi le regole senza bisogno dello stato.

Molte attività rispondono alla pandemia mettendo in atto misure profilattiche, come gli schermi di plexiglas alla cassa, disinfettanti e lavabi per lavare le mani, contenitori usa e getta per evitare contaminazioni, controllo della temperatura, percorsi obbligati, distanze minime e, sì, anche le mascherine obbligatorie. Alcune sono misure di facciata, altre sono veramente efficaci, anche se marginalmente. I dipendenti devono seguire le norme se non vogliono perdere il lavoro. I clienti idem se vogliono essere serviti e se non vogliono essere mandati fuori. Ma cosa succede con quelle attività che si rifiutano di attuare queste misure?

È qui spunta nuovamente l’idea di affidare la cosa allo stato. Se le attività non se la vedono da sé, bisogna obbligarle ricorrendo alla legge. Sbagliato. Perché esistono modi per fare pressione che possono essere sfruttati a fini sanitari. Se i clienti protestano, boicottano, scrivono lettere ai giornali, rendono nota la cosa, fanno pressione sui social o fanno chiasso altrimenti, allora vediamo come molte attività rispondono.

I dipendenti a rischio possono organizzarsi. Gli sforzi dei sindacati si sono già intensificati in risposta a quei lavoratori costretti a lavorare in condizioni rischiose e con precauzioni inadatte. Dobbiamo incoraggiare questi lavoratori e esprimere la nostra solidarietà. Dobbiamo appoggiarli seguendo il loro esempio, dimostrando ai datori di lavoro che i clienti stanno con i loro dipendenti, organizzando campagne informative, picchetti, e boicottaggi contro chi ancora si rifiuta.

E per quei luoghi pubblici che sono sotto il controllo dello stato, come i tribunali e le scuole pubbliche? Sì, l’obbligo della mascherina ha ancora un senso in quei luoghi in cui lo stato fa e impone le regole, ma non è detto che queste regole siano sempre imposte adeguatamente, o secondo criteri di giustizia, o che vengano imposte affatto, come nel caso di quella studentessa della Georgia sospesa per aver pubblicato su Instagram una foto in cui è ritratta in aula con un gruppo di studenti senza mascherina.

La cosa ha scatenato la solidarietà verso la ragazza e un rientro d’immagine negativo per la scuola, la sospensione è stata ritirata e la scuola ora dovrebbe imporre misure migliori. Ma il fatto che le scuole pubbliche restino aperte durante una pandemia mentre esiste l’alternativa della scuola online è un’altra ragione per diffidare dello stato. Molto meglio rinunciare alla scuola pubblica e evitare la proprietà statale quando possibile. Fortunatamente, sono sempre più le persone che optano per alternative scolastiche più sicure.

Certo, il mercato è tutt’altro che perfetto, e ci sono aziende che hanno ritirato l’obbligo della mascherina davanti alle reazioni della clientela, ma è molto più facile inscenare un casino contro un’attività privata e costringerla a cedere che non affidarsi alla polizia per obbligarla a mettersi in regola e far rispettare le regole in una maniera che somigli anche solo minimamente ad una vera giustizia. Dunque, state a case e rispettate il distanziamento il più possibile, indossate una mascherina in pubblico, lavatevi le mani, sostenete i rappresentanti dei lavoratori e fate acquisti nei negozi che impongono la mascherina; e allo stesso tempo combattete contro l’imposizione di stato della mascherina e sostenete il definanziamento della polizia.

It’s common for right-libertarians to attack — with some justification — the stupidity of those who equate opposing a law or government agency with opposing some value or goal in its name. Wanting to abolish the Department of Education, for example, doesn’t mean you’re against education. But right libertarians are guilty of a somewhat related fallacy themselves, as we will see shortly.

Another, similar fallacy, of which pro-capitalist apologists are disproportionately guilty, is exemplified by the social media retort “anti-capitalists with iPhones LOL.” Matt Bors mocked this fallacy with the widely circulated cartoon in which a peasant says “We should improve society somewhat” — to which a right-wing troll in a well replies “Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent.”

Implicit in the troll’s reply is the assumption that if we will the range of benefits which are currently available, we necessarily also will the current institutional arrangements by which they are delivered. But this argument would rule out any critique of social structures or institutions in any society, since the only way to receive benefits in any society is through the social mechanisms which deliver them. A defender of the Soviet planned economy might have challenged a free market advocate in identical terms: “And yet you live in a house, wear clothes, have furniture and appliances, etc., all of which were produced in state factories responsible to the industrial ministries, in accordance with a Five-Year Plan. Curious!”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, in two articles at Reason a few days apart, demonstrates both fallacies in spades. In “Democrats Hate Facebook. Republicans Want To Ban TikTok. The Bipartisan Backlash Against Big Tech Is Here and It’s a Disaster” (August 13), she writes:

Ordinary people have begun to treat the internet, and the opportunities it has created, as a nuisance. Even as their products have transformed nearly every aspect of everyday life, large tech companies have been subject to increasingly negative public perception and attendant political attacks.

She contrasts this mood to a brief period in the spring when Americans appeared to appreciate what the industry had done for them.

…as the U.S. shut down and stayed home in response to the coronavirus, it looked like American tech companies might be making a reputational comeback. With everyone trapped at home and indoors, Big Tech provided a lifeline, connecting Americans to food, entertainment, work, and each other. But America’s temporary truce with Big Tech wasn’t to last. Nearly five months into the pandemic, it appears any newfound goodwill earned by Silicon Valley has already been burned.

“There was a small window of time where everyone was grateful that technology was allowing us to continue to function as a society despite our inability to gather in physical spaces,” Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman tells Reason. “And yet that gratitude wore off so quickly. Everyone just went right back to hating on internet companies and forgetting all the great things we’re benefiting from today.”…

…Even as Big Tech has benefited ordinary people in countless ways, political backlash to the size and power of America’s largest technology companies — what some insiders call “techlash” — is coming stronger than ever….

 Think about all the ways digital tools and tech companies have ensured access to up-to-date and diverse information during the pandemic. Think about all the online streaming services, interactive video games, e-book purveyors, podcast makers, and apps that have been keeping us entertained. The many kinds of free chat services letting us keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. The online educational tools helping to make homeschooling at least somewhat tenable. All the crowdfunding donation platforms, people-powered marketplaces like Etsy and eBay, and gig economy apps from Uber to Patreon that are helping people make ends meet.

It’s fair to say this is far from ideal. But without today’s technology, it would be so much worse….

Think about how much of [the pushback against law enforcement abuses] would still have happened without not just smartphones and digital video but also quick, accessible, and gatekeeper-free ways to share and spread that video.

Notice how, over and over, both she and Eric Goldman treat one group of things — “the internet, and the opportunities it has created,” “a lifeline, connecting Americans to food, etc.,” “technology,” “streaming video, video games, etc.,” “smartphones and digital video,” “today’s technology” — as interchangeable with a different group of things — “large tech companies,” “Big Tech,” “Silicon Valley,” “internet companies,” and “America’s largest technology companies.” 

It’s a slick maneuver, if you don’t pay attention. But they’re not interchangeable, any more than housing, clothing, and appliances were interchangeable with state industry in the USSR. Any number of different institutional arrangements are feasible ways of delivering the same basic technical functions. And in every class society, some particular set of institutional arrangements is selected for. The choice of arrangements reflects the interests of the dominant class. As Paul Goodman wrote, “A system destroys its competitors by preempting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.”

The fact that the goods and services we consume come from the particular set of institutional arrangements selected by our power structure — and where else could they come from? — does not legitimize those arrangements. 

In “Anti-Tech Warriors Are Coming For Your Food Delivery Apps” (August 17) Brown applies the same line of argument to food delivery apps.

Tons of consumers and businesses across the U.S. use and enjoy food delivery apps. They allow individuals to patronize restaurants that might not otherwise offer delivery services; they allow businesses to expand their audience; they provide flexible gig work for delivery drivers….

Unsurprisingly, entrenched food businesses with established audiences tend not to like delivery apps. They don’t like giving app companies a cut of their profits, and they don’t like giving customers new options for places to eat. They’re competition. And they’ve been gaining use since the pandemic started, with people stuck at home and restaurants often closed for in-person dining.

The people who want to quash food delivery apps don’t say that, of course. They say apps are “exploiting restaurants, workers, and consumers” and taking “money out of the local economy.”

But their “Protect Our Restaurants” campaign is basically cronyist lobbying, asking the government to intervene so a favored class of businesses can make more money without improving services. We’ve seen similar crusades from newspapers, hotels, and other industries whose old business models have been undercut by the internet….

…Their solutions usually revolve around greater government regulation.

Throughout this passage, all the positive and liberatory language — the benefits that the apps “allow,” “provide,” etc. — is ascribed to the all-beneficent apps. And all the negative phrases — “entrenched food businesses,” “don’t like” (repeatedly), “quash,” “cronyist lobbying,” “favored class of businesses,” “old business models” — are attributed, on the other hand, to their opponents. If you feel like you’ve been played like a fiddle, I don’t blame you. 

Her framing of the regulatory debate is similarly one-sided. It is consistently the apps that offer “freedom” and “choice,” and the bad guys — the “entrenched food businesses” that hate “competition” — who call for more regulation.

But let’s get a few things straight. First of all, the profit model of those apps — which, Brown never once mentions, are all proprietary walled-gardens owned by corporations — depends entirely on intellectual property monopolies. And somewhat inconveniently for Brown’s little morality play, intellectual property is a government regulation that suppresses competition.

And despite all that liberatory rhetoric — “allow,” “provide,” “disruption,” “choice,” “flexible” — the same hand that has the power to loosen also has the power to bind. Food delivery, taxi, and other apps’ monopoly control over proprietary platforms enables them to unilaterally set the fees which they charge restaurants, drivers, or customers. Food delivery apps are notorious for gouging restaurants and stealing tips from drivers, as are “ride-sharing” apps for reducing driver pay. No doubt Brown would say the market limits their power to do this because customers, drivers, or restaurants can decide it’s not worth the cost; but the power to set prices at profit-maximizing levels based on utility to the consumer, and set the price at the level where it’s just barely worth the cost to the majority of people, is the definition of monopoly pricing.

And the pretense that workers are “independent contractors” is thin enough to read a newspaper through. As Cory Doctorow comments in the case of Amazon Flex, it’s

a “gig economy” delivery system that maintains the pretence that drivers are independent contractors, even as their motions are scripted to a fine degree by an app whose control over them exceeds that of any boss in history.

As with all gig economy work, the “independent contractor” wheeze is just a ruse to shift the risks and costs of being an employer onto the workforce, without any of the independence that real freelancers enjoy.

Amazon Flex drivers are a “chickenized” workforce, whose pay is determined by a black-box algorithm tuned to keep them on the brink of financial ruin (which is why Flex drivers have started HIDING THEIR PHONES IN TREES):

To put it bluntly, if a corporation owns the app you “contract” your labor to, and has the power to unilaterally set your pay or fire you, it’s your employer. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is a god damned shill.

Despite Brown’s manipulative framing of “cronyist” “incumbents” vs. “disruptors,” the fact is that the new proprietary apps — what genuine sharing economy advocates call “Death Star platforms” — themselves need to be disrupted. Their IP-based monopolies are every bit as much a form of government-enforced protectionism as any cab medallion system ever dreamed of being.

Treating the benefits we receive from technology as reason to be grateful to tech companies is comparable to saying that because medieval peasants needed land to grow food and benefited from access to land, they should be grateful to feudal landlords. You can almost see Brown popping out of a well and snarking, “And yet you use the products of tech companies. Curious!”

Consumers have to pay tribute to Big Tech to get the benefits of technology for the same reason peasants had to deal with landlords to access the benefits of land: tech companies possess a legal monopoly which allows them to control access to the benefits of technology, thanks to artificial property rights granted by the state. Tech companies don’t need to be reined in by “government regulation,” any more than did feudal landlords. The basis of their power is government regulation.

We can break their power, then, by either repealing or evading the intellectual property laws — government regulations — that are the basis of that power. One way to do this is through what Doctorow calls “adversarial interoperability.” Simply put, adversarial interoperability means removing intellectual property protections from proprietary apps’ codes and protocols, and business secret protections for source code, along with all other legal barriers to open-source apps plugging into them without permission. 

One exciting possibility is to create an absolute legal defence for companies that make “interoperable” products that plug into the dominant companies’ offerings, from third-party printer ink to unauthorised Facebook readers that slurp up all the messages waiting for you there and filter them to your specifications, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. This interoperability defence would have to shield digital toolsmiths from all manner of claims: tortious interference, bypassing copyright locks, patent infringement and, of course, violating terms of service.

In the case of unaccountable social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, that would mean allowing any open-source, user-governed instance to piggyback on the Twitter and/or Facebook platform, import contact lists, and make cross-platform posts, without any need for permission from Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg. 

Facebook alternatives like Diaspora could use their users’ logins and passwords to fetch the Facebook messages the service had queued up for them and allow those users to reply to them from Diaspora, without being spied on by Facebook. Mastodon users could read and post to Twitter without touching Twitter’s servers. Hundreds or thousands of services could spring up that allowed users different options to block harassment and bubble up interesting contributions from other users — both those on the incumbent social media services, and the users of these new upstarts.

So instead of disgruntled folks having to go to a Mastodon instance in a Fediverse with less than 1% as many users as Twitter, they could effectively turn Twitter itself into an open platform like the Fediverse, and retain all the network effects of access to Twitter’s user base.

Facebook’s advantage is in “network effects”: the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it (because more users increase the likelihood that the person you’re looking for is on Facebook). But adversarial interoperability could allow new market entrants to arrogate those network effects to themselves, by allowing their users to remain in contact with Facebook friends even after they’ve left Facebook.

In the specific case of what are falsely called “ride-sharing” apps, Doctorow explains how adversarial interoperability would facilitate genuine ride-sharing, for real:

But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.

Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.

That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.

This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. One fare at a time, we could cannibalize Lyft and Uber into the poorhouse.

The billions they’ve spent to establish “first-mover advantages” wouldn’t be unscalable stone walls around their business: they’d be immovable stone weights around their necks. Lyft and Uber would have multi-billion-dollar capital overhangs that their investors would expect to recoup, while the co-ops that nimbly leapt over Uber and Lyft would not have any such burden.

Could we do this?

Yes. Technically, this isn’t all that challenging. Create a service where drivers and passengers’ devices all register unique, per-ride codes, have the Meta-Uber check to see if the driver’s device has just posted a unique code that matches yours, and then use the built-in ride-cancelation tool that’s already incorporated into Uber and Lyft to tear down the old reservation and re-create it with Meta-Uber….

There are a hundred other Metas we can imagine: a Meta-Amazon that places your order with the nearest indy bookstore instead; a Meta-OpenTable that redirects your booking to a co-op booking tool.

Every single one of these co-ops would disrupt a digital monopolist who came to power preaching the gospel of disruption [i.e. the digital monopolists Brown and others at Reason devote so much interest to defending — K.C.]. Every single one of those digital monopolists would switch to the aggrieved bleats of a bewildered incumbent apex predator snarling and twisted impotently as its flesh was rent by a thousand tiny bites from swarms of fast-moving, highly evolved successors.

The real barrier isn’t technical; it’s legal, as he goes on to describe:

Tech law is a minefield of overly broad, superannuated rules that have been systematically distorted by companies that used “disruption” to batter their way into old industries, but now use these laws to shield themselves from any pressure from upstarts to seek to disrupt them.

First is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act…. CFAA is nominally an anti-computer-intrusion statute, which criminalizes “exceeding your authorization” on a computer that doesn’t belong to you. Even when it passed, more than 40 years ago, technologically clued-in scholars and practicioners [sic] warned that this was way too broadly defined, and that someday we might see this rule used to felonize normal activities involving computers we owned, because the computers would have to talk to a server to accomplish part of their work, and the server’s owner could use onerous “user agreements” and “terms of service” to define our authorization. If this became widespread, then these licenses could take on the force of criminal law, and violating them could become a jailable offense.

40 years later, those fears are vindicated: CFAA is used to threaten, intimidate, sue, and even jail people engaged in otherwise perfectly lawful activity, merely because they have violated some term of service on the way. The metastasis of terms of service into sprawling novellas of impenetrable legalese has created a world where anything you do to frustrate the commercial ambitions of digital monopolists is a potential criminal offense.

Then there’s Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a Bill Clinton bill that creates a felony for “bypassing an effective means of access control” (AKA Digital Rights Management or DRM) for copyrighted works….

Together, the CFAA and DMCA have given digital businesses access to a shadowy legal doctrine that was never written by Congress but is nevertheless routinely enforced by the courts: Felony Contempt of Business-Model.

The CFAA and DMCA 1201 have been carefully distorted into defensive, anti-disruption shields that are only available to digital businesses. Taxi medallion owners can’t use the CFAA and DMCA 1201 to keep Uber and Lyft out of their cities.

But Uber and Lyft could use these legal tools to keep Meta-Uber out of their bottom lines. Uber and Lyft have lengthy terms-of-service that set out the rules under which you are authorized to communicate with Uber and Lyft’s servers. These terms of service prohibit using their servers to locate drivers for any purpose other than booking a ride. They certainly don’t permit you to locate a driver and then cancel the booking and re-book with a co-op app.

And Uber and Lyft’s apps are encrypted on your phone, so to reverse-engineer them, you’d have to decrypt them (probably by capturing an image of their decrypted code while it was running in a virtual phone simulated on a desktop computer). Decrypting an app without permission is “bypassing an effective means of access control” for a copyrighted work (the app is made up of copyrighted code).

Uber and Lyft can use DMCA 1201 to stop you from figuring out how to use them to locate co-op drivers, and they can use the CFAA to stop you from flipping your booking from Uber to Meta-Uber.

And these same legal barriers — again, protectionist government regulations — are at the heart of proprietary apps’ business model, not just for “ride-sharing” but in general. 

So, to sum up, virtually every single component of Brown’s manipulative David vs. Goliath framing is false. Big Tech is entrenched and cronyist, and uses government regulations to suppress disruption. Restaurants, drivers, customers, and other users of Death Star platforms of all kinds need to expropriate their intellectual property, break their monopolies, and tell their defenders to go to hell.

In “The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism,” Aurora Apolito writes:

I don’t believe that markets can be “liberated” from capitalism, nor that they can do anything good anyway, regardless of their liberated status. In essence, this is because I view the market mechanism as running on a steepest descent towards a cost/energy minimum, in an attempt to maximize profit, which inevitably singles out the least valuable options, while wiping out anything that is of any value (but is not profit-making) along the process.

And elsewhere:

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 costed major social upheavals and difficult revolutionary actions to achieve. (We all want a Revolution, but not one that will immediately go wasted just because someone will turn on it the fast-capitalism-restoring-machine commonly known as markets!) To avoid a runaway reaction of wealth disparity accumulation, one needs to design an entirely different optimization process that does not reside in the market mechanism of profit maximization

First of all, there is no necessary connection between markets and a “profit driven maximization process” or “profit dynamics.” I argue not on the grounds merely of economics, but of history. Whether markets are a “fast-capitalism-restoring-machine” is a hypothetical; but we can see, from looking at history, that while markets have existed for thousands of years, capitalism only came about in modern times. And where it has come about, starting in Western Europe, it did not emerge as an outgrowth of markets as such. 

A society in which markets exist is not the same thing as a society in which commodity production and exchange are hegemonic, and the primary form of economic coordination. While markets have existed for thousands of years, until just a few centuries ago the overwhelming majority of production was for direct use, and took place outside the market mechanism. The incorporation of virtually all production and distribution into the cash nexus is a phenomenon imposed by early modern states, through the massive use of force.

And the triumph of the cash nexus and commodity production was itself only one among several structural changes likewise violently imposed by states, which were taken together all necessary for the rise of what we know as capitalism. Most important among these were the violent suppression of communal property rights in the land through Enclosure in the West, coupled with violent imposition of work discipline on the dispossessed peasantry, and the conquest and colonial looting of land and natural resources elsewhere in the world. In other words, capitalism was not the cause of concentrated private property ownership, but the result of it.

Historically speaking, the predominance of the cash nexus and commodity production/exchange came not through markets as such, which have existed on the margins for millennia, but were imposed by states. The concentrated ownership of the means of production, the dispossession of laboring classes from ownership in the means of production, and the wage system, did not come about — as in the hypotheticals of the anti-market Left — through a natural sorting process of winners vs. losers in the competitive market, but through massive land expropriations and totalitarian social control. And the growth of accumulated wealth in a few hands at everyone else’s expense, through the compound interest mechanism, requires artificial scarcities and artificial property rights like absentee landlordism, capitalist monopolies on the supply of credit, and intellectual property.

Second, there are plausible models for post-capitalist/non-capitalist societies that use markets for at least part of their calculation functions without inter-firm competition or profit entering the picture at all. The use of a market mechanism for allocational purposes does not at all imply an economic model centered on production by profit- or anything else-maximizing firms, or any significant level of competition between such firms. Far from it.

Although I refuse to prescribe any particular organizational template or economic model for a post-state, post-capitalist society, I’m strongly inclined to believe that the great majority of consumer goods (small appliances, food, clothing, furniture, etc.) will be produced on a largely communistic basis — i.e. for direct use, within micro-villages or other multi-family co-living units, and allocated based on something like Bookchin’s “irreducible minimum” of guaranteed subsistence to which individuals are entitled by virtue of membership in such co-living units.

I suspect, likewise, that most of the larger-scale infrastructures Apolito mentions in her discussion of scale — transportation, telecommunications, etc. — will be run as federated platforms with standing governance bodies representing the communities served by them and the peer producers or guilds that actually deliver their services. And industries that require larger scales of production — heavy producer goods, airships, trains, etc. — will likewise be projects serving federations of local communities.

The most likely role for markets will be, not to allocate production to the most efficient producer among a number of competing producers, but to allocate finite production inputs (e.g. the raw materials generated from commons-based natural resource governance bodies, and intermediate or producer goods produced by larger-scale industry) to their most efficient use among competing alternatives. A secondary use for markets might be to exchange surpluses between communities or co-living arrangements, in order to promote a more efficient division of labor between communities, based on specialization in particular crops, or skills disproportionately possessed by their members.

In other words, their primary use will be to carry out the very functions that Apolito outlines as a problem:

Even in a post-scarcity scenario, with abundant availability of renewable energy, certain materials would remain scarce, simply due to the different relative distribution of the chemical elements in the universe. Avoiding wastefulness and minimizing environmental impact would remain valuable goals. Such minimization problems are indeed well handled by techniques such as linear programming and are easily agreed upon. It is maximization goals that present the hard part of the question in our scaling problem. 

The issue is not whether forms of optimization are in themselves helpful, but rather what is being optimized. The main problem, which I will return to, is that when it comes to the distribution of services in a large-scale form of communist economy, a much higher level of informational complexity is required to design a valid system of valuations and constraints, one that does not reflect the simplistic capitalist notion of profit, but that can capture advantages that only take place on a much larger spatiotemporal scale and at much deeper complexity levels.

This is not to say that markets will be used to the exclusion of other mechanisms she discusses, such as decentralized cybernetic feedback networks. I am, as I said in my initial contribution, agnostic on the particular mix of coordination methods. 

But given initial conditions like appropriately defined property rules (i.e. permanently vesting land and natural resources in commons-based ownership, organizing bodies engaged in production or communications as stakeholder cooperatives or standing platforms with inalienable governance rights, etc.), markets are a very high-bandwidth way to convey information without any need for conscious planning — and without the danger of negatively affecting the distribution of productive assets, or distributing control over production among competing organizations. The primary incentive for optimizing efficiency, in terms of input-output ratios, will lie not in competition between productive organizations, but in the desire of producers themselves to minimize their effort while maximizing standard of living.

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.

Em uma coluna anterior, Examinei a maneira como aqueles que elogiam Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos e sua turma por seu “gênio criativo” ou “criação de valor” estão perdendo o crédito. Todos os componentes dos projetos da Tesla e do modelo de compras e logística online da Amazon já existiam. O conceito de “visão geral” de como combiná-los, longe de ser uma visão única em um século reservada a grandes cérebros empreendedores como Musk e Bezos, era bastante óbvio. Era o mesmo nível de “gênio” que ocorre todo fim de semana em milhares de sessões de besteira em dormitórios universitários alimentados com maconha, e que o próprio Musk exibe virtualmente todas as vezes que aparece em um podcast. E o trabalho real – colocá-los juntos e otimizá-los – veio inteiramente dos trabalhadores, fossem eles engenheiros das equipes de desenvolvimento ou trabalhadores da produção no chão da fábrica.

A única função de Bezos e Musk era fornecer financiamento, porque eles tinham o dinheiro. E o fato de que as equipes que realmente fizeram o trabalho estavam em posição de contar com ricos capitalistas arriscados para o capital inicial, e que estes últimos estavam na posse desse capital em primeiro lugar, era uma função da história e da estrutura falha do sistema.

Meu foco principal na coluna anterior foi sobre a natureza daqueles problemas estruturais – particularmente o sistema de crédito capitalista – que impedem os trabalhadores da engenharia e da produção de organizar e financiar seus próprios esforços inovadores. Não pretendo repetir isso aqui.

Mas em minha discussão sobre a disponibilidade de todos os pré-requisitos para as inovações atribuídas a Musk e Bezos, e a obviedade de colocá-los juntos de acordo com um determinado padrão, deixei de notar como essa generalização é historicamente confirmada pelo conceito de “tempo de máquina a vapor”. A maioria das inovações importantes é produto do intelecto social. Isso se reflete no fato de que, quando todos os pré-requisitos técnicos ou componentes existem em nosso kit de ferramentas coletivo, e a necessidade de uma inovação se demonstra, essa inovação aparece simultaneamente em vários lugares diferentes.

O exemplo óbvio é (ironicamente) Tesla vs. Edison. Mas olhe para o cálculo. Os gregos e árabes desenvolveram a trigonometria e os árabes desenvolveram a álgebra. E então a humanidade chegou ao ponto em que uma ferramenta matemática era necessária para lidar com coisas como trajetórias de artilharia de mecânica orbital e coisas do gênero, e o que aconteceu? Newton e Leibniz desenvolveram o cálculo independentemente.

A maior parte da inovação está combinando criativamente componentes da prateleira já criados pelo intelecto social, em resposta a problemas que qualquer número de pessoas percebe quando surgem. E quando o problema, oportunidade ou necessidade não atendida se mostra, qualquer número de inovadores individuais, ou equipes de inovadores, começam a pegar esses componentes da prateleira e colocá-los juntos.

A inovação é coletiva da mesma forma que a Wikipedia, ou e Software Livre e Aberto, é coletivo. É o produto de um processo estigmérgico e sem permissão que agrega muitas contribuições grandes ou pequenas em um design geral – um produto social que é maior do que a soma de suas partes e não pode ser atribuído a nenhuma delas.

Pessoas como Elon Musk e Jeff Bezos têm fortunas na casa das dezenas de bilhões de dólares e estão a caminho de dobrar essas fortunas desde o início da pandemia da COVID-19, apesar de o resto de nós vivermos em uma depressão, não por causa de qualquer intelecto especial, percepção ou originalidade de sua parte. Essa percepção, embora não seja universal, é bastante comum. Eles fizeram fortunas enormes porque detêm o monopólio de uma função necessária para colocar em prática os insights e as visões: capital de risco ou crédito. E uma vez que as inovações são realmente desenvolvidas, eles contam com outro monopólio – propriedade intelectual – para extrair mais receitas delas.

A riqueza agregada dos bilionários chega a milhares de dólares para cada ser humano. E é a riqueza que eles extraíram ao erguer um pedágio que impede e cobra tributo por essa função básica de pegar componentes das prateleiras que foram criados por nosso intelecto coletivo e social e colocá-los juntos de novas maneiras de acordo com os insights produzidos pelo intelecto coletivo. Por causa dessa barreira de pedágio, as inovações criadas pelo intelecto social, em vez de enriquecer todos nós com maior qualidade de vida e redução do trabalho, tornam-se artificialmente escassas e caras para todos nós. E o custo extra que pagamos vai para o bolso deles.

Eles são rentistas, que exploram seu monopólio na função de capital de risco alimentando-se do insight e do intelecto dos reais criadores de valor e da necessidade dos consumidores. E eles foram colocados em uma posição para fazer isso por um sistema que foi criado para tornar pessoas como eles ricas às custas do restante de nós.

Vamos destruir esse sistema.

In case it wasn’t already implied by the title, I’m arguably a follower of the “transgender ideology.” I prefer the term “non- binary” instead of “trans,” but I’m part of the community and I do adhere to the “ideology” of validating peoples’ gender identities by using their preferred pronouns. Much like a fair number of queer people I know, I don’t support government intervention — even if it’s “on my behalf.” I see the state as an oppressor, not an ally. Despite all of this, reactionaries will call people like me a “collectivist.” 

This is only one among many gaping inconsistencies in right-wing thought, but it’s one in which I find particular value, due in no small part to the fact that it directly threatens me. It’s also one of the best examples of why reactionary “individualism” is so deeply contradictory. On the face of it, there is no way to argue in good faith that being trans or gender non-conforming is a threat to individual autonomy. How someone chooses to present, what they put in their bodies, and what pronouns they prefer doesn’t affect your ability to be a free person. If you disregard pronoun preferences and deliberately misgender people, you might get kicked out of certain spaces that don’t condone that behavior, and if you actively seek out those spaces with the intention of provoking people, you can reasonably expect resistance. 

Instead of changing their minds after engaging in rational self-critique, reactionaries constantly repeat that queer identity politics is “collectivist,” framing the “transgender ideology” as a threat to science, pronoun preferences as a threat to freedom of speech, and safe spaces as a threat to free thought. Most infuriating among the list of talking points is the insistence that gender non-conformity is illegitimate, vaguely alluding to “biological sex” as their primary defense. It is anti-individualist, apparently, to support people who don’t fit traditional gender roles, actively defend people from targeted attacks through the use of safe spaces, and oppose cops arresting us for using the wrong bathrooms. To top it off, one of the most anti-individualist constructs ever conceived, binary gender, must be accepted without a hint of skepticism. 

It is utterly impossible to argue in good faith that a two-gender model is compatible with individualism. It is categorically anti-individualist to claim that all human beings can be classified into one of two roles within a society, even if you restrict your framing to a single culture. A core foundation of any legitimate individualist perspective is that every human being is unique to the extent that static labels can never describe a person to a sufficient extent, hence the opposition to “collectivist” attempts to put people into boxes that will never fit them. 

Queerness is fundamentally a declaration of uniqueness. Who we’re attracted to, how we want to present, what we do with our bodies, and many other aspects of our identities are defined on our own terms, subject to no one’s input but our own. It’s tragic to see people waving the banner of “individualism” as they actively stomp out people who don’t conform to arbitrary standards and fixed ideas, tying themselves into rhetorical knots painting us as the real collectivists.

When people talk about the post-9/11 world in terms of politics, most think of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, unwarranted wiretapping, and forever wars but rarely is ICE mentioned in the same breath despite Immigration and Customs Enforcement being a direct result of the post–9/11 policy of the so-called american government.

ICE was established under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 in response to 9/11, combining the criminal investigative and intelligence resources of the United States Customs Service, the criminal investigative, detention, and deportation resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and briefly the Federal Protective Service, which later became part of the National Protection and Programs Directorate in 2009. From 2003 to 2005, ICE also included the Federal Air Marshals Service which was part of the TSA before and since. ICE is the largest investigative arm of the DHS and the second largest contributor to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

In our current political climate, ICE has become a hot button issue. With Trump’s constant barrage of anti-immigrant rhetoric, people have started paying more attention to the practices of ICE, including the separation of children from their families and their literal detention camps with horrendous conditions that leave many traumatized and others dead. At times ICE has even been suspected by some of sex trafficking. I have personally known people whose immigration papers were torn to shreds in front of their faces by ICE agents during raids on their workplaces. It seems that even coming here through the legal channels doesn’t make one safe from ICE’s grasp.

And the call for the abolition of ICE has grown so strong that it has reached the halls of congress, with politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Justin Amash supporting ICE’s abolition. The Defund ICE movement has seen growing support from the public with people boycotting companies such as Amazon who contract with ICE (on that note, buy our books from our own C4SS store, NOT from Amazon).

Some seem unable to envision a world without ICE and become weary of such calls but many of those same people seem unaware of how young ICE really is and why it was actually formed. Reminding people that ICE is post-9/11 War on Terror policy places the battle firmly beside the fight against the PATRIOT Act, the TSA, and endless warfare. It is all a part of the same machine. As Reason and others have pointed out, abolishing ICE is only the first step. We also need to abolish the entire Department of Homeland Security along with it. So let’s honor those killed in the 9/11 attacks by not giving into terroristic threats and trading liberty for the false sense of security. Let’s reclaim our freedoms and abolish ICE.

I must confess no small horror on reading M Black’s contribution to this Mutual Exchange. A self-professed anarchist, defending centralization? I would normally let such arguments fall on their face alone, but if we are to platform them in this exchange I feel a moral obligation to reiterate basic reality. My response will be divided into two parts. I will first respond to M Black’s abrogation of basic anarchism in his acceptance of centralized democracy. Then I will respond to the specific claims as to the comparable inefficiencies of markets.

M Black rushes past the threat of “abuses of power” to admit some inefficiencies of central planners, but he immediately replicates Marx’s critique of the “anarchy of production”:

In a decentralized scheme, there may be no actual coordination whatsoever, and the movement and development of the organization could be thought of as complexity generated by the interactions of the organization’s subunits rather than conscious coordination, i.e. mutual readjustment of plans, as such. This is especially true in a context where there is no basis for cooperation, such as in a commercial market. 

It’s this overall “conscious coordination” that M Black wants, because “the competitive structure of markets necessarily inhibits cooperation and therefore also inhibits effective coordination toward common goals.” One imagines a harmonious meeting of the minds that just cranks some numbers and solves all the problems.

But let us pause for a minute and first rewind to the issue of “abuse of power.” One would think that any anarchist worth their salt would recognize that power itself is abuse; to control another person, to dominate and suppress their agency to the point where you can make decisions on their behalf, inherently violates the core of anarchist morality. While it is true in this world we are forced to navigate complex and repugnant contexts, sometimes accepting temporary tradeoffs, relationships of power are never positive or neutral, they are the very “archy” that we set our souls against.

There is a direct and inescapable sense in which social structures of representation violate anarchist values. Someone else — some committee or spokescouncil — making decisions on your behalf is itself objectionable. It takes agency out of your hands.

In his push for “conscious coordination” Black is trying to get towards overall clarity and predictability — an orderly plan — but there is a very real sense in which freedom is not and can never be highly predictable. We cannot predict developments in science or art — innovation never emerges from the boardroom but from the brain of an individual. Even the most incremental and cooperative innovation first requires the speedy leaps possible in a neural net, not the slow miasma of consensus discussion. And the creation of the new, by definition, on some level cannot be predicted or managed.

To desire a world of creativity inherently means a world of limited predictability. When everyone can generate at least one idea that changes everything the result is chaotic.

Anarchy is precisely about ceding control, letting the fountainheads of creativity that are individuals flourish and dance in wild ways no one can plan or manage.

Relationships of power are negative-sum in agency, the person deciding on the other person’s behalf may gain some broader choice, some influence upon the world, but the individual they deprive loses more.

However it is not just that relationships of power by definition constrain agency, positions of power incentivize further oppression.

Centralization in decision-making, representation, branding, resources, etc warps the landscape of choices, making autonomous action and development a less efficient investment towards any given ends than fighting for control over the center. At best this looks like the general assemblies of Occupy eating a hundred hours arguing about what actions should be certifiably branded “Occupy [City]”, but at worst it looks like vicious jockeying and coups that spiral out into an ever more hostile, fractious, and competitive environment. If you’ve ever been to an activist meeting of any size you thought wasn’t riven with status and position jockeying you were blissfully ignorant.

Power-seeking is a viral strategy that metastasizes into ugly dog-eat-dog or machiavellian landscapes without early intervention. Every institution or social configuration has game theoretic implications, and centralization is constantly a clusterfuck for activists because what it promotes isn’t “cooperation” but toxic, dishonest, and domineering competition over the center. For examples I need only point to virtually every activist group and non-profit on the planet. But if you need one in text from someone else, in The Utopia Of Rules David Graeber relays the anecdote of a New York activist group that, having been donated a car, found the bureaucracy and destructive incentives attendant to collective ownership of it so perverse they finally could only liberate themselves from the drama by setting the car on fire.

If you want to stop power-seeking, remove positions of power.

Like microbiota in an entropy gradient or particles around a black hole’s gravity well, monsters spring into existence wherever centralization exists. Power warps the social fabric.

Black thinks that separating domains of influence is enough to check power, and gives the following hypothetical:

Consider a regional anarchist confederation as an example. The confederation may have a central body with discretion over the publication of a collective journal chronicling member organizations’ theoretical output and practical activities. Although effectively centralized, such a structure would not be usurping control over local issues from member organizations, nor would it be dictating anything to them.

But the inevitable failure mode should be obvious to anyone with any organizing experience. The collective journal has an impact on all the member organizations, beyond loose psychological impressions of prestige attendant to control over the journal, it inherently certifies some contributions over others. Which activities and how they are represented makes admission to the central administration of such a journal a gateway to outsized influence. If the chapters have conflict with one another, managing who is on the journal could be of stark importance to how that conflict plays out. Even if the administrators of that journal are each proportionally drawn from each chapter there are all sorts of political power games immediately in play. At the center in the journal there’s who has standing and influence, who is charismatic and neurotypical, who has what connections and friendships, who is emotionally aware and sharp at manipulation games… you might want to work to ensure that representatives from other chapters fit the sensibilities and allegiances of those already overseeing the journal. If chapters are embroiled in long-term conflicts or tensions you might want to use the journal as a tool to ensure that the representatives from the other faction are less skilled in consensus and other machiavellian skills. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Even when there seem to be no stakes, five months later someone’s friend will get called out for rape and then see how the established patriarchs and old boys networks and shieldmaidens of patriarchy spring into existence to manage and massage what gets into the journal and how.

Centralized information flows may not “dictate,” but they do provide opportunities for disproportionate influence.

Anyone who denies that these games immediately and constantly break out in anarchist organizations is either an astonishingly blind rube or being openly dishonest. I bitterly wish it were otherwise, but anarchists in practice tend to fall for simplistic modes of organizing that leave in their wake a cruel mockery of our aspirations for a world without power.

Ultimately this is why anarchism must strike at organizationalism itself, because the inside-outside hierarchies or centralizations of group membership create a host of problems.

Black might respond that the nasty maneuverings and informal (or formal) hierarchies in nearly every activist group or non-profit can be prevented with the right culture and institutional “checks and balances.” But however good it starts out, a group’s culture is eventually shaped by institutional incentives, and the most efficient “checks and balances” to a central committee isn’t a laborious process document but more choices and, yes, competitors.

If the centralization of collective process drives brutal machiavellian power-jockeying it is actually the decentralization of parallel “competition” that can encourage altruism and cooperation. A popup marketplace where participants have roughly equivalent wealth will see vendors collaborating in setting up or breaking down stalls among other tasks. Because vendors are in an N-iterated game with one another — they will see one another again and again — they know that cooperation is more optimal than knifing one another for a few extra bucks, better to leave the competition purely in the jovial realm of differing products. But add a central organizing committee and the politicking emerges to gain the upperhand in seating charts and new policies.

The “archy” that anarchists set ourselves in absolute opposition to is wider than just centralization — just in terms of social network topologies it’s not enough to merely shatter power loci into “many centers,” we seek to also have a topology distributed in an egalitarian sense and both fluid and highly connected. And of course this doesn’t even begin to touch on the ethics of interpersonal relationships entailed in an-archy.

Anarcho-capitalists infamously only embraced decentralization, ignoring the vast additional dynamics that anarchism speaks to. Their movement was an obviously and laughably doomed clusterfuck as a result, often collapsing to something morally indiscernible from fascism. Black, by not even embracing that minimum, and writing apologia for centralization, kicks so far off from any recognizable anarchism there’s almost no discernible difference with Stalinism. Indeed he literally echos the most standard authoritarian communist critique of anarchism:

Our insistence as anarchists on decentralization at all costs may have us in an ant mill of our own, unable to confront growing authoritarian movements and powers, flailing from ideological fad to ideological fad, and unable to speak of any lasting victories since the heyday of anarchism in the nineteenth century workers’ movement.

This is such an obviously laughable critique that I’m quite deeply disturbed to find it leveled from a self-identified anarchist. Let me swallow down the cold horror in my belly and try to get through some anarchism 101s:

1) Centralization doesn’t beat centralized authorities, it replicates them. Centralization inherently creates a new monster to fight — a monster that through its own internal logic and the logic imposed by fighting the state in its own language becomes more like the state, even eventually functionally collaborating with the state. At the very best all that such organizing does is kick the can down the road a little bit. Why create the very thing you’re going to have to destroy. And how exactly do you think you will ever get it to self-abolish?

2) Decentralization is far more efficient at fighting centralized authorities. A central authority is forced to defend fixed territory from all points on the compass, whereas decentralized attackers only need to have one attack slip through. Centralization also creates centralized and brittle dependencies that are not sufficiently distributed to be resilient. Decentralization allows for a great breadth and depth of strategy, each individual evaluating and finding opportunities for themselves.

3) If the question is “how will we fight and win against decentralized enemies” well the immediate follow-up question is what on earth do you see us doing with a centralized organization that’s such a miracle cure? Do you think we can gulag and reeducation camp the fascists? Do you think we should go around exterminating every single person with fascist views? Donald Trump got 62 million votes. 62 million. What exactly is the thing we can do with a centralized organizational apparatus that we are not presently doing with decentralized crews and networks? And the same could be said of “capitalists” — it is no secret that the left will never have the numbers to break the backs of the petite bourgeoisie and redistribute all the wealth. Tens of millions of people will defend their wealth against popular uprisings. The only way the left might directly expropriate from them all is not with mobs but with an overwhelming state apparatus, police, prisons, black bags, etc. Beyond being a directly morally repugnant slaughter and repression of human beings (whatever their infractions), it is also completely and plainly irreconcilable with the long-term goals of a free world. The centralization necessary to ‘directly put down’ tens or hundreds of millions of adversaries would only harden into self-reinforcing tyranny. The only answer to stopping our decentralized adversaries is to make sure there are no positions of power for them to hold, undermine through distributed means any institutional/organizational centralization they attempt, and of course to autonomously defend ourselves. Evaluating and securing self-defense involves a host of particulars and local contexts that no central planner or centralized system can assist. Solidarity is critical, but having a wide pool of allies to call is not the same thing as a centralized body acting as 911 dispatch.

4) To say that anarchists haven’t had lasting victories since the fall of classical anarchism is preposterous. It was — if anything — classical anarchism in its more embarrassingly centralized modes that secured fewer lasting victories. Projects like CNT regional collectives in the Spanish Civil War were very state-like structures and all-or-nothing bets that ended up swept away and erased. Whereas when anarchists focused on contesting more decentralized cultural and technological issues in the 60s on, we saw profound and lasting impacts across the entire planet. From radical queer currents to the proliferation of cryptographic tools. Indeed the few lasting positive legacies from classical anarchism came as the result of decentralized struggles.

5) Lastly, it’s not like any other approach has had “lasting victories” by any metric anarchists care about. State socialism has been nothing but a serial parade of unmitigated disasters, murdering revolutions and churning out misery and atrocities. Occasionally these monsters might roll over on one of their slightly more reactionary allies or shit out some dreary housing blocks, but the only lasting successes the twentieth century saw have emerged out of the anarchist laboratory or from liberatory movements deeply similar in decentralized structure.

I know even suggesting that Black could see state socialism as having achieved victories worth celebrating much less envying is perhaps a line too far. I don’t mean to strawman him but to at least preemptively respond to other possible reads of his argument. Yet I will admit I do wonder.

So far I’ve been studiously trying to present Black’s defense of occasional centralization in the most generic terms, charitably assuming that he’s talking in terms of centralized projects that utilize consensus or another anarchist mode. But this steelmanning is itself a misrepresentation. Black is not talking about anarchist decision-making processes, he’s explicitly talking about democracy:

In an organization in which every member has voting rights, the centralized democratic body containing all members of the organization, making a decision in common, represents the effective merger of decentralization and centralization. What we must avoid is not centralization, but bureaucracy: the creation of a centralized decision-making power separate from the general membership whose business is to run the affairs of the organization.

Voting! Actual fucking voting! Black isn’t using an esoteric and tortured definition of “democracy” in terms of “societal openness” or “the unruly rabble,” he’s talking about voting. Even if the voting system in mind is something other than pure 51% majoritarianism, you only vote rather than use consensus when a majority of some kind seeks to rule over a minority. Such democracy clearly and self-evidently has nothing to do with an-archia. Take it away Malatesta:

It would be closer to the truth to say, ‘government of the majority of the people.’ This implies a minority that must either rebel or submit to the will of others.

As anarchists we seek not the collective rulership of all over all, but the abolition of rulership. I’ve covered this in great detail before.

Democracy is not reconcilable with anarchist values unless they are watered down to nothing but a muddled afterimage.

I know my defense of markets is a relatively strange one in the anarchist tradition and many would instinctively fear that the mere act of setting up a cart and hawking fish for sale in the town square creates similarly objectionable power dynamics to a collective voting. But I do think it’s worth really covering Black’s own level of deviation here. The implications are quite dire.

We must start by shaking out what our values are because while there can be failure modes of certain patterns of decentralized self-organization, the “solution” is often far worse.

It is trivially the case that decentralized emergent systems can go wrong, spiraling out — at various speeds — into catastrophic conclusions. But such catastrophic spiraling is always the case with centralization.

Black gives the analogy of an Ant Hill, where the complex emergent structure of an Ant Hill from individual ants following very simple instruction sets can derail into an Ant Mill where scents align so as to lock all the ants into an endless spiraling death march.

But to jump from that example to a defense of centralized democracy depends on an implicit introduction of an intelligence of far greater capacity than the individual ants — a human scale one that might plan and edict the ants into a better arrangement. The proper comparison would be how capable a single ant or an ant committee might be at designing a better Ant Hill. In our actually existing world there is no singular cohesive entity smarter than a single human being. A committee is in most ways less intelligent than every individual that makes it up because a collective discussion cannot process information at the speed of neurons firing in a single unified human brain. A democracy, taken as a collective intelligence, is a reduction in net intelligence. By forcing individuals towards a unified singular collective decision, that decision is pressed into the logjam of human-to-human communication.

Humans making autonomous evaluations and choices for themselves, freely associating insofar as the inherent limits of human-to-human communication are not a constraint, is the better path. But this cannot and does not look like centralized democracy. (And, to be extra clear about alternatives, a single tyrant, while avoiding the internal logjams in decision-making, is gonna be catastrophically disconnected from the desires and contexts of the people they rule.)

And this brings us to Black’s critique of markets specifically.

Black objects to the compressing of information involved in prices. This is a standard objection to markets, but one that rarely gets far. The price system reflects some portion of aggregate desire in relation to tradeoffs, which of course ultimately means the resolution of complex information sources into a “more” or “less” evaluation. But any system at root is going to have an energy potential that directs flows, whether in brains or economies. There is always some bare essential level of prioritization going on and the price system attempts to get at that.

Prices are hardly the only information transmitted in markets, just the baseline that other information flows ultimately try to collapse into. Markets set up incentive structures to convey not just prices and price changes but a host of other, far more contextual or particular things. Investors, speculators, local actors, etc — in a market near egalitarian distributions everyone has a stake in getting relevant information and making good predictions, and information longs to be free, so on the market any relevant information quickly gets leaked through various competitive pressures.

What’s important to note about this self-correction tendency is that it’s broadly incentivized and is allowed to take place at the individual level rather than getting bottlenecked in forced collective decisions.

It’s trivially true that a price change in isolation may not reflect the full universe of useful information to an investment, and there is even some minor latency in the propagation of price changes (although much of current latency is more of a technological artifact). What it is, however, is a concise way to aggregate relevant information and — through emergent secondary dynamics like futures markets — incentivize further aggregation of relevant and truthful information.

Black complains about speculative bubbles leading to centralized wealth, but the genesis and scale of bubbles under capitalism is primarily rooted in misallocations caused by central planners (wealthy capitalists). The centralization of investment and credit decisions into the hands of a few planners leaves them disconnected from shop-floor/etc realities. One need not look very far to see examples of absurd evaluations by venture capitalists today — clearly the product of their own insular remove. Further, because the capitalist “market” is so far from an egalitarian/competitive distribution, the pressures to return to accuracy are weaker and market corrections lag. This is worlds apart from a situation of truly distributed evaluations of investment, opportunity, and risk.

Of course there will always be unpredictable shocks and upsets in any economic system that will require restructurings in response, but centralization magnifies the catastrophe. In a non-capitalist market with far more egalitarian wealth distributions, smaller scale firms/coops, and more diverse individual income sources, there would be more fluidity and resilience in the face of necessary restructurings. Black complains that markets dislocate — severing some economic relationships and forming others — but it is precisely this dynamic that is critical to resilience.

When consumption patterns dramatically changed in the early days of COVID-19, resources went to waste because capitalist supply chains were relatively rigid and centralized, incapable of laterally shifting. Pallets of goods like toilet paper piled up in warehouses because corporate behemoths needed to restructure their entire distribution in a centralized way. Cases of warehouse employees stealing the unused or rotting products they were supposed to be responsible for and selling them in ad-hoc black market distribution channels did a better job than supposedly impressive logistics operations. When workplaces and schools are suddenly not buying toilet paper, how are centralized planners supposed to quickly map out exactly where consumers now most require them? The new answer is too complex, too messy, too distributed, and the central planners are too limited in cognition and attention.

In general Black implicitly appeals to the old myth that competition is fundamentally different than cooperation rather than often two sides of the same coin. This is unsustainable. Two children competing to see who can chop more firewood are cooperating, they cooperate in generating the competitive game itself and the contest results are themselves mutually beneficial. The same can be true for market competition. There is no deep psychological breakage between competition and cooperation, most play and human sociality involves both simultaneously. What matters is the specific incentive structures built up in a context.

Insofar as Black has a substantive case about “competition” it is just Aurora’s “secrecy” argument, which I’ve previously addressed. Will competition between, say, producers necessarily create an overall reluctance to share information?

To put it briefly, there’s first the fact that natural markets historically were more of the public ledger form (making it costly to hide that you’re purchasing X widgets from Joe or any other transaction). Second, there’s the fact that competition between firms leads to constant leaking of information from employees (a large part of why silicon valley was initially so successful). Finally, there’s almost certainly going to be a more robust reporting/etc ecosystem under anarchy. There are many many reasons to think that, but for empirical evidence even the partial and temporary stateless (not the same as anarchist) period in Somalia saw the emergence of an incredibly diverse and proactive local journalist sector. In an environment of radical openness the attempted exceptions are strongly suppressed. The only coop on the market which refuses to fully open source its recipes and make public its internal finances to competing auditors and consumer reports groups is going to look like an absolute monster.

I think the mistake that people like Black are instinctively making is taking an isolated situation of competition as emblematic of aggregate competition over multiple actors and repeated interactions. But as the anarchist Michael Taylor and many other game theorists made explicit a half century ago, in a large enough limit such tendencies can flip. While from a selfish perspective it may make sense to fuck someone else over in an isolated thought experiment, when you add more and more competing players into consideration and have any way to take into account prior behavior, then betrayals, dishonesty, violations, etc often become suppressed. Cooperation is an emergent feature when enough options are in competition. Booksellers at a bookfair are in competition for attendee dollars, sure, but they are also driven to certain detentes and collaborative agreements with one another that limits that competition to certain agreed upon domains, that checks it within certain implicit rules. While murdering another bookseller may appear in isolation as a great strategy for maximizing one’s share of the market, it alienates and mobilizes others against you, making it actually a far less optimal approach than just selling books to net social benefit. Same with dishonesty or other infractions.

This is not to say that certain catastrophic configurations can’t be stumbled into akin to an Ant Mill, but centralization is always a catastrophe, proper solutions to such problems must be built in decentralized, distributed, bottom-up ways.

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 Kevin Carson. Originale: In Memoriam: David Graeber, 1961-2020, pubblicato il 4 settembre 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

È abitudine iniziare un necrologio con una breve biografia. Eccola:

David detestava essere definito antropologo anarchico, dirò dunque che David Graeber, antropologo e anarchico, è morto a cinquantanove anni mercoledì tre settembre a Venice per cause tuttora non dichiarate.

Era attivista di Occupy Wall Street, nonché docente della London School of Economics; autore (tra le altre cose) di Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Debt: The First 5000 Years, The Democracy Project, The Utopia of Rules e Bullshit Jobs.

Lascia la moglie, la giornalista e artista Nika Dubrovsky.

In questi casi si usa aggiungere una nota personale, ma non c’è molto da dire. La nostra era una conoscenza casuale: alcune email e qualche scambio di opinioni su Twitter. A parte questo, ciò che più mi lega a lui è la sua influenza sul mio pensiero.

Debt: The First 5000 Years rappresenta il mio primo incontro con i suoi scritti. Era – o perlomeno avrebbe dovuto essere se ci avessimo prestato attenzione – l’equivalente di un candelotto di dinamite lanciato ad un incontro di libertari di destra. L’ideologia capitalista poggia su un gran numero di favole (tanto per citare Marx), storie inventate e robinsonate che servono a spacciare le origini delle caratteristiche principali del capitalismo come spontanee e naturali. Così la proprietà privata (ovvero individuale e assoluta) della terra sarebbe nata occupando pacificamente la terra, apportandovi il proprio lavoro e separandola dalla proprietà comune. Il dominio incontrastato della produzione destinata allo scambio di merci nel nesso di cassa sarebbe figlio della propensione dell’uomo al commercio, il baratto e lo scambio. Quanto al denaro, sarebbe una risposta al problema, proprio del baratto, della “doppia coincidenza dei bisogni” con l’aggiunta della comodità offerta dai metalli preziosi come merce universale. Ognuno di questi miti è stato postulato da pensatori liberali classici, agli inizi della modernità, come una sorta di “storia probabile” al fine di spiegare i fatti in assenza di dati storici concreti.

Ciò che colpisce è che nel corso dei secoli seguenti si è continuato a ripetere questi miti nonostante tutte le scoperte in ambito storico e antropologico, senza neanche cercare di correggerli o di conciliarli. E non sono solo economisti e polemisti libertari di destra a ripetere queste cose ancora oggi, ma anche buona parte degli economisti accademici. Basta prendere a caso un qualunque testo pdf tra quelli usati nei corsi propedeutici, cercare “doppia coincidenza dei bisogni” per trovare qualcosa. In Debt, Graeber va ad analizzare quei dati e dimostra come un mito in particolare (quello sull’origine del denaro e del debito), ma in buona misura anche altri miti correlati, è, detto semplicemente, puro e semplice pattume.

Il suo secondo libro che mi è capitato di leggere è The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. Qui due temi si incrociano: da un lato, la sua esperienza personale nel movimento orizzontalista Occupy, nonché la partecipazione ad altre simili forme partecipative di politica anarchica; dall’altro, l’antica tradizione della pratica di autogoverno democratico della gente comune. Rientra in quest’ultimo tema un affascinante percorso tra gli schiavi fuggitivi, le utopie dei pirati e le storie di persone che sceglievano di stare fuori dallo stato. Uno schiaffo a quei neoconservatori imbronciati che considerano la “democrazia” una sorta di fiore delicato in cima a un enorme letamaio, un fragile artefatto che compare solo nelle condizioni rarefatte di pochissime società sufficientemente avanzate, come l’Atene del quinto secolo aC, l’Inghilterra del 1688-89 e il Nord America a partire dagli anni 1760. Graeber, al contrario, spiega che…

la democrazia è vecchia come il mondo, come l’intelligenza umana. Nessuno può averne l’esclusiva. Penso che… sia nata quando gli ominidi smisero di accapigliarsi e diedero vita alle capacità comunicative per cercare di risolvere assieme un problema comune. Speculazione inutile. Il punto è che ritroviamo le assemblee democratiche ovunque e in qualunque epoca, dal seka di Bali all’ayllu della Bolivia, e con una varietà infinita di procedure formali, compaiono spontaneamente quando un gruppo numeroso di persone si siede a prendere una decisione collettiva basandosi secondo il principio che tutte le opinioni hanno lo stesso valore.

In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Graeber prende in esame la cultura burocratica delle grandi aziende, il potere dello stato e altre istituzioni centralizzate. Spiega anche come stato accentratore e aziende oligopolistiche, lungi dall’essere nemici – come vorrebbero i liberal-progressisti e i libertari di destra – sono semplicemente versioni diverse, se non parti diverse, della stessa cosa. Nei fatti, il capitalismo nasce sullo sfondo dello stato burocratico, ne è in gran parte il prodotto.

Devo ancora leggere, e lo dico con disappunto, il suo ultimo Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Dico con disappunto non solo perché sono curioso di vedere come gli argomenti si ricollegano a quelli di Utopia of Rules, ma anche perché non avrò la possibilità di mandargli un link al mio commento e sentire cosa ha da dire al proposito.

A giudicare dalle recensioni e gli estratti, nonché dai suoi articoli sugli stessi argomenti, Graeber rivede le nostre percezioni intuitive e spiega come i colletti bianchi non solo producono poco valore reale, ma lo distruggono. Chi fa un lavoro essenziale per la società (l’espressione “lavoratori essenziali” è emersa dagli eventi dopo la pubblicazione di questo libro) – chi cucina, assiste anziani e malati, insegna, lavora nell’industria alimentare, fabbrica cose utili, tratta con i clienti, pulisce per terra e così via – non solo è pagato male relativamente all’importanza del proprio lavoro, ma subisce abusi e disturbi da parte dei benpagati che fanno lavori stronzi.

I lavori stronzi diventano “indispensabili” solo nel contesto di una società in cui una minoranza ruba dagli altri e sta seduta sul malloppo. La maggior parte dei lavori stronzi consiste nel contare i fagioli che rappresentano la ricchezza dei ladri, o a salvaguardare i titoli di proprietà assenteista di terre inutilizzate, di case vuote e di altri beni inutilizzati, e ad assicurarsi che gli altri continuino a prendere ordini da chi possiede le macchine che loro fanno funzionare. Il resto è il risultato di un’economia basata sulla produzione incentivata dello spreco, necessaria a tenere in piedi un’industria sovradimensionata centralizzata, inefficiente e ad alta intensità di capitale.

Pur ritenendo il suo anarchismo, così come quello di Pëtr Kropotkin e Colin Ward, grossomodo comunista, io includerei Graeber, assieme ai due citati, nella mia categoria generica degli “anarchici senza aggettivi”. Come nel caso di Kropotkin e Ward, la fede di Graeber nella creatività e nelle possibilità dell’uomo, il suo amore per l’incredibile varietà di espedienti usati storicamente dagli uomini per stabilire relazioni reciproche e gestire collettivamente i loro problemi comuni, sono più forti di qualunque tentativo di farli rientrare in particolari schemi economici come il mercato, l’associazionismo o altro. Non tollerava quelle formulazioni teoriche aprioristiche che violentano la particolarità, la “realtà in sé” della storia, non tollerava che sulla base di queste formulazioni si interpretasse male la capacità delle persone di trovare soluzioni soddisfacenti, qualunque soluzione, semplicemente confrontandosi. Così come non tollerava che una qualche versione di anarchismo “con il trattino” limitasse la sua ammirazione per l’estrema varietà e particolarità delle istituzioni auto-organizzate e a misura d’uomo. Così scrive in Debt:

Se vogliamo davvero capire le basi morali della vita economica, e quindi della vita dell’uomo, a mio giudizio dobbiamo iniziare… dalle cose più piccole: i dettagli quotidiani della vita sociale, il rapporto con gli amici, i nemici, i figli; spesso si tratta di gesti così piccoli (passare il sale, scroccare una sigaretta) che raramente ci riflettiamo sopra. L’antropologia illustra i tanti e diversi modi di organizzarsi degli uomini.

A parte il suo anarchismo senza aggettivi, trovo particolarmente istruttive anche vari altri suoi concetti. Come la già vista democrazia concreta, propria delle persone comuni ovunque e in ogni tempo.

Altra nozione è quella di “anarchismo della quotidianità”: come spiega Colin Ward in Anarchy in Action, l’anarchismo, più che un sistema totalizzante attorno al quale la società dev’essere rimodellata sistematicamente, è qualcosa che esiste tra noi nelle nostre interazioni. “L’anarchismo è già oggi, ed è sempre stato, una delle basi dell’interazione umana. Noi ci organizziamo e ci aiutiamo reciprocamente in qualunque momento. L’abbiamo sempre fatto” (questa citazione e quella seguente sono prese da “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You”).

Il principio anarchico più elementare è l’organizzazione di se stessi: l’assunto per cui gli uomini non devono essere minacciati di punizione perché raggiungano una ragionevole intesa tra loro, o per costringerli a trattare gli altri con dignità e rispetto…

Anarchismo è il modo in cui agisce l’uomo quando è libero di fare come vuole, quando interagisce con altre persone ugualmente libere, e che pertanto sono coscienti della responsabilità verso gli altri che ciò comporta…

…L’anarchismo è oggi, ed è sempre stato, una delle basi dell’interazione umana. Noi ci organizziamo e ci aiutiamo reciprocamente in qualunque momento. L’abbiamo sempre fatto.

Per quanto rispetti l’immensa varietà e particolarità delle istituzioni storiche auto-organizzate, il che significa accettare la libertà della gente di scegliere come organizzarsi, ritiene certe forme organizzative altamente improbabili per un popolo libero, improbabili in assenza di un governo violento o di una conquista dall’esterno. Così scrive in The Democracy Project:

Come dimostra la storia, le enormi differenze di ricchezza, istituzioni come la schiavitù, la schiavitù per debito o il lavoro salariato possono esistere solo se sostenute da un esercito, le carceri e la polizia.

Per questo, spiega, un’ideale società anarco-capitalista non potrebbe durare senza lo stato:

Negli anni novanta frequentavo i newsgroup su internet, allora molto frequentati da persone che si definivano “anarco-capitalisti”. … Molti passavano il tempo condannando gli anarchici di sinistra, dicendo che fomentavano la violenza. “Come si può essere a favore di una società libera e allo stesso tempo contro il lavoro salariato? Se voglio assumere qualcuno per raccogliere i miei pomodori, come fai a impedirmelo se non con la violenza?” Secondo questa logica, dunque, qualunque tentativo di abolire il sistema salariale dovrebbe passare attraverso qualche nuova versione del Kgb. Sono ragionamenti frequenti. Nessuno, significativamente, dice mai: “E se voglio affittarmi per raccogliere i pomodori di qualcun altro, come fai a fermarmi senza l’uso della forza?” Tutti apparentemente pensano che in una futura società astatuale apparterranno alla classe dei datori di lavoro. Nessuno pensa che sarà un raccoglitore. Ma da dove credono che vengano i raccoglitori? Un piccolo esperimento mentale può essere d’aiuto: chiamiamola la parabola dell’isola divisa. Due gruppi di idealisti si dividono un’isola. Dividono concordemente il territorio in due parti più o meno equivalenti quanto a risorse. Uno dei gruppi crea un sistema economico diviso tra pochi padroni e molti nullatenenti, senza neanche garanzie sociali, che muoiono di fame se non accettano l’offerta di lavoro alle condizioni poste dai ricchi. Il secondo gruppo crea un sistema in cui a tutti spetta un minimo vitale e accetta qualunque nuovo arrivato. A questo punto, nella metà capitalista le persone destinate a fare i guardiani notturni, gli infermieri, i minatori avrebbero molte ragioni per emigrare. La metà capitalista resterebbe senza forza lavoro nel giro di qualche settimana. I capitalisti sarebbero costretti a vuotarsi i pappagalli da soli, fare i guardiani notturni e azionare da sé i loro macchinari pesanti… a meno che non offrano ai lavoratori condizioni praticamente da utopia socialista.

Per questa e per tante altre ragioni, sono sicuro che all’atto pratico qualunque tentativo di creare un’economia di mercato senza il supporto di eserciti, polizia e carceri cesserebbe ben presto di essere capitalismo. Ad esser sincero, penso che presto finirebbe per somigliare pochissimo anche a quello che solitamente consideriamo mercato.

Altro concetto che ha influito su di me è il “comunismo di base”: il fatto che tutte le società umane, che siano governate da feudatari, burocrazie statali o aziende capitaliste, hanno un fondo di comunismo libertario creato dalla gente comune per sopravvivere. Così scrive in Debt:

se le persone non si guardano in cagnesco, se i bisogni sono abbastanza forti, o i costi abbastanza accettabili, ecco allora che subentra il principio “da ognuno secondo le sue possibilità, ad ognuno secondo i suoi bisogni”…

In fin dei conti, il “comunismo” non è una magica utopia; non occorre neanche la proprietà dei mezzi di produzione. È qualcosa che esiste ora; cioè qualcosa che esiste, in grado maggiore o minore, in tutte le società, anche se non ne è mai esistita una in cui tutto era organizzato comunisticamente, cosa peraltro difficile anche da immaginare. Tutti noi ci comportiamo spessissimo da comunisti… Una “società comunista”… è impossibile. Ma tutti i sistemi sociali, anche il capitalismo e simili, poggiano su una base solida fatta di comunismo reale.

E poi, in The Machinery of Hopelessness:

…[C]omunismo significa tutti quei casi in cui le persone agiscono secondo questo principio: ognuno secondo le sue capacità, ad ognuno secondo i suoi bisogni. In effetti, questo è il comportamento di chi lavora assieme. Se, ad esempio, due persone stanno aggiustando un tubo e uno dice “passami quella pinza”, l’altro non risponde “cosa mi dai in cambio?” Succede così anche tra i dipendenti di Bechtel o Citigroup. Applicano i principi del comunismo perché sono gli unici che funzionano davvero. Questa è anche la ragione per cui intere città e paesi ripiegano su qualche forma di comunismo improvvisato dopo una calamità naturale o un collasso economico: mercati e gerarchie di comando diventano lussi che non ci si può permettere. Più creatività occorre e più le persone devono improvvisare e più la forma di comunismo risultante ha probabilità di essere egalitaria. Per questo anche i tecnici repubblicani (del partito repubblicano, ndt) che cercano di dar corpo a nuove idee in fatto di software tendono a formare piccoli collettivi democratici. È solo quando il lavoro diventa standardizzato e noioso (come nelle catene di montaggio) che è possibile imporre forme di comunismo più autoritarie, se non fasciste. In realtà, anche le aziende private sono organizzate internamente secondo principi comunistici.

Il grado di comunismo – di quella parte dell’attività sociale ed economica governata dal comunismo – varia molto da società a società e da un’epoca all’altra. È però vero che tutte le società prestatuali – che si tratti di raccoglitori e cacciatori o di villaggi agricoli astatuali – possiedono un grado relativamente alto di comunismo, e questo comunismo è sopravvissuto all’avvento degli stati e dei regimi feudali fino a qualche tempo fa. Fatto notevole, questa realtà era la norma ovunque non sia stata soppressa violentemente con l’esproprio della terra. Possiamo dire, senza esagerare, che l’organizzazione predefinita, a partire dalla Rivoluzione Agricola fino alla soppressione ad opera degli stati classisti, era il villaggio agricolo con le terre comuni in possesso temporaneo: le famiglie avevano diritto all’utilizzo di varie terre, di proprietà comune e ridistribuite periodicamente, oltre all’accesso ai pascoli comuni e ai boschi. Questo era lo schema tipico del villaggio a campi aperti, prevalente nell’Europa Occidentale e in Inghilterra fino agli inizi dell’epoca moderna, ma anche del cosiddetto “modo asiatico” soffocato da Warren Hastings in Bengala, e del Mir, che sopravvisse in Russia finché non fu distrutto dall’azione combinata delle “riforme” di Stolypin e della collettivizzazione forzata di Stalin.

Aggiungo che, al di là del suo apporto culturale, Graeber ha esercitato un’enorme influenza sul movimento Occupy. I dettagli sono in The Democracy Project. In breve: Tra luglio e agosto del 2011 Occupy era perlopiù un progetto in fieri della rivista Adbusters e una manciata di movimenti verticalisti come il Workers World Party; il programma prevedeva una tradizionale manifestazione con manifesti scritti a mano, slogan e dei capi designati, e quasi sicuramente il tutto sarebbe evaporato subito dopo le foto ricordo e gli arresti di rito. Un gruppetto di anarchici che aveva assistito al movimento M15 in Spagna si cristallizzò attorno a Graeber con l’intento di mettere su un’assemblea generale, e fu questo che spinse il movimento ad acquisire un carattere orizzontale. In assenza di questo fatto – in mancanza di quel bullone, è il caso di dire – Occupy sarebbe stato una nota a piè pagina della politica newyorchese. Movimenti come Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL e Antifa, in qualunque forma, sarebbero stati completamente diversi.

Come anarchico, David Graeber rientra nella stessa categoria di poche altre figure monumentali del passato, come Kropotkin, Ward, James Scott e forse anche Murray Bookchin. Ha fatto tutto in cinquantanove anni, con, probabilmente, ancora metà della sua carriera intellettuale davanti a sé. Scott è ancora attivo a ottantatré anni, gli altri sono morti sugli ottanta. Impossibile sapere cosa ci ha tolto la sua morte; molto, sicuramente.

In his book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, Chris Matthew Sciabarra makes the astute observation that  “[j]ust as relations of power operate through ethical, psychological, cultural, political, and economic dimensions, so too the struggle for freedom and individualism depends upon a certain constellation of moral, psychological, and cultural factors.” This is something that Dakota Hensley, in his article “Appalachian Anarchism: What the Voting Record Conceals,” seems to implicitly know but not elaborately understand. Hensley makes four general points: there is an existing culture akin to an explicitly ideological (individualist, Christian, agrarian, and even conservative) anarchism in Appalachia, many parts of the region are already exploring a rejection of government, the region is not truly a “conservative hotbed” as the voting record might indicate, and the area has a strong pro-labor history. Although he makes a compelling case for both an existing and emergent quasi-anarchism within the culture and communities of Appalachia, he fails to critically take into account the counter-liberatory impacts of reactionary cultural elements that would hinder an Appalachian-brand anarchism’s evolution into a genuine part of a common struggle for a truly free society. Therefore, I would like to critically consider and elaborate upon both the liberatory and reactionary components of Hensley’s ideas.

Hensley begins his piece by presenting five values of Appalachia—“[i]ndividualism, community, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and faith”—within which “we find an anarchism that has existed in the cities and rural communities for decades.” The first four of these values are absolutely central to anarchism and their presence in Appalachian culture is a compelling case for at least the groundwork for an emergent anarchism. And the last of these, faith, is not a necessary element of anarchism—at least in its religious sense—but when interpreted through the lens of Christian anarchism it begins to add up, and Hensley does this. He writes that Appalachian anarchism “is Christian anarchist in that faith is held dear to Appalachians who let the Bible guide them, despite 70% being unchurched and their native Christianity being decentralized and opposed to religious hierarchy and established churches.” This sort of thinking in anarchism absolutely has precedent. Gary Chartier writes in the foreword of Cam Rea’s God is an Anarchist, 

In the Abrahamic traditions . . . it is clear, for instance, that belief in divine transcendence has undermined the idolization of political authority; that belief in individual access to God and to divine truth has strengthened belief in the capacity of ordinary people to make their own political decisions; and that Jesus’ praise of peace has inspired rejection of state-made wars and the search for a truly consensual society. Religion and authoritarianism may sometimes be allies, but the story is too mixed to make it reasonable to insist that they have to be. 

David Fleming, in Surviving the Future, makes a compelling case too that makes a compelling case that religious culture—such as Appalachian Christianity—will be a central tool in creating a common context of trust, transparency, congruence, and collective decision making after the failure of the state and the collapse of the capitalist economy. He writes, “Religion provides meeting places in which people can come together building and sustaining friendships of social capital” and…

is the community speaking. It is culture in the service of the community. It is a framework for integrating care into the community’s life and culture; it takes charitable giving beyond the level of personal conscience and integrates it into the way the community sees itself and expresses itself.

He further speaks highly of the proactive proposal, paraphrased from Rabbi Johnathan Sacks, that “the community could start again, inventing its own synthesis of the traditions it has inherited—its own evolved tradition and narrative—helping its members to adapt the cultures they bring with them.” 

Ultimately, the sentiments of Christian anarchism are summed up well in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, wherein he writes on how Christianity applied to the real world takes the form of a rejection of government and violence in general. For example, he writes:

Only because this condition of universal arming and military service has come step by step and imperceptibly, and because for its maintenance the governments employ all means in their power for intimidating, bribing, stupefying, and ravishing men, we do not see the crying contradiction between this condition and those Christian feelings and thoughts, with which all the men of our time are really permeated.

Whether this is this type of peace-oriented sentiment touted by Tolstoy or the potential for the kind of new community religiosity desired by Fleming exist in Appalachia remains to be seen—a proper religious ethnography of the region might be necessary—but faith, particularly the sort of anti-hierarchical kind described by Hensley, can certainly serve to reinforce anarchism (even despite the popular anarchist slogan “no gods, no masters”). 

Hensley further describes Appalachian anarchism as “agrarian in its support of the back-to-the-land movement’s components, namely smallholding, self-sufficiency, community, and autonomy,” which need hardly be reconciled with anarchism as numerous anarchists—such as Karl Hess—have supported the American back-to-the-land movement throughout its existence. Sever points out that “[o]ne of the oldest anarchist slogans was ‘Land and Freedom.’ You don’t hear it much anymore these days, but this battle cry was used most fervently in the revolutionary movements in Mexico, Spain, Russia, and Manchuria.” And even further, that “[t]he truth is, the ‘back to the land’ movement and the rural communes of earlier generations, organized according to a wide variety of strategies of resistance, turned up a body of invaluable experience that anarchists collectively have still failed to absorb.” Perhaps then, explicitly ideological anarchism can learn from Appalachia—particularly the Indigenous peoples of the region who go unmentioned by Hensley—just as the latter can learn from the former.

And Hensley does not remain within the more conceptual realm of general cultural descriptions, but references specific contexts wherein “[m]any [Appalachians] spend their whole lives without interacting with a government or anything close to it” and “[m]any smaller unincorporated communities dot the Appalachian landscape, living peacefully without a local authority.” He presents the cases of Wallins and Harlan, Kentucky, the former of which “doesn’t even have a government (as a result of its being demoted from a city to an unincorporated community back in 2010 after failing to elect a mayor in 2008).” In Harlan there are 62 unincorporated communities where the only real government presence is Harlan Police and the Harlan County Rescue Squad, and in Wallins the volunteer fire department is “as far as government presence goes.” These examples are extremely relevant as they could be written off by non-Appalachians as indicators of ‘backwardness’ or ‘underdevelopment.’ But consider David Graeber’s summary, from Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres’s thought:

[Clastres] insisted political anthropologists had still not completely gotten over the old evolutionist perspectives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisticated form of organization than what had come before; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian societies Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to have attained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirely unaware of what the elementary forms of state power might be like—what it would mean to allow some men to give everyone else orders which could not be questioned, since they were backed up by the threat of force—and were for that very reason determined to ensure such things never came about? What if they considered the fundamental premises of our political science morally objectionable?

Despite acknowledged issues in Clastres’s work, Graeber builds off of this general idea—using examples like the Piaora of the Orinoco, the Tiv of Central Nigeria, the society of Highland Madagascar—to propose that “counterpower” (or “anti-power”)—this being, “[i]n typical revolutionary discourse[,] . . . a collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias”—need not exist in opposition to an existing state (or market) but can stand in egalitarian societies as “the predominant form of social power. It stands guard over what are seen as certain frightening possibilities within the society itself: notably against the emergence of systematic forms of political or economic dominance.” There would need to be more work on the matter, but perhaps a similar situation is taking place in Appalachia. As Hensley demonstrates, many cultural elements conducive of anarchism exist in the region. So perhaps, say, the loss of a government by Wallins due to its demotion from city to an unincorporated community or, even more so, the continuation of many communities’ unincorporation are themselves very conscious rejections of conventional institutionalized governance.

Finally, in my view, one of the most compelling points Hensley raises regarding anarchist tendencies in Appalachia is the area’s history of pro-labor solidarity. He writes:

Some will assume that Appalachian anarchism can’t be anarchism because of anarchism’s association with labor. And if we see Appalachia as conservative based on its voting record, that must make it anti-labor as well. That is far from the truth. Appalachia has had labor disputes for decades and its people are always on the side of the worker.

And this is an excellent and important point: Appalachian culture—and consequently an Appalachian anarchism—is deeply intertwined with labor struggle. As historian Elizabeth Catte explains, though the term ‘redneck’ originated as a derogatory term for poor, uneducated Southerners and Appalachians, the 1921 “Battle of Blair Mountain,” a clash between coal miners attempting to unionize and both company enforcers and the National Guard, during which miners wore red bandanas around their neck, marked a “transformation from a more generic epithet to something specific to group identity and union membership, particularly among coal miners, which is built into the way that many folks in Appalachia today reclaim the term.” (A good friend of mine carries around a bag with the phrase Put the “Red” Back in “Redneck” on it). This history and culture are central to building a more conscious working-class solidarity in Appalachia against attempts to trick rural Americans with racist dog-whistling nationalism. As Daniel Denvir writes, in the preface to his interview with Sarah Jones about Appalachia, that “[n]eoliberalism foments racism by paving the way for right-wing politics that tell white people that people of color are going to steal their share of a shrinking pie. Our response cannot be to write Appalachian folks off; it has to be to build a multiracial working-class movement.” And an important element of this is fighting the view of Appalachia as homogenously white (and straight and cisgender for that matter) and recognizing the diversity of the region. As Edward J. Cabbell writes, for most of contemporary U.S. history, “[s]tatistical data and published materials [on African-Americans in Appalachia have been] scarce, and the media frequently ignores their experiences.” And as a consequence, this…

Black invisibility provides strong support to the myth that the number of black people in the mountains is inconsequential. In reality, [as of the the 1980s,] one out of every fourteen Appalachians is black, and many of these black Appalachians have played important roles in working with whites for improved conditions in the mountains for everyone.

But things have begun to change in the right direction. As Sarah Baird explains for NPR’s Code Switch:

While there still is a way to go, a less whitewashed portrait of Appalachia seems to be gaining a foothold nationally, thanks in part to the efforts of scholars and grass-roots organizations. The term “Affrilachia” — a portmanteau of “African” and “Appalachian” coined by Kentucky poet laureate Frank X Walker — has brought together a loose collective of multiracial artists previously excluded from conversations about what it means to be an Appalachian.

And never should be forgotten the Indigenous people of Appalachia such as the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina.* Furthermore—despite controversies around its unethical allocation of funds—the network known as Queer Appalachia has, as Elizabeth Catte writes, showcases “that some of the region’s most successful, inclusive, and creative media-makers are queer and trans Appalachians.” Additionally, one study suggests that, despite their underrepresentation in the popular understanding of Appalachian culture, West Virginia has the nation’s highest percentage of transgender-identifying teens and a relatively high percentage of similarly identifying adults. And while outlining some of the non-white, non-settler, and non-cishetero demographics in Appalachia does not come close to ensuring the existence of a truly anti-colonial, anti-racist, working-class ‘rainbow coalition,’ it does at least demonstrate its possibility and therefore the broader possibility of pushing an Appalachian anarchism toward truly liberatory ends.

But while Hensley seems to be attempting to quasi-ethnographically piece together that “certain constellation of moral, psychological, and cultural factors” conducive of “the struggle for freedom and individualism” that Sciabarra describes, he fails to consider the manner in which reactionary cultural elements could potentially get in the way of a truly liberatory anarchist project in Appalachia. The two factors which stand out the most to me are uninformed anti-communism and social conservatism.

As mentioned, one aspect that Hensley attributes to Appalachian anarchism is that “[i]t is individualist in its opposition to communism and acceptance of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.” There is certainly nothing wrong with self-reliance and self-sufficiency, but a staunch anti-communism may be of concern to even the most individualist of anarchists (barring perhaps anarcho-capitalist types). From my experience growing up in southern Ohio on the border of Kentucky, colloquial understandings of ‘communism’ in the rural United States sometimes range from flawed and superficial familiarities with Karl Marx to ‘whatever neoliberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent,’ to even somehow what ultraconservatives consider ‘deviancy’ like being gay or transgender (à la cultural Marxism). Hensley sees this problem regarding anarchism itself, writing: “Anarchists forget that the large majority of Americans know nothing about anarchism or the philosophies of Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, William Greene and Stephen Pearl Andrews, or even Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. The few who do associate it with violence.” However, he fails to make similar observations regarding understandings of communism (and consequently anti-communism). 

A sentiment of anti-communism against, say, Stalinism or Juche is nothing to decry, but an uninformed anti-ideological stance could stand in the way of ideas like cooperative ownership, the commons, etc. The latter of these, as Alec MacGillis explains in his review of historian Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, was at one time an important cultural aspect of the region. He summarizes how, early in the history of Appalachia, “[s]urvival depended on shared use of the boundless forest beyond one’s own hollow or ridge — the ‘commons’ — for hunting game, raising livestock, small-scale logging and foraging bounties such as uganost (wild greens), toothworth, corn salad and ramps.” This fell apart thanks to the interests of corporate capitalists in the natural resources of the area, but Stoll imagines a “Commons Communities Act,” “under which land would be set aside for shared use, not unlike the great forests of old — farming, timber harvesting, hunting and gathering, vegetable gardening, cattle grazing — by a specified number of families. Residents would own their own homes and could pursue whatever sort of work they cared to beyond their use of the commons.” 

A staunch and uninformed anti-communism could be a powerful obstacle for more communitarian initiatives, and furthermore, it could—and has in the past—push rural Americans toward a nationalistic identification over-and-above working-class solidarity and even led  to further (particularly anti-Black) racism and antisemitism. As Roberta Wood writes, “The twin themes of anti-communism and racism have been used repeatedly by anti-democratic forces to attack progressive movements and candidates throughout American history. In 2020, just as during the Smith Act trials [of Communist Party leaders] of the 1950s, anti-communism provided a ‘safe space’ for fascist forces to grow and fester.” Consider, as a blunt representation, the infamous protest sign reading “Race Mixing is Communism” at the anti-integration protest in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1959. And Amiad Horowitz records how there is a “long history of the fusing of anti-communism with anti-Semitism that is ingrained in much of American right-wing thought” and “from the moment Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, anti-communism has gone hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism. Many of Marx’s enemies (both on the right and the left) used his Jewish heritage to disparage his ideas and followers.”  And this has continued through to the present day with the antisemitic trope of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ or the constant accusations that George Soros is somehow both a billionaire and a communist who funds Black Lives Matter.

The second issue with Hensley’s Appalachian anarchism is its social conservatism. He asserts “that Appalachia as this conservative hotbed is nothing but a myth,” and that this stereotype is representative of “only those who vote and, even then, their personal views are nothing like the views of the candidates they vote for.” However, southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, for example, are littered with anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ signs and Confederate, Blue Lives Matter, and Trump 2020 flags are as common as dirt, which I believe are representative of a culture in largely rural sections of the U.S.—including Appalachia—that is prejudicially traditionalist and reveres both hierarchy and authority. So, to say that there is little non-electoral conservatism is, to me, quite a difficult claim to back up even, as Hensley does, by using voting statistics. And Hensley even identifies Appalachian anarchism as being “traditionalist conservative in its views of social issues, being opposed to abortion and supportive of the traditions of the mountains among others.” And for him this presents no fundamental problem, as he considers in another article,

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.

Hensley is not highly specific in either article regarding what he means by social conservatism beyond a few name-dropped key issues, so I will function under the definition from RationalWiki which seems the most conventional:

Social conservatism emphasizes convention, morality (or old-fashioned notions of morality) and established roles within society and the family. Social conservatives are often, though not always, strongly religious. They support traditional gender roles, marriage and “family values” (a term with a multitude of meanings). Social conservatism is often accused of being homophobic, due to its distaste for same-sex marriage and sometimes racist and sexist to some degree because of the associations with traditional hierarchical societies in which everybody knew their place; and in the West, at least, the White, Anglo/European diaspora being regarded as the ultimate origin and standard of civilized culture.

The issue with seeing social conservatism as an acceptable trait in anarchism is, at least as it will be addressed here, twofold. For one it is completely unequipped to address systemic and systematic racism. Appalachia has a history of racial tension—as most areas of the U.S. do—particularly perpetuated by bosses and mass landowners. For example, Kate Aronoff writes how…

[a] favorite and especially nasty tactic used by mine owners around the country was bringing in black (non-union) strikebreakers to keep operations running as the UMWA [United Mine Workers of America] fought for contracts and better wages. The tactic infused existing racial tensions with a deeply felt economic anxiety, leading to outright violence against black miners that often left unaffiliated black families caught in the fray. These strikebreakers were often uninformed or — more likely — deceived about the conditions they were entering, especially in places where there were few other jobs on offer. Many found themselves as cannon fodder in dangerous and often deadly battles between unions and coal operators.

And these strategies continue to be used in contemporary lineages of the infamous Southern Strategy—where right-wing politicians utilize racial anxiety to turn the working class against itself and build loyalty to quasi-fascistic ideas. And racism is obviously a threat to individual freedom, even if it is conventionally ‘nonviolent,’’ because it can form what essentially amounts to a conspiracy in the form of systemic racism against BIPOC individuals that limits and sometimes completely deprives them of the resources necessary for survival and flourishing. But furthermore, as Sheldon Richman writes, one important…

libertarian reason to oppose nonviolent racism is that it all too easily metamorphoses from subtle intimidation into outright violence. Even in a culture where racial “places” have long been established by custom and require no coercive enforcement, members of a rising generation will sooner or later defiantly reject their assigned place and demand equality of authority. What happens then? It takes little imagination to envision members of the dominant race — even if they have professed a “thin” libertarianism [which holds that the only moral standard for a free society is the non-aggression principle] to that point — turning to physical force to protect their “way of life.”

And, ultimately, any cultural ideology—such as social conservatism in the U.S.—that uncritically accepts nearly all aspects of standard Anglo-American traditionalism, is not in any way prepared to address the racialized elements at its own core.

Social conservatism also creates and maintains communities with anti-abortion, anti-sexualist, harshly-traditionally-familial views that perpetuate patriarchy/cultural misogony, heteronormativity/homophobia/heterosexism, cisnormativity/transphobia, and so forth. These are without a doubt—even if they are theoretically completely free of the conventional, physical understanding of violence (which they almost never are)—systems of coercion that can stifle that “certain constellation of moral, psychological, and cultural factors” that “the struggle for freedom and individualism” is dependent on, as Sciabarra maintains. As Marshall Rosenberg accounts, 

Most people refer to violence as physically trying to hurt another. We also consider violence any use of power over people, trying to coerce people into doing things. That would include any use of punishment and reward, any use of guilt, shame, duty and obligation. Violence in this larger sense is any use of force to coerce people to do things.

And the rejoinder, as alluded to before, that individuals can just leave those communities that are not tolerant of their existence completely underestimates the power of community and nonphysical social infrastructure in general. This brings up the topic of ‘thick libertarianism,’ which right-libertarian critic of the concept Tom Woods understands as the assertion by some libertarians that one needs “to have left-liberal views on religion, sexual morality, feminism, etc., because reactionary beliefs among the public are also threats to liberty,” but Nathan Goodman more broadly defines as “any broadening of libertarian concerns beyond overt aggression and state power to concern about what cultural and social conditions are most conducive to liberty.” An example case might be Cathy Reisenwitz’s argument that libertarianism should take influence from sex-positive feminism as…

[s]ex-positivity seeks to destroy the judgment and shame which keep people from being able to fully enjoy sex, or a lack of sex, or anything in between. It seeks to allow the greatest amount of peaceful, voluntary sexual exchange. Libertarianism should seek to destroy the judgment and shame which keep people from being able to fully enjoy any kind of peaceful, voluntary exchange. In this way, it will fully engage in creating a world which allows the greatest amount of peaceful, voluntary exchange possible.

In essence, the acceptance of social conservatism—which uncritically advances an Anglo-American traditionalism that, for example, stigmatizes and shames gender and sexual nonconformity, ‘excessive’ sexual activity (generally of women), abortion and contraception, etc.—ultimately creates the cultural conditions through which individual freedom is restricted via coercive social mechanisms such as public shame and unjustifiable hierarchies. And because of this and its inability to address (and, frankly, likelihood to perpetuate) racism, social conservatism, despite Hensley’s assertions otherwise, cannot be systematically tolerated if an Appalachian anarchism is to become a part of a common struggle for human freedom and a truly free society. Anarchism must maintain its commitment to liberation in all spheres of life even (or perhaps particularly) when attempting to call upon elements in existing cultural conditions—such as those in Appalachia.

*Note: The author has chosen to remove reference to the “Appalachian Cherokee Nation” on the basis of complaints by members of the Cherokee Identity Protection Committee against said nation for allegedly misrepresenting or falsifying Cherokee heritage in the pursuit of federal recognition. The author, as a non-Indigenous person, does not feel it is appropriate to voice an opinion on this, but it would be irresponsible to leave it up as is. Amended: 7/24/22.

For a few years now, Modern Money Theory, or MMT, has been the hottest buzzword in economics. The insights of MMT regarding our nation’s spending debate have been simultaneously misunderstood, disregarded, and celebrated. In this essay I will explain the central argument of MMT. I will explore why its conclusions are dangerous in the wrong hands, and show how a radical libertarian application of the same macro-economic relationships can feasibly support the ideas behind Proudhon’s “Bank of the People.” In the debate between centrally organized economies and those decentrally organized, the coordinating potential of democratically operated banks merits consideration.

The essence of the political process is coming to terms with the inherent trade-offs we face in a world of limited resources and unlimited wants. The idea that people can improve their lives by depriving themselves of surplus goods and services contradicts both common sense and any respectable economic theory. When there are widespread unemployed resources as there are today in the United States, the tradeoff costs are often minimal, yet mistakenly deemed unaffordable.¹

MMT is an accounting explanation of what happens when the Federal Reserve, the US central banking system, adds money to the US economy (it also covers other countries with fiat currencies). Founded by Warren Mosler, its origins date back to Chartalism, first described by Georg Friedrich Knapp in his work, “The State Theory of Money.” I would like to return to a discussion of Chartalism below, but one main principle is a familiar concept: monopolies. A monopoly sets the price for whatever it provides, meaning that the price today is the same as the price in the future, and there is therefore no interest rate, or rate of return for holding onto the good. MMT claims this is the same relationship at work in monetary policy. Government is the monopoly provider and issuer of currency. Therefore, the government can set whatever interest rate they want, but the market cannot feasibly reward holding onto something that doesn’t become worth more over time, so any central bank interest rates above zero percent are effectively removing resources from the economy. This causes unemployment.  

How exactly do higher interest rates remove resources? When business owners or entrepreneurs seeking to start new businesses take out loans, they must evaluate whether their business will be profitable enough to pay back the loan. Businesses that might have been able to turn a profit with a lower interest rate will not be started, and businesses that find themselves struggling may need to close when they might have survived with a lower interest rate. Limiting businesses to only those able to pay a higher rate unnecessarily hinders growth and exacerbates decline. This in turn causes unemployment because only the relatively more profitable business ventures will be taken, leaving others to seek employment from them if available. This also leaves those with capital and the ability to leverage economies of scale with a distinct advantage against smaller competitors. 

The Origins of Chartalism

Georg Friedrich Knapp’s work in The State Theory of Money explains this unique theory of money, which often conflicted with the theories of the metallists of his time. 

Debts expressed in units of value can be discharged by engraved pieces, either coins or notes, which have by law a certain validity in units of value. Such pieces are called Chartal means of payment, or money. The validity is independent of the contents of the pieces. Law proceeds from the State; money is accordingly a State institution.²

For an issuer of a currency, this means money must be spent into existence by the issuing agency first paying someone to do something, or exchanging the new currency for the old (as happens when one country conquers another). It is this threat of the use of force that causes people in one geographic area to use only the currency of whoever conquered them, usually by demanding it be used in a year to pay taxes back to the government in that same currency. It is by this means that governments provide the infrastructure and services they desire — they can choose to raise crops or raise armies as they see fit.

MMT Today

MMT’s predictions seem to be playing out in reality as well. The US government has been massively spending far beyond revenue on their military for decades, but we have yet to see runaway inflation. According to MMT, this is because taxes play a deflationary role, removing money from the economy (with different impacts depending on where it’s taken from). It takes massively mismanaging an economy of this size to result in high or hyperinflation. Considering the results of our economic policies thus far, we clearly have more options available to us. 

Instead of buying bullets and bombs which are used to destroy people and economies, and cause a net loss to the world, those trillions of dollars could be invested in better schools, affordable or free college, social programs, hospitals, therapy, sex-education, or non-military technology. Does anyone doubt our economy would not grow more for it? It is the relationship of spending to our GDP and the profitability of those specific investments that is important, not solely the magnitude of the debt. You wouldn’t look around you at bridges and roads and say “where are we going to get the money to pay for all this? We must return it to zero out the debt which is hurting our economy!” Even the money you would use to pay it back would have to first be spent into the economy — creating a debt. Because most people fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between the government, taxes, and people(the issuer and users of currency), they think about these problems exactly backwards.    

It makes sense why so many, including libertarians, are hostile to MMT. However, the macro-economic relationships that allow MMT to function remain valid even if we find a way to get an economy to use a new currency without the threat of force. As mentioned previously, this tool is dangerous in the hands of authoritarian regimes. The ability to spend without having to force any special interests to pay more taxes or cut any spending from current budgets is alluring. As anarchists, we know power corrupts absolutely, and unleashing the ability to spend trillions of dollars is as massively significant as it is frightening. But it’s important to remember that it’s already happening, simply without people having the power to direct the spending to better places. Anarchists too should recall it was Proudhon who famously elaborated on the idea of a “Bank of the People.” His idea called for loans with no interest or “at cost” for the administrative expenses and risks taken. While exact operations were less clear, it has always been an anarchist idea to end rent-seeking by destroying the advantages capitalists have held over labor. MMT makes those operations a lot clearer.

Can a libertarian approach to implementing this framework allow us to separate the benefits from the violence, giving us a weapon against the state that allows both individual autonomy and agency as well as collective decision making for concentrating spending?

I believe that in the debate between centralized and decentralized economies, autonomous, democratically run banks can use this tool stolen from authoritarian regimes. Once adopted, its ability to more fluidly and responsively react, combined with its members’ abilities to invest or divest at will, should provide radicals with a more powerful weapon than the one they stole.  

Implementation

A transitional stage would allow for a voluntary entry into what becomes a market entity capable of working counter-cyclically — like a commune or union of sorts but with a currency to allow for internal transactions. I’ll return to what operating counter-cyclically means momentarily and how it’s useful.

Individuals in any current system might pool resources and funds to contribute to the foundation of this democratically-operated central bank. The issue with transitioning from any current fiat currency to a new one is giving people a reason to use the new currency. If an individual wishes to pay others, the currency being traded must be able to be used to obtain food, housing, medical services, and all the other things in an economy. Anyone offering a new currency must be able to demonstrate that there is an advantage to using the new currency in terms of buying power. Attracting more individuals to join the economy and offer their diverse goods and services to exchange for this currency is a necessary step. Once there are enough people willing to work for a currency, members can vote on who or what deserves more funds. Imagine a new society has formed and wants a hospital built — they can decide that the central bank creates a few million worth of new bills to attract a construction team and the hospital gets built, providing value to the society. The builders now contribute those bills to the rest of the society who are providing for their needs in exchange. They would only have taken the payment if they knew services they needed could be provisioned with it; with each new service added to the economy, the currency grows in value in real terms. Each new member has one more reason to join than the last.  

If the decisions being made become unprofitable and the buying power of the currency decreases, the members must reign in their investments or risk losing out to other groups that are more profitable. It may be possible that individuals join and leave associations or are members of multiple simultaneously. This could be similar to something like dual-citizenship today.    

To begin such a system, people could donate to the pool of resources and funds, and/or there can be a membership price. This allows individuals to exchange their membership fee for bills in the new currency and use the fee to invest in capital to get the economic leverage of the association started. The fee allows members to vote on how the future spending will be allocated. Use of the currency, of course, need not be exclusive to members — but voting power can incentivize further investment into the association. Something small like $500 could be an entry fee for membership, exchanging for new currency. I am aware Proudhon believed the Bank of the People should have no capital — this may be able to be achieved, I cannot say for sure — but it is not clear exactly what he might have meant considering he believed the accumulated talent of labor to be a form of “capital.” Proudhon would have had many disagreements with MMT, but he also was not aware of everything that we are today. I believe the establishment of the means of destroying capital are ultimately in line with the aims of the Bank of the People. Rather than Proudhon’s emphasis on many different Syndicates, it would give all members an equal vote on decisions directly (though they could still organize by industry if they wanted).

An additional incentive to non-members to join the banking association is that the currency, if properly managed in a growing economy, could become competitive with authoritarian fiat currencies. Once the buying power of the new currency is stronger than the competitors, there will be some market transition to the competing economy. This economy need not be geographically separate from non-members. In all likelihood, if competing associations adopt similarly informed models, there may be many associations overlapping, allowing individuals even more representation in how their resources and currencies are managed. They can join whichever groups favor their industries or are geographically convenient. Whereas Americans today have no say over where trillions of newly printed dollars go, under this system members could vote on investments and leave the association if they don’t like the decision, taking their economic contribution with them. This model of voluntary associations of tax-paying members can allow different groups with different ideas sharing the same geographic area to experiment in different strategies, and learn from each other, joining and separating as desired on an individual level, even on a vote-by-vote basis.

Unique Advantages

The advantages of a market entity capable of working counter-cyclically include, for example, the ability to respond to a pandemic by offering pay for needed projects like increasing medical infrastructure or production of masks in lieu of the pay people miss from shuttered businesses, quarantines, and lockdowns. As Warren Mosler has pointed out in his debate with Robert P. Murphy,³ markets are pro-cyclical. When things are growing people spend more and when things are declining people spend less. It helps to have a central bank capable of increasing spending leveraged against the economic capacity of an economy, to balance against the drop in spending in order to maintain employment. Unemployment arises when there are not enough dollars in the economy to allow less profitable opportunities to be taken. An association operating a central bank according to these principles can offer something Mosler has expounded upon called a Job Guarantee. This could be offered for necessary infrastructural repairs and other such things at a set wage rate below the prevailing market rate, such that in economic declines it is an alternative to unemployment; during recoveries, the set wage remains below what the market offers, allowing workers to resume employment in the private market as wages outbid them from the guaranteed position. Banks can offer zero-interest loans to new businesses or struggling businesses to assist in transitioning the economy from one industry to another.   

Proudhon pointed out that the primary function of capital is rent-seeking. When a capitalist owns the means of production and the workers are unable to use their skills without the capitalist, it is the capitalist taking advantage of the unavailability of credit. If workers could get loans for the investments they need, they wouldn’t depend on capitalists. Only the productive would have the ability to profit. Proudhon strongly believed this system would demonstrate the fact that labor produces all value, and capital truly produces nothing. By putting economic power into the hands of the common people, capitalists must find some other way to be useful besides idly owning resources that anyone is capable of obtaining. MMT meets the requirements of this most anarchist of tactics. It asserts zero-interest rates as natural and preferable. 

There’s no reason why anarchists should feel the need any longer to re-invent the wheel, so to speak, when it comes to banking. If what is desired is a means of coordinating resources that respects individual autonomy, MMT offers a modifiable framework. This tool of authoritarians, abused and underutilized, can be adopted into a truly functioning Bank of the People. Their best weapon is more powerful in the hands of the many than it is in the hands of the few.

In 1849, financial feudalism has its fortress: it is the Bank of France. A clever engineer has come to tell us that this fortress, which all thought impregnable, is not so. Let us have courage, then, and the temple of usury, no longer seeing the product of our sweat flow into its coffers, deserted by its priests, will collapse, taking the old world with it.⁴

1. Warren Mosler, Soft Currency Economics. pp.1. <http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Soft-Curency-Economics-paper.pdf>
2. Knapp, Georg Friedrich, The State Theory of Money. pp 25. <https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/knapp/StateTheoryMoney.pdf>
3. Warren Mosler and Robert P. Murphy, MMT vs. Austrian School debate. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUTLCDBONok>
4. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, Bank of The People. <http://www.anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/bank-people>

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.

Joining us today is Emmi Bevensee. Emmi is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and currently organizing the Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. They identify as a solarpunk mutualist and research disinformation and fascism on the internet as a Mozilla Open Web fellow and data scientist. In this discussion, we discuss Emmi’s lead essay in C4SS’ recent Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. This is a rich discussion about a complicated issue that anarchists of all stripes, and political theorists more generally, need to take on: how do we get the goods delivered to where they need to be in society. Emmi expresses a sense of skepticism about claims social anarchists have made that communes can economically coordinate in the absence of markets. We also discussed the lead essay of and their reply to another essay from the exchange which tried to give a mathematical formulation to social anarchist attempts to work around the calculation problem by Aurora Apolito. This was an interesting informative discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having it.

Also stay tuned for the next episode! It will feature a discussion between Aurora Apolito and William Gillis. Even though they agree on some essentials, they are vehemently opposed on other points. The upcoming conversation will make up for an interesting continuation of this episode’s content, adding a commentary by William Gillis and Aurora herself to the exchange.

You can find the essays mentioned here:

• Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation by Emmi Bevensee
• The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism by Aurora Apolito
• In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You by Cosma Shalizi on Crooked Timber

This podcast is made possible by support from our listeners on Patreon. Thank you so much for allowing us to continue this project. If you’re not a supporter yet, subscriptions start at $2 per month, and you’ll get access to bonus content, including roundtable episodes, as well as books, zines, stickers, and more from the C4SS online store. If you’re already a supporter, feel free to let us know what kind of content you’d like to see more of, or any other feedback you have for the show!

Facebook is back at it again. In the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville a few years back, and with much pushing from activists, Facebook responded with a wave of bans and censorship of “racial extremists” that was so wide-reaching and simultaneously ineffective that many literal white supremacists were able to continue spouting their bullshit, while anti-racist activists caught bans for making comments about white people. Earlier this month, Facebook banned anything to do with the Boogaloo movement, painting them as violent racists when many of the Boogaloo Facebook groups and pages expressly banned racism and bigotry. While admittedly not always being the most educated or nuanced, these groups and pages largely leaned libertarian and were often filled with memes about yeeting nazis that mirrored some of the spiciest memes from antifa. And now Facebook has banned pages, groups, and individuals associated with antifa, anarchism, QAnon, and militias.

This certainly mirrors the “both sides” bullshit that saw anti-racist activists getting conflated with racists under Facebook’s previous rules. Right-wing militia groups such as the Oathkeepers and QAnon cultists are lumped in with leftist self-defense groups and anarchists, in a similar manner to what Trump himself does. In fact, this also plays right into the Trump administration’s targeting of anarchists and antifascists, which is concerning. Although what’s more concerning in my opinion is the fact that so many anarchists have become so reliant on this particular platform for outreach and organizing when we should know better.

Instead of organizing and communicating via indymedia channels as anarchists used to, or even utilizing alternative social media platforms to a larger extent, we have become reliant on Facebook to a dangerous degree. And I get it, it’s a platform that our family and friends outside our political circles use, thus there is more opportunity to reach people outside of our echo chambers. But maybe it’s time for us all to jump ship. Even those not targeted by these bans should have concerns over Facebook’s data farming operation in general.

Of course the biggest roadblock to getting people to make the switch to another platform such as MeWe, Minds, Mastodon, etc. is that a majority of your social network is not already there. But that was an issue Facebook had during the days of Myspace and eventually overcame. It may take a while for the transition to be to the mass scale we wish it to be but it has to start somewhere.

So instead of fighting to get back on Facebook, take the agorist route and join a different platform while encouraging others in your social circles to do the same. Bring along your family, friends, and political comrades alike. We need a mass movement away from Facebook. We should have never let Zuckerberg have that much power. Let the platform die off as a relic of the past as we pave new paths among the many decentralized social networking sites available to us. Sure, we might have to stretch ourselves across a few to regain the network we had on Facebook but many of us already have multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc. and don’t think about it all that much, so what’s the difference?

So let’s take this opportunity to get the ball rolling a little further down its path and leave Facebook to the dinosaurs.

Di Kelly Wright. Titolo originale:  When Facebook Bans Peaceful Anarchists But Not The Violent State, pubblicato il 22 agosto 2020. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

“Lo stato chiama legge la sua violenza e crimine quella del singolo.” ~ Max Stirner

Il 19 agosto scorso Facebook, cedendo a forti pressioni sociali e politiche, ha annunciato le nuove regole riguardanti “organizzazioni e persone violente”, con particolare attenzione per “gruppi anarchici offline che sostengono la protesta violenta, organizzazioni paramilitari con base negli Usa (tra cui apparentemente gli antifascisti) e QAnon.” Queste drastiche regole fanno seguito ad una campagna durata mesi orchestrata da politici allarmisti statunitensi che accusano “sobillatori esterni” e “anarchici professionisti” di aver istigato le recenti rivolte contro la violenza della polizia.

Il giorno dell’annuncio, gli autori di questo articolo oltre a due colleghi del Center for a Stateless Society hanno subito la sospensione a tempo indefinito degli account. Noi quattro gestivamo una pagina Facebook, chiamata “Leftists for Self Defense and Firearm Freedom”, che sosteneva il diritto al possesso delle armi secondo un’ottica di sinistra. Facebook ha rimosso la pagina e sospeso i nostri account il giorno stesso dell’annuncio della nuova politica. Nessuno di noi ha ricevuto da Facebook comunicazioni riguardanti le ragioni, così che le cause si possono solo supporre.

“Leftists for Self Defense and Firearm Freedom” nacque il 5 novembre 2013 per evidenziare questioni riguardanti il controllo delle armi solitamente trascurate nel discorso politico generale. Le leggi sul possesso delle armi sono applicate dal sistema penale statunitense con i preconcetti e le iniquità strutturali del caso. Così che per effetto di queste leggi gli afroamericani hanno molte più probabilità di finire in galera. Anche quelle proposte solitamente definite “sensate”, come i controlli sui precedenti e le liste nere che limitano l’accesso alle armi, colpiscono soprattutto gli emarginati. Scrive Dean Spade, sostenitore dell’abolizione del carcere: “Quando si parla di violenza armata ignorando la violenza di stato, si finisce spesso per fare proposte che marginalizzano e criminalizzano ulteriormente le persone di colore, i poveri, i disabili, gli immigrati e i giovani.”

Questioni ignorate nel dibattito pubblico sul controllo delle armi. Da un lato vediamo commentatori di centrosinistra che si dicono preoccupati per gli emarginati ma vogliono il controllo delle armi. Dall’altro lato, commentatori di destra che sostengono sì il diritto di possedere armi, ma anche certe forme di violenza di stato che minano tale diritto e il diritto all’autodifesa, come nel caso della guerra alla droga. In quest’ultimo caso, ogni incursione senza mandato diventa un’invasione dello spazio privato che rischia di trasformare una persona armata che difende la propria casa in una vittima o in un imputato di assassinio. Ne è un esempio il caso di Matthew David Stewart, un veterano che soffriva di disturbi post traumatici che rispose con le armi ad un’incursione all’alba dell’antidroga. La polizia era alla ricerca della marijuana che Stewart coltivava per uso medico. Polizia e accusa infangarono Matthew e cercarono di condannarlo per assassinio aggravato. Morì in carcere prima della sentenza, apparentemente suicida. Morì semplicemente per due piantine di marijuana e per aver difeso la sua casa. In un mondo in cui accadono queste cose, il diritto alle armi e all’autodifesa è incerto.

I primi tempi cercavamo di evidenziare quei casi in cui l’autodifesa poteva essere garantita senza armi da fuoco. Chiedevamo il rilascio di CeCe McDonald, una donna transessuale di colore finita in carcere per essersi difesa da un crimine d’odio. Appoggiavamo anche l’operato del Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project, che chiedeva la scarcerazione delle donne arrestate per essersi difese da un compagno violento. Tutti questi esempi dimostrano come rafforzare lo stato carcerario sia spesso in forte contrasto con l’obiettivo femminista di liberare le donne dalla violenza diffusa.

Abbiamo cominciato a pubblicare con rinnovata urgenza sulla scia dell’assassinio da parte della polizia di Philando Castile, l’uomo del Minnesota ucciso davanti alla fidanzata e la figlia per un’arma che portava legalmente. Castile aveva frequentato il corso obbligatorio. Ma, data la sua pelle scura, la legge vedeva le cose in modo diverso, e l’agente Jeronimo Yanez gli ha sparato diverse volte pochi secondi dopo l’incontro. In un caso esemplare di violenza di stato, quell’istituzione suprematista che è la polizia statunitense ha pensato di far fuori sommariamente una persona che esercitava il suo diritto all’autodifesa armata. Il silenzio assordante della destra pro-armi fu un fatto offensivo, e tale rimane, soprattutto dopo l’irruzione senza mandato che ha portato alla morte di Breonna Taylor e la denuncia (poi lasciata cadere) del suo ragazzo per aver sparato in risposta agli agenti in borghese mascherati che avevano fatto irruzione in casa e ucciso la sua ragazza.

Come amministratori della pagina, ci limitavamo a condividere qualche meme e articoli che parlavano del John Brown Gun Club o dei Redneck Revolt. Ricordavamo le persecuzioni razziste contro le Pantere Nere ad opera di chi voleva il controllo delle armi sotto Reagan. Spiegavamo anche come persone importanti del pensiero di sinistra sostenessero il diritto alle armi in quanto necessario alla liberazione della classe lavoratrice. Lo stesso Marx diceva: “Armi e munizioni non dovrebbero mai essere consegnate per nessuna ragione; ogni tentativo di disarmare i lavoratori deve essere impedito, se necessario con la forza.”

Tanto è bastato per cancellare la pagina e disattivare i nostri account a tempo indefinito, senza preavviso e senza aver ricevuto comunicazione della violazione dei termini di servizio. E non siamo stati gli unici. Vittime della polizia dei contenuti sono stati anche gruppi antifascisti come ItsGoingDown e CrimethInc.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1296210507259576324

Facebook ha però avuto l’accortezza egoista di codificare esenzioni alla norma per quanto riguarda la violenza di stato, con scappatoie che si traducono in comode eccezioni per le istituzioni e i loro rappresentanti: “…persone e gruppi non-statali rientranti nella definizione di persone o organizzazioni pericolose saranno eliminati dalla nostra piattaforma.”

Questi sarebbero i segni che indicano un pericolo inaccettabile secondo Facebook:

• Parlare delle origini razziste del controllo delle armi

• Sostenere che minoranze emarginate come donne transessuali o persone di colore debbano armarsi per difendersi dal fascismo che avanza

• Supportare la lotta per la liberazione delle donne ingiustamente incarcerate dallo stato carcerario

• Sostenere il diritto di armarsi dei neri

Mentre questi altri non sono un pericolo, sempre secondo Facebook:

• Arruolare militari sfruttando lo stato di povertà delle persone per poi inviarle a diffondere violenza e brutalità nel mondo

• Polizia di frontiera che si vanta di aver distrutto aiuti umanitari, come l’acqua, per i migranti che attraversano il deserto

• Dipartimenti di polizia che istigano alla violenza contro i manifestanti che esercitano il loro diritto di esprimersi liberamente

https://twitter.com/anarchakelly/status/1296418835709464577

Queste nuove regole rappresentano un oltraggioso inasprimento dello sforzo concertato rivolto a togliere dalla piattaforma, a distruggere le attività decentrate che lottano contro l’autoritarismo. Mettere assieme gruppi di sinistra che sostengono il diritto alle armi con complottisti di estrema destra come QAnon o bande neonaziste violente come i Proud Boys è un atto chiaramente dubbio. Le nuove politiche di Facebook rivelano il fallimento morale di questo “bipartisanismo”. Trattare alla stessa stregua i suprematisti bianchi e i loro oppositori è, nel migliore dei casi, una distorsione del discorso pubblico e, nel peggiore, un modo efficace per mantenere immutato l’attuale suprematismo bianco.

Mentre i sostenitori di sinistra del diritto alle armi venivano banditi da Facebook nel nome della lotta alla disinformazione di QAnon e delle squadracce di destra, il presidente degli Stati Uniti nella sala stampa della Casa Bianca celebrava le virtù di QAnon. Ma la cosa peggiore è forse che il presidente può continuare ad usare liberamente Facebook per sostenere le peggiori violenze di stato come il rimpatrio forzato, il carcere, le bombe.

Questo cambiamento delle regole sui contenuti fa presagire un futuro in cui i giganti dei social saranno costretti a fare da moderatori delle loro mostruose piattaforme. Un futuro reso più probabile dal Congresso che da qualche tempo cerca di minare l’articolo 230 della legge del 1996 sulla moralità nelle comunicazioni che esenta editori come Facebook da responsabilità riguardo il contenuto prodotto dai suoi utenti. Forse le aziende saranno spinte, per ragioni di cautela, ad omettere voci importanti dal discorso pubblico. È improbabile che le organizzazioni antifasciste bandite da Facebook ricevano la stessa attenzione che riceve un commentatore “cancellato” dai palinsesti televisivi o dalle colonne dei giornali per le sue opinioni. La richiesta di maggiori controlli sulla parola porta inevitabilmente al bavaglio per chi ha meno risorse, è vulnerabile o è scomodo.

Ad un primo sguardo, parrebbe che Facebook stia prendendo di mira soltanto i gruppi affiliati con QAnon. In realtà, sta facendo molto di più. Anche anarchici, antidittatoriali, antifascisti e antirazzisti rischiano il bando improvviso senza preavviso e senza spiegazioni. Facebook giustifica il bando dicendo di voler fermare la “violenza”, lasciando però che i sostenitori della violenza di stato usino la piattaforma liberamente.

Mark Zuckerberg cita Max Stirner: “Lo stato chiama legge la sua violenza e crimine quella del singolo”. Ma mentre Stirner condanna lo stato e sta con il singolo, Zuckerberg ne ribalta il senso condannando il singolo e schierandosi con lo stato. Qualunque sia la politica sui contenuti che Facebook sta escogitando, non dobbiamo permettere che questi mostri dei social ci distolgano dal proposito di denunciare la violenza di stato per quello che è.

Possono nascondere la violenza di stato solo finché noi glielo permettiamo.

Sono loro ad essere sulla difensiva.

It’s conventional to start an obituary article with a brief biographical summary, so here it is.

One of David’s pet peeves was being referred to as an anarchist anthropologist, so I’ll say that David Graeber, an anarchist and an anthropologist, died at age 59 Wednesday, September 3rd in Venice of as yet unreported causes. 

He was an Occupy Wall Street activist, a professor at the London School of Economics at the time of his death, and the author of (among other things) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Debt: The First 5000 Years, The Democracy Project, The Utopia of Rules, and Bullshit Jobs.

He leaves behind his wife, journalist/artist Nika Dubrovsky. 

It’s also common in these things to add a personal note, but there’s not a lot to say. We knew each other casually, exchanging a few emails and interacting on Twitter a bit. Aside from that, our main connection was the influence his work had on me.

Debt: The First 5000 Years was my first encounter with his writing. It was — or at least should have been, if they were paying attention — the equivalent of a stick of dynamite thrown into the midst of the right-libertarian community. Capitalist ideology relies on a number of bourgeois nursery fables (to borrow Marx’s term), just-so stories, and robinsonades that frame the origins of major features of capitalist society as spontaneous and natural. Private — i.e. individual, fee-simple — property in land came about through individuals peacefully homesteading it, mixing their labor with it, and separating it from the commons. The overwhelming dominance of production for commodity exchange in the cash nexus has its origin in a natural human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. Money was adopted as a response to the problem, arising from barter, of “double coincidence of wants,” and the convenience of precious metals as a universal commodity. Every one of these myths was posited by classical liberal thinkers in early modern times, a priori, as a sort of “likely story” to explain things in the absence of any real historical data. 

But the remarkable thing is that they continued to be repeated over the ensuing three or four hundred years as enormous amounts of historical and anthropological data poured in, with no effort whatsoever to address the data or reconcile them to it. Not only right-libertarian economists and polemicists, but to a large extent mainstream economists, have continued to repeat most of these right up to the present day. You can still pick up a pdf of any random economics text currently in widespread use in introductory college courses, search for “double coincidence of wants,” and very likely hit pay dirt. In Debt, Graeber drew on that data to show that one myth in particular (that of the origin of money and debt) and to some extent the others tangentially as well, were — not to put too fine a point on it — complete and utter bullshit.

The second book of his I read was The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. In it two themes intersected: Graeber’s personal experience in Occupy as a horizontalist movement, and as a participant in other similarly participatory forms of anarchist politics; and the long history of ordinary people’s practice in democratic self-governance. The latter included a fascinating historical tour of Maroons, pirate utopias, and other groups of people intentionally living outside the reach of state governance. And it was a slap in the face to the harrumphing neoconservative tweed-trash who see “democracy” as a sort of delicate flower growing on an enormous dungheap, a fragile artifact that has only emerged in the rarified conditions of a tiny number of sufficiently advanced societies like fifth century BC Athens, England of 1688-89, and North America from the 1760s on. Rather, Graeber argued,

democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose…one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have an equal say.

In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Graeber examined the bureaucratic culture of the large corporation, the government agency, and other centralized institutions. In the process, he showed that the centralized state and oligopoly corporation, far from being enemies — as in mainstream liberal/progressive and right-libertarian narratives — were just different versions of the same thing, or perhaps different parts of the same thing. In fact capitalism grew up against the background of the bureaucratic state, and is in large part its creation.

I’ve yet to read his latest book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, much to my chagrin. I say to my chagrin not only because I’d like to see how its themes dovetail with those in Utopia of Rules, but because now I’ll never have a chance to tweet a link to my feedback at him and see what he has to say about it. 

Based on what I’ve seen in reviews and excerpts, and Graeber’s own articles covering the same material, it elaborated on our intuitive perception that the highest-paid white collar jobs not only produce little of real value, but actively destroy value. The people who do the necessary work of society (the term “essential worker” emerged in the face of events some time after this book was published) — the people who prepare food, care for the sick and elderly, teach children, process chicken parts or widgets on assembly lines, deal with retail customers, clean the floors, etc. — for the most part are not only badly paid relative to the importance of their work, but suffer abuse and interference from the well-paid people in bullshit jobs.

The bullshit jobs are only “necessary” in the context of a society in which a minority of people has robbed the rest, and sits on top of the piled up loot. A major part of bullshit jobs are either bean-counting jobs that track the wealth of the looters, or gatekeeping jobs that protect absentee title to idle land, empty houses, and other unused assets, and make sure the people doing the work continue to take orders from the people who own the machines they’re working. The rest are the result of an economy based on subsidized waste production, which is necessary to keep overbuilt and inefficiently centralized and capital-intensive industry running.

Although I would guess that Graeber’s anarchism — like that of Pyotr Kropotkin and Colin Ward — is more or less communistic, I include him with those other two figures in my general category of “anarchists without adjectives.” As with Kropotkin and Ward, Graeber’s faith in human creativity and agency, and his fondness for the incredible historical variety of expedients they come up with for relating to one another and cooperatively handling their common affairs, is bigger than any doctrinaire attempt to pigeonhole them into particular economic templates like markets, syndicates, etc.  He was unwilling to let a priori theoretical formulations do violence to the particularity and “is-ness” of history, or on the basis of such formulations to interfere with the ability of ordinary, face-to-face groupings of people on the spot to develop workable arrangements — whatever they may be — among themselves. He was likewise unwilling to let any particular hyphenated variant of anarchism override his affection for the variety and particularity of self-organized, human-scale institutions. In Debt, he wrote:

If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life and, by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start… with the very small things: the everyday details of social existence, the way we treat our friends, enemies, and children — often with gestures so tiny (passing the salt, bumming a cigarette) that we ordinarily never stop to think about them at all. Anthropology has shown us just how different and numerous are the ways in which humans have been known to organize themselves.

Besides his anarchism without adjectives, I’ve found several of Graeber’s other concepts especially helpful. One of them, the real-life democracy of ordinary people all around the world and throughout history, we already considered above.

 Another is “everyday anarchism”:  as Colin Ward showed in Anarchy in Action, rather than being a totalizing system according to which society must be systematically remodeled, anarchism exists all around us right now as a way people interact with one another. “[A]narchism is, already, and has always been, one of the main bases for human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have” (this and the block quoted material immediately below are from “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You”).

The most basic anarchist principle is self-organization: the assumption that human beings do not need to be threatened with prosecution in order to be able to come to reasonable understandings with each other, or to treat each other with dignity and respect….

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails….

…[A]narchism is, already, and has always been, one of the main bases for human interaction. We self-organize and engage in mutual aid all the time. We always have.

Despite Graeber’s respect for the immense variety and particularity of self-organized institutions throughout history, and acceptance of people’s freedom to choose their own arrangements, he nevertheless considers some arrangements to be extremely unlikely choices for any free people, and unlikely to exist on a stable basis anywhere absent violent rule or conquest. As he wrote in The Democracy Project:

History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage, or wage labor, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police.

For the same reason, as he argued in the same book, the ideal society of anarcho-capitalists is unlikely to last long without a state:

I used to frequent Internet newsgroups in the 1990s, which at the time were full of creatures that called themselves “anarcho-capitalists.”… Most spent a good deal of their time condemning left anarchists as proponents of violence. “How can you be for a free society and be against wage labor? If I want to hire someone to pick my tomatoes, how are you going to stop me except through force?” Logically then any attempt to abolish the wage system can only be enforced by some new version of the KGB. One hears such arguments frequently. What one never hears, significantly, is anyone saying “If I want to hire myself out to pick someone else’s tomatoes, how are you going to stop me except through force?” Everyone seems to imagine that in a future stateless society, they will somehow end up members of the employing class. Nobody seems to think they’ll be the tomato pickers. But where, exactly, do they imagine these tomato pickers are going to come from? Here one might employ a little thought experiment: let’s call it the parable of the divided island. Two groups of idealists each claim half of an island. They agree to draw the border in such a way that there are roughly equal resources on each side. One group proceeds to create an economic system where certain members have property, others have none, and those who have none have no social guarantees: they will be left to starve to death unless they seek employment on any terms the wealthy are willing to offer. The other group creates a system where everyone is guaranteed at least the basic means of existence and welcomes all comers. What possible reason would those slated to be the night watchmen, nurses, and bauxite miners on the anarcho-capitalist side of the island have to stay there? The capitalists would be bereft of their labor force in a matter of weeks. As a result, they’d be forced to patrol their own grounds, empty their own bedpans, and operate their own heavy machinery—that is, unless they quickly began offering their workers such an extravagantly good deal that they might as well be living in a socialist utopia after all.

For this and any number of other reasons, I’m sure that in practice any attempt to create a market economy without armies, police, and prisons to back it up will end up looking nothing like capitalism very quickly. In fact I strongly suspect it will soon look very little like what we are used to thinking of as a market. 

The other concept I found influential was “baseline communism”: that is, all human societies, whether ruled by feudal landlords, state bureaucracies, or capitalist corporations, rely on a foundation of libertarian communism as practiced by ordinary people for their existence and continued survival. He writes in Debt:

unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply….

In fact, “communism” is not some magical utopia, and neither does it have anything to do with ownership of the means of production. It is something that exists right now — that exists, to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organized in that way, and it would be difficult to imagine how there could be. All of us act like communists a good deal of the time…. “Communist society”… could never exist. But all social systems, even social systems like capitalism, have been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

And in “The Machinery of Hopelessness”:

…[C]ommunism really just means any situation where people act according to this principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. This is, in fact, the way pretty much everyone acts if they are working together. If, for example, two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say “and what do I get for it?” This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply the principles of communism because they’re the only ones that really work. This is also the reason entire cities and countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters or economic collapse – markets and hierarchical chains of command become luxuries they can’t afford. The more creativity is required and the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be. That’s why even Republican computer engineers trying to develop new software ideas tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring (think production lines) that becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are internally organized according to communist principles.

The degree of such communism — the share of total social and economic activity governed by it — has varied a great deal from society to society, and from time to time. But all prestate societies — whether hunter-gatherer groups or stateless agricultural villages — have had comparatively high degrees of communism, and such communism has persisted even under states and landlords in many places until fairly recent times. What’s more, this state of affairs has been the norm in all cases where it was not violently suppressed by enclosures. We can say with little exaggeration that the default human form of human organization, from the Agricultural Revolution until it was suppressed by class states of one kind or another, was the agrarian village with communal land tenure; families had use-rights to periodically reassigned shares in several different common fields, along with rights of access to common pasture and woodland. This was the open-field village system of Western Europe and England that prevailed until early modern times, the so-called “Asiatic mode” suppressed by Warren Hastings in Bengal, and the Mir that survived in Russia until destroyed by the combination of Stolypin’s “reforms” and Stalin’s forced collectivization.

I should add that, aside from his scholarship, Graeber had a huge practical effect on the Occupy movement. You can learn the details in The Democracy Project, but in brief: in July and August of 2011, Occupy was largely the initial project of Adbusters magazine and a handful of verticalist movements like the Workers World Party; it was envisioned as a conventional demonstration with prefab posters and slogans, and designated leaders, and would in all likelihood have fizzled out after the photo ops and ceremonial arrests. A handful of anarchists who’d witnessed M15 in Spain crystallized around Graeber to create a general assembly, and nudged it into its ultimate horizontalist direction. Absent their intervention — a “for want of a nail” story if there ever was one — Occupy would likely have been a footnote to radical New York politics. Whatever form subsequent movements like Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL, and Antifa took, they would have been unrecognizable.

As an anarchist thinker, David Graeber falls into the same category as a handful of other monumental figures of the past century or so including Kropotkin, Ward, James Scott, and perhaps Murray Bookchin. Note that he accomplished this by age 59, with by rights half or more of his mature intellectual career ahead of him; Scott is still alive at age 83, and the others all died in their 80s. There’s no knowing what his death took from us — only that we’re poorer for it.