Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale pubblicato il 21 dicembre 2021 con il titolo Marx, Conflict and Cooperatives. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Marx e Engels nel Manifesto dicono: “la storia dell’umanità non è che una storia di lotte di classe. Uomini liberi e schiavi, patrizi e plebei, baroni e servi, oppressori ed oppressi, in opposizione costante, hanno condotto una guerra ora aperta e ora dissimulata…” La storia dell’umanità è dunque la storia di un conflitto istituzionale. All’interno del capitalismo, questo conflitto è sostanzialmente un conflitto tra classe capitalista e classe lavoratrice, che nella quotidianità diventa una lotta tra lavoratori e padroni all’interno della struttura aziendale capitalista e, come sottoinsieme di questa relazione di fondo, tra lavoratori di paesi diversi come risultato della delocalizzazione, e tra lavoratori e macchine in conseguenza dell’automazione e dello sviluppo tecnologico. Come dice l’economista marxiano Richard Wolff nel suo libro Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, inseguendo la “massimizzazione dei profitti e un più alto tasso di crescita o una quota più ampia di mercato, … [il capitalista] licenzia lavoratori per sostituirli con macchine, oppure impone tecnologie che espongono il lavoratore a rischi per l’ambiente o la salute ma fanno crescere i profitti, o ancora sposta la produzione all’estero per sfruttare la manodopera a costi più bassi.” Per questo forse elemento comune a tutte le lotte anticapitaliste è l’intento di abolire questi conflitti. Sicuramente è questo l’intento dei movimenti per il lavoro cooperativo, e io qui vorrei delineare brevemente la loro proposta per la soluzione di tali conflitti con un libro prezioso, Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities del gruppo femminista di studi geoeconomici Gibson-Graham, nonché facendo riferimento alla teoria marxista in generale (con una spruzzata di libertarismo di sinistra). L’argomento è molto discusso, ma vale la pena tornare alle sue basi.

In un’azienda capitalista esiste un conflitto costante tra lavoratori e padroni. Questo perché gli interessi sono opposti. I lavoratori mirano a massimizzare i propri interessi con stipendi più alti e più indennità come l’assistenza sanitaria e la maternità. I padroni invece “impostano” l’attività in modo da massimizzare la competitività – conseguenza secondaria del tentativo di massimizzare i profitti e, molto più limitatamente, il problema della conoscenza nelle strutture gerarchiche – abbassando gli stipendi, delocalizzando l’attività e così di seguito.[1] Caratteristica fondamentale di questo conflitto è lo sfruttamento del lavoratore che si esplicita nell’estrazione di plusvalore. Quest’ultimo, come spiega Wolff…

“è il valore extra aggiunto dal lavoratore col suo lavoro – e preso dal datore di lavoro – rispetto al valore pagato con lo stipendio. Per dare dieci dollari l’ora al lavoratore, il datore deve ricevere più di dieci dollari di valore vendibile per ora. Il plusvalore è il guadagno del capitalista al netto dell’input diretto, del costo del lavoro e dei costi fissi necessari a produrre.”

Questo valore extra, data la proprietà privata dei mezzi di produzione, è un furto ai danni del lavoratore. Secondo Wolff, nell’ottica della “critica del plusvalore” questo è l’aspetto centrale del capitalismo, prima ancora dei mercati e dello scambio di merci. Così scrive: “nell’ottica della critica del plusvalore, ciò che definisce primariamente un sistema economico – ad esempio, il capitalismo – non è la proprietà delle risorse produttive o come risorse e prodotti sono distribuiti. L’aspetto chiave è invece l’organizzazione della produzione.” La questione si riflette nell’ingiuria quotidiana dei lavoratori. Come spiega Gibson-Graham con un esempio elementare: “I lavoratori pensavano che… i profitti finissero all’estero o che fossero stati bruciati in speculazioni finanziarie. La vita, il sostentamento dei lavoratori non potevano essere lasciati nelle mani dei padroni e dei dirigenti.” Molti padroni, poi, necessitano di uno staff che li rappresenti. E, cosa importante, i lavoratori non devono andare oltre le capacità basilari, il loro lavoro dev’essere semplice. Secondo Wolff, un’impresa di proprietà dei lavoratori dovrebbe prendere il posto…

“dell’attuale organizzazione produttiva capitalista negli uffici, le fabbriche, nei negozi e in altri luoghi di lavoro delle società moderne. Questo farebbe scomparire lo sfruttamento, ovvero la produzione di plusvalore appropriato e ridistribuito da chi non produce. La struttura classista del capitalismo (datori di lavoro che sfruttano lavoratori salariati) scomparirebbe così come sono scomparse altre precedenti strutture classiste (feudatari che sfruttano i servi nel feudalesimo o padroni che sfruttano schiavi nelle società schiavistiche).”

La soluzione del conflitto verrebbe dalla combinazione degli interessi dei lavoratori con quelli dei padroni. Un lavoratore che è anche padrone dei mezzi di produzione avrebbe interesse a migliorare il proprio tenore di vita mantenendo benefici e paga alta e migliorando l’efficienza produttiva allo stesso tempo. Così si creerebbero le risorse necessarie a far crescere le capacità professionali e l’istruzione dei lavoratori, come nel caso, tanto per citare un esempio riportato da Gibson-Graham, della cooperativa industriale argentina FaSinPat, in cui una parte del plusvalore prodotto va a finanziare una scuola primaria e un istituto superiore per lavoratori.

C’è poi la questione del conflitto tra lavoratori locali e stranieri. Come già ho accennato, si tratta di un sottoinsieme del conflitto tra lavoratori e padroni in quanto prodotto della ricerca del massimo profitto. Gibson-Graham spiega come “certi capitalisti reagiscano alla richiesta di salari più alti da parte dei lavoratori delocalizzando in zone con salari inferiori e orari di lavoro più lunghi.” Questo genere di delocalizzazione genera xenofobia e sciovinismo tra i lavoratori del nord del mondo, che vedono il nemico nei lavoratori stranieri piuttosto che nei capitalisti. Un malinteso che nasconde la verità, che la colpa non è dei lavoratori, che semplicemente cercano di sopravvivere con un minimo di agio, ma dell’imperialismo, che Lenin definì “fase suprema del capitalismo”. Come scrivono Marx e Engels nelManifesto del partito comunista, “la ricerca di una costante espansione dei mercati per i loro prodotti assilla la borghesia ovunque essa si trovi. Essa è costretta così ad entrare, insediarsi, stabilire relazioni ovunque.” Così le tradizionali attività locali scompaiono…

sotto il peso delle nuove industrie, la cui introduzione diventa una questione di vita e di morte per tutte le nazioni civilizzate, sotto il peso di industrie che non usano più le materie prime del luogo, ma le importano dai luoghi più remoti; e i cui prodotti sono consumati non solo sul luogo, ma ai quattro angoli del mondo. Ai vecchi bisogni, soddisfatti dai prodotti locali, si sostituiscono nuovi bisogni, la cui soddisfazione richiede l’importazione di prodotti di luoghi e climi diversi.

Questi concetti formano la base della più ampia teoria imperialista marxista, secondo la quale lo sfruttamento esiste non solo all’interno delle nazioni ma anche tra nazioni. Come scrive Lenin, “Le forze produttive della società e la portata del capitale vanno oltre gli stretti confini dei singoli stati nazione. Da qui gli sforzi delle Grandi Potenze, che cercano di schiavizzare altri popoli, di avere colonie che siano fonte di materie prime e una sfera d’investimento per i capitali.” Certo le cooperative non rappresentano la soluzione di tutti i problemi degli attuali processi coloniali e imperiali, ma, ripeto, se combiniamo gli interessi personali del lavoratore e del proprietario si riducono gli incentivi a spostare la produzione all’estero tagliando i posti di lavoro. Inoltre, con un sistema cooperativistico cresce la possibilità di fare una politica collaborativa piuttosto che concorrenziale tra lavoratori locali e di altri paesi. Come esemplificato dalla cooperativa spagnola Mondragón, che ha spostato parte della produzione all’estero. Come spiega Gibson-Graham, “questa strategia non mette i lavoratori gli uni contro gli altri ma assicura l’impiego di soci e non. La Mondragón punta ad accrescere la partecipazione dei lavoratori nella proprietà e nella gestione delle aziende che fanno parte della sua rete.” Le cooperative di lavoratori/produttori possono anche associarsi ad altre cooperative di consumatori a proprietà diffusa così da formare catene logistiche internazionali che pongano al centro l’uomo e il commercio equo[2].

C’è poi infine il conflitto tra lavoratore e macchina; un conflitto unilaterale in termini di coscienza, certo, ma pur sempre un conflitto, una lotta che in passato ha generato movimenti come quello dei luddisti. Anche questo è un sottoinsieme del conflitto tra lavoratore e padrone. Secondo Gibson-Graham “le macchine danno all’imprenditore capitalista la possibilità di sostituire il lavoratore, abbassare il costo generale della manodopera e aumentare la produzione di plusvalore.” Acutamente, Marx, molto prima dell’avvento dell’automazione, notava…

[s]e quindi l’uso capitalistico del macchinario crea da un lato nuovi potenti motivi di un prolungamento smisurato della giornata lavorativa e rivoluziona il modo stesso di lavorare e anche il carattere del corpo lavorativo sociale in maniera tale da spezzare la resistenza a questa tendenza, dall’altro lato quest’uso produce anche, in parte con la assunzione al capitale di strati di lavoratori in passato inaccessibili, in parte con il disimpegno degli operai soppiantati dalla macchina, una popolazione operaia sovrabbondante, la quale è costretta a lasciarsi dettar legge dal capitale.

E l’aumento della meccanizzazione non solo porta ad un maggiore sfruttamento, in quanto aumenta il plusvalore da estrarre e crea una popolazione superflua, ma mina anche le basi del valore in una società che è lavoro vivente[3]. In un mondo socialista o comunista, essendo la macchina nelle mani del lavoratore, ogni crescita dell’automazione dà la possibilità di accorciare la giornata lavorativa senza produrre una “popolazione operaia sovrabbondante”. Notavo in un articolo precedente come, in un’ottica materialista storica e in risposta alla richiesta di un reddito universale come panacea,

[a]nche se non causa disoccupazione di massa – e a maggior ragione se lo fa – l’automazione inasprirà le vecchie divisioni sociali e ne farà emergere di nuove. Chi può accedere più di altri a queste tecnologie può plasmare meglio economicamente, politicamente, socialmente e legislativamente il mondo a discapito degli altri. È probabile che a tanti verrà impedito l’accesso alla proprietà dalla proprietà intellettuale e altri simili provvedimenti stato-capitalistici. Non importa se c’è un reddito universale di base, perché anche col potere d’acquisto che esso dà la gente deve spendere denaro per acquistare beni fisici all’interno di una società in cui la forza sta nelle mani di un numero sempre più piccolo di capitalisti.

Il primo problema, la crescita dello sfruttamento e della popolazione in eccesso è, almeno in teoria, contrastato dalle cooperative di lavoratori; i lavoratori potrebbero automatizzare grosse porzioni delle attività possedute collettivamente e gestite democraticamente, il che si tradurrebbe in orari di lavoro più corti per tutti invece che licenziamenti. Allo stato attuale le cooperative sono di fatto costrette a competere con le aziende capitaliste in mercati artificialmente delocalizzati, e per questo non possono sfruttare l’automazione per accorciare l’orario di lavoro[4]. Il problema potenzialmente potrebbe essere risolto arginando lo stato, o magari eliminandolo (cosa più facile a dirsi che a farsi), e sempre più persone reclamerebbero ai lavoratori il potere di definire la realtà sociale dei mezzi di produzione al fine di abbattere il capitalismo. Per tornare all’attuale realtà delle cooperative di lavoratori, lo dico per l’ennesima volta, è interesse personale dei suoi soci, in quanto lavoratori, mantenere il livello occupazionale. Parlando della cooperativa Mondragón, Gibson-Graham spiega come “[l]’impiego di macchine che consentono di risparmiare lavoro porta non al licenziamento di lavoratori ma al loro impiego con mansioni diverse in altre cooperative della rete regionale. Alcuni sono anche incentivati a frequentare corsi tecnici per apprendere nuove tecniche produttive. Durante questo tempo, ricevono un salario di mantenimento.” Così nelle cooperative di lavoratori il conflitto tra lavoratore e macchina diventa collaborazione e sintesi.

Molti socialisti, soprattutto di area marxista, sono molto critici verso le cooperative. Famosa la frase del comunista Amadeo Bordiga “[i]l male del capitalismo non è l’azienda, è il fatto che l’azienda abbia un padrone”[5]. Per il resto, basta dare un’occhiata all’ormai defunto r/muhcoops. Le critiche non sono illecite; le cooperative di lavoratori che operano entro uno stato capitalista non sono la salvezza del mondo. L’umanità dovrà muoversi maggiormente verso un modo di produzione cooperativo, decentrato e flessibile che assicuri la sopravvivenza su questo pianeta. Le cooperative possono contribuire. Da notare che anche Marx, ad un certo punto, parlò favorevolmente delle cooperative. Nelle Istruzioni per i delegati del consiglio centrale provvisorio dice: “Riconosciamo il movimento cooperativo come una delle forze trasformatrici della società presente, basata sull’antagonismo delle classi. È suo grande merito mostrare praticamente che il sistema attuale di subordinazione del lavoro al capitale, dispotico e pauperizzatore, può venir soppiantato dal sistema repubblicano e benefico dell‘associazione di produttori liberi ed eguali.” E ne La guerra civile in Francia, riferendosi alla Comune parigina del 1871: “Ma se la produzione sociale non rimane semplice apparenza o finzione, se essa colpisce il sistema capitalistico, se l’unione delle associazioni regola la produzione nazionale secondo un piano comune, lo prende sotto la propria direzione e vuol farla finita con l’anarchia permanente e con le convulsioni che si manifestano periodicamente e che sono la sorte inevitabile della produzione capitalista – che altro sarebbe, signori miei, tutto questo se non il comunismo, il «possibile» comunismo?”[6].

Note

1. Vedi Kevin Carson, “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth.”

2. La mia opinione è che nel lungo termine le catene logistiche internazionali saranno usate soltanto per beni essenziali, e avranno frequenza e lunghezza il più possibile ridotte. Il futuro è locale.

3. Per un’attuale revisione della teoria del valore del lavoro vedi Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.

4. Vedi Kevin Carson, “The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies” e Pandemia: Lo stato cura o provoca?

5. Come dice Kevin Carson, “L’attuale assetto proprietario e organizzativo della produzione nella nostra cosiddetta economia di ‘mercato’ riflette l’intervento coercitivo dello stato precedente ed estraneo al mercato.” E in Organization Theory spiega come – tramite legislazioni particolari, incentivi (soprattutto alle infrastrutture dei trasporti e delle comunicazioni), proprietà intellettuali e dazi doganali – il governo statunitense abbia cementato il potere aziendale capitalista facendone la struttura economica predefinita; un fenomeno che avrebbe contribuito all’attuale capitalismo statalista. Senza l’intervento continuo dello stato, è il ragionamento di Anna Morgenstern, “dati i costi crescenti della protezione della proprietà [senza la protezione della polizia e dei militari], si arriva ad un punto critico oltre il quale accumulare capitale diventa economicamente sconveniente.” E poi: “senza un sistema bancario e finanziario protetto dallo stato, accumulare alti profitti indefinitamente sarebbe praticamente impossibile.” E: “senza la concentrazione di capitali la schiavitù salariale è impossibile.” E ancora Gary Elkin spiega come, in un mondo senza monopolio bancario e finanziario, “se l’accesso al credito mutuo dovesse far crescere il potere negoziale dei lavoratori fino al punto predetto [da Benjamin Tucker], potrebbero 1) chiedere ed ottenere la democrazia sul posto di lavoro, e 2) mettere assieme il proprio credito per acquisire l’azienda e gestirla collettivamente. Così eliminerebbero le strutture piramidali e priverebbero i padroni della possibilità di attribuire a se stessi grosse paghe.” Si potrebbe scrivere ancora molto, molto, molto di più, ma questo basta come nota.

6. Non trovo la fonte originale della citazione ma mi è capitato di leggerla in numerose occasioni.

7. Per una riflessione più approfondita sulla relazione tra marxismo e movimento cooperativo vedi: David Prychitko, Marxism and Workers’ Self-Management: The Essential Tension.

De Eric Fleischmann. Original: Laurance Labadie’s “Letter to Mother Earth”, del 17 de enero de 2022. Traducción de Camila Figueroa.

Carta a la Madre Tierra

Creyendo que el intento de hacer del tiempo de trabajo un estándar para una unidad monetaria es una falacia y está destinado a fracasar en la práctica, presento algunas preguntas y observaciones. ¿De quién es el trabajo que debe usarse como estándar, del hombre eficiente o del ineficiente? Tomemos un producto cualquiera, por ejemplo, unos zapatos. Juan produce cinco pares al día, Santiago produce diez. ¿Es posible que Juan, en un mercado libre, pueda obtener por sus zapatos un precio dos veces mayor que el de Santiago? Es absurdo. En un mercado competitivo, Juan se vería obligado a cerrar el negocio si cobrara un precio dos veces mayor que el de Santiago. Si cobra el mismo precio, lo que debe hacer para seguir en el negocio, ¿qué pasa con la unidad de tiempo de trabajo? Desaparece.

¿Qué es un estándar de valor? Es un producto en función del cual se mide el tipo de cambio de otros productos. Es cierto que el trabajo, bajo la forma de la utilidad del obstáculo objetivo superado, cuyo valor se determina en un mercado competitivo, entra como un elemento que determina el valor de cambio del producto y en un mercado de libre competencia tiende a convertirse en todo el factor. Pero los productos deben ser útiles para ser intercambiables, y la utilidad está determinada por el deseo. El valor del trabajo se determina por su resultado, no el resultado por la cantidad de trabajo en tiempo.

Lo cierto es que el deseo de un producto puede medir la utilidad y, por tanto, el valor del trabajo invertido en su elaboración, pero la cantidad de trabajo no puede, a la inversa, medir el valor de un producto. Porque, ¿qué se puede decir del trabajo productivo y del trabajo desperdiciado? ¿Cómo se pueden diferenciar? Sin duda, hay que ver que en un sistema de libre competencia la ineficiencia y el despilfarro se eliminan automáticamente. Esto beneficia a toda la sociedad. Por eso un sistema de libre competencia es, en realidad y en términos generales, la condición más automáticamente cooperativa posible. Y por eso, afortunadamente, esa libertad resuelve el problema económico. La eficiencia desplaza a la ineficiencia, poniendo al hombre adecuado en el lugar adecuado y remunerando a cada uno según el servicio que presta a la sociedad.

El problema de las condiciones económicas es que no son de libre competencia y el Estado es la institución que mantiene este sistema de robo. Con todos los privilegios garantizados y las desventajas impuestas a los diferentes productores, sucede que algunos pueden obtener más de lo que les corresponde de la riqueza producida. Las condiciones necesarias para una sociedad de libre competencia que los anarquistas desean, la igualdad de oportunidades, está muy lejos de realizarse hoy en día. Por eso luchan tan valientemente por instruir a la gente en los beneficios económicos de la libertad.

Aunque afirmamos que la libertad resuelve todos los problemas sociales solucionables, ya sea en la educación, el sexo, la literatura, el arte, la delincuencia, las creencias religiosas o lo que sea, hacemos hincapié en el campo económico, ya que éste, se cree, es la clave de todos los demás. Es lamentable que tantos supuestos radicales (hombres que van a la raíz de las cosas) no entiendan los procesos económicos, especialmente tal como existirían bajo la libertad. En mi opinión, lo que hace esto es, no sólo las perversiones intencionales hechas por los economistas de los libros de texto, sino también los estúpidos errores cometidos por Karl Marx en su, creo, honesto intento de luchar por la causa de la clase obrera.

En cuanto al problema del dinero, todo lo que los anarquistas desean es que cualquiera o cualquier combinación pueda entrar en el negocio de proporcionar dinero o asegurar el crédito. Para el pensador superficial, especialmente el de mentalidad autoritaria como los socialistas o comunistas, esto parecería el verdadero retorno al caos. Pero ya veremos cómo le va al dinero fraudulento o inseguro cuando exista la libre competencia bancaria, y qué será del fenómeno del interés. Lo más probable es que ocurra ha sido demostrado hábilmente por Proudhon, Wm. B. Greene y otros.

Pero es bastante dudoso que un intento de adoptar directamente una unidad de valor tiempo-trabajo tenga algún éxito.

Laurance Labadie

Comentario – Eric Fleischmann:

Esta última adición al Proyecto de Archivo de Laurance Labadie fue enviada primero como una carta a la versión de John G. Scott y Jo Ann Wheeler de Mother Earth, impresa en un número de 1933, y luego finalmente encontró su camino a la Colección Joseph A. Labadie de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Michigan. Siendo el último verdadero anarquista tuckerita, Labadie se erige como el heredero natural de las ideas de Josiah Warren, quien, en el siglo XIX, abrió su “Tienda del Tiempo” experimental en Cincinnati, Ohio. En dicha tienda, como describe William Bailie, la compensación estaba “determinada por el principio del intercambio igualitario de trabajo, medido por el tiempo ocupado, e intercambiado hora por hora con otros tipos de trabajo”. Esto sentó las bases para que Edgar S. Cahn iniciara en los años 90 el movimiento de los bancos de tiempo, que hasta entonces había permanecido en gran medida inactivo, salvo en el ámbito teórico del pensamiento mutualista y en pequeños experimentos a lo largo de la Gran Depresión. Lo más probable es que Labadie responda a lo primero -como en el caso de Warren-.

Como alguien que ha trabajado para un banco de tiempo, tengo que discrepar en última instancia con la evaluación de Labadie sobre las monedas basadas en el tiempo, pero esto no trata de mí, así que permítanme señalar la interesante anticipación de las críticas a los bancos de tiempo a finales del siglo XX, principalmente la del economista del MIT Frank Fisher. En los años 80, Fisher argumentó que, dado que los precios de las monedas basadas en el tiempo son fijados por el propio banco de tiempo, éste es susceptible de sufrir los mismos problemas esenciales de cálculo e incentivos inherentes a una economía de planificación centralizada [1]. Esto se acerca relativamente al siguiente punto de Labadie: “Tomemos un producto cualquiera, por ejemplo, unos zapatos. Juan produce cinco pares al día, Santiago produce diez. ¿Es posible que Juan, en un mercado libre, pueda obtener por sus zapatos un precio dos veces mayor que el de Santiago? Es absurdo”. Tanto para Labadie como para Fisher, las monedas basadas en el tiempo son inadecuadas en su función como mecanismos de distribución de información a través del precio.

Pero Labadie sostiene que, independientemente de sus problemas, una moneda basada en el tiempo ni siquiera es necesaria. Él -heredando la teoría del valor del trabajo de Benjamin Tucker y Pierre-Joseph Proudhon y anticipando su reconstrucción contemporánea por Kevin Carson- sostiene que “concediendo la libre competencia, es decir, el acceso libre e igualitario a los medios de producción, a las materias primas y a un mercado sin restricciones, el precio de todos los artículos siempre tenderá a medirse por el esfuerzo necesario para su producción”. En otras palabras, el trabajo como factor de medición del valor se volverá predominante”. Básicamente: si las mercancías ya caen al coste del trabajo, entonces la moneda utilizada para valorarlas ya está midiendo necesariamente por el trabajo, sólo que no por el tiempo de trabajo.

Nota

1. Véase Cahn’s No More Throw-Away People: El imperativo de la coproducción.

One of the central claims of capitalism is that it is the best system to bring supply and demand together; when people need a good or service, the capitalist market will provide. However, the reality of the situation can be quite the opposite. An excellent example of this—from my perspective as a lay person whose experience with the pharmaceutical industry is one of a consumer for mental health purposes—is access to important medication such as EpiPens and HIV treatment in the United States. The former averages around $700 per pack of two auto-injectors and the latter, depending on its type and whether it is brand name or generic, can reach up to over $4,000 per 30-60 tablets or capsules; and more generally, according to Andrew W. Mulcahy, medications are 2.56 times more expensive in the United States than in 32 other countries. One could arguably trace the problem to the corporate business structure or the universalization of the profit motive, but more directly the problem is one of corporate-state scheming through stringent intellectual property laws. These laws keep genuine competition—supposedly a main selling point of capitalism—from taking place in the market by granting exclusive manufacturing rights to specific entities—usually massive corporations but sometimes individual scumbags like Martin Shkreli. These entities can then drive the prices of medication to truly ridicouous levels. And in the context of insulin in particular, this price manipulation is so extreme that Lucas Kunce asserts that “[t]he cost of insulin isn’t determined by supply and demand. It’s really just 3 companies setting a price based on how many deaths and amputations the market will bear until people start rioting.”

This is a problem that has the potential to affect all human beings, but, as with many socio-economic problems, it hits the working class—and particularly its [queer and] BIPOC members and those with disabilities—the hardest. This is obviously in part because of how expensive the medication is, but also because people of lower class backgrounds do not have access to high-standard housing, healthy food choices, low-pollution environments, etc. All of these can both create and accentuate health problems that require the aforementioned medications. And capitalists only care enough about workers to help them be skilled enough and stay alive long enough to produce and reproduce, giving thought to their health and medical needs only at a whim or by minimal, loophole-filled legal mandates. As Karl Marx writes, wages are simply “the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer” plus “the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones.” But even putting aside (true) rhetoric about class, capitalism, and such, the simple problem of the matter is that there are people who need medication and that medication exists, but for abstract reasons invented by people in power the individuals in need cannot gain access to that medication with ease. 

The obvious solution is to simply eliminate the entire institution of IP, opening the way to, as Laurance Labadie writes, “free competition, that is, free and equal access to the means of production, to the raw materials, and to an unrestricted market, [so that] the price of all articles will always tend to be measured by the effort necessary for their production. In other words, labor as a factor in measuring value will become predominant.”And—having eliminated all state-sanctioned monopolies, IP and beyond—not only would medication be massively more affordable but, according to Kevin Carson…

licensing cartels would no longer be a source of increased costs or artificial scarcity rents. [Therefore, t]here would be far more freedom and flexibility in the range of professional services and training available. Some . . . neighborhood cooperative clinics might prefer to keep a fully trained physician on joint retainer with other clinics, with primary care provided by a mid-level clinician.

Or imagine an American counterpart of the Chinese “barefoot doctor,” trained to set most fractures and deal with other common traumas, perform an array of basic tests, and treat most ordinary infectious diseases. He might be able [to] listen to your symptoms and listen to your lungs, do a sputum culture, and give you a run of Zithro for your pneumonia, without having to refer you any further. And his training would also include identifying situations clearly beyond his competence that required the expertise of a nurse practitioner or physician.

But barring this effective and far-reaching but rather (at least for the meantime) improbable solution, another extrasystemic tactic is available: the open access publishing of DIY ways to produce life-saving medication by way of the Internet—essentially liberating the information from the private-corporate sphere into the digital commons. 

This is not an original concept as it originates in the work of Professor Michael Lauer and his group Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, whose goal is to generate open access means for anyone with access to a computer, basic chemistry technology, and a 3D printer to synthesize medicine. These include such things as instructions for building an “Apothecary Microlab” and DIY EpiPens as well as 3D printer blueprints for homemade chemical reactors. This essential idea has been taken up by the Open Insulin Foundation, who…

are creating an open source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open source alternatives to production. [They] are developing organisms and protocols to produce rapid acting (lispro) and long acting (glargine) insulin. Additionally, [they] are working on developing open hardware equivalents to proprietary production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are developing plans for local, small-scale manufacturing pilots.

In the context of this open access availability, Sebastian A. Stern writes, “Do-It-Yourself scientists working in hackerspaces are positioned to make significant contributions with low overhead and little formal training (becoming necessary and valuable apprenticeship sites as the current higher education system deteriorates). The state has yet to heavily clamp down, but, because such freedom threatens the status quo, we can expect intervention to intensify.”

This type of strategy completely rejects the use of the state and its organs to try to correct the problem from within the system. And this makes sense! The state capitalist system is the central cause of artificial barriers to medicine, and as such solutions sought through the state follow the logic touted by Robert LeFevre that “[g]overnment is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” And the process by which state-based solutions like price ceilings are being proposed, such as for insulin under Biden’s Build Back Better plan, have proved again and again to be both convoluted and seriously drawn-out; downsides quite serious for a problem where lives are on the line. Karena Yan also points out that Colorado’s “$100 cap for a 30-day of supply” has…

revealed a few loopholes. Some health plans fell into an exemption in the legislation, leaving the people on those health plans ineligible for the insulin price cap when purchasing their monthly insulin. Additionally, instead of offering a flat $100 maximum on monthly insulin prescriptions, the current legislation allows insurers to charge $100 per prescription per month, which translates to $200 for those who take both basal and mealtime insulin or two other insulins, such as short-acting and long-acting. 

And while the FDA will come cracking down on open access DIY pharmacology eventually, eluding the state apparatus for as long as possible is ideal. Milton Friedman points out that “[t]he FDA has done enormous harm to the health of the American public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process” [1]. Ryan Calhoun even accounts of the 2014 seizure of “19,618 parcels of ‘unapproved’ prescription medication. More plainly, the FDA stole people’s medication and denied them any reasonable manner of attaining it again.” And David D’Amato makes a compelling argument that “[v]oluntary membership associations, ratings and review services, and noncompulsory, competing accreditors are more than capable of furnishing the information that consumers want and need to make safe, smart decisions.”

However, there are, rather obviously, serious practical problems to this praxis. While sharing information about DIY pharmacology is not illegal and, as Grants Birmingham writes for Time, the Open Insulin “project seems to be in a regulatory safe space, but that may change as it gets closer to making actual medicine.” And, of course, “if [Open Insulin] does reach a production phase, [it] would have to conform to Good Manufacturing Practice, the FDA rules for factories that make medicine, food, cosmetics and medical devices. And because the group plans to share its insulin-production framework online, crossing state lines, there may be other legal issues on the horizon.” Then there is the immediate danger of throwing together cocktails of homemade medication. For example, pseudoscience debunker Yvette d’Entremont is firm in her opinion that “there are so many things that could go wrong in constructing [the DIY EpiPen]. It seems like such a bad idea.” And, further, “[i]t’s all fun and games until your product gets contaminated and you get a giant abscess in your muscle.” I know I would be very hesitant to try something like this at this stage of development. Furthermore, any proposal regarding the liberation of medication in the U.S. must be considered within the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic—where people are spreading vaccine misinformation en masse and making ‘independently researched’ and completely stupid decisions to take horse dewormer as treatment—as well as the long-standing opioid crisis [2]. So while with the decay and eventual collapse of state capitalism, this may certainly become the manner in which essential medications are made available through the aforementioned neighborhood cooperative clinics and North American barefoot doctors at the price of their necessarily low cost of production, for now, I–someone who, it must be made clear, is neither a scientist nor medical professional–would have to agree with the CEO of DIY genetic engineering company The Odin Josiah Zayner, who calls the work done by Four Thieves Vinegar “proof of concept stuff . . . usually the first step in innovation.”

Due to these serious problems, one might be inclined to focus on more respectable but still decentralized solutions available in the form of healthcare insurance cooperatives, fraternal benefit societies (hopefully to be raised back up to their former glory), healthcare sharing ministries, free medical clinics (in the style of the Black Panther Party), pharmaceutical purchasing cooperatives (for lay people not just pharmacies), etc. Logan Glitterbomb writes that…

[c]reating, supporting, or volunteering at [the aforementioned] free clinics, cooperative clinics, and grassroots union-run facilities are great ways to increase access to medical care for low-income individuals. Having these facilities also promote and focus on preventative care, rather than treatment, can also cut down cost and increase public health in the long term. The Ithaca Health Alliance was created by the same minds behind the labor time-based alternative currency known as, [Ithaca] Hours. It is a wonderful example of a community-based healthcare cooperative that is right in line with anarchist values and tactics. Their network of over 150 local healthcare providers offer a 5-10% discount to all IHA members. The IHA also runs the Ithaca Free Clinic, a free community clinic staffed by volunteer physicians, herbalists, acupuncturists, and more. The Ithaca Health Fund, which offers emergency medical grants to low-income patients, also provides grants to other community-based health projects in the area, all funded through donations.

Projects such as these present the possibility of creating a dual power healthcare infrastructure. But setting aside the critiques of open access DIY pharmacology presented above, a main advantage of this strategy is that it doesn’t just give people the things they need to live comfortably or live at all, it also attacks the central cause of artificially high medication costs (IP) and—as would come by any placement of medication in the information commons—decentralizes medical knowledge. The contemporary medical system—as opposed to its non-patriarchal predecessors—is oriented towards a small group of professional, highly-educated elites [3]. Though it is important to have experts and specialists (as the ignorance of large swaths of the U.S. public during the present pandemic has made clear), there is no good reason for the level of totalizing hyper-specialization and stringent regulation—public and private—that only gives a small elite within highly specific institutional frameworks access to such important knowledge.

But if the future is to be decentralized, the liberation of medication goes deeper than 3D printers and DIY chemistry. It means shifting toward antiauthoritarian community practices of health. As Simon the Simpler writes, 

A society of people who are responsible for their own health and able to gather or grow their own medicines is a hard society to rule. These days we are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care and medical specialization: the secret society of the doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the corporate decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless greed and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our hearts or even envision a world without such oppression [4].

And so, through a combination of decentralized medical technology and a general motion toward these kind of health practices, perhaps the liberation of medication is on the horizon.

1. I cannot find the original source of this quote.
2. Not much can be said that has not already been said about how the opioid crisis is not the product of some non-existent free market but of corporatism; and a properly libertarian perspective on COVID-19 can be found in Carson’s “Pandemics: The State As Cure or Cause?” and Andrew Kemle’s “Libertarianism vs Psychopathic Dumbfuckery.”
3. See Barbara Ehrenreich’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers.
4. This is not even to delve into the biopolitics of modern medicine as theorized by Michel Focuault; a topic which could fill an entire other article.

Money and Politics

Money, especially credit money, is undoubtedly one of the greatest of cooperative discoveries. Without it no great specialization of labor seems possible, except under an all-inclusive state control of industry, and even here something of its nature would be necessary to maintain a check of and on consumption

Money is inconceivable without at the same time thinking in terms of a standard of value, and, surely, a basis of issue. To say that it is a “pernicious delusion that there must be something in back of money” is to utter an absurdity. Money, being a claim on wealth, must be based on something more substantial than mere promises in order to be sound, stable, or trustworthy. And this something is tangible wealth, i.e., anything of value which is not liable to quick and severe depreciation.

It is also as absurd to think that under a really sane monetary system hoarding is an evil causing hard times as to say that a man who has saved for a rainy day will suffer for it. Hoarding being merely pos[t]poned consumption, there is no warrant in reason in believing that it can fundamentally change either the production or distribution of wealth. When it is understood that the natural limit of credit money is the amount of wealth on which it is based, it is an obvious mistake to think that hoarding can curtail the amount of needed currency as long as there is any unmonetized wealth.

Another “pernicious delusion” is that the “proper increase or withdrawal of currency” can affect its value or “stabilize” it. Money is a promise to pay. If Smith has 1000 bushels of wheat and issues 100 promises each for 1 bushel against it, how can it affect the value of those promises should he issue 100 more? The value can only decrease if he over-issues, i.e., when there is not “something back of (his) money.” “Unstability” is a characteristic of a faulty monetary system.

After all, what is the money problem? It is to furnish a sound medium of exchange at a low cost. Interest has been too often proved to be an artificial phenomenon and the main cause of exploitation. It may be caused by two things, an insufficiency of money or the control of its issue in few hands. Today it is caused by both, but principally the latter. The actual labor cost of banking is probably less than one-half of one percent. All charges over this is pure interest, in other words robbery and swindle.

As far as we know, gold, more than anything else, possesses the ideal qualities of a standard of value. It is comparatively stable in value, useful, durable, easily recognizable, uniform in quality, can be subdivided without impairing its value, and has comparatively great value in small quantities. But it makes a very poor basis of issue measured in terms of gold but should have an equal opportunity with gold to serve as a basis for the issue of money.

Today we have the spectacle of those privileged individuals, the owners of gold, thru the Federal Reserve System receiving interest from 8 to 15 times their original capital. When it is understood that money interest is the main cause of business profits, the enormity of this swindle is manifest. It is vital in understanding economic processes to differentiate between the industrial and financial fields. The financial sphere is almost pure leachery. Banking interests are inevitably gobbling up and gaining control of industry.

Commentary – Eric Fleischmann:

This piece, archived in the University of Michigan Library’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, was originally written for the second anarchist journal named Mother Earth and, in 1933, published therein by John G. Scott and Jo Ann Wheeler. This is one of seemingly hundreds of pieces that Labadie wrote on the subject of money. Chord—the anonymous author found in Anarcho-Pessimism—writes that “[w]ith typical disregard for popular tastes or fashion, Labadie conceived the basic outline of his conspiratorial concept of money in the 1930’s, with its implication that the single reform that could bring most leverage into the service of individualism and freedom would be the separation of money and state!” And in this commentary for the Laurance Labadie Archival Project, I would like to discuss first his theory of credit and then his relationship with the Federal Reserve System. 

For Labadie, “the natural limit of credit money is the amount of wealth on which it is based” and as such “[m]oney, being a claim on wealth, must be based on something more substantial than mere promises in order to be sound, stable, or trustworthy. And this something is tangible wealth, i.e., anything of value which is not liable to quick and severe depreciation.” This stands in contrast to Kevin Carson’s understanding of credit in The Desktop Regulatory State, where he discusses the idea of a mutual credit-clearing system in which businesses “spend money into existence by incurring debits for the purchase of goods within the system, and then earning credits to offset the debits by selling their own services within the system. The currency functions as a sort of IOU by which a participant monetizes the value of her future production.” Comparing these two mutualistic considerations of credit leads to the observation that: the former holds credit up as primarily a tool of exchange through ‘stock’ ownership, whereas the latter sees credit as first and foremost a mechanism for ‘flows’ of goods and services. Whose model of credit is correct? Perhaps only a truly free[d] market will tell.

But following this belief in decentralized credit money, Labadie is necessarily opposed to central banking such as the FRS. And opposition to the Fed is a mainstay of North American libertarian politics, with the Libertarian Party platform consistently including “the abolition of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Banking System, and all similar interventions.” However, Labadie’s critique of “those privileged individuals, the owners of gold, thru the Federal Reserve System receiving interest from 8 to 15 times their original capital” comes almost 40 years before David Nolan founded the Libertarian Party in response to Nixon’s end of the partial gold standard that began the same year Labadie wrote this piece. In fact, Labadie writes this piece around 20 years before Dean Russell proposed that classical liberals abandon the public title of liberal and argued that “those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own . . . the good and honorable word ‘libertarian.’” Having been born 15 years before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 set the U.S. on the seemingly permanent course toward contemporary centralized banking, Labadie experienced first hand the destruction that such a system wrought, especially during the Great Depression. This gives special credence to the perspectives he presents and a greater context to reading analyses such as these for contemporary libertarians on both the right and the left.

Over the last several weeks, it has been difficult to ignore the whining that has been going on throughout much of the so-called “online left” — and even some in the mainstream press — over the utter collapse of the Build Back Better bill, mostly due to opposition to said bill by extremely conservative Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. While it is entirely true that Manchin and Sinema are morally reprehensible characters who are irredeemably corrupt puppets of corporate America, it is not true to say the bill they very well may have killed was anything to write home about. The bill is a watered-down hodgepodge of policies which progressives assume will help Americans and their families get back on their feet after suffering for over two years due to the economic catastrophe brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are multiple problems with this premise. First, while aid from the state can certainly be helpful as a temporary means of providing a financial cushion during difficult times, it doesn’t solve the underlying issue of workers being exploited to the point where they are unable to support themselves or their families. The problem isn’t only about money. It’s also about capitalist exploitation, and there is nothing in Build Back Better designed to address that because the state, which is designed to protect the owners of private capital, is not interested in altering the capitalist status quo. 

The second problem, as alluded to above, lies in the bill itself and in how much it has been watered down by both Democrats and Republicans. The spending in the bill, as of this moment, totals less than $2 trillion. According to Politico, the original Build Back Better Act was supposed to cost $3.5 trillion (after the first proposal of $6 trillion was rejected). Vox reports that many of the provisions in the bill will expire after a short time. For instance, the expanded child care provision will expire after 3 years, and the expanded preschool program, which was originally supposed to be universal, is set to expire in 2028. 

An additional problem concerns the bill’s tax policy. According to Vox, while the bill indeed raises corporate taxes, it also cuts taxes primarily for wealthy people in blue states. To add insult to injury, the bill contains a tax on e-cigarettes, which would clearly have a negative impact on low-income smokers. This bill accomplishes little more than rewarding wealthy liberals and punishing everyone else in the country via tax increases and temporary programs disguised as a pathetic expansion of America’s already meager “safety net.” So-called progressives can mourn what looks to be the inevitable death of the Build Back Better Act, but anarchists should not shed a single tear. 

 We cannot rely on corporate-backed bureaucrats to come to our aid, even in stressful times like the COVID-19 pandemic. The American government, particularly at the federal level, has consistently shown incompetence and indifference throughout this ongoing crisis. As a result, many Americans from all political persuasions are hesitant to trust the government. According to a Pew Research poll published in May 2021, only 2% of Americans say they “just about always” trust them, and 22% say they trust them “most of the time.” The poll also shows that trust in the government is at an all-time low.

People are tired of relying on empty promises and double standards from their leaders. It’s time to act for ourselves. We don’t have much left to lose. Through decentralized cooperation and mutual aid organizations, we can find a way to survive and flourish on our own. We should not rely on the government or corporations to rebuild and recover from the pandemic. Instead, why not use it as a springboard for a new movement free of government intervention and controlled completely by the people? Unemployment has been a popular subject of discussion as of late. Unemployed people could use this opportunity to either form worker co-operatives or figure out what their own dreams and talents are and then manage themselves. 

The COVID era has been a trying time for everyone and has undeniably brought a lot of fear and uncertainty into a world already steeped in chaos and corruption. The good news is there is still time to reverse course and change society for the good of everyone. Do not mourn the death of the Build Back Better Act. It’s time to “build back” ourselves. 

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale: Is the Market to Blame for Current Supply Chain Problems? del primo gennaio 2021. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

È dal picco della pandemia ad oggi (e forse oltre, data la comparsa improvvisa di Omicron) che noi, gli Stati Uniti in particolare, vediamo un imponente sconvolgimento delle catene logistiche. A chi chiede “perché?” si risponde ovviamente (e correttamente) perché il lavoro è alla base della società, e se il lavoro, soprattutto quello che fa muovere le merci, va in coma a causa di un orribile pandemia e subisce le angherie di spietati capitalisti e politici idioti, ecco che tutta l’economia subisce un forte rallentamento. Kim Moody, in un eccellente articolo dal titolo “The Supply Chain Disruption Arrives ‘Just in Time”, spiega come “La scarsità di camionisti, manutentori stradali, magazzinieri e altri elementi della catena logistica porti alla congestione dei porti, con navi cariche ferme e magazzini strapieni, e poi ritardi, scaffali vuoti e prezzi in salita.” Più in particolare, Moody punta il dito contro i problemi strutturali delle catene logistiche rappresentati dal modello just-in-time:

ideato da Taiichi Ohno, tecnico della Toyota Motors negli anni Cinquanta… il just-in-time [era] un modo per incrementare i profitti eliminando gli “sprechi”, tagliando scorte, manodopera e minuti di lavoro. Invece di impiegare tempo, fatica e denaro immagazzinando scorte lungo la catena di montaggio o in un magazzino (come le industrie facevano da decenni), l’idea di Ohno era che i fornitori avrebbero dovuto fornire i pezzi solo quando questi servivano, eliminando così le scorte.

Adottato in occidente dall’industria automobilistica negli anni Ottanta, il sistema è diventato un elemento caratteristico della globalizzazione, così che oggi quantità enormi di prodotti che viaggiano per mare e complesse catene logistiche sono la norma. Questo ha reso molto più fragile l’economia globale. Ancora Moody:

Più velocità significa più rischi. Inondazioni, blackout, piccoli errori informatici, strade dissestate, dispute sindacali o, come adesso, pandemie e problemi commerciali: qualunque cosa può bloccare il sistema just-in-time perché non tollera rallentamenti. Uno stoccaggio insufficiente può aumentare il rischio di blocco, mentre al contrario la velocità crea accumuli a monte o a valle della catena logistica, creando effetti a cascata o a valanga.

Il modello in generale va contro ogni norma preventiva. Nel video Wolff Responds: Lessons Learned from Corona Pandemic, Richard Wolff spiega come l’attuale capitalismo scambi il profitto a breve termine per efficienza, il che spinge l’industria a non produrre, non avere scorte, non organizzarsi in vista di eventi disastrosi oggi diventati più frequenti, come la pandemia ma anche l’influenza del 1918 o la Sars. Kevin Carson, nel suo Pandemia, lo Stato Cura o Provoca?, elenca le misure precauzionali: “riportare la produzione a livello locale, passare da un sistema salariale ai beni comuni gestiti secondo i principi dell’economia sociale, mettere su reti di mutuo soccorso per condividere rischi e costi. Serve un’economia meno connessa, meno roba che viaggia per migliaia di chilometri, meno persone che prendono l’aereo ogni giorno; un mondo in cui chi svolge un lavoro non indispensabile può stare a casa e assentarsi senza chiedere il permesso a un capo e senza rischiare di finire sulla strada.”

Tornando alla crisi, cito William I. Robinson il quale nota come…

[d]ietro il blocco delle catene logistiche c’è la questione più ampia della globalizzazione capitalista, che in questi ultimi decenni ha comportato l’inserimento di ogni nazione in un sistema produttivo, finanziario e di servizi globalmente integrato. Questo sistema è caratterizzato da frammentazione e decentramento della produzione industriale, e da processi distributivi divisi in un gran numero di fasi intermedie geograficamente distribuite nel globo.

La nota fa da complemento all’osservazione, fatta da Marx e Engels nel Manifesto, secondo cui “la necessità di ampliare costantemente il mercato dei propri prodotti assilla la borghesia in ogni angolo del pianeta. La costringe ad entrare, insediarsi, stabilire relazioni ovunque.” Il quadro di riferimento è stato impostato dai processi imperialistici di oggi e del passato, così come dal modo in cui si è imposta la militarizzazione globale, ma questi sono aspetti extra-economici del capitalismo basati, sostanzialmente, sull’uso diretto della violenza. Si critica ampiamente (e giustamente) anche questo, ma per tanti a sinistra il presunto colpevole è sempre il mercato. Moody punta il dito contro “decenni  di deregolamentazioni, privatizzazioni e culto del mercato” che avrebbero “indebolito la società lasciandola in balia delle forze scatenate del just-in-time e privandola degli strumenti politici con cui domare la bestia. Anche l’indebolimento dei sindacati e delle organizzazioni cooperative hanno contribuito a indebolire ciò che fa muovere le catene logistiche, ovvero l’ambiente di lavoro, che sia una fabbrica, un magazzino, un camion o un treno, un porto, lo schermo di un computer, un negozio.” Le critiche al mercato, accusato di essere il colpevole dei problemi legati al covid, sono argomento comune dal centrosinistra alla sinistra; con titoli come: “La pandemia dimostra il fallimento del libero mercato”, “Il papa: il capitalismo di mercato fallisce nella pandemia” e “Capitalismo e covid: perché occorre un’economia pianificata” Viene da chiedersi, soprattutto riguardo i problemi delle catene logistiche: ma tra tutti gli aspetti del capitalismo, la colpa è solo del mercato?

Secondo Gary Chartier, “il ‘capitalismo’ può essere inteso in almeno tre modi”. Ovvero:

capitalismo 1

un sistema economico caratterizzato da diritti di proprietà e scambio volontario di beni e servizi.

capitalismo 2

un sistema economico caratterizzato dalla relazione simbiotica tra grandi aziende e stato.

capitalismo 3

dominio (sul luogo di lavoro, la società e, se esiste, lo stato) dei capitalisti, ovvero di un numero relativamente ristretto di persone che controllano la ricchezza investibile e i mezzi di produzione.

Il primo descrive bene le basi del mercato e spiega cosa accadrebbe spontaneamente se non ci fosse l’intervento dello stato, che non è certamente ciò che accade attualmente. Il secondo e il terzo spiegano l’attuale sistema economico, in cui dominano potere aziendale e concentrazione della ricchezza. Negli altri due casi il mercato non è una caratteristica centrale ma più un meccanismo secondario, che può facilitare il compito del capitalismo ma che non lo definisce e i cui principi sono sistematicamente violati. Sembrerebbe una questione di definizioni, e certamente in parte lo è; quando gli anticapitalisti parlano di “mercato” in realtà intendono “l’economia di mercato esistente sotto il capitalismo”, ma in certi casi intendono il mercato comunemente inteso: “[u]na configurazione tale per cui due o più parti praticano lo scambio di beni, servizi e informazioni tramite un meccanismo distributivo chiamato mercato”. Ricorda la critica di Carson ai libertari volgari che confondono capitalismo e libero mercato. Significa confondere forme capitaliste di economia di mercato e mercato in generale come meccanismo distributivo. Ma la questione va ancora più in profondità, verso il modo in cui intendiamo la relazione tra il capitalismo e le sue parti.

Scrive Wolff che…

[i] mercati sono un mezzo per ridistribuire risorse e prodotti, beni e servizi. Do ut des è ciò che definisce i mercati: una persona offre in vendita qualcosa a qualcun altro, il quale si offre di acquistarla ad un rapporto di scambio pattuito con o senza la mediazione del denaro. Un mercato esiste quando la ridistribuzione avviene con un simile sistema di scambio. L’esistenza di un mercato non spiega il modo di produzione o la trasformazione delle risorse in prodotti. Il capitalismo è invece l’organizzazione della produzione di beni e servizi, ma anche il modo in cui i partecipanti stanno in relazione tra loro nel processo produttivo.

I mercati in quanto “meccanismi distributivi all’interno della società” possono esistere “in relazione a diversi sistemi produttivi”. “Solitamente coesistono e interagiscono con apparati statali. Tali interazioni a loro volta sono caratterizzate da interventi più o meno marcati dello stato: dalla regolamentazione più rigida dello scambio fino al ‘libero’ mercato con regole minime o nulle.” Quest’ultima forma è spesso erroneamente scambiata per capitalismo dai succitati libertari volgari; in realtà, un sistema capitalista è caratterizzato dalla presenza strutturale di monopoli approvati dallo stato, che Benjamin Tucker identifica nel monopolio fondiario, quello del denaro, dei brevetti e della politica protezionistica, ai quali Charles Johnson aggiunge il monopolio dell’agroindustria, quello delle infrastrutture e dei servizi, le normative protezionistiche e il monopolio della sanità. Tutto ciò conduce ad un sistema che contempla sì un mercato, ma che internamente si comporta perlopiù in modo del tutto estraneo alla logica dei mercati spontanei. Di fatto, questa distorsione ad opera di meccanismi extra-mercato va così in profondità nei sistemi economici statunitense e globale che, come scrive Alex Aragona, “[a]rriviamo al punto per cui è impossibile non notare che gran parte del mondo in cui viviamo oggi non solo tende a un capitalismo statalista che con l’azione statale e la difesa del potere aziendaleviola necessariamente i principi del mercato, ma che di questo modo d’azione ha fatto la regola principale. Insomma, viviamo in un sistema di capitalismo statalista con piccole sacche di libero mercato, non il contrario.” Pertanto la domanda, economicamente parlando, è: qual è l’elemento del capitalismo che causa il problema? È un mercato debole e prigioniero usato perlopiù come strumento organizzativo passivo, o è l’intervento dello stato che crea e tiene in piedi le strutture che rendono il capitalismo quello che è? Nel caso dei problemi strutturali delle catene logistiche durante la pandemia, e sinceramente anche in molti altri casi, la risposta è la seconda.

Una prova di ciò la possiamo trovare nel già citato saggio di Carson, che analizza in profondità la questione degli aiuti al monopolio delle infrastrutture dei trasporti e del monopolio della proprietà intellettuale. Carson spiega come gli aiuti internazionali e i prestiti della Banca Mondiale siano serviti perlopiù a finanziare le infrastrutture dei trasporti e dei servizi che rendono proficua la delocalizzazione della produzione; la quale produzione dipende fortemente dal rispetto dei brevetti e dei marchi commerciali, punto centrale di quasi tutti gli ‘accordi di libero mercato’ approvati dai governi in ogni angolo del mondo. Aggiungiamo a ciò il fatto che per le aziende il costo dei trasporti tramite navi container di ciò che si produce all’estero è “alleggerito dal fatto che la marina militare americana mantiene sicure le rotte a spese dei contribuenti.” Casi che non si limitano “all’Occidente industrializzato. C’è anche la cinese Road and Belt Initiative, che cerca di integrare il blocco euroasiatico con parte dell’Africa su dimensioni tali da far impallidire il vecchio imperialismo occidentale.” Perfino NPR’s Planet Money in una puntata ha spiegato come la spedizione di merci acquistate dalla Cina su internet costi molto meno di una spedizione locale grazie alla Universal Postal Union, in cui siedono rappresentanti di 192 governi nazionali. In sostanza: “una misteriosa organizzazione internazionale fissa il prezzo delle spedizioni, affossando così le piccole attività locali.” Si potrebbe andare avanti per ore, ma al fondo di tutto resta il fatto che, come dice Carson, “quella che chiamiamo ‘globalizzazione’ è, così come i Piani Quinquennali di Stalin, interamente un prodotto dell’ingegneria sociale dello stato altrimenti impossibile.” E poiché la globalizzazione è una struttura opera principalmente dello stato – e spesso di più stati – e non dello sviluppo spontaneo del mercato, e sarebbe logisticamente impossibile altrimenti, possiamo ragionevolmente dedurre che questo just-in-time diffuso ha un’origine principalmente extra-economica.

Andando oltre, basta guardare certi fenomeni specifici come la deregulation, le privatizzazioni e l’indebolimento dei sindacati – principali promotori del modello just-in-time secondo Moody – nel contesto dell’intervento dello stato. La deregulation è, secondo definizione, “l’atto o il processo di rimozione delle restrizioni o dei regolamenti”. Una definizione che non corrisponde esattamente a ciò che avviene nell’attuale regime capitalista. Così Carson: “[q]uasi tutto quello che troviamo di problematico nel capitalismo – lo sfruttamento del lavoratori, l’inquinamento, gli sprechi e l’obsolescenza programmata, la devastazione ambientale e lo spoglio delle risorse – è il risultato della socializzazione dei costi e dei rischi e della privatizzazione dei profitti.” Nonostante le “deregolamentazioni”, la loro permanenza è assicurata dall’intervento statale di oggi e di ieri. Riferendosi alle riforme del mercato, Carson parla di “limone riformistico”: “il capitalista liquida le politiche interventiste dello stato dopo averne spremuto tutti i benefici.” Ma anche “le presunte ‘deregolamentazioni’ sono a ben vedere perlopiù illusorie, con l’industria ‘deregolamentata’ che con mille trucchi riesce comunque a trarre benefici.” Trucchi ampiamente usati dalle aziende sia per distribuire i costi delle proprie infrastrutture produttive che per sfruttare le nazioni del sud del mondo. Ad esempio, al fondo di quasi tutti gli accordi di “libero” commercio ci sono negoziati multilaterali sui quadri normativi che permettono alle aziende di operare impunemente; la deregolamentazione in questo caso riguarda al massimo la rimozione di restrizioni superficiali.

Discorso simile vale per le privatizzazioni, teoricamente un passaggio “dal regime di diritto pubblico a quello di diritto privato”; mentre, come dice Charles Johnson, “la ‘privatizzazione’ di cui parlano il fondo monetario internazionale, gli stati neoliberali e le aziende dei baroni ladri è tutt’altra bestia rispetto a quella di cui parlano i sostenitori radicali del mercato.” Ad una privatizzazione intesa in senso genuinamente libertario come “trasferimento della ricchezza a chi l’ha creata, trasformando tutte le attività secondo il principio della libera associazione e del libero scambio reciproco” si oppone la privatizzazione neoliberale che comprende: “contratti finanziati con soldi pubblici” per cui “Black Water e DynCorp forniscono mercenari alle guerre dello stato”, o grazie ai quali “la Wackenhut offre, in cambio di soldi pubblici, carceri, forze di polizia, vigili del fuoco e altro”; a questi si aggiungono “le aste e i contratti sottobanco per la vendita a privati di aziende monopolistiche pubbliche: industrie petrolifere, acquedotti, centrali elettriche e altro.” Secondo la logica neoliberale, privatizzare non significa semplicemente trasferire la proprietà dal pubblico al privato, ma trasferire quelli che sono monopoli di fatto nelle mani di ricchi capitalisti. E la pratica non riguarda solo gli Stati Uniti. In molti paesi dell’America Latina, le privatizzazioni comportano dosi massicce di corruzione e nepotismo, con cui le élite monetizzate acquisiscono la proprietà di rilevanti entità economiche, aziende ex-statali, per dirigerne la produzione verso l’esportazione, in linea con le politiche standard di istituzioni come il fondo monetario, se lo stato non faceva già così.

E l’“indebolimento dei sindacati e dell’organizzazione sociale del lavoro”, pure responsabile secondo Moody della rapida adozione del modello just-in-time, è il risultato diretto del tentativo dello stato di evirare le organizzazioni dei lavoratori. Tra i primi esempi troviamo le leggi Wagner del 1935 e Taft-Hartley. Così Carson in riferimento alla prima: “Prima della Wagner, gli scioperi rappresentavano solo una delle tante tattiche utilizzate dai lavoratori nei rapporti con i datori di lavoro. I metodi impiegati dai sindacati, più che lo sciopero e l’astensione dal lavoro, riguardavano l’azione dei lavoratori all’interno del posto di lavoro al fine di aumentare il loro potere contrattuale nei confronti dei padroni.” Con la sua adozione sotto la presidenza di Franklin Delano Roosevelt, la Wagner Act, tramite l’intervento dello stato, “mise fine alla tattica conflittuale asimmetrica rappresentata dall’azione diretta sul posto di lavoro e impose la disciplina sociale trasformando i sindacalisti in gendarmi addetti all’imposizione del contratto sui loro iscritti. La Wagner mirava a spostare le dispute dalla lotta asimmetrica verso un sistema formalizzato e burocratizzato incentrato sui contratti di lavoro imposti e fatti rispettare dallo stato e dalle gerarchie sindacali.” Similmente, “la Taft-Hartley non solo applicava a tutti i settori ciò che valeva per il settore ferroviario, ovvero il divieto degli scioperi di solidarietà, ma prevedeva la possibilità di imporre ‘periodi d’interdizione’ in settori come quello dei trasporti terrestri e marittimi.” La legge era significativa perché permetteva allo stato di indebolire i lavoratori e dirigere il mercato verso un modello just-in-time. Carson aggiunge poi che “[i]n assenza delle restrizioni imposte ai lavoratori dalle leggi in questione, l’economia ‘just-in-time’ di oggi sarebbe molto più soggetta a disfunzioni dell’economia degli anni Trenta.” E, fatto ancora più importante, senza un sindacato forte con una vasta gamma di azioni volte a garantire buoni salari e benefici, la delocalizzazione e la riduzione al minimo degli stock diventa pressochè inevitabile.

Il malinteso nasce quando Moody lamenta l’assenza di “strumenti politici per placare la bestia” dell’economia just-in-time globalizzata. Carson riassume bene la questione quando scrive: “L’attuale struttura proprietaria del capitale e l’organizzazione della produzione nella nostra cosiddetta economia di ‘mercato’ rivela l’intervento coercitivo dello stato che precede ed è estraneo al mercato. Agli albori della rivoluzione industriale, quello che nostalgicamente oggi viene chiamato ‘laissez-faire’ in realtà era caratterizzato dallo stato che interveniva per sovvenzionare l’accumulazione, garantire i privilegi e mantenere la disciplina sul lavoro.” Un mercato veramente libero, spiega Carson, “privo di distorsioni capitalistiche e basato interamente sul libero scambio, non porterebbe a una forte concentrazione della ricchezza e al predominio del lavoro salariato.” Porterebbe invece ad una serie di economie di mercato a dimensione locale. Sarebbe praticamente l’opposto dell’economia globalizzata just-in-time. Un aiuto in questo senso, qui nel nord del mondo, può venire, tra le altre cose, da un rafforzamento di sindacati anti-statalisti come l’Industrial Workers of the World, da una ripresa delle mobilitazioni di massa del tipo di Occupy, da un ritorno alla lotta al fianco delle popolazioni indigene come gli Wetʼsuwetʼen. Ma soprattutto occorre diffondere la lotta per la proprietà cooperativa dell’economia nello stile di Cooperation Jackson.

De Eric Fleischmann. Artículo original: Laurance Labadie’s “Money and Your Freedom” 8 de enero de 2022. Traducción al español de Camila Figueroa.

El dinero y tu libertad

Queridos Ron y Laura:

Don ha estado en el este por un tiempo y se pasó anoche. Entre otras cosas me puso al día sobre su pensamiento y sus plantas. Sabía que mi explosión, cuando saliera a verte, te molestaría. Pero pensé que valía la pena si se podía evitar que te metieras más en la carrera de la rata económica. Don me enseñó cartas recientes para ti y de ti, y observé que querías reflexionar más sobre el tema.

Estoy dispuesto a hacerlo, pero primero me gustaría replantear tu situación tal y como yo la veo. Te va a costar mucho, tanto si te quedas y te pliegas al statu quo, como si observas tus escrúpulos y te sales de él. Si sigues “jugando el juego”, aprovechando ciertas facilidades (gubernamentales y de otro tipo), puede que mantengas unos buenos ingresos. Pero vendrá, directa o indirectamente, de la renta y los intereses. Sería como si estuvieras en un círculo de personas, cada una de las cuales roba a su vecino más cercano. Si todos robasen en cantidades iguales, sería lo mismo que si no hubiesen robado en primer lugar. Pero en nuestro sistema, las reglas son tales que el robo es desigual. Así que es duro para los que salen perjudicados y es más duro para los que no les gusta el robo.

Ahora no quieres ser un explotador, y no quieres formar parte del sistema militar. Así que lo vas a tener muy difícil para intentar ganarte la vida. Repito que ninguna persona tiene la culpa del desorden reinante. Son nuestras formas y métodos institucionales actuales los que tienen la culpa. Las injusticias inherentes a las instituciones coercitivas modernas son las que atrapan a todo el mundo para que se gane la vida de formas y con fines que cualquier persona cuerda e inteligente consideraría absurdos, si no inmorales.

Así que me interesa tu objetivo actual de una comunidad intencional donde se puedan practicar las ideas libertarias. Como puedes adivinar, creo que esto sería sólo una gota de agua en comparación con la necesidad generalizada de una reforma libertaria. Pero al menos es un paso en la dirección correcta, y si lo consigues, te dará un buen ambiente, y puede animar a otros a hacer lo mismo. Como sabes, considero que lo que se llama el problema del “dinero” es muy básico para la libertad, así que estaré encantado de esbozar aquí la cuestión tal y como la veo.

Supongamos que en tu hipotética “ciudad asentada sobre una colina” cada individuo y cada familia está ahora en posesión equitativa de su porción de tierra. Ahora cada uno produce lo que desea en bienes como maíz, patatas, madera, fruta, hierbas; o en servicio como carpintería, arquitectura, partería, enseñanza o asesoramiento psicológico. ¿Cómo intercambiarán equitativamente su tiempo y energía?

Por supuesto, todos los productos básicos son el resultado de la aplicación de la energía humana a la tierra. El maíz, las patatas, la madera y la fruta se diferencian de la tierra en que son el resultado de aplicar energía a la tierra. En realidad, los productos cuestan diversas cantidades de energía humana. Si, en lugar de producir a partir de la tierra, alguna persona opta por procesar o transportar algún producto -o prestar otros servicios necesarios a la comunidad-, no hace más que ofrecer su trabajo a otros de forma más directa, sin mezclarlo primero con la tierra. Pero como debe disponer de esos productos laborales esenciales (maíz, patatas, madera, fruta, etc.) sus servicios representan realmente, para él, una parte de esos productos concretos. Vemos, pues, cómo tanto los bienes como los servicios son realmente extensiones de los seres humanos que los producen.

Supongamos que la producción de hierbas exóticas y la enseñanza de la música expresan su personalidad o satisfacen sus necesidades. Por tanto, la forma de intercambiar tus hierbas o tu música con los demás es muy importante para ti. Si en el intercambio obtienes algo que no quieres, tus objetivos no se cumplen. La oportunidad de negociar en términos que satisfagan tanto a ti como al otro, u otros, con los que intercambias, es importante para todas las partes de la transacción. Ninguna de las partes implicadas en este intercambio puede hacerlo tan bien como tú. No, si la “explotación” se incorpora a un método de intercambio, puedes ver cómo distorsionará la libertad y la equidad. Veamos algunos patrones o métodos de intercambio diferentes.

En una carta a Don dijiste que te gustaba ir a un mercado moderno y comprar lo que querías. Con tu dinero estás haciendo tus propias elecciones para satisfacer tus necesidades, y con tus compras estás votando por esos productos y animando a algún productor y transportista a continuar su trabajo. Realmente estás cooperando con ellos, lo cual es bueno, aunque no los conozcas. Esto es posible gracias al dinero. El dinero es un gran invento. Se convierte en una herramienta mediante la cual elegimos cómo queremos alcanzar nuestros objetivos.

Pero, como saben, hoy en día el dinero tiene algunos aspectos de explotación. Recuerdo haber señalado durante nuestra memorable visita que en nuestro actual sistema monetario, sólo un determinado grupo tiene el privilegio legal de emitir dinero y, por ello, puede controlar la oferta y emitirlo en sus condiciones, a un tipo de interés que les beneficia a ellos y explota a los demás. En realidad, prestan dinero para que exista sobre la base de una deuda. Su dinero no representa realmente bienes concretos, y esto provoca la inflación, o la disminución del valor del dinero. Además, como te dije antes, los intereses que se cobran a los prestatarios marginales contribuyen a fijar el precio de todos los bienes, por lo que aumenta el precio de todo lo que tú y los demás compráis. Los bancos pueden prestar ocho y diez veces más de lo que hay en sus depósitos de ahorro, a tipos más altos que los que pagan a sus depositantes, por lo que se convierte en una práctica muy lucrativa para los banqueros. Estos y otros desajustes son posibles porque la banca es un monopolio legal. La característica de monopolio del dinero inyecta suficientes aspectos negativos para contrarrestar las ventajas de conveniencia y selectividad en el mercado que le da el dinero.

Mucha gente, muy comprensiblemente, quiere erradicar la característica de monopolio. Algunos intentan disminuir el efecto sobre ellos mismos de un sistema monetario monopolista reduciendo la cantidad de dinero que utilizan. El Plan de Regalos Laborales, #2207, 150 Nassau St. Algunas personas establecen una granja productiva y producen, en lugar de comprar, muchos de sus servicios y la mayoría de sus alimentos. En la medida en que puedan hacerlo de forma agradable, son muy sabios. Otras personas están recuperando el hábito del trueque de producto por producto o de servicio por producto. Conozco a varias personas que pagan la factura del médico con el paisaje, o que dan clases particulares a un niño a cambio de mantequilla y huevos. Pero el trueque es muy torpe y consume mucho tiempo en una sociedad compleja. Otras personas no quieren ningún sistema de intercambio. No valoran su trabajo ni sus productos laborales. Esto ocurre a menudo en las comunidades de reparto total, donde cada uno trabaja como puede; produce lo que puede, contribuye al fondo común y saca del producto total lo que necesita. La dificultad aquí estriba en decidir qué necesita cada uno y quién debe tomar la decisión. Si la toma cada persona, no veo que haya mejorado respecto a algún tipo de negociación cara a cara. Si la toma un tercero, entra en escena un elemento de arbitrariedad y autoritarismo.

Tal y como yo lo veo, en este fondo común, o “producir como se pueda y tomar lo que se necesite”, los asuntos de cada uno se combinan en lugar de individualizarse. Así, algunas personas pueden verse involucradas más allá de sus deseos en obtener las consecuencias de la acción de otra persona, o de su falta de acción. En un sistema de este tipo, una persona puede estar protegida de las consecuencias de sus actos y estar así alejada de la realidad que podría ayudarle a madurar y a ser más responsable.

Un tercer tipo general de intercambio puede denominarse trueque complejo.

Un desarrollo reciente en este grupo son los Bancos de Intercambio en los que los miembros participantes no utilizan dinero. Un miembro “regala” ostensiblemente un objeto a otro. En lugar de venderlo por dinero, acepta un recibo del “comprador” por un valor acordado y deposita este recibo en el banco de intercambio. De este modo, acumula un crédito contable con el que puede hacer negocios con otros, emitiendo recibos por los bienes que obtiene de otros en el sistema. La Escuela de la Vida puede dar información al respecto.

En una forma más antigua de trueque complejo, se emite un medio de intercambio llamado scrip. Se trata de un trozo de metal o de papel que representa (es decir, se basa y puede canjearse en) algún producto real estable que sea ampliamente aceptado y utilizado. Los vales se parecen mucho a un certificado de regalo. Una persona tiene un certificado para un regalo en una determinada tienda. No le interesa ese artículo, así que puede intercambiar su certificado de regalo con alguien que sí lo quiera. Los vales de compra son certificados de regalo que tienen cierta aceptación general. Es como el título de propiedad de nuestra casa o de nuestro coche. Evidentemente, no podemos llevar los objetos de un lado a otro, pero podemos llevar los títulos de los mismos en nuestros bolsillos y, al intercambiar los títulos, intercambiamos los bienes.

Una asociación de intercambio voluntario podría ayudar a poner en práctica este tipo de medio de intercambio. Podría emitir títulos de crédito sobre bienes aceptables como títulos generalizados de productos reales, por lo que un grupo de personas dentro de un área podría realizar intercambios equitativos. Tendrían la conveniencia de un medio monetario aceptable con el que hacer selecciones en la cantidad y calidad de los bienes y servicios que quisieran. Daría el tipo de libertad en el regateo que les gusta, y a la vez proporcionaría equidad para todos los implicados en el intercambio. Tal medio de intercambio permitiría la infinita individualidad entre los hombres. Como dijo Stephen Pearl Andrews “daría lugar a la igualdad de soberanía de cada individuo en el sentido de que las consecuencias de sus acciones serían asumidas por él mismo. … La ley del auténtico progreso en los asuntos humanos es idéntica a la tendencia a la individualización.” De este modo, un grupo de personas puede “trocar” no para obtener beneficios, sino simplemente para intercambiar el trabajo representado en los bienes y servicios.

Esta es una exposición demasiado breve de este problema “público” inmensamente importante, que ha sido expuesto muchas veces, pero sobre el que la mayoría de la gente hoy no es consciente o está muy confundida. Dos libros antiguos le ayudarán a ver cómo se desarrolló el sistema actual: Delmar’s History of Monetary Systems (Historia de los sistemas monetarios) y Other People’s Money (El dinero de los demás), del ex juez asociado Brandeis. David T. Bazelon describe el espantoso y aterrador lío actual en The Paper Economy (1959, Random House).

En busca de respuestas más tradicionales, la mayoría de la gente busca hoy en día que el Gobierno emita y controle el medio de circulación. Algunos creen que nuestro complejo sistema industrial exige que el gobierno imprima dinero. Sólo tiene que imprimirlo en cantidades que igualen e igualen la riqueza inagotable que nuestra tecnología corporativa y cibernética puede producir. Con esto podrían proporcionar a cada persona un ingreso garantizado por el gobierno, independientemente de si trabaja o no. Esta filosofía de vacas contentas que descansa en la planificación y el apoyo del gobierno es desagradable para una de mis inclinaciones individualistas-anarquistas. Y no hay que tener miedo a esa palabra, anarquismo. El anarquismo individualista es un producto americano -del pensamiento de Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, y notablemente Benjamin Tucker. El Dr. James Martin los describe y analiza en su libro Men Against The State. Estos hombres propusieron y desarrollaron una economía basada en el contrato y la asociación voluntaria en la que cada persona podía crecer y madurar asumiendo las consecuencias de sus propios actos. Los anarquistas individualistas consideran que una sociedad verdaderamente libre tiene que empezar con el acceso libre e igualitario a la tierra y al crédito, y con los productos creados por el trabajo como propiedad privada.

Silvio Gesell, un exitoso hombre de negocios en Europa y Sudamérica, desarrolló y puso en práctica, a principios del siglo XX, un sistema combinado de tierra y dinero en un marco de referencia generalmente libertario. Se describe en su Natural Economic Order, disponible en la Free Economy Association, 2618 East 54th St. Huntington Park, California. Mi propio concepto de libertad en la banca, basado en las ideas de Proudhon, está en Property and Trustery, de la School of Living. Espero que alguna vez puedas localizar un pequeño libro de Charles Dana, que fue editor de The New York Sun, titulado Proudhon’s Bank of the People.

Intentaré responder a cualquier pregunta que quieras enviar, y desde luego quiero seguir en contacto contigo. Recuerda que soy tu amigo,

Larry Labadie

Comentario – Eric Fleischmann:

En primer lugar, me gustaría dar un gran agradecimiento a la Unión de Egoístas en UnionOfEgoists. com por proporcionar una copia de esta pieza para el Proyecto de Archivo de Laurance Labadie. Escrito a Ron y Laura Baker en 1962 -el Don al que se hace referencia es Don Werkheiser- y publicado por primera vez en Go Ahead and Live! de Mildred Loomis en 1965, “Money and Your Freedom” de Laurance Labadie es un consejo que da a sus jóvenes amigos para vivir una vida no parasitaria y liberada en medio de una sociedad parasitaria y opresiva. Le interesan especialmente las posibilidades monetarias de la comunidad libertaria propuesta por Baker. Esto no es una sorpresa, ya que, como escribe el autor anónimo Chord en Anarco-Pesimismo, “Con el típico desprecio por los gustos populares o la moda, Labadie concibió el esquema básico de su concepto conspirativo del dinero en la década de 1930, con su implicación de que la única reforma que podría poner la mayor parte de la palanca al servicio del individualismo y la libertad sería la separación del dinero y el Estado”. Y esta pieza en particular toca muchos de los detalles de estas ideas y dilucida un conjunto más amplio de propuestas para una sociedad post-capitalista y post-estatalista.

Para muchos izquierdistas -incluidos los anarquistas- el intercambio es casi siempre un asunto secundario con respecto a la producción, y aunque no estoy en desacuerdo con este énfasis (mis propias influencias marxianas y materialistas son bastante públicas), a veces puede dejar atrás importantes elementos de análisis -particularmente en la diferenciación de los mercados del capitalismo. Por ejemplo, David Graeber explica, en una entrevista con Neal Rockwell titulada El capitalismo es sólo una forma realmente mala de organizar el comunismo, que el historiador francés Fernand Braudel “básicamente dice… que hay tres niveles que se pueden distinguir en la mayoría de las civilizaciones, y uno es el nivel de los regalos y la ayuda/mutua y la gente que se desenvuelve en la vida. Luego están los mercados, pero los mercados, dice… bueno, toma esta idea marxista de la diferencia entre CMC y MCM, que significa” mercancía-dinero-mercancía y dinero-mercancía-dinero. Así que…

los mercados, dice, son mercancía-dinero-mercancía. Esa es la lógica básica: Tengo algunas gallinas, soy un agricultor, necesito velas. No tengo abejas; no puedo producir mi propia cera. Voy a comerciar con algunos de mis pollos, conseguir algo de dinero y comprar algunas velas. En definitiva, de eso se trata. Se trata de diferentes personas con diversos bienes que necesitan y diversos bienes que necesitan obtener, y el dinero es sólo un medio.

Y un cambio hacia este circuito no capitalista no sólo cambia la definición del sistema económico, al menos en el nivel de intercambio, alejándose del capitalismo y acercándose a los mercados, sino que también asesta un golpe significativo contra el beneficio -una forma de usura en opinión de Labadie- y la acumulación -una práctica perfectamente correcta en un “sistema monetario realmente sano”- y hacia el intercambio de bienes y servicios [1].

Para Josiah Warren -una influencia significativa en el pensamiento de Labadie a través de Benjamin Tucker- el mecanismo para lograr este resultado es una moneda basada en el tiempo que permite el intercambio casi directo de trabajo, mientras que Silvio Gesell -mencionado en el artículo anterior- aboga por una moneda local sin ningún tipo de interés y con un coste de transporte artificial para penalizar el acaparamiento. Pero Labadie rechaza ambas propuestas, escribiendo en su ensayo “Fighting and Folly” (disponible en Anarcho-Pessimism) que el de Gesell “es un sistema originado por un libertario que trabaja bajo graves falacias sobre la naturaleza del dinero y el crédito” y que “se derrumbaría cuando llegara a un enfrentamiento” y explicando en una carta a la segunda revista anarquista que lleva el nombre de Madre Tierra “que el intento de hacer del tiempo de trabajo un estándar para una unidad monetaria [es] una falacia y está destinado a fracasar en la práctica”. Por ello, Labadie aboga por formas de trueque complejas a través de los Bancos de Intercambio y las Asociaciones de Intercambio Voluntario productoras de vales. Siendo modos de intercambio necesariamente horizontales, éstos -ya sea explícitamente o no- aparentemente cambiarían el circuito de intercambio de dinero-mercancía-dinero a mercancía-dinero-mercancía, mientras mantiene sus críticas a casi todos los otros experimentos monetarios anarquistas además del crédito mutuo al estilo de Tucker y William Batchelder Greene.

Nota

1. Véase “Money and Politics” de Labadie en Mother Earth, diciembre de 1933.

To read Proudhon, to many non-mutualist thinkers beyond anarchist academia, is laughable. Anarchist communists will insist that Bakunin, Kropotkin and Bookchin expand on Proudhon, rendering the original mutualist promise as empty (ironic considering the massive amount Bakunin took directly from Proudhon.) Anarchist capitalists insist that his theories were flawed, socialist, and/or didn’t rely on the non-aggression principle or Austrian economics (or generally some otherwise lackluster defense of the freedom of capitalists). Marxians, much to the dismay of left anarchists, will insist that Marx “debunked Bakunin and Proudhon” during his time (as if the schools haven’t had a dialogue for as long as Marxism has lived).

Marxists quite frequently point to Marx’s infamous response to Proudhon — the piece that, sadly, has seemed to outlive Proudhon’s writings. In our Proudhonian revival, it is key to tackle Marx’s mediocre criticisms and respond from our modern anarchist perspective. The compatibility of post-structuralist Marxist thought with Tucker-esque market anarchism, or De Cleyre-esque meta-anarchy, continues to provide reason to abandon the stale communist mythology that continues to blind the left.

The (post-structuralist?) neo-mutualist analysis is useful here. (What sort of Jargon is that? Simply put, markets & marxists.) It should be made clear that much of what Marx criticized in Proudhon has to do with what Marx sees as Proudhon failing at his conceptualization of Hegelian dialectics. Deleuze, through his reading of Nietzsche, would peel Dialectics away from anti-capitalism, and there have been varying anti-Hegelian arguments by those besides Deleuze which renders it relatively useless to discuss in great detail here. I, personally, am contra Hegel, but there are modern mutualists who would still consider themselves Hegelians, and that point truly isn’t central to the liberatory movement. What is important about Marx’s “Poverty of Philosophy” is that it makes economic criticisms of Proudhon’s anarchism. That, then, is what we must criticize and respond to.

Anarchy is dead, according to Marxists — but reality is displaying quite the opposite. Anarchists, arguably, carry on Marx’s creative spirit better than Marxists today, seeing as Marx’s arguments were premised on showing how bourgeois assumptions about capitalism had within them radical conclusions that pointed beyond capitalism — and yet Marxists often like to dismiss all modern economics as “bourgeois pseudoscience.” The modern left is riddled with intellectual stasis such as this.

Austrian economists and post-structuralists have previously unexplored overlap. The twentieth century communists revisiting the positivity of competition and the deterritorialization  feared by conservatives displayed as a benefit of market exchange speak to the Deleuzian point that the new left must have “Nothing to do with Government.” Including fiscally. What is he arguing then? What is Deleuzian anti-capitalism at all? We say it must be free exchange, a movement that, despite a lack of self-awareness, mirrors the Boston Anarchist promise a century earlier. Market Anarchism has kept itself alive despite Marxist nonsense. It’s time to attack the stale communist critique that refuses to face the emancipatory aspects of markets head on.

The Division of Labor – Marx contra Proudhon

To begin with Marx’s criticisms beyond Hegelian bickering (which permeates the entire text), Marx throws into question the conceptualization of the division of labor made by Proudhon. Much of Marx’s critique of Proudhonian dialectics is that they are a sort of bastardized Hegelianism that paints things in black and white and attempts to wrestle the existing good from the existing bad that encompasses it. In the Proudhonian dialectic, the goal is to find a synthesis, or to find good through a mix of the status-quo and the counter-status-quo.

Marxists tend to make the same mistake as Proudhon is attacked for here, splitting things into black and white and then claiming that their historical process is science when rather it tends to be the same bland, dualistic concept of repeated negation. The division of labor, Marx says, Proudhon does not eliminate entirely. Proudhon’s solution largely tends to surround individual trade, partnerships of workers into workshops and the division of labor separate from state bureaucracy. Marx draws an inverted line, saying that the less control that a community has over the ability for capitalists to divide their workers, the more likely it is that the power within a form is driven directly to the capitalist.

This, from a mutualist perspective, is flawed. Marx does not see how the “boss” controlling the labor process (and thus the division of labor) is maintained entirely by authority — including community authority. Accumulation of capitalist power is, historically speaking, a byproduct of state intervention, (and it’s protection of absentee property, the principle of accumulation) not an existence contradictory to state intervention. Market anarchist works like Carson’s IFBTIH demonstrate this concisely. This is what Marx misses in Proudhon’s “anti-privilegism.” The tendency for privilege to correlate to any and all forms of exploitation, not despite them but due to them and through them, is at the heart of the mutualist response here. The relation of laborers and their employers revolves around economies of scale, which rely on rent, interest rates, statist education practices, fiat currencies, land monopolies, intellectual property and central banking. These forces which Greene would’ve deemed usury were the target of the mutualist project to begin with, despite Marx’s misreading. Dyer D. Lum, an anarchist of the Proudhonian tradition, would exemplify the mutualist response quite clearly.

“It is not in division, but in the subordination of division to privilege that the Economists make the error of ascribing disadvantages to a law evolved in social growth. The element of freedom lacking in exchange, division consequently falls under the control of prerogative, hence the limitations and disadvantages of which Economists learnedly prate.” (D. Lum, ‘The Economics of Anarchy’ section IX)

Marx’s point is that by allowing markets to prosper, we allow capitalists to suppress worker desire in the name of efficiency. Capitalist efficiency, however, is in many ways efficiency of control. The efficiency that we as anarchists strive for is the maximization of agency. Top-down control is thoroughly inefficient in this regard. For this process of capitalists to put workers in factory lines and divide their labor, not according to desire, but according to “efficiency,” relies on authority. Mass production must happen, which, as has been explored by Kevin Carson, is a direct byproduct of state authority. Proudhon’s rhizomatic “many workshops” model entirely skirts many problems of mass production.

Beyond this, capitalists must here have power to begin with. This is the same flawed Marxist accusation Engels makes in “On Authority;” being that firms must inherently function how capitalist firms function. As Proudhonians and other anarchists have argued for over a century, the hierarchy present in capitalist firms is precisely a byproduct of capitalist relations of domination, not a cause for it, and not antithetical to it. We have real world examples of success in alternative organization strategies — workers cooperatives being more productive and better capable at using technology and silicon valley firms leveraging worker autonomy to get ahead. Market anarchists see possibility and creativity as central to the anti-capitalist promise, and we follow through on that promise.

Marxist materialism doesn’t account for the ways in which capitalism was born entirely from hierarchy, which it somehow boasts around as a “one-up” on Proudhon. Without this hierarchy, labor is not divided into misery. It is divided in the sense that humans are divided. Organically by desire and free contract.

Competition & Monopoly – A Marketist Response

Marx similarly dismisses competition as liberal mythology, despite Proudhon’s intricate exploration of competition and both its upsides and downsides. To Proudhon, good aspects of competition go as follows; competition is free exchange, and thus equal exchange (as far as capability, positive liberty and agency go). It represents association, and the freeing of associations and competition is antithetical to “cronyist” monopoly, and thus capitalist monopoly is antithetical to competition and association, two forces dependent on one another.

Marx responds here by using the dialectical process to point out that Feudal authority came first, and competition endangered it, which resulted in the synthesis of modern, capitalist monopoly. First, take note of how closely this dialectic resembles the “butchered dialectic” Marx criticized in Proudhon, but also, zoom out for a more nuanced lens surrounding market history. Our anti-authoritarian recap of economic events would point out, on the contrary, that competition remains the opposite of monopoly, and that the Marxist suppression of competition fails insofar as it doesn’t eliminate competition (which is omnipresent), it simply further monopolizes it (monopoly being the source of capitalist property relations).

Competition endangered feudal monopoly for the same reason it endangers capitalist monopoly. Far from being the opposite of feudal monopoly, capitalist monopoly is the same force with the same underlying aim. Authority, Deleuze says, attempts to systematically “recapture” the freed flows competition naturally brings about. The modern monopoly existing within a supposedly “competitive” system is far from evidence competition doesn’t work. If anything, a further examination of capitalist authority reveals how all forces upholding monopoly are in many ways the same ones formulated by the aristocracy to suppress peasant competition, and the forces suppressing competition are the ones that spawn from the monopoly kept afloat only by the negation of competition that Marxists seek to continue.

Marxist history, a dialectical history, is what Deleuze would later critique as being single-minded, trapped by it’s premise in the same way Freudian psychoanalysis sees Oedipus in everything and anything. Marxist history zooms into class analysis to such an extent that other vectors for liberation through mechanisms like competition are ignored because historically, competition didn’t put an end to authority regarding class and class only (even though, in some senses, it did) The Austrians would discuss this later on in depth, but as market-positive anarchists committed to emancipation, we pose two questions in response to this conception of competition as faux-equality.

“Aren’t the failures of competition to suppress monopoly entirely the  direct byproduct of monopolistic control of competition?”

And, subsequently,

“Doesn’t your plan extend the flaws present in capitalist monopolization, i.e. suppression of competition at the hands of authorities, rather than getting rid of it?”

It’s also worth mentioning the two “cons” that Marx says Proudhon displays surrounding markets. One of these flaws is that markets tend to blur lines surrounding identity, nationality, ingroups and outgroups, to which we’d now say “yeah, that’s the whole point!” The second flaw is that competition “destroys trust in social relations,” but it is precisely economic planning that destroys trust to begin with. Exchange beyond top-down intervention is mediated entirely by trust, not despite it. Every exchange is equal in a market free of authority, consisting of only voluntary parties. Trust is advocated for by, and only by, the most radical forms of competition. The reason competition appears to destroy trust is because capitalism refuses to escape monopoly. To finish here, we will once again look to Dyer Lum as to what he said about competition over one hundred years ago.

“COMPETITION is the exact opposite, not the parent of monopoly. Freedom is essential to true competition, and wherever restriction exists on one side, it implies privilege on the other, and insofar competition ceases: monopoly rather than competition now exists. In the abrogation of privilege competition becomes not only free, but acts, as the governor on an engine, self-regulative and bringing cost as the mean of price. ‘Our friends, the enemy,’ the Socialists, in flying into a passion at the mention of competition but thereby betray their own logical adherence to the militant camp, for liberty includes and implies freedom to compete.”

Value Theories and Anarchist Conclusions

The following chapter illuminates that rent as a concept relies on surplus extraction and competition. Once again, however, competition is antithetical to authority (which Marx admits) and authority exists currently largely to suppress competition, and because competition was frozen by existing feudal monopoly. Rent, as Greene would put it, is usury — it’s quite emblematic of the very concept of usury. A completely freed competition wouldn’t treat property as a lease, and so the entire concept of rent as a byproduct of competition is done away with by a simple analysis of mutualist property.

Marx’s disagreement with Proudhon also relies on the idea that rent is the byproduct of social relations in which “land is exploited,” but this exploitation (i.e. commodification) relies on mass production, a concept that, as pointed out, is entirely statist, and one that Marx’s theory itself doesn’t do away with in any capacity beyond the abolition of economic calculation and property titles. Proudhonian “exploitation” of land is just use, which is present in any system, and the “abolition of ownership” that coincides with use-possession according to communists tends to use authority to justify itself regardless.

The other critique Marx makes of Proudhon has to do with Ricardian ideas of value, but the modern mutualist recast of the Ricardian value theory, as well as the continuingly rising frequency of exceptions to the labor theory of value in our current market make this criticism pretty worthless. See Graeber, Carson or even modern Marxists for dismissals of certain dismissals of the labor theory, or perhaps we could even unmask older texts like those of Eugene Böhm-Bawerk.

The final chapter has to do with Proudhon’s idea that a raise in minimum wage would inevitably lead to a cost increase of goods and services. This debate is unresolved to this day, and it serves us little to nothing to continue engaging with debates of minimum wage for precisely the reason that the existence of a minimum wage necessitates a central planning agency to administer such a wage regulation.

In a freed market, the subjective interpretation of the value of labor by the laborer (seeing as “socially-necessary labor time” can be done away with as an oversimplified and ultimately useless concept from Marx) has to do with disutility; it can be seen that the reason that surplus extraction can exist in a marxist framework, then, is that there are unequal boss-employee relations. These are not freed contractors, but victims of capitalist hierarchy. With entirely freed negotiating power, and the release of desire from capitalist shackles, labor is a freed force in line with desire — one which is paid for in full by its negotiating power and the lack of disutility currently omnipresent in capitalist enterprise.

Our criticisms of economic planning are numerous. They go far beyond a stale, conservative “inflation” criticism like the one made by Proudhon attacked thereafter by Marx (which, to be fair, was relatively new for Proudhon’s time). We consult the problems surrounding calculation, knowledge, bandwidth, agency, authority, and centralization to which Marxists of the previous century have failed to adequately respond. Despite the Marxist rejection of Proudhon and Bakunin, Bakunin offers us wisdom on this centralized solution. As he once said,

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he’d be worse than the Tsar himself.”

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our anarchist analysis of this central agency is simply that the power it requires is violent and oppressive. Regardless of Marxist responses regarding the minimum wage as not having to do with inflation, it does have to do with central planning. It is suppressing and controlling, and there are easier ways to help the working class than by trying to control the network of interactions that make up the economy.

There is a very genuine liberatory potential in the market now, trapped in hierarchical cells. Marxists point to the lack of effectiveness of these market revolutions to be representative of market failure, and their solution is to build more fiscal prisons with statist guards. Beyond the repetitive communist dismissals surrounding anarchy, there is a revival undercurrent, and competition is quite central to it — quite central to any progressive movement.

Marx’s criticisms of Proudhon have rotted with time. An outdated conception of dialectics haunts the work Marxists publish to this day. Criticisms surrounding division of labor and competition similarly ignore the much more fundamental anti-power history; the history of multiplicity similar between the market anarchists and the post-structuralists. Critiques of rent or inflation in Proudhon are dismissive of the much wider anarchist picture, and ignorant of the power authority has in the current economic situation.

I’ll give Marx points for cleverness surrounding the title, as well as an overall humorous and angsty dismissal of Proudhon throughout “The Poverty of Philosophy,” but that’s it. Anarchist history is one of nuance and multiplicity, and anarchist conceptions of competition and monopoly go beyond a hyper-focused view of production-monopolization like the one made by Marx. Proudhon is outdated, sure. I have issues with his theories, specifically surrounding his federalism, electoralism and Hegelian influence (not to mention rampant and disgusting anti-semitism and anti-feminism). What he isn’t, though, is “lost to the test of time” despite what many Marxists claim today. His theories are diverse and inspirational, and creative reciprocity will be the formulation of any genuine non-capitalist economy.

Let competition prosper! Let rent dissolve! And, most importantly, let exchange be freed!

As an anarchist prisoner, it has been said many times that one can learn a great deal about society by looking towards its prisons. Look towards its dungeons and there you will see in concentrated and microcosmic form the sickness of the entire system. And today there is something that is particularly revealing about the analogy between the prison and the larger society of which it is a reflection. For in a painfully real sense, we are all prisoners of a society whose bombastic proclamations of freedom and justice for all are nothing but meaningless rhetoric.

In our society today, we are surrounded by the very wealth and scientific achievements which hold forth a promise of freedom. Freedom is so near, yet at the same time it is so far away. This thought invokes in me the same sensation I feel while awaiting my release in prison in a few short months while enduring the conditions of the past 46 years of incarceration. 

From my cell, I am eagerly awaiting to join the movement of my fellow comrades with the freedom of space which was taken from me while in captivity. The conditions in the here and now of all races on the streets bears a striking resemblance to the conditions in the prisons I have been in and at the present moment in my life. The wealth and technology around us tells that a free, humane, harmonious society lies near. But at the same time, it is so far away because someone is holding the keys and that someone refuses to open the gates to freedom. Like all prisoners, locked up with the ugliness of racism and poverty and wars and all the attendant mental frustrations and manipulations. We’re also locked up with our dreams and visions of freedom, and with the knowledge that if we only had the keys – if we could only seize them from our keepers, the oil companies, automotive manufacturers, all the giant corporations, and of course from their yellow belly protectors, the government. If we could only get our hands on those keys, we could transform these visions and these dreams into reality. Our situation bears a very excruciating similarity to my situation as a prisoner, we must never forget this. For if we do, we will lose our desire for freedom and our will to struggle for liberation. 

This place destroys the logical processes of the mind if a man loses hope in humanity. A man’s thoughts can become completely disorganized. The noise, the madness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds from the cells, from the walls, the guards’ keys, the iron doors opening and slamming shut, the hollow sound of a cast iron sink, a toilet, the smells, the human waste thrown, unwashed bodies of the mentally broken, the rotten food. Relief is so distant that it is very easy to lose hope. And the guards with the carbines, and their Maglite clubs and tear gas are ever present to preserve the terror, to preserve it at any cost.

This terror in prison life, the sociopolitical function of prisons today, is about a self-perpetuating system of terror. Prisons are political weapons. They function as means of containing elements in this society which threatens the stability of a larger system.

In prisons, people who are actually or potentially disruptive of the status quo are confined, contained and punished, and in some cases forced to undergo psychological treatment by mind altering drugs. This is happening. The prison system is a weapon of repression. The government views all races, especially the younger generation as potentially the most rebellious elements of this society today. And thus, the jails and prisons of our society are overflowing with our generation of all social genders. Anyone who has seen the streets and ghettos can already understand how easily a sister or brother can fall victim to the police who are always there en masse.

Tens of thousands of prisoners have never been convicted of any crime they’re simply there, victims – they’re there under the control of insensitive, incompetent, and often blatantly racist public defenders who insist they plead guilty even though they know their client is just as innocent as they are. And for those who have committed a crime, we have to seek out the root cause. And we seek out this cause not in them as individuals, but in the capitalist system that produces the need for crime in the first place.

The materially hungry must steal to survive, and the spiritually hungry commit antisocial acts because their human needs cannot be met in a property-oriented state. It is a fair estimate to say that somewhere around 90% of crimes committed would not be considered crimes or would not occur in a people-orientated society.

Someone recently asked me what my name is. I answered that I am a revolutionary. What is my crime? I was born a freedom fighter. How long have you been in? Since the day I was born.

My life revolves around resisting government and authoritarians who violate the rights of humanity and animals. I have been saved to uplift my people, the innocent and to be free to free all the beautiful people that are struggling along with me. All of our brothers and sisters must live and struggle together against the terrible realities of the fascist governments that try to imprison our society to elevate their political agendas to control our society.

My freedom was achieved as a massive peoples struggle that kept me united with comrades that kept me strong and with hope for my release from tyrant confinement in three months after 46 years. It was the people that seized the keys, young people, Black, brown, Asian, Native American and white people, students and workers. They opened the gates to bring more sisters and brothers to join the ranks of our struggle for freedom.

Letter to Mother Earth

Believing that the attempt to make labor-time a standard for a monetary unit a fallacy and bound to fail in practice, I submit a few questions and observations. Whose labor is to be used as a standard, the efficient or the inefficient man’s? Take any product you may, say shoes. John produces five pairs a day, James produces ten. Is it possible that John in a free market will be able to obtain for his shoes a price twice as great as James? Absurd! In a competitive market, John would be forced out of business if he charged a price twice as great as James. If he charged the same price, which he must do to remain in business, what becomes of the labor-time unit? Disappeared!

What is a standard of value? It is one product in terms of which the exchange rate of other products are measured. It is true that labor, in the shape of the utility of the objective hindrance overcome, the value of which is determined in a competitive market, enters as an element determining the exchange value of product and in a freely competitive market tends to become the whole factor. But products must be useful in order to be exchangeable, and usefulness is determined by desire. The value of labor is determined by its result, not the result by amount of labor in time.

The truth is that the desire for a product can measure the utility and hence the value of the labor expended in making it, but the amount of labor cannot conversely measure the value of a product. For, what may be said of productive labor and wasted labor? How are they to be differentiated? Surely it must be seen that under a freely competitive system inefficiency and waste are automatically eliminated. This is to the benefit of society at large. This is why a freely competitive system is, truly and broadly speaking, the most automatically cooperative condition possible. And this is why, fortunately, that freedom solves the economic problem. Efficiency crowds out inefficiency, putting the right man in the right place and remunerating each according to the service he renders society.

The trouble with economic conditions is that they are not freely competitive and the State is the institution which maintains this system of robbery. What with all the privileges guaranteed to and handicaps placed upon the different producers it so happens that some are able to derive more than their just share of the wealth produced. The necessary conditions for a freely competitive society which anarchists desire, the equality of opportunity, is very far from being realized today. This is why they so valiantly struggle to instruct people in the economic benefits of liberty. 

While we claim that liberty solves every solvable social problem either it be in education, sex, literature, art, crime, religious beliefs or whatnot, we emphacize most strongly on the economic field, for this, it is believed, is the key to all others. It is unfortunate that so many so-called radicals (men who go to the root of things) do not understand economic processes, especially as they would exist under freedom. In my estimation, what makes this so is, not only the intentional perversions made by the text book economists, but also the stupid blunders made by Karl Marx in his, I believe, honest attempt to fight for the cause of the working class. 

As far as the money problem is concerned, all that anarchists desire is that anyone or any combination may go into the business of furnishing money or insuring credit. To the superficial thinker, especially the authoritarian minded such as Socialists or Communists, this would seem the veritable return to chaos. But we will see how fraudulent or insecure money fares when free competition in banking exists, and what will become of the phenomenon of interest. What will most probably happen has been ably shown by Proudhon, Wm. B. Greene, and others.

But it is quite doubtful that an attempt to directly adopt a labor-time unit of value will meet with any success.

Laurance Labadie 

Commentary – Eric Fleischmann:

This latest addition to the Laurance Labadie Archival Project was first sent as a letter to John G. Scott and Jo Ann Wheeler’s version of Mother Earth, printed in an issue in 1933, and then eventually found its way to the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of the University of Michigan Library. Being the last true Tuckerite anarchist, Labadie stands as the natural inheritor of the ideas of Josiah Warren, who, in the 19th century, opened his experimental “Time Store” in Cincinnati, Ohio. In said store, as William Bailie describes, compensation was “determined on the principle of the equal exchange of labor, measured by the time occupied, and exchanged hour for hour with other kinds of labor.” This laid the groundwork for the eventual initiation of the timebanking movement by Edgar S. Cahn in the 1990s, which until then had largely lain dormant except in the theoretical realm of mutualist thought and small experiments throughout the Great Depression. The former—as in Warren—is most likely what Labadie is responding to.

As someone who has worked for a timebank, I have to ultimately disagree with Labadie’s assessment of time-based currencies, but this is not about me so instead let me point to the interesting anticipation of criticisms of timebanking in the late 20th century–primarily that of MIT economist Frank Fisher. In the 80s, Fisher argued that since the pricing of time-based currencies are set by the timebank itself, it is susceptible to the same essential problems of calculation and incentive inherent in a centrally planned economy [1]. This comes at least relatively close to Labadie’s following point: “Take any product you may, say shoes. John produces five pairs a day, James produces ten. Is it possible that John in a free market will be able to obtain for his shoes a price twice as great as James? Absurd!” For both Labadie and Fisher, time-based currencies are inadequate in their function as mechanisms of information distribution via price.

But Labadie argues, regardless of its problems, a time-based currency is not even necessary. He—both inheriting the labor theory of value from Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and anticipating its contemporary reconstruction by Kevin Carson—holds that “granting free competition, that is, free and equal access to the means of production, to the raw materials, and to an unrestricted market, the price of all articles will always tend to be measured by the effort necessary for their production. In other words, labor as a factor in measuring value will become predominant.” Basically: if goods already fall to the cost of labor, then the currency used to valuate them already is necessarily measuring by labor, just not labor-time.

1. See Cahn’s No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative.

De Eric Fleischmann. Artículo original: Laurance Labadie’s “The Money Problem In the Light of Liberty” del 12 de enero de 2022. Traducido al español por Camila Figueroa.

El problema del dinero a la luz de la libertad

Muchas personas reflexivas son cada vez más conscientes de que las depresiones industriales son causadas principalmente por un control defectuoso del dinero y del crédito. La mayoría de los “reformistas”, o aquellos que recomiendan medidas para remediar esto, recurren al gobierno para la emisión y el control del dinero. Es mi propósito aquí presentar brevemente un análisis y una “cura” a la luz de la libertad económica.

Apenas es necesario informar a los pensadores claros de que el monopolio legal y la libertad son opuestos. Para los auténticos libertarios, sólo hay una manera de delegar las funciones sociales, y es la libre competencia. Si algún individuo o grupo cree que puede realizar alguna función social mejor de lo que se hace, debe tener el derecho y la oportunidad de demostrarlo en la práctica, bajo su propia responsabilidad y la de quienes se unan voluntariamente a él. Establecer por ley un monopolio de cualquier actividad social es una forma segura de promover el chanchullo y la explotación. Esta es la falacia del comunismo, del fascismo y de todos los esquemas que implican un monopolio gubernamental.

Si, en lugar de discutir entre sí, los diversos grupos de reforma monetaria se manifestaran abiertamente a favor de la libertad bancaria, entonces cada uno podría seguir adelante con sus planes con cooperadores voluntarios. El dinero de cada uno circularía entre aquellos que consideraran el plan sólido y viable. Pero nadie estaría obligado a aceptar otro dinero que no fuera el que quisiera. Las mejores ideas y sistemas se impondrían, al haberse demostrado su solidez mediante su funcionamiento real. No cabe duda de que habrá fracasos al principio. Pero es por medio de la prueba y el error libres, en la que sólo los experimentadores y los cooperadores libres se “queman”, como se logra finalmente la satisfacción. Este es el método de la libertad. Muchos de los que ahora recurren a los planes gubernamentales para reducir la situación del hombre pueden encontrarse pronto atados por la fuerza y la violencia del gobierno, como ha sido la suerte de varios pueblos en el hemisferio oriental.

El dinero surgió de la necesidad de librarse de los inconvenientes del trueque. El dinero es aquella riqueza o medio de comunicación que generalmente se acepta en el intercambio de bienes o servicios.

El dinero es de dos tipos: dinero mercancía y dinero crédito.

El dinero mercancía es aquel que tiene su valor inherente en sí mismo, como las pieles, el ganado, el maíz o una pieza de oro.

El dinero a crédito es una promesa de bienes de una cantidad o calidad específica, ya sea “a la carta” o en un momento determinado. Todo el papel moneda es dinero a crédito. El dinero a crédito puede estar (en realidad, debería estar) respaldado, basado y canjeable en riqueza o mercancías reales. Esto se llama dinero respaldado por mercancías. El dinero a crédito basado en deuda pública es dinero fiduciario o deshonesto.

Una transacción a crédito es aquella en la que transcurre un intervalo entre la realización del intercambio. En una transacción a crédito hay un intercambio completo de los derechos de propiedad, un intercambio incompleto de los bienes en cuestión. Dado que el papel moneda no es riqueza en sí mismo, el uso del papel moneda significa hacer negocios a crédito.

Base de emisión y norma de valor

El dinero es inconcebible sin una base de emisión y un patrón de valor. Uno de los aspectos más incomprendidos del dinero es la distinción entre la necesidad y la naturaleza de estos dos factores.

La base de emisión es alguna riqueza estable, como fardos de algodón, fanegas de trigo u onzas de oro, contra la que se emite el dinero y en la que puede canjearse, a voluntad del titular. El valor del dinero a crédito viene determinado por el valor de la riqueza en la que se basa o garantiza, medido en términos de una unidad de valor estándar.

El patrón de valor es una cosa, una unidad de oro, como un dólar, una libra, etc. o un conjunto de cosas, de valor por el que se mide el valor de cambio de otras cosas [1]. La función de un patrón de valor es servir de vara de medir los valores. Aparte de esto, no tiene ninguna otra influencia sobre el dinero. La sustancia del patrón no tiene por qué tener una relación inmediata con un sistema monetario. *

Mientras el dinero se base en la riqueza y sea suficiente en cantidad para realizar los intercambios necesarios, su valor se mantendrá a la par con el patrón (unitario) de valor, independientemente de la cantidad de dinero en circulación. El valor del dinero a crédito no está determinado por la cantidad de dinero existente. No sigue la ley de la oferta y la demanda, como creen los reformistas del dinero. Depende del valor de la unidad utilizada como patrón y, sobre todo, de la riqueza en la que se basa y de la probabilidad de que se canjee en esa riqueza.

Cualquier dinero es bueno si es realmente redimible por su emisor tal y como se indica en el billete. Muchos sistemas monetarios actuales no se basan en la riqueza redimible, sino en la deuda pública. Existen sólo por la fuerza de la costumbre porque sus usuarios no entienden el “sistema” y sus defectos. Se derrumbarían si llegaran a un enfrentamiento, si los poseedores del dinero pidieran su rescate. Y es este dinero basado en la deuda o fiduciario el que los gobiernos inflan y devalúan, siendo ambos incumplimientos de contrato y repudio parcial de la deuda. En estas condiciones es difícil ver cómo, incluso en una economía parcialmente libre, el colapso financiero no es inevitable en muchos países hoy en día.

(continuará, con sugerencias para inaugurar un sistema monetario libre y basado en la riqueza)

Hablando del impuesto que el banquero que tiene un monopolio impone a todo el comercio, Bernard Shaw dice “Sólo mediante la libertad de otros financieros para adoptar este sistema y tentar a sus clientes ofreciéndoles compartir la ventaja con ellos, puede esa ventaja ser [d]istribuida a través de la comunidad.” Sólo, observen. Ningún otro método lo hará. El monopolio gubernamental no lo hará. Nada más que el laissez-faire, la libre competencia, el dinero libre, en resumen, hasta donde llega, el anarquismo puro, puede abolir el interés sobre el dinero. Cuando el Sr. Shaw aplique este principio en todas las direcciones, él y sus anarquistas estarán en una sola plataforma.
-Benjamin R. Tucker

*Nota del editor: Una vez un pequeño grupo de nosotros experimentó para aprender lo esencial de un sistema de dinero libre y utilizó un tarro de crema fría casera como estándar de valor. Hay que admitir que no era “estable”, pero un miembro lo puso a disposición y era aceptable para todos nosotros para el canje de nuestro dinero en efectivo. -M.J.L. [Mildred J. Loomis]

Nota

1. El texto original dice “Una unidad de oro, como un dólar” y “etc.”.

Comentario – Eric Fleischmann:

En primer lugar, me gustaría dar un gran agradecimiento a Union of Egoists en UnionOfEgoists. com por proporcionar una copia de esta pieza para el Proyecto de Archivo de Laurance Labadie. “El problema del dinero a la luz de la libertad” se publicó por primera vez en 1937 en la revista del propio Labadie, Discussions, y luego se volvió a publicar en 1963 en la revista de la Escuela de la Vida, Way Out. Como puede demostrarse en otras obras suyas como “La economía de la libertad”, “El dinero y su libertad”, “Aspectos básicos del problema del dinero” y “La relación del dinero con el problema social”, Labadie ve el dinero como un elemento clave de la sociedad que hay que desestatizar y liberar. Al igual que pensadores libertarios anteriores a él, como Stephen Pearl Andrews y William Batchelder Greene, y posteriores a él, como Murray Rothbard, Labadie sostiene que el gobierno -específicamente el control gubernamental del monopolio del dinero- es en última instancia la causa de las crisis económicas. Y, por lo tanto, adopta la posición libertaria común con respecto al dinero abogando por la expansión de la acuñación de moneda en un sistema monetario verdaderamente libre.

Se relaciona notablemente con Rothbard en particular por su acuerdo en cuanto al problema pero no del todo en cuanto a la solución, una tensión que todavía se siente entre los libertarios de izquierda y de derecha hasta el día de hoy. En America’s Great Depression, sostiene que la crisis titular se produjo por culpa de la Reserva Federal por su excesiva impresión de dinero. Esto sigue su formulación preferida del ciclo económico austriaco, que sostiene que la expansión por parte del banco central da la falsa apariencia de un mayor nivel de ahorro, filtra el dinero a través de un sistema bancario de reservas racionales para ser prestado y depositado, y en última instancia conduce a inversiones no rentables a largo plazo en el mercado. La solución de Rothbard, que se encuentra en su tratado ¿Qué ha hecho el gobierno con nuestro dinero?, es la competencia totalmente privada en la moneda y la banca que, en su opinión, conducirá al uso del oro u otros metales preciosos por peso como principal medio de cambio. Esta es la solución reflejada en la propuesta de Labadie, y postula que el dinero-mercancía es la solución en contraposición al dinero-crédito. Labadie reconoce el oro, pero en última instancia no lo favorece como forma de dinero mercancía para el medio de cambio estándar. Pero, a diferencia de su padre, Jo, no defiende la idea del dinero fiduciario y, en cambio, propone ideas de dinero-crédito y crédito mutuo que evitarían el vacío del dinero fiduciario acuñado por el Estado, al tiempo que mantienen la creencia en el acceso libre y generalizado a la creación de nuevo dinero.

Y situar a Labadie en comparación con Rothbard no es una mera cuestión de capricho. Los dos pensadores, aunque en cierto modo forman parte de un linaje común hacia el anarquismo de mercado contemporáneo de izquierdas, representan el declive de la tradición individualista anticapitalista del siglo XIX y principios del XX y el ascenso de los libertarios capitalistas, respectivamente. Y además, en ocasiones se enfrentaron. Por ejemplo, en respuesta a la crítica de Rothbard a la anterior defensa individualista de la anulación del jurado en un sistema de derecho “privatizado”, Labadie escribe: “Cuando el Sr. Rothbard discute las ideas jurisprudenciales de Spooner y Tucker, y al mismo tiempo defiende presumiblemente en sus tribunales los mismos males económicos que son en el fondo la razón misma de la contención y el conflicto humanos, parecería ser un hombre que se atraganta con un mosquito mientras se traga un camello”.

Di ZH. Originale pubblicato il 20 dicembre 2021 con il titolo Process Totalitarianism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

La parola totalitarismo fa pensare a un dittatore che detta il proprio volere a burocrati e prefetti, i quali poi eseguono diligentemente. Fa pensare ai nazisti, ai sovietici staliniani, o ai tanti dittatori della fantasia popolare, come l’impero di Star Wars. È questo che solitamente s’intende per totalitarismo, e forse è una forma debole e insicura perché richiede una pressione crescente per tenere a bada la popolazione. Credo che anche gli Stati Uniti siano un regime totalitario, ma in quella forma molto più stabile e sicura che è il totalitarismo processuale.

Il totalitarismo processuale non domina dall’alto ma attraverso un processo burocratico, il cui risultato è più o meno determinabile. Lo stato mette in atto processi che danno una gamma ristretta di risultati. A prescindere dal fatto che si condivida il processo o i suoi risultati, il punto è che è lo stato, e non una gestione democratica, a controllare il processo, producendo così risultati prevedibili che rafforzano il potere dello stato stesso. Come ogni organizzazione capitalista, lo stato mira soprattutto alla propria riproduzione; pensare che un processo controllato dallo stato serva a qualcosa di diverso dalla riproduzione del potere statale è un errore.

Perlopiù si tratta di cose banalissime. Vai alla motorizzazione, passi l’esame di guida, prendi la patente e legalmente puoi guidare. Il risultato del processo è più o meno determinato, puoi avere la patente, ma prima devi fare il salto mortale, che serve a legittimare l’autorità dello stato. Adesso puoi guidare.

Altri aspetti del totalitarismo processuale sono più subdoli. Prendiamo ad esempio l’istituzione di un processo penale. C’è l’istruttoria, si discutono le regole del processo, si seleziona la giuria e infine c’è il processo vero e proprio. Il processo serve a stabilire la verità, ma passa attraverso lo stato, che lo imposta in un certo modo, e il risultato è più o meno predeterminato.

Prendiamo ad esempio il processo Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse fu assolto dall’accusa di aver ucciso dei manifestanti. Prima di tutto, i giudici sapevano esattamente cosa si sarebbe detto al processo perché era venuto fuori nell’istruttoria, per cui al processo difficilmente potevano esserci sorprese. Prima ancora del processo, difesa e accusa conoscono la forza delle loro posizioni. Inoltre le regole possono essere impostate a favore della difesa o dell’accusa. In questo caso specifico, accadde che le persone uccise da Rittenhouse non potevano essere definite vittime ma erano chiamate rivoltosi. Infine c’è la giuria, impostata secondo un’ottica razziale bianca tramite la dottrina della “persona ragionevole” (vedi Milton, 2021, Bloomberg Law Review qui).

Altri processi sono invece impostati in modo da favorire l’accusa. Ad esempio con l’utilizzo regolare del patteggiamento per spingere gli accusati poveri ad accettare una condanna al carcere, anche se l’accusa è debole, semplicemente con la minaccia di una condanna più pesante. Ancora una volta, lo stato imposta il processo in modo da arrivare ad un risultato prefissato: il processo non è controllato democraticamente. Durante il caso Rittenhouse, il processo fu impostato a favore della difesa, ma la questione più importante è che è lo stato ad avere il controllo, non il popolo.

Dunque il risultato di un processo penale – che è una messinscena – è più o meno predeterminato. Questo è totalitarismo processuale: il controllo completo, totale della società da parte dello stato tramite il controllo dei processi attraverso i quali opera la società.

E questo avviene in ogni ambito. Le elezioni, ad esempio: le regole del voto vengono cambiate continuamente al fine di raggiungere un certo risultato, i distretti elettorali vengono bloccati in modo da favorire questo o quel partito. Un politico uscente ha il 95% di probabilità di essere confermato. Aggiungiamo che occorre un mucchio di soldi per candidarsi e capiamo che parlare di democrazia è a dir poco imprudente. E anche qui è lo stato che imposta il processo in modo da arrivare a risultati prefissati.

E impostando questi processi lo stato crea un velo di legittimità. Votano tutti quanti, gli avvocati fanno le loro arringhe, i giudici dirigono il processo e la giuria decide: dietro la maschera del processo democratico si nasconde il controllo statale.

Un’alternativa sarebbe la seguente. I giurati vengono eletti a caso tra le persone di un particolare ambito geoculturale; il giudice è una persona autorevole riconosciuta dalla comunità, viene eletto e svolge il suo compito part-time, e insomma è un delegato; gli accusati scelgono autonomamente il modo di difendersi; e a fare la parte dell’accusa è il ricorrente, la vittima o un suo famigliare. Non sarebbe più un processo dominato e manipolato da ufficiali dello stato, ma una questione locale, gestita in maniera di fatto paritaria. Forse in un’entità astatuale avverrebbe così o forse no, ma il fatto importante è riuscire ad immaginare un’alternativa, perché solo così possiamo vedere i processi che ci governano per quello che sono: un totalitarismo processuale.

Diamo uno sguardo alla nostra vita e vediamo come siamo sommersi da miriadi di processi che non possiamo controllare.

“Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale, Can Standke tarafından kaleme alınmış. 1 Ocak 2021 Tarihinde “John Locke and the Supposedly Metaphysical Reality of Property Rights” başlığı altında yayınlanmıştır.

İster emeği bir zenginlik kaynağı olarak gören Adam Smith olsun, isterse Karl Marx’ın emeğin insanlığı oluşturduğu iddiası olsun, emeğin çeşitli nitelendirmeleri ortaya konmuş olsa da emeği meşru mülkiyet iddialarının kaynağı olarak görenler arasında benzersiz olan John Locke’tur. Modern liberteryenler, kişinin emeğinin karıştırılmasını (kişinin kendi emeğini maddeye vererek kendi vücudunda sahip olduğu hakları mülküne aşılaması, yani Lockean mülk görüşü) orijinal, doğal (siyasi değil) temellük kaynağı olarak gören Lockeçu mülkiyet anlayışlarına sıklıkla atıfta bulunurlar. Bu el konulan malzeme, daha sonra, diğerlerinin esas olarak el koydukları şeye karşı alınıp satılırsa, bu, başka bir meşru sahiplenme kaynağını oluşturur: ticaret. Bu çerçevede, kişinin emeğini doğal bir kaynakla karıştırması, bu kaynak ile sonraki sahibi arasında bir bağ oluşturur ve mülkiyet, ilk başta fiiliyat alanına bu şekilde girer. Bununla birlikte, bir nesne ile sahibi arasında var olan bağlantıyı fazlasıyla “ortada”, fazlasıyla “gerçek” olarak görmek, bu kavrayışta zımnen yapılır. Mülkiyetin çoğu zaman sanıldığı kadar “gerçek” olduğundan şüpheliyim ve yeterince ilginçtir ki, söylemden bağımsız gerçeklik olarak bu mülkiyet anlayışı, insanları sağ liberter spektrumla ilişkilendiriyor veya bu yelpaze içinde tutuyor. Daha sonra bunu takiben, mülkiyetin bu sözde metafizik gerçekliğine meydan okumak istiyorum.

Birinin en sevdiği nesneyle olan bağının, başkalarının onun hakkında ne düşündüğüne rağmen var olduğunu hayal etmesi çok bireysel ve romantik görünebilir ve belki de bu yüzden mülkiyeti herhangi bir tartışmalı ihtimalden bağımsız bir gerçeklik olarak düşünmeye meyilliyiz. Herhangi birinin meydan okumaya cesaret etmesi durumunda burada sadece ben, tüfeğim ve çayırım var. Ama bu fikir tutar mı?

Bir deneye katıldığınızı hayal edin. Birkaç cansız nesne arasında bir kişinin bulunduğu bir odaya giriyorsunuz ve bu nesnelerin bir kısmının bu kişiye ait olduğu söyleniyor. Sahip olunan nesneleri sahiplerine doğru şekilde atayabiliyor musunuz? Yapamıyorsanız, nedeni nedir? Şunu düşünün: Bir şeye sahip olmayı tercih eden başka düşünen faillerin olmadığı ve kıtlığın olduğu bir yerde, nesneler için herhangi bir rekabetin olmadığı bir dünyada mülkiyetin bir anlamı olduğunu düşünmek mantıklı olur mu? Değilse, bunun nedeni mülkiyetin, düşünen failler arasındaki süregidenlerin dışında var olmayan, ancak tam olarak bu haliyle var olan bir şey olması olabilir mi?

Büyük ölçüde Locke’un hamisi Lord Shaftesbury tarafından desteklenen Hükümet Üstüne İkinci Tez’i yazmak için yalnızca siyasi teşviklerin ötesinde, açıkçası Locke’un ele alması gereken bir soru, mülkiyetin nasıl haklı gösterilebileceğidir- yani, yani bir kişiyi bir nesneyi talep etmede neyin haklı kıldığı konusunda zaten açık, devam eden bir söylem vardı. Locke’un yaptığı şey, bireysel ilişkisel anlamda mülkiyetin tanımı olan kaynaklara imtiyazlı erişim hakkına sahip olduğunu makul olarak neden iddia edebileceğine dair bir argüman sunmaktır; onunki kesinlikle Locke’un kendisinin yeterince inandırıcı bulduğu ve başkalarının da bunu kabul etmesini beklediği bir argüman. Görünüşe göre bu, mülkiyet için gerekçelendirmelerin yararlı olduğu tek bağlamdır, çünkü tüm gerekçeler yalnızca birinin bir şeyi haklı çıkardığı bir söylem olduğunda faydalıdır ve biz zaten düşünen faillerden bağımsız bir mülkiyet gerçekliğinden yeterince şüphe etmişizdir. Böylece, kendimizi kendimizle veya başkalarıyla bir tartışma alışverişinde bulmamız durumunda hazır tutmak isteyeceğimiz normatif değerlendirmelerle baş başa kalırız. Dolayısıyla, mülkiyeti söylemde ortaya çıkan bir şey olarak görmek, onu sosyal söylemin bir ürünü ve tabii ki sosyal olarak inşa edilmiş bir yapı olarak görmek faydalı görünüyor.

Şimdi bu söylemin öncelikle toplumda hangi gerekçeyle yapıldığını sorabiliriz. Anlayışımız, mülkiyetin neden bir şey olduğuna dair sık sık atıfta bulunulan bir toplumsal işlevi açıklamaya elverişli olabilir: Çatışmadan daha ortaya çıkmadan kaçınma, “toplumsal çıkara” atfedilebilecek bir işlev. Doğal olarak tarihsel gelişmeler piyasalara ve endüstriyel sosyal paradigmalara yol açmış olsa da kendimizi çelişen tercihlerin olduğu bir dünyada bulacağız ve makul olarak bunların barışçıl bir şekilde tartıldığını görmek isteyebiliriz. Bu nedenle, bu işlevi yerine getirmek için söylemsel mülkiyet yapısının var olması sosyal olarak uygun görünmektedir. Bir toplumun, sürekli (potansiyel olarak şiddet içeren) bir çatışmaya girmeden kendi işlerimize devam edebilmemiz için ayrıcalıklı erişim etrafında bir söylem benimsemesi faydalı görünüyor. Seçtiğimiz ortam, çatışan çıkarları çoğunlukla barışçıl, müdahaleci olmayan, söylemsel alışverişin içine çevirir.

Böyle bir söylemde, Locke’un gerekçesi, bir diğerinin kabul etmeye meyilli olabileceği bir gerekçe olabilir veya olmayabilir. Ancak çıkarılması gereken önemli ders, bu özel gerekçenin hiçbir üstünlük iddiasının olmadığıdır. Muhtemel diğerleri arasında bir Lockeçu argümanı kabul etmeye meyilli olabilirim, ama nihayetinde benim söyleme katkım bireysel değerlendirmeme bağlıdır, çünkü bir argümanın söylemde kabulü nihai olarak ilgili bireylere bağlıdır. Birisi bir başkasının kararına katılmayabilir ve gerekçelendirme aynı şeyin kabulüne eşit olmadığı için, sözde meşru taleplerinin zorla ihlal edildiğini tespit etmeleri durumunda tehdit etmek veya savunmacı güç kullanmak bile haklı olabilir. Ancak nihayetinde kişinin mülkünü elinde tutması ya bu güce ya da karşılıklı kabule bağlıdır. Ve karşılıklı kabul, birinin mülkiyeti olarak iddia ettiği şeyi tutmak için daha zarif (daha barışçıl ve risksiz) bir çözüm gibi göründüğü için, başkalarının onları kabul etmeye meyilli olması için iddialarımıza yönelik gerekçeler üretiriz. Locke’un yaptığı buydu.

The Money Problem In the Light of Liberty

Many thoughtful people are more and more aware that industrial depressions are caused chiefly by faulty control of money and credit. Most “reformers,” or those who recommend measures to remedy this, turn to government for issue and control of money. It is my purpose here to briefly present an analysis and “cure” in the light of economic liberty.

It is hardly necessary to inform clear thinkers that legal monopoly and liberty are opposites. To genuine libertarians, there is but one way to delegate social functions, and that is free competition. If any individual or group believes they can perform any social function better than is being done, they should have the right and opportunity to prove it in actual operation, on their own responsibility and that of any who voluntarily join them. To erect through law a monopoly of any social activity is a sure way to promote graft and exploitation. This is the fallacy of communism, fascism, and all schemes involving government monopoly.

If, instead of arguing with one another, the various money reform groups would come out openly for freedom in banking, then each could go ahead with their plans with voluntary cooperators. Each one’s money would circulate among those who considered the plan sound and workable. But no one would be compelled to accept any other money than he wished. The better ideas and systems would win out, having been proven sound by actual operation. There might be failures at first, no doubt. But it is by free trial and error, with only experimenters and free co-operators getting “burned,” that satisfaction is finally achieved. This is the method of liberty. Many of those who now turn to governmental schemes for lessening man’s plight may soon find themselves hog-tied by government force and violence, as has been the lot of several people in the eastern hemisphere.

Money grew out of the need to get rid of the inconveniences of barter. Money is that wealth or media that is generally acceptable in the exchange of goods of services.

Money is of two kinds: commodity and credit money.

Commodity money is that which has its value inherent in itself—such as skins, cattle, corn or a gold piece.

Credit money is a promise of goods of specific quantity or quality, either “on demand” or at a specified time. All paper money is credit money. Credit money may be (in honesty, should be) backed by, based on and redeemable in actual wealth or commodities. This is called commodity-backed money. Credit money based on government-debt is fiat or dishonest money.

A credit transaction is one in which an interval elapses between the completion of the exchange. In a credit transaction there is a complete exchange of the rights of ownership, an incomplete exchange of the goods in question. Since paper money is not wealth itself, the use of paper money means doing business on a credit basis.

Basis of Issue and Standard of Value

Money is inconceivable without both a basis of issue and a standard of value. One of the most misunderstood aspects about money is the distinction between the need for and nature of these two factors. 

The basis of issue is some stable wealth like bales of cotton, bushels of wheat, ounces of gold, against which the money is issued and in which it can be redeemed, at the wish of the holder. The value of credit money is determined by the value of the wealth upon which it is based or secured, measured in terms of a standard unit of value.

The standard of value is some one thing, a unit of gold, like a dollar, ire, pound, etc. or a composite of things, of value by which the exchange value of other things is measured [1]. The function of a standard of value is to serve as a yardstick for the measurement of values. Beside this it has no other influence on money. The substance of the standard need have no immediate connection with a monetary system.*

As long as money is based on wealth and is sufficient in quantity to carry on the necessary exchanges, its value will remain on par with the (unit) standard of value, irrespective of the amount of money in circulation. The value of credit money is not determined by the amount of money in existence. It does not follow the law of supply and demand as any money reformers believe. It depends upon the value of the unit used as a standard, and mostly upon the wealth on which it is based and the likelihood of its redemption in that wealth.

Any money is good if it is actually redeemable by its issuer as stated on the note. Many monetary systems today are not based on redeemable wealth, but are based on government debt. They exist only by force of habit because their users do not understand the “system” and its faults. They would collapse if it came to a showdown, if the holders of money asked for redemption. And it is this debt-based or fiat money which governments inflate and devalue, both of which are breaches of contract and partial repudiation of debt. Under these conditions it is difficult to see how even in a partially free economy, financial collapse is not inevitable in many countries today.

(to be continued, with suggestions for inaugurating a free, wealth-based money system)

Speaking of the tax which the banker who has a monopoly levies upon all commerce, Bernard Shaw says “Only by the freedom of other financiers to adopt this system and tempt his customers by offering to share the advantage with them, can that advantage be [d]istributed through the community.” Only, observe. No other method will do it. Government monopoly will not do it. Nothing but laissez-faire, free competition, free money, in short, as far as it goes, pure Anarchism, can abolish interest on money. When Mr. Shaw will apply this principle in all directions, he and his anarchists will stand on one platform.

-Benjamin R. Tucker [2]

To illustrate the foregoing points let us imagine ourselves starting an suitable free money system. We must have a duplicating machine or a printing press, a person who can estimate the value of property or “security”, a bank toller and a bookkeeper. And we must agree on something as a standard of value, a thing of specific quality and quantity. Suppose we agree on a dollar worth 32.5 ounces of gold. Then we print our money, designating what fraction or multiple of the standard this money is to represent. Our money may read: “Good for one dollar in value, to be ultimately redeemed through the Waverly Peoples Bank”. Then we are ready to put the money in circulation.

Now the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer — anyone who has conmoditie: or tangible wealth which he wants to buy or sell — comes to the bank to get money with which to circulate this wealth. We commonly say such person “borrow” of the bank, though this term is really misleading. A bank’s customer does not “borrow” money. He merely goes to the bank to have his honesty and reliability verified. The so-called “borrower” of money is really the issuer of money. He holds the wealth upon which the money is issued, by which it is secured, and with which the money can be redeemed. Even a property-less person may “borrow” money from the bank provided he has a property owner vouch for his reliability, i.e. sign his note.

Obviously anyone can issue a promissory note in payment for goods, i.e., enter a credit transaction, but his promise could not circulate very far because he is not generally known. Such a note therefore would not be money in the sense of a generally circulating medium of exchange. A bank eliminates this difficulty. In the division of labor, the bank assumes the work of determining the reliability of its customers and verifies that reliability by giving them notes, in exchange for the right to confiscate an equivalent part of the pledged property in case the customer should default. This requirement is necessary to protect those who have surrendered goods in exchange for money.

Estimating Value of Security.

A bank customer needing money, to circulate wealth, appears at our bank. Then our bank manager sends our estimator to look over his wealth. The estimator states its value, whereupon the bank agrees to give a loan minus a fraction of its value as a risk premium, a margin of safety determined by experience. Thereupon the exchange is made. The bank gives the bank notes, and the customer gives to the bank the right to take an equivalent portion of the value of his property at the end of the term of loan if he does not return these notes. The money is now in circulation and passes freely from one person to another in exchanging commodities. Eventually the “borrower” finishes his product and sells it on the market. Then he takes the notes to the bank to release his pledge, and the bank then withdraws this many dollars from circulation. Meanwhile other persons have “borrowed” and “repaid”. Money was issued and withdrawn in response to the normal demands of the needs of trade. Such is the natural course of the issue, circulation and redemption of money. The final redemption of money constitutes a cancellation of pledge or debt.

Of course there is labor connected with the business of banking. Managers, tellers, bookkeepers, estimators and supplies need to be paid for. In ordinary banking business, this cost runs around one-half of one percent of the amount of “loans” made. Another small item needs to be covered: the loss sustained when the wealth which secures loans is destroyed or depreciates from unavoidable causes. For this another small percent is charged (should never be over one-half of one percent) a sort of mutual insurance. This total of one-percent should be the total cost to the bank’s customers. There need or should be no other “interest” charge.

Points to Note in Above Procedure

1. It is not necessary for a bank to have capital of its own.

2. The bank performed its only legitimate function: to insure credit.

3. All money issued in this manner is amply backed, secured and insured.

4. The only sound limit to the volume of credit money is the amount of monetizable wealth in existence, which is hundreds of times more than needed to circulate the wealth in trade.

5. Irrespective of the amount of money issued, the value of purchasing power of that money remains the same as the standard. When gold is the standard, no gold need enter into the bank’s transactions, but gold must be exchanged on the open market for other commodities in order to determine the values of things in terms of gold.

6. In this system the value of the gold returns to normal because it is stripped of the law-created privilege of being the sole basis for the issue of money. The money is really issued on the goods or wealth of the customers. It is really the labor necessary to mine gold which is the standard of value.

7. This money is not fiat money — not irredeemable paper money, not unsecured money. It is not subject to change in value which might cause inflation or deflation, which are never necessary.

8. The amount of currency is always adjusted to the amount needed, as it can be issued and withdrawn (pledges redeemed) at the will of the customers.

9. The value of the currency fluctuates no more than the value of the gold used as the standard commodity.

10. Interest is eliminated, so long as people are free to open this type of bank. Any attempt to charge interest would immediately meet the pressure of competition. Customers would go to the banks which only charged 1 (1%) cost of doing business and the insurance. (Bank interest in general practice is due to the fact that banks have a legal or law-created privilege to charge 5% or 6% or more).

11. “Hoarding” is not objectionable because it cannot curtail the amount of needed currency. Currency can always be obtained on monetizable wealth.

12. Since there is no governmental control of this currency, there is no possibility of bureaucratic tampering or exploitation.

13. Free competition and the possibility of rejecting currency eliminate the possibilities of favoritism, graft, irresponsibility, inefficiency, and incompetence; and the abolition of the legal tender privilege will have the effect of good money forcing bad money out of circulation.

14. The books of these banks would always be open for public inspection, with their condition published monthly, upon investigation by public accountants.

15. These banks and the money must exist by voluntary support and therefore maintain themselves in a competitive field. This is the method of liberty.

*Editor’s Note: Once a small group of us experimented to learn the essentials of a free money system and used a jar of homemade cold cream as a standard of value. Admittedly this was not “stable,” but one member made it available and it was acceptable to all of us for redemption of our scrip money. -M.J.L. [Mildred J. Loomis]

1. The original text reads “Aunit of gold, like a dollar” and “etc.Q.”
2. Everything after this point was not included in the journal Discussions and was sourced by the Anarchist Library from The Storm!, issue 4/5 (Spring & Summer 1977). Updated 3/17/23.

Commentary – Eric Fleischmann:

Firstly, I would like to give a big thanks to Union of Egoists at UnionOfEgoists.com for providing a copy of this piece for the Laurance Labadie Archival Project. “The Money Problem In the Light of Liberty” was first published in 1937 in Labadie’s own journal Discussions and then republished in 1963 in the School of Living’s journal Way Out. As can be demonstrated in other pieces of his such as “Economics of Liberty,” “Money and Your Freedom,” “Basic Essentials of the Money Problem,” and “The Relationship of Money to the Social Problem,” Labadie sees money as a key element of society to be destatified and liberated. Like libertarian thinkers before him such as Stephen Pearl Andrews and William Batchelder Greene and after him such as Murray Rothbard, Labadie argues that government—specifically government control of the money monopoly—is ultimately the cause of economic crises. And he therefore takes the common libertarian position regarding money of advocating for the expansion of currency minting into a truly free market monetary system.*

This is notably related to Rothbard in particular because of their agreement regarding the problem but not entirely on the solution, a tension still felt between left- and right-wing libertarians to this day. In America’s Great Depression, he argues that the titular crisis occured by the fault of the Federal Reserve by their excessive printing of money. This follows his preferred formulation of the Austrian Business Cycle, which holds that expansion by the central bank gives the false appearance of increased level of savings, filters money through a rational-reserve banking system to be lent and deposited, and ultimately leads to long-run-unprofitable investments in the market. Rothbard’s solution, to be found in his treatise What Has Government Done to Our Money?, is totally private competition in currency and banking that, in his opinion, will lead to the use of gold or other precious metals by weight as the primary medium of exchange. This is the mirrored solution to Labadie’s proposal, and posits commodity money as being the solution as opposed to credit-money. Labadie acknowledges gold but ultimately does not favor it as a form of commodity money for the standard medium of exchange. But, unlike his Greenbacker father Jo, he does not hold up the idea of fiat money and instead he proposes ideas of credit-money and mutual credit that would sidestep the emptiness of state-minted fiat while maintaining the belief in free and widespread access to the creation of new money.

And placing Labadie in comparison to Rothbard is not purely a matter of whim. The two thinkers, though in some ways part of a common lineage toward contemporary left-wing market anarchism, represent the decline of the anti-capitalist individualist tradition of the 19th and early 20th century and the rise of capitalist libertarians respectively. And furthermore, they butted heads on occasion. For example, in response to Rothbard’s criticism of the earlier individualist advocacy of jury nullification in a ‘privatized’ system of law, Labadie writes, “[W]hen Mr. Rothbard quibbles about the jurisprudential ideas of Spooner and Tucker, and at the same time upholds presumably in his courts the very economic evils which are at bottom the very reason for human contention and conflict, he would seem to be a man who chokes at a gnat while swallowing a camel.”

*Note: The author has chosen to remove reference to counterfeiting in light of the tangential debate among libertarians on the subject. Amended 1/19/22.

Partition & Entanglement: Review of Home Rule by Nandita Sharma

“The entire, eons-long practice of human  movement  into  new  places  was  pushed  out  of  our  imagination — or,  perhaps more accurately, was reimagined as a national security threat. In the process, stasis was glorified as the normative way of being human.”

“Only after the death of the national liberation project can we renew our commitment to decolonization.”

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

My friend found this preposterous; we already have lines of critique to deal with the privileges of the gentrifier class and the negative structural mechanisms of gentrification. Virtually no one in the American context calls white tech bros “migrants” — the term has almost exclusively valences of brown skin and manual labor. The average American who runs across a “Migrants Welcome” sticker knows immediately what it means (and gets mad about it), whereas the term “Refugees” is much more sparingly used and in many cities is far less contentious or even that meaningful. This isn’t an abstract sense, but something empirically visible: in San Francisco and Portland white yuppies would ignore “refugees welcome” stickers my friends ordered from European antifa distros, but frequently tear down “migrants welcome” — sometimes even leaving racial slurs scrawled in their place.

Further, my friend argued, surely as anarchists we support the freedom of individuals to move for whatever personal reason, not just when they are formally categorized as “victims.” The response was sharp, no, she emphasized, neighborhood communes should have the power to democratically decide who is allowed in.

Nandita Sharma writes from the context of a different intersection of struggles. Sharma is an anarchist, activist, and academic whose family was shaped by the traumatic partition of India and their immigration to so-called Canada. In the dedication to Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, she relays her mother’s dismay at the suppression of a Mohawk revolt: “Us and them, same, same.”

This is the central focus of Home Rule: to ruthlessly criticize and deconstruct the migrant versus indigenous conceptual dichotomy rather than ignore it. Whether such categorical distinctions come “‘from above’ or ‘from below,‘” from the right or from the ostensible left.

It is not a rejection of specific claims or a sweeping leveling of complex differences in historical injustice. Struggles for land and liberation, for the defense of culture violently suppressed, in response to the traumas and particularities, are obviously vital and important. But Sharma is not tip-toeing around, timidly qualifying statements so much they say nothing, as so many writers in this space do. Her target is all nationalism, and ultimately all parochialism, all regionalism, explicitly including the nationalism of the oppressed, and her argument is that for all the leftist discursive trappings, such a framework reproduces the structures of an existing postcolonial order that has simply laundered power and domination, rather than abolishing it. To truly break the legacy of colonialism we must break entirely with the frame of nationalism and the idea of discrete peoples each inherently “of some place,” cultivating instead, a more complex global commons.

Central to Sharma’s argument is that notions of nativeness do violence to the complexities of the actual human tapestry — to fix some people as being “of a place” and others as aliens to it — is a simplification that benefits power and hierarchy. While the mistaken frame of sovereignty has spontaneously emerged in various places for thousands of years (to inevitable damage and horror), today’s global interlocking nationalist order is a direct continuation of the imperial and colonial process of legibility construction.

Home Rule is a book that refreshingly says something, not just with hyper-particularity, but with general conclusions.

This has been a hard review to write because I unabashedly love this book and have spent over a year urging every academic anarchist I know to read it — to universal followup thanks and praise. There are plenty of merely good books that merely retread or repackage important positions and critiques, the activist press is filled with them. Perfectly enjoyable books that get consumed on a monthly subscription basis by thousands to little fanfare or impact. Rare is the book like Debt: The First 5000 Years or Caliban And The Witch that become lasting centers of gravity in the left. And rarer still is the book that doesn’t just meet the radical left where much of it already is, but pushes it further. I am not given to hyperbole in praise, so let this serve as a high water mark in a decade of lengthy reviews: Home Rule feels like a worthy sequel to The Many Headed Hydra.

This may seem a little non-sequitur given how directly Home Rule leans on a lot of established work in postcolonial studies, but thematically and ideologically, it’s plain throughout the entire text that Sharma is tightly aligned with Linebaugh and Rediker. And while their famous collaboration developed over a series of engaging historical anecdotes or studies weaving together into a broader picture of universal struggle for the commons and against power, Sharma’s is more of a meticulously broad weapon, rigorously covering a sweeping global history of empire and the rise of various nationalisms over the last two centuries. Entire eras in the development of individual nations are sometimes given merely an incisive paragraph. Sharma strings the reader along with as many engaging examples and detailed contrasts as she can, but her need to provide exacting scope leaves much of Home Rule a ratatatat of globetrotting examples and citations as she presses her general point. Yet the passionate universalism, the sense that the struggle against domination is one timeless struggle at the heart of humanity, fills your chest in a way few other books even bother to attempt.

Sharma’s approach in Home Rule is to demonstrate 1) How historically useful the divisions of nationality, of foreigner and native, were to the European imperialist project. 2) The complex ways that settler colonial ideology is parasitic on this framework and reproduces it. And 3) how the modern paradigm of a checkerboard of nations covering the planet was the continuation and — in many ways — intensification of the logic of prior imperialist horrors.

Today there’s widespread interest in either painting nationalism as a timeless reality of human nature and innate community structures, or in overly distinguishing the particular norms of the westphalian nationstate system as some kind of totally unique phenomenon. Sharma is clear that nations in the broader sense have an unfortunately long legacy reaching back thousands of years, but at the same time European imperialism played a significant role in deepening the poison. Virtually all the modern associations we have with borders as well as the repulsion of non-natives, have their genesis in the administrative needs of empire.

In the US context we often forget or ignore historical developments beyond our borders, turning the slave trade into an entirely US-centric story, for example, and ignoring worldwide phenomena that we weren’t central to. But Sharma draws out how, on the global level, the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire led to a calamitous decline in the productivity of centralized capital intensive projects like plantations, as former slaves focused on efficiently satisfying their interests as small farmers or paid laborers. Since these decentralized forms of economic activity are both less taxable and less legible and more facilitative of resistance and power erosion… as always, the misfortune of high-capital projects means the misfortune of the state. And of course, low-capital projects like small farmers have little capacity to capture political power for themselves to stop the state from recoiling.

The replacement of slave labor with “coolie” labor from India and China filled the same boats, and served the same economic niches, and was conditioned and controlled through indenture and immigration controls. It was an explicitly racialized system that in many cases amounted to contract slavery, but added token paperwork (a contract in an alien language stamped with your fingerprint and an early passport) and shifted around (de facto) slave flows to benefit British interests.

Essentially: first you conquer the world, then you slice it up into little prisons and refuse to allow people to seek economic opportunities across your new prison walls unless they have certificates that are only given to those with indenture contracts. Since people have always moved to seek opportunities, you have a base population of workers, but since it’s always nice to keep the labor market completely desperate, you also implement policies of vicious enclosure, dispossession, repression, and famine-making.

This is the essential thing to understand: even as Americans we live in the continuation of a global system created in large part by the British Empire. A system that became so globally encompassing it could do away with the traditional focus of states or nations on limiting exit and instead shift to now limiting entry between subdivisions of the empire. Through systematic dispossession almost every region produced displaced and desperate workers for the global benefit of the empire, but rather than have their origin region administrate their distribution to other regions, it was recipient imperial regions that oversaw admissions.

To be clear — the British themselves didn’t need to cover literally every square inch of the planet, merely a sufficient fraction of it so as to crystalize a new world system, partially of imitators and partially of regimes around the periphery who — still focused on preventing the exit of their own populations — saw the benefit. So, for example, the nominally independent Chinese government actively collaborated with this new immigration control system since it offset the costs of preventing its population’s escape.

Moreover, paternalistic liberal reformism reinforced this new system, taking the existing (racialized) internal barriers to movement and strengthening them. The liberal imperialist declared that Indian and Chinese migration must be stopped for their own good, so the systematic dispossession and immiseration of colonial occupation continued, but now even sharper constraints were put up against rational relocation. Liberals found the new immigration-regulatory state form quite amenable to these reforms because it served state and capitalist power.

Sharma emphasizes that these practices of imperialism weren’t confined to contexts like India where partition makes them blindingly apparent, they were also critical to white settler states like the US, and liberal paternalistic reformism (intersecting with state needs) likewise played an important role, although with some limited inversions.

Since local populations (often with access to commons, ecological knowledge, wider community support, etc.) were at least perceived as distinctly resistant to work and thus obliging the importing of various forms of coerced and dispossessed labor, and because their existence threatened certain mobilizing narratives, a distinct approach was taken with them. “Definition, segregation, protection, and immobilization” were repeatedly shepherded by liberal paternalism, flattening the complexities and dynamism of pre-columbian societies into a fetishized place-bound ideal of stasis. Notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’ were leveraged to patronizingly preserve ‘tradition’, in ways that systematically suppressed the native to extremely limited means or modes of engagement, while stripping anyone who wandered outside those borders of native status. So for example in Canada,

“Indians needed a permit from a government Indian agent to sell, trade, or barter (Opekokew 1980; Sluman and Goodwill 1982). Obtaining a university degree or voting in a Canadian election was declared to be “un-Indian” and, if practiced, would, until 1960, result in the loss of “Indian” status.“

Meanwhile across settler states it was generally decided that a woman who married a white man lost her legal “native” protections. “Protection” meant segregation, and “tradition” meant deprivement of wider mobility, solidarity, and economic access.

This suppression of potential market activity no doubt helped monopolistic ambitions of white capitalists, but it’s a stark comparison to the forced entry into labor markets going on elsewhere. Sharma roots the explanation in terms of legitimization processes distinct to white settler societies.

If the arc in the surrounding British imperial world started with forced assimilation and then transitioned to the construction of nativism, in general terms the US and other white settler states went from the construction of nativism to forced assimilation. These divergent paths were related to the need of white settler states to construct their own nationalist sovereignty and identity to bind disparate whites against the migrant labor being imported. As the pivot from empire to nationalism took place globally, with for example the US revising its self-perception into a nation rather than aspiring empire, the white dominated colonies focused on constructing whiteness as a native identity (erasing prior complexities and divergences in origins and motivations).

“what makes White Settler colonies distinctive is not that, from the start, imperial states wanted to extinguish Native life in order to gain territory to populate with Europeans. Instead, what is unique about them is that the Whitening of one portion of the working class sowed deep and long-lasting divisions between workers… Arguably, the success of strategies used to Whiten workers was an initial moment in the imperial turn to biopower and informed all subsequent “define and rule” strategies of indirect-rule colonialism across the empire.”

This inevitably meant championing not just the nationalistic and native paradigms, but also a framework of extermination, assimilation, and “preservation” that framed prior populations as static snapshots and objectified them in terms of identification with place and history — to be treated as museum curios on the side of the road — rather than agents capable of an active conflicting claim to nativeness. White settlers could then be constructed as uniquely native and migrant by removing the agency and presence of existing native populations. And insofar as those populations were to achieve agency or capacity for self-alteration they were to be forced into whiteness.

Thus a major byproduct of constructing white settler national identity as “natives” was the construction and reinforcement of national and native frames in actually native populations. Some of these dynamics are well known. Policies like the Dawes Rolls incentivized deep alignment towards the state’s notion of “indianness” by tribal leaders and many individuals. Blood quantification and discreteness of “membership” were but part of a wider array of incentivized dynamics in the construction of identity.

And this followed imperial and colonial patterns worldwide:

“Colonialism was now portrayed as necessary, not to change Indigenous-Natives  (e.g.,  to  “civilize”  them), but to preserve their (often invented) traditions and customs as they encountered the “modern” world”

Reservations confined survivors to remove them from attention and facilitate cultural extermination, but they also reinforced and even created identifications of peoples with place. Imperialist and settler-colonial practice thus shaped and constructed indigenous subjectivities. This is both a trivial and a sharp claim, and Sharma leans into the latter.

The forcible crushing of cultures and knowledge erased much, but it also imposed opportunity costs. What is lost to western imperialism is not just what was, but what might’ve grown on their own or in varying degrees of collaborative contact with distant cultures. The pathways of exploration and creation — the consensual syntheses and wildly divergent children — that were made impossible. Such is also the legacy of colonization.

This is an image of colonialism not just as imposed contact, but actually as violent segregation. This picture of colonization is the suppression of meshing networks, instead violently affirming simplifications and removals. Anything to stop hybridization and complex cyborg flows or diversifications of agential currents. White settler society could only hold itself together if it removed all fluidity and activity from those it wanted to steal “nativeness” from. Ratcheting up the definition and immobilization inherent to any construct of nativeness, hoping to impose such to the point of rigor mortis.

The Third Reich would infamously later take up this ideological drive into an explicit institutional crusade for the ‘preservation’ of local cultures against the ‘imperialism’ of global culture. Such hyper-paternalistic reduction of diverse, mobile, and fluid populations into fixed eternal peoples with similarly eternally fixed traits and behaviors was, we must remember, cast as a noble struggle of resistance. Part of what made national socialism so potent was its self-narrative as standing up for the little guys worldwide. Germany sincerely saw itself as defending the indigenous nations of Europe against globalism, universalism, and foreign corruption. And, just as in the settler states it took partial inspiration from, this meant concentration camps and mass murder.

It’s important to highlight however, that such define-and-rule paternalism wasn’t just the invention of some happenstance global norms or conventions constraining the arrival of immigrants, it was also bound up with the wider imposition of capitalist dynamics that incentivized the perpetuation and reinforcement of these new norms even once the regional prison administrators had autonomy.

The imperialists put the system into place but could then, in the twentieth century, step back and let it perpetuate itself.

To put it in more concretely theoretical terms: it took the genocidal engines of imperialism to push most of the world into a profoundly suboptimal equilibria state. A new configuration that resisted transformation and pulled anything nearby into its own destructive form.

Indeed, having brutally reshaped the world into this new norm of states policing entry, the ruling imperial powers increasingly found it advantageous to remove their own administrative overhead once a region had been integrated into the new global system.

That the project of imperialism became constructing these discrete “nations” was explicit in many ways. The League of Nations openly framed the role of Empire as the development of nations, the “tutelage” of populations into becoming distinct “Peoples” and then nations.

Of course FDR used British desperation in and after World War 2 to strong-arm the UK into effectively turning their empire over to the US, but this wasn’t a change of the foundations. The US model was a decentralized next step in the British approach to administration: where discrete national prisons were administered through the UN and brought to heel via one-sided open trade with the US — the last standing industrial and financial powerhouse — but retained enough independence to resiliently keep the whole system afloat. It was the intensification of the British policy of getting Natives to continue the process of empire themselves. Struggles of resistance, having now aligned with US power and aspirations, were then able to create a checkerboard of postcolonial nations.

This escalated processes of enclosure and suppression because local rulers had local knowledge and were now embedded in more totalizing and resilient wider incentive structures.

When U Nu, the nationalist first prime minister of Burma, described the UN charter as “one great mutual security pact” he was not speaking of the security of nations against one another, but of the security of power in the face of that which would dissolve it. In this sense the interlocking national structure was not a matter of securing peace (wars continued unabated), but of securing domination itself from the spectre of revolution, insurrection, and revolt.

Power embraced decentralized fragmentation (according to a fixed logic) to avoid dissolution.

Natural systems, left to their own devices, will generally entangle. When ink disperses into water the result is a dissolution of simplistic discrete categories and structures. This is the opposite of nationalistic fragmentation which continues the construction of legibility started by Empire. If the preservation of “order” requires a fractal subdivision of humanity — the forced relocations and dispossessions of countless souls in endless partitions — then all the worse for any actual living breathing individual human beings. Humanity must be fed into the meatgrinder of simplistic abstractions.

Sharma is quite clear that, in her mind, the term “imperialism” poorly characterizes the US-created postcolonial system. The US was a hegemonic locus of power that extracted absurd concessions and material wealth from the rest of the world, spread its bases everywhere and bombed civilians, but the global nationstate it built was significantly different from all prior empires. Sharma is without mercy in her description of the machinations of the US (and USSR), but it’s still deeply unsettling to read a leftist author put “US imperialism” in scare quotes, so deeply has the anti-imperialist frame of analysis become hegemonic. In Sharma’s insistent frame, neither the US nor the USSR were “empires,” they were rather postcolonial powers, a classification which she seeks to give equivalently negative valences.

Sharma is concerned that the “imperialism” frame centers foreigners invading and controlling natives, an analysis that both misses critical dynamics of the Postcolonial New World Order and reproduces the nationalism it is dependent upon. In her ideal world we would recognize the “postcolonial” system as a distinct and arguably worse evil.

I am, it must be said, not sanguine about this rhetorical strategy. Whatever our ideal language might be, activist usage largely does not follow academic invention, but is shaped by and responds to pragmatic needs and pressures, constantly collapsing to the most succinct frame that makes intuitive use of existing language. Complex formal definitions rarely win against general resemblances. And it is simply a fact that capital flows continue to be centralized in imperial metropoles. Why shouldn’t we speak of the US, USSR, and PRC as empires and imperialist projects? Their economic as well as political centralization and direct military domination has clearly followed longstanding imperialist patterns. Comparisons to imperialism are inherent because the term has widespread negative cachet in general populations. There is no feasible pathway to establishing similarly potent valances for “postcolonial” on its own; we struggle mostly within the language we are given.

Sharma confidently claims that global inequality is worse today than in the age of empire.

“Between 1960 and the late 1990s, a significant widening of world income distribution took place. Indeed, the extent of the disparities surpassed those during the Age of Empires”

But I find such quantifications suspect. One can point to all manner of depredation and slaughter today, but can anyone really say with any certainty that today’s world is more unequal than when the Belgians were chopping off hands and feet in Congo? This is not to entirely foreclose the possibility, but it seems like the sort of claim that’s impossible to establish. In short it collapses tangles of complexities much the same way nations collapse the complexity of our social relations. Never mind the discontinuities of measuring wealth over a period where the fine-grained legibility of title itself has changed, or the incomensurabilities papered over by “inflation adjusted” figures. Even pointing out the enclosure of the dark parts of the map sweepingly described as “commons” proves very little about relative degrees of access and power within said old commons. I simply can’t imagine a single unified measure of “inequality” or any bundling of an aggregate measure that could even remotely establish this claim. (Much less by way of citation to Samir fucking Armin, a Khmer Rouge and Putin defending wingnut.) 

This is not necessarily to push back on the idea that the creation of postcolonial national regimes made things overall worse, when examined within a certain window, but as an argument it’s a quagmire. What sort of time window should we be using to evaluate this? From one side someone could make the argument that national liberation struggles led to a gradual weakening of imperial power long before flags formally changed on a map, from the other side the nationalist ideologues could just as easily say “undoing imperialism is just really hard, we need another five centuries before things get net positive, but then things will get truly good.” There’s no winning once we get bogged down into arguing over which timescale and period to measure over.

It’s certainly true that many things have gotten worse in the postcolonial era. For example, where colonial administration hadn’t managed to implement border controls, the newly “liberated” nationstates acted quickly to create them. This meant that the transition from colonial rule to postcolonial rule in for example much of Africa saw the sudden creation of constraints on movement that had been free throughout prior history. In this respect Sharma is correct in identifying the postcolonial system as even worse than the imperialist system, intensifying its logic of domination rather than breaking from it. And similar analysis can be made in terms of the formalization of new property regimes and the intensifying legibility of claims at the cost of the old support mechanisms of the commons.

But this doesn’t necessarily prove an overall devolution.

Regardless of whether national liberation was a net advancement or a net escalation of horrors, I am frankly quite sick of common leftist rhetoric that dismisses things like the abolition of chattel slavery as an irrelevant trick of smoke and mirrors. Radicals often feel we have to pretend we live in the worst of all possible worlds because if people feel there’s any advantages to our present order they might not want to risk toppling it. This is a path by which radicalism perversely ends up generating reactionary frames at least as noxious as nationalism. The sloppy leftist dismisses the immense suffering under for example monarchy and slavery and the awe-inspiring, hard-won social transformations away from them, declaring instead that all progress so far has been illusory, even that things have gotten worse. It is true of course that power has gotten more dextrous, more insidious, and its function more complex. But that retreat to complex mechanisms is itself a sign of power on the back foot.

When the mechanisms of power are forced to adopt greater internal complexity they lose efficiency and either become more brittle or open up more space for erosion. Power may survive in the face of resistance by mutating and trying to co-opt or misdirect that resistance, but that is not necessarily to say it ends up on a stronger footing. Merely that the strategic landscape changes.

The Left spent the last half of the twentieth century in a tizzy about insidiously complex systems of control like advertising and the construction of desire that end up being largely paper tigers. It convinced itself that progress was impossible, that Moloch had perfected titanic systems to generate false consciousness, even while progress was being made in myriad places, often without the help of leftist or radical theorists. This is not to suggest that nationalism of the oppressed is a necessary step towards progress, nor that no one knew better — many anarchists at the time certainly did and far too many paid with our lives for the sin of correct prognostication — but I do think we can’t afford to ignore or discard the positive currents and improvements that got mixed up in the noxious morass of national liberation struggles.

A significant aspect of Sharma’s argument is that no nation escaped neoliberalism because in fact nationalism and neoliberalism each imply the other. In her account national liberation states didn’t “sell out” to western imperialists, rather they continued the logic of nation building, that is to say building infrastructure and exclusionary power systems necessarily provoked positive sum (for capitalists and rulers) collaboration between nations. Sure the Washington neoliberal institutions profited immensely, but so too did the “national liberation” projects, once you realize what nation building means. And Sharma’s right that in many contexts the most supreme and omnipresent power in people’s lives was national.

Indeed one of the ways national liberation states benefit from the horrors of global apartheid is by externalizing costs: the rule of autocrats depends upon exporting the unemployed and dissidents they create. That those people are made desperate by immigration restrictions in other countries and at best become a deeply policed inferior class helps maintain order at home. Obey and stay or else get thrown into a meatgrinder. Submit to the prison at home, or else become a prisoner completely without rights or even voice in the global system. The project of national control is only stabilized by the ability to eject, to make alien or immigrant, those in the fuzzy areas (which are ultimately almost everyone). The nationalist and the capitalist both need the dispossessed underclass inherent to the construction of borders and national identities.

Sharma drills down in particular on how the specific term “neo-colonialism” was invented and theorized by Kwame Nkrumah who ruled Ghana and served as a major figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. Nkrumah only wrote and publicized his theory after he had already destroyed the homes of tens of thousands for a dam to power a smelter for Kaiser Aluminum, a U.S.-based corporation and then created permanent economic catastrophe by nationalizing much of the economy into a command system. Every step of the way Nkrumah’s ruling circle enriched itself while exacerbating inherent state dysfunction. The national liberation regime sweepingly tried to do big things with the blunt instrument of the state, externalizing the costs to the people, while profiting from the asymmetries. The analysis of “neocolonialism” thus emerged from the outset as an apologia and deflection by those in power.

In contrast to this theorizing-from-above, Sharma emphasizes how the rot of the entire postcolonial system was focused on and critiqued by theorists-from-below like Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah as having always been lying in wait in the national liberation project.

In short, our postcolonial hellworld isn’t perversion or undermining of national liberation, but its natural culmination. 

Under the postcolonial order all legitimacy lies in being a discrete People “of place.” Such Peoples can make political claims, declarations, demands, but the same is virtually unthinkable for migrants, those “out of place”.

“while  the  “human  rights”  of  many  National  Citizens  were  not  recognized, respecting such rights for foreigners was always out of the question”

Further, the power structures, the lines of domination that persisted under or were necessary for the “nation” were framed as “peoples’ power.” The very possibility of abolishing power itself was thus made increasingly unthinkable. Rather, the fascistic philosophy shared from Engels to Schmidt became hegemonic: ‘there is nothing outside domination, only questions of who wields it.’

The paradigm of national liberation thus is the paradigm of postcolonial apartheid, not of actual decolonization.

In Sharma’s account the postcolonial period of nationalization was necessarily a ratcheting of the violent hierarchies introduced or intensified by colonization. By splintering the world into competing nations every nation was forced into a “development” arms race that intensified processes of enclosure. If imperialism had partially dispossessed a subsistence farmer the nationalist project only furthered this suffering. Just as capitalism depends on simplistically slicing up collectively managed commons into fungible and alienable parcels, the entire paradigm of “the nation” works to slice apart different natives, and create a fungible underclass out of everyone too entangled to fit in these boxes.

Migrant labor is thus the gasoline that drives the world power system, while native labor helps structure, condition, direct, and control it. The global patchwork of discrete nations necessarily creates migrants by their existence, slicing up (violently simplifying) the inherently more complex network that is humanity as well as obviously stripping options and agency from individuals.

All this has deep implications and insights with regard to the turn to patchwork micronationalism intensifying among most currents of reactionaries and fascists since the 80s. Obviously a strategy of fractal secession would only further deepen the creation of oppressed migrant classes. The micronationalists frequently act like the problem with existing nationalisms is that they encompass too much complexity and so the logic of nationalism should be pushed further to the point of every town, every neighborhood a nation. The fractal checkerboard of Iraq and Syria emphasizes that this doesn’t bring peace, it brings displacement and more directly attentive gang rule. And, of course, a mass refugee crisis.

Today’s reactionaries often fetishize “exit” on the premise that folks can vote with their feet and thus minimize the harms of governments, but the incentive structures of nationalism at the margins, as economists say, don’t work that way. Rather, constructed minorities are targeted and pushed out of one region on the premise that they have less legitimate “claim” to belonging and then no other region has incentive to provide them full citizenship. Elevating a stranger to equivalent political power and rights as you is rarely worth that person’s marginal economic contribution to your nation. Thus the global ratchet is towards intense hierarchies of Nth-class noncitizens. A patchwork of democracies or populist dictatorships thus rapidly converges on arbitrary class ladders with the enfranchised few shrinking and the base of exploited or just suppressed constantly expanding. 

It’s easy to lose legitimacy as a “native” but almost impossible to gain it.

Of course it should always have been trivially apparent that a patchwork of states would be inclined away from freedom. A market with 200 hundred competing buyers and seven billion competing sellers is always going to be skewed to the buyers. When what’s being sold is labor and the system iterates constantly the emergence of essentially slavery conditions is a foregone conclusion. Even if there were two million buyers the asymmetry in bargaining power will remain pertinent.

This authoritarian ratchet of the inter-national system was what we opposed in the streets of Seattle fighting the WTO, a system of “globalization” that used national barriers to reinforce power globally. The only way to stop the race-to-the-bottom enabled by the interlocking system of “nations” is to abolish them entirely. Sharma is quite clear that reinforcing borders doesn’t protect local workers, it is an essential component of the overall downward spiral.

If we start from the perspective that the world is an irreducibly complex network, then it’s preposterous to think that such a network can be decomposed into a set of discrete villages or cliques. Rather, with every subdivision forcibly sliced through the tangled knot of humanity, lives are cut short and single threads cast loose. Fractal secession or subdivision is thus the most damaging, most harmful, strategy possible. It looks at the harm caused by nationalism, by borders slicing up the world, displacement, genocide, and war, and thinks the solution is to double down.

Instead of framing things in terms of a “right to exit” we must realize that the modern nation paradigm is predicated on a claimed “right to eject” that is to manage populations by violently subdividing them, by the construction of “the inside and the outside.” The nationalist takes the nation as given but there is no such cohesive simplistic discrete set of people. Not even a “family” has an a priori inside and outside, lines of connection and association are always graduated and intermeshed in complex ways that defy simple accounts. The nationalist’s given is not a reflection of reality, it is an idol he is asserting, an idol whose “rights” inherently require human sacrifice.

It’s beyond critical that we emphasize this, because the fact that a structure emerged out of a specific historical context doesn’t mean it wouldn’t and hasn’t emerged in other contexts. An intellectual fascist, upon reading Sharma, would no doubt see her argument about the historical roots in imperial bureaucratic management as beside the point. 

The specificity of “nationalism” as a word and ideological history has become blurred out in popular perception to virtually any and all projects of usness versus themness. The modern proponent of nationalism would look at two germanic tribes warring with one another thousands of years ago and see two “nations.” And it is not clear to me that such a wider definition is “objectively” wrong. For what it lacks in congruence with the historical emergence of the term, it can be argued the more generalized definition does a better job at cutting reality at the joints. Beyond the relevance of popular usage, to achieve the generality and universalism of a truly radical analysis, our words should arguably try to pick out perpetually emergent dynamics, rather than exclusively tracing out particular usage within a specific historical context.

William C Anderson reminds us of all this in general terms in his critique of Ashanti Alston’s sympathies for black nationalism, writing in The Nation Of No Map, “some of us are descended from the enslaved because of the betrayal of nations, one group of people pitting themselves against another for dominance… our past is a cautionary tale.” [emphasis added] While many horrible particular norms of the present postcolonial nationstate system were created by Empire, that system itself had roots in the generalized logic of nations and division. The pull of simplicity driving clustering dynamics and closed communities aren’t a cure for Empire, they’re what gave rise to it in the first place.

Sharma doesn’t deny the widespread tendency to chauvinism, but she doesn’t directly address that in Home Rule, being instead at pains to undermine our current reception of Native and Migrant conceptual categorizations as timeless, putting their present use in historical context as products of specific power systems and interests. And, as a correction Home Rule can at least emphasize that the particular potency of nationalism and native identification today is overwhelmingly propped up by a specific history of power. But, while the problem posed by human inclinations towards clustered communities and simplistic cognitive abstractions of groups (in-group or out-group) is an eternal threat that can obviously reproduce territorial barriers and the like on its own, the history that Sharma highlights has clear general implications.

Even in those cases where a nationalistic tendency is not carrying a legacy of imperialist managerial needs, the fact that managers love the nation form and that such can only be cleaved out of humanity’s tangles via systemic violence is relevant. While there may be a cognitive laziness in humans that eternally pulls us towards the mistake of nationalism, this is not at all to say that nations are natural or good, any more than a common illusion or confusion is.

Common fantasies of a return to perfectly uniform and closed communities of fixed traditions are motivated by fear of complexity and a hunger for the abolition of thought and responsibility. This is not to suggest that complexity is innately good, or truth not often quite simple, but nations are the product of valuing simplicity as an ends almost unto itself. They’re not about accurately mapping what is true, they’re about imposing a reduction of complexity. This is the common goal of would-be slaves and rulers, and so the historical equivalence and ever-more-deepening ties between nationalism and various forms of authoritarianism is unavoidable. The imperialist and post-colonial leader obviously share in a need to impose simplicity to build power structures, but so too does a certain type of revolutionary or insurgent have an investment in making the battlefield simple.

Today if it is said that we can no more envision the end of capitalism than the end of the world, we can even less envision the end of nationalism. The only alternative to European imperialism folks can imagine under its spell is often just European feudalism, re-baked as a kind of voluntary micronationalism. But the manors of feudal Europe — with their aspiration to operate villages as closed social universes in ways wildly different from how bands and sedentary communities have emerged in other societies — are not some natural configuration emergent from free association and personal preference. They were, themselves, the historical product of imperialism and maintained through immense violence, serving the ends of power.

And this is a critique that can be turned back, to some degree, on Sharma’s appeal to and valorization of the commons.

There’s a broad metanarrative in circulation, especially among Marxists looking for a way to ditch their historical materialist baggage by focusing on the end of the first volume of Capital, that once upon a time “the commons” provided freedom, security, and community, only to be brutally sliced up at the onset of capitalism, dispossessing and creating the working class. As an account of the enclosures this is certainly quite accurate. And it’s easy to see the congruities between this aspect of capitalism and what Sharma focuses on in the construction of nationalism. Similarly the core of her argument that the postcolonial nation system is worse than imperialism is that it has enabled more dextrous enclosures. Distant imperial bureaucrats couldn’t dream of incentivizing and handling the construction of modern property norms to the same extent as local rulers shouting about national honor and growth.

Libertarians tend to treat Lockean property titles as unalloyed positives, arbitrarily selecting a thin slice of possible property norms as the most ideal, in no small part — even when they hide such consequentialist roots to this position — because it facilitates fungibility and investment and ideally thus rapid “development.”

Part of what is glossed over is the cost of such imposed orthogonalization in property titles. Whereas while every society has a property system of some kind, claims are usually far more entangled than anything like the cleanly separable ones of Lockean norms. As claims of ownership originally emerged in bottom up processes of widely or mutually useful detentes, they kept all sorts of artifacts of their context. Someone’s title to their house might not be exclusive or apply in every dimension. This impedes selling property, staking it as collateral, etc, if only because one person’s title claim is not something entirely in one’s own hands, and is also ultimately dependent upon the aggregate acceptance of countless individuals in one’s community.

Further, sure, this entanglement in conventional property impedes rapid “development,” but when the state violently slices through those entangled connections to impose one universal and fungible map it can only assure “development” in a similarly slapdash and unilateral form. Instead of distributed weighing of every individual’s context and desires, these violently “optimized” market processes can only serve the hamfisted ends of power. That is to say: there are very different directions and branches of “development” possible, serving very different interests.

But this brings us to some frictions in the popular “lost commons” narrative. Firstly, many societies do not have commons in anywhere near the same sense as the feudal villages often treated as prototypical. Even the egalitarian !Kung San hunter-gatherers traded overlapping titles to regions of land and all their benefits within their gift/debt system. While their specific individual ownership system and market norms are quite foreign to our own, they said they found the concept of “collective ownership” particularly repugnant and hard to conceptualize, even finding much of the current global norms of property and market exchange liberating. This is in no remote sense to minimize the repression that the !Kung San have faced as a minority and the shittiness of the capitalist dynamics many have been forced into, but the point is that our world does not have a uniform history and cultural inheritance.

One huge lurking danger to the valorization of the commons is that to many the takeaway is always that everyone was at least better off in subsistence farming villages and should have more or less remained there in some kind of essentialistic and static natural relationship. Of course that so many people dig their feet in there is understandable if the only other pole is to uncritically embrace more or less the exact infrastructural norms of dominant modernity and say “look destroying thousands of villages for some dam is obviously a net positive.” If these are our only two options then we are indeed in trouble. Hence why a crucial response to the claims of national liberation states that they promoted development is to contest what sort of development in what direction, at what cost. To specify which pathways were available and which were derailed, by whom. Just as nationalism erases all other modes of resistance to imperialism, collapsing our options into just replicating a unified state or “people” with a military and economy that fight with (eg interface with) foreign ones on their terms, so too does it erase all pathways to material abundance that are not in the interest of power. The problem isn’t that infrastructure and property relations changed after independence, it’s how they were changed. Just as we must defend the right to move and freely associate globally we must defend the freedom to evolve, hybridize, and reconfigure ourselves.

Another danger in popular narratives that focus on the enclosures is to view complexity and illegibility as ends in themselves. In this frame the commodification eating the world is a matter of increasing precision and detail in our map of things, going from a lackadaisical commons where no accounts are kept, to a stressfully overly quantified world where every single individual grain of rice is indexed, tracked, and purchasable with a personal loan for a low annual rate. Yet, there is value to clarity, reconfigurability, and material capacity. Elinor Ostrom emphasized that not only is the tragedy of the commons a real danger that communities around the world have long been quite familiar with, but people solve such in bottom-up ways through a diverse variety of often overlapping means, including strategies that increase clarity and even parcel out the commons. Further, being able to extract oneself from social contexts, to sell one’s stake in a clean manner has clear liberatory aspects. Sharma mentions urbanization in the list of effects of national “development” and neoliberal reforms, and there’s a serious danger here of building a narrative against urbanity itself. We must not pretend that every dynamic driving urbanization was violent or created by imperial interests, the interconnection of a globalizing world was in part facilitated by voluntarily adopted technologies and individuals embracing exit from parochial communities closed as a result of their own power structures and material constraints. Choice in one’s social relations has been an incredibly liberating experience for many and is deeply related to why migration isn’t just an inextricable component of human existence, but a freedom to be encouraged. And part of having choice is knowing what the choices are. Legibility and even simplicity can thus be liberating, in the right contexts.

This is why I’ve emphasized a focus on positive freedom and a network lens. While I have no doubt Sharma would not embrace any of the nefarious takes above, she has certainly gotten fastidious about the dangers of myriad language choices like “global south” and so I must interject that talk of a global commons does carry its own dangers. There has never been a true global commons, because we have never been as strongly and directly connected to one another. Every historical instance of “commons” was inherently, and usually quite explicitly, partially closed and parochial. Historically access to the commons of a village is usually tied to membership within that village, or even one’s property title within it. We have never had a global commons in anywhere near as direct a sense and so the concept is a cipher that people will take different assumptions and priorities into.

Sharma looks back to the radical aspirations of the Diggers and Ranters, enormously influential seventeenth century precursors to the modern anarchist tradition who conjoined a fight for land with grand aspirations for a world without exclusion or territory. For the Diggers, “an essential aspect of this freedom/mobility was the ability to change or shift one’s identity” and for the Ranters “the people in England, France, and Turkey [must become] one people and one body, for where the one lives there liveth the other also.” I have long shared in a deep admiration and love for these proto-anarchists who emerged endogenously within the belly of European empire at the dawning of capitalism. For two decades have I teared up while belting “this earth divided / we will make whole” but the devil is in the details. 

My concern with Sharma’s framework is that while it correctly objects to the forcible creation of markets and the forcible creation of dispossession and enclosures, as well as the construction of titanic industrial infrastructure along a single innovation pathway, her narrative risks empowering reactive or clumsy rhetorical corrections. Choice is not quite the same thing as commons, although they can be allies. In some contexts it can be useful to disentangle local knots so as to enable more global connections. I have no sweeping answers or blueprints for property norms, but I know that orthogonalizability is not always evil. The broad strokes of the historic enclosures at the dawn of capitalism were surely quite evil in most means and consequences, similarly the followup processes of enclosures that were applied beyond Europe by imperialists and then postcolonial nationalists, but these broad strokes eclipse the people from below who sincerely and for good reasons pushed for changes in their existing property norms in ways that included dividing and individualizing some things. That they didn’t get the direction and types of reforms they wanted nor the results, trammeled over by the powers who orchestrated and profited from enclosures, doesn’t mean they should be erased from our understanding. I don’t think we have to pose their struggle for liberation against the liberatory aspirations of the Diggers. The truth here is more complicated. To shift identity and context, to sincerely struggle to step into alien perspectives, is at the core of building a better world and resolving the wounds that have been sliced into us by empire and nation alike. But such individual mobility can require slicing us free of inherited community, picking up our things and departing, and in so doing can be quite at odds with many venerations of “the commons.”

To connect globally, to build the tower of Babel that Sharma so resonantly speaks of and quotes Toni Morrison on, should not involve the flattening or smothering of diverse experiences and views, but the integration of them. And that includes those who want independence, or, perhaps better put, a different and more far-reaching type of interdependence than that provided by the commons of old.

These are of course very broad points, about very broad narratives and concerns, but the most refreshing thing about Home Rule is the degree to which it audaciously embraces radicalism, which, lest we forget, is not a synonym for extremism or coolness but is about getting to the root.

Sharma’s book contrasts with for example Harsha Walia’s recent Border & Rule, which, while powerful in its lists of horrors, avoids comparably “abstract” discussion of underlying roots to instead focus on relatively more particular associations and mechanisms. Where Home Rule traces how underlying ideas, identities, policy orientations, and narratives came into being, Border & Rule focuses more on the myriad examples of how specific border policies functionally interface with or reproduce patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, etc. — the long menagerie of formal oppressions we already instantly recognize as bad — and generally function as part of a control apparatus to brutally manage the global workforce. This is certainly valuable, and Walia is a rightfully beloved figure in the movement, but her words at points reveal, I think, a difference in philosophy between the two books:

“I align with a leftist politics of no borders, since the borders of today are completely bound up in the violences of dispossession, accumulation, exploitation, and their imbrications with race, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability.” (emphasis mine)

Walia is seemingly not foreclosing support for borders in some other context, merely our own. Similar arguments and lines have been used by Marxists to endorse “all cops are bastards” and “prison abolition” solely in our present historical and social context, and not universally as anarchists do. They align with those politics here, today, but make no promises about tomorrow.

Arguments that critique cops, prisons, and borders, solely because of their present genealogies, affinities, and structural role leave open the door to schemes to implement them in the future, “beyond capitalism,” “beyond settler colonialism,” etc. The anarchist project, however, is not to critique the symptomatic expressions of power in our time, but the lines of underlying rot that inexorably drive new expressions as contexts change.

Sharma on the other hand is repeatedly very clear that the logic of nationalism and borders is rotten not just today, but inherently, “national liberation did not result in decolonization, nor could it have.” (her emphasis)

If Walia’s case is that borders are today interwoven with the function of capitalism and that the displacement of migrants is coerced by war and economic exploitation, Sharma’s argument is more that borders arose as a symptom of an underlying viral way of thinking: of cutting the world up into discrete regions with distinct “natives,” castigating and often enslaving the exceptions to this schema as “migrants.” It is a nuanced historical picture that traces the complications of white settlers dancing back and forth between categories as need be to keep their domination. But Sharma is interested in pushing a point that is unfortunately novel and contentious in the wider left: “nationalism from below” cannot offer us a break with the horrors we struggle against, indeed it can ultimately only ratchet up those horrors.

Much structural violence is obviously involved in the displacement of many migrants today, but Sharma warns against implicitly taking for granted that people are or should be of some place.

Resistance to imperial domination and struggles embedded in specific histories of trauma, genocide, and dispossession do not require ceding to a fixation with collective priority and origin. We’ve repeatedly seen, from the horrors perpetuated in Côte d’Ivoire between groups with conflicting claims over who was more “native” to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya as supposedly “illegal Bengali immigrants,” that such frames are a fountainhead of oppression. 

And it must be emphasized that “being of place” as an ossified collective identity is quite distinct from active knowledge and love of the land you work or a bioregion and a painstakingly built web of ecological relationships. To liberate land, air, and water from those who would control, monopolize and/or despoil them is not the same thing as a struggle for territory and sovereignty, concepts inherently tied to fixed relations, social discreteness, and functions of authority (whether collective or not). 

Sharma’s rejection of the former is sharp and motivated by a deep concern that firstness and of-placeness are subsuming the radical imagination and erasing or placing themselves before all other ethical considerations. Worse, this replacement of other driving values is happening in ways that places itself beyond discourse or consideration. 

“All mobilizations of national autochthonous [nativeness] discourses… view indig­eneity as a first princi­ple of po­liti­cal action… autochthony is usually represented as “ ‘au­then­tic,’ ‘primordial,’ ‘natu­ral’ and ‘self-­evident.’”

While it’s understandable that people leverage what claims are fecund within an international liberal Wilsonian legal context, we must undermine the supposed incontestability of this principle of nativeness and origin. As such legitimization criteria is increasingly accepted as the starting point of movements of resistance, to engage with critiques of it increasingly verges on unthinkable. Nevertheless we must think it. And say it.

We exist in a global discourse and community. Backing a generalized muddle of autochthonous narratives and implicit first principles in Turtle Island, for instance, has spillover effects that can hurt migrants in Europe. For the first principle of nativeness applied generally has quite noxious implications. Let me be very clear: no European should ever have a nation, there is no amount of reparations for the atrocities of imperialism that might “reset the clock” nor excuse Fortress Europe’s exclusion of migrants. Fortress Europe is not bad because of a specific history of European colonialism that they owe reparations for and invalidates their nations, it’s wrong because fuck nations, everyone has a right to migrate. While reparations and liberation in the face of dispossession and oppression is essential, our goal is not to restore some prehistoric balance wherein an indigenous “Frenchness” can live alongside a checkerboard of other national identities but to abolish all such discrete categories. To grant wider and deeper options to everyone and escalate the dynamic swirling complexity of humanity.

In land projects across North America and Europe it’s common to hear ecofascists and green reactionaries speaking of seeking, reestablishing, and defending an “indigeneity.” This can come either in the packaging that “the first people colonized were whites by the Romans” (recasting whiteness as a gateway to oppressed class status) or it can emerge from a supposed imperative to land-based spirituality (implying that constructing abusive mysticisms is a valid path out of white guilt).

The most facile response is to merely critique the absurd bundling and recent lineage of “whiteness.” But rarely are the speakers already unaware of such, nor would grounding one’s identity in some resurrection of a more specific lineage and tradition (eg “viking-ness”) necessarily avoid anything important. Nor is the important fact that these “land projects” are often on stolen land and facilitating continued settler colonial dynamics a sufficient response. One shouldn’t wish ecofascist communes on the people of Denmark.

This is not merely two distinct uses and definitions of “indigenous” in various languages — for example the chauvinist “here first” usage by mainstream right-wing political parties in many countries versus a philosophical or spiritual notion of “ecological relationship to the land” usage increasingly pushed by younger activists across a subset of colonized peoples — but in fact a more complicated matter of bleed, appropriation, and opportunistic mutation. When many white scumfucks, like infamous political prisoners Sadie and Exile, leaned into fascist blood-and-soil mysticism they did so draped under the stolen language and signifiers built up by indigenous activists, not beer-soaked Trump chuds. And part of why so many US white radicals had trouble identifying and expelling them was an increasing treatment of “indigeneity” — even the pagan playacting of white settlers doused in fascist iconography — like a third rail. A first principle or apex value that automatically vanquishes all other considerations, removes all critical thinking and turns people’s knees to jelly.

This is to say that while “lanes” and epistemic humility can have value, we should not render ourselves completely useless in some performative surrender of our minds and thus responsibilities. If white radicals fail to recognize clearly dangerous invocations of “indigenous” we will be of no use to anything or anyone. Sharma covers examples of intensely reductive ideologies of indigeneity, from Patrick Wolfe declaring that, “The fundamental social divide is not the color line. It is not ethnicity, minority status, or even class. The primary line is the one distinguishing Natives from settlers—­that is, from every­one ­else. Only the Native is not a settler. Only the Native is truly local.” to Métis scholar Bonita Lawrence (and self-­identified “Asian settler Colonist” Enakshi Dua) arguing that because non-indigenous people of color are functionally settlers “antiracism is premised on an ongoing colonial proj­ect.”

It is, however, important for anarchists to challenge ourselves and read charitably. Sharma focuses in on various examples of language like “We must be the ones who determine who is and who is not a member of our community, based on criteria accepted by our people,” but while the inside-outside hierarchies of any sovereignty are inherently abusive and unjust and it’s trivial to point to examples of First Nations governments who have wielded access to tribal membership as a tool of power or exclusion, it warrants emphasis that one of the most pressing motivations for sovereign control over tribal membership is precisely to make them more inclusive than settler governments allow. There is little more universally reviled than the blood quanta system that essentializes indigeneity as a matter of genes rather than culture and heritage. I most commonly hear calls for sovereignty over tribal membership invoked to resist various limits and restrictions imposed by settler governments. The motivation of settler states is straightforward: not only do they wish to see tribal membership ultimately evaporate, they dare not risk a situation where tribal membership expands like a corrosive acid of more complex overlapping jurisdictions.

I want to be absolutely clear that competitive governance is no grand improvement, especially when territorial restrictions on scope remain in play. But it’s easy enough to imagine an enlightened future where the US faces a crisis of legitimacy and jurisdiction with mass settler defection into the ranks of strong and expanding first nations. Where various clear territorial claims break down into more complex and overlapping communities. This would be far from anarchist ideals, but it is not quite the same thing as nationalisms of territory and blood. Of course virtually no one is proposing radical expansions of first nations ranks divorced from cultural heritage, and unfortunately what Actually Existing First Nation governments have focused on is quite different from the idealism of those radical indigenous activists focused on inclusion.

Sharma zooms in on examples like the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke stripping major rights from citizens who married non-citizens and evicting their partners from tribal land, and — of course — the infamous Cherokee exclusion of Freedmen. These are obviously horrifying and reflective of real dangers, but it’s worth noting that many decolonial indigenous activists who fought against such did so in the frame of “nationalism,” however awkwardly. For example, Ellen Gabriel’s aghast statement on the evictions of families in Kahnawà:ke over what amounts to miscegenation correctly emphasizes that such constrained or blood-based notions of identity were imposed by colonizers to whittle away tribal membership, but she, at the same time, frames inclusion as necessary to “rebuiding our nations from colonial genocide.” Of course we might wish that statements like “For over a hundred years the Indian Act has coercively indoctrinated Indigenous peoples into believing that the colonizers definition of identity was true.” would also be applied to the concept of nations too, but still language usage here can get muddled and contradictory.

Of course, even if we were to cede that certain activists mean nothing more than a sense of community with their usage of “nation” — there’s little reason to think this personal or local redefinition will survive and flourish. As I pointed out against Sharma’s attempt to change our language around imperialism, history and popular usage creates certain gravitational effects on words. The least complex, most intuitive, and already familiar definition in a language tends to win out. Someone could, for instance, try to reclaim or redefine the term “fascism” to only mean “solidarity,” but the net effect of their particularized usage is almost certainly going to be the legitimization of actual fascists and actual fascism. And that’s hardly an extreme comparison. “Nationalism” is pretty much politically interchangeable with “fascism” (modulo a myth of palingenesis), with an even wider umbrella of atrocities it has historically covered. There is no conceivable universe in which nationalism pivots in its associations. As such, attempts to gain standing within a wider dominant discourse of nationalism (and imposed legal context where it has salience) are doomed to only legitimize such, with all its baggage.

But sadly many in indigenous spaces of resistance don’t mean merely community by their usage of “nation” and aren’t merely opportunistically exploiting loopholes in the ideological framework of the colonizer, rather struggles within the nationalist framework have in many cases taken to heart the logics of national sovereignty, discreteness, exclusion, and territory.

“Self-­defined anarchist Taiaiake Alfred (2005, 266–267), for instance, argues that supposedly distinct and discrete “nations” can and should “move from colonial-­imperialist relations to pluralist multinational associations of autonomous ­peoples and territories that re­spect the basic imperatives of indigenous cultures as well as preserve the stability and benefits of cooperative confederal relations between indigenous nations and other governments.” This vision is, of course, the core of the Postcolonial New World Order.”

Again, such ghastliness isn’t to imply that there aren’t far more enlightened, original, complex, and probing perspectives in the impossibly complex expanse of varied experiences and positions thrown haphazardly under the umbrella label of “indigeneity” (and Sharma cites a wide array of literature across the board) but it does sufficiently highlight that instances of mistakes exist. One need not point to unquestionable fascists leveraging both their tribal membership and frameworks of “indigeneity,” from the national-anarchist Vince Reinhart to the neonazi Serafin Perez, for the general point about conceptual and rhetorical dangers to be pressing.

“the differences posited between autochthons and allochthons—Natives and Migrants—is a fundamental political, as well as ontological and epistemological, challenge we must address to achieve something that can live up to our aspirations for liberty.”

It is always hard to critique an ideology that has not yet widely taken power or begun to implement its vision. When anarchists attacked Marx for the coming catastrophic failings of his framework we were absolutely right, but it still took decades for the mounting bloody evidence to become overwhelming. Sadly, anarchists have not always had such foresight, and those who participated in national liberation struggles or made common cause with nationalists have always come to regret it. Many Korean anarchists today denounce prior generations as fake anarchists and embarrassments for even temporarily tolerating Korean nationalism, nevermind how intense and pressing the boot of Japanese Imperialism was.

While compassion, humility, and attention are extremely warranted when navigating the complex and fraught complexities of situations of oppression, I have long since renounced the lefty Irish nationalism I grew up connected to and have no doubt that in the view of future generations nationalism-from-below will always prove a grave and harrowing mistake. I think a lot about Korean anarchists I’ve met who grimaced in reference to their predecessors. I wonder how long it will take us to truly learn our lessons.

I have already praised Home Rule as a thematic sequel to The Many-Headed Hydra, but I worry that it will also take the place of Statism and Anarchy as a text clarifying emerging fractures and perfectly predicting mistakes to come, but trapped in the Cassandra gutter anarchists must so frequently retreat to. Some warnings are as unpopular as they are — consequently — necessary.

Since publication Sharma has caught some unfair and plainly dishonest attacks that present her as unattentive to indigenous scholarship and attempting to fight some kind of battle on behalf of migrants against natives, when everything in Home Rule seeks to dispel that dichotomy.

“Us and them, same, same.”

This is not a cloak or defense for settler fuckery or a sameness that erases differences, histories, lines of power, and important lessons. It’s a call for solidarity with teeth and audacity. A swirling hurricane of possibility, rather than a fractal landscape of micro tailored prisons. Or at least enough audacity to see past lazy simplifications and the limited imaginary bequeathed us by feudal chains and genocidal empires.

If nothing else, many of the arguments in Home Rule at least provide a counter to those who declare that the desire for mobility and wide connection, thinking in abstract or universal terms rather than place-based, etc, are all imperialist constructions. Maybe! But the same can be said about the ideological elevation of local parochialism, particularity, and fixedness. So let’s just clear out claims of historical false consciousness and just make direct arguments for a given value or approach.

The white anarchist who years ago denounced our oh-so contentious “Migrants Welcome” stickers because she couldn’t imagine a world without closed territorial communes of democratic tyranny and who couldn’t see modes of resistance to yuppie fuckery that weren’t grounded in territorial claims is a perfectly fine human being, sincerely trying her best, her mistake was reflective of a widespread atrophy of our imagination. And this is one of the worst crimes inflicted by our rulers. We do not have to turn to fixed, simple models.

Imperialism and colonialism violently, unfairly, and inanely crushed immeasurable knowledge and culture; healing that damage and tearing down the power structures that perpetuate it is overwhelmingly in the interest of all humanity. But ultimately no abstraction or set of practices has value in and of itself, people matter, actual individual human beings in all their rich complexity, their agency, their freedom, is what we’re fighting for, and an ideology or a technology or a practice or a belief or even “community” is only valuable insofar as it furthers that. Healing is not the same thing as preservation. As some indigenous anarchists have taken to saying a “tradition” is something static and dead “that sits on a shelf,” in contrast a lifeway is something that evolves and dances, intertwined and inseparable from the knot of humanity and nature around us.

As Sharma puts it powerfully for anarchists, “an origin of “state” is “stasis,” or immobility.”

Money and Your Freedom

Dear Ron and Laura:

Don has been East for a while and dropped in last night. Among other things he brought me up to date on your thinking and plants. I knew that my blast, when I was out to see you, would upset you. But I thought [it] worth while if you could be prevented from getting deeper into the economic rat race. Don showed me recent letters to and from you, and I noted you wanted to do more thinking about it.

I’m willing to do this, but first I’d like to restate your predicament as I see it. You’re in for a tough time either way—if you stay in and bend to the status quo, or if you observe your scruples and step outside of it. If you keep on “playing the game,” taking advantage of certain expedients (government and otherwise), you might maintain a good income. But it will come, directly or indirectly, from rent and interest. It would be as if you were in a circle of persons each of whom filches from his nearest neighbor. If they all filched in equal amounts it would be the same as if they had not robbed in the first place. But in our system, the rules are such that the filching is unequal. So it is tough for those who come out short—and it’s tougher on those who don’t like the filching.

Now you don’t want to be an exploiter, and you don’t want to be a part of the military system. So you’re going to have a pretty difficult time trying to make a living. I repeat that no one person is to blame for the prevailing mess. It is our present institutional forms and methods which are at fault. The inherent injustices of modern coercive institutions is what traps everyone into earning their living in ways and for purposes which any sane and intelligent person would consider nonsensical if not indeed immoral.

So I’m interested in your present goal of an intentional community where libertarian ideas might be practiced. As you can guess, I think this would be only a drop in the bucket in comparison to the widespread need for libertarian reform. But at least it is a step in the right direction, and if you can achieve it, it will give you a good environment—and it may encourage others to go and do likewise. As you know, I consider what is called the ‘money’ problem very basic to liberty so I’ll be glad to sketch here the issue as I see it.

Let us assume that in your hypothetical “city set upon a hill” each individual and each family is now in equitable possession of their portion of land. Now each produces what he wishes in goods like corn, potatoes, wood, fruit, herbs; or in service like carpentry, architecture, midwifery, teaching or psychological counselling. How will they equitably exchange their time and energy?

You see, of course, that all commodities result from applying human energy to land. Corn, potatoes, wood and fruit are different from land in that they are the result of applying energy to land. The products actually cost various amounts and quantities of human energy. If, instead of producing from the land, some person chooses to process or transport some product—or supply other needed services to the community—he is merely offering his labor to others more directly, without first mixing it with the land. But since he must have these essential labor products (corn, potatoes, wood, fruit, etc.) his services really represent, for him, some portion of those concrete products. You see then how both goods and services are really extensions of the human beings who produce them.

Let us suppose that you will find producing exotic herbs and teaching music express your personality—or meet your needs. Therefore, how you exchange your herbs or your music with others is very important to you. If in the exchange you get something that you do not want, your goals are not achieved. The opportunity to bargain on terms that satisfy both you and the other, or others, with whom you exchange, is important to all parties in the transaction. No party involved in this exchange can do as well as you who are. No if ‘exploitation’ is built into a method of exchange, you can see how it will distort freedom and equity. Let us look at some different patterns or methods of exchange.

You said in a letter to Don that you liked to go into a modern market and buy what you want. With your money you are making your own choices to suit your needs, and with your purchases you are voting for those products and encouraging some producer and transporter to continue his work. You are really cooperating with them which is good, even though you don’t know them. This is possible because of money. Money is a very great invention. It becomes a tool by which we choose how we want to achieve our goals.

But as you know, today money has some exploitive aspects. I remember pointing out during our memorable visit that in our present money system, only a certain group has the legal privilege of issuing money and because of this they can control the supply and issue it on their terms—at an interest rate which benefits them and exploits others. They really loan money into existence on debt. Their money does not actually represent specific goods, and this causes inflation, or the lowering of the value of money. In addition, as I said to you earlier, the interest charged to marginal borrowers helps set the price for all goods, and so raises the price of everything you and others buy. Banks may loan out eight and ten times more than is in their savings deposits, at rates higher than they pay their depositors, so it becomes a very lucrative practice for the bankers. These and other maladjustments are possible because banking is a legal monopoly. The monopoly feature of money injects enough negative aspects to counteract the advantages of convenience and selectivity in the market which money gives you.

Many people, very understandably, want to eradicate the monopoly feature. Some try to lessen the effect on themselves of a monopoly money system by reducing the amount of money they use. The Labor Gift Plan, #2207, 150 Nassau St., New York City, is such a plan. Some people set up a productive homestead and produce, instead of buying, many of their services and most of their food. To the extent that they can do this enjoyably, they are very wise. Other people are reviving the habit of bartering commodity for commodity or service for commodity. I know several people who pay their doctor’s bill in landscaping, or, who tutor a child in return for butter and eggs. But barter is very clumsy and time consuming in a complex society. Other people want no exchange system at all. They put no evaluation on their labor or labor products. This often occurs in the communities of total sharing where everyone works as he is able; produces what he can, contributes to the pool and takes out of the total product what he needs. The difficulty here is in deciding what each one needs and who shall make the decision. If each person makes it, I do not see that they have improved over some kind of face to face bargaining. If a third party makes it, an element of arbitrariness and authoritarianism comes into the picture.

As I see it, in this common pool, or ‘producing as they are able and taking what one needs,’ everyone’s affairs are combined instead of individualized. Some persons may thus become involved beyond their wishes in getting the consequences of another person’s action, or their failure to act. In such a system, a person may be protected from the consequences of his acts and so be removed from the reality which could help him to mature and become more responsible. 

A third general type of exchange can be called complex barter.

A recent development in this group is Banks of Interchange in which participating members do not use money. A member ostensibly “gives” an object to another. Instead of selling it for money he accepts a receipt from the “buyer” for an agreed value, and deposits this receipt with the bank of interchange. He thus builds up a book-keeping credit against which he can do business with others—issue receipts for goods he gets from others in the system. The School of living can give information on this. 

In an older form of complex barter, an exchange medium called scrip is issued. This is a piece of metal or paper which represents (i.e., is based on and can be redeemed in) some actual stable product which is widely acceptable and used. Scrip is much like a gift certificate. A person has a certificate for a gift in a certain store. He doesn’t care for this item, so he can exchange his gift certificate with someone who does want it. Scrip is a gift certificate which has some general acceptance. It is like the title to our house or car. Obviously we cannot carry the objects around, but we can carry titles to them in our pockets and in exchanging titles, we exchange the goods.

A Voluntary Exchange Association could help put this kind of exchange medium into practice. It could issue scrip on acceptable goods as generalized titles to actual products, thus, a group of people within an area could make equitable exchanges. They would have the convenience of an acceptable money medium with which to make selections in the quantity and quality of goods and services they wanted. It would give the kind of freedom in bargaining you like, and yet provide fairness for all concerned in the exchange. Such a medium of exchange would permit the infinite individuality among men. As Stephen Pearl Andrews said “it would result in the equal sovereignty of each individual in that the consequences of one’s actions would be assumed by himself. . . . The law of genuine progress in human affairs is identical with the tendency to individualize.” In this way a group of persons may “barter” not for profit but merely to exchange the labor represented in the goods and services.

This is all too brief a statement of this immensely important “public” problem, which has been exposed many times, but about which most people today are unaware or very confused. Two older books will help you see how the present system developed: Delmar’s History of Monetary Systems and Other People’s Money by former Associate Justice Brandeis. David T. Bazelon describes today’s frightful and frightening mess in The Paper Economy (1959, Random House).

For more traditional answers most people today are looking to Government to issue and control circulating medium. Some feel that our complex industrial system calls for the government to print money. Just print it in amounts to equal and match the inexhaustible wealth which our corporate and cybernated technology can turn out. With this they could provide every person a government-guaranteed income, regardless of whether or not he worked. This contented-cow philosophy resting on government planning and support is unpalatable to one of my individualist-anarchistic leanings. And don’t be afraid of that word, anarchism. Individualist anarchism is an American product—from the thinking of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and notably Benjamin Tucker. Dr. James Martin describes and discusses them in his book, Men Against The State. These men proposed and developed an economics based on contract and voluntary association in which each person could grow and mature by getting the consequences of his own acts. Individualist anarchists see that a truly free society has to start with free and equal access to land and credit, with labor-created products held as private property.

Silvio Gesell, a successful business man in Europe and South America, developed and put into practice in the early 1900s, a combined land and money system in a generally libertarian frame of reference. It is described in his Natural Economic Order, available from the Free Economy Association, 2618 East 54th St. Huntington Park, California. My own concept of freedom in banking, based on Proudhon’s ideas, is in Property and Trustery, from the School of Living. I hope you can sometime locate a small book by Charles Dana, once editor of The New York Sun, called Proudhon’s Bank of the People.

I will try to answer any questions you’d like to send on, and I certainly want to keep in touch with you. Remember I am your friend,

Larry Labadie

Commentary – Eric Fleischmann:

Firstly, I would like to give a big thanks to the Union of Egoists at UnionOfEgoists.com for providing a copy of this piece for the Laurance Labadie Archival Project. Written to Ron and Laura Baker in 1962—with the Don referenced within being Don Werkheiser—and first appearing in publication in Mildred Loomis’s Go Ahead and Live! in 1965, Laurance Labadie’s “Money and Your Freedom” is his advice to young friends on living a non-parasitic, liberated life in the midst of a parasitic and oppressive society. Of particular interest to him is the monetary possibilities of the Baker’s proposed libertarian community. This is no surprise, for as the anonymous author Chord writes in Anarcho-Pessimism, “With typical disregard for popular tastes or fashion, Labadie conceived the basic outline of his conspiratorial concept of money in the 1930’s, with its implication that the single reform that could bring most leverage into the service of individualism and freedom would be the separation of money and state!” And this piece in particular touches upon many of the specifics of these ideas and elucidates a broader set of proposals for a post-capitalist, post-statist society.

For many leftists—anarchists included—exchange is almost always a secondary matter to production, and while I do not disagree with this emphasis (my own Marxian and materialist influences are fairly public), at times it can leave important elements of analysis behind—particularly in the differentiation of markets from capitalism. For example, David Graeber explains, in an interview with Neal Rockwell titled Capitalism is Just a Really Bad Way of Organizing Communism, that the French historian Fernand Braudel “basically says . . . that there are three levels you can distinguish in most civilizations, and one is the level of gifts and help/mutual aid and people sort of getting on in life. Then there are the markets, but markets, he says… well, he takes this Marxist idea of the difference between CMC and MCM, which means” commodity-money-commodity and money-commodity-money. So…

markets, he says, are commodity-money-commodity. That’s the basic logic: I’ve got some chickens, I’m a farmer, I need candles. I don’t have any bees; I can’t produce my own wax. I’m going to trade some of my chickens, get some money and buy some candles. So that’s ultimately what it’s about. It’s about different people with various goods that they need and various goods that they need to get, and money is just a medium. 

And a shift toward this non-capitalist circuit not only definitionally changes the economic system, at least at the level of exchange, away from capitalism and toward markets, but also strikes a significant blow against profit—a form of usury in Labadie’s opinion—and accumulation—a perfectly fine practice in a “really sane monetary system”—and toward exchange of goods and services [1].

For Josiah Warren—a significant influence on Labadie’s thinking through Benjamin Tucker—the mechanism to achieve this outcome is a time-based currency that allows for almost direct exchange of labor, whereas Silvio Gesell—mentioned in the above piece—argues for a local currency both without any interest rates and with an artificial carrying cost so as to penalize hoarding. But Labadie rejects both of these proposals, writing in his essay “Fighting and Folly” (available in Anarcho-Pessimism) that Gesell’s “is a system originated by a libertarian laboring under serious fallacies on the nature of money and credit” and that it “would collapse when it came to a showdown” and explaining in a letter to the second anarchist journal bearing the name Mother Earth “that the attempt to make labor-time a standard for a monetary unit [is] a fallacy and bound to fail in practice.” So Labadie instead calls for forms of complex barter via Banks of Interchange and scrip-producing Voluntary Exchange Associations. Being necessarily horizontal modes of exchange, these would—whether explicitly or not—seemingly shift the circuit of exchange from M-C-M to C-M-C, while maintaining his critiques of almost all other anarchist monetary experiments besides mutual credit in the style of Tucker and William Batchelder Greene.

1. See Labadie’s “Money and Politics” in Mother Earth, Dec. 1933.

An Abolitionist Approach to Reactionary Violence: Lessons from the Kyle Rittenhouse Case

On August 25th, 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people dead and injured one at a protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Though this event (and the trial proceedings that follow) will be the main focus of this article, my analysis and conclusions should generally apply to most other manifestations of reactionary violence. All that said, we’ll be discussing right-wing terrorism, police violence, and vivid descriptions of really fucked up shit. Consider this a content warning.

Before we continue, let’s set some ground rules. First and foremost, we’re only going to look at the facts of the case leading up to Rittenhouse’s acquittal rather than speculating about what “should” have happened. While there’s plenty of discussion to be had about how and why things escalated, I don’t see value in having that conversation right now. People are dead, Rittenhouse was found “not guilty” on all charges, and a lot of people continue to actively support him. Pure theory will not save us now. 

My second constraint is perhaps more radical; I’m going to completely ignore Rittenhouse’s testimony and stated intentions, as well as most of the details of the trial. I don’t care whether his intention was to kill protesters and I don’t believe the state’s legal system provides legitimate conclusions to questions of premeditation or justification. My sympathies explicitly lie with the victims, Joseph Rosembaum and Anthony Huber; the survivors, including Gaige Grosskreutz who was shot in the bicep by Rittenhouse; Jacob Blake, whose shooting on August 23, 2020 provoked the Kenosha protests; and all of the families affected by this horrific series of events. This unambiguous bias will inform the rest of this piece, but I’m still capable of engaging with the facts and allowing evidence to guide my claims. If that’s not fair or balanced enough for you, thanks for reading this far at least, I encourage you to do further research (checking your sources for their own biases as well, of course). With that, let’s begin.

Vigilance, Verdicts, and Violence

No matter how this case turned out, right-wingers were going to mobilize, either out of anger or a sense of validation (“if Kyle could do it, maybe I can get away with it too!”). Which one is worse is an open question, but what’s not up for debate is that we’re definitely going to witness more violence from the right, and cops will not intervene until it’s too late — assuming they do at all. Many of us are now very aware of the unavoidable reality; if we don’t defend ourselves and each other from fascist violence and government tyranny, no one will. But like… how? What can we actually do?

While copagandists and “pragmatists” often use this question as a thought-terminating cliche (“Who you gonna call? The Ghostbusters???”), when asked in good faith, it’s an open invitation to think about alternative solutions. If we want to know if a neighbor is doing okay, but we don’t want people with guns and qualified immunity to get involved, who do we actually call? Is there an app for that? Can I phone a friend? Hyperlinks aside, people have been organizing to respond to nonviolent situations and neighborly disputes long before the recent explosion in police violence, and they’re never going to stop. I could go into way more depth about the large body of organizations and initiatives meeting the demands of communities who reject the police, but Logan Marie Glitterbomb already does a much better job of that in her excellent piece, Don’t Call the Pigs.⁴

Of course, we can’t ignore the reality that some disputes do get violent, people do get hurt, and situations sometimes escalate to the point where someone is killed. There’s a valid discussion to be had about the disparities between media coverage and the actual prevalence of violent crime but for now, given the main focus of this piece, let’s table it. So, people die sometimes, that much we’ve already covered. What do we do about it? Add more guns to the situation? Gaige Grosskreutz, Rittenhouse’s only surviving victim, was armed with a pistol, but this good guy with a gun didn’t save the day; Grosskreutz was shot in the arm and nearly died. If you’re at all familiar with basic self-defense procedures or have ever gone through safety drills at your school or workplace, you might be wondering why he didn’t run away from the man with a gun, instead getting closer to the active shooter situation. Gaige Grosskreutz, in addition to being a gun owner, is also an EMT; medics are trained to go towards the sound of gunfire, he was not approaching with the intent to outgun Rittenhouse.

For those of us who aren’t trained medics, however, if there are gunshots, RUN TO SAFETY. Self-defense isn’t glorious, it’s not a hobby for adrenaline junkies, and it’s absolutely not supposed to be fun. Keeping yourself safe and alive often requires getting the fuck out of a bad situation, and that’s perfectly okay. If brandishing a weapon de-escalates a situation, that’s also fine; asserting that you have the capacity to respond to immediate physical intimidation is a key component of defending oneself in certain cases. Just because you have a gun does NOT mean you have to fire it at anyone. Gun ownership for self-defense against real threats isn’t an aspirational power fantasy. It’s preparation for dangerous situations that require the possession of lethal force. 

So, what does Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal mean? Simply put, not much. As said in the intro paragraph, the ongoing threat of white terrorism and armed opposition to protests against police brutality would remain no matter how the trial concluded. If he got life in prison, the right would be angry; if he got acquitted (the worse timeline), the right would be overjoyed. Both scenarios end with a bunch of energized right-wingers being validated, organizing a motivated base of supporters, and showing up to protests with the stated intention of “protect property.” Nothing has changed and we have to stay alert.

Justice: A False Promise

Radicals of all stripes (or at least a fair majority of us) are deeply concerned with the concept of “justice.” Workers winning tangible benefits from striking, marginalized communities getting reparations for generational harm, confederate monuments getting torn down by protesters — these are all powerful symbols of progress, and it genuinely feels awesome when that stuff happens. Of course, these are only symbols, momentary signals of gradual changes in perception, not massive systemic upheavals. Court proceedings, especially high-profile televised criminal trials, function the same way. Let’s endorse, for a moment, the possibility that Kyle Rittenhouse got sentenced to life in prison without parole. What would that change?

Sure, he would be off the streets, but that’s just one white kid with an AR. What about his supporters? Maserati Mike, the man who stalked the courthouse grounds with a long rifle during the trial, was allowed to go home after a nice chat with the cops, and he probably wouldn’t have been too happy with that verdict — nor would the thousands of other white folks with gun licenses who idolize this crying little twit. With all that considered, is the harm not potentially increased when we publicly send right-wing figures to prison and agitate their loyal, trigger-happy, armed supporters?

“Harm,” it turns out, is an immensely complicated thing to measure in any circumstance, let alone politically motivated violence. This makes accurate proportional sentencing extremely difficult (if not impossible), so how does the justice system get around this problem? Short answer: it doesn’t. The idea that justice systems function as detached, neutral, and “rational” systems of deliberation and restitution is itself a legal fiction.¹ In practice, justice systems serve primarily to allocate punishment. Victims are never the priority because punitive justice is a framework that doesn’t recognize their agency; it’s not about protecting people from harm, it’s about violent reinforcement of legal order.

Sadly, this issue isn’t resolved when the process is democratized. The jury system, while it technically operates on random selection, hardly embodies the sentiment “by the people, for the people” in the conventional sense. In addition to numerous assessments of qualification for service, individual jurors may be automatically excused for “extreme views” on a given law (the death penalty, for example) that might compromise the “rationality” of their conclusions.¹ Though technically illegal, jurors may also be dismissed on the basis of political identity, race, and gender if those identities pertain to the details of a given case. Considering the fact that juries are constructed as representative “cross-sections” of highly localized communities, this presents a huge problem for hate crime legislation. How does the neutral “all facts no feelings” system of punishment identify crimes motivated by reactionary premeditation? If Rittenhouse’s case is any indication, it certainly doesn’t appear to bring these people to “justice” in any meaningful sense.

In fairness, we can’t just blame jurors for everything (though Rittenhouse’s case definitely raises serious concerns about their neutrality) just like we can’t blame all citizens of a democracy for the crimes of their elected officials. Even though juries may come to a consensus, it’s inaccurate to say they’re exercising power. The jury didn’t write the law nor directly participate in any violence, that’s the state’s job. Juries serve the symbolic purpose of cosmetically democratizing an otherwise hierarchical system, involving laypeople to the extent that government can share its responsibility with “the common people” when it enforces the law (Conley). Would a system of direct mob rule be desirable by comparison? Would this lead to the realization of a genuine “people’s justice”?

At this point, we’re forgetting what abolition is supposed to accomplish. Abolition isn’t just a rejection of present structures and proposing “new and improved” versions of the same thing; it’s the radical declaration that the current system is so fundamentally broken and dysfunctional that everything, from its foundational principles to its post-hoc justifications, needs to be dismantled. “Justice,” as we understand it now, is one of those archaic constructs we need to seriously re-examine, if not totally reject. 

Rehabilitation: Abolishing the Gun with the Taser

The focus on rehabilitation among budding radicals reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the main goal of abolishing prisons. In dismantling the prison industrial complex, we’re aiming to make space for experimentation where we can try totally different approaches to harm reduction that recognize and enable the autonomy of all. Anarchists don’t want an update to the criminal justice system’s mission statement; we want radical institutions and conflict resolution networks completely divorced from the carceral state in both function and underlying design. Most importantly, no individual, collective, or government has the legitimate authority to lock living beings in a cage. Yes, supervillains technically will exist, but never in a capacity that could empirically justify systemic confinement.

This is where advocates of rehabilitation often disagree with total abolitionists, relying on a mix of utilitarian logic and appeals to paternalism. Common amongst self-professed “abolitionists” is the desire to send fascists, reactionaries, and deviants to “rehabilitation programs,” rather than “prisons.” Instead of a cell, some argue, Kyle Rittenhouse needs “mental treatment” and “rehabilitative care” to iron out the psychological urges that led him down the radicalization pipeline. Humane treatment for the betterment of the “patient” is a huge improvement over the punishment of the “prisoner,” so they claim. Confining people “for their own good,” it seems, is a much more justifiable hierarchy.

(Full disclosure, this approach makes me sick. I want to maintain focus on the shortcomings of the rehabilitation argument for the purposes of this piece, but be aware that I’m actively restraining myself from just ranting at length about how repulsive I find this position and the people who hold it. If for some reason you want to see me do that, follow me on twitter.)

Ignoring for a moment the fact that “confinement for one’s own improvement” was the original justification for prisons, this obviously runs counter to the premises we discussed earlier — enabling and recognizing autonomy. Paternalism, the exercise of authority over others in their supposed best interest, is an active violation of individual agency, a denial of autonomy in favor of benevolent governance. This is the logic of statism, but it’s disturbingly popular among self-proclaimed anarchists.

Put bluntly, this is a pretty clear extension of the left’s long history of ableism. Whether that’s the result of poor translations and over-reliance on old sources, or a byproduct of systems and narratives that dehumanize disabled people, is still an ongoing, worthwhile discussion to have. In the meantime, we need to deal with the present issue: there is a common association between reactionary violence and “mental illness” that we need to dismantle in order to address the real factors that lead to stochastic terror. 

For good measure though, let’s investigate the claim that mass shootings and firearms offenses more generally are committed by “mentally ill” individuals. They aren’t. Far be it from me to suggest that politicians and lobbyists might be lying to you, but if the general empirical consensus is to be taken seriously, the truth is much more complicated. People turn to reactionary thought for a wide variety of reasons, some psychological, others mostly circumstantial. While they often emphasize uniformity, reactionaries are, ironically, a very diverse bunch; some are ardent capitalists, while others have taken a deliberate turn towards “anti-capitalism” to shift leftist discourse towards thinly-veiled ethnonationalism and economic protectionism. Every radical community has had to deal with these grifters and authoritarian fusionists, either as a result of deliberate infiltration, uncritical regurgitation of essentialist narratives, botched platforming to a gentrified audience, or something entirely different. 

To loosely paraphrase Dan Olson, reactionaries are not otherwise empty vessels that believe in one wacky thing.³ They have an agenda, and everything else is subsumed by that greater belief in social order and authority. Skepticism towards authority isn’t a sign of a “healthy belief system,” it’s got nothing to do with wellness or mental aptitude. The sad truth is that some people just suck, advocating for bad things because they genuinely believe them. People don’t fall down reactionary pipelines because they’re stupid; reactionaries exist because intelligent, creative, and passionate individuals disagree with the premise that society should be free. Compulsory therapy won’t magically fix any of those problems, and it’s not worth the investment to try.

If we want to build a new world that actually is free, we need to allow for the fact that people will believe different things and have genuine disagreements. Kyle Rittenhouse and his supporters should, broadly speaking, be allowed to express their repugnant chauvinism freely on whatever platform will host them. What they have zero right to do is impose their worldview and maintain their existing privilege through police violence, military intervention, and vigilante statism (i.e. going to anti-cop protests to “defend private property”). In the interest of not becoming that which we seek to destroy, we shouldn’t center our strategies around the hearts and minds of reactionaries; we just need to make sure they never have the power to shape society in their image.

After Monopoly

So what is the solution then? How do we keep the bad people away from their victims without the state? How do we know what the future of law and order looks like?

The short answer is we don’t know, we can’t know, and we likely never will. Crime is complicated – even the word “crime” doesn’t accurately capture the full scope of what we’re discussing here, not only due to the whole “no government” premise (Statists don’t usually have a good answer for this either beyond “more better cops and prisons,” which is funny considering that doesn’t work). The best we can do is understand the anarchic conditions we’re trying to achieve and make informed estimates as to what institutions will thrive absent the state.

The first major difference, of course, will be increased involvement of “citizen-consumers” in the provision of defense and conflict resolution services. This phenomenon, co-production, is already a major component of existing law enforcement; while police forces have their own surveillance systems, civilians, by calling 911, recording potential crimes, and generally existing as witnesses, are a vital component for deterring and responding to violence.² In the context of a decentralized, polycentric system with multiple overlapping jurisdictions, co-production plays a much more significant role. This necessarily incentivizes the direct construction of local norms by affected communities, rather than distant representatives or legal authorities.

Secondly, we can reasonably assume that post-state “justice” will be decentralized. Decentralized networks can respond to conflicts much more efficiently and are less susceptible to failure than centralized, monocentric systems. If one point in a decentralized system fails, the rest of the network isn’t necessarily harmed, a vast improvement over our current, piss-poor excuse for community defense. Most importantly, decentralization distributes power; without state monopoly, taxation, and the civilian/non-civilian divide, individuals have a choice over who, if anyone, defends them or their community. Some might reel at this description and my source for this analysis, since this is, bluntly speaking, a market for defense. Terminology aside, “market” or not, free experimentation based on mutual exchange and cooperation is the heart of anarchy, and whether or not Koch-funded Austrian economists make particularly convincing arguments for it, we on the left shouldn’t shy away from it.

Not a Conclusion

This is only one of many potential abolitionist approaches to the problem of reactionary violence, a point I hope I’ve established from the outset by titling this piece “An Abolitionist Approach.” Crime is a complicated issue, even in cases that are supposedly clear cut; there are no absolutely proportional uses of force, unambiguously righteous acts of appropriation, or “just” murders that need to be committed. Any framework providing certainty in the area of arbitration is reductive, uninformed, and, at worst, actively hostile to genuine liberation. Abolitionism is not the construction of a new institutional order to supplant the current one, but a method of discovery based on the total rejection of existing narratives and hegemonies.

“Without cops, who will lock up the murderers?” is a question we can’t answer with certainty, but it’s also a question that misses the point of abolition. We aren’t updating existing systems via minor adjustments to changing conditions, that’s what moderate reformists do. Abolition is a rejection of the premise that the current system was ever necessary, let alone presently, challenging us to explore alternative arrangements beyond the state, beyond monopoly, and beyond justice.

Notes and works cited:

[1] Conley, Robin. Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases. 2 November 2015. 

This book is incredibly accessible and greatly informs my perspective on not only the current US justice system, but all systems that claim to keep society orderly and safe. Absolute banger, one of my favorite anthropology readings.

[2] Coyne, Christopher J. and Goodman, Nathan, Polycentric Defense (September 11, 2019). GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 19-31, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3451634 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3451634

This paper is a great example of contemporary Austrian economics absent Mises Institute bullshit, using consistent analysis to build a convincing argument for polycentricity, particularly on a “national” scale. I’m not strongly committed to the Austrian method, but this is a great representation of its radical potential.

Nathan’s other work is also great and worth checking out.

[3] Folding Ideas – In Search of a Flat Earth: “Flat earthers are not otherwise empty vessels that believe one wacky thing. Flat earthers have an agenda.”

Not only a great line, but Dan Olson’s work here is some of the best analysis of reactionary conspiracism you can find on YouTube. Is that setting the bar too low? Perhaps… go watch the video though.

[4] Yes, this is behind a paywall, but also Logan could use your money. Also, to my knowledge, it’s the latest version of the piece, so that’s two good things by my calculations. 

Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale, Alex Aragona tarafından kaleme alınmış. 12 Ağustos 2021 tarihinde Checkmate Anarchists başlığı altında yayınlanmıştır.

Anarşistlerin sıklıkla duyacağı bir itiraz, genel bir anarşist ilkeler dizisinin teoride çekici olduğu, ancak pratikte insan ilişkilerinin her zaman organize karar almaya, kuralların ve yasaların oluşturulmasına ve sonuç olarak hiyerarşi ve kurumsal gücün yaratılmasına yol açtığıdır. Başka bir deyişle, maksimum bireysel özgürlük durumuna ulaşmak bu dünya için değildir- ve şu ya da bu toplumda gerçekleşmiş olsa bile, kısa ömürlü bir deney olacaktır. Buna cevaben, bazı anarşistler bunun neden böyle olmayacağını açıklamaya çalışırlar. Burada, bu itirazı öne süren eleştirmenin aslında doğru olduğunu söyleyeceğim- ama bu, anarşist düşünceye pek de bir itiraz değil.

Bir eleştirmenin bunu anarşist düşünceye bir itiraz olarak görmesinin -ya da bir savunucunun bunu kurtulması gereken bir tuzak olarak görmesinin- tek yolu, anarşiyi birçok farklı yapı üretebilecek bir dizi ilke ve temelden ziyade bir toplumdaki ideal düzenlemelerin ve yapıların sıkı bir taslağı olarak yanlış tanımlamalarıdır. Dolayısıyla yukarıda sunulan iddialarda anarşist değerlerle bağdaşmayan hiçbir şey yoktur.

Bir dereceye kadar, sosyal organizasyonla ilgili tüm tartışmalar, kurallar ve kişinin altında yaşamak istediği düzen türü hakkındadır. Bu anlamda herhangi bir toplum, davranışlar ve eylemler üzerinde bir tür kısıtlamaya yönelik bir eğilimdir. Başka bir deyişle, mutlakiyetçi, tam bir özgürlük duygusu uygularken diğer insanlar (ya da terbiyeli olmak istiyorsanız hayvanlar) arasında yaşamanın bir yolu yoktur. Örneğin, 23:00’ten sonra gürültü kısıtlamaları olan bir topluluğa gönüllü olarak girmeyi düşünün. Bu, kelimenin tam anlamıyla, en sevdiğiniz gürültü çıkarma faaliyetini gerçekleştirme özgürlüğünüzün kısıtlanmasıdır, ancak bu, birinin örtülü veya açık olarak kabul edebileceği bir kısıtlamadır. Anarşistlerin nihai hedefi, herhangi bir bireyin başkaları veya topluluk üzerindeki etkisi ne olursa olsun, istediği her şeyi yapması için mutlak özgürlük olsaydı, anarşistler bu topluluk kuralını ilke olarak kabul edilemez ve birbirlerinin suratlarına yumruk atmayı ve birbirlerinin mallarını çalmayı tamamen kabul edilebilir görürlerdi.

Öyleyse, anarşist bir toplum, kişilerarası ilişkilerin, üretimin ve ticaretin en temel biçiminin ötesine nasıl geçebilir ve piyasa dışı etkileşimleri veya topluluk meselelerini nasıl ele alabilir? Çeşitli sosyal organizasyon biçimlerinin, ekip yapılarının, oylama mekanizmalarının veya başka herhangi bir şeyin, merkeziyetçi olmayan bir modelde belirli görev ve rollere sahip bir delegasyonda neden demokratik yollarla bir rol sahibi olamayacağının nedenlerini düşünmek zor olurdu. Bu bilgi yapılarına ve hiyerarşilerine gönüllü olarak girilecek olsa da (ve kuvvet tekelini veya sizi hapse atma münhasır hakkını talep etmeyebilirler), birinin geleneklere veya diğer topluluk kararlarına uygun olarak hareket etmesini veya belirli eylemlerden kaçınmasını gerektiren bağlayıcı sosyal görevlerin hiçbir suretinin olmayacağını düşünmek için bir neden yoktur – piyasa odaklı anlaşma ve düzenlemelere benzer olarak.

Anahtar, grupların ve toplulukların davranışları, belirli kaynakların kullanımını vb. düzenleyen veya yönlendiren kararlara nasıl ulaştığıdır. Bugün bildiğimiz şekliyle devletlerin olmadığı bir dünya ve söz konusu toplumu etkileyen önemli kararların, içindeki en eski ailenin patriğinin irade ve kaprisleriyle alındığı bir topluluk hayal edilebilir- çünkü her zaman böyle yapılmıştı. Bu, yalnızca bir yönden “anarşist” olacaktır. Alternatif olarak, önemli, piyasa dışı kararların, önce topluluk girdisinin toplanması, ardından konuyla ilgili bir tartışma veya tartışma için bir forumun teşvik edilmesi ve daha sonra, belki de son olarak, belki de bir oylamaya sunulması yoluyla alındığı bir topluluk da hayal edilebilir. Herhangi bir işlem için üçte iki çoğunluk gereklidir. Bu eylem, bir kuralın oluşturulması veya ayarlanması, topluluk üyelerinin ek tartışmalara katılma çağrısı veya hatta bir alt komitenin oluşturulması veya daha küçük bir gruba sorumluluğun devredilmesi için anlaşma olabilir. Demokratik, hayatınızı etkileyen her bir öğe için oy kullanmak veya el kaldırmak anlamına gelmez- bu, bir şekilde bu öğeler üzerinde bir tür girdi ve kontrol sahibi olmakla ilgilidir. Merkezi olmayan, herkesin her eylem öğesinden sorumlu olduğu anlamına gelmez- karar verme gücünün nerede olduğu ile ilgilidir.

Elbette, tam olarak farklı sosyal yapıların, hiyerarşilerin, kuralların, davranış kurallarının vb. nasıl görüneceği, anarşistlerin ayrıntılı olarak ortaya çıkarmaya çalışabileceği (veya yapması gereken) bir şey değildir- her ne kadar eğilimler veya akımlar üzerinde düşünebilseler de. Mesele şu ki, anarşist bir toplumun bir tür organize karar alma eğiliminde olacağını, belirli kurumların yaratılmasına ve akabilinde bir tür kuruluşa ve kurallara bağlılığa yol açacak bir toplum olduğunu anlamak çok önemlidir.

Anarşistin yüzleşmesi gereken, bu iddiayı çürütmek değil, daha çok sıralayacaklarımıza odaklanmaktır: Gruplar tarafından gönüllü, organize karar vermeyi ne tür altyapılar mümkün kılar; ne tür sosyal veya topluluk kurumları meşrulaştırılabilir (ve haklı olarak ne türden bir özerkliğe sahip olabilirler); kurallar ve yasalar nasıl bir yere sahip olacak. Etkileşime, organizasyona, örgütlenmeye, işbirliğine, yapılar yaratmaya, karar verme yetkisine vb. yönelik insan eğilimi anlayışını anarşist temellerle uzlaştırmak, entelektüel eylemin başladığı yerdir.

As some may have heard, the Center for a Stateless Society has joined Krewe de Main as a co-host of this year’s upcoming Coup de Gras festival. Coup de Gras is an annual radical Mardi Gras festival launched in 2020 by Krewe de Main, an anarchist Carnival krewe based around the former Coup de Main land project in Southern Louisiana.

We also have a few exciting virtual and local events leading up to the festival, which takes place from February 25th to March 3rd. First, to get some hype going, and raise some funds for the event, we’ll be putting on our first ever Anti-Nazi Gaming League livestream this Thursday, starting at 4:00 PM CST. Some of our writers, scholars, and friends will be on the stream to game, chat, and hype up the festival. I hope many of you will tune in and consider supporting the stream. All funding will go towards Coup de Gras event expenses, with any extra funds raised going to our ongoing writer fundraisers for Logan Marie Glitterbomb and Anna Morgenstern. We’ll stream until we hit $1,000!

We hope to see you at this premiere livestream for the benefit of Coup de Gras!

Major guests on the stream include:

• C4SS’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory, Kevin Carson
• Comedian Jake Flores
• C4SS Assistant Editing Coordinator Eric Fleischmann
• BreadTuber Emerican Johnson
• Coup de Gras Organizer Logan Glitterbomb
• And C4SS Coordinating Director Alex McHugh

Where to watch:

• Anti-Nazi Gaming League on Breadtube
• Anti-Nazi Gaming League on Kolektiva
• C4SS Feed44 on YouTube
• Coup de Gras on Breadtube
• Coup de Gras on Kolektiva
• Green Market Agorist on Breadtube
• Green Market Agorist on Kolektiva

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale pubblicato il 16 novembre 2021 con il titolo NFT Suck for Labor. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Dico subito che non sono un tecnofilo. Sono solo un tifoso dell’open-source e delle tecnologie eque, paritarie e decentrate; per il resto, sono a livello di Playstation.[1] Ci sono però certi aspetti del mondo tecnologico e digitale che mi urtano. Ad esempio l’ultima metastasi in fatto di proprietà privata: gli NFT (che forse avete già visto su internet). NFT sta per “non-fungible token” (oggetti non fungibili, ndt), che sono, come spiegano Robyn Conti e John Schmidt su Forbes…

una risorsa digitale che rappresenta oggetti reali, come opere d’arte, musica, elementi ingame e video. Si scambiano online, spesso con criptomonete, e solitamente sono codificati con lo stesso software delle criptovalute.

Esistono dal 2014 ma solo oggi stanno attirando l’attenzione come sistema di compravendita di opere digitali. Da novembre del 2017 a oggi in NFT è stata spesa la cifra incredibile di 147 milioni di dollari.

Sono detti “non fungibili” perché, a differenza delle normali criptovalute, non possono essere scambiati o venduti gli originali. La funzione di base di un NFT è di permettere l’acquisto dei diritti della versione originale di un oggetto che, tramite una blockchain (un elenco decentrato gestito tramite una rete crittografata), può essere autenticato dal possessore originale a prescindere da quante volte e in quanti modi sia stato condiviso.

Scontata la critica convenzionale d’impronta socialista: la proprietà privata è fondamentalmente antisociale, pertanto qualunque diffusione della stessa nel mondo digitale genera soprattutto problemi. Ma una critica più ampia della proprietà intellettuale precede internet di decenni ed è dominio di anarchici individualisti e mutualisti. Così scrive il grande mutualista Benjamin Tucker:

Il monopolio dei brevetti sostanzialmente protegge inventori e autori dalla concorrenza per un periodo lungo abbastanza da permettere loro di estorcere dalle persone un compenso enormemente sproporzionato al servizio offerto, ovvero dà a certe persone il diritto di proprietà, per un periodo di molti anni, su leggi e processi naturali, a cui si aggiunge la capacità di esigere un tributo in cambio dell’utilizzo di una ricchezza che dovrebbe essere liberamente accessibile. L’abolizione di questo monopolio sarebbe per i suoi beneficiari una salutare iniezione di terrore della concorrenza, il che dovrebbe indurli a ritenersi soddisfatti quando per i loro servizi ricevono un pagamento pari a quello ricevuto dai loro dipendenti per il loro servizio, e quando per assicurarsi questo pagamento metteranno sul mercato i loro prodotti ad un prezzo iniziale così basso da non attirare la concorrenza più di quanto non faccia qualunque altro prodotto.

Questa filosofia trova un degno erede novecentesco in Laurance Labadie, per il quale alcune delle principali “restrizioni alla libera produzione e distribuzione sono rappresentate dai brevetti, i diritti d’autore e i dazi”. Oggi Kevin Carson scrive: “se la Nike può pagare un paio di dollari per un paio di scarpe prodotte da uno sfruttatore in Bangladesh per rivenderle a duecento dollari è solo grazie alle protezioni garantite della ‘proprietà intellettuale’. Gran parte del prezzo infatti non rappresenta il costo dei materiali e della manodopera, ma il marchio commerciale”.[2] La proprietà intellettuale, come tutti i monopoli, serve pertanto a limitare la libera produzione e lo scambio volontario, spingendo i prezzi artificialmente al di sopra dei costi di produzione, oltre quell’equilibrio della teoria del valore-lavoro così come interpretato oggi da Laurance Labadie e Carson.[3] I quali scrivono rispettivamente: possiamo dire che, data la libera concorrenza, cioè il libero e equo accesso ai mezzi di produzione, alle materie prime, e a un mercato senza restrizioni, il prezzo di ogni prodotto tende sempre a riflettere il lavoro necessario alla produzione. Ovvero, il lavoro diventa il fattore predominante nella quantificazione del valore”; e, “[i]n un’economia a proprietà distribuita… le preferenze temporali si baserebbero solo sul calcolo che il lavoratore fa del proprio consumo presente contro il consumo futuro. E tutto questo consumo, presente e futuro, sarebbe indiscutibilmente opera del lavoratore.”

Ma perché parliamo della proprietà intellettuale e dei suoi effetti sui prezzi? A tutelare gli NFT è una blockchain, non lo stato, no? Non è proprio un diritto d’autore. No, gli NFT sono altra cosa rispetto al diritto d’autore e altre forme di proprietà intellettuale. Secondo David Lizerbram & Associates, chi possiede NFT…

ha diritto al possesso, alla vendita, al prestito o comunque alla cessione di detto NFT. Non ha il diritto (a meno che non possieda i diritti d’autore) di fare o vendere copie di un’immagine digitale, non può trasferire il diritto d’autore sull’opera, né creare opere derivate basate sull’originale.

In ambito digitale, la questione del “diritto di fare copie” è confusa. Ad esempio, se io compro un NFT e poi lo pubblico su Instagram con su scritto “Guardate che bell’NFT ho comprato!”, sto creando molte copie digitali. Ma oggi questo vale per le opere visive, e l’autore è libero di chiedere a Instagram di rimuovere la copia per violazione dei diritti. Il fatto che io possieda l’NFT non invalida tale richiesta a meno che io non possieda anche il diritto d’autore.

Dunque il prezzo di un NFT non altera direttamente (non in misura significativa, almeno) il prezzo dei beni rispetto ai loro costi di produzione, ma fa qualcosa di simile con il diritto di proprietà di un bene, creando così un mercato artificiale di proprietà di cose invece che di cose. Questo fa crescere il valore del certificato da poco più di zero – i costi di produzione del diritto di proprietà (ma c’è da dire che i costi di mantenimento “del singolo oggetto” con la blockchain meritano attenzione sistemica soprattutto in considerazione delle esternalità ambientali dato il forte uso di energia inquinante e un’attività che, come si vedrà poi, serve a far andare internet con la produzione di tecnologie informatiche) – a prezzi stratosferici dati dalla vendita speculativa dell’oggetto o come “originale” o come parte di un “marchio” NFT. Si crea così un finto valore completamente separato dall’attività necessaria alla sua produzione. Con uno scenario ipotetico, Amanda Yeo spiega questo proliferare di “falsi” valori:

Tu vai a una festa post-covid, o post-apocalittica, e agitando una bottiglia mezzo piena di birra urli nelle orecchie di qualcuno superando il frastuono della tecno.

“Ho dei tweet bloccati di @dril,” confidi, e dici anche @ perché è quello che sei diventato tu. “Come gli originali. Roba mia.”

“Tu non puoi possedere i tweet di qualcun altro,” risponde la tua vittima, per niente impressionata, e dà un’occhiata in giro alla ricerca di qualche amico. “È solo del testo su internet.”

Tu vacilli. “No, non hai capito; li ho tokenizzati. Ho preso l’originale. Tutto… Il resto, i retweet, sono solo copie. Non… I miei hanno un valore.”

Tu non puoi spiegare cos’è questo valore, ma siccome hai pagato due milioni e mezzo qualche valore dev’esserci. I diffusori continuano a battere il ritmo. Il ritmo batte sempre. Ha sempre battuto. Ha battuto tredici anni fa.

Sostanzialmente, è come credere che comprare “mezzo ettaro sulla luna”, o una stella, garantisca lo stesso valore di mezzo ettaro reale o di una stella reale, al punto che puoi rivenderli purché trovi qualcuno come te.

Questa rozza visione distopica dovrebbe preoccupare soprattutto i lavoratori. Primo, come visto, alimenta una cultura, diffusa in particolare su internet, che non capisce o non accetta il lavoro come motore principale del valore; una cultura, da notare, che può essere distrutta solo dall’azione diretta della classe lavoratrice e con la lotta per ampliare la diffusione dei mezzi di produzione e la ricchezza investibile.[4] Da quando si è affermato internet, questo è un grosso problema. Come spiega la Wu Ming Foundation…

Dietro l’apparenza fantasmagorica di internet si nasconde un insieme di relazioni sociali ben definite, che Marx definirebbe relazioni di produzione, di sfruttamento. La retorica internettiana trascura queste relazioni. Si potrebbe parlare di internet per ore, giorni, mesi, e sfiorare appena l’argomento di chi lo possiede, chi realmente controlla i nodi, le infrastrutture, l’hardware. Meno ancora si parla della piramide del lavoro, compreso il lavoro semischiavistico, incorporata nei dispositivi che usiamo (computer, smartphone, lettori digitali e così via) in conseguenza di internet. Ogni giorno le grandi aziende espropriano ricchezza sociale in rete e opprimono i lavoratori di ogni angolo del mondo rimanendo dietro le scene.

La fondazione va poi ancora più a fondo evidenziando come Facebook e altri social – le piattaforme che erano e sono indispensabili alla proliferazione degli NFT (Facebook e Twitter vorrebbero integrarli ancora di più) – sono in gran parte il prodotto del pluslavoro degli utenti. Di fatto…

“Tutto quello che fai su Facebook è pluslavoro perché non sei pagato. Tutti i giorni Zuckerberg vende il tuo pluslavoro, cioè la tua vita (i tuoi dati sensibili, i siti che frequenti e altro), e le tue relazioni. E ogni giorno guadagna milioni, perché lui possiede i [mezzi] di produzione e tu no. Le informazioni sono merce. La conoscenza è merce. Nel post-fordismo, o come vogliammo chiamarlo, è la merce per eccellenza.”

Tornando alla questione più in generale della valorizzazione dell’antilavoro, in una prospettiva marxista è qualcosa che compare in tutti gli scambi di mercato – come ovviamente le transazioni degli NFT, sotto forma di feticismo della merce, con la falsa convinzione che il valore di una merce sia in qualche modo intrinseco, e la conseguente incapacità di vedere il suo valore in quanto lavoro investito. E la scomparsa delle relazioni sociali di cui sopra non è che la versione “in rete” di questo fenomeno. Ma per gli anarchici individualisti e i mutualisti, come abbiamo detto, questo non è, almeno nella misura posta dai marxisti, una condizione universale dello scambio di mercato, bensì una condizione posta da un sistema economico come il capitalismo, che limita la libera concorrenza nella produzione e nello scambio, passando così a definire il valore attraverso l’utilità marginale. Entrambe le parti però concorderebbero probabilmente sul fatto che gli NFT contribuiscono ad incorporare il problema nella tecnologia blockchain.

Aggiungiamo poi che secondo i neoliberali moderati la proprietà intellettuale può diventare indispensabile a proteggere un’opera creativa. Lo stesso discorso viene usato per promuovere gli NFT, ed è così che la cosa mi veniva presentata quando facevo il musicista punk “part-time”. Quanto alla sinistra e i lavoratori tutto ciò può apparire come la conferma dello slogan “il lavoratore ha diritto a ciò che crea”. O perlomeno potrebbe sembrare uno stratagemma di cui può servirsi un grafico, un musicista o uno scrittore per aumentare il proprio profitto. Secondo Conti e Schmidt, infatti…

la tecnologia blockchain e gli NFT offrono a un creativo la possibilità unica di monetizzare le proprie opere. Un pittore, ad esempio, non è costretto a servirsi di una galleria d’arte o di un’asta per vendere le proprie opere. Può venderle direttamente al cliente sotto forma di NFT, che tra l’altro gli permette di tenere per sé una quota maggiore di profitto. Un creativo può anche programmare le royalties in modo da riscuotere una percentuale sul prezzo ogni volta che una sua opera viene venduta a un nuovo proprietario. È una possibilità allettante visto che solitamente, una volta venduta l’opera, non si riceve nulla da ulteriori utilizzi.

Ma la realtà è molto meno rosea e Yeo spiega benissimo perché:

Si dice che gli NFT siano un vantaggio per i grafici digitali perché offrono la possibilità di essere pagati per il proprio lavoro. Oggi capita spesso che le immagini vengano facilmente scaricate, duplicate e diffuse online senza neanche dare credito all’autore. L’NFT autentica un’opera, le attribuisce valore, stimola il mercato dell’arte permettendo ai collezionisti di collezionare. Ma davvero si tratta di un buon uso delle criptovalute?

Io dico: se vuoi un’opera d’arte unica, commissionala all’artista. Se vuoi che l’autore sia compensato per la propria opera, contatta direttamente l’artista. Se ti sta a cuore il futuro del mercato delle opere d’arte, allora rivolgiti a un artista.

Per giunta l’NFT neanche garantisce che il denaro vada all’autore. Allo stato attuale, niente impedisce a qualcuno di trasformare in NFT l’opera di qualcun altro, dichiararla sua e trarne profitto. Di fatto sta già succedendo. C’è anche un servizio di Twitter che trasforma in NFT ogni tuo tweet anche se non l’hai scritto tu: basta metterci un tag.

La tecnologia blockchain, in particolare la criptomoneta, è sempre più accessibile, spuntano dappertutto spuntano cripto bancomat e sempre più paesi approvano l’uso delle criptovalute. Come dice Jim Barth, “inizialmente si trattava di un movimento di nicchia sostenuto da pochissimi iniziati, ma sta già seguendo la traiettoria del cellulare, degli acquisti online, dei pagamenti elettronici e di altri sviluppi comportamentali legati alla tecnologia. Tutte queste innovazioni partono in sordina, raggiungono una massa critica e si diffondono massicciamente.” Barth nota anche come anche “i più diffusi sistemi di pagamento, compreso Paypal, diano la possibilità di comprare e vendere bitcoin, o frazioni di bitcoin, direttamente dal proprio conto. Sempre più aziende tecnologiche, come Square Inc., accettano pagamenti in bitcoin e tengono parte delle loro riserve liquide in moneta digitale. Anche Visa si è gettata nella mischia. Coinbase, il principale mercato di criptovalute statunitense, si appresta ad offrire una carta di debito Visa con cui spendere bitcoin dal proprio conto Coinbase Visa.” Ora che la sua popolarità aumenta, è bene che si sappia quale terribile, stupida realtà gli NFT rappresentano per grafici, musicisti, scrittori e altri artisti.[5] Per il lavoratore, gli NFT sono una fregatura.

[1] Vedi Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Karl Hess’s Community Technology, e E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

[2] Qui i diversi tipi di proprietà intellettuale – brevetto, diritto d’autore, marchio commerciale – hanno lo stesso effetto come strumenti di monopolio.

[3] Odiati dagli economisti! Sappiatelo!

[4] Nel contesto di internet e le sue tecnologie, la fondazione Wu Ming vede tutto ciò come una “alleanza a livello mondiale tra ‘attivisti digitali’, operatori della conoscenza e dell’industria elettronica.” Ma poi aggiunge che “i modi di questa alleanza sono tutti da scoprire.”

[5] La miglior cosa per un creativo è e sarà sempre il permesso dell’autore o sistemi simili del common digitale e intellettuale. Come dice Carson, per esempio, “la condivisione di file ha mandato in fumo una montagna di introiti dell’industria discografica. E si tratta di perdite a carico delle case discografiche e dei loro profitti. Gli autori non hanno subito perdite significative; anzi, probabilmente con la condivisione hanno aumentato le vendite.” Nel mio piccolo di musicista punk (vedi i miei progetti Consumerist, Manbitesdog, e Soy.), rendere di ampio e immediato dominio la mia musica ha fatto crescere il seguito e incoraggiato la gente a comprare cassette, magliette e altro. Questo fenomeno è una costante del settore creativo. Come Carson, anch’io credo che: “una libera cultura va a vantaggio di consumatori, autori e la cultura in generale. Gli unici a non avere vantaggi sono le (parassitarie) aziende. Buon viaggio!”